Origins of Socialist Thought

Some of the earliest socialist influences in Japan came from Russian populism (Narodnism) and Leo Tolstoy’s Christian pacifism. In the 1890s, socialism was largely an intellectual pursuit, focused more on the need for high standards of ethical behavior than on building a mass movement of the working class.

Rapid industrialization produced appalling working conditions in late-nineteenth-century Japan. The largely female factory workforce endured long hours and draconian restrictions on their freedom. Many were the daughters of peasant farmers or downwardly mobile samurai from the countryside and were confined to their dormitories at night, sometimes with terrible consequences when fire broke out in cheaply constructed wooden buildings.

Some early socialists like Katayama Sen (1859–1933) became labor organizers, and a modern labor movement began to take shape with the formation of a metalworkers’ union in 1897. There were some strikes, but unions lacked the financial resources to support them, and they were made entirely illegal in 1900.

The Meiji authorities were quick to identify socialism and organized labor as a threat. They developed an extensive repressive apparatus to contain the spread of socialist ideas and to imprison and punish its sympathizers. The Public Order and Police Provisions Law of 1900 had a severe impact on the fledgling movement.

Japan’s first socialist political party, the Shakai Minshutō (Social Democratic Party), was founded in May 1901 in an attempt to avoid this repression. Yet Minister of Home Affairs Baron Kenchō Suematsu (1855–1920) ordered the party’s dissolution on the same day and laid charges against editors of newspapers who had published the new party’s platform, which was based in part on the Communist Manifesto.

Labor organizing continued all the same. The Yūaikai (Friendly Society) formed in 1912 was based on the principle of the early British friendly societies. None of these early organizing efforts attracted a significant membership.

War and the High Treason Incident

Some Japanese socialists were motivated by pacifism and opposition to modern Japan’s own imperialist wars. One of the earliest socialist intellectuals, Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), developed a theory of anti-imperialism in response to Japan’s involvement in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion on the Chinese mainland. He founded the Commoners Society in 1903, together with Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923), based on a mixture of Christian pacifism, anti-imperialism, and proletarian internationalism.

The society opposed the Russo-Japanese War in the pages of its newspaper but was censored when the tide of war seemed to be turning against Japan. In 1904, the Japanese socialist Katayama Sen famously met his Russian counterpart Georgii Plekhanov during the Congress of the Second International, symbolizing the notion of socialist internationalism between nations that were officially at war.

Some European social democrats voiced support for a Japanese victory in the war, claiming that it would be a defeat for Tsarist despotism. Japanese socialists criticized this position, noting that a Japanese victory would only embolden their own ruling class and insisting that socialists everywhere must oppose imperialist wars from the perspective of the brotherhood of the workers.

Kōtoku visited the United States in 1905–06, where he was influenced by the anarchist movement and became the leading exponent in Japan of a “direct action” strategy. In 1910, the government alleged that it had uncovered a plot by Kōtoku and other anarchists, such as the anarcha-feminist Kanno Sugako (1881–1911), to assassinate the emperor. Twenty-four anarchist sympathizers were sentenced to death in what has come to be known as the High Treason Incident, though twelve later had their sentences commuted to life in prison.

The incident signaled the beginning of a period of heightened repression of the Left known as the “socialist winter.” Despite the repression of the organized movement, social tensions exploded in 1918 in widespread riots that broke out in response to dramatic increases in the price of rice. Some ten million people took part in the riots, with uprisings occurring in 636 places across Japan. They continued for two months and brought down the Terauchi Masatake government.

Taishō Democracy

Japan developed its first party-political system, albeit with an extremely limited franchise, during the period known as “Taishō Democracy” from 1918 to 1932. A new wave of strike activity in the 1920s enabled the development of a wide-ranging labor and socialist movement. This included the formation of a national federation of labor and farmers’ unions in the early 1920s and the founding of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in 1922.

