Japanese Communist Party
일본 공산당
Japanese communist party founded in Tokyo on 15 July 1922 in consultation with the Comintern. Illegal and repressed from its founding, it became a legal party after the Allied occupation authorities released political prisoners in 1945. Having abandoned the armed-struggle line of the early 1950s, it advocates a "democratic revolution" through elections and extra-parliamentary struggle, and it is the oldest active political party in Japan.
In depth
Sen Katayama became a communist in the United States and was a founding member of the Communist Party USA, and Sanzō Nosaka was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. According to the Japanese-language source, Toshihiko Sakai, Hitoshi Yamakawa, Eizō Kondō and others formed a preparatory group in Tokyo in April 1921, and on 15 July 1922 eight people including Sakai, Yamakawa and Kondō met in a rented room of Kiyoshi Takase in Shibuya and founded the Japanese Communist Party as an illegal party. The English-language source says it was founded at a Tokyo meeting where Kyuichi Tokuda reported on sessions between the Japanese delegation and Comintern officials. The draft "1922 Theses" it received on joining the Comintern in November demanded abolition of the monarchy, universal suffrage for men and women over 18, the eight-hour day, confiscation of large estates and transfer of tenanted land to the peasants, and complete withdrawal of Japanese troops from China, Taiwan, Sakhalin and Korea.
In May 1923 the police found a membership roster, and on 5 June almost every member was arrested. The party decided to dissolve itself at the Morigasaki Conference in March 1924, but the Comintern's Grigori Voitinsky rejected this and ordered it rebuilt, and it was re-established on 4 December 1926 with Kazuo Fukumoto as its leading theorist. After the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 the party was repressed by the Special Higher Police, and arrested members were pressed to "convert". A round-up on 15 March 1928 arrested 1,200 people, and party chairman Masanosuke Watanabe killed himself after his arrest in October. The writer Takiji Kobayashi died under police torture. The arrest of Satomi Hakamada in March 1935 left the party without an organisation, and until the end of the war its members were either imprisoned or in exile; in Yan'an Nosaka founded the Japanese People's Emancipation League.
When the Allied headquarters ordered the release of political prisoners on 4 October 1945, Kyuichi Tokuda and others rebuilt the party as a legal organisation, and on 1–2 December it held its 4th Congress, the first in nineteen years. Membership rose from 1,180 in December 1945 to 70,000 in December 1947 and over 100,000 by April 1950; for February 1946 the English-language source gives 7,500 and the Japanese-language source 6,847, the figure announced at the 5th Congress. Koreans in Japan were an important base of support. In the 1949 general election the party increased its seats from 4 to 35.
From the autumn of 1949 the occupation authorities and the Japanese government carried out the Red Purge, firing tens of thousands of communists and suspected communists. When the Cominform criticised the party's peaceful line in January 1950, the party split and turned to armed struggle under the "1951 Platform", and in the 1952 general election it lost all 35 of its seats. The 6th Congress of 1955 renounced the militant line, and Kenji Miyamoto, General Secretary from 1958, distanced the party from the Soviet Union and China, stayed neutral in the Sino-Soviet split and supported a multi-party system. During the 1960 Anpo protests membership doubled from 40,000 to 80,000, and by 1979 the party held about 10% of the seats in the Diet. It has since declined: membership fell from about 500,000 in 1990 to about 250,000 in January 2024, when Tomoko Tamura succeeded Kazuo Shii as chair.