[3] After leaving the United States, Nosaka worked in China from 1940 to 1945, supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by encouraging and recruiting captured Japanese soldiers to support and fight for the Chinese communists against the Imperial Japanese Army, and coordinating a spy network that operated throughout Japanese-occupied China.

Nosaka joined the faculty of Keio University, and he was widely idolized among left-wing intellectuals until shortly before his death, when the fall of the Soviet Union exposed controversial aspects of his relationship with Stalin's Communist regime.

Nosaka decided to write his senior thesis on the moderate labor organization founded by Bunji Suzuki, "Yuaikai" ("The Friendly Society").

[10] As a greater volume of leftist literature entered Japan from the West, Nosaka's political orientation moved farther from the center.

The first Western texts on revolutionary social theory available in Japan were mostly on anarchism, but Nosaka also enjoyed Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward.

[1] Nosaka announced his intentions to go abroad to study social theory in the November 1918 issue of Rodo Oyobi Sangyo.

[11] In 1934, Nosaka secretly traveled to the West Coast of the United States, where he became involved in intelligence work on behalf of the International Liaison Department of the Comintern against the Imperial Japanese government.

He planned to recruit American and Japanese agents to send to Yokohama to establish a cell that would operate as a communist front organization.

[17] From March 1940 to the end of 1945, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Nosaka resided at the Chinese Red Army base in Yan'an, in Shaanxi Province, where he headed the Japanese People's Emancipation League (JPEL).

The JPEL engaged in the "re-education" of numerous Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) and created propaganda on behalf of the Chinese Communists.

The policy of the Eighth Route Army, the main communist force active during World War II, was to interrogate prisoners and then release them.

The Japanese army attempted to use numerous spies and assassins in order to eliminate Nosaka (who used the name "Okano Susumu" for the duration of the war), but were unsuccessful.

[21] To research the enemy, Nosaka and his crew took care to analyze current events in Japan and China, which they did by stocking Japanese newspapers, magazines, journals, and diaries that were purchased or seized on the battlefield.

Visiting American officers used Nosaka's Japanese soldiers to critique and improve their own methods of anti-Japanese psychological warfare.

Demanding immediate repatriation from the first Americans they found, they declared their intention to return and work "for the democratization of Japan and the establishment of peace in the Far East".

In 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of Japan's defeat, Nosaka was publicly praised by name by the highest-ranking general in China at the time, Lin Biao.

[26] After World War II, Nosaka's return to Japan was facilitated by E. Herbert Norman, the Canadian representative to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, who may also have been a Soviet spy.

[29] He returned to China as a recognized protege of Mao Zedong, and enjoyed the informal recognition as a "roving ambassador" for Japanese communism.

Nosaka's strategy was to foster what he called a "lovable" image for the JCP, seeking to take advantage of the seemingly pro-labor American-led Occupation to bring about a peaceful socialist revolution in Japan.

However, with the fall of China in 1949 and increasing Cold War tensions around the world, the United States initiated the so-called "Reverse Course" in Occupation policy, shifting away from demilitarization and democratization to remilitarization, suppressing leftists, and strengthening Japan's conservative elements in support of U.S.

[5] This resulted in a campaign of terror in which JCP activists threw Molotov cocktails at police boxes across Japan and cadres were sent into the countryside with instructions to organize oppressed farmers into "mountain village guerrilla units" (sanson kōsakutai).

[34] The JCP spent the next three years gradually backing down from the militant line, finally renouncing it fully in 1955, which paved the way for Nosaka's return to power.

[8] In May 1960, as the protests were reaching their height, Nosaka published a lengthy essay in the Communist journal Zen'ei titled "We Will Not Accept the New Security Treaty.

"[36] These massive demonstrations forced the American president, Dwight Eisenhower, to cancel a visit to Japan, and forced the Japanese Premier, Nobusuke Kishi, to resign, but failed to achieve their main goal of preventing passage of the revised Security Treaty, which Kishi ruthlessly rammed through the Diet in spite of the popular opposition.

[39] On October 12, during a televised election debate, Inejirō Asanuma, the chairman of the Japanese Socialist Party, was assassinated by a 17-year-old right-wing youth, Otoya Yamaguchi, who rushed onto the stage and fatally stabbed him twice in the stomach with a wakizashi.

[10] Nosaka joined the faculty of Keio University, and was one of many prominent communist intellectuals active in Japanese academic institutions in his time.

[8] On September 27, 1992, two Journalists working for the magazine Shukan Bunshun, Akira Kato and Shun'ichi Kobayashi, publicly revealed evidence of Nosaka's involvement in the deaths of Kenzo Yamamoto and his wife.

Akahata ("Red Flag"), a prominent communist newspaper, sent a team of journalists to Moscow to investigate the allegations, and they confirmed the authenticity of the documents.

[8] After the allegations against Nosaka became widely known, he checked himself into Yoyogi Hospital in Tokyo (a common tactic of Japanese politicians facing scandal).

The show "features 160 pictures of 39 foreign friends who worked together with the Chinese people and made contributions to China's independence and freedom.