The Anarchist Movement In Japan Part 1

THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT IN j.a.pAN.

Preface by the ACF

The Anarchist Communist Federation have decided to reprint John Crump's pamphlet The Anarchist Movement in j.a.pan (which is a summary of his book Hatta Shuzo and Pure Anarchism in Interwar j.a.pan) for a variety of reasons.

One is as a tribute to the continuing struggle of the libertarian movement in j.a.pan, bringing to the attention of English-speaking comrades what is unfortunately a little known part of the global struggle for a free and equal society. We hope this will be a starting point for greater understanding of a valuable tradition of anti-authoritarian communism and may lead to increased co-operation with j.a.panese anarchists today, on the road to a truly world-wide anarchist movement.

As well as being an inspirational example of struggle against a powerful authoritarian state, this history of j.a.panese anarchism is also of great value in providing an example of the development of anarchist theory. The clear and cogent arguments against the reformism of the trade unions and social democracy are still relevant today, as is the critique of Bolshevism, revealing its inherent hierarchical nature in contradiction to the oft repeated claims of Trotskyists that it only degenerated under Stalin. It also serves as a historical lesson in the futility of resorting to terrorism when faced with state repression, and in the danger of anti-organisational tendencies.

Even more important for anarchists today is the record of the debate between the anarcho-syndicalists and anarchist communists in the movement. While we in the ACF have criticisms about some of the positions taken by anarchist communists in j.a.pan at different periods, such as formation of a party, working within the trade union structure, making a distinction between cla.s.s struggle and insurrection, as well as their vision of how the future anarchist society will be organised, we think that the rejection of syndicalism as a strategy for social revolution is correct, particularly for the reason that it can only duplicate the economic structure of capitalism.

We do not aim to offer in this short preface an in-depth a.n.a.lysis of these or the many other important issues raised by the j.a.panese movement. The pamphlet speaks for itself, and as is often the case with timely anarchist literature, its success will be judged by its influence on the practical activity of working cla.s.s militants today.

Anarchist Communist Federation, Summer 1996

Author's Dedication

This pamphlet is dedicated to Oshima Eizaburo, whose undiminished pa.s.sion for anarchist communism, despite his advanced years, is an inspiration to many younger comrades.

Not only that, but how many can enliven a flagging conversation with the casual remark: "When I set off a smoke bomb at the imperial palace..."? Oshima-san can.

Author's Note

j.a.panese names are given in the customary East Asian form, i.e. family name (e.g. Kotoku) followed by personal name (e.g. Shusui). Long vowels in j.a.panese words are indicated by accents (e.g. o).

Chapter One: 1906-1911.

Anarchists in j.a.pan! For many the very idea is surprising. j.a.pan's popular image is of a hierarchical and regimented society, while the j.a.panese are widely regarded as unswervingly loyal servants of the company and the state. Even within j.a.pan there are many j.a.panese who are unaware of the anarchist movement's existence, of the martyrs who have died for the cause, and of the sustained struggle that has been fought against the capitalist state and the inhumanity it has perpetrated over the years. Not so long ago a young j.a.panese who happened to be studying at an American university wrote to me for information on the anarchist movement in j.a.pan after she had read one of my articles in the Bulletin of Anarchist Research. That she should have discovered the anarchist movement only after leaving j.a.pan is a good ill.u.s.tration of the extent to which the existence of j.a.panese anarchism has been omitted from the officially sponsored historical record, filtered out of the education curriculum and ignored by the ma.s.s media.

HISTORICAL AND ECONOMIC BACKGROUND.

Of course, there is an (albeit one-sided) element of truth in the popular image of j.a.pan and the j.a.panese. This has much to do with the way j.a.pan modernised in the years of major social upheaval following 1868. In 1868 power had fallen into the hands of a narrow circle of young samurai who were determined to make j.a.pan a wealthy and militarily strong country. In order to achieve this, they were intent on creating a highly centralised state, an industrialised economy and an overseas empire which would compensate for j.a.pan's lack of raw materials. These were ambitious goals for what was at that stage still a small, weak and backward country on the edge of world civilisation. To realise these ambitions the j.a.panese people had to be dragooned into conformity, partly persuaded and partly threatened into putting the state's interests before their own, and fed an ideology of national pride and service to the Emperor.

For many years after 1868 the bulk of the population remained peasants, toiling on the land. Agriculture was the basis of the economy, since industries could only be established by squeezing wealth out of the peasants and channelling it into the factories, shipyards and mines which were set up with the state's encouragement. To achieve this transfer of wealth from the agricultural sector of the economy to the developing industries a heavy land tax was imposed. One effect of this was that many peasants who could not pay their taxes were forced to sell their land and become tenant farmers. From a society composed mainly of peasant families engaged in the intensive farming of small parcels of land which they owned themselves, j.a.pan was transformed into one where the bulk of the land was worked by tenants who surrendered typically half their crops in the form of rent to often absentee landlords. As the conditions of the agricultural population deteriorated in this way, some cut their links with the land, drifted into the towns and sought work in the mushrooming industrial and commercial enterprises.

It was among this emerging working cla.s.s that the first attempts were made towards the end of the nineteenth century to organise unions, but the state reacted swiftly by introducing in 1900 a "public peace police law" which effectively outlawed all workers' organisations and, needless to say, strikes.

Not only were the peasants for many years the backbone of the economy; they were also the mainstay of the sizeable conscript army which the new state rapidly established. The formative years of the average peasant or working cla.s.s lad were spent being moulded and disciplined, first in elementary school and later in the army. The Emperor's p.r.o.nouncement of 30 October 1890, known as the Imperial Rescript on Education, well conveys the beliefs which the authorities attempted to implant in youngsters' minds. It read in part: Always respect the Const.i.tution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be Our good and faithful subjects, but render ill.u.s.trious the best traditions of your forefathers.1 Peasant and working cla.s.s girls escaped some of this organised brain-washing, partly because they were more likely than their brothers to be kept off school in order to help out around the home even during the few years of compulsory education. Nevertheless, the weight of convention burdened young women too, as they were urged to turn themselves into "a good wife and a wise mother" and were taught from an early age that a woman's fate is to obey the three men in her life - her father in her youth, her husband in her prime and her eldest son in old age.