Japanese enterprises reacted to a fluid labor market by instituting what has been called “industrial paternalism.” This involved providing significant nonwage benefits such as low-cost boarding houses and other services, as well as regular graded pay increases and lifetime employment to skilled workers who remained with their employer over the long term. Company unions were formed to help maintain the loyalty of workers. Independent unions were mostly confined to smaller factories and shops, where high labor turnover and the boom-bust cycle severely hampered efforts toward long-term organizing.

While the repression of labor organizing in the 1920s was severe, gendered notions of what constituted a worker were also a major obstacle to labor organizing. Textile manufacturing was the first major capitalist industry in Japan in the late nineteenth century and relied primarily on female labor. However, the reality of these working women was mystified by a patriarchal family and gender ideology.

Under the Meiji Civil Code of 1898, women were enjoined to be “good wives and wise mothers.” Under the 1900 Public Peace Police Law, women were prohibited from participating in political activity. Women did engage in some spontaneous strike action against the extremely exploitative conditions in the factories, but the labor movement failed to organize them on a mass basis. Although factory legislation promulgated in 1911 placed some restrictions on the exploitation of women and child workers, both the government officials who drafted it and male labor organizers saw women as passive victims in need of paternalistic protection rather than as workers with rights.

Labor organizing was further inhibited by the fact that female factory workers were initially drawn mainly from the country and lived in factory-controlled boarding houses that were inaccessible to labor organizers. The struggle to repeal these restrictions on women’s participation in politics was thus a focus of women’s political activism in the early twentieth century.

The early 1920s saw the establishment of socialist women’s groups such as the Red Wave Society (Sekirankai) and Eighth Day Society (Yōkakai). Women were allowed to attend meetings from 1922, and women’s suffrage leagues later emerged alongside the proletarian parties that were founded following the enactment of manhood suffrage in 1925.

The Taishō period also saw the first attempts by members of the outcast burakumin group to challenge discrimination based on their historic association with trades such as butchery and leather tanning that are regarded as tainted within the framework of Japanese religious beliefs. In 1922, a number of burakumin groups came together to form the Levellers Society to pursue equal social and political rights.

The expanding Japanese empire depended on a proliferating hierarchy of gendered and racialized forms of oppression against women, burakumin, indigenous Ainu and Okinawan people, and Korean and Chinese subjects of the empire. These oppressions divided the working class.

In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake rocked Tokyo, causing 150,000 deaths and widespread destruction of property. Rumors were circulated that blamed Koreans and leftists for the disorder after the earthquake, and they were accused of poisoning wells and looting homes. Armed groups carried out beatings and killings of those identified as responsible, fueling the ethnonationalism that the Japanese state would need to prosecute its expansionary agenda overseas.

Communism and the Debate on Japanese Capitalism

The first Japanese translation of the Communist Manifesto had appeared in 1904, although the issue of the Commoners Newspaper in which it was printed was swiftly banned. As a distinct socialist movement emerged, many intellectuals looked to Marxism to try to understand the nature of the Meiji Restoration and the society it had produced. The resulting debate on Japanese capitalism was the first major attempt by Japanese intellectuals to understand their own recent history.

The Comintern and its supporters in the Japanese Communist Party, who were known as the Kōza faction, characterized the Meiji Restoration as an incomplete bourgeois revolution that had failed to do away with the vestiges of feudal society. They concluded that the goal of socialists was therefore to first complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

The Rōnō (worker-farmer) faction, formed around party leader Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880–1958), argued instead that Japan was already a bourgeois-democratic society and that conditions were ripe for socialist revolution. They rejected the need for a vanguard party in favor of a broad alliance of the proletariat and its supporters in a legal, mass-based united front political party.

Yamakawa and his supporters left the Communist Party in protest at its adoption of the Comintern’s July 1927 Theses on Japan. These Rōnō faction intellectuals formed the nucleus of the left-wing current of the Japan Socialist Party after World War II.

Following the passage of manhood suffrage in May 1925, labor and farmers’ unions as well as left-wing intellectuals began working to establish proletarian political parties in order to contest the first elections in 1928. Many wanted to build a united party, but in reality, an enormous number of tentative parties formed, split, and reformed in a chaotic process.

