UN PANORAMA LATINOAMERICANO

In which the author completes the story of Yanaihara Tadao’s expulsion from Tōdai. He then reviews the mass arrests of the first Popular Front Incident (December 1937), which included many members of the non-Communist left, and the arrests of three professors of the Faculty of Economics in the Faculty Group Incident (February 1, 1938). The Tōdai spy Hashizume Akio takes center stage, along with the arrest of Ōuchi Hyōe. Throughout this period, Japan’s war in China has a major impact on events at Tōdai.

In the Lecture Hall, Scattered Applause

One of those present at Yanaihara’s final lecture of was Ōgiya Shōzō, for many years editor in chief of Weekly Asahi and architect of that magazine’s golden age. At the time,

Ōgiya was a novice reporter for the Tokyo Asahi; he had graduated two years earlier from Tōdai’s Faculty of Letters with a specialty in Japanese history. Long afterward, in an essay about Yanaihara’s resignation, he wrote as follows¹:

1 “Tōdai hikkashi” (The Publication-Indictment Issue at Tōdai), Bungei shunjū, October 1955.

I rushed to the lecture hall. Students came streaming in. There were also some people in suits. … Among them were likely Special Police from the Motofuji Station, eagle-eyed men in threadbare suits. …

10:30. Professor Yanaihara Tadao arrived. His slender frame was bent, and he seemed sad. “I think you know. Yesterday, not wanting to cause further trouble for the university, I submitted my resignation….” Then he turned to his lecture, serenely. It was about the role of bank capital in colonies….

The lecture went on for an hour.

He said, “I'll stop here. In conclusion….” And then, raising his head, he spoke to this effect: “The mission of the university lies in criticizing the policies of the actors of the day from a higher, comprehensive viewpoint. Sometimes that involves criticizing even war itself. Sometimes such criticism is useful to the actors, sometimes not. That's unavoidable in the world of the university…unavoidable.” In the term ‘actor’—specifying neither government nor military—I sensed a sign of the times.²The hall had become very quiet… Scattered applause was heard in the hall.

“But at this parting, students, I want to say only one thing to you. No matter how your body may be stained, may you keep your souls unstained. I respect such people. And I despise those who—no matter how splendid their bodies—have souls that are stained…”

Thunderous applause. A storm of applause—as if a dam had burst. Amid it, seeming a bit cheered up, Yanaihara left the building.

The Mass Arrest of Four Hundred Rōnōha Members

2 RHM: Other translations of Yanaihara's jikkōsha include executor, performer, implementer, even policy-maker.

Within a scant two weeks of Professor Yanaihara’s final lecture, mass arrests of Rōnōha people nationwide were carried out (the first Popular Front Incident), and at one fell swoop four hundred people in eighteen prefectures were arrested on suspicion of infringing the Peace Preservation Law. Among those arrested were famous left-wing men of letters³ and sitting representatives in the Diet: Kuroda Hisao (Social Mass Party) and Katō Kanjū (Japan Proletarian Party). Virtually all those arrested were leading members of the Japan Proletarian Party or of labor unions affiliated with the JPP or of the national council of labor unions. Among those arrested: virtually all the powerbrokers of the non-Communist left.⁴

What was the Rōnōha? In a word, Rōnōha was a collective term for the non-Communist left that sought no ties with the Comintern—that’s the most understandable and accurate description. It wasn’t a factional group with any organization of its own; this label was applied by journalists.

Under the influence of the Comintern, those in the socialist movement met in 1922 and formed—illegally—the Japan Communist Party. But it splintered quickly over the issue of whether to make the abolition of the emperor system a slogan, and it dissolved under the shock of the official terror against the socialist movement that arose after the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. In 1926 the party was reestablished, but there was a confrontation over the direction to take thereafter between two

3 RHM: Tachibana mentions, among others, Yamakawa Hitoshi, Ōmori Yoshitarō, Sakisaka Itsurō, Arahata Kanson, Suzuki Mosaburō.

4 RHM: Tachibana mentions Inemura Junzō, Yamahata Hideo, Shimagami Zengorō, and Akamatsu Isamu, who after the war all became Socialist Party Diet representatives.

factions—Yamakawa-ism, which advocated proceeding as a mass political movement based on the labor movement (for this faction, socialist revolution became a distant goal), and Fukumoto-ism, which argued a two-step revolution, first a bourgeois revolution that overturns the monarchy, with progressive revolutionary party members taking the lead, then a rapid transformation to socialist revolution.

