hello and welcome to the history of
Japan podcast episode 81 the great
treason incident picture the setting a
small room in Nagano Prefecture in 1910
home to one Miyashita Takichi  a lumber
mill employee the date is May 20th and
outside the police are lining up to
prepare to raid the place they break in
and begin to search only to find exactly
what they feared would be their parts to
produce a bomb this confirms their worst
fears it's exactly as they suspected
someone is plotting to kill the Meiji
Emperor the raid on Miyashita’s home was
the climax of an investigation which
came at one of the most unsettled points
in japan's national history
only five years earlier crowds had
rejoiced in the streets of victory over
russia but that rejoicing had been
short-lived the military had done an
excellent job at keeping a lid on just
how hard things had been going in
Manchuria and as a result the majority
of Japanese were simply not aware of how
much they had sacrificed for victory in
particular they had no good explanation
for the fact that their country's debt
was not being wiped out with a massive
war indemnity the Japanese had in fact
decided their position was not good
enough to demand one from Russia for the
fact that their country was not indexing
everything up to the Amur River in
northern Manchuria same reason and for
the fact that rice prices were spiking
inexplicably
military requisitioning was driving up
the prices but most people assumed it
was just war profiteering the result
were riots that started in the Hibiya
district of Tokyo but spread across
Japan's big urban centers and in which
eventually over 1 million people
participated for the Meiji leadership
this was some
of their worst nightmares they were
dangerously close it seemed to losing
control of the masses you see perhaps
because some of their first experiences
abroad really coincided with the
high-water marks of the European left
the Paris Commune for example or the
steady rise of the German Socialist
Party or the early days of the British
Labour Party the leaders of Meiji Japan
were always very worried about the
threat of leftist ideologies like
Marxism anarchism or socialism they
worried the Japanese industrialization
would naturally bring these same
problems to Japanese shores in part that
fear actually spurred these leaders to
be more progressive than they otherwise
would have been borrowing from the
PlayBook of Otto von Bismarck who did
the exact same thing in Imperial Germany
the Meiji leadership led by Ito Hirobumi
Yamagata Aritomo and the fiscal expert
of the bunch Matsukata Masayoshi
decided to implement several reforms to
preempt a lot of the issues socialists
traditionally drew support from in
particular they arranged for the passage
of factory acts regulating working
conditions and hours in the 1880s
at which point Japan had less than 50
factories across the entire country the
idea basically being will need these
laws eventually so we might as well have
them now this kind of system is referred
to as a social monarchy in essence the
monarchy provides reforms normally
associated with socialist parties in a
sort of paternalistic way designed to
attach the people more directly to their
ruler who cares clearly so deeply for
their well-being despite their best
attempts to keep a lid on things however
the radical left began to gain strength
in the early 20th century and that
scared the hell out of the Meiji
leadership it's kind of hard for those
of us born at the tail end of the Cold
War to really grasp because we tend to
think of ideologies like anarchism or
socialism as that finger slightly stoned
French from college won't shut up about
but at the time these were really potent
ideologies that scared a lot of
establishment people because of their
potential for forcing radical
change this was particularly true of
anarchism which as an ideology had
motivated a wave of assassinations in
Europe in America during the latter half
of the 19th century
Tsar alexander ii in russia in 1881
President of the Republic of France
 Marie François Sadi Carnot in 1894
Empress Elisabeth of Austria Hungary in
1898 incidentally her corset was laced
so tight that after she was stabbed she didn't start to bleed seriously until
it was taken off and President William
McKinley of the United States in 1901
and those are just the highest-profile
ones there were plenty more thus the
Meiji oligarchs decided to complement
the old velvet glove with a little bit
of the old iron fist if playing nice
didn't work well how about a little good
old repression the first targets of
their wrath were organizations like the
Japan Socialist Party which was first
formed in 1901 and then shut down by the
police within and I am not kidding three
hours of its formation also in the
crosshairs was an organization called
the Heimin-Sha the commoners association
which produced a newspaper called the
Heimin Shimbun the commoners newspaper
its editor a young intellectual named
Kōtoku Shūsui  had produced in that
paper among other things the first
partial Japanese language translation of
the Communist Manifesto as well as the
works of Russian anarchist Peter
Kropotkin the heimin Shimbun was also
shut down in 1905 Kōtoku by the way
is both a fascinating person in central
to the story so we should talk about him
for a little bit he was the descendant
of a rather well-to-do samurai family
because no the stereotype about rich
kids embracing Marxism or anarchism is
