Conceptualizing Bourgeois Revolution: The Prewar Japanese Left and the Meiji Restoration

¹ This was the explicit motivation for the preparation of the seven-volume Symposium on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism by the Kōza-ha, the orthodox or feudal faction of intellectuals who supported the Comintern strategy of a two-stage (bourgeois and then proletarian-socialist) revolution in Japan. See Eitarō's, Noro introduction to the Symposium in Nihon shihon-shugi hattatsu shi kōza [Symposium on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism], 7 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1932–33; reprint 1982), bessatsu [supplementary volume] Kaisetsu-shiryō [Commentary and reference materials], 1–2. For a full-length study of the debate on Japanese capitalism between the two factions, see Hoston, Germaine A., Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).

² It is with some hesitancy that the term bourgeois democracy is used here. It has not been adopted in a Marxian or Marxist usage; the term denotes the larger socioeconomic context of an industrial capitalist society in which democratic politics takes place. Alternative terms such as parliamentary democracy or participatory democracy may be associated with the same socioeconomic context historically but do not embrace it in their definitions; hence, they are inadequate for the purposes of this study.

³ The many works within and beyond the field of Japan studies that have embraced this view implicitly or explicitly include: Lockwood, William W., The Economic Development of Japan: Growth and Structural Change, 1868–1938 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954);Scalapino, Robert A., Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953; reprint, California Library Reprint Series Edition, 1975); Beasley, W.G., The Meiji Restoration (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972);Bendix, Reinhard, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), ch. 12; and more recently, Gluck, Carol, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, especially ch. 7.

⁴ Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

⁵ See, for example, Trimberger, Ellen Kay, “State Power and Modes of Production: Implications of the Japanese Transition to Capitalism,” The Insurgent Sociologist, 7 (Spring 1977), 85–98;Trimberger, Ellen Kay, Revolutions from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Modernization in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1978);Moulder, Frances V., Japan, China and the Modern World Economy: Toward a Reinterpretation of East Asian Development ca. 1600 to ca. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977);Bendix, Reinhard, “Preconditions of Development: A Comparison of Japan and Germany,” in Comparative Perspectives: Theories and Methods, introduction and edited by Etzioni, Amitai and Dubow, Frederic L. (Boston, Mass: Little, Brown and Co., 1970), 311–29; and Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Random House, 1971; reprint, Vintage Books, 1975).

⁶ Traditional intellectuals were to be distinguished from organic intellectuals who emerged out of or expressed the alternative perspectives of the subaltern classes. Gramsci had used the term intellectuals rather broadly to refer to those engaged in mental (as opposed to manual) labor in the service of the regime. Thus, jurists, technicians, clergy, and bureaucrats all qualified for this appellation. See Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell, eds. and trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–13.

⁷ Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Discourses, Crick, Bernard, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1970), 176–7.

⁸ See Takeda Kiyoko;, “Tennō-sei shisō no keisei” [The Formation of the Emperor System Ideology], vol. 16: Kindai [Modern times] vol. 3 in Iwanami Kōza: Nihon rekishi [Iwanami Symposium: Japanese History], 21 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1962), 269. Compare the emphasis on the identification of the emperor with “modernity” and “progress” in Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, passim.

⁹ In prewar Japan, the use of the terms left and right can be problematic because the distinction between the two political orientations is blurred by the presence of thinkers such as Kita Ikki, Takabatake Motoyuki, Akamatsu Katsumaro, and many others whose radicalism embraced elements conventionally associated with both extremes. Here the term the right is used with caution to refer to those who advocated the conservation and reinforcement of traditionalist, militarist, and authoritarian elements of the body politic; and the term the left refers to those who advocated the rapid abolition of these elements and their replacement by liberal, democratizing forces respectively. Marxists here are associated with the left, despite the unfortunate traditionalist and authoritarian Stalinist outcome of the application of Marxism to Russia because of the commitment to the dissolution of the state. Marxian national or state socialists are thus not assimilated to the left as it is used in this study. Compare the usage of Itō Takashi in “Shōwa seiji shi kenkyū e no ichi shikaku” [One Perspective on the Study of Shōwa Political History], Shiso [Thought], no. 624 (06 1976), 215–28. Also compare the observations made in Wilson, George M., “Kita Ikki's Theory of Revolution,” Journal of Asian Studies, 26:1 (11 1966), 89.

