From Episode 81 of Isaac Meyer's History of Japan Podcast http://isaacmeyer.net/
In 1910, an anarchist plot to assassinate the Meiji Emperor was uncovered. Seizing the opportunity, conservatives in the government pounced in to arrest 26 anarchists. The background of this confrontation between the government and the radical left, the trials themselves, and their modern legacy are our topics
I've become something of a podcast junky thanks to my work schedules, and I've slowly been working my way through Isaac Meyer's History of Japan podcast. Meyer has spent several years in several cities across Japan, has a PHD on the nations history and can speak the language to a degree so he's quite the expert. This episode 81, caught my interest as its about the history of Japan's anarchist movement, an often overlooked subject despite the roots anarchism was able to spread within Japan. In the 1910s-30s Japanese and Korean and Chinese anarchists were a major thorn in the increasingly militaristic and imperialist governments side. And as such they were singled out for repression.
Unfortunately there is not much material about or by these early Japanese rebels in English though speakers of Japanese, Russian and Esperanto have a wider selection thanks to the popularity of those languages amongst the group. And books covering Japanese feminism do have some information on female anarchists from this period like Kanno Sugako and Ito Noe. Here's what I've been able to find in English.
Kanno Sugako
Ito Noe
Osugi Sakae
CIRA-Nippon An anarchist group active in the seventies that occasionally included historical sketches on this period.
Added Transcript.
The Great Treason
Incident
Anarchism in Japan
Isaac Meyer December 6th 2014
Hello and welcome to the History of Japan Podcast, episode
81 the Great Treason Incident. Picture the setting, a small room in Nagano Prefecture
in 1910, home to one Miyashita Takichi a lumber mill employee. The date is May
20th and outside the police are lining up to prepare to raid the
place, they break in and begin to search, only to find exactly what they feared
would be there, parts to produce a bomb. This confirms their worst fears, it’s
exactly as they suspected, someone is plotting to kill the Meiji Emperor.
The raid on Miyashita’s home was the climax of an
investigation which came at one of the most unsettled point’s in Japans national
history. Only five years early crowds had rejoiced in the streets of victory
over Russia, but that rejoicing had been short-lived. The military had done an
excellent job of keeping a lid on just how hard things had been going in
Manchuria and as a result the majority of Japanese were simply not aware of how
much they had sacrificed for victory. In particular they had no good
explanation for the fact that their country’s debt was not being wiped out with
a massive war indemnity- the Japanese had in fact decided their position was
not good enough to demand one from Russia- for the fact that their country was
not annexing everything up to the Amur river in northern Manchuria -same
reason- and for the fact that rice prices were spiking inexplicably.
Military requisitioning was driving up the prices, but most
people assumed it was just war profiteering. The result was riots that started
in the Hibiya district of Tokyo but spread across Japan’s big urban centres and
in which over 1 million people participated. For the Meiji leadership this was
some of their worst nightmares. They were dangerously close it seemed to losing
control of the masses. You see perhaps because some of their first experiences
abroad really coincided with the high water marks of the European left, the
Paris Commune for example or the steady rise of the German Socialist Party, or
the early days of the British Labour party. The leaders of Meiji Japan were
always very worried about the threat of leftist ideologies Marxism, Anarchism
or Socialism.
They worried that Japanese industrialisation would naturally
bring these same problems to Japanese shores. In part that fear actually
spurred these leaders to be more progressive than they otherwise would have
been. Borrowing from the playbook of Otto Von Bismarck, did the exact same
thing in Imperial Germany. The Meiji leadership lead by Ito Hirobumi, Yamagata
Aritomo and the fiscal expert of the bunch Matsukata Masayoshi decided to
implement several reforms to pre-empt a lot of the issues socialists
traditionally drew support from.
