Yuri Chekalin
Japan is usually associated with cutting-edge technology, neon-lit Tokyo, bullet trains, and the triumph of corporate capitalism.
Yet for more than a century, Japan has also been home to one of the most unusual political phenomena in the modern world: the Japanese Communist Party, or JCP.
Its story began on July 15, 1922, when a small group of Japanese Marxists founded an underground party linked to the international communist movement and the Comintern. At the time, the very idea of communism in Japan was almost synonymous with treason.
But the party did not disappear.
It survived police repression, prisons and torture, militarism, war, the American occupation, the Cold War, pressure from Moscow, internal schisms, armed struggle by some of its radicals, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of an era in which the word “communism” seemed synonymous with world revolution.
And today, the JCP still exists.
Indeed, it is one of Japan’s oldest political parties.
That is why the history of Japanese communism is interesting not merely as the history of one political organization. It is a kind of political experiment: what happens to a revolutionary ideology when the revolution never actually takes place?
Revolution in the Land of the Emperor
When the JCP emerged in 1922, Japan was profoundly different from the country we know today.
The imperial system possessed enormous political and symbolic authority. The military and bureaucracy played exceptionally important roles. Japan was expanding its empire across Asia, while the state viewed socialists, anarchists, and communists with deep suspicion.
In 1925, the government enacted the Peace Preservation Law. It allowed the authorities to prosecute people suspected of seeking to alter Japan’s national system or abolish private property.
For communists, the message was clear: Underground.
Japan’s political police, the Tokkō, became the principal instrument for suppressing left-wing organizations.
Arrests were widespread. Suspects were interrogated, subjected to brutal treatment, and pressured to renounce their beliefs. Many communists ended up in prison.
But Japanese communists continued their work.
Bukharin and the Japanese Revolution: How Moscow Shaped the JCP’s Course
There is one document in the history of the Japanese Communist Party that reveals, perhaps better than many later declarations, just how closely the young party was tied to Moscow.
It was the Comintern Theses on Japan, adopted by the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on July 15, 1927. The document is commonly known as the “27 Theses” or the “July Theses of Bukharin.” In the archives of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, it is recorded as an official Comintern document. On the same day, Nikolai Bukharin delivered a report on the Japanese question before the Presidium of the Comintern.
The significance of the document is difficult to overstate.
The Comintern was, in effect, defining how Japanese communists were supposed to understand their own country—and what kind of revolution they were supposed to prepare for.
The central argument contained a paradox.
Japan had already become a capitalist power.
The Meiji Restoration had opened the way for capitalist development, and the old political order had gradually evolved into a bourgeois state. Yet Japanese capitalism remained closely connected to the landed elite, the monarchy, the bureaucracy, and the military. Japan was portrayed as a distinctive bloc of capitalists and landlords operating under bourgeois leadership.
That led to a second conclusion: the Japanese revolution could not simply be a copy of the Russian Revolution.
The Comintern argued that political tasks of a bourgeois-democratic character had to be addressed first—above all, the destruction of the monarchical system—before a transition to socialist revolution could take place. At the same time, the theses rejected the expectation that the Japanese bourgeoisie would become a reliable revolutionary ally of the communists.
But the most important feature of the document was its international context.
Bukharin viewed Japan primarily as an imperialist power in East Asia. Japanese expansion in China and the possibility of war against the Soviet Union became central concerns for the Japanese communist movement. Studies of the theses identify precisely these two issues as their principal political themes.
The JCP, therefore, was expected to fight not only to transform Japanese society. It was also becoming part of a much broader Comintern strategy in East Asia: opposing Japanese imperialism in China and countering the possibility of a Japanese war against the Soviet Union.
Nikolai Bukharin was the principal architect and presenter of the theses, although formally they were adopted by the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In 1927, Bukharin still occupied a leading position within the organization.
The fact that the political direction of the JCP was being decided in Moscow, that Japanese communists participated only in discussions over the party’s course within the Comintern, and that the final political formula was approved by the Comintern Presidium reveals the degree of dependence of the young party on the international communist center.