¹⁰ See Shillony, Ben-Ami, Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973);Smethurst, Richard J., A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 163–5. Although they rejected the bureaucratic centralism of the status quo, these reservations about the Meiji Restoration and its consequences were shared by nōhon-shugisha [agrarian populists] who saw the essence of Japan in the precapitalist agrarian era when the bushidō [way of the warrior] prevailed. See Havens, Thomas R.H., Farm and Nation in Modern Japan: Agrarian Nationalism, 1870–1940 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), especially 204–6, 268–9, 319.

¹¹ Wilson, “Kita Ikki's Theory of Revolution,” 96; and Wilson, George, Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita lkki, 1883–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), especially ch. 2.

¹² Wilson, “Kita Ikki's Theory of Revolution,” 94.

¹³ For detailed discussions of these thinkers, see Hoston, Germaine A., “Marxism and National Socialism in Taishō Japan: The Thought of Takabatake Motoyuki,” Journal of Asian Studies, 44:1 (11 1984), 43–64;Totten, George O., “The National Socialism of Akamatsu Katsumaro (unpublished paper prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., 08 30–09 2, 1984); and Hoston, Germaine A., “Emperor, Nation, and the Transformation of Marxism to National Socialism in Prewar Japan: The Case of Sano Manabu,” Studies in Comparative Communism, 18:1 (Spring 1985), 25–47.

¹⁴ See Hirai, Atsuko, Individualism and Socialism: Kawai Eijirō's Life and Thought (1891–1944) (Cambridge: Council of East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986), 154, 160; Nolte, Sharon H., Liberalism in Modern Japan: Ishibashi Tanzan and His Teachers, 1905–1960 (Berkeley: University of California: 1986), 133–140;Minichiello, Sharon, Retreat from Reform: Patterns of Political Behavior in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 15–17; and Germaine A. Hoston, “The State, Modernity, and the Fate of Liberalism in Prewar Japan” (unpublished paper).

¹⁵ See Toshiyoshi, Miyazawa, Tennō kikan setsujiken: shiryō via kataru [The Emperor–Organ Theory Incident: The Historical Materials Speak] (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1970), vol. 1, chs. 2 and 4.

¹⁶ Nolte, Sharon Hamilton, “Individualism in Taishō Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies, 43:4 (08 1984), 679–81; and Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan, 149.

¹⁷ Hirai, Individualism and Socialism, 106.

¹⁸ There is a striking similarity between the fascination among Japanese leftist scholars with the presence or absence of bourgeois revolution in Japan's past, on the one hand, and the only recently challenged consensus among German historians that the weakness of parliamentary democracy and the eventual rise of Nazism in Germany lay in the absence of bourgeois revolution in Germany's past. For cogent critiques of this German exceptionalism, see Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and the essays collected in Eley, Geoff, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London and Boston: Allen and Unwin, Inc., 1986).

¹⁹ The erosion of the Marxist view that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution was launched by Cobban's, AlfredThe Myth of the French Revolution: An Inaugural Lecture (London: n.p. 1955) and The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). In France itself, the decline of the orthodox Marxist view is manifested in the ascendancy of the interpretation of François Furet. See Furet, François and Richet, Denis, La Révolution française [The French Revolution], 2 vols. (Paris: n.p., 1965–1966), and Furet, François, Interpreting the French Revolution, Forster, Elborg, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1981). The Marxist orthodoxy is represented in Soboul, Albert, The French Revolution 1787–1799, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). A similar decline of the influence of the orthodox Marxist perspective has occurred with respect to the English Revolution. See Pocock, J.G.A., ed., Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980);Richardson, R.C., The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988); and Stone, L., The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). The orthodox Marxist view of the English Revolution can be found in Hill, J.E.C., The English Revolution 1640 (London: n.p., 1940).