Not surprisingly, even though the state leaders were successful in achieving most of their aims to turn j.a.pan into a richer and more powerful country, and even though most j.a.panese men and women conformed to the roles prescribed for them, some brave individuals resisted the trend of the times. Moreover, just because j.a.pan was such a highly conformist society, so the reaction against conformity was all the more intense when it occurred, since the state's demands for absolute obedience and loyalty left little room for compromise, liberal half-measures or the escape route of eccentricity. The princ.i.p.al structures of the modern j.a.panese state were established by the end of the nineteenth century and opponents of the regime were first inclined to embrace Western ideologies such as Christianity and social democracy, in the belief that these offered alternative and more humane models for modernisation. What exposed the inadequacies of Christianity and social democracy alike was j.a.pan's first major war of the twentieth century, the Russo-j.a.panese War of 1904-5. Despite its unmistakably imperialist nature, many j.a.panese Christians were prepared to support this war as a means of ingratiating themselves with the state, while many social democrats throughout the world favoured a j.a.panese victory, on the grounds that this would precipitate revolution in Russia. Those who were determined to resist both the state and the war turned elsewhere for political inspiration - and, in so doing, lay the foundations of the j.a.panese anarchist movement.

KOTOKU SHuSUI AND THE EMERGENCE OF j.a.pANESE ANARCHISM.

Kotoku Shusui played a major role in introducing anarchism to j.a.pan.2 He was born in 1871 in the provincial town of Nakamura in Kochi Prefecture, about 700 kilometres West of Tokyo as the crow flies. Even today, if you visit Nakamura, you will find that his grave is well cared for and ample evidence that it is still a place which people visit in order to acknowledge their intellectual and political debts to Kotoku. After moving to Tokyo in his mid-teens, Kotoku became a journalist in 1893 and from 1898 he was a popular columnist on the most radical daily paper of the period, the Every Morning News (Yorozu Choho). Politically, Kotoku moved from the liberalism which initially attracted him to social democracy and he was one of a small group which attempted to organise a Social Democratic Party in Tokyo in May 1901, only to see it immediately banned by the government.

Kotoku was a man of considerable integrity and courage, who stuck to his principles, no matter how painful or dangerous the consequences. As war with Russia approached, the liberal and previously anti-war Every Morning News fell into line with government-orchestrated opinion and became increasingly belligerent. Kotoku refused to toe the paper's new line and instead chose to resign from the job which up till now had provided him with both a steady income and a "voice" in respectable society. Together with another Every Morning News journalist, called Sakai Toshihiko, he now took the risky step of launching an outspokenly anti-war journal at a time of increasingly hysterical militarism. This was the weekly Common People's Newspaper (Heimin Shinbun), the first issue of which appeared in November 1903 and which battled on bravely against the war-mongering government until being forced out of existence in January 1905. Throughout its brief existence, the Common People's Newspaper's editors and journalists were repeatedly prosecuted, fined and imprisoned for infringements of the stifling press laws and in February 1905 Kotoku started to serve a five months jail sentence for one such offence.

The Common People's Newspaper was not an anarchist journal. Its raison d'etre was opposition to the war and, to the extent that its supporters had any other commonly held political views, these were largely social democratic. This, of course, was a period when far and away the most influential social democratic party in the world was the German SPD. To be a "Marxist" in this era before the Russian Revolution meant not to be a Leninist, but to share the political outlook of Kautsky, Bernstein and the other SPD leaders. When Kotoku and others had attempted to found the j.a.panese Social Democratic Party (Shakai Minshuto) in 1901, they had opted for a programme of political reforms resembling the SPD's and similar influences were acting on Kotoku and Sakai when they jointly translated Marx's and Engels' The Communist Manifesto and published it in the Common People's Newspaper in November 1904. This was the first ever translation into j.a.panese of The Communist Manifesto and not only was the issue of the Common People's Newspaper which carried it banned from sale, but Kotoku and Sakai were heavily fined.

After Kotoku emerged in July 1905 from the five months he had spent in prison, he claimed that he "had gone [to jail] as a Marxian Socialist and returned as a radical Anarchist".3 In fact, the change in his political views was less clear-cut than this suggests, but there can be no doubt that his ideas were moving in an anarchist direction. While in prison, Kotoku had read Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops and he had also thought long and hard about the position of the Emperor in j.a.panese society. Like the German SPD, the j.a.panese social democrats largely kept silent on the imperial inst.i.tution. At worst, this was because some of them regarded social democracy as purely a question of installing a new government, but otherwise leaving the bases of j.a.panese society (from the imperial household to the wages system) unchanged. At best, more radical social democrats though it wise simply to ignore the Emperor and leave the resolution of this problem to the future. However, Kotoku was becoming increasingly aware of the extent to which the Emperor was the linchpin of both the ideology and the machinery of the state, which together kept capitalism in existence in j.a.pan.

With this increased awareness that capitalism and the state could only be brought to an end in j.a.pan if the Emperor inst.i.tution were abolished too, Kotoku decided after his release from prison to get away from j.a.pan for a while so that he could "criticize freely the position of 'His Majesty' and the political and economic inst.i.tutions from a foreign land where the pernicious hand of 'His Majesty' cannot reach."4 It was in this frame of mind that Kotoku left j.a.pan in November 1905 to spend six months in the USA. As reading material for the long sea voyage, he took with him Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

"AMERICAN" INFLUENCES.

Kotoku remained in the USA (mainly California) until June 1906 and absorbed many influences which proved to be crucial not only for him but for j.a.panese anarchism as a whole. In the first place, there was the anarchist communism advocated by Kropotkin and others. Kotoku started to correspond with Kropotkin during his time in the USA, but was also exposed to anarchist communist ideas from many other quarters as he interacted with the numerous political activists in California who held such views in the early years of this century. The anarchist communist influence acting on Kotoku (and through him on the movement in j.a.pan) is best symbolised by what many regard as Kropotkin's greatest work, The Conquest of Bread. Kotoku acquired a copy of this book in English translation while he was in the USA and started to translate it when he returned to j.a.pan. Eventually a clandestine edition of one thousand copies was published in March 1909 and was widely distributed among students and workers.

The second important influence was syndicalism, partly in the shape of the newly formed Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which had been organised in Chicago in June 1905, and partly as pamphlets and articles on the European syndicalist movement, which were readily available in California. We know that shortly after Kotoku arrived in San Francisco, three members of the IWW called on him and invited him to speak at one of their meetings.5 As for European syndicalism, the German anarchist Siegfried Nacht's pamphlet The Social General Strike had been published in English over the pseudonym "Arnold Roller" in Chicago in June 1905 to coincide with the IWW's founding conference. Again, Kotoku obtained a copy of this pamphlet and translated it into j.a.panese after returning from the USA. In 1907 it was published clandestinely, using the ploy of giving it the innocuous t.i.tle The Future of Economic Organisation so as to throw the authorities off the scent. Once again, it achieved a nationwide distribution among political militants.

