Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction)

Japan Revolutionary Communist League
日本革命的共産主義者同盟革命的マルクス主義派
ChairpersonTakuma Ueda
Founded1959
IdeologyCommunism
Marxism
Anti-Stalinism
Trotskyism
Political positionFar-left
Website
www.jrcl.org

The Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction) (Japanese: 日本革命的共産主義者同盟革命的マルクス主義派, romanized: Nihon Kakumeiteki Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei, Kakumeiteki Marukusushugi Ha) is a Japanese Trotskyist[1][2][3] revolutionary group, often referred to by the abbreviation Kakumaru-ha (Japanese: 革マル派). It is classified as far-left.

Formerly close to the Spartacist League,[4] the group now has friendly relations with the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction.[5]

History

The group's origins lie in its split from the Japanese Communist Party following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The dissenting factions attended a congress of the Japanese New Left in 1957 and agreed to unite as the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), usually abbreviated as Kakukyōdō in Japanese.[6] This group was fervently anti-Stalinist, and soon fell under the sway of the charismatic half-blind Trotskyist philosopher Kan'ichi Kuroda.[6] Their goals at this time were to overthrow the Japanese government, end U.S. occupation of Okinawa, and abolish the U.S.-Japan Alliance.[7]

Kakumaru-ha evolved into its current form after a series of schisms. In 1959, Kuroda Kan'ichi was expelled from the RCL in the wake of a scandal in which he tried to sell compromising information about the JCP to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). Therefore, Kuroda, along with his right-hand man Nobuyoshi Honda, founded their own version of the RCL, with the appellation "National Committee" added to the name, and took many of their followers with them to create the RCL-NC.[8] In 1960, a youth branch of the RCL-NC was established for Zengakuren student activists as the Marxist Student League (MSL), abbreviated Marugakudō in Japanese.[9]

Finally in 1963, the parent organization RCL-NC split in two as the result of a disagreement between Kuroda and Honda over whether to pursue socialist revolution in alliance with others, or to focus on strengthening and expanding a single revolutionary organization, with the resultant split of Marugakudō into the "Central Core Faction" (Chūkaku-ha), which was led by Honda and favored allying with others, and the "Revolutionary Marxist Faction" (abbreviated Kakumaru-ha), which staunchly adhered to Kuroda's insistence on going it alone.[10]

The two groups had frequent violent conflicts and, by the mid-1970s, these were resulting in several deaths per year—16 in 1975 alone,[11] including Kakumaru-ha's assassination of Chūkaku-ha's leader Honda Nobuyasu.[12] The organisation subsequently engaged in a number of high-profile guerrilla activities while continuing to organise on university campuses, primarily through their Zengakuren faction. In 1998, police seized thousands of recordings of their conversations made by Faction members, which a spokesperson claimed had been "necessary to protect the organisation."[13]

In the spring of 2019, a group led by Hideki Matsushiro, who has written many works on the labor movement and economics within the Revolutionary Maru faction, criticized the ideological control and individual organizational disposition by the central government of the Japan Revolutionary Communist Alliance Revolutionary Marxist faction (inquiry faction)Declared a split with this, and called it the "Fourth Division of the Revolution Community".[14].

References

  1. ^ "Japan Revolutionary Communist League". Fourth International. Retrieved 10 December 2025.
  2. ^ "Kan-ichi Kuroda: Marxism in Japan (Winter 1962)". www.marxists.org. Retrieved 10 December 2025.
  3. ^ Kapur, Nick (July 2022). "The Japanese Student Movement in the Cold War Crucible, 1945-1972". Asia-Pacific Journal. 20 (16) (published 15 July 2022). doi:10.1017/s155746602201912x. ISSN 1557-4660.
  4. ^ Robert Jackson Alexander, "International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement", pp. 599–601
  5. ^ ".::: Flti :::".
  6. ^ a b Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 146. ISBN 9780674988484.
  7. ^ "Introduction to Japan Revolutionary Communist League". JRCL Website.
  8. ^ "A Short History of Japan Revolutionary Communist League-National Committee (JRCL-NC)". zenshin.org. 28 November 2009.
  9. ^ Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 149. ISBN 9780674988484.
  10. ^ Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 150. ISBN 9780674988484.
  11. ^ J. Mark Ramseyer and Minoru Nakazato, Japanese Law: An Economic Approach, pp. 160–161
  12. ^ Andrews, William (15 August 2016). Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima. Hurst. p. 157. ISBN 978-1-84904-919-1.
  13. ^ "Raid on Leftist Lair Yields Police Radio Recordings", The Japan Times, 10 April 1998
  14. ^ 松代秀樹編著『コロナ危機との闘い　黒田寛一の営為をうけつぎ反スターリン主義運動の再興を』刊行！ - Tankenha Official Blog(01/20/2026)
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