Talk:Left Socialist Party of Japan

Name

Please do not change the name of this article to "Leftist Socialist Party." Google Books and Google Scholar searches of academic scholarship by Japan specialists both show significantly more results for "Left Socialist Party" than "Leftist Socialist Party" (131 vs 80 and 278 vs 58, respectively). --Ash-Gaar (talk) 03:13, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

@Ash-Gaar: Can you link your Google Books and Google Scholar searches so I can confirm this? I did the same searches and got the opposite results (although we may have used different parameters; I included "of Japan" in my search to exclude similarly named parties of other countries):

Method	Left	Leftist	Right	Rightist
Google search	5,160	1,320	664	657
Google Books	82	196	72	152
Google Scholar	1	11	0	5

Left/Right mentions are only greater than Leftist/Rightist mentions when returning all results (i.e. through Google search). Obviously this is not the most reliable indicator since it includes Wikipedia and mirrors of Wikipedia. Google Books contradicts your assertion but its reliability is also questionable because the first result it returns (at least for me) is a book which uses Wikipedia as a source, ironically. The only English source given in both this article and Right Socialist Party of Japan is Japanese Economic Development: Markets, Norms, Structures (2007) by Carl Mosk, which uses "Leftist" and "Rightist".

Google, Google Books, and Google Scholar, however, are also limited because they do not show mentions of books and academic articles which have not been published electronically and publicly. I tried the same searches through my university's online library archives and repository (including an external database which specifically hosts academic articles by historians and political scientists), but all searches returned no results. It might be the case that none of these names are that common (hence the small number of results through Google and its search engines), or the topic is just too fringe. I checked the main resource used by my university's Japanese studies department for contemporary politics, Governing Japan: Divided Politics in a Resurgent Economy by J. A. A. Stockwin, and it describes the situation completely differently: The Japan Socialist Party leaned further leftwards in the 1950s and a rightist faction split off and founded the "Democratic Socialist Party of Japan" (65). So that was not helpful either.

Of course translations and names can be changed or updated over time, so if you have examples of recent scholarly sources which use "Left/Right" as opposed to "Leftist/Rightist", please link them here.

Regarding other possible points (i.e. unrelated to WP:COMMONNAME): Leftist/Rightist are the grammatically correct adjectives because they describe "Socialist Party of Japan" and not "Socialist", i.e., "Leftist socialist" and "rightist socialist" sound odd because of the two "-ist" suffixes, but "leftist [organisation]" and "rightist [organisation]" do not (if we ignore the fact that "rightist" itself is rarely used in contemporary English, and left-wing and right-wing are far more common). "Left [organisation]" and "right [organisation]", meanwhile, also sound odd. The two factions were the leftist and rightist (i.e. left-wing and right-wing) factions of the Socialist Party of Japan, not Left Socialist and Right Socialist parties (whatever those could mean).

@Yue: Thank you for your comprehensive reply. I appreciate your attention to detail.

First of all, I will note that for the vast majority of the existence of these two Wikipedia articles' history, they were named "Leftist Socialist Party of Japan" and "Rightist Socialist Party of Japan," until I changed them several months back. This means that book and article search results very likely reflect some degree of Wikipedia influence in favor of those wordings. Second of all, I will note that in my extensive reading of English-language secondary literature on these parties, the literature only rarely includes the "of Japan" part, which is usually not necessary in context. Accordingly, I re-ran the search and added a regular Google search using the search terms linked below and received the following results:

Method	Left	Leftist	Right	Rightist
Google search	12,900	4,710	4,730	540
Google Books	417	240	134	45
Google Scholar	285	69	37	17

If you take a chance to scroll through these search results, you will see that leaving out the "of Japan" from the quotation while also including a generic "Japan" in the search clearly returns highly relevant results. Given the significant disparity in the numbers in favor of "Left" and "Right," I believe you will find these results compelling. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 05:02, 22 June 2022 (UTC)