Japanese Communist Party Research Articles

A critical overview of Zainichi Korean films since 1945

ABSTRACT This paper gives an overview of the history of Zainichi Korean films from 1945 to the present and explores the historical environment and popular demands that drove the production of major works. After World War II, the Zainichi Korean community took on the challenge of film production for the first time on the strength of GHQ’s favorable policies and cultural solidarity with the Japanese socialists. This challenge, which began with newsreels and documentary films, soon entered a long period of stagnation due to the political upheaval of the time, a conflict with GHQ, and deteriorating relations with the Japanese Communist Party. In the 1970s, Zainichi films gradually began to revive, centering on the documentary genre, thanks to Zainichi Korean directors who had learned production skills under progressive Japanese filmmakers. As the mini-theater boom in the 1980s created an environment in which small-scale, non-mainstream films could be distributed and consumed in Japan, Zainichi films gradually expanded their scope through the production of various drama films. At last, the Zainichi Korean film genre finally began to establish itself firmly in Japanese film history. In particular, after the 2000s when the Korean Wave (Hallyu) phenomenon became noticeable in Japan, female directors and South Korean directors emerged to capture minor and workaday issues from multifaceted perspectives, and the general public in Japan enthusiastically consumed their works. Zainichi Korean films continue to strive to embrace both social issues and mass appeal.

Two Communist Esperantists: A Bulgarian-Japanese Dialogue

The Japanese Kurisu Kei (1910–2009) and the Bulgarian Nikola Aleksiev (1909–2002) never met. They were devoted to communism (for which they were imprisoned several times) and at the same time enthused about Esperanto. In 1933–34, Kurisu received a coded warning from a Soviet citizen (a veteran Communist and Esperantist) against Stalin’s terror regime. Kurisu put this experience aside for a long time. In the 1930s, he used Esperanto to spread Georgi Dimitrov's plea for an anti-fascist popular front in Japan. He became a renowned translator from Czech literature and maintained a worldwide correspondence. It was not until 1951 that he left the Japanese Communist Party. His Esperanto involvement contributed significantly to the departure from communist beliefs. In 1992, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, he got in touch with Aleksiev, who had been a leading figure for the party in Bulgaria and for the Esperanto movement as well. Kurisu accused him of having unswervingly defended the imperialist policy of the Soviet Union. Aleksiev exercised some self-criticism. He admitted that communist rule had not been brought down by the class enemy , but by its own mistakes and crimes , and recalled an old taboo: the murder of Soviet Esperantists under Stalin.

Political Party Affiliation and COVID-19 Vaccination Status in Japan, 2022.

An association has been reported between political affiliations and vaccination worldwide. In Japan, a significant proportion of the population are non-partisans, and major political parties advocate COVID-19 vaccination. The association between supporting political parties and COVID-19 vaccination coverage in Japan remains unclear.This study aims to investigate the relationship between political party affiliation and COVID-19 vaccination status in Japan. Methods: This study utilized data from large-scale nationwide internet surveys conducted in Japan in 2022, with a sample size of 21,162 participants. The surveys collected information on participants' COVID-19 vaccination status and political party affiliation. The political parties included in the analysis were the Liberal Democratic Party, the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Komeito, the Japanese Communist Party, the Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai), and the Reiwa Shinsengumi, as well as non-partisans. Logistic regression analysis was performed to examine the relationship between political partisanship and COVID-19 vaccine status. The analysis controlled for potential confounding variables such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, and geographic location. The odds of being unvaccinated were lower for supporters of large political groups (e.g. Liberal Democratic Party {OR 0.6; 95% CI, 0.5-0.7}), while higher for small political groups (e.g. Reiwa Shinsengumi {OR 2.6; 95% CI, 1.9-3.6}), in comparison with non-partisan. Political affiliation may be associated with vaccination disparities in Japan. Supporters of minor parties were more likely to be unvaccinated than those of the larger parties.However, this study has several limitations, including self-reporting bias andselection bias due to the Internet survey methodology.

