Sen Katayama (1860 – 1933) is the most outstanding of the pioneers of the Japanese labor movement. His principal biographer, Hyman Kublin, writes:
“A rebel from his adolescent years, he devoted his entire adult life of almost half a century to social struggle. His career ultimately mirrored the entire spectrum of social-political radicalism in modern Japan. First upholding Christian Socialism, he gradually shifted his loyalties to Marxism and finally to revolutionary Communism….
“In his homeland he is known as a pioneer in the social movement, a founder of professional social work, and a leader of the early trade union movement. He is also remembered as the editor of Japan’s first labor newspaper, as an organizer of his country’s initial Social Democratic Party, as Japan’s first Bolshevik, and as an active force in the creation of the Japan Communist Party. In the final years of his life he was a member of the Executive Committee and Praesidium of the Communist International.”
In 1897, the first modern union in Japan, the Iron Workers’ Union, with over one thousand members in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, was founded and elected Katayama as secretary. Katayama was then involved in several attempts to create a socialist party, in the face of government repression. He attended the Amsterdam congress of the Second International in 1904, and his symbolic handshake on the rostrum of the congress, with George Plekhanov, leader of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, in the midst of the Russian-Japanese war, as a demonstration of proletarian solidarity, has remained part of the socialist legend.
Meanwhile, government repression in Japan was mounting, culminating in the High Treason Trial of 1910-11, a deliberate frame-up of the Katsura government, where Denjiro Kotoku, leader of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, and eleven other syndicalists and socialists were condemned to death and executed for allegedly plotting against the life of the Emperor. In 1912, Katayama was imprisoned for over eight months for leading a streetcar strike in Tokyo. In 1914, Katayama left Japan for the United States.
In the United States, he was once again involved in the American socialist movement, also organizing socialist study groups of Japanese exiles. After November 1917, he followed the American socialist left into supporting the Bolshevik revolution. Despite an upsurge in social struggles in Japan, he did not return but remained in the United States and became an activist of the Comintern after its formation in 1919. In 1921, Katayama left for Moscow, where he was received with high honors. He was met by an honor guard of the Red Army, and Bolshevik leaders like Kalinin, Zinoviev, Radek and Lunacharski were present to meet him. The official welcoming speech was held by Leon Trotsky, commander-in-chief of the Red Army.
Kublin writes that “With his triumphal entry into Moscow Katayama’s many flights and wanderings at last came to an end. The Soviet Union may well have provided him with a home and a haven for the remaining years of his life. But in a larger sense his eleven years in Russia were the end of the revolutionary trail for Katayama. For almost a quarter of a century he had enjoyed a free political hand and had acknowledged neither man nor movement as his master. Bolshevism, however, permitted no such latitude of choice. It was either serve or be destroyed.”
Katayama chose to serve. In the internal conflicts in the Soviet Communist Party and the international Communist movement, he quickly moved to the Stalin camp and became a reliable supporter of the Comintern and of its most disastrous policies until his death in 1933. His historical contribution to the labour movement of his country is not diminished by his failings and his sad end.
“The Labor Movement in Japan” was written by Sen Katayama in 1917, in the United States. It is, according to Katayama, a “necessarily brief and incomplete review” of the Japanese trade union and radical (socialist and anarchist) movement of the time, from the personal point of view of a leading participant. It was meant to provide basic historical information for readers unfamiliar with Japanese affairs for two main reasons, explained by Louis C. Fraina in his introduction: in the first place, Fraina anticipated an economic and military conflict between the United States and Japan over the exploitation of Asia, and of China in particular. “In this situation latent with catastrophe, the workers of the two nations must understand each other, must assist each other, must unite to avert the impending menace.”
The second purpose was to combat racial prejudice in the American labor movement. “It is the task of the Socialist to break down these hatreds,” Fraina wrote. “And when the American Federation of Labor foments racial hatred against the Japanese, it is betraying the interests of the workers. The Japanese workers in this country are part and parcel of our proletariat; they have proven that they are organizable, that they can fight the industrial oppressors, that they are excellent material for the militant proletarian movement. It is sheer suicide for the American proletariat to indulge in race hatred against the Japanese, or against and other racial element of our people.”, Fraina concluded.
Originally intended for the American socialist press, “The Labor Movement in Japan” was eventually published as a book in 1918 by Charles H. Kerr in Chicago.
Today, its importance lies mainly in that it documents the rise of a vibrant labor movement in Japan more or less at the same time as in Europe, with the same political complexity and sophistication, facing repression on a scale comparable to that in Tsarist Russia or in the monarchies of Central Europe, conducting industrial and political struggles, with periods of progress and periods of retreat—in other words, a perfectly normal labor movement for the time. If there was any “clash of civilizations”, it was certainly not between Japanese workers and workers of other industrializing countries, even though there was little contact and mutual knowledge between them. Japanese workers reacted to their situation as any workers would, and as workers in fact did, everywhere else.
Having helped us realize that Japanese workers behave like workers anywhere, Katayama’s little book also helps us go on and demolish another myth: that the Japanese labor movement actually originated in 1945 and that its early history is unimportant. In one form or another, this is a version often promoted by the right wing in the Japanese trade union movement.
