Kenji Hasegawa is associate professor of modern Japanese history and coordinator of international student exchange at Yokohama National University. He is the author of Student Radicalism and the Formation of Postwar Japan.
From its origins in 1955 as a US-sponsored bulwark against the Left, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party has dominated Japanese politics for seven decades. It now faces a new electoral challenge from parties of the populist, xenophobic right.
For most of Japan’s postwar era, the Socialists were the second force in the country’s political system and the main challenger to conservative rule. But when they ditched their left-wing, anti-militarist principles in the 1990s, they collapsed into minor-party status.
The Japanese Communist Party turns 100 today. Its activists challenged the authoritarian emperor system of prewar Japan, and it remains an important countervailing force in a deeply conservative and conformist political culture.