The Failures and Changes of the Japanese Left, led by Tetsuzo Fuwa in the Localization of Marxism

This research explores the similarities and differences between the Chinese rhetoric and the Japaneseization of Marxism. It does so in order to present the failure of socialist movements in Japan regardless of whether those movements opt for a revolutionary strategy or gain power through parliamentary democracy. As a result of the altered conditions, the Japanese Communist Party has enacted a variety of party policies, both internal and external, that take into account all local and worldwide problems, and has made more popular judgements.

Online political communication about the Tokyo Olympics

ABSTRACT This article investigates how Japanese politicians and their followers tweeted about the Tokyo Olympics between 1 January 2020 and 24 September 2021. Using a comprehensive dataset of Japanese politicians’ tweets and followers, plus text (sentiment) and network analysis, it finds that politicians from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) stayed relatively quiet about the Games but did tweet positively about the Games after they started. In contrast, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) politicians tweeted energetically in their attempt to have the Games cancelled. Politicians from other parties were more muted, in line with the levels of interest expressed by their followers. Followers of Kōmeitō politicians, junior coalition partners of the LDP, tweeted much less about the Games than users following LDP politicians. These findings were repeated when politically interested users were grouped into clusters of mutual followers. Overall, this suggests that the Olympics were a polarizing issue in Japan, with users following opposition figures strongly opposed to the Games while those following the largest governing party were more supportive.

Graph Youth and the Japanese Communist Party Youth Movement circa 1960: The Image of ‘Democracy’

In 1950, Cominform (the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties) criticised the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) for promoting ‘peaceful revolution’ under the Allied Occupation. The critique led to the so-called ‘1950 issue’, a period beset by ideological divisions, in which the JCP split, with one faction continuing to support ‘peaceful revolution’ and the other siding with Cominform’s views. Nuyama Hiroshi founded the magazine Gurafu wakamono (Graph Youth) in 1958 after a temporary respite to the 1950 issue. The magazine was aimed at the young people of Japan, and ran until 1971. Nuyama was regarded as an authority on cultural issues within the JCP and, in addition to being the first editor-in-chief of Gurafu wakamono, he led the ‘Dance for Dance’s Sake’ movement, sometimes referred to as the ‘Singing and Dancing Communist Party’. In 1966, during the lifetime of the magazine, Nuyama’s ideological differences regarding the Cultural Revolution in China led to his excommunication from the Communist Party. Drawing on material from the magazine itself, this article examines the democratic ideology promulgated by Gurafu wakamono and its successor magazine, also edited by Nuyama, with particular emphasis on editions published in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions ed. by Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay

