Japanese Communist Party

The Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党, Nihon Kyōsan-tō; abbr. JCP) is a communist 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, engaging in underground activity. 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 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.