Foundation Sanzō Nosaka became a communist in the late 1910s and was a founding member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain.
Sen Katayama left Japan for the United States in 1914, after serving a prison sentence for supporting a strike. He became a communist during his time in the country and was a founding member of the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Katayama founded the Association of Japanese Socialists in America and served as chair of the Far Eastern People's Congress. In 1921, Katayama was informed by the
Communist International (Comintern) that the First Congress of the
Toiler of the Far East would be held on 21 January 1922 in Irkutsk. Three men from his organization (Watanabe Haruo, Taguchi Unzo, and Maniwa Suekichi) served as delegates. The Japanese Communist Party was founded in Tokyo on 15 July 1922, at a meeting where
Kyuichi Tokuda discussed sessions held between the Japanese delegation and Comintern officials. Two delegates were sent to the
4th World Congress of the Communist International and a general meeting of the party was held in
Ichikawa, Chiba, on 4 February 1923. The party's early leadership was drawn from the
anarcho-syndicalist and
Christian socialist movements that developed around the turn of the century. From the former came
Hitoshi Yamakawa,
Sakai Toshihiko, and
Kanson Arahata, who had all been supporters of
Kōtoku Shūsui, an
anarchist executed in 1911. Katayama, another early party leader, had been a Christian socialist for much of his political life. The three former anarchists were reluctant to found the JCP, with Yamakawa shortly after arguing that Japan was not ready for a communist party and calling for work to be done solely within labor unions. Katayama's theoretical understanding of
Marxism also remained low.
Outlawed and persecuted ,
Sanzō Nosaka and
Yoshio Shiga, 1945–1946 In May 1923, a roster of the JCP's membership was found by police at Manabu Sano's quarters at
Waseda University. A series of protests were occurring at the university about military training. On 5 June, almost every member of the party, except those in rural areas or outside the country, were arrested. The Japanese government used the
1923 Great Kantō earthquake as an excuse to crack down on suspected enemies of the state and murdered socialists, anarchists, communists, and labor officials. Ōsugi was
murdered in his prison cell. A group of Japanese communists, including Arahata, assembled in
Vladivostok in August, and decided to create a
proletarian party. Those members arrested in 1923, and released in 1924, believed that the conditions for a communist party were not present and decided to dissolve the party at the Morigasaki Conference in March. However,
Grigori Voitinsky rejected this and ordered them to reestablish the party. In August, a committee with Tokuda as chair was formed to reestablish the party.
Masanosuke Watanabe and Manabu Sano held positions in this committee and Arahata was an organizer in the
Kansai region. The JCP was formally reestablished on 4 December 1926.
Fukumoto Kazuo, a rising figure in Japanese communism, was a member and his ideology, Fukumotoism, was a main part of the platform. When the JCP was outlawed in 1925 with the passage of the
Peace Preservation Law, the JCP was subjected to repression and persecution by the
Special Higher Police (), nicknamed the "Thought Police". JCP members and sympathizers were imprisoned and pressured to "
convert" () to anti-communist nationalism. Many of those who refused to convert remained imprisoned for the duration of the
Pacific War. The Japanese Communist Party member
Hotsumi Ozaki, who was part of the
Richard Sorge spy ring for the
Kremlin, was the only Japanese person hanged for treason under the Peace Preservation Law. Police also commonly used methods of torture against arrested communists. One of the JCP members killed by police torture in this period was the writer
Kobayashi Takiji.
Hyōgikai was formed on 25 May 1925, and this union served as a vehicle for the communist party. Other proletariat parties (
Japan Farmers Party,
Japan Labour-Farmer Party,
Social Democratic Party, and
Labour-Farmer Party) were formed during this period.
