Our New Programme is, in practice, becoming the programme of the whole people. - Kyuichi Tokuda

The main question on which the leadership of our Party lacked clarity was whether postwar Japan was an imperialist country or whether it had become a colonial, dependent country. The Party leadership held that Japan was, as before the war, a military imperialist state although its normal development had been disrupted. True, the leadership of the Party pointed out that, as a result of the American occupation, Japan found itself in a dependent position and that its liberation from the occupation regime was an important question. However, the leadership of the Party failed to give a clear definition to the character of the revolution as a revolution in a colonial, dependent country, a revolution the principles of which were explicitly elaborated by Comrade Stalin. The leadership of the Communist Party advanced the task of national liberation and felt that in these conditions the national bourgeoisie could become one of the active elements in the liberation struggle. We worked pretty hard on this question, but failed all the same to achieve complete clarity.

In reply, the working class, the peasantry, students and other sections of the intelligentsia as well as the medium and small businessmen rose in resolute struggle, acting in the spirit of the New Programme of the Communist Party.

Our task is, persistently to conduct the class-political training of the membership, to master the art of combining legal work with underground work, to eliminate the shortcomings that we still meet in our work, to base our entire activity on maintaining the confidence of the masses and not to lag behind the revolutionary struggle which is developing at a rapid rate.