Osugi was a Modern Japanese Rebel
Osugi Sakae was a central figure in the left-wing radicalism of early twentieth-century Japan. Labeled a "pioneer of freedom" and "the shogun of anarchism," he was admired by some of his fellow Japanese before and by many more after World War II for his rebellion against an overbearing state and an oppressive society.
Osugi became a political activist while a student of only nineteen. Two years later, in 1906, he was arrested in a street demonstration protesting the economic oppression of the working class. This led to his first prison sentence at the age of twenty-one. He would be arrested three more times in the next two years alone, serving a total of almost thirty-six months in prison before he was twenty-seven years old. This government suppression, when combined with factional disputes within the radical movement and its inability to attract popular support, halted the momentum of the political left. After the 1910 show trials that condemned to death such prominent activists as Kanno Sugako and Kotoku Shusui for plotting the assassination of the emperor, even the nonviolent left was forced into a period of near dormancy.
By the time the movement reawakened at the end of the First World War, Osugi had reaped a certain notoriety from a 1916 scandal involv-
ing two of the most famous women radicals of the day, Kamichika Ichiko and Ito Noe. Concurrent adulterous affairs with the two women led to a published denunciation by his wife, who then divorced him, and to a sensational trial for Kamichika, who spent two years in prison for assaulting Osugi with a knife. It was this scandal, as much as his essays on free love, that earned him the sobriquet of "the erotic anarchist."
But Osugi had also established a more serious reputation as an editor, essayist, and translator. In part because of his translations of Kropotkin, he became known as "the leading anarchist thinker of this period" and a "charismatic" theorist for the then dynamic anarcho-syndicalist wing of the labor movement.[1] Osugi was also the main Japanese representative at the 1920 conference of Far Eastern Socialists held in Shanghai under the auspices of the Comintern. The Communists were initially willing to provide funds for Osugi's efforts, but his subsequent estrangement from bolshevism and the growing strength of more moderate Japanese labor leaders meant that Osugi was gradually to lose political influence.
In 1922 Osugi set off with a false passport to visit Europe and confer with the Western anarchists who had invited him. On May Day 1923 French police arrested him as he spoke at a rally in the suburbs of Paris and deported him to Japan, perhaps at the request of Japanese authorities. He had only two more months to live. His death in September came at the hands of members of the military police who had kidnapped him along with his second wife, Ito Noe, and a six-year-old nephew during the chaotic aftermath of the devastating Kanto earthquake of 1923.
Osugi is thus celebrated as an early twentieth-century rebel who left a legacy of struggle against the establishment, even though he achieved little in the way of concrete political or social reforms in his own time. The brutal circumstances of his death transformed Osugi into a martyr at the age of thirty-eight, neutralizing some of his critics and perhaps sparing him the ignominy that attached to those comrades who eventually strayed from the cause. But what sets Osugi apart from his fellow
[1] Stephen S. Large, Organized Workers and Socialist Politics in Interwar Japan , 32; Tatsuo Arima, The Failure of Freedom , 60. For more on Osugi's influence, see other works on the socialist movement and Thomas Stanley's very informative biography, Osugi Sakae , listed in the bibliography.
radicals is not merely that he was once in the forefront of the movement, or even that his life had such dramatic elements. His flamboyant personality and flair for the dramatic were almost matched by his skill as a writer. Throughout his adult life Osugi supported himself by editing and contributing to a variety of leftist periodicals. The first posthumous publication of his complete works, including one work of fiction co-authored with Ito Noe, ran to nine good-size volumes in the late 1920s; postwar versions reached fourteen. These translations and original works, including the Autobiography , earned Osugi a secure place in both the socialist canon and the history of the development of what is known as "proletarian literature" in Japan.[2]
Osugi's Autobiography can thus be read on several levels. Chapters 5 and 6 offer a view inside the fledgling socialist movement around the time of the Russo-Japanese War. Here he reminisces about meetings of the Commoners Society (Heiminsha) in 1904 and friction within the loose coalition of Marxists, labor unionists, and Christian socialists who agitated for social reform at home and pacifism abroad. He also analyzes the influences that led him to commit irreversibly to the movement. Chapter 7 describes the months and years in prisons that many others in the movement also endured. At this level, the significance of the Autobiography as historical document is clear.
Osugi himself clearly intended that the earlier chapters also be read for insights about the formative years of a rebel. For many readers these insights will be the best justification for an English translation. Chapters I through 3 describe a childhood and adolescence circumscribed by the narrow horizons of an army family posted to a garrison town, although we also glimpse the opulent life-style of the military elite when Osugi visits his Tokyo relatives. Always Osugi is at pains to show us how little freedom was possible in this brutalizing atmosphere, as in chapter 4 when he takes us to the dormitories and playing fields of the military education system.[3] The leitmotif throughout is personal freedom—how
[2] See, for example, Yamada Seizaburo, ed., Puroretaria bungakushi .
[3] Some of the violence and sexual behavior Osugi depicts has analogues in the boarding schools for the civilian elite; see Donald T. Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan and my review in Journal of Japanese Studies 8, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 205-8.
possession or deprivation of it determines the development of individuals and their relations with others.
Although the entire work expresses this perspective, it also contains extraordinarily compelling descriptions of Meiji life that go beyond the historical significance of Osugi as a radical thinker or of the political movement in which he participated. There are, for instance, rare sketches of life in a provincial town far from the modernizing Tokyo or Osaka. Among its most sympathetic inhabitants were the schoolgirls, army wives, and other females Osugi portrays in considerable detail. And, although we cannot easily assess how typical his experiences were, he offers interesting scenes of the highly competitive environment of the school system there, as well as in Tokyo of the 1900s. In contrast to such schools, the military academies matriculated only a small minority of Japanese youths, but even fewer had Osugi's skill or reason to write an exposé. The result translated here may well be unique.
Throughout, Osugi reminds us that sharp contrasts characterize his life. He begins this account by describing the surprise expressed by a prison guard that Osugi of all people should have come to such a place. His family held quite conventional attitudes: his father was a decorated officer who served in both of Meiji Japan's triumphant wars; his mother was a spirited but nonetheless dutiful army wife with no apparent aspirations other than those for her family. The public elementary and middle school that Osugi attended stressed the values of patriotic duty and obedience to authority, while his peers enforced the collective norms of informal youth gangs—all of which prepared him for a military education. Yet he subtly foreshadows what many of his readers would already know: his subsequent rejection of these conventions and the success of his rebellious spirit in withstanding even the rigors of imprisonment.
The tone that dominates Osugi's account of his life, however, is not acrimony but irony. If the vignettes of authority figures are sharply pointed, Osugi's animosity is frequently tempered by a poignant humor and a wry wit. If he dwells on the oppressive aspects of his early life, it is also true that he crafts his memoirs with an ear for telling dialogue and a sure dramatic touch. And throughout the indictment of his soci-
ety, he sustains a lucid prose style. These characteristics no doubt partially explain the popularity of the work among Japanese readers; they—rather than any inherent difficulties in the vocabulary or syntax—also constitute the main challenge to the translator.