The movement split. In the end, via a ruling of the Comintern, Yamakawa-ism was rejected as opportunism, and under the leadership of the Comintern, the Japan Communist Party moved forward as a Leninist party of professional revolutionaries aiming at a two-stage revolution.

Put simply, the Rōnōha was Yamakawa-ism, which parted ways with the Comintern at this time; among the strands—labor movement, farm movement—of the mass movement, it was consistently stronger than the radical movement led by the Communist Party. The Communist Party had greater leadership than the Rōnōha only among students and intellectuals who favored a radical idealistic movement.

Government officials drew up the Peace Preservation Law specifically to control the Communist Party and create a structure that could suppress political parties that hoisted such slogans as “a change in the kokutai” (i.e., abolition of the emperor system) and “non-recognition of private property” in particular. In 1928 they added the death penalty. But the Rōnōha aimed at a legal mass movement with a legal political organization and didn’t call for abolishing the emperor system or not recognizing private property, so it couldn’t get tripped up by the Peace Preservation Law.

The Popular Front—the Comintern’s Major Policy Change

So why did officials apply the Peace Preservation Law to the Rōnōha at this time and make large-scale arrests nation-wide? In the background lay a major change by the Comintern. The Comintern’s previous policy had called for breaking up the social democrats: the social democratic parties were the revolutionary party’s greatest enemy, so crushing them was the shortest path to revolution. In July-August 1935, the Seventh Congress of the Comintern turned instead to the anti-fascist Popular Front: in order to fight fascism, make common cause with all political forces that oppose fascism; form a Popular Front.

In Japan at this time, the Communist Party had already been destroyed; the end of the Communist Party was the December 1933 incident when Party members tortured two suspected Central Committee spies and murdered one of them.⁵The last member of the party’s central committee was arrested in March 1935, so when the seventh congress of the Comintern adopted the tactic of the Popular Front, there existed in Japan no party organization to follow that guidance.

But with this change in Comintern tactics, the fierce fighting in Europe between Communist Party and social democrats disappeared, and the great political fault line became fascism vs. Popular Front. In 1928 the Fascists came to power in Italy; in 1933, the Nazis took power in Germany.

In France and Spain the Popular Front won electoral victories, and even in China, thanks to the Comintern’s change in policy, national unity arose for the sake of the

5 RHM: In December 1933 Party members tortured two members and killed one accused of betrayal.

resist-Japan hate-Japan policy; up till then, there had been fierce opposition and civil war between Guomindang and Communist Party.

In the absence of the Japan Communist Party, the Comintern’s policy change was communicated to Japan by various routes and had a major influence on the remaining non-communist left. Nosaka Sanzō’s “Letter to Japanese Communists” was delivered through the American seaman’s union, but more general newspapers and magazines had a much greater role in communicating this change; the mass media reported on the policy change itself steadily throughout 1935. A bit later, in October 1936, Kaizō put together a thirty-page special issue, lining up articles by such luminaries as Arahata Kanson and Minobe Ryōkichi.

The general election of 1936 was held a scant few days before the February 26 Incident. In part as a result of the Comintern’s change in policy, the Social Mass Party made great gains, growing from five seats in the Diet to eight. In this election Katō Kanjū ran on the ticket of the most left-wing Proletarian Party with an anti-fascist slogan and won the most votes nationwide. In 1935, Katō had gone to the United States at the invitation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and at that time met Nosaka Sanzō, then in the United States; he heard from him firsthand about the Comintern’s change of policy. Katō’s election battle was the Popular Front epitomized in Japan.

The election returns likely frightened officials. In November that year the Japan-Germany pact was signed.

This mutual defense treaty is formally the “German-Japanese pact against international communism” (i.e., the Comintern), and the heart of the pact is that the two parties cooperate in sharing intelligence and taking the defense measures necessary to confront the Comintern. A secret

annex provided that if either country were attacked by the Soviet Union, both countries would respond. The Soviet Union and the Comintern were seen as one and the same.