The third major influence was political terrorism, which impinged on Kotoku and others less from anarchist sources than by means of the example set by the Russian Social Revolutionary Party (the SRs), whose "fighting organisation" had carried out numerous a.s.sa.s.sinations of tsarist officials. The SRs' exploits were widely known about even in the USA and were much admired by the political activists with whom Kotoku came into contact in California. Shortly before Kotoku returned to j.a.pan, more than 50 j.a.panese immigrants (out of the more than 70,000 who had settled on the West coast) gathered in Oakland in California on 1 June 1906 to found a Social Revolutionary Party (Shakai Kak.u.meito in j.a.panese).

This Social Revolutionary Party lacked the resources to sustain organised activity for long, but during 1906-7 it did publish several issues of a journal called Revolution (Kak.u.mei), the contents of which were revealing. Revolution declared that "reformism and the parliamentary policy" were "like trying to fight a raging fire with a child's water pistol". As an alternative, it believed that the only effective means of revolution was armed violence: The sole means is the bomb. The means whereby the revolution can be funded too is the bomb. The means to destroy the bourgeois cla.s.s is the bomb.6 Revolution also described the j.a.panese Emperor as "a tool controlled by the present ruling cla.s.s for the purpose of enslaving the ma.s.ses".7 On the Emperor's birthday, on 3 November 1907, some of those a.s.sociated with the Social Revolutionary Party issued in the USA a leaflet headed "Terrorism" (Ansatsushugi) which threatened an armed a.s.sault on the Emperor. Addressing the Emperor by his personal name of Mutsuhito, the leaflet ended with the words: Mutsuhito, poor Mutsuhito! Your life is almost at an end. The bombs are all around you and are on the point of exploding. It is goodbye for you.8 News of the distribution of this leaflet in the USA was relayed back to j.a.pan and created a sensation in ruling circles. Outraged officials could scarcely believe that any j.a.panese would dare to address the supposedly sacred Emperor in such a fashion and vowed to exact revenge whenever the opportunity presented. Some three years later they were to have their chance.

KOTOKU'S RETURN AND THE ANARCHISTS.

ORGANISE IN j.a.pAN.

As soon as Kotoku returned from the USA, a large public meeting was organised in Tokyo to welcome him back and to give him the opportunity to report on how his ideas had developed while in America. At this meeting, held on 28 June 1906, Kotoku spoke on "The Tide of the World Revolutionary Movement", which he a.s.serted was flowing against parliamentarism and towards the general strike as "the means for the future revolution".9 He followed up his speech with numerous articles in the revolutionary press, all of which repudiated social democratic parliamentarism and argued for direct action. The best-known of these articles was "The Change in My Thought (On Universal Suffrage)", which was published on 5 February 1907. A few extracts from this lengthy article will convey the extent to which Kotoku's political outlook had altered: I want to make an honest confession. My views on the methods and policy to be adopted by the socialist movement started to change a little from the time that I went into prison a couple of years ago. Then, during my travels last year, they changed dramatically. If I recall how I was a few years back, I get the feeling that I am now almost like a different person.

...If I were to put in a nutsh.e.l.l the way I think now, it would be along the following lines: "A real social revolution cannot possibly be achieved by means of universal suffrage and a parliamentary policy. There is no way to reach our goal of socialism other than by the direct action of the workers, united as one."

...Formerly I listened only to the theories of the German socialists and those in the same current and laid far too much emphasis on the effectiveness of votes and of parliament. I used to think: "If universal suffrage is achieved, then surely a majority of our comrades will be elected. And if a majority of the seats in parliament are occupied by our comrades, then socialism can be put into effect by means of a parliamentary resolution." It is true, of course, that I recognised at the same time the urgent need for workers' solidarity, but still I believed that at least the first priority for the social movement in j.a.pan was universal suffrage. My speeches and articles were full of this, but I now think of it as an extremely childish and naive idea.

...What the working cla.s.s needs is not the conquest of political power - it is the "conquest of bread". It is not laws - but food and clothing. Hence it follows that parliament has almost no use for the working cla.s.s. Suppose we were to go as far as putting our faith and trust simply in such things as introducing a paragraph into a parliamentary law here or revising several clauses in some bill or other there. In that case we could get our aims carried out merely by putting our trust in the advocates of social reform and the state socialists. But if instead of this what we want is to carry out a genuine social revolution and to improve and maintain the real living standards of the working cla.s.s, we must concentrate all our efforts not on parliamentary power but on developing the workers' solidarity. And the workers themselves too must be ready not to rely on such creatures as bourgeois MPs and politicians but to achieve their aims by means of their own power and their own direct action. To repeat: the last thing the workers should do is to put their trust in votes and MPs.

...I hope that from now on our socialist movement in j.a.pan will abandon its commitment to a parliamentary policy and will adopt as its method and policy the direct action of the workers united as one.10 Kotoku's new ideas astounded his comrades. Most were accustomed to accept the SPD's a.s.surance that its doctrine represented the forces of reason, progress and good order within society, whereas they had been taught by the same source that anarchism was a primitive and chaotic reaction to political repression, which had nothing in common with "scientific socialism". Yet here was the best known and intellectually most accomplished socialist of his day challenging the SPD's teachings and arguing coherently and persuasively for anarchism. Some of the j.a.panese social democrats were resistant to the new train of thought. For example, in September 1907 Katayama Sen, who pioneered social democratic and labourist ideas in j.a.pan and who in later years went on to become one of Stalin's yes-men in the Comintern (there is a plaque commemorating him on the Kremlin wall in Moscow), scornfully rejected Kotoku's anarchism as follows: The Socialist movement of j.a.pan is somewhat crippled and hindered on account of anarchistic views held by some who profess to be...socialists and hold some influence among their Comrades. Those who have gone over to Anarchism oppose legislative and parliamentary tactics and political movement, and preached so-called direct action or a revolutionary or destructive general strike. We are sorry that some of our best Comrades have changed to the above views and no longer go with us...11 Katayama was right in one respect - that it was often the most able social democrats who responded positively to Kotoku's challenge to their previously held views. For many younger socialists, Kotoku's call to anarchism came like a breath of fresh air and he soon gathered round him an impressive body of support. Osugi Sakae, Arahata Kanson, Yamakawa Hitoshi and many others played important roles at this time in popularising ideas of self-liberation and direct action, although in later years some like Arahata and Yamakawa were to succ.u.mb to the illusory promise of Bolshevism.