Reviewed by: Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions ed. by Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay Matthew Galway Drachewych, Oleksa and Ian McKay, eds. – Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020. 448 p. In a May 26, 1943, "Report on the Dissolution of the Communist International" (關於共產國際解散問題毛澤東同志作詳盡報告/Guanyu gongchanguoji jiesan wenti Mao Zedong tongzhi zuo xiangjin baogao), Mao Zedong reflected on the Comintern's great contribution to the Chinese Communist revolution. He averred that throughout its quarter-century of existence, the Comintern "has rendered the greatest services in helping each country to organize a truly revolutionary workers' party, and it has also contributed enormously to the great cause of organizing the anti-fascist war." Mao's reflection on its past utility then segued to an explanation of why it had outlived its purpose: "It is a principle of Marxism-Leninism that the forms of revolutionary organizations must conform to the necessities of the revolutionary struggle. If a form of organization no longer suits the necessities of the struggle, then this form of organization must be abolished … To continue this organizational form would, on the contrary, hinder the development of the revolutionary struggle in each country." Mao's appraisal of the Comintern as a force behind Communist movements worldwide and as an organizational body that applied obdurately its "Moscow Line" approach instead of adapting to suit specific movements, is where Left Transnationalism breaks new ground. At its heart, as editors Oleksa Drachewych and Ian Mackay note in the Introduction, Left Transnationalism constitutes a "post-post-Cold War project" that throws overdue light on horizontal links that operated "without the direct involvement of Moscow" (pp. 6, 35). Each contributor to the volume sets about "establishing the foundation for new approaches" upon which "there might emerge new insights into the global cultural challenge constituted by the revolutionary upheaval that the Comintern sought to accelerate" (p. 33). The volume consists of four parts: "Orientations," "Transnational Personal Relationships," "Race and Colonialism," and "National Questions." In a comprehensive opening chapter of the first part, Lars Lih explores the links between the Third International and prewar revolutionary social democracy. He casts the Third International as a body that held "a global perspective from the very beginning," but one that did not necessarily deviate from "the original model of revolutionary social democracy" (pp. 56, 68). S. A. Smith tells the story of the Bolshevik Revolution's resonance in the colonized Global South in two halves. First, it asks how the Bolsheviks came to value the "twin issues" of national self-determination and anti-colonial revolution amid socialist crises at home and elsewhere on the continent. Second, it explores the propagation of the October Revolution's symbolic capital as a watershed event with global applicability through horizontal transnational connections (pp. 74, 86). The next two chapters, by John Riddell and Alastair Kocho-Williams, shift the focus to Comintern efforts to forge unity against, undermine, and openly resist European colonial and imperial domination in Asia. [End Page 192] An exceptional entry to the second part is Sandra Pujals' chapter on Latin American and Caribbean poputchiki, or "fellow travelers," such as Seki Sano, Arcady Boylter, Ángel Del Río, and James Sager. These artists and luminaries had "direct, short-lived, or even accidental" relationships with the Comintern's worldwide network, which, as Pujals demonstrates, "underscores the Comintern's presence in the region even after its period of activity" (pp. 156–157). Another excellent contribution, by Xiaofei Tu, explores two incidents of outright betrayal by Japanese Communist Party (JCP) leader Nosaka Sanzo of his comrades Yamamoto Kenzo (to the Comintern) and Ito Ritsu Sanzo (to the Chinese Communist Party). Through a critical analysis of Japanese autobiographies, media reports, and Japanese Communist Party journals, Xu concludes that Sanzo's justification for these betrayals was a mix of careerism, "self-protection," "power-hunger," and a purportedly unshakeable loyalty to global Communism (pp. 218–219). Three chapters stand out from the subsequent two parts: Chapter 10 by Marc Becker, Chapter 11 by Kankan Xie, and Chapter 15 by Anna Belogurova. Becker's contribution...

Ideology of Japanese Communist Party in the 1920s

Ideology of Japanese Communist Party in the 1920s

The Japanese Factor in the Making of North Korean Socialism

This article explores a commonly ignored aspect of Japan–North Korean relations: the Japanese factor in the making of Korean socialism. Korea was indirectly influenced by the Japanese Jiyuminken Movement, in the 1910s–1920s serving as a stepping-stone for the creation of a Japanese Communist Party. Wartime mobilization policies under Japanese rule were continued and expanded beyond the colonial era. The Juche ideology built on tendencies first exhibited in the 1942 Overcoming Modernity Conference in Japan, and in the 1970s some Japanese leftists viewed Juche as a humanist Marxism. Trade between Japan and North Korea expanded from 1961 onwards, culminating in North Korea’s default in 1976, from which point on relations soured between the two countries. Yet leaders with direct experience of colonial rule governed North Korea through to the late 1990s.

