Christopher W. A. Szpilman
A series of major upheavals both abroad (World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the republican revolutions in Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the emergence of the United States as the world’s dominant power) and at home (the Rice Riots of August 1918 and the formation of the Seiyūkai party cabinet led by Hara Takashi) provided a dramatic setting for the founding in August 1919 of a radical pan-Asianist organization known as the Yūzonsha (The Society of Those Who Yet Remain).
The Yūzonsha’s antecedents go back to 1915, when Mitsukawa Kametarō (1886–1936; see Szpilman 2007), the editor in chief of the monthly Dai Nihon (Greater Japan), formed a discussion group on current affairs. Under the impact of the worldwide turmoil unleashed by World War I, this group was reorganized and renamed itself the Rōsōkai (Old and Young Society) in October 1918.
The Rōsōkai was a debating society, not an association that could engage in political activism. Though it is sometimes described as a pan-Asianist body, Pan-Asianism was not its ideology but merely one of many subjects discussed at its meetings. In fact, the Rōsōkai had neither a political program nor an ideological focus. No publications appeared under its imprint, and it eschewed political action. Its only discernible activity was regular, monthly lectures followed by discussion. Its members were drawn together not by ideological affinities but by their interest in current affairs, especially the rapidly changing international situation. They included rightists (e.g., Ōkawa Shūmei; see II:4; see also Szpilman 1998b) and leftists (e.g., Sakai Toshihiko) and military men both on active duty (who preferred to keep a low profile and so do not appear in the published members’ lists, because soldiers and sailors on active duty were legally forbidden to join political associations) and in retirement (General Satō Kōjirō, 1862–1927, and Admiral Kamiizumi Tokuya, 1865–1946).
Though the Rōsōkai lacked an ideological focus, a high proportion of its leading members espoused pan-Asian views and went on to distinguish themselves in the pan-Asian movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Both Ōkawa, who having joined the body quickly became its leading light, and Mitsukawa were dissatisfied with the indefinite character of the Rōsōkai and on 8 August 1919 founded the Yūzonsha, an organization with a clear pan-Asianist and reformist agenda.
In addition to Mitsukawa and Ōkawa, the core members of the Yūzonsha included Kanokogi Kazunobu (1884–1949; see II:14), Nunami Takeo (1877–1927), Kasagi Yoshiaki (1892–1955), Shimonaka Yasaburō (1878–1961), Kanauchi Ryōsuke (1895–1966), Ayakawa Takeji (1891–1966), Yasuoka Masahiro (1898–1983; see II:29), Shimizu Kōnosuke (1895–1981), Iwata Fumio (1891–1943), and Nishida Mitsugi (1901–1937). Most of these men had also been associated with the Rōsōkai. The new organization complemented rather than superseded the Rōsōkai. The manifesto reproduced here stated clearly that the Yūzonsha would engage in political action.
Mitsukawa and Ōkawa asked pan-Asianist radical Kita Ikki (1883–1937; see I:27) to provide ideological leadership for the new organization. Kita, who, having accepted the invitation, arrived in Tokyo from his self-imposed exile in Shanghai in January 1920, moved into the Yūzonsha headquarters but on the whole kept aloof from its day-to-day activities—even if his quasi-totalitarian Kokka Kaizō Hōan Daikō (A Plan for National Reconstruction, 1919) did provide the society with some ideological guidance. The Yūzonsha illicitly circulated stenciled copies of this banned work, and its radicalizing influence apparently inspired right-wing activist Asahi Heigo (1890–1921) to assassinate the financier Yasuda Zenjirō (1838–1921). Copies of Kita’s plan were also given to a number of young army officers, some of whom were involved in the military coups and terrorist acts that shook Japan in the 1930s.
The Yūzonsha had ambitious plans to spread its radical pan-Asianist and nationalist message to university students as an alternative to the liberal and democratic views propagated by Dr. Yoshino Sakuzō’s Shinjinkai (New Men’s Association), but this attempt to recruit Japan’s future elite was not successful. Several branches were set up at universities, but they attracted only a small fraction of the student body.
The Yūzonsha also made efforts to spread its message to a wider audience by launching, in August 1920, a monthly journal, Otakebi (War Cry). The funds for the journal were provided by the financier Inoue Junnosuke (1869–1932), who, in an ironic twist of fate, was assassinated in 1932 by a right-wing terrorist partly inspired by Yūzonsha ideology. But even with Inoue’s support, the journal turned out to be ephemeral: only three issues were printed, in small runs and at irregular intervals, before it folded up. Equally ineffectual were the Yūzonsha’s efforts to publish books. Only a few pamphlets were published under its imprint, notably Ōkawa Shūmei’s Kakumei Yōroppa to Fukkō Ajia (Revolutionary Europe and Asia in Revival, October 1922; see Ōkawa, 1993).
