TOKYO, July 18 (UPI) -- Kenji Miyamoto, who led the Japanese Communist Party to adopt revolution through democracy instead by force, died Wednesday in Tokyo at age 98.
Quoting party sources, the Kyodo news service reported he died of old age at a hospital.
Miyamoto had been the Japanese Communist Party's general secretary when the platform change was made in 1961, distancing the party from the communist parties of the former Soviet Union and China, the report said. That platform has continued to be the party's basic policy since then.
Miyamoto, who became Japanese Communist Party chairman in 1970, also helped remove the phrase ''proletarian dictatorship'' from the platform at the party's convention in 1976. In its place, he helped adopt a declaration of freedom and democracy.
Miyamoto, an economics graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, joined the Japanese Communist Party in 1931. Two years later he was arrested in the death of a police spy and jailed until Japan's surrender in 1945 at the end of World War II, Kyodo reported.