not a new thing from what would have
been Tosa domain and what was now
Kochi prefecture in Shikoku in 1871 in
his 20s he fell under the influence of
Katyama Sen a prominent Christian
socialist Kōtoku embraced socialism
and was one of the founding members with
katayama of the aforementioned socialist
party like everyone else he was arrested
within a few hours of its formation
however technically speaking there
wasn't anything they could be charged
with so while that party was shut down
they were released
katayama and Kōtoku  ended up
splitting, katayama moved away from
Christian socialism which was a big
thing in the 19th century but not so
much in the 20th towards communism he
would eventually join the Communist
International, helped found the Japan
Communist Party in 1922 and spend the
remainder of his life in exile in the
Soviet Union Kōtoku  meanwhile began
moving towards Anarchism he left
Japan in 1905 for the United States
where in the age-old tradition of
hippies everywhere again not making this
up he moved to San Francisco and joined
a commune because some things never
change
his rationale for leaving was a desire
to openly critique the emperor in the
imperial family whom he saw as the
legitimizing force of the evils of
Japanese capitalism he returned to Japan
a year later after incidentally living
through and helping rebuild from the
great San Francisco earthquake in 1906 a
very different man from the one who had
left for the US now he was a committed
anarchist and among other things he
abandoned some of the more moderate
goals of socialism including universal
voting rights in favor of a more radical
position of direct action against
oppressive structures of government
direct action of course makes the
authorities think of the fates of all
those world leaders who had been killed
by Anarchists because what's more
direct than a bomb throwing or a
stabbing in fact reading his writings
it's more likely Kōtoku  is calling for
general strikes than assassination now
it's worth stopping here to note because
if I don't any anarchist who listens to
the show will likely flood my email with
messages reminding me that most
anarchists then and now did not advocate
violence just as with a great many
ideologies over the course of human
history it was only a small lunatic
fringe that did but of course as a
general
the lunatic fringe out there is always
better getting noticed than the
down-to-earth people anyway between his
previous past as a socialist and his
current one is an anarchist Kōtoku  is
now definitely a person of interest for
the government they were watching him
very carefully this despite the fact
that after his return most of his public
energy seems to have been expended on
that great pastime on the left-leaning
internal structures between functionally
identical factions in particular the
Japanese left was split between
anarchist Christian socialist and
Marxist socialist camps with a
smattering of other folks thrown in to
keep things exciting
it's all very Byzantine and vaguely
reminiscent of the whole people's front
of Judea versus the Judean people's
front bit for Monty Python's Life of
Brian however the fact that Kōtoku and
his allies descended into squabbling
that would be incomprehensible to most
people didn't seem to change the picture
as much for the authorities he and his
friends were dangerous this impression
was confirmed in 1908 by what was known
as the Akahata Jiken  or the red
banner incident on june 22nd of that
year a prominent anarchist named
Yamaguchi Kolken was released from jail
after serving of his term he was greeted
by a giant anarchist rally several
hundred anarchists waving banners with
slogans like "Revolution" and "Anarchy and
Communism" greeted Yamaguchi and the
police terrified of this human mass
decided that something had to be done
they went in and started beating and
arresting whoever they could get their
hands on to disperse the rally, in the
wake of the incident the new prime
minister Katsura Taro who had taken
over a few weeks earlier from our old
buddy Saionji Kinmochi future japanese
delegate to Versailles and tutor of Konoe
Fumimaro decided the key would crack
down on the troublemakers he began to
push for even more police power to be
deployed against socialists and
anarchists and that leads us to where we
started on katsura's orders the police
began digging and through their
infiltration of anarchists cells
sometimes I really wonder how many of
these cells were actually anarchists and
how many were all just police informants
snitching on each other they came across
a plot someone had talked about killing
the Emperor and apparently one of the
people that spoken to was Kōtoku Shūsui
so the investigation continued given
more urgency by the assassination of Ito
Hirobumi since his assassin Ahn
jung-geun was often incorrectly
described as an anarchist a label he's
sometimes still given today though he
was not he was very much a nationalist
the plot the authorities had come across
was very real the only five people were
involved in it one of them by the way is
someone we've talked about before
Kanno Sugako, Kanno she was one of
Japan's leading feminists and like
Kōtoku Shūsui  had started out a
Christian socialist and moved towards
anarchism over time Kanno had also been
in a relationship with Kōtoku Shūsui though by 1910 they'd broken things
off her life story is absolutely
fascinating she was born in Osaka to a
family of merchants in 1881 and became
involved in socialism because at the
