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2025 December 24 - 2026 January 6 TOP3 [JCP]

Former JCP Central Committee Chair Fuwa Tetsuzo dies

Former Japanese Communist Party Central Committee Chair Fuwa Tetsuzo (birth name Ueda Kenjiro) died of acute cardiac failure on December 30 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 95.

His funeral will be held with only family members attending. The JCP will hold a funeral with public attendance at a later date.

Fuwa Tetsuzo was born in 1930 in Tokyo’s Nogata Village (currently part of Nakano Ward). He joined the JCP in 1947 when he was a student at First High School in Tokyo (currently Tokyo University) under the old education system.

Fuwa was elected JCP Secretariat Head in 1970, JCP Executive Committee Chair in 1982, and Central Committee Chair in 2000. After retiring as the JCP CC Chair in 2006, he served as a director of the JCP Social Sciences Institute until 2024.

For 34 years after he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1969, Fuwa spearheaded the JCP efforts in the Diet to protect people’s livelihoods, democracy, and peace.

In the 1960s, the JCP experienced interference by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of China’s Mao Zedong group, both of which aimed at putting the JCP under their control. At the time, Fuwa played an important role in the JCP fight to put an end to the two parties’ interference as well as in developing the party’s policy of maintaining its sovereign independence.

Fuwa in 1982 and in 1993 published books regarding the JCP fight against Soviet interference. One is titled “Stalin and Great-power Chauvinism” in which he criticized Stalin’s hegemonism and the other is titled “Interference and Betrayal: Japanese Communist Party Fights Back Against Soviet Hegemonism” in which Fuwa wrote about the full extent of the JCP investigations regarding the Soviet interference. The books’ English version (1994, Japan Press Service) garnered international interest.

Fuwa made a significant mark on the JCP efforts to develop its program line and theory of scientific socialism based on the party’s position of sovereign independence. He took the lead in the party’s theoretical activity to fundamentally reexamine and renew “Marxism-Leninism” from the original position of Marx and Engels. This theoretical exploration bore fruits for visions based on scientific socialism such as “revolution through winning majority in a parliament” and “the theory of future society”, which were utilized in the full revision of the Party Program in 2004.

Fuwa from his youth passionately and consistently devoted himself to studying Marx and Engels and undertook new research such as developing Marx’s theories on economic crises and revolution. Building upon the accomplishments of the “Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe : MEGA”, he played a major role in the publication of the “New Edition Das Kapital” by Shin Nihon Shuppan.