While Kotoku had been away in the USA, a second attempt had been made to form a social democratic party. Known this time as the Socialist Party of j.a.pan (Nippon Shakaito), it was founded in February 1906 and was initially tolerated by the authorities, princ.i.p.ally because it courted respectability and undertook to "advocate socialism within the limits of the law of the land".12 A related development which occurred was that in January 1907 the Common People's Newspaper (Heimin Shinbun) was relaunched, this time as a daily. Although the Socialist Party of j.a.pan was a small organisation, with only about 200 members, Kotoku correctly described it in December 1906 as an amalgam of many different elements: Social-Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and even Christian Socialists...Most of our comrades are inclined to take the tactics of Parliamentarism rather than Syndicalism or Anarchism. But it is not because they are a.s.suredly convinced which is true, but because of their ignorance of Anarchist Communism. Therefore our most important work at present is the translation and publication of Anarchist and Free-thought literature.13 The issues raised by Kotoku's new stance were thoroughly debated at a conference of the Socialist Party of j.a.pan which was held in Tokyo on 17 February 1907. Many of the views advanced there represented a clean break with social democracy and the delegates supported a call to strike out from the party rules the commitment to operate "within the limits of the law of the land". Not only did this lead to the government banning the Socialist Party of j.a.pan on 22 February 1907, but the tense relations between social democrats and anarchists swiftly reached the point of an outright split. When the daily Common People's Newspaper folded in April 1907, due to the combined effects of financial difficulties and government persecution, it was replaced in June 1907 by two separate journals - the weekly Social News (Shakai Shinbun), which was under the control of the social democrats, and the bi-monthly Osaka Common People's Newspaper (Osaka Heimin Shinbun), which argued strongly for direct action. This development represented the definitive split between social democrats and anarchists in j.a.pan. From this time on, anarchism has remained a separately organised, distinctive current, which is as much opposed to social democracy (and later Bolshevism) as it is to conventional capitalism.14 MOUNTING REPRESSION.

It was mentioned earlier that the anarchist ideas which Kotoku brought back from the USA were a mixture of anarchist communism, syndicalism and terrorism. Kotoku himself was first and foremost an anarchist communist (a "Kropotkinist", if one wishes to use the term). Conditions in j.a.pan made anarchist communism seem highly relevant and attractive. Like the Russia which had inspired Kropotkin's vision of a society based on common ownership, libertarian federation and mutual aid, j.a.pan too was a largely agrarian society. Its agricultural villages seemed ready made for conversion into anarchist communes, especially since the practices a.s.sociated with rice production had given rise to deeply ingrained cooperation and solidarity among the farmers. Many anarchists besides Kotoku were enthused by the anarchist communist vision and threw themselves into the effort to popularise this view of how society could be organised. One example among many was Akaba Hajime, who in 1910 wrote the pamphlet The Farmers' Gospel (Nomin no f.u.kuin). Here Akaba skilfully bridged the gap between the village community of the past, which the corrosive effects of the market were undermining, and the revolutionary commune of the antic.i.p.ated future. He wrote: We must send the land robbers [i.e. the landlords] to the revolutionary guillotine and return to the "village community" of long ago, which our remote ancestors enjoyed. We must construct the free paradise of "anarchist communism", which will flesh out the bones of the village community with the most advanced scientific understanding and with the lofty morality of mutual aid.15 The political methods employed by anarchist communists were, by and large, the spreading of their ideas by means of written and oral propaganda. In attempting to spread the word, however, they came up against the intense repression enforced by the state. After the forced dissolution of the Socialist Party of j.a.pan in 1907, public meetings were routinely disrupted, distribution of publications was prohibited and anarchists were subjected to many types of everyday persecution, ranging from police violence to dismissal from work to tailing by detectives. What happened to Akaba is a case in point. After the publication of The Farmers' Gospel, he was forced to go underground because of the same pamphlet's criticism of the Emperor, was eventually arrested by the police and died in Chiba Prison on 1 March 1912 after a period of hunger strike.

Syndicalism was attractive to many anarchists because it seemed to be in tune both with the rapid expansion of industry, which was under way in j.a.pan at the time, and with the marked combativity of sections of the working cla.s.s, such as the miners. There was a belief among syndicalist-inclined anarchists that, however many trump cards were in the hands of the state and the bosses, they still had their Achilles' heel. The line of reasoning at work here was that the capitalist state needed to industrialise in order to realise its economic and military ambitions but that, since industry depended on the working cla.s.s, the stronger j.a.pan became industrially the more it became vulnerable to a general strike carried out by determined and well organised workers. This train of thought was given added plausibility by the frequency with which exploited workers were answering the bosses' arrogance with strikes, some of which reached insurrectionary proportions. The most famous case in this period of a strike which escalated into violence against the company and armed confrontation with the military was the dispute at the Ashio copper mine in February 1907. After the Ashio miners went on strike, they cut the electricity supply, blew up and set fire to company buildings, gave the head manager a severe beating with their pickaxe handles, attacked a nearby police station and ultimately did battle with three companies of infantry which were sent into action against them. Although the Ashio dispute was the best known instance of an insurrectionary strike at this time, it was far from being the only one. In the months that followed, a series of conflicts in other mines boiled over into violence, and attacks on company officials and destruction of company property were by no means unknown in other industries.16 Although anarchists obviously welcomed signs that workers were prepared to struggle to improve their conditions, the situation never showed any signs at this stage of getting beyond the point where the state could control it. As long as labour disputes occurred one by one, the state could concentrate its resources first here and then there in order to break the resistance of isolated bodies of workers. What the situation demanded, as syndicalist theory taught, was a federation of industrial unions which could coordinate disjointed actions, overcome the weakness brought about by isolation, and raise the struggle to the level of a general strike. This proved impossible to achieve in this period, however, because of the provisions of the already mentioned "public peace police law".

Perhaps because the capitalist state was aware of the fact that it was more vulnerable on the economic than the political front, it was even more Draconian in its handling of labour organisations than it was of socialist groups and journals. Even the mildest of trade unions were not tolerated, so that any which attempted to form were immediately hounded out of existence.

