The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) is a communist political party in Japan. The party was founded in 1922 by anarcho-syndicalist activists Yamakawa Hitoshi, Sakai Toshihiko, and Arahata Kanson and the Christian socialist activist Katayama Sen. The JCP brought together anarchists and Christian socialists, and they were quickly driven underground; many communists (including Osugi Sakae) were massacred by military, police, and vigilante forces following the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, and the party was banned in 1925. The JCP was subjected to repression and persecution by the Special Higher Police thought police, and detained members were pressured to convert to anti-communist nationalism. After World War II, the American occupiers emptied Japan's prisons of political dissidents, and the party, led by Sanzo Nosaka, attempted to portray itself as "lovable" by taking advantage of the pro-labor stance of the Allied occupation of Japan to organize the urban working classes and win power at the ballot box rather than through violent revolution. In 1949, the party won 10% of the vote and sent 35 representatives to the Diet. However, the "Reverse Course" in Allied occupation policy following the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 saw the Allied occupiers and Japanese government carry out a "Red Purge", firing tens of thousands of communists from government posts, teaching positions at schools, and private corporations. At the same time, amid the Korean War, the Soviet government attempted to force the JCP to carry out an immediate violent revolution along Maoist lines, leading to JCP activists throwing Molotov cocktails at police boxes and organizing farmers into "mountain guerrilla squads". The government cracked down, while voters wiped out the JCP at the 1952 general election. The party reverted to its democratic socialist line in 1955, and it organized the Anpo protests in 1960. The party's membership doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 as a result of the protests, and it came to have 120,000 members by the mid-1960s and 300,000 members by 1970. The party's abandonment of Marxism-Leninism in 1976 proved popular among Japanese voters, and the party surpassed its 1949 results by winning 38 seats in the Diet in 1972 and reached 500,000 members by 1980.
After the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, the JCP celebrated the end of its "great power chauvinism and hegemonism," but it experienced a significant loss of electoral support and was forced to become a more traditional democratic-socialist party in the 1990s. By the 21st century, the party's core support bases were the teachers and professors' unions, and LDP ministers frequently attacked the unions for their open distribution of communist campaign literature to students. The party was the most progressive in Japanese politics, spearheading the gay rights and feminist movements. The party also supported a non-aligned foreign policy, an end to the alliance with America, and reconciliation with South Korea. The JCP was staunch rivals with Komeito, as both parties competed for the vote of disillusioned and disenfranchised voters; Komeito traditionally won the support of rural migrants to urban centers, where the JCP also attempted to win over the working-class urbanite vote.
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