Japan
Japan is a capitalist country in East Asia. Politically, its major parties are all centrist, with a significant rightist presence also ingrained culturally and through organizations such as Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference). Groups like the Yakuza also have close ties to the right wing. Though Japan has one of the largest communist parties in the world, leftism in general currently has a predominantly backseat role in the country.
History
Japan had a feudal mode of production starting from the 12th century, featuring military dictators (shogun) who though nominally appointed by the emperor, where the de facto rulers of the country. Beneath them were the landlords (daimyo) and warrior nobility (samurai). The samurai generally had a right to strike with a sword those of a lower class who were perceived to have offended them in what is known as kiri-sute gomen.
Japan had a long civil war starting in the 15th century and ended up reunified under the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. It remained a feudal country up until the mid-19th century, though much of the practices and culture from then carried on, such as clan affiliation. Perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of this was in World War II, when the Army and Navy would actually be very antagonistic towards each other partially on the basis of such, to the detriment of the war effort, though there were other factors such as which of the four major corporations (zaibatsu) they had the backing of and whose interests they were fighting for.
During the Meiji era Japan rapidly industrialized and was able to become a power on par with those of Europe, defeating the ailing Russian Empire in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. By the outbreak of war with the United States in December 1941 the Japanese already controlled Korea, Manchuria, and parts of the Pacific.
Economy
Japan's economic miracle, which lasted from the post-war period until the 1990s and which made it one of the largest economies, was primarily the result of foreign investment and a paternalistic government that directed economic development.
Workers in Japan often have to commute hours every day to get to their job, which is often in one of a couple cities. Despite labor laws stating a maximum working length of 8 hours per day and 40 hours per week, many end up working much more. The OECD estimates that 22% of Japanese employees work more than 50 hours per week, whereas in the United States this figure is 11%. This is for several reasons: for one, people are culturally pressured into working extra long because it would be considered shameful not to, with loyalty and hard work prized and emphasized in Japanese culture, with the corporate applications of this dating back to Japan's rapid industrialization and militarization in the 1920s, which was reinforced by the need to rebuild the country and pay off war reparations after World War II. People also have to work more to support a large elderly population — according to 2018 OECD data, Japan has the largest proportion of the age 65+ population, at 28.1%, trailed distantly by Italy at 22.7% and Greece at 21.9%, with the OECD average being 17.2%.[1] This is further exacerbated by Japan's low fertility rate (around 1.3) as well as little immigration. Employees are also often required to work extra by their employers — a 2016 government report found that over 25% of all Japanese companies demand 80 hours of overtime each month, roughly four hours per working day.[2] This is all despite this having adverse effects on health, accounting for things like Japan's high rate of suicide and low birth rate.
Japan also has high rates of elderly employment, with about half of those aged 65–69 and a third of those who are 70–74 still working, with employment rates for elderly people broadly rising throughout the 2010s as they have in previous decades — those aged 65 and over were 5% of the workforce in 1980, but 13.4% in 2020.[3] Another phenomenon of labor in Japan is karoshi, literally "overwork death", which is most often exhibited through heart attacks and strokes as a result of stress and a starvation diet, though also including suicides due to overwork. This also affects high-ranking business executives because of which this term was popularized in the mid–80s.
Zaibatsu
Japanese Communist Party
The JCP was founded in 1922 and is one of the largest non-ruling communist parties in the world, both by sheer membership amount and as a percentage of the vote it receives. Since the 1970s it has received somewhere around 10% of the vote, peaking at 13.1% in the 1996 general elections. It has been quite separate from the socialist bloc, and access to Marxist texts were historically scarce. It furthermore did not really take a stance on the Sino-Soviet split. Altogether, this on one hand isolates it from the rest of the socialist world, however also frees it of historical burdens. Because of its detachment from socialist traditions it ended up taking a non-Marxist–Leninist turn, and seeks to achieve socialism by having it emerge from increased democratization of the workplace, through unions, or employee stock ownership. Despite not being as hardline as Western communist parties, the JCP still participates in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, the largest international platform of Marxist–Leninist parties.
The JCP mostly focuses on the more pressing issues like workers' rights, such as to form a union. It is certainly not in a position to call for armed revolution, and does not, considering that Japan is governed by a highly reactionary state. The JCP is already monitored as it is by the Public Security Intelligence Agency, which claims that this is necessary under the anti-subversion law. The JCP however has never called for violent revolution and authorities have never come up with any indication either despite spending quite a lot of resources on trying to find such.[4]
The party does view the Japanese monarchy favorably, however the dynamic in Japan is different from the one that socialists in Western countries typically have had with their monarchies. In Japan the establishment of a strong, central monarchy with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 was a progressive force that set Japan on the course to modernity, replacing the feudal shogunate which had up to that point ruled for nearly seven hundred years with the emperor as only a nominal leader. This is in contrast to Western countries where the bourgeois struggle against feudalism was progressive. The emperor represents an Anti-American current in Japanese society, with the current one furthermore having rather poor relations with the Japanese right wing establishment, which ordinarily is in favor of strengthening the monarchy.
Sanrizuka Struggle
The Sanrizuka Struggle is a conflict between the Japanese government and the agricultural community of Sanrizuka, particularly its farmers, leftist groups, and other residents. It began with the construction of an airport there without the involvement or consent of the locals, who built a protest fortress on the site of the airport.[5] After it was torn down, the protest movement began opposing an expansion to the airport through raids and guerilla warfare, of which there were hundreds of instances of even up to the present.