With the anarchist communist and anarchist syndicalist routes thus effectively blocked, it was hardly surprising that some anarchists should have turned to terrorism, the third of the major influences acting on the j.a.panese anarchist movement. Yet even when, from about 1908, a few anarchists did start to toy with the idea of meeting state violence with their own violence, hoping thereby to spark off a wider popular uprising, their plans never got beyond the stage of experimenting with explosives. As a fraction of the anarchist movement as a whole, the merest handful was involved. Furthermore, in a highly repressive society such as j.a.pan, where all known dissidents were kept under close watch, it took considerable time to acquire the necessary information and materials. When four anarchists were arrested on 25 May 1910 following the police discovering a stash of bomb-making equipment, not a single attack had yet been carried out on any target whatsoever. The most that had been achieved was the successful detonation of a trial bomb in the mountains. Nevertheless, here was the opportunity the authorities had been waiting for ever since the "Terrorism" leaflet of 1907. Hundreds of suspects were taken into custody and a case was fabricated that 26 of these had been involved in a plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Emperor.17 When the trial was held in December 1910, it was closed to the public and the state's handling of the entire investigation indicated that it was not going to let legal niceties interfere with its determination to cripple the anarchist movement. The only thing that prevented the authorities from involving even larger numbers in the affair was that various prominent anarchists, such as Osugi Sakae, were already serving prison sentences for other offences and could hardly be implicated in plotting which was supposed to have taken place while they were behind bars. Predictably, all 26 defendants were found guilty and all except two were sentenced to death Although twelve of those awaiting execution subsequently had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, the remaining twelve whom the state was determined to hang included Kotoku Shusui. By the time of Kotoku's execution on 24 January 1911 the j.a.panese anarchist movement was already reduced to a state of near hibernation in what became known as its "winter period". The state was determined to close down all journals, ban all meetings and generally make life intolerable for anarchists who attempted to sustain any form of activity. For many there was no alternative but to withdraw to the countryside, eke out some kind of living off the land and bide their time as they waited over the next few years for a change of circ.u.mstances. Others went into exile. Ishikawa Sanshiro, who had repeatedly been imprisoned for offences under the press laws, left j.a.pan for Europe in 1913 and did not return until 1920. However, the important thing was that the ideas did not die. Nor was the flame extinguished. The movement somehow survived the long years of almost total obliteration which now ensued, so that when a change in conditions following the First World War forced the state to relax slightly its stranglehold, anarchism resurfaced stronger than ever.

Chapter Two: 1912-1936.

Throughout the years 1912-36, anarchist communism, syndicalism and terrorism remained identifiable trends within j.a.panese anarchism. During the first half of this period, it was syndicalism which predominated intellectually, whereas in the latter half the pendulum swung towards anarchist communism. Compared to these two major theoretical influences, terrorism was never more than a minor sub-current in the anarchist movement but, although those inclined to armed struggle were always a small minority, unremitting state repression ensured that there were invariably some anarchists whose anger and frustration boiled over into attempts to pay back in kind their oppressors.

There are a number of reasons why syndicalism should have predominated initially. During the "winter period", which lasted until 1918, anarchists were aware that they were all but defenceless in the face of a particularly vicious state which had overwhelming force at its disposal and would not stop at even legally sanctioned murder to suppress anarchism. Although the organisation of labour unions was still prohibited, at least as a theoretical proposition the idea that a ma.s.s union movement could provide a bulwark against the power of the state had strong appeal. Second, with the death of Kotoku, Osugi Sakae was left as the most talented thinker and most productive writer in the anarchists' ranks and he happened to be greatly inspired by the growth of the French syndicalist union federation, the CGT. It was mainly through Osugi's articles that the CGT was held up as an example for j.a.panese workers to emulate. Third, the reputation of anarchist communism was tarnished, albeit temporarily, when Kropotkin succ.u.mbed to French chauvinism following the outbreak of the First World War. Subsequently, anarchist communists were rea.s.sured when Malatesta and others reiterated principled opposition to the war, but Kropotkin's defection nevertheless delivered a severe shock to those who had absorbed anarchist communism from sources such as The Conquest of Bread.

One fortuitous stroke of luck for the anarchist syndicalists was their success in managing to publish the journal Modern Thought (Kindai Shiso) even in the depths of the "winter period". Throughout the "winter period" there were many attempts by anarchists to launch different journals but, almost without exception, they were closed down and their editors fined and imprisoned. The one exception was Modern Thought, which Arahata Kanson and Osugi Sakae started in October 1912 and which they managed to publish monthly until September 1914. Modern Thought survived for two years, mainly because it contrived to present syndicalist ideas in the guise of philosophical discussion rather than as a practicable proposition. In a.s.sociation with Modern Thought, Arahata and Osugi also organised a Syndicalism Study Group (Sanjikarizumu Kenkyu Kai) which held numerous public meetings between l913 and 1916. Again, the authorities probably failed to appreciate the true significance of the Syndicalism Study Group's meetings because they attracted mainly young intellectuals rather than workers. Despite this drawback, they were an important morale booster in what was otherwise a period of unrelieved gloom and continuing defeat.

END OF THE "WINTER PERIOD".

What brought the "winter period" to an end was the spontaneous outbreak of popular anger which expressed itself in the summer of 1918 in the form of nationwide "rice riots". The years of the First World War were a period of boom for j.a.panese capitalism as j.a.panese companies took advantage of the problems, brought about by the war, which interfered with the operations of their European rivals. As the economy boomed, inflation took hold and the price of rice, the staple food, spiralled upwards in a frightening fashion in the closing year of the war, leaving wages far behind. As a result, a small demonstration by fisherwomen in Toyama Prefecture on 23 July 1918, in protest against the shipping of rice out of their district, unleashed a torrent of anger which spread across the length and breadth of j.a.pan over the next few weeks, involving hundreds of "incidents" of one sort or another. Not all these disturbances attained the proportions of full-scale riots, but in one major city after another there were pitched battles between tens of thousands of rioters and the police, with the army being called out in many instances. To people in Osaka on 12 August 1918, for instance, it felt "as though a revolution had really come".18 Here at last was the kind of situation the anarchists had dreamed about during the bleak years of the "winter period". The state was no longer firmly in control, there were too many disturbances for it to be able to concentrate its forces and smother the protests one at a time, and the ruling cla.s.s was scared into making concessions. j.a.pan by no means became a liberal democracy overnight as a result of the 1918 rice riots. On the contrary, the "public peace police law" and its 1925 replacement, the "maintenance of public peace act", remained on the books throughout the years to come and the anarchists continued to be prime targets of the state's repression. But the blanket suppression of all activity was no longer possible and the anarchists were quick to seize the opportunities that presented to regroup, launch new journals and involve themselves in the workers' and peasants' movements.

