Suehiro Nishio

was a Japanese labor activist and party politician whose career extended across the prewar and postwar periods. A long-serving member of the National Diet (15 terms in total),

Early life and education Nishio was born into poverty in Shiyūjima Village in Kagawa Prefecture, in what is now the city of Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku. At the age of 14, Nishio dropped out of school and went to Osaka to work a variety of factory jobs, beginning with a lathe apprenticeship at the Osaka Arsenal. Nishio soon became involved in militant labor activism, which forced him to frequently switch jobs. In 1919, he joined the Yuaikai labor federation, and in 1926 he participated in the formation of the Social Democratic Party

Political career Nishio was elected to the House of Representatives in the National Diet for the first time in 1928. In 1932, he was one of the founders of the Social Masses Party, the most conservative of the three prewar “proletarian” parties. Although Nishio was anti-communist and Hitler and Mussolini would soon be Japan's allies, Joseph Stalin was deemed an inappropriate hero for a Japanese Diet Member, and his fellow members voted to dismiss Nishio from the Diet. Thereafter, Nishio consistently pushed for the Socialist Party to try to expand its base beyond urban working classes to encompass a broader coalition of farmers and small business owners, a position which conflicted with the Marxist dogma adhered to by the party's left wing that a socialist party should be based entirely on the working class. Nishio also earned the enmity of the left Socialists because unlike most Socialist Party Diet Members, who drew support from the left-leaning Sōhyō labor federation, Nishio and his allies drew support from the smaller, much more moderate Zenrō labor federation, and in the late 1950s Zenrō had embarked on a controversial effort to hive off Zenrō-affiliated "Second unions" from Sōhyō affiliated unions, which Sōhyō viewed as an existential threat. The left wing of the Socialist Party and the leaders of the Sōhyō labor federation decided that Nishio was impeding the anti-treaty struggle and began taking steps to have him booted from the JSP. Rather than waiting to be expelled, Nishio bolted the party himself, announcing the formation of the new Democratic Socialist Party of Japan (DSP) on 24 January 1960, and taking around 40 members of the old Right Socialist Party with him.

Nishio's new party was received with great fanfare by the media in Japan and initially received support from a number of prominent centrist intellectuals, leading to talk of a "Democratic Socialist boom" in the spring of 1960. U.S. diplomats also placed great hopes on the new party as a much-needed more moderate alternative to the left-wing opposition parties in Japan. Nishio died on 3 October 1981, at the age of 90 due to renal failure.