time it was one of the few ideologies
out there unquestioningly dedicated to
the idea of women's liberation she
became a social critic and a journalist
but over time more committed to direct
action unlike in the case of Kōtoku
who was definitely not involved in this
assassination plot against the emperor
she definitely was, someone talked though
and the police pounced in addition to
grabbing the five people actually
involved in the plot Kanno Sugako Miyashita
Takichi  the guy with the bomb components
in his home and three others they also
took the time to round up 21 other
suspected anarchists prime minister
Katsura decided that now that he had the
excuse he was time to crack down hard
Kōtoku Shūsui was one of them he was
arrested at an onsen while recovering
from a bout of respiratory illness
because obviously when you're plotting
high treason you have to take care of
your lungs ironically enough there were
a bunch of other anarchist leaders the
government wanted to
arrests as well but couldn't people like
the anarchist in labor leader Arahata
Kanson they were in jail as a result of
the red banner it's back in 1908 and
thus even by the loosely defined
standards of evidence which surrounded
the whole affair they couldn't really be
said to be involved now the trial these
people were given well if he described
it as a farce it would be a grave insult
to the farcical arts the 26 defendants
were brought up on charges from articles
73 to 76 of the Penal Code which allowed
death sentences for those who harmed or
attempted to harm the imperial family
and hard labor for those who
disrespected the family which could for
example include destroying or damaging a
Shinto shrine the chief prosecutor was a
man named Hiranuma Kiichirō who had gotten
his start in the Justice Ministry and
was generally considered to be a star
prosecutor he was also very much of the
tough-on-crime school and press for the
death penalty in every case even those
only guilty by association incidentally
he's come up in our story before but
later along in his career as one of the
prime ministers of the 1930s I said we'd
be only dealing with him one more time
on the show but it turns out I was wrong
I actually didn't know he was involved
with this case until I started writing
this episode he'll come back next August
when we turned to the events of 1945 and
you probably won't like him much then
either very recently in fact only a few
years ago a letter from Kanno Sugako
to a journalist at the Asahi Shimbun
named Sugimura Jyuou dated directly
before the trial came to light it has
shed some light on what was going on in
her head during the lead-up to the
sentencing the way she wrote it was
actually very ingenious she used a
needle to poke characters in a piece of
paper so that it looked blank but the
writing was visible when you held it up
to a light the letter itself flatly
states that  Kōtoku Shūsui knew
nothing about the plot and implore Sugimura to find a lawyer for Kōtoku it
also correctly predicted the sentencing
the chief judge through Joe Ichiro
apparently decided that this was no time
to look soft on treason because he went
with Hiranuma sentenced 24 of the
26 defendants to death the remaining two
were giving varying  terms of
imprisonment things were getting out of
hand a message had to be sent this
provided an opening for the imperial
house to show its benevolence the
Emperor who at this point was already
ailing and would die of natural causes
two years later personally intervened to
commute the death sentences of thirteen
of the defendants however neither Kanno
nor Kōtoku were among them Kōtoku
and Kanno spent the remaining months in
prison Kōtoku's own mother actually
died when she came down to Tokyo to
visit him and Kanno Sugako whom she was
extremely fond of and then caught
pneumonia Kanno who is quite the writer
left a testament of her reflections
during the lead-up to the final carrying
out of the execution it's very moving
and deeply depressing she describes the
outcome of the trial quote my poor
friends my poor comrades more than half
of them were innocent bystanders who had
been implicated by the actions of five
or six of us just because they were
associated with us they now are to be
sacrificed in this monstrous fashion
simply because they are anarchists they
are to be thrown over the cliff to their
deaths
we had sailed into the vast ocean ahead
of the world's current of thought and
the general tides of events
unfortunately we were shipwrecked but
this sacrifice had to be made to get
things started new routes are opened up
only after many shipwrecks and dangerous
voyages this is how the other Shore of
one's ideals is reached after the sage
of Nazareth Jesus that is was born many
sacrifices had to be made before
Christianity became a world religion in
light of this I feel our sacrifices
minuscule and quote the majority of
executions including Kōtoku's were
carried out on January 24th 1911 Kanno
Sugako was executed the next day her
execution was particularly politically
explosive
was the first woman ever executed by the
Meiji government the story has a sad
PostScript after his death Kōtoku Shūsui  became a martyr to the Japanese left
both because of his intellectual
presence before his death and because of
his show trial leading up to it
the trials rather than undercutting the
Japanese left actually galvanized it to
a degree in fact in 1923
someone tried to avenge him as then
Crown Prince Hirohito was writing to the