In particular they arranged for the passage of factory acts
regulating working conditions and hours in the 1880s, at which point Japan had
less than 50 factories across the entire country. The idea basically being, `We’ll
need these laws eventually, so we might as well have them now`. This kind of
system is referred to as a Social Monarchy. In essence the Monarchy provides
reforms normally associated with socialist parties, in a sort of paternalistic
way designed to attach the people more directly to their ruler. [Sarcastically] Who cares clearly, so
deeply for their well being [/sarcastically].
Despite their best attempts to keep a lid on things however,
the radical left began to gain strength in the early 20th century and
that scared the hell out of the Meiji leadership. It’s kind of hard for those
of us born at the tail end of the Cold War to really grasp, because we tend to
think of ideologies like Anarchism or socialism as `that thing your slightly
stoned friend from college won’t shut up about` but at the time these were
really potent ideologies that scared a lot of establishment people because of
their potential for forcing radical change.
This was particularly true of Anarchism, which as an
ideology had motivated a wave of assassinations in Europe and America during
the latter half of the 19th century. Tsar Alexander II in Russia in
1881, President of the Republic of France Marie François Sadi Carnot in 1894,
Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary in 1898 -incidentally her corset was laced
so tight that after she was stabbed she didn’t start to bleed seriously until
it was taken off- and President William McKinley of the United States in 1901.
And those are just the highest profile ones, there were plenty more.
Thus the Meiji oligarchs decided to complement the old
velvet glove with a little bit of the old iron fist. If playing nice didn’t
work, well how about a little good old repression. The first targets of their
wrath were organisations like the Japan Socialist Party, which was first formed
in 1901 and then shut down by police within and I’m not kidding; three hours of
its formation. Also in the crosshairs was an organisation called the
Heimin-Sha, the Commoner’s Association which produced a newspaper called the Heimin
Shimbun the Commoner’s Newspaper. Its
editor a young intellectual named Kōtoku Shūsui had produced in that paper
among other things the first partial Japanese language translation of the
Communist Manifesto as well as the works of Russian Anarchist Peter Kropotkin.
The Heimin Shimbun was also shutdown in 1905. Kōtoku by the way is both a fascinating person and
central to the story, so we should talk about him for a little bit.
He was the descendant of a rather well-to-do samurai family
`because no the stereotype about rich kids embracing Marxism or Anarchism is
not a new thing`. From what would have
been Tosa domain and what was now Kochi Prefecture, in Shikoku in 1871. In his
20s he fell under the influence of Katayama Sen a prominent Christian Socialist.
Kōtoku embraced socialism and was one of the founding members with Katayama of
the aforementioned socialist party. Like everyone else he was arrested within a
few hours of its formation.
However technically speaking there wasn’t anything they
could be charged with so while the party was shutdown they were released.
Katayama and Kōtoku however ended up splitting. Katayama moved away from
Christian Socialism which was a big thing in the 19th century but
not so much in the 20th, towards communism. He would eventually join
the Communist International, helped found the Japan Communist Party in 1922 and
spend the remainder of his life in exile in the Soviet Union.
Kōtoku meanwhile began moving towards Anarchism. He left
Japan in 1905 for the United States, where in the age old tradition of Hippies
everywhere -again not making this up- he moved to San Francisco and joined a
commune, because some things never change. His rationale for leaving was his
desire to openly critique the Emperor and the Imperial family, whom he saw as
the legitimising force of the evils of Japanese capitalism. He returned to Japan a year later, after
incidentally having lived through and helping rebuild from the great San
Francisco earthquake in 1906. A very different man from the one who had left
for the U.S. Now he was a committed Anarchist and among other things he
abandoned some of the more moderate goals of socialism, including universal
voting rights, in favour of a more radical position of direct action against
oppressive structures of government.
Direct action of course makes the authorities think of the
fates of all those world leaders who had been killed by Anarchists. Because
what’s more direct than a bomb throwing or a stabbing? In fact reading his
writings its more likely Kōtoku was calling for general strikes than
assassination.
