While Shūsui Kōtoku [幸徳 秋水] (1871-1911) is generally deemed the precursor of modern anarchism in Japan, Sakae Ōsugi [大杉 栄] (1885-1923) is perhaps its best known representative. If that's the case due to his written works or rather due to his rather unconventional life trajectory and character, it would be hard to ponder. As Stanley states on the preface, there are very few historical figures so vividly biographical as Ōsugi, nowhere in the world and particularly in Japan; endowed with an intense personality and presence as the byproduct of both a troubled coming of age and an innate curiosity, Ōsugi's ideas were best exemplified by his actions, from his almost unknown adventures fleeing the police of Imperial Japan in Chinese vessels sailing towards Shanghai, Europe or USA, to his romantic endeavours, featuring a ménage à trois with two women authors who granted him a knife wound. This latter scandal not only sadly overshadowed his entire biography due to the titulars at the time, but also inspired Kiju Yoshida's 1969 new wave film Eros+Massacre [エロス＋虐殺]. ''Sadly'' because Ōsugi's last return to the newspapers would be of a higher order: the news of his death at the hands of the military police during the havoc raised by the Great Kantō Earthquake, along with his partner and his nephew, a child at the time. This did put an end to the perceived threat he became through the years, at the eyes of the military establishment.
Stanley's work paradoxically sets apart Ōsugi's biographical information from a second half of the book, which deals with his works and political activity. Acknowledging the fact of how strongly intertwined both of them are, he presents a reasonable excuse: we only have flashes of credible information of the second half of his life; his political activity was strictly watched by the Government at the time, and he literally lived on the run, leaving works and residences behind him. When he stayed on a particular home (as it was with his family for a time), he was openly shadowed by police agents day and night, so much so that he would ask them to take his suitcases or books for him, jokingly considering them part of his family. And, when he had to run, he did so and completely disappeared (as he recalls in his memories 'My Escapes From Japan', translated by Michael Schauerte) for months or years at the time. Thus, this is the reason as to why this book starts with Ōsugi's almost novelesque life story (his stutter, his many imperfections as a youngster and his relationships with family and others) and it gets fairly disembodied and scholarly as it progresses. Nevertheless, this later half is probably the best English material available to study Ōsugi's ideas, still untranslated from Japanese as far as I know; this remains enigmatic, since Ōsugi was himself fluent in at least 5 languages, including Russian, French, Italian, German, English and Esperanto aside from his native Japanese, and published various translations as a means of earning some income.
Ōsugi grew up in a modestly well off family at the time; his father Azuma was a low-rank army officer who spoke three languages and didn't really cared for him, being a quite distant father. This along with the death of his mother may had something to do with Ōsugi's fierce tendence towards leadership, competition and confrontation of any kind; some even consider Ōsugi used to exaggerate his already notorious stutter in order to be recognized as his father's son, since both of them featured it. Ironically, Ōsugi's would improve whenever he was nervous or spoke in public forums, making him a good advocate for a speech even when he was pretty self-conscious about it under other circumstances. He started many paths during his juvenile years: a military Kadet school in order to be a war correspondant, then a medicine cram school and such. In most of these contexts he seemed to be honestly incapable or unwilling to fit in; he even got into a homosexual relationship in the army school, almost the epitome of ''antisocial behaviour'' according to authorities there. When he decided to set in Tokyo and study there, he also engaged with both the literary blossoming happening by the discovery of Western literature (enterprise still going strong in 1900) and the new lifestyles of modern
urbanite men in Japan, which set an stark contrast with the previous traditional customs. Two strains that influenced his move towards political activism appear to be very far from it: evolutionary theories of evolution of nature (which pushed away traditional immobilism and sparked evolutionary and progressive theories of social change), very much in line with his studies at the time, and, on the other hand, Christianity. He even got baptised into Ebina Danjo's [海老名 弾正] Church of ''Shintoistic Christianity'', which was pushing for making Christianism, long forbidden in Edo Japan, palatable for both the Government and the Japanese public. Of course Ōsugi would later distance himself from the Church, but it is interesting to ponder what exactly attracted him to the idea in the first place. Quoting Stanley on both of these topics:
Evolutionary thought did not lead him to socialism directly, but it opened his mind to the authority of science, which would be an important basis on which socialism and anarchism, would latter appeal to him and other young men in the late Meiji and early Taishō periods (...) what drew him to Ebina's church was Ebina's contention that religion was cosmopolitan, that it superseded national boundaries, and that it was libertarian in its denial of all earthly authority
Around that same time, Ōsugi also started to participate in riots, attend meetings and publish in socialist journals and magazines. He also joined Kōtoku's Heimin-sha [平民社], an organization of young socialists who also published the Heimin Shinbum [平民新聞], or the Commoner's Newspaper; his compromise was still weak and a matter of affinity, but he still help cleaning, handling bills and other similar tasks after his study and work schedules. He states that at least half of the members were also Christians too. Around this period, three major events changed everything for him. First, the Russo-Japanese War sparked around 1904, and he definitely left Ebina and other Christian leaders who cheered the war effort, identifying himself with pacifism from then on. Secondly, Ōsugi was arrested for the first time in 1906, forever sealing his destiny as a political activist incapable of making a career
in the war machine as his father had. Last but not least, the High Treason Incident in 1910 did bring an end to the Heimin-sha, and got Kōtoku himself executed along with Uchiyama Gudō. It is often said that Ōsugi only lived because of his being behind bars at the time; his imprisonment was to become a permanent and frequent aspect of his life, him being perhaps the single Japanese person most frequently arrested. Even considering his double life as an elite military student and a socialist writing in journals, he was still capable of becoming a regular member of society; but his arrest definitely turned him into politics. Also, as he stated, he received his real education in prison: there he read the classics and also studied his many languages.