Diet to open a new section he passed
Toranomon  an area between the imperial
palace at Akasaka and the Diet building
and Nagatachō a gunshot rang out the
shot missed the Crown Prince though it
did hit a Chamberlain in the entourage the
perpetrator was tackled shortly after
and revealed to be one Namba Daisuke
Namba Daisuke was actually the son of a
prominent Diet man a representative who
had started his life fairly nationalist
he actually can start joining the army
but was converted to radical leftist
politics among other things he said that
he planned to assassinate Hirohito in
revenge for the death of Kōtoku
Shūsui 
unsurprisingly Namba Daisuke was
convicted of high treason in short order
and hanged but now the fear was back the
radical left had not been forced
underground by the trials and now
someone had yet again tried to
assassinate a member of the imperial
family to make matters worse the hard
left was even more entrenched than it
had been before like we covered earlier
the Japan Communist Party had been
founded a year earlier in 1922 and while
the Socialists had gone under the
anarchist had died the Communists if
anything were going far beyond anything
the other two had ever managed they were
even openly getting into academia in the
form of Marxist economists like Kawakami Hajime clearly the crackdown
initiated by Katsura was not working he
by the way had been forced out of office
shortly thereafter by a scandal we
covered in another episode basically he
proved unable to control the army
something even harsher was necessary the
result was the peace
in law of 1925 easily the harshest and
most authoritarian law in Japanese
history and used to justify the vast
majority of their oppression that would
happen in the 1930s and 1940s the law
was written by the Home Minister who was
wait for it no one other than our old
friend  Hironuma Kiichirō the
prosecutor from the treason trial the
first two articles read quote anyone who
organizes a group for the purposes of
changing the national polity or of
denying the private property system or
anyone who knowingly participates in
said group shall be sentenced to penal
servitude or imprisonment not exceeding
ten years an offence not actually
carried out shall also be subject to
punishment anyone who consults with
another person on matters relating to
the implementation of these objectives
described in Clause one of the preceding
article shall be sentenced to penal
servitude or imprisonment not exceeding
seven years the remainder of the law
went on to specify that inciting others
to these activities was also punishable
at by penal servitude that financially
supporting anyone found guilty of these
crimes was illegal and incredibly that
you were still guilty even if you broke
the law outside of Japanese Jurisdiction a Japanese citizen writing an
editorial in the United States about
changing the Constitution would be
arrested upon returning to Japan when a
Dietman questioning the utility of the
new law attempted to undercut here in
nuuma by pointing out that the way the
law was currently worded a legislator
could be arrested for suggesting an
amendment to the Constitution Hironuma Kiichirō responded that that Dieteman was
absolutely correct it says right in the
Meiji Constitution that only the emperor
can propose amendments so anyone else
doing so is a violation of the peace
preservation law this draconian bit of
lawmaking would become emblematic of
totalitarian Japan and incidentally it
would also be one of the first laws
repealed under the US occupation
government the peace preservation law
really is the ultimate legacy of the
great trees the incident the fear with
which the Japanese elite looked at
radical left prompted them to put into
place a totalitarian system of
repression that was then seized by the
military and turned on the society it
was supposed to defend from radicalism
Kanno Sugako  and her four compatriots
thought they were attacking the linchpin
of an oppressive system in reality they
never really had much of a chance of
getting their planned off the ground and
all they did was provide an excuse for a
crackdown Kōtoku Shūsui  and all the
other innocent anarchists meanwhile
became sacrifices in the name of
abstract notions of social stability and
national security they were among the
first but they would not be the last
in a final sad note after the war the
families of the victims tried one last
time to get justice they requested a
retrial of the case since legally
speaking the original verdicts were
still on the books even after the war
Kōtoku officially was still legally a
traitor their request for a retrial was
denied by the Supreme Court of Japan in
1969 prior to his execution Kōtoku Shūsui
we etched the following onto the wall of
his cell "how has it come about that I
have committed this grave crime today my
trial is hidden from outside observers
and I have even less Liberty than
previously to speak about these events
perhaps in 100 years someone will speak
out about them on my behalf" well I guess
I'm three years late and I'm not the
first to bring this up but for what it's
worth Kōtoku  you were right
that's all for this week special thanks
this week to pierre Prue and Jerome Van
Eps for donating to support the show to
join them to find out more about this
episode or any other episode or to
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out the podcast web page at
www.opm.gov/openseason politicians
ozawa Ichiro
