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 political party in the country. It has 250,000 members as of 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 was repressed by the Japanese government in the three decades immediately following its founding. The Allied occupation of Japan legalized the JCP after World War II, but the party's unexpected success in the 1949 general election led to the "Red Purge", in which the Japanese government removed tens of thousands of actual and suspected communists from their jobs. The Soviet Union encouraged the JCP to respond with a violent revolution; the consequent internal debate fractured the party into several factions. The dominant faction, backed by the Soviets, waged an unsuccessful guerrilla campaign in Japan's 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. His efforts to regain electoral support were particularly successful in 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.
Miyamoto also began distancing the JCP from the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s. The party did not take sides during the Sino-Soviet split and declared its support for multi-party democracy, as opposed to the one-party politics of China and the Soviet Union. 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 scientific socialism and 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 current constitutional position of the emperor 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.
History[edit]
Prewar roots[edit]
The Japanese Communist Party was founded in Tokyo on 15 July 1922.[2] Its early leadership was drawn from the anarcho-syndicalist and Christian socialist movements that developed around the turn of the century. From the former came Yamakawa Hitoshi, Sakai Toshihiko, and Arahata Kanson, who had all been supporters of Kōtoku Shūsui, an anarchist executed in 1911. Katayama Sen, 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.[6][7] In the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, there was a campaign of rumors instigated by Japanese state authorities that incited widespread massacres of suspected enemies of the state by military, police, and vigilante forces. Military and police officials assassinated key leftist leaders under the cover of martial law, including Ōsugi Sakae.[8]
Membership[edit]
During the 1980s, party membership began to decline, falling to 500,000 by 1990[38] and 370,000 by 1997.[23]
Following its advancement in the 2013 Tokyo prefectural election, the party enjoyed an increase in membership growth, with over 1,000 people joining in each of the final three months of 2013. Approximately 20% of new members during this period were aged 20 to 40, showing a higher ratio of young people joining the party than in the past. The JCP had approximately 320,000 members in January 2014.[94]
More recently, however, membership numbers have declined, with membership around 300,000 in 2017, 270,000 in 2020,[95] and 250,000 in 2024.[4]
Electoral performance[edit]
House of Representatives[edit]
Prior to 1996, the entire House of Representatives was elected by majoritarian / "semi-proportional" voting systems with votes cast for individuals (1946: limited voting in multi-member districts, 1947 to 1993 SNTV in multi-member districts). Since 1996, the House of Representatives is elected in a parallel election system—essentially two separate elections only in the lower house complicated by the fact that a candidate may stand in both segments and the sekihairitsu system which ties proportional list ranking to FPTP results: only the majority of members the House of Representatives, 295 (initially 300) seats, are elected in a majoritarian system with voting for candidates (first-past-the-post in single-member districts), while the remaining 180 (initially 200) seats are elected by a proportional representation system (votes are cast for party lists in regional multi-member districts, called "blocks" in the House of Representatives). The votes and vote percentages in the table below are the JCP candidates' vote totals for the whole election from before 1993 and just the votes for the party in the election to the 180 proportional seats after 1996.
The JCP polled 11.3% of the vote in 2000, 8.2% in 2003, 7.3% in 2005, 7.0% in 2009, and 6.2% in 2012. These results seemed to indicate a trend of declining support, but the party won 21 seats in 2014, up from eight in the previous general election, as the JCP received 7,040,130 votes (13.3%) in the constituency section and 6,062,962 (11.37%) in the party lists. This continued a new wave of support that was also evident in the 2013 Tokyo prefectural election in which the party doubled its representation. Fighting on a platform directly opposed to neoliberalism, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, attempts to rewrite the constitution, United States Forces Japan, and nuclear power, the JCP tapped into a minority current that seeks an alternative to Japan's rightward direction.[96] Following the 2016 Japanese House of Councillors election, the party held 13 seats in the House of Councillors.[97] After the 2017 Japanese general election, the party held 12 seats in the House of Representatives, and since the 2021 Japanese general election, it holds 10 seats.