Do populists support populism? An examination through an online survey following the 2017 Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election

Based on an ideational approach, a burgeoning body of literature has directly measured populist attitudes among supporters of populist parties. However, few empirical works have examined whether these attitudes among voters also explain their preferences for politicians whom a political-strategic approach regards as populists. In addition, no research has verified the applicability of individual populist scales to non-Western countries. To overcome these shortcomings, this study assesses populist attitudes among Japanese citizens and explores whether a respondent with these attitudes tends to vote for populist politicians in Japan. We conducted an online survey after the 2017 Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election. Survey results revealed that the supporters of the Tokyoites First Party – a typical populist party in a political-strategic sense – lack the quintessential elements of populism. Further, several subcomponents of populist attitudes led to support for the Japanese Communist Party – a radical leftist party.

Contested liberation: the Japanese Communist Party, human rights groups, and the new anti-discrimination law

The 2016 Law for the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination (LPEBD) was a significant development in the history of postwar Buraku liberation politics. Why then was there such strong opposition to it by the Japan Communist Party and JCP-affiliated groups? This article explains this opposition to the new law by placing it within a larger postwar historical context. Once the content and meaning of the strong opposition to the law’s passing is placed in historical perspective, and the reasons for and motivations behind the law’s pronouncement are contextually clarified, the importance of the critiques provided by these groups becomes more readily apparent. The concerns raised about the possible negative impact the law might have upon individuals and communities identified as belonging to the contemporary Buraku liberation movement are cogent and worthy of close consideration, particularly in light of the murky circumstances and distinct lack of political debate that actually surrounded the passing of the bill. The article, however, also concludes by discussing some of the problems with the JCP interpretative framework, and suggests the need for new interpretative paradigms to envisage the twenty-first century Buraku liberation movement.

Body height, social dominance and the political climate - a comment.

Background: The association between stature and social dominance is known. Dominance within social groups and current politics are related issues. We therefore aimed to compare estimates of the opinion of a population about their current political issues, with physical growth. Material and methods: We used data on the 2012 and the 2014 elections for the Japanese House of Representatives and the percent proportion of votes of the 47 prefectures of Japan, and regional data on body height of 17.5 year old men and women. Information on capita income, possession of mobile phones, urban/rural population ratio, and age distribution were added to capture socioeconomic factors. Four political parties were present in most of the 47 prefectures: the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the New Komeito Party (Kom) that is known for their social network community, and the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). Results: A dense network of associations exists between height, age distribution, per capita income, number of smartphones, and voting results. Male and female body height was inversely related with the proportion of votes for New Komeito Party. Average stature decreases by one mm per percent votes for this political party. Medium strong positive associations were found for male body height and voting results of the DPJ and for female body height with the JCP election results. Conclusion: In modern Japan, popular preferences for conservative political structures coincide with shorter stature.

日本共産党の組織形成 : 五色大会より三・一五事件まで

日本共産党の組織形成 : 五色大会より三・一五事件まで

Fighting the Korean War in pacifist Japan: Korean and Japanese leftist solidarity and American Cold War containment

ABSTRACTWhere does “pacifist” Japan fit within the history of the Korean War? Was Japan simply the beneficiary of the wartime boom – a case best exemplified by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s characterization of the Korean War as “a gift of the gods”? When North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and launched a full-scale attack against South Korea, the U.S. occupation in Japan quickly transformed the pacifist nation into the indispensable rear base of United Nations military intervention in the Korean War. The Japanese Communist Party and leftist groups organized by zainichi Koreans (Korean residents in Japan) launched an antiwar movement to stop Japan from producing and sending arms to UN forces in Korea. The U.S. occupation responded with determined efforts to contain every antiwar voice emerging from the streets of the pacifist country. By examining the political dynamics of zainichi Korean and Japanese leftist solidarity and U.S. countermeasures, this article shows how the Korean War was fought in pacifist Japan. It also illuminates how the practice of Cold War containment was mutually linked on the ground between occupied Japan and South Korea.

Explaining the Surges and Declines of the Japanese Communist Party

The Japanese Communist Party’s tumultuous electoral performance, especially the sudden surge in the 2014 general election, is an intriguing phenomenon. Analysis of electoral data reveals that a large number of votes shifted back and forth between the Communists and a few new right-wing parties in the last three elections.

