The Heroic Origins of Japanese Socialism
Japan’s socialist movement took shape in the face of brutal repression as the country embarked on a path toward imperialist expansion. Against the odds, Japanese socialists built a political force that could challenge the new capitalist order.
In February 1898, engineers and stokers at the Japan Railway Company successfully struck for an improvement of status and higher wages. The same year, ships’ carpenters in Tokyo and Yokohama formed a union, and a dispute followed with demands for higher wages. (Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Socialism developed in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries against the background of general social upheaval caused by rapid modernization. In 1853 and 1854, United States commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in Japan with a fleet of “black ships” (steam-powered gunboats) and demanded that Japan open itself to trade with the West. This imperialist violence shook the old feudal order and acted as a catalyst for the establishment of a modern capitalist nation-state.
Japanese elites responded to the threat of imperialism by seeking to Westernize and modernize Japan. The domains of Satsuma, Chōshū, and their allied samurai clans led a movement that toppled the Tokugawa shogunate in the name of the young Meiji emperor, who was “restored” to the center of political power in 1868. The Meiji emperor’s Charter Oath eliminated the feudal class system, abolished the feudal domains, and established a modern administrative apparatus. Conscription into the new imperial military for all adult males functioned to eliminate the distinction between samurai and commoner.
The Meiji rulers imported people, technologies, and ideas to help shake off the unequal treaties foisted upon them by the United States and the European powers. Liberalism thus entered Japan together with a wide spectrum of European social thought. It influenced the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement that began agitating for democratic reforms and the enlargement of the franchise from the 1870s.
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