The JCP’s national revolutionary strategy was, to a considerable extent, being formulated outside Japan itself.
That is why the history of the “27 Theses” matters for more than just the biography of Bukharin. It is an early example of how the Comintern sought to transform individual communist parties into components of a unified international political system.
Interestingly, in November 1930, the Comintern produced a special document entitled “The Principal Errors of the 1927 Theses on Japan.” This shows that the theses themselves subsequently came to be treated as a distinct political conception—one that could be criticized and revised.
In 1928, the JCP began publishing Sekki, or Red Flag, which later became known as Akahata.
For an underground party, a newspaper was much more than a newspaper.
It was a connection between people.
Information.
Propaganda.
An organizational center.
And at the same time, a symbol that the party was still alive.
A Country Where You Could Die for Communism
The prewar history of the JCP is particularly important because the party was nearly destroyed by state repression.
By the mid-1930s, its underground organization had been dismantled. Many of its leaders were in prison.
But here a fascinating paradox emerges.
The Japanese Communist Party was part of an international communist movement oriented toward Moscow. Within Japan, it opposed militarism, colonial expansion, and war.
This gave the party a unique historical position.
As the Japanese state gradually transformed itself into a military-imperial power, the communists spoke of an entirely different future.
They opposed war and militarism.
They demanded workers’ rights.
They called for political freedoms.
They sought to transform the social order.
The JCP would later make this experience a central element of its own historical mythology.
For the party, the prewar communists became people who had refused to renounce their beliefs even in the face of imprisonment and death.
And this was not merely political rhetoric.
For some of them, it was literally true.
1945: The Americans Release the Communists from Prison
Then something happened that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few years earlier.
Japan lost the war.
The emperor announced the surrender.
American troops entered the country.
General Douglas MacArthur took command of the occupation administration.
And American occupation policy helped Japanese communists emerge from the underground.
Political prisoners were released, old restrictions were lifted, and the Communist Party was allowed to operate legally.
History sometimes has a remarkable sense of irony.
The Americans who, only a few years later, would confront Japanese communists during the Cold War initially created the conditions for their political return.
In 1946, the JCP took part in the first postwar elections and won five seats in parliament.
Three years later came a genuine political earthquake.
In the 1949 election, the communists won 35 seats in the House of Representatives.
For a party that had only recently existed underground, it was an extraordinary result.
Japan was struggling through difficult postwar years. Destroyed cities, inflation, food shortages, unemployment, and social instability created fertile ground for left-wing politics.
The communists were saying what many workers wanted to hear.
They demanded higher wages, stronger trade-union rights, social protections, and democratization.
For a moment, it seemed that Japanese communism had finally found a path to becoming a mass movement.
Then the Cold War began.
When an Ally Became an Enemy
After 1947–48, the American administration’s attitude toward Japanese communists began to change sharply.
For Washington, the central issue was no longer simply democratizing defeated Japan. It was turning the country into a reliable American ally in East Asia.
The Chinese Revolution, the growing Soviet-American confrontation, and the Korean War only accelerated the process.
The Red Purge began.
Communists and people suspected of communist sympathies were dismissed from government agencies, newspapers, radio stations, and major corporations. Thousands lost their jobs.
The former liberators of Japanese communists had gradually become their political opponents.
But the greatest crisis was taking place inside the JCP itself.
1950: Moscow Demands Revolution
On January 6, 1950, the Cominform published a criticism of an article by Sanzo Nosaka, one of the JCP’s leading figures. Nosaka had advocated the idea of a “peaceful revolution” in Japan. The Cominform, by contrast, effectively demanded a revision of this approach.
The Japanese party split between an “International Faction,” which opposed outside intervention, and the Tokuda–Nosaka group, which accepted the Cominform’s criticism.
It was a decisive moment.
Moscow no longer regarded the Japanese communists’ parliamentary strategy as acceptable.
For Stalin, the Japanese Communist Party was acquiring a completely new significance.