Maiden Martyr for "New Japan": The 1960 Ampo and the Rhetoric of the Other Michiko

Maiden Martyr for "New Japan":The 1960 Ampo and the Rhetoric of the Other Michiko Hiroko Hirakawa (bio) During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Shōda Michiko, the commoner who married Prince Akihito in 1959, gained iconographic status in the media (Bardsley 2002). Around the same time, another Japanese woman who happened to have the same given name attracted as much if not more attention. Her name was Kanba Michiko. A Tokyo University coed and Zengakuren activist,1 Kanba was killed in a violent confrontation between Ampo protesters and the police in June 1960. This essay examines the rhetoric surrounding Kanba Michiko and her death that appeared in a popular weekly magazine, Shūkan Asahi (Asahi Weekly). I describe how Shūkan Asahi portrayed the Ampo struggle as a polarized opposition of old, diehard fascism pitted against a newly emerging democratic force, with the fascist camp having the upper hand until the sacrificial death of a maiden martyr. As I hope to show, this clearcut depiction inevitably positioned the middle-class nuclear family as the critical element in the Ampo protests. Moreover, as I will argue, by positing the death of the maiden as a case of thwarted motherhood, Shūkan Asahi limited the definition of women's political activism to forms of middle-class motherhood. In this sense Shūkan Asahi's portrait of Kanba Michiko not only echoed the prewar ideology of a nonpolitical "good wife, wise mother" (ryōsai kenbō) but reflected and foretold the rise of "housewife feminism" in postwar Japanese society as well. [End Page 12] Ampo, Gender, and the Media in 1960 In February 1960, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presented a bill to renew the revised U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Nichibei Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku, abbreviated in Japanese as Ampo) to the House of Representatives for approval. The Ampo bill quickly met with fierce opposition from the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) and Japanese Communist Party (JCP), both of which saw the Ampo treaty as creating the potential for Japan's remilitarization and as imposing restrictions on the nation's sovereignty. Consequently, debate on the bill soon reached an impasse. Finally, when only one week in May remained before the end of the session, the LDP took desperate measures to secure passage of the bill, using police force to push it through the House on May 19. This aggressive action outraged millions of Japanese, fueling massive anti-government demonstrations and rallies across the nation. This volatility, in turn, resulted in cancellation of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's visit to Japan, which subsequently forced Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke to resign. Despite the scale and vehemence of the protests and Kishi's resignation, the treaty went into effect in June 1960. Yet to this day, the 1960 Ampo turmoil often serves as a key reference point in narrating postwar Japanese history. What is it about this event that continues to exert such power over the collective psyche? Unlike most studies to date, which approach the Ampo controversy as party politics, Wesley Sasaki-Uemura addresses the question of its direct impact on public and personal memory. He characterizes the Ampo protests as "a struggle over the form Japanese democracy would take rather than a critique of international relations" (Sasaki-Uemura 2001, 3). Examining civic groups involved in the Ampo dissent, Sasaki-Uemura details how they perceived themselves "as small grassroots groups with fluid organization and fluctuating memberships" (7). His analysis sheds light on these movements' impact on the ensuing oppositional praxes in Japanese society. Sasaki-Uemura identifies four factors as crucial to explaining the large-scale mobilization of people involved in the Ampo struggle: 1. Memories of World War II were still a palpable presence in the minds of most people, who remained apprehensive about the possible return to wartime conditions; 2. Many of those who participated in the Ampo movements had been initiated into political activism through various bunka sākuru (cultural circles) active in the 1950s—small, spontaneous groups that gathered for cultural activities organized at people's workplaces or residences; 3. Out of the actual practices in the circle movements and contemporary debates among the leftist intellectuals, a new ethos...