Ikuo Oyama, the leader of the Labour-Farmer Party, was sympathetic to the Communists. These parties won several seats in the
1928 election, but a
crackdown on 15 March resulted in 1,200 people, including Communist leaders, being arrested and the Japanese government dissolved Hyōgikai and Labour-Farmer Party. Manabu Sano, Masanosuke Watanabe,
Shoichi Ichikawa, Kenzō Yamamoto, and Hideo Namba avoided arrest as they were serving as representatives to the
6th World Congress of the Communist International and reorganized the party. The Labour-Farmer Party was reconstituted, with opposition from the Comintern-affiliated communists, into the
Proletarian Masses Party with
Mosaburō Suzuki as Secretary General. Masanosuke Watanabe, the chair of the party, committed suicide on 6 October 1928, after being arrested. An attempt to reform Hyōgikai resulted in more arrests, so a new organization, the National Council of Japanese Labor Unions (Zenkyō), was formed as an underground group with 5,500 members on 25 December. Police found a chart of the JCP's district organization in Tokyo after arresting a prominent member on 18 March 1929. Shoichi Ichikawa was arrested on 28 April, Mitamura Shiro and Nabeyama Sadachika on 28 April, and Manabu Sano avoided arrest until his apprehension in Shanghai on 16 June 1929. Kenzo Yamamoto, who was sick in Moscow, was one of the few leaders not imprisoned. 81 high-ranking members of Zenkyō were arrested in April. The party was reconstituted by Seigen Tanaka, Zenshirō Zennō, and Sano Hiroshi in July. Many members wanted to dissolve the party as the Peace Preservation Law was amended to inflict the death penalty. A police raid led by a former wrestler arrested most of Seigen Tanaka's subordinates on 14 July 1930, and he was arrested later that same day. Kenzō Yamamoto was executed by the Soviets in 1939, after Sanzō Nosaka accused him of spying; Yamamoto's death was reported as 1942, and the truth about his death was not revealed until 1992. In 1932, Japanese authorities raided a meeting of members of the Japanese Communist Party in
Atami. According to a March 1933 article on the raid, the accused were not the "rag-tag-and-bobtail" of the people. Only a very small minority of the accused were laborers. Almost all the accused were of the "better classes". Among the accused were two judges, two professors of universities, lawyers, teachers, and students. Professor S.H Roberts of the
University of Sydney reported in a 1934 newspaper that "all Japan was stirred when it was realized that only a minority of prisoners were laborers." In addition, the arrested were also accused of being connected to the
Omori Bank Robbery.
Postwar reemergence On 4 October 1945, all political prisoners, including communists that had been imprisoned for decades, were ordered to be released by the
Allied military occupation of Japan. The first issue of
Shimbun Akahata after the end of the war thanked the Allied occupation for the "democratic revolution" that was occurring and called for the recreation of a communist political party. A national conference was held on 8 November 1945, and the 4th Party Congress was held from 1 to 2 December. This was the party's first congress in nineteen years. According to
Jacobin, the JCP, unlike the French, and Italian communists, emerged into the postwar period without an organizational base established through wartime resistance movements. As a result, the postwar JCP relied heavily on support of Korean activists in Japan. Of the roughly one thousand supporters who gathered in Western Tokyo to greet party members who had emerged from prison on 10 October 1945, half or more were Korean. Initially the JCP advocated for a united front with the Japan Socialist Party though this did not occur due to profound positional disagreements between the two parties. Nosaka returned to Japan after fourteen years in exile on 10 January 1946. Under the guidance of Nosaka, the party pursued a policy of portraying itself as "lovable". Nosaka's strategy involved avoiding open calls for violent revolution and taking advantage of the seemingly pro-labor stance of the Allied occupation to organize the urban working classes and win power at the ballot box and through propaganda. In particular, the party was successful in winning acceptance of the notion that communists had been the only ones to resist
Japanese wartime militarism. This propaganda effort won the party thousands of new members and an even larger number of sympathizers, especially among artists and intellectuals. Party membership, which never exceeded 1,000 in the pre-war period, rose from 1,180 in December 1945, to 7,500 by February 1946, 70,000 by December 1947, and over 100,000 by April 1950.
Sanbetsu, a union affiliated with the JCP, had around 1.5 million members as overall Japanese union membership rose to 6 million in the post-war period. The JCP benefited from Japan's
Korean population that was more favorable to communism due to discrimination and high unemployment rates. The JCP made dramatic gains in the
1949 Japanese general election, tripling its popular vote support and increasing its seat total from 4 to 35.
Red Purge and turn to violence Beginning in the fall of 1949, in reaction to the JCP's electoral success, increasing labor strikes, and as part of the "
Reverse Course" in Allied occupation policy amid rising
Cold War tensions, the Allied occupation authorities and the Japanese government carried out a sweeping
Red Purge, firing tens of thousands of communists and suspected communists from government posts, teaching positions at schools, and private corporations. The purge was further intensified in response to the outbreak of the
Korean War.
