Kamejiro Senaga, the former vice chairman of the Japanese Communist Party, Lower House member and noted activist against the U.S. presence in Okinawa, died Friday night of pneumonia at a hospital in the village of Tomigusuku, Okinawa Prefecture. He was 94.
Senaga, an Okinawa native, led political campaigns against the U.S. military rule of the prefecture from shortly before Japan's surrender at the end of World War II in 1945 to the islands' reversion to Japanese rule in 1972.
He was a founding member of the leftwing Okinawa People's Party, set up in 1947, and later became its chairman.
Senaga was imprisoned for two years from 1954 after a U.S. military trial on charges of harboring a party member who defied a U.S. military order.
In 1956, he was elected mayor of the Okinawa capital of Naha, but under a U.S. military order he was forced out of the post within a year.
He continued to oppose the heavy U.S. military presence in the prefecture after its reversion to Japanese rule.
When the Okinawa People's Party merged with the JCP in 1973, Senaga became the JCP's vice chairman. Since 1970 he had been elected seven times in a row as a House of Representatives member. He retired from politics in 1990 due to health reasons.
"Mr. Senaga always led the people of Okinawa during the tough times under the U.S. occupation and he contributed a great deal to the development of the prefecture," Okinawa Gov. Keiichi Inamine said.
Senaga's funeral will be held in Daitenji temple in Naha from 1 p.m. Monday.