Now its worth stopping here to note because if I don’t, any
Anarchist who listens to the show will likely flood my e-mail with messages
reminding me that most Anarchists, then and now did not advocate violence. Just
as with a great many ideologies over the course of human history it was only a
small lunatic fringe that did. But of course as a general rule the lunatic
fringe out there is always better getting noticed than the down to earth
people.
Anyway between his previous past as a socialist and his
current one as an Anarchist Kōtoku was now definitely a person of interest for
the government. They were watching him very carefully, this despite the fact
that after his return most of his public energy seems to have been expended on
that great pastime on the left-leaning, internal structures between
functionally identical factions. In particular the Japanese left was split
between Anarchist, Christian Socialist and Marxist socialist camps. With a smattering
of other folks thrown in to keep things exciting.
It’s all very Byzantine and vaguely reminiscent of the whole
People’s Front of Judea versus the Judean Peoples Front bit from Monty Python’s
Life of Brian. However the fact that Kōtoku and his allies descended into
squabbling that would be incomprehensible to most people, didn’t seem to change
the pictures much for the authorities. He and his friends were dangerous.
This impression was confirmed in 1908 by what was known as
the Akahata Jiken or the Red Banner Incident. On June 22nd of that
year a prominent anarchist named Yamaguchi Koken was released from jail after
serving out his term. He was greeted by a giant Anarchist rally. Several
hundred Anarchists waving banners with slogans like “Revolution” and “Anarchy
and Communism” greeted Yamaguchi and the police terrified of this human mass
decided that something had to be done. They went in and started beating and
arresting whoever they could get their hands on, to disperse the rally.
In the wake of the incident the new Prime Minister Katsura
Tarō, -who had taken over a few weeks earlier from our old buddy Saionji
Kinmochi, future Japanese delegate to Versailles and tutor of Konoe Fumimaro,-
decided that he would crackdown on the troublemakers. He began to push for even
more police power to be deployed against Socialists and Anarchists. And that
leads us to where we started, on Katsura’s orders the police began digging and
through their infiltration of Anarchist cells -sometimes I really wonder how many
of these cells were actually Anarchists and how many were all just police
informants snitching on each other- they came across a plot.
Someone had talked about killing the Emperor and apparently
one of the people they’d spoken to was Kōtoku Shūsui. So the investigation
continued given more urgency by the assassination of Ito Hirobumi, since his
assassin An Jung-geun was often incorrectly described as an Anarchist, a label
he is sometimes still given today though he was not, he was very much a
Nationalist. The plot the authorities had come across was very real though only
five people were involved in it. One of them by the way is someone we’ve talked
about before, Kanno Sugako.
She was one of Japan’s leading Feminists and like Kōtoku
Shūsui had started out a Christian Socialist and moved towards Anarchism over
time. Kanno had also been in a relationship with Kōtoku Shūsui though by 1910
they’d broken things off. Her life story is absolutely fascinating, she was
born in Osaka to a family of merchants in 1881 and became involved in socialism
because at the time it was one of the few ideologies out there unquestioningly
dedicated to the idea of women’s liberation. She became a social critic and a
journalist, but over time more committed to direct action.
Unlike in the case of Kōtoku who was definitely not involved
in this assassination plot against the Emperor, she definitely was. Someone
talked though and the police pounced. In addition to grabbing the five people
actually involved in the plot Kanno Sugako, Miyashita Takichi -the guy with the
bomb components in his home- and three others. They also took the time to round
up 21 other suspected Anarchists. Prime Minister Katsura decided that now that
he had the excuse it was time to crack down hard.
Kōtoku Shūsui was one of them, he was arrested at an onsen
while recovering from a bout of respiratory illness. [sarcasm]Because obviously
when you’re plotting high treason you have to take care of your
lungs[/sarcasm]. Ironically enough there were a bunch of other Anarchist
leaders the government wanted to arrest as well but couldn’t. People like the
Anarchist and labour leader Arahata Kanson. They were in jail as a result of
the Red Banner Incident back in 1908 and thus even by the loosely defined
standards of evidence which surrounded the whole affair, they couldn’t really
be said to be involved.
