Tsukoshi Kanaï is 24 years old. He joined the Communist Party six months ago. He works at an Internet cafe six days a week, 10 hours a day and makes 1,400 euros a month. He says his salary is too small. He has no unemployment insurance, no health insurance and no pension. Under Japanese labour law, the company is supposed to pay for all of that but in his case, it doesn’t.

Every month, for the past year and a half, 1,000 people like Tsukoshi have joined the party’s ranks. They are mainly temporary workers, who account for more than a third of the local workforce. The party chief’s views attract them. Kazuo Shii is one of the few politicians who defend their cause. Kazuo Shii wants layoffs to be regulated and the same salaries for the same jobs.

The communist revival has also been boosted by literature. One publishing company has published manga forms of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and "Kanikosen", a 1929 Japanese novel about exploited workers on a crab boat. The first sold 100,000 copies and the latter, 250,000.

The Communist Party was popular in the 1960s and 70s and has kept a strong presence in local and prefectural assemblies. Still, it remains weak at a national level, with nine seats out of 480 in the country's House of Representatives. But the situation could change at this year’s general elections. Jeffrey Kingston, an Asian Studies specialist at Tokyo’s Temple University says, “Lots of people are turned off of politics whether it is the LDP ruling party or the leading opposition party, the DPJ. They always lurch from scandal to scandal and money politics as usual. The Communist Party offers an alternative”.