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 270,000 members as of 2020, 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 in the 1970s to elect a number of progressive mayors and governors. By 1979, the JCP held about 10 percent 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 JCP did not suffer an internal crisis after the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, though its overall electoral strength remains in decline, despite a brief resurgence after the collapse of the Japan Socialist Party in 1996.

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.