ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the Japan Communist Party's (JCP) relations with the North Korean Worker's Party, the Vietnamese Party, Tito's Yugoslavia, and maverick Romania, among ruling Communist parties. After a tour of Southeast Asian countries, and as the invasion of Iraq seemed imminent, the JCP diplomacy continued with the Middle East, visiting Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates in October 2002. In 2003, a JCP delegation headed by Fuwa visited Tunisia on the occasion of the Congress of the governing Democratic Constitutional Rally. As the Soviet Union and China developed first economic and then political relations with the South, however, the JCP began to have informal meetings with South Korean leaders in Japan or visited South Korea as members of Japanese parliamentary delegations. A new Japan will actively engage in international aid activity by non-military means, with the aim of resolving humanitarian problems, including disaster, refugees, poverty, and starvation.