Douglas MacArthur considered banning the JCP on 3 May 1950. Twenty-four members of the party's central committee were removed from office on 6 June and its newspaper,
Shimbun Akahata, was suspended on 27 June. A total of 11,000 workers and 1,200 government workers were fired from 1949 to 1950. Union divisions and attacks on communist influence in labor led to Sanbetsu's membership falling to 400,000 by 1949. Against this backdrop in January 1950, the Soviet-led
Cominform, at the behest of Soviet premier
Joseph Stalin, issued a blistering criticism of the JCP's peaceful line as "opportunism" and "glorifying American imperialism". It also demanded that the JCP carry out an immediate violent revolution along Maoist lines. This devastating "Cominform Criticism" led rival JCP factions to compete for the Cominform's approval, and ultimately led to the militant which declared that "it would be a serious mistake to think that Japan's liberation can be achieved through peaceful, democratic means" and called for an immediate violent revolution. This thesis was a combination of late Stalinist and Maoist thought. The result was a campaign of violence in which JCP activists threw Molotov cocktails at police boxes and cadres were sent up into the mountains with instructions to organize ostensibly oppressed farmers into "
mountain guerrilla squads". The backlash to the JCP's new militant line was swift and severe as militants were rounded up, tried, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In the
1952 Japanese general election, voters vented their ire at the JCP by stripping the party of every single one of its 35 Diet seats, a blow from which it would take two decades to recover. Stunned, the JCP gradually began to pull back from its militant line, a process facilitated by the death of Stalin in 1953. At the 6th Party Congress in 1955, the JCP renounced the militant line completely, returning to its old "peaceful line" of gradually pursuing socialist revolution through peaceful, democratic means. and were informally controlling the JCP in the early 1950s. Tokuda's death in 1953 created a power vacuum in the party. Shida won and Itō was expelled from the party, having been accused of being a spy. Shida's influence waned in the late 1950s as Miyamoto, who became General Secretary in 1958, gained power. Members of Shida's faction later broke away to from a new JCP in September 1965. This group performed poorly in elections despite support from the Soviet Union. In 1959, the party held 11 seats in the prefectural assemblies, 349 seats in the city assemblies, and 565 in the town and village assemblies.
Anpo protests held the party's leadership position from 1958 to 1982. In 1960, the JCP played a central role in organizing the massive
Anpo protests against the
U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, which were the largest protests in Japanese history. The JCP took a different line than the
Japan Socialist Party,
Sohyo labor federation, and other groups who argued that the main target of the protest movement was Japanese monopoly capitalism. Instead, the JCP argued that the main enemy was American imperialism, and along with affiliated groups, focused its protests around the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Accordingly, JCP-linked groups were the driving force behind the "
Hagerty Incident" in which the car carrying U.S. President
Eisenhower's press secretary
James Hagerty was mobbed outside of Tokyo's
Haneda Airport on 10 June 1960, provoking a major international incident and helping to precipitate the downfall of the
Nobusuke Kishi cabinet. The Anpo protests were a turning point in the JCP's ongoing attempts to revive its political fortunes after the disastrous turn toward violent revolution in the early 1950s. Although the Maoists had been purged from the party following the earlier disaster, the JCP was still riven by the age-old rivalry between the Rōnō Ha (Worker-Farmer Faction) and the Kōza Ha (Lecture Faction), which dated back to the prewar era. Among other disagreements, the two factions disagreed over which stage of Marxist development Japan was currently in; the Rōnō Ha believed that Japan had already achieved full capitalism, which meant that an immediate socialist revolution was possible, whereas the Kōza Ha argued that Japan's transition to capitalism was not yet complete and that therefore what was needed was a "
two-stage" revolutionfirst a "democratic revolution" that would overthrow American imperialism and establish true democracy, and then a "socialist revolution" that would establish communism. Although the "mainstream" of the JCP, led by
Kenji Miyamoto, favored the Kōza Ha interpretation, as late as the 7th Party Congress in 1958 the "anti-mainstream" Rōnō Ha faction, led by Shōjirō Kasuga, still controlled around 40% of the delegates. The Anpo protests greatly strengthened the hand of the Kōza Ha faction. During the protest, the JCP, still scarred by the backlash to its violent line in the 1950s, consistently advocated peaceful, orderly, and restrained protests. This stance was highly unpopular with the radical student activists of the
Zengakuren student federation, who broke decisively with the JCP as a result and began to build a
New Left student movement. The movement proved unpopular with the broader public, and the JCP was able to use its image as a "peaceful" and "positive" force during the protests as a recruitment tool. Membership in the party soared during the course of the protests, doubling from 40,000 to 80,000, and most of the new recruits wound up supporting the Kōza Ha line.