In a context of increased political repression after the High Treason Incident, Ōsugi was back at it again after more than 3 years of imprisonment, and he did not flinch an inch from reviving the libertarian and pro-pacifist discourse when it was terribly dangerous to do so. He not only started writing on many other topics, from literature to aesthetics, but also gave a new flavor to libertarian thinking in Japan. He was not satisfied with just promoting Kropotkin and Marx, or advocating for a general strike to stop the war, but he also developed his theory of 'life expansion' which tried to marry Marx and Nietzsche via his personal considerations. A kind of Kropotkinesque mutual aid of class oriented Marxists with a Nietzschean/Stirnite view of reality thus began to flourish, including many genuinely Japanese considerations also, such as the emphasis of the physical and the free development. Ōsugi himself writes:
Evolutionary thought did not lead him to socialism directly, but it opened his mind to the authority of science, which would be an important basis on which socialism and anarchism, would latter appeal to him and other young men in the late Meiji and early Taishō periods (...) what drew him to Ebina's church was Ebina's contention that religion was cosmopolitan, that it superseded national boundaries, and that it was libertarian in its denial of all earthly authority
Around that same time, Ōsugi also started to participate in riots, attend meetings and publish in socialist journals and magazines. He also joined Kōtoku's Heimin-sha [平民社], an organization of young socialists who also published the Heimin Shinbum [平民新聞], or the Commoner's Newspaper; his compromise was still weak and a matter of affinity, but he still help cleaning, handling bills and other similar tasks after his study and work schedules. He states that at least half of the members were also Christians too. Around this period, three major events changed everything for him. First, the Russo-Japanese War sparked around 1904, and he definitely left Ebina and other Christian leaders who cheered the war effort, identifying himself with pacifism from then on. Secondly, Ōsugi was arrested for the first time in 1906, forever sealing his destiny as a political activist incapable of making a career
In a context of increased political repression after the High Treason Incident, Ōsugi was back at it again after more than 3 years of imprisonment, and he did not flinch an inch from reviving the libertarian and pro-pacifist discourse when it was terribly dangerous to do so. He not only started writing on many other topics, from literature to aesthetics, but also gave a new flavor to libertarian thinking in Japan. He was not satisfied with just promoting Kropotkin and Marx, or advocating for a general strike to stop the war, but he also developed his theory of 'life expansion' which tried to marry Marx and Nietzsche via his personal considerations. A kind of Kropotkinesque mutual aid of class oriented Marxists with a Nietzschean/Stirnite view of reality thus began to flourish, including many genuinely Japanese considerations also, such as the emphasis of the physical and the free development. Ōsugi himself writes:
In a movement there is direction. However, there is no 'ultimate purpose'. The ideal of a movement is not something that discovers itself in its 'ultimate purpose'. Ideals usually accompany the movement and advance with it. Ideals are not things that precede the movement. They are in the movement itself (...) As Nietzsche says, the self , meditating and acting freely, is an eager arrow speeding to the target. Freedom and creativity are not outside of us nor in the future. They are within us now
Stanley states that while many Japanese socialists also emphasized the role of individual will, his personal advocacy for ego expansion was ''an ideal completely anti-Japanese in its promotion of individuals and self-assertion, rather than altruism and the achievement of self-fulfillment through service to society''. I'd say that, just as Confucius used Taoism as a means of unifying the collective and the individual, deriving the first from the satisfaction and development of the second, Ōsugi nurtured Marxism with Individualism. Yet, all his theoretical explorations were to be shattered by his personal life: in 1915 he started a triangular relationship with two female reporters (Kamichika Ichiko and Itō Noe) while still married to a previous woman (Hori Yasuko), in an effort to test the possibility of free love in society. Of course, and long story short, Ōsugi was a much better advocate for women's liberation on paper than on real life, and his behaving like a dick had much to do in frustrating the already difficult situation, as they all were pretty much simple acquaintances prior to that.