It was no longer supposed to be merely a legal party seeking parliamentary influence. It was expected to become a force capable of opposing the American presence and potential Japanese remilitarization.
American diplomatic documents from the period likewise recorded that the Cominform criticism was aimed at fundamentally changing the JCP’s strategy and turning it into a harder revolutionary organization.
On June 6, 1950, the occupation authorities purged JCP leaders from public life. General Secretary Kyuichi Tokuda and other leaders were forced out of legal political activity.
Tokuda and his supporters subsequently moved to China. From there, a new phase in the party’s history began.
Part of the JCP leadership operated from abroad under strong Soviet and Chinese influence. Inside Japan, another group emerged, later known as the International Faction, associated above all with Kenji Miyamoto.
The JCP had effectively developed several competing organizational centers.
1951: The Final Turn Toward Armed Struggle
In 1951, the party adopted a new program—the famous 1951 Platform (1951 nen Kōryō).
It rejected the idea that revolutionary transformation in Japan could be achieved through peaceful parliamentary means.
At the same time, the so-called military line emerged: the creation of underground organizations and armed groups and preparations for revolutionary insurrection.
Research by Japanese historian Fumiki Matsuma shows that in 1951 the JCP leadership adopted a new political platform prepared with direct participation from the Kremlin. It was this platform that became associated with the party’s turn toward armed struggle.
A brief and deeply painful period followed, later remembered as the era of the “Red Guerrilla.”
There were attacks, arson, clashes with police, and other forms of political violence.
It is important, however, not to confuse the various organizations and factions of the Japanese radical left.
Later extremist groups—including the Japanese Red Army—were not simply the “armed wing” of the JCP.
But for the Communist Party itself, this period was disastrous.
Japanese society saw that at least part of the revolutionary left was genuinely prepared to move from elections and strikes to violence.
The JCP’s reputation suffered severely.
And this experience would later become one of the reasons for its definitive rejection of armed revolution.
Kenji Miyamoto and Revolution Without the Rifle
The turning point came in the mid-1950s.
Kenji Miyamoto became one of the leading figures of the party’s new leadership.
In 1955, the JCP held its Sixth National Conference, or Sixth Party Congress. It rejected the previous ultra-left course and laid the foundation for restoring the party’s organizational unity.
In 1957, the leadership formally began reviewing the “1950 problem,” and in 1958 it definitively established the principle of independence and autonomy—rejecting interference by foreign communist powers in the Japanese communist movement.
By 1958, the JCP had restored organizational unity and begun constructing an entirely new political course.
The key word was: independence.
The party no longer wanted to be an instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy.
Later, it would be equally critical of Beijing.
This was unusual in the communist movement of the Cold War.
Soviet and Chinese communists might quarrel with each other, but both operated on the assumption that some form of international center of communist politics existed.
The Japanese gradually said: No.
Japan would follow its own path.
In 1961, a new program formalized the party’s commitment to democratic transformation and parliamentary struggle.
Revolution no longer meant armed insurrection.
The assumption now was that society could be changed through elections, trade unions, municipal politics, parliament, and mass movements.
This was arguably the most important turning point in the entire history of the JCP.
The communists abandoned the expectation of a revolutionary assault.
They began building a party designed to survive for decades.
And that calculation proved remarkably farsighted.
The Communists Build Their Own Little Japan
The JCP understood something simple: if it could not seize the state, it had to learn how to operate inside society.
And this is where one of the most fascinating chapters in its history begins.
The party built its own infrastructure.
A newspaper.
Publishing houses.
Trade-union organizations.
Local party branches.
Public campaigns.
Medical organizations.
Cultural and educational projects.
The network of medical institutions associated with the democratic medicine movement MIN-IREN became one of the most visible components of Japan’s left-wing infrastructure.
This was a very different kind of communism.
It was a vast network of people dealing every day with municipal politics, trade unions, medicine, newspapers, and elections.
And once again, Akahata came to the center of the story.