²⁰ Best, Geoffrey, “Editor's Introduction,” in The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789–1989, Best, Geoffrey, ed. (London: Fbntana Press, 1988), 1–2.

²¹ Kamenka, Eugene, “Revolutionary Ideology and The Great French Revolution of 1789–?” in The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, 1789–1989, Best, Geoffrey, ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 86.

²² Best, “Editor's Introduction,” 2.

²³ Kamenka, “Revolutionary Ideology,” 86; Karl Marx, “The German Ideology: Part I,” 174, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 475–83, both in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd, Tucker, Robert C., ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978);Durandin, Catherine, Révolution à la française ou à la russe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989),passim; and Best, Geoffrey, “The French Revolution and Human Rights,” in The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, Best, Geoffrey, ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 101–2.

²⁴ Kamenka, “Revolutionary Ideology,” 91; and Best, “Editor's Introduction,” 6, 8–9.

²⁵ Bowen, Roger W., Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 182–4, 216–21.

²⁶ Crump, John, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan (London: Croom Helm and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 37.

²⁷ Smith, Henry Dewitt, II, Japan's First Student Radicals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 71–77.

²⁸ Kamenka, “Revolutionary Ideology,” 76.

²⁹ Ibid., 78.

³⁰ Marx, Karl, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, vol. 3, 791–2 of Capital, 3 vols., Engels, Frederick, ed. (New York: International Publishers Co., Inc., New World Paperbacks, 1967).

³¹ See Marx, Karl, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: Selections,” in Marx-Engels Reader, 67; O'Malley, “Editor's Introduction” in Marx, Karl, Critique of Hegel's “Philosophy of Right”, O'Malley, Joseph, ed., Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; paperback ed., 1977), xiii–xiv. There is also a “Draft Plan for a Work on the Modern State” by Marx dated 1845 (in Marx, and Engels, Frederick, The German Ideology [Moscow 1968]), cited by Maguire, John M., Marx's Theory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 8.

³² Robert C. Tucker, “The Political Theory of Classical Marxism,” in Tucker, Robert C., The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: Norton, 1970), 80.

³³ Wolfe, Alan, “New Directions in the Marxist Theory of Politics,” Politics and Society, 4:2 (Winter 1974), 131.

³⁴ The argument here and below on changes in Marx's views draws heavily from Furet's accounts. François Furet, “The Young Marx and the French Revolution,” in Furet, François, Marx and the French Revolution, Furet, Deborah Kan, ed. and trans., with an Introduction by Lucien Calvie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 8–9. The quotation from Hegel is cited by Furet on p. 9, from Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie, J.B., trans. (New York: Harper and Row, Torchbooks, 1967), 605.

³⁵ Marx, , Critique of Hegel's “Philosophy of Right,” 30, 70–73, 77–78.

³⁶ See Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Marx-Engels Reader, Tucker, ed., 56–60; Miliband, Ralph, “Marx and the State,” in Karl Marx, Bottomore, Tom, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973) 130–2;Dupré, Louis, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1966), ch. 4; and Plamenatz, John, Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 295–6.

³⁷ Furet, “Young Marx,” 5, 13–14.

³⁸ Ibid., 15.

³⁹ Marx, Karl, “On the Jewish Question,” in Marx-Engels Reader, Tucker, , ed., 46 (emphasis in the original).

