The Japanese Communist Party: Organization and Resilience in the Midst of Adversity

Abstract

A RGUABLY, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) is the largest nonruling Communist party in the advanced industrial democracies in terms of party and front organizational membership, party newspaper readership and electoral support.' With the exit of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from communism, the JCP became the largest nonruling Communist party by default rather than by a marked increase in its mass popularity. (See appendix 1). Unlike the PCI, which had transformed itself into a social democratic party, the JCP has retained its Marxist ideology and the organizational principle of democratic centralism. Notwithstanding the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR and an overall crisis of communism, the JCP had succeeded in minimizing its electoral decline and had even staged a modest electoral recovery in the July 1995 Upper House Elections.2 In that election, theJCP captured 9.5 percent of the votes cast in the party proportional list in contrast to 7.9 percent three years earlier. In the April 1995 local elections, the JCP obtained 6.6 percent of the votes in the prefectural assemblies and 12.0 percent of the votes cast in the special-designated cities. Four years earlier, it won only 6.3 percent of the prefectural votes and 11.8 percent from the special-designated cities.3