The Japan Communist Party was the Japan branch of the Comintern, so the Communist Party was under the control of the Comintern and received its support: manpower, material, ideology. Under the Peace Preservation Law’s rubric of “associations that aim to change the kokutai and reject private property,” the Japan Communist Party was included, of course, but also the Comintern itself. And in the “crime of pursuit of ends” of the Peace Preservation Law, actions on behalf of the Comintern were also covered.

This meant that after the Seventh Congress, once the Popular Front became formally a Comintern tactic, it became possible to use the Popular Front to charge the Rōnōha under the Peace Preservation Law. A December 22, 1937 news release made the connection: “Since its founding, the officers of the Japan Proletarian Party have worn a mask of legality, based on the directive of tactical camouflage issued by the Comintern, headquarters of world communism, and have been engaged in a strange communist movement. Aware of this, officials have exerted every effort at surveillance and just recently seized evidence that, based on the guiding principles of the Rōnōha that serve communism, the Japan Proletarian Party is engaged in secret maneuvering to change the kokutai.

Now, after careful deliberation with officials of the Ministry of Justice and in view of the current crisis, the officials have finally lowered the boom on the entire party”

(Italics: Tachibana). It reported that the Japan Proletarian Party had been declared illegal under the Peace Preservation Law. Unlike the Japan Communist Party, the

Rōnōha didn’t have a superstructure, so the Japan Proletarian Party was singled out as the core organization.

In addition, a page-two report, “Intent to Mobilize the Masses Aiming at Communist Revolution,” explained this policy change at the Comintern’s Seventh Congress. This wasn’t Asahi commentary; it was the explanation put out by the Home Ministry’s press office: “[The Comintern] made a major change in its previous policy and took a policy similar to that of the Rōnōha, so the activities of the Rōnōha since then have gained strength and rapidly intensified.”

Noting that the anti-fascist Popular Front struggle that the Japan Proletarian Party boasted of matches Comintern policy precisely, it said: “Recently, based on the ideology of the Rōnōha, the Japan Proletarian Party gives evidence of intending to change the kokutai, and it has become clear that the establishment of the anti-fascist Popular Front, the central movement goal, is exactly the same as the Comintern’s new policy—to mobilize the masses for communist revolution.” The Rōnōha movement had always been a legal organization and legal movement, so sophistry was necessary to ensnare it in the Peace Preservation Law:

Japan Proletarian Party equals Rōnōha equals communist revolutionaries equals anti-fascist Popular Front equals Comintern Popular Front equals goal of communist revolution equals goal of changing the kokutai equals infringement of the Peace Preservation Law. But at every stage, this sophistry makes very large logical leaps and factual mistakes.

In fact, in both word and deed the Rōnōha had always drawn a line between it and the Communist Party and taken pains to preserve its legality, so such sophistry wasn’t so easy to sell. As we shall see later, this sophistry was stretched to the limit when applied of all Rōnōha members

to the Faculty Group. There were eleven members of the Faculty Group—Ōuchi, Arisawa, Wakimura, Uno Kōzō, Takahashi Masao, Abe Isamu, Minobe Ryōkichi, and the others, and it was for this reason that all except Abe and Arisawa were found innocent in the first trial: “it is not recognized that they were aware that the Rōnōha was a society with the aim of realizing a proletarian revolution.”

Then in appellate court, the Rōnōha itself was not

“recognized as a society with the aim of changing the kokutai,” and all were found innocent. The rest of the group—Yamakawa Hitoshi, Katō Kanjū, Suzuki Mosaburō, and the others—fought till the end; but while the fight was still going on, the war ended, and the Peace Preservation Law lapsed. So all had the charges against them dismissed.

To return to the earlier article, the italicized part—“in light of the current crisis”—of course referred to the fact that beginning with the Sino-Japanese Incident (July 7, the Marco Polo Bridge incident), Japan went onto war footing.

By December 15, when these Rōnōha mass arrests were carried out (the news accounts came one week later), the war was already in full flood. In fact, the mass arrests were carried out two days after the fall of Nanjing.