Zenith Over the remainder of the 1960s, the Kōza Ha was able to purge many members from the Rōnō Ha faction, and others, dissatisfied with JCP policies, quit the party of their own accord. Miyamoto was able to cement his control over the party and reigned as party chairman all the way until 1982. Meanwhile, the party's membership continued to grow rapidly, and the party began to make steady gains at the ballot box, winning more and more seats in the
National Diet. By the mid-1960s, the
United States Department of State estimated party membership to be approximately 120,000 (0.2% of the working-age population), Miyamoto reported a membership above 100,000 in 1964, and the party had acquired around 300,000 members by 1970. The JCP's vote totals in the prefectural assemblies doubled between the 1959 and 1963 elections and their seats rose from 12 to 22 despite running 200 fewer candidates. The JCP's vote totals and seats in city council elections rose from 509,069 to 880,991 votes and 218 to 369 seats. Their vote totals in the town council elections doubled and their seats rose from 168 to 314. The JCP's revenue of $9 million in 1969, was larger than all of the other parties except for the LDP. In the
1972 Japanese general election, the JCP won an astonishing 38 seats in the Diet, surpassing its 1949 high of 35 and signaling the party's full recovery from the disastrous militant line of the early 1950s. Party membership continued to grow in the 1970s, albeit at a slower rate than in the 1960s, reaching approximately 500,000 members by 1980. By the 1970s the JCP was the largest non-ruling communist party in the world.
1990s to 21st century Ward, pictured in 2018 After the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, the JCP released a press statement titled "We welcome the end of a party which embodied the historical evil of
great power chauvinism and
hegemonism". The party also criticized the Eastern Bloc countries which abandoned socialism, describing their decisions as a "reversal of history". Consequently, the party did not suffer an internal crisis as a result of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, nor did it consider disbanding or changing its name; however, owing to a significant loss in electoral support, the party revised its policies in the 1990s and became a more traditional
democratic socialist party. however, the party failed to increase its number of seats in the
2009 Japanese general election. Subsequently, the projected decline of the party was halted, with the JCP becoming the third-largest party in the
Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, and also making gains in the House of Councillors, going from six to 11 seats. The party surged in the 2014 elections, receiving 7,040,130 votes (13.3%) in the constituency section and 6,062,962 (11.37%) in the party lists. During the nomination period of the
2016 Japanese House of Councillors election, the party signed an agreement with the
Democratic,
Social Democratic and
People's Life parties to field a jointly endorsed candidate in each of the 32 districts in which only one seat was contested, uniting in an attempt to take control of the House from the LDP–Komeito coalition. JCP leaders expressed willingness to enter into a coalition with the Democratic Party, a notion which was rejected by then-Democratic Party President
Katsuya Okada as being "impossible" in the near future due to what he viewed as some of the "extreme leftist policies" promoted by the JCP. The party had three Councillors up for re-election and fielded a total of 56 candidates in the election, down from 63 candidates in the 2013 election, but still the second-highest number after the LDP. Only 14 of those candidates contested single- and multi-member districts, while 42 contested the 48-seat national proportional representation block. Councillor
Tomoko Tamura was appointed as the party's first chairwoman on 18 January 2024, replacing Kazuo Shii who had occupied the role for over 23 years. ==Ideology and policies==