Kyuichi Tokuda
徳田球一
First JCP chairman who endured 18 years in imperial prisons
At the 1956 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev asked delegates to rise in memory of Stalin, Gottwald, 'and the little-known Kyuichi Tokuda'—and the entire congress rose.
A founding member of the Japanese Communist Party (1922), he was arrested in 1928 under the Peace Preservation Law and spent 18 years in prison without recanting, emerging in 1945 to rebuild the party as its first secretary-general. When the Cominform condemned the JCP's peaceful-revolution line in 1950, Tokuda swung the party toward armed struggle aligned with Moscow and Beijing; purged from public office, he defected to China and directed the party from his Peking Organization until his death in 1953.
Career timeline
- 1922Co-founded the JCP, Central Committee member
- 1928–1945Arrested under Peace Preservation Law; 18 years in prison (Abashiri, Chiba, Toyotama, Fuchu)
- 1945JCP Secretary-General (first post-war leader)
- 1946–1950House of Representatives member (3 terms, Tokyo 3rd district)
- 1950–1953Defected to China; led 'Peking Organization,' directed armed struggle