The Man Who Tailed Ōuchi, Arisawa, and the Others The account in the last chapter—that all Tōdai held a ceremony to commemorate the fall of Nanjing, with faculty and students processing from the ceremony to the palace and to Yasukuni Shrine, bowing at the palace and praying at the shrine: all that took place on the day after the Popular Front Incident. In the first Popular Front Incident only former—not current—members of the Tōdai Faculty of Economics were arrested: Ōmori Yoshitarō, former assistant professor, and Sakisaka Itsurō, former instructor

(he became a professor at Kyushu University and resigned in the March 15 Incident).

The second Popular Front Incident occurred on February 1, 1937, a scant two months after the first Popular Front Incident; on that day current professors—mainly from Tōdai—were arrested. Ōuchi was considered the “authority in Marxian economics” and was the central figure of the Faculty Group. In My Resume, he says of the events:

Ōuchi: Meanwhile, in December Rōnōha members were arrested. And I was Rōnōha, and a motion was introduced at Faculty Meeting calling for Rōnōha professors to resign. Amid this panicky state of affairs, in the evening edition for January 29, 1937, an article appeared saying that the Faculty Group, I and the rest, would likely be arrested. I thought that was strange. On the one hand, I thought that they'd never arrest us, but given the disorganization of the authorities of the day, they just might.

Takahashi: Tell us about the arrest.

Ōuchi: At that time, it had already been in the air for two or three days, so even though I thought it wasn't necessary, I prepared against all contingencies and did make preliminary plans with Arisawa and Minobe. We agreed on what to say and how to say it.

But afterwards that caused real trouble. A spy found out about it. To this day I still don't know the details…but they knew it all: where I ate, what I said and when.

In the arrests nationwide in the Faculty Group Incident that day, thirty-eight people got picked up, but the focus was the Faculty Group of the Tōdai Faculty of Economics:

Professor Ōuchi and Assistant Professors Arisawa and Wakimura. In addition, Minobe Ryōkichi and Abe Isamu,

professors at Hōsei University, were arrested, too, but they were Ōuchi disciples of the Tōdai Faculty of Economics and until recently had been Tōdai teaching assistants, in the same group as Ōuchi and the others; so “Faculty Group”

equaled “Ōuchi Group.” Arisawa’s specialty was statistics, and he was a major expert on controlled economies; in the next day’s papers he was identified as “a Marxist authority on war economy.” Arisawa had long been known as a central figure of Marxist economics at Tōdai, and he had been implicated earlier, too, in the Takigawa Incident; at that time he was Tōdai’s most prominent red professor.

Later, looking back on that time, then-president Onozuka Kiheiji made the famous comment, “I’m glad nothing happened to Arisawa.” In the speech of Miyazawa Yutaka in the Lower House of the Diet criticizing red professors, the speech that triggered the Takigawa Incident, there is this passage: “A middle-aged assistant professor who handles statistics in the Tōdai Faculty of Economics uses a book by Marx as text and criticizes the theory of marginal utility unmercifully; he praises Marxist economics and is the worst red professor.” It was clear to those involved that this was a reference to Arisawa. In the symposium of retirees in Fifty Years of the Tōdai Faculty of Economics, Arisawa remembers that time this way: “Even the students sensed that I was in trouble, and some even said, ‘Professor Arisawa, this is the last class, isn’t it.” The owner of the second-hand bookstore Shimazaki said, ‘Professor, it’s over.’ (The store was in front of the Red Gate; its proprietor had taken a course with Arisawa.) In response, I said boastfully, ‘Don’t talk nonsense. They can’t touch me.’ But one day Dean Mori summoned me and said, ‘You’ve been made an issue of in the House of Peers, and there’s been an inquiry from the Ministry of Education. What text are

you using?’ The text was Diehl and Mombert Wert und Preis [Value and Price], a book of readings, and it actually did include an essay by Marx, but there were also pieces by Böhm-Bawerk, Marshall, Ricardo, and others.⁶ I knew because I’d read it. I explained, ‘It’s a book Faculty Meeting accepts as a textbook. And we read it from page one; right now, actually, we’re reading Marx.’ Then Mori said, ‘I just don’t know what to say. I do understand.’ And that was the end of it. Several days later I bumped into him in the corridor and he told me, ‘Arisawa, that matter is settled.’”

Arisawa had escaped arrest in the Popular Front

Arisawa had escaped arrest in the Popular Front