The very next year did bring the 1917 Russian Revolution, which threw the scarce socialist movement in Japan into turmoil and overdrive. Immediate factionalism caused educated discussions, public denunciations and even fights between all representatives and adherents, and Ōsugi was also at the center of it. Boiled down, everything came to be whether if completely and unidirectionally adhering to a Bolshevik interpretation of marxist-leninism or not; the ideology had its historic momentum and seemed plausible to follow a Russian model in any country; of course, the circumstances were absolutely different in reality. Ōsugi was happy at first, but the rigidity and limits of the orthodox Komintern ideologist repulsed him completely, and in fact drove him to the anarchist wing of socialism, distancing himself from the religious enthusiasm which overwrote all other discussions within the libertary movement. But the real problem was that the authorities and the military also took note of the Russian Revolution (in fact, Japan also sent troops to extinguish it, exceeding the limits imposed by the International Powers). From 1917 onwards, any intellectual deemed as sympathetic towards socialism, humanism or internationalism was to be considered a traitor, and could be imprisoned. Socialism, never really liked by the political establishment, was now perceived as a threat to Japan's ''modernization'' and its claiming for an equal footing with colonial and military powers.
As a visible head of the movement, Ōsugi was arrested and shadowed multiple times. It is now that his biography forces us to render him a ghost at all practical effects. He evaded the authorities enough to visit Paris on May Day (where he was also arrested, hilariously enough), and Stanley's accounts are kind of funny. Ōsugi found Paris dirty and chaotic, with most rental apartments lacking bathrooms (shocking for a Japanese) and most of the Europeans (idolatred by the Japanese higher education) living in ''quite barbaric'' conditions, with miserable salaries, awful infrastructure and untold hygienic conditions. Of course, this convinced him more of the need for a international union of workers.
It is at his return in 1923 that he dies; the Great Kantō Earthquake just preceded his ship arriving, and thus he was unharmed by the shockwave or the fires that killed thousands and burned the metropoli to the ground. Itō went to receive him among the havoc, and both spent a time helping friends and family reconstruct their homes and watch over properties and children. While Itō knew of the troubles her fellow women writers at Seitō were having because of the fires and quakes, a bigger event was happening, unnoticed: martial law had been activated, and both Koreans and political oponents were being either murdered or detained under pretenses of ensuing ''public safety''. In retrospective, this is known as the Kantō Massacre. Other political writers such as Kaneko Fumiko and Hatsuyo Niiyama were being detained due to their association with the magazine Fuitei-sha [不貞社]. It was in this context that Ōsugi and Itō were murdered and thrown into a well, their bodies covered by a tatami.
The culprit was found to be captain Amakasu Masahiko, along with his detachment of the military police. Authorities held the forensic data for years; it specified that both of them, along with six year old Munezaku, were harshly beaten, before being murdered by strangling and then thrown at the well. As the public opinion protested this murder case, Amakasu was apparently condemned to a 10 year sentence; in reality, after barely three he was promoted to a higher position in Manchuria; that is food for thought. Some suspected of Fukuda Matasarō, who had proclaimed the martial law in the first place, as Amasaku's boss on the matter. Stanley takes the most conservative approach of considering Ōsugi either a victim of vigilante ''justice'' by rogue military personnel or perhaps a late addition to a to-kill list by some officials, but not of the Japanese Government as a whole, considering the lack of historical proof and record on this latter matter. Of course, they would have covered any open murder plot in any case, so we'll likely never know. Their death was nevertheless all too real, and the funeral parade was multitudinary as shown in these rare photos. For better or worse, both Ōsugi and Itō had become public figures since the love triangle incident (as ruckus between lovers was loved by the Japanese at the time, as the Sada Abe [阿部 定] case would show again ten years later) , and they were part of the news relatively frequently; their death seemed underserved and brutal. Now they are considered among the first really modern Japanese freethinkers, and the militaristic turn of Japan in the decades following their murder reassured everyone that their voices for political peace and freedom of spirit were in fact precious and necessary, even if not listened to at their own time.
The culprit was found to be captain Amakasu Masahiko, along with his detachment of the military police. Authorities held the forensic data for years; it specified that both of them, along with six year old Munezaku, were harshly beaten, before being murdered by strangling and then thrown at the well. As the public opinion protested this murder case, Amakasu was apparently condemned to a 10 year sentence; in reality, after barely three he was promoted to a higher position in Manchuria; that is food for thought. Some suspected of Fukuda Matasarō, who had proclaimed the martial law in the first place, as Amasaku's boss on the matter. Stanley takes the most conservative approach of considering Ōsugi either a victim of vigilante ''justice'' by rogue military personnel or perhaps a late addition to a to-kill list by some officials, but not of the Japanese Government as a whole, considering the lack of historical proof and record on this latter matter. Of course, they would have covered any open murder plot in any case, so we'll likely never know. Their death was nevertheless all too real, and the funeral parade was multitudinary as shown in these rare photos. For better or worse, both Ōsugi and Itō had become public figures since the love triangle incident (as ruckus between lovers was loved by the Japanese at the time, as the Sada Abe [阿部 定] case would show again ten years later) , and they were part of the news relatively frequently; their death seemed underserved and brutal. Now they are considered among the first really modern Japanese freethinkers, and the militaristic turn of Japan in the decades following their murder reassured everyone that their voices for political peace and freedom of spirit were in fact precious and necessary, even if not listened to at their own time.
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