Labour-Farmer Party
The Japan Peasant Union leader Motojirō Sugiyama became the chairman of the party, Nagawa, Abe, Aso and Nishio were included in its Central Committee.
[10] Three members of the Central Committee of the party, Matsuda Kiichi, Ueda Onshi and Saiko Bankichi, were also leaders in the Suiheisha movement.
[11] The platform of the Rōdōnōmintō stated that the goal of the organization was the political, social and economic emancipation of the proletarian class, and through legal means work advocate agrarian reform and re-distribution of production.
The anti-communist sectors wanted to block members of leftwing groups like Hyōgikai, the Proletarian Youth League and the Society for Political Studies from joining the party.
A meeting was held in Moscow, in which Bukharin, M. N. Roy, J. T. Murphy and Béla Kun participated, along with Fukumoto and other Japanese communist leaders.
[18] In December 1927, the Yamakawa group began publishing the monthly journal Rōnō, borrowing the name of the Labour-Farmer Party for their factional organ.
[19] In the midst of financial crisis that hit Japan in the spring of 1927, the party stepped up its propaganda work, launching a campaign to call for early elections.
[2] Regarding the Chinese question, the party opposed the Japanese government policy and ran a "Hands off China" campaign.
[22] The party aided the foundation of the Taiwan Peasant Union and supported its struggles against the agricultural policies of the Japanese governor-general on the island.
[25] The bulk of the votes for the party came from areas where its Japan Peasant Union was more active; Kagawa, Niigata, Akita and Hyogo.
[25] Ahead of the 1928 national Diet elections the Labour-Farmer Party issued a list of radical demands, calling for the abolition of all forms of discrimination of subject races and reductions of the size of the armed forces.
[5] Slogans such as "Establish a Worker-Peasant Government" and "Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat" were raised in the election campaign.
His campaign headquarters in the Kagawa Prefecture constituency (where he stood as candidate, facing the incumbent finance minister) were raided by police.
[29] Another communist, the trade union organizer Kenzo Yamamoto, was a Labour-Farmer Party candidate in Hokkaido.
[14][34] After the Labour-Farmer Party had been banned, the government attempted to expel its representatives from the Lower House of the Diet of Japan.
[37] Yamamoto Senji, who was elected as a Labour-Farmer Party candidate for Kyoto at the first general election under universal suffrage held in February 1928, spoke in the Imperial Diet on February 8 1929, inquiring about the torture and illegal detention of prisoners by the police, who had boasted of being the "Amakasu of Showa".
