Nosaka, Sanzo

▪ 1994

      Japanese politician (b. March 30, 1892, Yamaguchi prefecture, Japan—d. Nov. 14, 1993, Tokyo, Japan), held sway for more than 70 years in the Japan Communist Party (JCP) as one of its founders in 1922, as chairman of the Central Committee from 1958 to 1982, and as honorary chairman from 1982. He was disgraced and expelled from the party as a traitor in December 1992, however, when it came to light that he had falsely accused (in a 1939 letter to the KGB in Moscow) Comintern comrade Kenzo Yamamoto and his common-law wife of spying for the kempeitai (Japanese military police). The two were executed by a Soviet firing squad. Nosaka, who graduated (1917) from Keio University, was studying in England when he joined the British Communist Party upon its formation in 1920, a move that precipitated his deportation. In Japan Nosaka became a trade union organizer and editor of the Communist Party's newspaper, Musansha Shimbun. His political agitation resulted in two imprisonments, and in 1931 he and his wife, Rye, were sent by the party to Russia, where he served as an executive member of the Comintern, the Soviet organization in charge of the international activities of the Communist Party. During World War II Nosaka was in China working with Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung). He also formed the Japan Liberation League and conducted propagandist activities against the Japanese army. After returning to Japan in 1946, Nosaka helped reestablish the JCP and was elected to the lower house of the Diet (parliament). He was one of the leading theoreticians of the party and professed a peaceful evolution into communism. He went underground when the U.S. occupation authorities purged communists from politics during the 1950s Cold War era. He resurfaced in 1955 as first secretary of the JCP and assumed a prominent role as the grand old man of the JCP until the age of 100, when revelations about his former activities destroyed his reputation.

* * *