The Newspaper That Fed the Party
Akahata, or Red Flag, became one of the most important assets of the Japanese Communist Party.
The newspaper first appeared in 1928 and survived almost the entire history of the party.
It was shut down.
It was banned by the occupation authorities.
Then it returned.
It was printed.
Distributed.
And used to build its own audience.
At the height of the party’s influence, the Sunday edition of Akahata reached an audience of several million.
Today, the numbers are much smaller. The JCP itself reports a combined circulation of roughly 850,000 copies for its daily and Sunday editions.
But the principle remains the same.
The party has its own media outlet, independent of government funding and major commercial corporations.
For a political organization, that is an enormous advantage.
A newspaper provides more than influence. It provides money.
That is one reason the Japanese Communist Party has been able to maintain one of the most durable financial models among Japan’s smaller political parties.
The Golden Age
During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese communism experienced a genuine revival.
Japan was becoming rapidly wealthier.
But the economic miracle also produced social conflicts.
Workers demanded higher wages.
Students protested against the Vietnam War.
Society debated the role of American military bases.
Environmental disasters forced people to confront the price of industrial development.
At precisely this moment, the JCP was able to present itself less as a party of world revolution and more as a party of concrete social demands.
In the 1972 election, the JCP won 39 seats in the House of Representatives, marking one of its strongest electoral performances to that point.
Seven years later, in 1979, the party matched that total, winning another 39 seats. It secured 10.42 percent of the vote, with more than 5.5 million Japanese voters supporting the communists.
The number of seats was the same as in 1972. What made the 1979 result remarkable was that the JCP had consolidated itself as a major parliamentary opposition force at the height of Japan’s postwar economic success.
In a country that was already becoming one of the centers of global capitalism, roughly one in ten voters chose the communists.
It was a uniquely Japanese paradox.
The economic miracle did not destroy the communists.
It turned them into a parliamentary opposition.
Why Did They Never Come to Power?
The answer has several parts.
First, Japan proved to be an extraordinarily successful capitalist society.
Millions of people gained homes, education, stable employment, and eventually entered the middle class.
Then there was the Liberal Democratic Party.
For decades, it provided political stability and successfully incorporated a remarkable range of interests, from major corporations to rural communities, into its political system.
Finally, the communists were burdened by the memory of the Cold War itself.
Even an independent JCP could not entirely escape the word “communism,” which many Japanese associated with the Soviet Union, China, and revolutionary violence.
The party therefore gradually chose a different role.
Not to seize the system.
But to push it continuously to the left.
The Constitution Instead of the Barricades
One of the most important symbols of modern Japanese communism became Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.
It begins: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation…”
For the JCP, this is more than a legal provision.
It is a political banner.
The party has consistently opposed Japanese remilitarization, the expansion of the capabilities of the Self-Defense Forces, and the strengthening of Japan’s military alliance with the United States.
As a result, the Japanese communist of the 21st century can look surprisingly different.
He or she may talk about the Constitution.
Social welfare.
Women’s rights.
Overwork.
Environmental problems.
Peace policy.
And only somewhere toward the end of the conversation does the word “revolution” appear.
Communism vs. Overwork
By the end of the 20th century, the JCP was searching for a new political language.
Japanese society had changed.
Lifetime employment was no longer a universal norm.
An enormous population of irregular workers emerged—freeters, temporary employees, and people employed on short-term contracts.
The working class had changed.
And the party changed with it.
The JCP increasingly focused on the minimum wage, overtime, insecure employment, social protections, and the rights of younger workers.
Instead of the old slogan, “Workers of the world, unite,” the language became much easier for a modern Japanese worker to understand:
How many hours do you work? How much are you paid? And what happens to you if you lose your job?
That is one reason Japanese communism proved far more resilient than one might have expected.
It learned to talk not only about Marx.
It learned to talk about paychecks.
1991: The Soviet Union Disappears
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was a catastrophe for many communist parties around the world.
For the Japanese Communist Party, it was almost the opposite.
