physics

Japanese Communist Party

Japanese Communist Party is a physics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Japanese Communist Party rather than just read about it. In short: The Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党, Nihon Kyōsan-tō; abbr. JCP) is a major political party in Japan.

Key takeaways

Japanese Communist Party belongs to physics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Japanese Communist Party to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Japanese Communist Party from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党, Nihon Kyōsan-tō; abbr. JCP) is a major political party in Japan. Founded in 1922, it is the oldest active political party in the country. It had 250,000 members as of January 2024, 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, founded in 1922 in consultation with the Comintern, was deemed illegal in 1925 and repressed for the next 20 years, while continuing its activities underground. After World War II, the party was legalized in 1945 by the Allied occupation authorities, but its unexpected success in the 1949 Japanese general election led to the "Red Purge", in which tens of thousands of actual and suspected communists, along with their sympathizers, were fired from their jobs in government, education, and industry. The Soviet Union encouraged the JCP to respond with a violent revolution, and the resulting internal debate fractured the party into several factions. The dominant faction, backed by the Soviets, waged an unsuccessful guerrilla campaign (Mountain Village Operation Units) in 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 and extremism. Miyamoto also began distancing the JCP from the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s. The party maintained a neutral position during the Sino-Soviet split and expressed its support for a multi-party system of liberal democracy in contrast to the authoritarian one-party systems of Communist-led nations such as the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Measures were also undertaken to expel members who were aligned with either pro-Soviet or pro-China positions. His efforts to regain electoral support were particularly successful in the main urban areas such as Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and the JCP worked with the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) in the 1970s to elect a number of progressive mayors and governors. By 1979, the JCP held about 10% of the seats in the National Diet. The party saw a brief electoral resurgence after the collapse of the JSP in 1996; however, the party has generally been in decline since in terms of electoral results and party membership. The party at present advocates the establishment of a democratic society based on 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 constitutional position of the Emperor of Japan 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.

History

Foundation Sanzō Nosaka became a communist in the late 1910s and was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Sen Katayama left Japan for the United States in 1914, after serving a prison sentence for supporting a strike. He became a communist during his time in the country and was a founding member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Katayama founded the Association of Japanese Socialists in America and served as chair of the Far Eastern People's Congress. In 1921, Katayama was informed by the Communist International (Comintern) that the First Congress of the Toiler of the Far East would be held on 21 January 1922 in Irkutsk. Three men from his organization (Watanabe Haruo, Taguchi Unzo, and Maniwa Suekichi) served as delegates. The Japanese Communist Party was founded in Tokyo on 15 July 1922, at a meeting where Kyuichi Tokuda discussed sessions held between the Japanese delegation and Comintern officials. Two delegates were sent to the 4th World Congress of the Communist International and a general meeting of the party was held in Ichikawa, Chiba, on 4 February 1923. The party's early leadership was drawn from the anarcho-syndicalist and Christian socialist movements that developed around the turn of the century. From the former came Hitoshi Yamakawa, Sakai Toshihiko, and Kanson Arahata, who had all been supporters of Kōtoku Shūsui, an anarchist executed in 1911. Katayama, another early party leader, had been a Christian socialist for much of his political life. The three former anarchists were reluctant to found the JCP, with Yamakawa shortly after arguing that Japan was not ready for a communist party and calling for work to be done solely within labor unions. Katayama's theoretical understanding of Marxism was also alleged to remain low.

Outlawed and persecuted

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Japanese Communist Party

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Japanese Communist Party claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In physics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Japanese Communist Party before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Japanese Communist Party ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Japanese Communist Party

In research: Japanese Communist Party appears in physics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Japanese Communist Party in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Japanese Communist Party is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Anti-capitalist organizations, Anti-capitalist political parties, Anti-imperialism in Asia, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Japanese Communist Party outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Japanese Communist Party in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Japanese Communist Party means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Japanese Communist Party out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Japanese Communist Party in simple terms?

The Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党, Nihon Kyōsan-tō; abbr. JCP) is a major political party in Japan.

Why does Japanese Communist Party matter?

Because it connects several physics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Japanese Communist Party?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Japanese Communist Party.