The Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党, Nihon Kyōsan-tō; abbr. JCP) is a major political party in Japan. Founded in 1922, it is the oldest active political party in the country. It had 250,000 members as of January 2024, making it one of the largest non-governing communist parties in the world. The party is chaired by Tomoko Tamura, who replaced longtime leader Kazuo Shii in January 2024.
The JCP, founded in 1922 in consultation with the Comintern, was deemed illegal in 1925 and repressed for the next 20 years, while continuing its activities underground. After World War II, the party was legalized in 1945 by the Allied occupation authorities, but its unexpected success in the 1949 Japanese general election led to the "Red Purge", in which tens of thousands of actual and suspected communists, along with their sympathizers, were fired from their jobs in government, education, and industry. The Soviet Union encouraged the JCP to respond with a violent revolution, and the resulting internal debate fractured the party into several factions. The dominant faction, backed by the Soviets, waged an unsuccessful guerrilla campaign (Mountain Village Operation Units) in rural areas, which undercut the party's public support.
In 1958, Kenji Miyamoto became the JCP's leader and moderated the party's policies, abandoning the previous line of violent revolution and extremism. Miyamoto also began distancing the JCP from the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s. The party maintained a neutral position during the Sino-Soviet split and expressed its support for a multi-party system of liberal democracy in contrast to the authoritarian one-party systems of Communist-led nations such as the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Measures were also undertaken to expel members who were aligned with either pro-Soviet or pro-China positions. His efforts to regain electoral support were particularly successful in the main urban areas such as Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and the JCP worked with the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) in the 1970s to elect a number of progressive mayors and governors. By 1979, the JCP held about 10% of the seats in the National Diet. The party saw a brief electoral resurgence after the collapse of the JSP in 1996; however, the party has generally been in decline since in terms of electoral results and party membership.
The party at present advocates the establishment of a democratic society based on pacificism. It believes that this objective can be achieved by working within an electoral framework while carrying out an extra-parliamentary struggle against "imperialism and its subordinate ally, monopoly capital". As such, the JCP does not advocate violent revolution, but rather a "democratic revolution" to achieve "democratic change in politics and the economy". It accepts the constitutional position of the Emperor of Japan but opposes the involvement of the Imperial House in politics. A staunchly anti-militarist party, the JCP firmly supports Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution and seeks to dissolve the Japan Self-Defense Forces. It opposes Japan's military alliance with the United States as an unequal relationship and infringement of Japan's national sovereignty.
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 was also alleged to remain low.
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 (Tokkō), nicknamed the "Thought Police". JCP members and sympathizers were imprisoned and pressured to "convert" (tenkō suru) 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.