III.

This joyful infatuation with freedom was not simply a vague instinctive goal for me alone; soon the opportunity came for me to link it with theory and extend it to society. The opportunity came quite unexpectedly.

I have already written about one episode from my memories of this period in "From Amidst the Cremated Ashes" in the volume The Honor of Beggars :

It was around May of my eighteenth year (or perhaps two or three months later). I had only recently arrived from the country and was absorbed in preparing for the school entrance examinations. I knew absolutely nothing about world affairs and at that time never gave any thought to such matters. My lodgings were in the Yarai-cho section of Ushigome. There were five or six students from W (Waseda)^[4] University and one cold evening they went rushing pell-mell out of the house. I could hear the noise of what seemed a great crowd waiting outside. I opened the sliding window to look out. At least twenty students were there, all wearing the distinctive four-cornered cap with its tassel, milling about boisterously, holding aloft paper lanterns on poles and waving them like huge banners.

"It's getting late! If we don't run all the way, we'll be late!"

"But that's better! It's too cold to walk. Besides, we'll get a lot of attention if so many of us trot through the streets."

"You're right! Let's run! Let's run!"

And they all flew off, shouting loudly to one another in high spirits.

Even now the scene floats clearly in my memory: the flickering lights in the big paper lanterns illuminating the bold letters "Y (YANAKA) VILLAGE COPPER POLLUTION PROBLEM MASS MEETING ." And I can still hear their voices chanting "Left, right; left, right" long after they were out of sight.

[4] Osugi provided the identifications in parentheses: the men were all major figures in the left-wing movement as well as successful journalists and will be identified more fully as they appear in later sections; Waseda was and remains a prestigious private college whose uniform included the four-cornered square cap referred to below; the Yorozu Choho had one of the largest readerships in Japan with a circulation well over 100,000.

This incident was what first impressed on my mind the name of Y village.^[5] From then I began to read with considerable care the Y (Yanaka) village articles that appeared frequently in the one newspaper I was taking at the time—the Y (Yorozu Choho) News .

The Y village problem soon waned. As I think back on it, that was about the end of the great public commotion over it. Accordingly my own interest in the Y village also died out for a time. But thanks to this incident I first learned the names of D (Kotoku) and S (Sakai) of the Y (Yorozu Choho) News , and K (Kinoshita Shoko) of the M (Tokyo Mainichi Shim-bun) News and A (Abe Isoo) of W (Waseda) University. Thus I developed an interest in the numerous social issues appearing at the time in these papers; in particular the writings of S and of D were hugely appealing to me. Later at school in the spring of the following year I wrote essays with titles such as "A Discussion of the Gap between the Rich and the Poor" and began to feel as if I too were a kind of a social revolutionary.

I was not alone. The great majority of the promising young men who flocked to join the new Socialist movement had been led into the movement through the copper pollution issue or through its stimulus had become interested in social problems. This began when D and S left the Y News because of their stand against war and started a weekly newspaper (Heimin Shimbun ).^[6]

This is an excerpt from what I wrote about the copper pollution problem at Yanaka village. Though of course there are no falsehoods in it, it errs in tilting a bit too much toward the copper pollution problem. As I reread these lines now in the light of my memories of how I felt about freedom at that time, I need to rectify this tilt somewhat. At least that is my real belief now.

I first took the Yorozu News merely because it was the cheapest newspaper. Having just come from the provinces, a world preoccupied with military life, and having for years been forbidden to read newspapers, I did not know its name much less what kind of paper it was.

[5] Yanaka was among the villages along the tributaries of the Tonegawa River where the mining operations of the Ashio Copper Company caused flooding and pollution and generated national concern in the 1890s (Fred G. Notehelfer, "Japan's First Pollution Incident").

[6] The semifictional piece "From Amidst the Cremated Ashes" (Shika no naka kara ) was written in collaboration with his second wife, Ito Noe; it appeared in the fall of 1919 and was reprinted in a 1920 collection, The Honor of Beggars (Kojiki no meiyo) . This passage can be found in Osugi Sakae zenshu 3:548-49.

About the only two national events in those years that I recall anything about were the marriage of the crown prince (the present emperor) and the assassination of Hoshi Toru. The marriage of the crown prince occurred shortly after I entered cadet school. We were taken to greet the couple at the station precincts as the two passed through on their pilgrimage to Ise Shrine. I recall that we were deeply grateful when they kindly returned our salutes. It is a sidelight, but Yamakawa Hitoshi, who was to become one of my shining mentors, was at that time already publishing a small magazine about Christianity. He made some criticism of the marriage and was sent up for something like three years and nine months on a charge of lèse-majestè^[7]

Hoshi Toru's assassination took place the year I left cadet school. I heard about it in the schoolyard from a friend who had lived at Hoshi's as a student houseboy. All I felt about it was admiration for the steadiness of hand of the swordsman Iba.^[8] I had no idea what kind of man Hoshi was or what he had done wrong.

So by sheer chance it fell to the Yorozu Choho News to take me by the hand and lead me out of blindness. Through the Yorozu Choho News , for the first time I was exposed to life as it was lived in the world outside the military. It especially made me see society's unjust and immoral aspects.