As socialists argued among themselves over history and strategy, the Japanese economy faced a deepening crisis, and the authorities clamped down hard on their activism. On March 15, 1928, the police arrested 1,600 associates of the JCP under the Peace Preservation Law, crippling JCP influence in the socialist and labor movements.

The proletarian literature movement sought to document the experience of the working class and to exhort them to rise up against their bosses. Radical theater and culture circles helped forge a working-class culture in urban Japan in the 1930s, but they faced increasingly draconian repression from the police.

The Communist Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933), one of the movement’s most successful writers, penned The Factory Ship in 1929. The novella was based on reports of a mutiny by commercial fishers working in the highly exploitative crab-canning industry in Japan’s northern waters near Russia. Forced from his job at a bank following the publication of the novel, Kobayashi was living underground when he was arrested and tortured to death by the police in 1933 at just twenty-nine years of age.

Militarism and the Road to War

The increasing repression at home was related to Japan’s expansionary policy abroad. In 1931, Japan’s Kwantung Army staged a bomb attack on the Manchurian Railway in northeast China. The incident served as justification for a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. This initiated the conflict with China known to Japanese historians as the Fifteen-Year War, which continued until Japan’s defeat in 1945.

In July 1932, various socialist groups combined to form the Social Masses Party (SMP), but the Left won just five out of 466 lower house seats in the Diet elections of that year. Some socialists believed that if they gave their support to the nationalist movement, it would enhance their electoral appeal. A legal socialist movement continued on this basis.

However, the populist nationalism of the young military officers, who offered a revolutionary solution to the problems of the Great Depression, enjoyed the support of the peasantry. The officers’ campaign of political violence directed against the civilian government enabled the Imperial forces to expand their activities in northeast China. In the general elections of April 30, 1937, the SMP won thirty-six seats and threw its support behind the army in the name of national defense.

Left-wing unionists founded the Japan Proletarian Party (JPP) in 1937 to organize a popular front against the right-wing SMP’s collaboration with the militarists. But the Left suffered further repression. Between December 1937 and February 1938, nearly five hundred socialists were arrested.

In 1940, the police dissolved the JPP and its affiliated union federation Zempyo (the National Council of Japanese Labor Unions) and arrested four hundred members and sympathizers. The same year, the few remaining independent unions were forcibly dissolved into the Federation of Patriotic Industrial Service (Sanpō), under the responsibility of the Home and Welfare Ministry, and turned to support the war effort.

Some labor organizers continued to struggle, even under wartime conditions. The Print and Publishing Workers’ Club, for example, continued to operate covertly as a culture circle into 1942. Nevertheless, by the early 1940s, most of the socialist movement had either been imprisoned, converted to support for Japanese expansionism, or rendered silent.

Out of the Ashes

The prewar Japanese socialist movement struggled to organize labor militancy under conditions of rapid social change. While they achieved some successes, the movement faced severe repression as Japan became engaged in its own imperialist expansion in Asia and the Pacific.

The accommodation of some leading socialists with the nationalist movement reflected their own limited grasp of socialism as a philosophy and practice of human liberation. For many leading intellectuals within the movement and beyond it, Marxist and social democratic theories were seen as providing insight into different ways of organizing state and society without necessarily overthrowing capitalist social relations.

This conservative form of social democracy continued to exert a significant influence in Japan after 1945. It helped produce the developmentalist form of capitalism that enabled Japan to rise from the ashes and become one of the leading capitalist nation-states in the postwar world. The efforts of genuine socialists to reform and revolutionize Japanese society in the early twentieth century were insufficient to halt the misery and devastation that Japanese militarism ultimately inflicted in Asia and on Japan’s own populace as they were mobilized for total war. But the heroic struggles of socialist militants and grassroots activists in the labor and women’s movements laid the groundwork for a socialist revival after 1945, and those struggles continue to inspire activists in Japan and beyond.