Not only was there widespread rioting on the streets in this period, but in the factories too labour disputes were commonplace. In 1918 more than 66,000 workers were involved in 417 separate disputes. These figures might sound meagre by present-day standards, but they need to be set against the figure of less than 1.5 million workers employed in all factories at the time. Even though unions remained technically illegal, the state was no longer in a position to enforce the letter of the law entirely. A Friendly Society (Yuaikai), which had been formed in 1912 with a mere 15 members, had expanded its organisation and membership to 30,000 by 1918 and in 1921 changed its name to the j.a.panese Confederation of Labour (Nihon Rodo Sodomei). It is true that most newly formed unions, both inside and outside the j.a.panese Confederation of Labour, were led by out and out reformists, who were simply looking to improve the position of the workers within capitalism, at the same time as they sought to carve out careers for themselves. Nevertheless, among the unions that emerged in this period were some which embraced anarchism, both as the goal of their struggle and as an organisational method. One such union was the Shinyukai printworkers' union which, although when it was first formed in 1916 had a purely reformist outlook, had by 1919 expanded its membership to 1,500 and opted for anarchism. Also in 1919 another anarchist-inclined printworkers' union, the Seishinkai, was formed by 500 newspaper workers. The Shinyukai and Seishinkai linked up in 1923 to establish a printworkers' federation and by 1924 this had attained a combined membership of 3,850, a not inconsiderable number by the standards of the time.

The Shinyukai and Seishinkai have been singled out for special mention here since the printworkers formed the backbone of the anarchist union movement throughout the prewar years. Yet anarchist unions were by no means confined to the printing industry alone. A declaration issued in November 1922 by workers' groups which favoured organisation based on "libertarian federation" and rejected "centralised authority" was signed by unions representing, among other sections of the workforce, watchmakers, general labourers, tramworkers, shipbuilders, engineering workers and communication workers.19 This provided an indication of the spread of anarchist ideas among the working cla.s.s generally.

One important anarchist group which was formed in 1919 in response to the developments described above was the Labour Movement (Rodo Undo) Group, which issued a journal of the same name. The most striking feature of the journal Labour Movement was that, whereas previously a journal such as Modern Thought had recommended syndicalism as a course of action to be followed and a goal to struggle towards, Labour Movement was more concerned with reporting and a.n.a.lysing on-going struggles, which often a.s.sumed an anarchist form, no matter whether the workers were aware of syndicalist theory or not. What this signified was that, with the ending of the "winter period", anarchist syndicalism moved from the realm of theory to the field of practice. In one sense this represented the maturing of anarchist syndicalism in a j.a.panese context, but in another it forced many j.a.panese anarchists to face up to problems inherent in syndicalism of which they had previously been unaware. We shall return to this below when we discuss the split between anarchist communists and anarchist syndicalists which occurred in 1928.

ANARCHISM VERSUS BOLSHEVISM.

In j.a.pan, as in many countries, it took some time to grasp the true nature of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Initially there were many anarchists in j.a.pan who were sympathetic to the little they knew about the Bolsheviks. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, all that was known about Lenin and his followers was that they had executed the tsar, extricated Russia from the war and thereby earned themselves the hatred of the bourgeoisie and the reformist social democrats alike. At first glance, this appeared to be a course of action which many anarchists might have pursued under the circ.u.mstances. Hence it was hardly surprising that, to start with, Bolshevism attracted the sympathetic interest of many j.a.panese anarchists and that, although some swiftly grasped that Lenin and his fellow leaders were simply a new ruling cla.s.s which was intent on consolidating its power, others were taken in by the new creed and were lost to anarchism. Indeed, when the Communist Party of j.a.pan was founded in 1922, among its leaders were Arahata Kanson (formerly co-editor with Osugi of Modern Thought) and Yamakawa Hitoshi (who had been one of the first to rally to Kotoku after his "change of thought" and had helped to translate The Conquest of Bread). Furthermore, the Party's first chairman was none other than Kotoku's old friend, Sakai Toshihiko (who, while never having been an anarchist, had resigned in 1903 from the Every Morning News and had helped Kotoku to launch the Common People's Newspaper). It is interesting to note that, while none of these had any further a.s.sociation with anarchism, neither did any of them last long in the ranks of the Communist Party, since their capacity for independent thinking prevented them from swallowing every twist and turn of Comintern policy.20 Although Osugi never showed any signs of abandoning anarchism for Bolshevism, even he was prepared to accept an invitation to visit Shanghai in October 1920 for discussions with Comintern agents. He returned with 2,000 to be used for restarting Labour Movement, which had temporarily ceased publication in June 1920. The result of this Comintern funding was the second series of Labour Movement, which lasted from January to June 1921 and coincided with the high point of cooperation between anarchists and the j.a.panese supporters of Bolshevism.21 During this brief period articles written from both anarchist and Bolshevik perspectives appeared side by side in Labour Movement, but it was not long before the strains in the relationship started to show. Lenin's regime put down the Kronstadt uprising against Bolshevik despotism in March 1921, Osugi soon started to translate eyewitness reports by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman of Bolshevik repression of the Russian anarchists and before long Osugi had concluded that there was nothing to choose between Russian state capitalism and Western private capitalism. Bolshevik policy, he wrote, "has cast the chains of wage slavery for the Russian proletariat and has dragged the workers down into a worse situation than the conditions of labour found in other capitalist countries".22 Labour Movement continued to be published intermittently until October 1927 but, after the brief anarchist-Bolshevik flirtation which was a feature of its early numbers, it soon settled down into a 100 per cent anarchist journal which was unambiguously opposed to Bolshevism.

Parallel to the temporary cooperation between anarchists and Bolsheviks in the field of publishing, which has been described above, there were also attempts in the early days of the union movement to bridge the ideological divide. Unions of different ideological persuasions jointly organised the first ever May Day demonstration in j.a.pan in 1920 and out of this emerged a Labour Union Alliance (Rodo k.u.miai Domeikai). Yet, when a May Day rally was held again the following year, members of anarchist and reformist unions came to blows and the Labour Union Alliance foundered. In 1922 there was one last attempt to form an all-encompa.s.sing federation of unions, this time in the shape of the All-j.a.pan General Federation of Labour Unions (Zenkoku Rodo k.u.miai Sorengo). Its founding conference was held in Osaka on 30 September 1922 and was attended by 106 delegates, representing 59 organisations with a combined membership of over 27,000. The unions represented were split three ways ideologically between anarchists, reformists and Bolsheviks. Although there was no love lost between the reformists and the Bolsheviks, they cooperated temporarily to oppose the anarchists' preference for a decentralised federation and insisted instead that the union movement should have a centralised leadership with powers to enforce its decisions. Naturally, where the reformists and Bolsheviks disagreed was over which of them should be exercising leadership. This antagonism was to come to a head three years later in 1925 when the Bolshevik-controlled unions broke with the reformists to set up the j.a.panese Labour Union Council (Nihon Rodo k.u.miai Hyogikai). From the point of view of this account, however, the most significant outcome of the failed attempt in 1922 to establish the All-j.a.pan General Federation of Labour Unions was that 20 unions revealed their strong preference for anarchist organisational principles by signing in November 1922 the "Announcement to Workers Throughout the Country" to which reference has already been made.23 Four years later this core support was to be the focus around which the first nationwide federation of anarchist-inclined unions, the All-j.a.pan Libertarian Federation of Labour Unions (Zenkoku Rodo k.u.miai Jiyu Rengokai) was to crystallise.

