By: Gavin Blair
Article Reprint
A smiling, smartly attired 30-year-old woman sits at an expansive table in a meeting room decorated with simple elegance on the fourth floor of a modern office building in central Tokyo.
Only the sunflower broach – an anti-nuclear symbol – on the woman’s suit, and perhaps that the large calligraphy scroll on the wall behind her that isn’t hung perfectly straight, betray the fact that this isn’t a scene from corporate Japan. Yoshiko Kira doesn’t look like she intends to dismantle capitalism, but this is the headquarters of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), and she is one of its rising stars, and that’s her plan.