The element of truth in it is the fact that as from 1940 all independent labor organizations in Japan were dissolved and replaced by a government-controlled organization based on the fascist ideology of the military dictatorship. In 1945, the American occupation authorities introduced labor legislation favoring the emergence of free trade unions. The movement that emerged under this legislation included unions organized by socialists and communists coming out of jail or illegality as well as unions led by those who had participated in the government-sponsored fraud under the dictatorship.
Today, the leadership of the largest and dominant trade union organization is presiding over a movement in decline. The dominant ideology represents a version of corporatism where company-based unions identify with the company’s interests as defined by management. History would suggest that the true predecessor of this ideology is the “national unity” ideology of the organizations of the military dictatorship supported by the large corporations, such as the Sangyo Hokoku Undo (Patriotic Industrial Movement) of the late 1930s. In this light, the origins of the current China policy, for example, of the mainstream of the Japanese trade union movement could be seen as the continuation of national and corporate policies of the pre-war period, in a formally democratic context. Against this background, it is important to remember that the historical Japanese trade union movement was a predominantly socialist and anti-capitalist movement as long as it remained independent of government and corporate control.
Louis C. Fraina, the author of the Introduction, was a leading writer and propagandist of the left-wing in the American Socialist Party before and immediately after the First World War. First an activist of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party, Fraina was later influenced by the Dutch Left Wing, represented in the US by S.J. Rutgers from 1915 to 1918, and by the Russian revolutionary émigrés who included Alexandra Kollontay, Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky. In 1919, at the age of twenty-five, he had been active for ten years in the movement and had edited, singly or with others, five literary and political journals of the socialist Left. In 1921, Fraina was assigned by the Comintern to a mission to Mexico, together with Katayama. The mission, which appears to have been based on wrong premises (that Comintern intervention was desired or even possible in the Mexican revolution at that time) remained inconclusive. Developments in the American Communist movement, which had left him out of the leadership, proved equally disappointing. By the end of 1922, Fraina had dropped out of the American Communist Party and, for a time, out of political life. He eventually re-emerged as an academic scholar and writer under the name Lewis Corey. His major writings of that period are: The “Decline of American Capitalism” (1934) and “The Crisis of the Middle Class” (1935). Moving away from Marxism, he tried to develop an alternative theory of democratic socialism in “The Unfinished Task” (1942). In 1950, he wrote “Meat and Man, a history of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America”. He died in 1953.
The publisher of the book, Charles H. Kerr and Company began in 1886 as a publisher of Unitarian tracts. After its founder, the son of abolitionist activists, became a socialist at the turn of the century, it became the leading socialist publishing house in the English-speaking world. It published the writings by Marx and Engels including Marx’ Capital in three volumes, other Marxist theoreticians such as Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lafargue, and American socialist classics (Eugene Victor Debs, Mary Harris Jones [Mother Jones], Lucy Parsons, Mary Marcy). It was also the publisher of the International Socialist Review, the leading English-language publication in the Second International.
Now in its 120th year, Charles H. Kerr is still publishing (“subversive literature for the whole family since 1886”) under the direction of Franklin Rosemont, author of a biography of Joe Hill, the famous songwriter of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and of other books on the revolutionary counterculture in the US. Its catalogue includes re-editions of the Marxist classics and of socialist literature from the early 20th century, as well as works on abolitionism, surrealism, the blues, socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, the IWW and revolutionary cultural movements.
The history of the Charles H. Kerr company was written in 1997 (Allen Ruff, “We Called Each Other Comrades”, University of Illinois, 336 p.). The book has a hammer and sickle on the cover (in the “o” of Comrades), inappropriately so since the company never had any connection whatsoever with the Communist Party. However, the Proletarian Party, which originally adhered to the Comintern but dissented from any suggestion that the triumph of American bolshevism was at hand, ran the company from 1928 to 1971, while respecting its non-sectarian character. In 1971, with the PP passing out of existence, its leaders gave control of the company to a new Board of Directors including Fred Thompson of the IWW and Bert Rosen and Virgil Vogel of the Libertarian Socialist League. The revived company proved unexpectedly successful. A reprint of “The Autobiography of Mother Jones”, a labour classic first published in the twenties, was reissued in time to sell thousands of copies in mining towns during the coal strikes of the seventies. Another important publication was Daniel Fusfeld’s “Rise and Repression of Radical Labor”.
Organized as a worker-owned co-operative not-for-profit educational association, Kerr is now not only a link with the most vital radical traditions of the past but also a part of today’s struggles for a better world.
Charles H. Kerr Company
1740 West Greenleaf Avenue
USA – Chicago, IL 60610
web site: http://www.charleshkerr.org
FURTHER READING
Hyman Kublin, “Asian Revolutionary: The Life of Sen Katayama”, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, US, 1964, 370pp.
Evelyn S. Colbert, “The Left Wing in Japanese Politics”, Institute of Pacific Relations, New York, 1952, 353pp.
George Oakley Totten III, “The Social Democratic Movement in Pre-War Japan”, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1966, 455pp.