⁴⁰ Furet, “Young Marx,” 5, 7. For Trotsky's and Lenin's analyses of how “uneven and combined development” (Trotsky's phrase) had led to an uninterrupted revolution in Russia, see Knei-paz, Baruch, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), chs. 3 and 4; and Lenin, V.I., “Two Tactics of Social Democracy,” in The Lenin Anthology, Tucker, Robert C., ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975). Trotsky's and Lenin's views were very close on this question, although Trotsky's more extensive theoretical and historical elaborations on it were repudiated under Stalin. They found expression in most of the Comintern's theses concerning Japan, and through that vehicle they influenced Japan's leftists.

⁴¹ See Marx, “Contribution to the Critique: Introduction,” 64–65; and Marx, Karl, “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform,’” in Marx-Engels Reader, Tucker, , ed., 129.

⁴² Francois Furet, “The Marx of 1848 Confronts 1789,” in Furet, François, Marx and the French Revolution, Furet, Deborah Kan, ed. and trans, with an introduction by Lucien Calvié (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 44 (emphasis added).

⁴³ Marx, Karl, “The Civil War in France,” in Marx-Engels Reader, 627. Compare “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (p. 607) in the same collection:

Under the absolute monarchy, during the first revolution, and under Napoleon, bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration, under Louis Philippe and under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however much it strove for power of its own.

Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent. As against bourgeois society, the state machine has consolidated its position…

⁴⁴ Marx, “Civil War in France,” 628–9.

⁴⁵ Friedrich Engels, “Addendum to Preface to the Second Edition,” in Engels, Friedrich, The Peasant War in Germany (New York: International Publishers, 1926).

⁴⁶ This is especially evident in the “Eighteenth Brumaire.” Cf. François Furet, “Marx and the French Enigma (1851–1871),” in Furet, François, Marx and the French Revolution, Furet, Deborah Kan, trans., and Lucien Calvié, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 74–75.

⁴⁷ Furet, “Young Marx,” 28–29.

⁴⁸ Furet, “Marx and the French Enigma,” 71–72.

⁴⁹ See Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development, passim.

⁵⁰ See Dobb, Maurice, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers Co., 1947; rev. ed., 1963);Sweezy, Paul, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: A Symposium (New York: Science and Society, 1954); and contributions by Sweezy, Dobb, and others in Hilton, Rodney, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1976).

⁵¹ See the studies included in Aston, T.H. and Philpin, C.H.E., eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-lnduslrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Past and Present Publication Series, 1975).

⁵² Cf. Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1974), 420–1.

⁵³ This is readily conceded by Rōnō-ha theorist Tsuchiya Takao. See Kamekichi, Takahashi, Takahashi keizai riron keisei no rokujū nen [Sixty Years of the Formation of Takahashi's Economic Theory], 2 vols. (Tokyo: Toshi Keizai-sha, 1976), 139–41. For fuller examinations of this unusual and prolific theorist's work from different perspectives, see Hoston, Germaine A., “Marxism and Japanese Expansionism: Takahashi Kamekichi and the Theory of ‘Petty Imperialism,’” Journal of Japanese Studies, 10:1 (01 1984), 1–30; and Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development of Prewar Japan, ch. 4.

⁵⁴ The conditions included: (1) the flourishing of production forces that resulted from the copying or borrowing of production technologies from the more industrialized Western Europe and the United States; (2) the resulting increased yield of Japan's scarce raw materials that had not been exploited under Tokugawa feudalism; and (3) an ample and readily available supply of cheap labor both within Japan and in countries on the Asian periphery where Japan had an economic presence. See Kamekichi, Takahashi, Nihon shihon-shugi hattatsu shi [History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism], revised and enlarged ed. (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōron-sha, 1929), 332–8; and Kamekichi, Takahashi, Nihon keizai no yukizumari to musan-kaikyū no taisaku [The Deadlock of the Japanese Economy and the Countermeasures of the Proletariat] (Tokyo: Hakuyō-sha, 1926), 17–21.