The JCP did not mourn the disappearance of the USSR.
Japanese communists had long criticized the Soviet model and regarded the Soviet Union as an example of the bureaucratic distortion of the socialist ideal.
In party rhetoric, the collapse of the Soviet Union could therefore be interpreted not as the defeat of socialism, but as the collapse of a system that had itself betrayed socialist principles.
And here the Japanese party gained an important advantage.
It could tell its voters:
We warned you that the Soviet system was not the only possible form of socialism.
That allowed the JCP to survive 1991 without organizational collapse.
But the price was high.
The word “communism” itself lost much of its former appeal.
The world had changed.
The Cold War was over.
Japan entered an era of prolonged economic stagnation.
And for a new generation, the central political questions were no longer “socialism or capitalism,” but employment, housing, demographics, inequality, and quality of life.
A Woman Takes the Helm
Another symbolic turning point came in January 2024.
Tomoko Tamura became the first woman to lead the JCP in its more than century-long history. She was elected at the party congress in Atami.
The fact itself was remarkable.
A party born in 1922 in a world of underground revolutionary cells was now being led by a female parliamentarian.
Tamura became known for her work on labor relations, social policy, gender equality, and government accountability.
Her rise to the leadership was part of an effort to modernize the party’s image and appeal to a broader audience.
The symbolism was stronger than any party declaration.
Twenty-first-century Japanese communism no longer looks exclusively like a movement of male factory workers.
It is trying to speak to women, young people, irregular workers, and people who are simply dissatisfied with existing politics.
What Remains of the Revolution?
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the modern JCP is that the revolution has almost disappeared from its political practice—but not from its theory.
The party still speaks of socialism.
It still regards capitalism as a historically transient system.
It still uses Marxist terminology.
But at the same time, it participates in elections, works in parliament, builds coalitions, competes for municipal seats, and defends the existing Constitution.
It is an extraordinary political hybrid.
A revolutionary party that learned how to become parliamentary.
The Japanese Paradox
In 1922, Japanese communists dreamed of revolution.
In the 1930s, they fought simply for the right to remain free.
In 1945, the Americans unexpectedly helped them emerge from the underground.
In 1949, they won 35 parliamentary seats.
In the 1950s, they experienced a split and a period of armed struggle.
In 1958, they began building a new party—independent of both Moscow and Beijing.
In the 1970s, they became one of the country’s largest opposition forces.
In 1991, they survived the disappearance of the Soviet Union.
In the 21st century, they began talking about freeters, overtime, women, environmental protection, and social welfare.
And in 2024, for the first time, a woman became leader of the party.
According to the party’s own figures as of February 2026, the JCP has approximately 250,000 members, around 17,000 local organizations, and roughly 2,200 representatives in local government. Following the 2026 elections, it holds four seats in the House of Representatives and seven in the House of Councillors.
This is no longer a party preparing to seize power tomorrow. But neither is it a museum piece.
It is a political organization with its own newspaper, infrastructure, cadres, and a durable electoral base.
The Communism That Learned to Wait
Perhaps that is why the history of Japanese communism is far more interesting than the simple formula of “revolution—victory—dictatorship,” or “revolution—defeat—disappearance.”
Japan produced a third possibility.
The revolution never happened.
But the revolutionary party survived.
It abandoned armed insurrection, outlived its original allies and enemies, and gradually became part of the very political system it had once intended to destroy.
There is almost a Zen-like paradox here.
To preserve the idea of revolution, Japanese communists had to abandon revolutionary tactics.
They stopped waiting for the barricades and began waiting for the next election cycle.
They stopped building underground cells and began building municipal organizations.
They stopped speaking only about world revolution and began talking about wages, hospitals, schools, and working hours.
And that is why the history of Japanese communism is, ultimately, not so much the story of communism’s victory. It is the story of its extraordinary ability to adapt.
The Japanese Communist Party did not destroy capitalism. It learned how to exist inside it.
Kamil Askerkhanov
Alexander Rimov
Robert Reich