As mentioned, Ōkawa and Mitsukawa had founded the Yūzonsha to engage in political action, not to deal in words. Some action indeed ensued. In 1920 the Yūzonsha, alongside the Kokuryūkai (see I:10), was involved both in a successful campaign to prevent the annulment of the crown prince Hirohito’s engagement to Princess Kuni Nagako (1903–2000) and in an unsuccessful campaign to prevent the crown prince’s forthcoming European tour. Some Yūzonsha members engaged in violence (e.g., an attack on Saionji Hachirō [1881–1946], a court official who was Prince Saionji Kinmochi’s son). However, this was about the sum of the group’s activities, and one is forced to conclude that, in spite of all the talk, the Yūzonsha achieved little more than the Rōsōkai. This dearth of achievements may have been caused by a rift between Kita and Ōkawa, who, after a brief period of friendship, decided they could not stand each other. Ōkawa’s enmity toward Kita may have been grounded in self-interest, for Ōkawa had by then realized that his own career was suffering because of his association with Kita, who had acquired a reputation for blackmail and extortion. But Ōkawa was also vexed by Kita’s ad hominem attacks on Viscount Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), Ōkawa’s mentor, over his efforts to normalize Japan–Soviet relations (Szpilman 2002: 472).
Whatever the reason, the conflict between Kita and Ōkawa caused the dissolution of the Yūzonsha in March 1923, even if, for the sake of appearances, Kanokogi Kazunobu’s departure for Germany provided a convenient pretext. The Rōsōkai too petered out more or less at the same time, though no official dissolution was announced.
Since the Yūzonsha was a body consisting of individuals, each with a mind of his own, it would be simplistic to assume that the society had a monolithic pan-Asian policy or that its members espoused a uniform set of pan-Asian ideas. That clearly was not the case. The leading members differed over the details and even over the scope of their Pan-Asianism. For instance, Kita limited his pan-Asian disquisitions largely to China, Manchuria, and Mongolia, even if on occasion he talked of the conquest of Australia. Ōkawa, by contrast, stretched his conception of Asia to areas that are conventionally included in Africa (Egypt) and Europe (the Balkans).
But if it is possible to generalize about the group of diverse individuals who formed the membership of the Yūzonsha, it can be safely asserted that, first of all, they agreed on what they hated. They despised Western (or as they would have put it, “Anglo-Saxon”) civilization, which they regarded as the incarnation of materialism, egoism, hedonism, individualism, and such like; they despised ideals such as pacifism, liberalism, and democracy, which President Wilson propagated; they hated the idea of armament reductions; they despised the Japanese advocates of liberalism and democracy; they despised the established political parties, which reminded them too much of the Anglo-American system of governance; and, above all, they hated Western imperialism. From this perspective, they denounced the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the League of Nations (1920) and condemned the Washington Treaties (1922). The Versailles–Washington treaty system, as they saw it, was designed to preserve the teetering imperialist status quo, perpetuated racial discrimination, and hypocritically prevented Japan from expansion on the Asian continent in pursuit of its pan-Asian mission to liberate Asia from the Western yoke.
Emphasis on domestic reform went hand in hand with the society’s stress on Japan’s pan-Asian mission. These two aspects of the Yūzonsha’s program were inseparable (as the text reproduced here shows). Though the Yūzonsha’s leading figures stressed the primacy of domestic reform, they all regarded domestic reforms as a precondition for the realization of a higher purpose: the liberation of Asia.
Second, all the members of the Yūzonsha without exception were ardent nationalists. This nationalism informed their sense of history, which they interpreted as an ongoing racial struggle between the peoples of color (representing Asia) and the whites (Ōkawa, Mitsukawa, and Ayakawa) or as a contest between the Western “have” states and “have-not,” proletarian Japan (Kita and Kanokogi). Sometimes both views were held concurrently.
This nationalism also colored their Pan-Asianism, as is clear both from their axiomatic assumption that Japan would play a commanding role in the mission to liberate Asia that they envisaged and in their subsequent (post-Yūzonsha) writings (Ōkawa, Kanokogi, Mitsukawa, and so on) that justified Japanese expansion in China in terms of a pan-Asian mission.
Yet it would be wrong to regard the Yūzonsha’s Pan-Asianism as mere window dressing for Japanese expansionism and racial supremacism. That this was not the case is apparent both in Mitsukawa’s criticisms of Japanese colonial policy and in the Yūzonsha’s quixotic commitment to propagate Esperanto as a lingua franca that would, the leaders of the organization somewhat naively hoped, facilitate the advent of Asian unity. Kita favored Esperanto because he thought the Japanese language was so difficult for foreigners to learn that it constituted a significant obstacle to the realization of Japan’s pan-Asian mission (Wilson 1969). But Kita was not the only Yūzonsha member to promote this artificial language. Ga Minezō, too, was a well-known Esperanto enthusiast, and as early as October 1919 (i.e., several months before Kita’s return to Japan), Fujisawa Chikao (1893–1962), who during the Pacific War was to gain notoriety for his rabid and narrow-minded nationalism, gave a talk at the Rōsōkai titled “The Origins of Esperanto.”
