It is the youth wing of the Japanese Communist Party, as well as an organizational body of Zengakuren.

The DYLJ was formed on 5 April 1923 in the Empire of Japan as the Japanese Communist Youth League (JCYL), influenced by the Russian Revolution in Russia.

Also, like the JCP, it was banned under the Peace Preservation Law and some of its members, such as Kawai Yoshitora, Takashima Mato, and Iijima Kimi, were arrested by police and were either killed during interrogations or else died in prison.

Following a series of violent misadventures in the 1950s, in which the JCP tried to foment an immediate communist revolution and ordered the JCYL into the mountains to help form "Mountain Village Guerrilla Squads", the JCP hastily retreated from its former militant line and the JCYL was recast as a "force for peace and democracy" and renamed the Democratic Youth League of Japan.

At the height of the 1968–1969 Japanese university protests, while other students were hurling rocks and stones at police, Minsei students observed major events such as International Anti-War Day in 1968 by holding peaceful potluck picnics in the park, and emphasized peaceful forms of activism such as petitioning university administrations to improve campus facilities, a focus on mundane daily life that led the more militant students derisively nicknamed the "toilet paper line.