Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 178, Red Star Over Tokyo, Part 3.

So we left things off last week with the founding of the Japan Communist Party in

1920, as the worldwide profile of communism was rising at a rather spectacular rate.

The Russian Revolution was five years old. Global communist movements were springing up in places that had never had

such movements before, and it looked for all the world like the revolution was truly on the march.

But in Japan, the established government was committed to combating the scourge of communism.

Russia, previously an aggressive geopolitical foe, was now an ideological foe as well, and as a result,

no expense was too great to protect Japan.

Police surveillance of suspected communists was stepped up dramatically. As I mentioned last

week, Nosaka Sanso denied his true political affiliations to all but his closest confidants

for that exact reason. Even wings of society only tangentially related to the communist movement came under attack.

Japan's labor movement, for example, was on the upswing by the early 1920s.

In 1912, the first long-lasting labor union, the Uaikai or Friendly Society, was established in Tokyo.

That name, though, proved a little too non-combative in terms of branding, and it was

eventually changed to the Nihon Ro Do So Dome, or Japan Federation of Labor, in 1921.

The economic downturn in Japan after World War I proved good for the Federation as workers

interested in protecting the gains of the boom years of the 1910s flocked to their banner.

However, the 1920s saw the tables turn pretty dramatically, partially because of continued

cutbacks in heavy industry, the bread and butter

sector for the unions, and partially because enthusiastic union organizers came under suspicion

as communists, and as a result, the labor movement started to lose ground.

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