⁵⁵ Takahashi, Nihon shihon-shugi hattatsu shi, ch. 1. Takahashi cited waves of abortions and declining population after the 44-percent growth rate from 1603 to 1703 as indicators as the economic stagnation of the bakufu and its inability to support the Japanese population. Conversely, the population increase of about 48 percent in the first thirty-five years after the Restoration reflected the Meiji's robust economy and dramatically higher standard of living (see Table):

Cf. Kamekichi, Takahashi, Nihon keizai no yukizumari to musan-kaikyū no taisaku [The Deadlock of the Japanese Economy and the Countermeasures of the Proletariat] (Tokyo: Hakuyo-sha, 1926), 6–10, 59–60.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 61,72; and Takahashi, Nihon shihon-shugi hattatsu shi, ch. 1.

⁵⁷ See Hirano Yoshitarō's responses to Hani Gorō (also of the Kōza-ha) during the debate on the manufacture period in Japan (see below), especially Hirano Yoshitarō, “Jiyū minken: sono seishitsu, undō no gendo, naibu-teki kihon tairitsu no kiso kōsatsu” [Civil Rights: An Examination of their Character, the Limits of the Movement, and the Basis of its Fundamental Internal Contradictions], Kaizō [Reconstruction] (December 1933), 12n–13n.

⁵⁸ Takahashi, “Nihon keizai no yukizumari,” 123–4.

⁵⁹ See Tsunao, Inomata, “Shihon-shugi Nihon no teikoku-shugi” [The Imperialism of Capitalist Japan] (06 1927) and Tsunao, Inomata, “Waga kuni shihon-shugi no gendankai no mondai” [The Problem of the Present Stage of Capitalism in Our Country] (08 1927), both in Tsunao, Inomata, Teikoku-shugi kenkyū [Studies on Imperialism] (Tokyo: Kaizō-sha, 1928).

⁶⁰ Tsunao, Inomata, Nōson mondai nyūmon (Tokyo: Kōdō-sha, 1937), 106–10, 127–8, 134–44.

⁶¹ See Takao, Tsuchiya, “Bakumatsu manyufakuchua no sho ronten” [Some Points at Issue in bakumatsu Manufacture] (01 1934), in Takao, Tsuchiya, Nihon shihon-shugi shi ronshū [Collected Essays on the History of Japanese Capitalism] (Tokyo: Ikusei-sha, 1937), 176–8; and Rōdō Kenkyūjo, Shakai Keizai, ed., Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō shi [History of the Debate on Japanese Capitalism] (Tokyo: Itō Shoten, 1947), 56–57.

⁶² Hitoshi, Yamakawa, “Seiji-teki tōitsu sensen e! Musan seitō gōdō-ron no konkyo” [Toward a Political United Front! The Basis of the Argument for the Merger of Proletarian Political Parties] (11 10, 1927), in Hitoshi, Yamakawa, Yamakawa Hitoshi shū [Collected Writings of Yamakawa Hitoshi], Michitoshi, Takabatake, ed. “Kindai Nihon shisō taikei” [Outline of Modern Japanese Thought], no. 19 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1976).Tsunao, Inomata, Gendai Nihon kenkyū: Marukishizumu no tachiba yori [Studies on Contemporary Japan: from a Marxist Perspective] (Tokyo: Kaizō-sha, 1929, 1934), 158.

⁶³ Ibid., 177, 183.

⁶⁴ Jōkichi, Uchida and Jirō, Nakano, Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō: Rekishi hen [The Debate on Japanese Capitalism: A Historical Volume], revised and enlarged ed. (Tokyo: Shinkō Shuppansha, 1952), 33.