New Revolutionary Agenda: The Interwar Japanese Left on the "Chinese Revolution"

To achieve socialist revolutions in Asia, the Third Communist International (Comintern) recommended to Asian revolutionaries the strategy of a united front comprising the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie, which would prioritize the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. The early Japanese Communist Party (JCP) (1922–1926) resisted this recommendation, which lumped together colonized India and semi-colonized China with the only empire in Asia, Japan. The JCP insisted on the priority of the domestic national struggle, arguing that without toppling the imperial government at home by means of a socialist revolution, there could be no dismantling of Japanese imperialism and therefore no Chinese Revolution. After the outbreak of Japanese aggression in China in 1927 (the first Shantung intervention in May of that year) and the rise of popular nationalist support for the empire at home, members of the Japanese Left recognized that they had failed to properly engage with Japanese imperialism in Asia. Based on Comintern archives and the writings of leading Japanese Communists, this article argues that, as a strategy to rebrand and redeem itself in the new critical situation in Asia, the Japanese Left began to regard the Chinese Revolution as the only path to liberation, not only for Asia but for Japan as well.

For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature ed. by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field

Reviewed by: For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature ed. by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field Mats Karlsson (bio) For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature. Edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016. x, 430 pages. $87.00, cloth; $29.00, paper. The present volume is an exceptionally welcome and valuable contribution to the body of translated works of Japanese fiction into English. In terms [End Page 466] of main literary genres there is probably none that has hitherto been as underrepresented as the genre of proletarian literature. Except for the heroic efforts of Željko Cipriš (A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle), in addition to an older translation of Kobayashi Takiji's masterpiece The Factory Ship plus The Absentee Landlord by Frank Motofuji, what we have had easily accessible in the field so far are occasional well-known proletarian short stories tucked away in anthologies of modern Japanese literature. That we have had to wait for almost a century after the event for translations to appear is probably indicative of a bias working against proletarian fiction in general, as referenced in the introduction: "Despite the commonplace view that ahistorically reduces all literature produced within a leftwing movement to 'socialist realism' and understands this to be a mindless, propagandistic celebration of workers and tractors, these writers regularly warned one another of the pitfalls of formulaic writing" (p. 1). As mentioned in the introduction, the proletarian literature movement that the volume treats was the most vigorous wing of the wider anticapitalism and anti-imperialism proletarian cultural movement that was in operation for about a decade, roughly speaking from 1925 to 1935. Originally a congregation of writers, artists, critics, students, and intellectuals of various leftist, anti-establishment leanings, the movement was gradually bolshevized as it came under the increasing influence of the banned Japanese Communist Party, which pounced on it as it had few other legal channels to spread its ideology. Operating in semilegal circumstances, the movement became tolerated less and less by the authorities until they decided toward the middle of the 1930s that they could no longer risk leftist dissent being disseminated through society. Reading through the stories in the collection that give ample testimony of harassment at all levels, one wonders why authorities even bothered about only interfering with the movement when they surely possessed the means to clamp down on it decisively much earlier. But then again, Japan was ostensibly a democracy that perhaps needed to appear to be adhering to minimum standards of rules of engagement. Perhaps, also, the movement was up to a point a useful tool to authorities in that it constituted a red peril, an enemy on the home front to unite against that warranted close state surveillance and control of its own citizens? The present anthology is the result of collective work by 14 translators including the editors. The translations of the 40 short pieces that go into the collection are organized into seven chapters by topic—"The Personal Is the Political," "The Question of Realism," and "Art as a Weapon," to name a few—each of which is usefully prefaced by the editors. Cross-referencing of works together with biographical notes about featured writers combine to make the volume a user-friendly learning tool. It is a strong merit of the collection that it takes a broad outlook over the field to include aspects such as writings for children and the movement's [End Page 467] internationalist intentions, which tend to be overlooked in treatments of the movement. Noteworthy also, 13 of the translated pieces are penned by women writers, who are otherwise marginalized in a movement perceived to have been a heavily male-oriented initiative. One crucial question regarding the popularization of the movement is raised in the introduction to the second chapter, "Labor and Literature": "What is the relationship between labor and proletarian literature? On the one hand … proletarian literature sought to represent the indignities and aspirations of those with nothing but their labor to sell. On the other hand, proletarian writers anguished...