This internationalist emphasis on Esperanto combined with the Yūzonsha’s inherent nationalism formed an incongruous mix, but it was not the only paradox presented by the society.
Yūzonsha members’ outlook on Japan’s pan-Asian mission fluctuated between optimism and pessimism. Its leading members allowed themselves a degree of optimism because they had become convinced, possibly even before they read Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1917) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (1919), that World War I marked the beginning of the collapse of Western civilization, and consequently that Western imperialism and the Western domination of Asia was about to crumble. But, at the same time, they feared that Japan’s party government would, by failing to reform the country rapidly enough, miss a golden opportunity to implement a pan-Asian mission of liberation that had presented itself as a result of the decline of Western power in the aftermath of World War I.
The Yūzonsha’s concrete achievements may have been meager, but its influence was considerable. After its dissolution, most members (minus Kita) joined the Kōchisha (Society for Action on Earth), which was headed by Ōkawa. Officially the Kōchisha was founded in April 1925 with the appearance of the monthly Nihon, though meetings of a Kōchikai were held as early as January 1924. In 1926 several members, including Mitsukawa, Nakatani, and Ayakawa, resigned, mainly because of personal differences with Ōkawa Shūmei, but the Kōchisha managed to survive this schism. Under Ōkawa’s leadership the Kōchisha expanded its membership and carried on the publication of Nihon until 1932. It collapsed only when Ōkawa was arrested for his involvement in the 1932 conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (May 15 Incident).
The enduring legacy of the Yūzonsha’s Pan-Asianism was due to a number of factors. First, Ōkawa, Mitsukawa, Kanokogi, Nakatani, and Yasuoka were prolific writers who throughout the 1920s and 1930s published a veritable stream of popular pan-Asianist books and articles. Second, many of them pursued successful academic careers, which gave them a considerable advantage and provided them with a captive audience in propagating their pan-Asian views. Third, they were active in various pan-Asian organizations. Mitsukawa, for example, after he had quit the Kōchisha, was involved in the Kōa Gakujuku (Asian Revival Academy) and, after 1932, together with Kanokogi and Nakatani, played a important role in the pan-Asian Dai Ajia Kyōkai (see II:13). It was the activities of these members as much as the personal connections of Ōkawa Shūmei or Kita Ikki’s political intrigues that ensured the relatively short-lived Yūzonsha’s enduring influence as a pan-Asian organization—an influence that intensified in the 1930s.
Source (translation from the Japanese original by Christopher W. A. Szpilman; see also Wilson 1969: 98, for an alternative, somewhat abridged version of the same passage)
Foundation Principles of the Yūzonsha, Otakebi, October 1920.
The Eight Main Policy Planks of this Magazine:
The movement to build a great revolutionary empire
A creative revolution of the national spirit
Advocacy of a moral foreign policy
The formation of a great military state with the goal of liberating Asia
Coverage and critique of the reform situation in various countries
Propagating and popularizing Esperanto
[Serving] as a liaison organ for reformist movements
Spiritual training for comrades (dōshi) to turn them into pillars of the nation
Yūzonsha Associates
We publish “War Cry,” determined to cast aside the pen.
Our decision to cast aside the pen is also a decision to take up the sword. The time has now come for Japan to fight a war to liberate slaves, both domestically and internationally. But this new history must be recorded in our own hot blood (keiketsu), not in ink. We, the Japanese people, must stand at the vortex of a tornado that is the war to free mankind from slavery. Accordingly, the Japanese state must serve as an absolute [standard] for forging our ideal of world revolution. [But] before we achieve this absolute goal, our God-given task is to realize the moral fulfillment of the Japanese state and prepare it for war. [For] the Japanese nation-state is about to realize the ideal of Martin Luther, who said that the state is an ethical institution.
The multiple dangers and difficulties that are staring us in the face do not afford us the luxury of shrinking from radical reform of the state organism and of shunning a creative revolution of the national spirit. Nor do we think it enough to limit reform and revolution to Japan alone. We want to liberate Japan first precisely because we in fact believe that the Japanese people are destined to become the great apostle of the war to liberate mankind. Our gods point toward China and India, and Vietnam, Burma and Siam which lie at the center of a circle formed by China, India and Australia. They point toward the plain through which the Tigris and Euphrates flow, and towards the area where the Nile empties into the sea—that is, to the areas where yellow and white races abut each other. The area where the most ancient human history was recorded will be where the Japanese people will write the latest human history. We must raise the Japanese people to turn it into a great Lincoln for the sake of 900 million Asian slaves.
The gods of the State of the Rising Sun will without fail take up the sword. Justice without the sword is after all an empty word. We will not add another empty argument to the many empty words that [already] fill the world. The present in particular is no time to govern a state by resorting to the written word.
Ōkawa Shūmei and Mitsukawa Kametarō