To my eyes, however, this injustice and immorality reflected the simple realities of the world. They were purely abstract matters, not subjects that I could say stirred the innermost regions of my heart. Rather what amazed me was the free and untrammeled tone of the whole newspaper. I was especially astonished by the articles signed with the name Shusui.^[9] Nothing frightened him or blocked his way. Brandishing the

[7] Yamakawa (1880-1958) was a young Socialist who in 1897 dropped out of the preparatory school for Doshisha, the Christian school in Kyoto, moved to Tokyo, and for three years lived a student life not unlike Osugi's a few years later. In 1900 Yamakawa was charged with lèse-majestè for an article in an obscure monthly that criticized Christians who revered the imperial family.

[8] In June 1901 Iba Sotaro cut down Hoshi, a flamboyant onetime Speaker of the House of Representatives who was involved in bribery scandals.

[9] Shusui was the nom de plume of Kotoku Denjiro (1871-1911), a pioneer in Japanese anarchism who was executed after being convicted of plotting the death of the emperor. The term was also used of keen-bladed swords, hence the allusions Osugi makes in the next paragraph.

pen in his hand exactly as if it were the naked blade his pseudonym implied, he cut his way wherever his beliefs led him. I was absolutely awed by his merciless attacks on militarism and the military. I, born to a military family, raised among military men, given a military education, and then coming to curse the blind obedience and binding fetters of that military life, was enchanted by these qualities of Shusui's anti-militarism.

It was among Shusui's circle that I discovered new, and this time true, "companions." However, one thing irritated me. Because I liked the image of a blade flowing like water, I had secretly chosen the nom de plume Shusui for my own; and now that I learned of a famous man who already had Shusui as a pen name, I'd have to abandon it.

Someone else with whom I had closer contact also helped open my eyes—a man named Sasaki who had the room next to mine at the lodging house. He was an older student, about thirty, who had graduated from Waseda two or three years earlier. Every year since, he took the higher civil service examination and failed each time. His kimono was dirty and worn and he shaved his head like a Buddhist priest. He would often growl at the maid in his thick Akita accent, his voice loud but affable. In spite of his forbidding mustache, he had a pleasing face, plump with a dimple in both cheeks when he smiled. I had no friends and soon struck up an acquaintance with this veteran student. Sasaki loved to argue, even with a child like me. Not wanting to be defeated, I would let fly with a barrage of things that I had got someplace from reading Shusui.

Sasaki had a friend named Onodera whom I knew from the French Language School. In the same advanced class as I, Onodera had also graduated from Waseda two or three years before and was now a researcher in sociology under Dr. Tatebe. He was small and, despite protruding front teeth, handsome with the air of a young court noble. One evening we were returning from class with another student named Takahashi, a captain in the transport corps. Takahashi asked Onodera what sort of things one studied in sociology.

Onodera answered proudly. His accent was as thick as Sasaki's but he spoke as if delivering a lecture. "Well, let's consider the state, for

example. And below you have the various institutions, you see. In sociology we investigate such things as how these came to be and in what manner they have developed."

"That sounds interesting," Captain Takahashi said, sounding really envious although he was an equestrian instructor at the Army Officer School and was said to be such an accomplished rider that he could control a galloping mount with a single thread for reins.

This was the first I had ever heard of sociology or what it was about. And I joined Captain Takahashi in envying Onodera for doing such scholarship. So I asked Takahashi and Onodera to lend me some books on sociology and on psychology as a fundamental science. I read them intently, even the parts I couldn't understand at all. One work was probably the sociology of Endo Ryukichi put out by Waseda and another, the sociology of a man named Totoki something, published by the Hakubunkan. I read them through. I also read Kaneko Umaji's history of psychology, entitled something like "Recent Psychology," and an introductory collection of lectures on philosophy also published by Waseda.

In addition, Onodera urged me to read a French edition of Le Bon's Psychologie des foules , saying it was a very interesting book. By checking the dictionary over and over again, I finally managed to finish it, though I didn't understand anything.^[10]

There were no vacancies that April at the Gakushuin nor was it possible to get into the Gyosei Middle School. Therefore I went to take the entrance examination at the only school left, the Seijo Middle School. On the application I put down French as my foreign language and the school accepted it. When the day of the examination finally came, however, they told me, "No more French students are being taken into the fifth-year class at this time." Applying there had been a waste of time.

I had no choice except to wait until September and take the English examination at some other middle school. I quickly began to study English. I had heard that you could pass the test at any school if you could read English at the level of the fourth book of the Union Reader series.

[10] A decade later, in 1914, Osugi published his translations of Le Bon's works, La Naissance et l'évanouissement de la matière and Les Idées nouvelles sur la matière .

Therefore, stopping my other studies, I started going to an English teacher in the neighborhood for lessons on the fourth book of that series. Since I hadn't glanced at an English text for several years, I was rather rash to start on the fourth book. Nevertheless, I studied with all my might, going to hear the teacher's lectures and then returning to my room to read with a dictionary and a guide for self-study. After a month or two the fourth book of the Union Reader ceased to cause me great problems.

Then, without warning, one day in July or August I received a telegram from my father: "MOTHER IN CRITICAL CONDITION—COME AT ONCE ."