Shanghai connection: The construction and collapse of the comintern network in east and southeast Asia

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Nowadays, especially after the end of the Cold War, communism has lost its appeal as revolutionary thought. Although there are several communist regimes still in existence, nobody except the most committed communists imagines that a communist revolution is possible or historically inevitable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, communism was one of the major political ideologies that inspired revolutionary movements all over the world. The success of the Russian Revolution in 1917 was so impressive that those who were inspired by this first successful communist revolution tried to create their own revolutions in their countries.In East and Southeast Asia, communism was received with enthusiasm by young intellectuals who wanted to liberate their countries from colonial rule or tried to solve social and economical inequalities by way of communist revolutions. They taught communism to laborers and peasants at night schools or by distributing leaflets, and mobilized them to go on strikes and demonstrations. They organized labor unions, peasant associations, and communist institutions. The first communist party in East and Southeast Asia was the Communist Association of the Indies, which was established in the Dutch East Indies in 1920 (and renamed the Communist Party of Indonesia in 1924). The next year the Chinese Communist Party was established, followed in 1922 by the Japanese Communist Party. In 1930, four communist parties were established in Southeast Asia: the Indochinese Communist Party, the Siamese Communist Party, the Malayan Communist Party, and the Philippine Communist Party.Local communist movements in East and Southeast Asia were led by these communist parties, labor unions, and peasant associations, but there was another important dimension to the communist movements in the 1920s and 1930s. The local parties were linked in a network of international and/or regional communist movements under the aegis of the Third International (Comintern). Moreover, local communists frequently sought to promote communism regionally or to help neighboring movements. While there are a number of studies on country-based communist movements, studies of the international or regional communist movement in East and Southeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s are not as well done, except for several pioneering works on such topics as the regional and international liaisons of the Malayan Communist Party (Cheah 1992; Hara 2009), those of the Indochinese Communist Party (Goscha 1999; Kurihara 2005), and the Comintern's activities in Asia (McKnight 2002). But these works do not reveal clearly how the regional and international liaison networks in East and Southeast Asia were constructed and maintained, and how they collapsed.This paper describes the international and regional communist movement in East and Southeast Asia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, focusing mainly on activities of the regional headquarters of the Comintern in Shanghai. In 1926 the Comintern established the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) in Shanghai, followed by the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat (PPTUS) in 1927. These two organizations were in charge of supervising local communist movements in East and Southeast Asia, allocating funds, dispatching couriers and agents, and receiving local communists who tried to go to Moscow. To conduct these works, it was crucial to construct and maintain a liaison network in the region. Construction and maintenance of this liaison network was done by agents and couriers who had contacts both with staff of the regional headquarters in Shanghai and with liaison officers in local communist movements. The network of the international and regional communist movements in East and Southeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s consisted of links between agents, couriers, the regional headquarters' staff in Shanghai, and local liaison officers acting as nodes. This paper shows how this international and regional network was constructed in the late 1920s, how it was maintained, and finally how it collapsed in 1931. …

Surging progressives in the conservative mood

This article examines the conditional effects of income and urbanism on vote choice in an attempt to explain why both the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the progressive Japanese Communist Party (JCP) were successful in the 2014 Japanese Lower House election. Casting doubt on the conventional explanations, it argues that social division along income lines caused a polarization of voting in urban areas, which in turn allowed the two parties to prosper in the election. More specifically, Prime Minister Abe’s monetarist economic policies implemented during an economic downturn influenced the welfare of people differently according to income level, and consequently divided them into voters for the LDP and for the JCP. Using Japan as a case study, this research shows how an economic policy implemented during an economic downturn can create social and political divisions among people, which in turn impacts elections.