The Labor Movement in Japan

by Sen Katayama

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The Labor Movement In Japan, Volume 20; The Labor Movement In Japan; Sen Katayama

Sen Katayama

C. H. Kerr & Company, 1918

Labor movement; Socialism; Socialism in Japan; Socialisme; Travail et travailleurs

Genres: Japan, History, Nonfiction, Economics, Politics

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2013

Reviews

[Enrique Mora Roás · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un texto interesantísimo sobre el desarrollo del movimiento obrero en Japón.
Se aprecia mucho un recorrido en primera persona. Relativamente accesible, pero se disfruta mucho más con conocimientos del contexto sociopolítico y del socialismo japonés.

[Alexandria · Rating 4 out of 5]

The edition that I read, published by On Our Own Authority!, contained an introduction that takes up about half of the book's total length, and was frankly more substantive than Katayama's writing (also very critical of it). As such I would really recommend finding and reading the On Our Own Authority! edition of this book, as it, combined with Katayama's original writing, provides a brief and interesting summary into the early labor movement in Japan.

[Victor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A number of important forerunners of the Japanese socialist movement began as participants in and veterans of the liberal movement.

Not only that, but in a first for Asia - possibly the world - the 1890s saw a follower of the theories of Henry George (who argued that while people should reap the value of their own production, a land tax or ‘single tax’ was necessary to ensure the economic value of land would belong to all members of society - ‘we must make land common property’ was one of his proposals, essentially a call for its socialisation) elected as a member of the Imperial Diet i.e. the Japanese parliament.

Diet members were not elected on the basis of universal suffrage, much like the Prussian Lantag and indeed the German Reichstag of the Second Reich era.

One early mutual influence between the two countries was the breaking up of Japanese workers’ meetings and assemblies on the basis of ‘applying an old law copied from Prussia.’

Sen Katayama was among the first Japanese socialists, whose activism took him around the world, including and especially the United States.

During the Russo-Japanese war his handshake with the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov at the Sixth Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam was symbolic of international workers’ solidarity and opposition to imperialist war in place of national hatred and conflict. He was later a founder of the Japanese Communist Party, and died virtually exiled from his country of origin in 1933, in Moscow.

His ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis alongside other revolutionaries (Yakov Sverdlov, Inessa Armand, John Reed, IWW leading light Big Bill Haywood to name four) and during his funeral Stalin was one of the pallbearers, captured in a photograph from the time.

Katayama was later honoured on Soviet stamps.

His short 1918 work, ‘The Labor Movement in Japan’, is well worth the reader’s time.