By 1922, then, antagonism between anarchists and Bolsheviks had reached a level of intensity which made all future cooperation impossible. From that point on, anarchist hostility to the Communist Party of j.a.pan equalled the long standing contempt in which anarchists held the reformist social democrats.

OSUGI'S DEATH AND FRESH ATTEMPTS AT TERRORISM.

In September 1923 anarchism in j.a.pan was dealt a blow as hard as the execution of Kotoku and his comrades twelve years earlier. It has already been mentioned that, after Kotoku's death, Osugi was indisputably the most talented thinker and writer in the anarchists' ranks. Throughout the harsh repression of the "winter period" and into the years of resurgence that followed, his combination of pa.s.sionate commitment to personal liberation with an equally ardent enthusiasm for the aims and methods of anarchist syndicalism had provided inspiration for many. Now, tragically, he was to be cut down in his prime. On 1 September 1923, Eastern j.a.pan (the Kanto region) was. .h.i.t by a major earthquake. More than 90,000 people died and close to half a million buildings were destroyed, partly from the initial effects of the earthquake but mainly from the subsequent fires which burnt out of control for days on end. As swathes of fire cut through Tokyo, Yokohama and elsewhere, rumours that arsonists and revolutionaries were out on the streets spread as frighteningly as the flames themselves. Hysteria took hold and led to lynchings, many of the victims of which were Korean immigrants. In this situation of panic and chaos, the authorities were presented with another golden opportunity for eliminating enemies of the state. Osugi Sakae, his partner Ito Noe (who was herself an outstanding anarchist) and Osugi's six year-old nephew Tachibana Munekazu (who happened to be with them) were seized by a squad of military police and all three were brutally put to death. Taken into custody on 16 September 1923, their battered bodies were discovered four days later where they had been dumped in a well.24 The brutality of Osugi's and his companions' murders was compounded by the state's hypocrisy. Amakasu Masahiko, the captain in command of the military police unit, was put on trial and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, but within three years he was free again and back on duty. Comrades of Osugi who had known him personally, as well as others who knew him as an inspired propagandist and an irrepressible champion of freedom only through his writings, were incensed by the casual ease with which the state had killed the ablest anarchist of his generation, as though it were swatting a fly. Not surprisingly, there were those who vowed to exact revenge. In September 1924, an anarchist group which was aptly named the Guillotine Society (Girochin Sha) made two attempts on the life of f.u.kuda Masataro, the general ultimately in command of the troops who had murdered Osugi. In the first attempt one of Osugi's old comrades, Wada Kyutaro, shot General f.u.kuda but only succeeded in wounding him, while in the second f.u.kuda's house was bombed, although he was not at home at the time. Wada was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, but committed suicide while in prison in 1928. Other members of the Guillotine Society were given long prison sentences and two, Furuta Daijiro and Nakahama Tetsu, were executed for their part in a bank robbery which was undertaken in October 1923 in order to raise funds and in the course of which a bank employee was killed.

However righteous the indignation which fired these attempts to retaliate against the cruelty perpetrated by the ruling cla.s.s, terrorism proved to be totally unproductive in advancing the anarchist cause. Ma.s.s arrests and stepped up repression were the inevitable outcome of attacks which mostly missed their targets and inflicted insignificant damage on the structures of power. Despite the evident failure of these various incidents, however, they did not finally lay the terrorist ghost to rest. Terrorism was the result of the systematic inhumanity practised by the capitalist state and the persistence of this causative factor guaranteed that in years to come a minority of anarchists would continue to be provoked into attempts to pay back the ruling cla.s.s in kind.

THE RESURGENCE OF ANARCHIST COMMUNISM.

Many accounts of anarchism in j.a.pan, particularly those which are sympathetic to Bolshevism, suggest that from about the time of Osugi's death anarchism was locked into a downwards spiral. This is far from being the case. During the 1920s the anarchists in j.a.pan were organisationally stronger than ever before, and there was a corresponding flowering of ideas and theories, particularly among the anarchist communists.

In 1926 two nationwide federations of anarchists were formed. The first, organised in January 1926, was the Black Youth League (Kokushoku Seinen Renmei) which was usually known by its j.a.panese abbreviation of Kokuren. When Kokuren was set up it was mainly composed of young anarchists from Eastern j.a.pan (the Kanto region) but it swiftly expanded to take in all generations and to extend its federal organisation throughout j.a.pan and even beyond into j.a.panese colonies such as Korea and Taiwan. The second federation was the All-j.a.pan Libertarian Federation of Labour Unions (Zenkoku Rodo k.u.miai Jiyu Rengokai) whose name was generally abbreviated in j.a.panese to Zenkoku Jiren. At its founding conference on 24 May 1926, 400 delegates attended, representing 25 unions with a combined membership of 8,400. These figures compared with the 35 unions (with around 20,000 members) which had remained in the reformist j.a.panese Confederation of Labour when 32 of its const.i.tuent unions (with 12,500 members) had split away in 1925 to form the Bolshevik-led j.a.panese Labour Union Council. Although Zenkoku Jiren was thus smaller than its reformist and Bolshevik rivals, the unions which comprised it were implanted in virtually all areas of j.a.pan, from the island of Hokkaido in the far North, through major urban centres such as Tokyo and Osaka in j.a.pan's industrial heartland, to cities in the South-West of the country, such as Hiroshima. In addition to the wide geographical spread of Zenkoku Jiren, it also had roots in most major industries. Its unions were organised along industrial lines and encompa.s.sed sectors of the workforce as varied as printworkers, textile workers, engineering workers, food workers, rubber workers, general labourers and so on.25 There was another sense too in which Kokuren and Zenkoku Jiren could be said to have been widely based when first formed. This was that they took in most shades of anarchism, from anarchist syndicalism to anarchist communism. For example, although the heavy presence of anarchist communists in Kokuren's and Zenkoku Jiren's ranks was obvious from the start, the progamme which the latter's founding conference adopted was nevertheless clearly influenced by the cla.s.sic statement of syndicalist principles - the French CGT's Charter of Amiens (1906). Zenkoku Jiren's founding programme declared: * We take the cla.s.s struggle as the basis for the movement to liberate the workers and tenant farmers.