Now the trial these people were given, well if you described
it as a farce it would be a grave insult to the farcical arts. The 26
defendants were brought up on charges from articles 73 to 76 of the Penal Code;
which allowed death sentences for those who harmed or attempted to harm the
Imperial family and hard labour for those who “disrespected” the family. Which
could for example include destroying or damaging a Shinto Shrine. The Chief
Prosecutor was a man named Hiranuma Kiichirō, who had gotten his start in the
Justice Ministry and was generally considered to be a star prosecutor. He was
also very much of the `Tough on crime school` and pressed for the death penalty
in every case, even those only guilty by association.
Incidentally he’s come up in our story before but later on
in his career as one of the prime ministers of the 1930s. I’d said we’d be only
dealing with him one more time on the show but it turns out I was wrong, I
actually didn’t know he was involved with this case until I started writing
this episode. He’ll come back next August when we turn to the events of 1945
and you probably won’t like him much then either.
Very recently, in
fact only a few years ago, a letter from Kanno Sugako to a journalist at the
Asahi Shimbun named Sugimura Jyuou, dated directly before the trial came to
light. It has shed some light on what was going on in her head during the lead
up to the sentencing. The way she wrote it was actually very ingenious, she
used a needle to poke characters into a piece of paper so that it looked blank
but the writing was visible when you held it up to a light. The letter itself
flatly states that Kōtoku Shūsui knew nothing about
the plot and implores Sugimura to find a lawyer for Kōtoku. It also correctly
predicted the sentencing.
The chief judge [can’t understand name] apparently decided
that this was no time to look soft on treason because he went with Hiranuma and
sentenced 24 of the 26 defendants to death. The remaining two were given
varying terms of imprisonment. Things were getting out of hand, a message had
to be sent. This provided an opening for the Imperial House to show its
benevolence, the Emperor who at this point was already ailing and would die of
natural causes two years later, personally intervened to commute the death
sentences of thirteen of the defendants. However neither Kanno nor Kōtoku were
among them.
Kōtoku and Kanno spent their remaining months in prison.
Kōtoku#s own mother actually died when she came down to Tokyo to visit him and
Kanno Sugako, whom she was extremely fond of, and then caught pneumonia. Kanno
who was quite the writer left a testament of her reflections during the lead-up
to the final carrying out of the execution. It’s very moving and deeply
depressing, she describes the outcome of the trial quote “ my poor friends, my
poor comrades, more than half of them were innocent bystanders who had been
implicated by the actions of five or six of us. Just because they were
associated with us they now are to be sacrificed in this monstrous fashion
simply because they are Anarchists, they are to be thrown over the cliffs to
their deaths. We had sailed into the vast ocean ahead of the worlds current of
thought, and the general tides of events. Unfortunately we were shipwrecked,
but this sacrifice had to be made to get things started. New routes are opened
up only after many shipwrecks and voyages. This is how the other shore of one’s
ideals is reached. After the sage of Nazareth, Jesus that is, was born, many
sacrifices had to be made before Christianity became a world religion. In light
of this I feel our sacrifice is miniscule.”
End quote.
The majority of executions including Kōtoku’s were carried
out on January 24th 1911, Kanno Sugako was executed the next day.
Her execution was particularly politically explosive since she was the first
woman ever executed by the Meiji government. The story has a sad postscript,
after his death Kōtoku Shūsui became a martyr to the Japanese left, both
because of his intellectual presence before his death and because of his show
trial leading up to it.
The trials rather than undercutting the Japanese left
actually galvanized it to a degree. In fact in 1923 someone tried to avenge
him. As then Crown Prince Hirohito was riding to the Diet to open a new session
he passed Toranomon an area between the Imperial palace at Akasaka and the Diet
building in Nagatachō. A gunshot rang out, the shot missed the Crown Prince,
though it did hit a chamberlain in the entourage. The perpetrator was tackled
shortly after and reveled to be one Namba Daisuke.
