that hit Japan in the spring of 1927, the party stepped up its propaganda work, launching a campaign to call for early elections. The Kantō Women's League, a women's organization connected to the party, was founded on July 3, 1927. The Kantō Wome's League was dissolved in March 1928, after the party had issued a directive against the existence of a separate organization for women. The change of position regarding the women's organization was a side-effect of the factional battle inside the party. Regarding the Chinese question, the party opposed the Japanese government policy and ran a "Hands off China" campaign. The party was supportive of the leftist Wuhan government. The party aided the foundation of the Taiwan Peasant Union and supported its struggles against the agricultural policies of the Japanese governor-general on the island. Electoral activity The party launched 108 candidates in the 1927 prefectural elections, out of whom 13 were elected (nine from rural areas, four from urban areas). The bulk of the votes for the party came from areas where its Japan Peasant Union was more active; Kagawa, Niigata, Akita and Hyogo. The combined vote of the candidates of the party stood at 119,169. Ahead of the 1928 national Diet elections the Labour-Farmer Party issued a list of radical demands, calling for the abolition of all forms of discrimination of subject races and reductions of the size of the armed forces. Slogans such as "Establish a Worker-Peasant Government" and "Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat" were raised in the election campaign. However, there was considerable government interference against the electoral campaigns of the Labour-Farmer Party. Electoral meetings were interrupted by police and election campaign workers were often arbitrarily arrested. Night after night, police forces interrupted the campaign speeches of Oyama Ikuo. His campaign headquarters in the Kagawa Prefecture constituency (where he stood as candidate, facing the incumbent finance minister) were raided by police. Amongst the candidates of the party were eleven communists. Kyuichi Tokuda, who later became the general secretary of the Communist Party, stood as a candidate of the party. Another communist, the trade union organizer Kenzo Yamamoto, was a Labour-Farmer Party candidate in Hokkaido. All in all the party supported 40 candidates in the elections, whom together mustered 181,141 votes (1.9% of the nationwide vote). Banno, however, states that the combined vote of the 40 Labour-Farmer Party candidates was 193,047. According to Banno's account,