* We reject all political movements and insist on economic action alone.

* We advocate libertarian federation organised industry by industry and we reject centralised authoritarianism.

* We oppose imperialist aggression and advocate the international solidarity of the working cla.s.s.26 Relations between Kokuren and Zenkoku Jiren were extremely close, with the former acting as a hard core of committed and battle-hardened activists within the wider ranks of the latter. When unions affiliated to Zenkoku Jiren became involved in industrial disputes, it was often Kokuren militants who took on the most dangerous forms of direct action, such as battling with the police and firebombing the bosses' houses. In this respect, the relationship between Kokuren and Zenkoku Jiren has often been compared to that between the FAI and CNT in Spain. However, this a.n.a.logy cannot be pressed too far since, as we shall see, the ideas which inspired many j.a.panese anarchists increasingly diverged from those held by their counterparts in Spain and elsewhere.

The story of the next few years is of an ever-sharpening antagonism between anarchist communism and anarchist syndicalism, which led the anarchist syndicalists to withdraw from both Kokuren and Zenkoku Jiren in 1927/28 in a mood of considerable bitterness and to set up their own independent organisations. The reasons for this confrontation are various. One of the easiest to identify is the influence of two outstanding anarchist communist theoreticians and propagandists, called Hatta Shuzo and Iwasa Sakutaro.27 Although Hatta was active in the anarchist movement only during the last ten years of his relatively short life (1886-1934) he was widely acclaimed as "the greatest theoretician of anarchist communism in j.a.pan".28 Iwasa lived much longer (1879-1967) and increasingly came to be regarded, with a mixture of affection and respect, as the grand old man of j.a.panese anarchism. Although different types in many ways, Hatta and Iwasa complemented one another extremely effectively and what they shared was a profound distrust of both syndicalism and the conventional labour movement. As a lapsed Protestant clergyman, Hatta was a masterly public speaker, the sort of man who could hold an audience of tenant farmers or workers spellbound for hours on end, moving them to tears with his description of the iniquity of both conventional capitalism and Bolshevism, and firing them with pa.s.sion for an alternative society which would successfully combine individual freedom and communal solidarity. Iwasa was a quieter, less flamboyant type, who was at his best in informal chats and discussions. Forever on the move, he travelled the length and breadth of j.a.pan, quietly making friends and implanting the ideas of anarchist communism wherever he went.

Yet, however talented Hatta and Iwasa might have been as exponents of anarchist communism, the resurgence of this doctrine in j.a.pan at this particular time cannot be adequately explained in terms of their influence alone. For anarchist communism to have enjoyed the popularity it did in j.a.pan in the late 1920s, it had to provide a convincing explanation for the oppression which so many were experiencing and, equally, had to correspond with their aspirations for a new life. Many tenant farmers and workers found that anarchist communism could fulfil these roles far more effectively than anarchist syndicalism could. From the point of view of the desperately poor tenant farmers, who comprised the bulk of j.a.pan's population in this period and far outnumbered factory workers, the reasons for this are perhaps not difficult to understand. When the anarchist communists talked about converting by revolutionary means the miserably impoverished farming villages into flourishing, self-supporting communes, their message seemed directly relevant to the tenant farmers in a way in which the predominantly urbanised, industrialised and unionised approach of the anarchist syndicalists could never be.

Nevertheless, the split between anarchist communism and anarchist syndicalism cannot be adequately grasped simply in terms of the different social positions of tenant farmers and industrial workers. For one thing, there was a good deal of movement between the countryside and the towns, with new workers being absorbed by the factories as the economy periodically expanded and just as regularly discharged whenever the inevitable economic downturns occurred. For another, even among permanently town-based workers, anarchist communism impressed many as const.i.tuting a more fundamental break with the structures and values of capitalism than anarchist syndicalism could ever achieve.

Many of these workers found Hatta's argument convincing when he insisted that, because anarchist syndicalism based itself on union organisations that were outgrowths of the capitalist workplaces, it would replicate in its social relations the centralisation, hierarchy and power found under capitalism. Hatta argued that, by adopting a form of organisation which mirrored capitalist industry, anarchist syndicalism would perpetuate the division of labour. It was predicted that, even if the bosses were eliminated so that the mines were controlled by the miners, the steel mills by the steelworkers and so on, tensions would still arise between different industrial sectors and different bodies of workers. Even though it was recognised that anarchist syndicalism was ideologically committed to abolishing the state, Hatta maintained that there would be an inherent tendency for some form of arbitrating or coordinating body to emerge in order to deal with conflicts of interest between different economic sectors and those who worked in them. Not only would the danger thus exist that here would be a new state in the making, but those able to exert control over this coordinating body were likely to become an emergent ruling cla.s.s. As Hatta put it: In a society which is based on the division of labour, those engaged in vital production (since it forms the basis of production) would have more power over the machinery of coordination than those engaged in other lines of production. There would therefore be a real danger of the appearance of cla.s.ses.29 Hatta and Iwasa were also highly critical of anarchist syndicalism's belief that the revolution could be pursued via cla.s.s struggle. In the first place, they pointed out that the social relations which existed between the millions of tenant farmers and the landlords from whom they rented their land were closer to feudalism than to capitalism. Hence j.a.panese society could not be reduced to a schematic cla.s.s structure of workers versus capitalists, as anarchist syndicalists (and the Communist Party of j.a.pan, for that matter) tended to a.s.sert. Secondly, and more fundamentally, it was argued that victory in the cla.s.s struggle at most changes the pecking order between cla.s.ses but does not bring about the cla.s.sless condition which is implicit in anarchism. Iwasa expressed this by means of an a.n.a.logy which became famous among j.a.panese anarchists - the a.n.a.logy of a gang of mountain bandits. If the bandit chief (equivalent to the capitalists) was ousted and replaced by one or more of his henchmen (equivalent to the conventional labour movement), the pecking order (cla.s.s structure) could be said to have changed, but not the exploitative nature of society (represented in Iwasa's a.n.a.logy by the continued marauding activity of the bandit gang).30 It was on grounds such as this that Hatta drew the conc