Namba Daisuke was actually the son of a prominent Diet
member representative. Who had started his life fairly nationalist, he actually
considered joining the army but was converted to radical leftist politics.
Among other things he said that he planned to assassinate Hirohito in revenge
for the death of Kōtoku Shūsui. Unsurprisingly Namba Daisuke was convicted of
high treason in short order and hanged. But now the fear was back. The radical
left had not been forced underground by the trials and now someone had yet
again tried to assassinate a member of the Imperial family.
To make matters worse the hard left was even more entrenched
than it had been before. Like we covered earlier the Japan Communist Party had
been founded a year earlier in 1922 and while the Socialists had gone under the
Anarchists had not. The Communists if anything were growing far beyond anything
the other two had ever managed. They were even openly getting into academia in
the form of Marxist economists like Kawakami Hajime. Clearly the crackdown
initiated by Katasura was not working – he by the way had been forced out of
office shortly there after by a scandal covered in another episode, basically
he proved unable to control the army- something even harsher was necessary.
The result was the Peace Preservation law of 1925, easily
the harshest and most authoritarian law in Japanese history. And used to
justify the vast majority of the oppression that would happen in the 1930s and
1940s. The law was written by the Home Minister who was -wait for it- no one
other than our old friend Hironuma Kiichirō, the prosecutor from the treason
trial. The first two articles read quote “ Anyone who organises a group for the
purposes of changing the national polity or of denying the private property
system or anyone who knowingly participates in said group shall be sentenced to
penal servitude or imprisonment not exceeding ten years. An offence not
actually carried out shall also be subject to punishment. Anyone who consults
with another person on matters relating to the implementation of these
objectives described in Clause one of the preceding article shall be sentenced
to penal servitude or imprisonment not exceeding seven years.”
The remainder of the law went on to specify that inciting
others to these activities was also punishable by penal servitude, that
financially supporting anyone found guilty of these crimes was illegal and
incredibly that you were still guilty even if you broke the law outside of
Japanese Jurisdiction. A Japanese citizen writing an editorial in the United
States about changing the Constitution would be arrested upon returning to
Japan. When a Dietman questioning the utility of the new law attempted to
undercut Hironuma by pointing out that the way the law was currently worded a
legislator could be arrested for suggesting an amendment to the Constitution
Hironuma responded that that Dietman was absolutely correct, it says right in
the Meiji Constitution that only the Emperor can propose amendments, so anyone
else doing so is a violation of the peace preservation law.
This draconian bit of law making would become emblematic of
Totalitarian Japan and incidentally it would also be one of the first laws
repealed under the US occupation government. The Peace Preservation law really
is the ultimate legacy of the Great Treason Incident. The fear with which the
Japanese elite looked at the radical left prompted them to put into place a
Totalitarian system of repression that was then seized by the military and
turned on the society it was supposed to defend from radicalism.
Kanno Sugako and her four compatriots thought they were
attacking the lynchpin of an oppressive system. In reality they never had much
of a chance of getting their plan off the ground and all they did was provide
an excuse for a crackdown.
Kōtoku Shūsui and all the other innocent Anarchists
meanwhile became sacrifices in the name of abstract notions of social stability
and national security. They were among the first, but they would not be the
last. In a final sad note, after the war the families of the victims tried one
last time to get justice. They requested a retrial of the case since legally
speaking the original verdicts were still on the books. Even after the war
Kōtoku Shūsui was still legally a traitor, their request for a retrial was
denied by the Supreme Court of Japan in 1969.
Prior to his execution Kōtoku Shūsui etched the following
onto the wall of his cell “how has it come about that I have committed this
grave crime? Today my trial is hidden from outside observers and I have even
less liberty than previously to speak about these events. Perhaps in 100 years
someone will speak out about them on my behalf. “
Well I guess I’m three years late and I’m not the first to
bring this up, but for what its worth Kōtoku you were right. That’s all this
week.
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