⁶⁵ Tsunao, Inomata, “Hiyorimi-shugi-teki senryaku ka ‘senryaku-teki’ hiyorimi-shugi ka” (II) [Opportunistic Strategy or ‘Strategic’ Opportunism? (II)] (03 1928), in Tsunao, Inomata, Nihon puroretariaato no senryaku to senjutsu: zasshi “Rōnō” keisai ronbun shū (Tokyo: Tosho Shinbun-sha, 1973), 65–66; and Tsunao, Inomata, “Waga senryaku ni okeru burujoa minshushugi-teki tōsō no yakuwari” (I) [The Responsibilities of the Bourgeois-Democratic Struggle in Our Strategy (I)] (09 1928), in Inomata Tsunao, Nihon puroretariaato no senryaku to senjutsu, 106–7.

⁶⁶ Tsunao, Inomata, “Puroretaria senryaku ni okeru burujoa minshu–shugi tōsō no yakuwari” (II) (12 1928) [The Responsibilities of Bourgeois-Democratic Struggle in the Strategy of the Proletariat (II)], in Inomata, Nihon puroretariaato no senryaku to senjutsu, 114.

⁶⁷ Issaku, Niijima [pseudonym of Inomata Tsunao], “Ninon musan-kaikyū undō ni kansuru teize II. Seiji jōsei” [Theses on the Japanese Proletarian Movement. II. The Political Situation] (06 1928), in Inomata, Nihon puroretariaato no senryaku to senjutsu, 25; and Tsunao, Inomata, Gendai Nihon kenkyū: Marukishizumu no tachiba yori [Studies on Contemporary Japan: From a Marxist Perspective] (Tokyo: Kaizō-sha, 1929, 1934), 150.

⁶⁸ Tsushima, , “Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō” shiron [Treatise on the “Debate on Japanese Capitalism”] (Tokyo: Kōdo-sha, 1947), 94–97; and Tsunao, Inomata, “Tochi mondai to hōken isei” [The Land Problem and Feudal Remnants] (12 7, 1929), in Tsunao, Inomata, Nihon musan-kaikyū no senryaku [The Strategy of the Japanese Proletariat] (n.p.: Bungei Sensen Shuppan-bu, 1930), 148–9.

⁶⁹ Inomata, “Tochi mondai,” 147–9 (emphasis in the original).

⁷⁰ Uchida and Nakano, Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō, 145–7 (emphasis in the original).

⁷¹ Inomata, “Tochi mondai,” 147–8.

⁷² See Inomata, “Tochi mondai,” 149–60; Inomata, Gendai Nihon kenkyū, 147–8; and Inomata, Nihon musan-kaikyū undō no hihan: Kominterun no hihan o yomite [A Critique of the Japanese Proletarian Movement: Reading the Comintern's Criticism], Musan-sha panfuretto [pamphlet] no. 16 (n.p., Musan-sha, 1928), 8.

⁷³ See, for example, Yamakawa, Seiji-teki tōitsu,” 177–8, 178n, 179, 183; Hitoshi, Yamakawa, Yamakawa Hitoshi jiden, Kikue, Yamakawa and Itsurō, Sakisaka, eds. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961), 430–1; Inomata, Gendai Nihon kenkyū, 149, 158–60; and Inomata, “Nihon musan-kaikyū undō ni kansuru teize II. Seiji jōsei,” 24–26.

⁷⁴ Yamakawa, “Seiji-teki tōitsu,” 177–8.

⁷⁵ Inomata, “Nihon musan-kaikyū ni kansuru teize. II. Seiji jōsei,” 26–27; and Yamakawa, “Seiji-teki tōitsu,” 181.

⁷⁶ This term was borrowed from Nikolai Bukharin's work on the advanced capitalist state. See Inomata, Gendai Nihon kenkyū, 163; and Niijima Issaku [pseudonym of Inomata Tsunao], “Nihon musan-kaikyū undō ni kansuru teize. I. Nihon shihon-shugi no gensei” (December 1927) [Theses on the Japanese Proletarian Movement. I. The Contemporary Situation of Japanese Capitalism], in Inomata, Nihon puroretariaato no senryaku to senjutsu, 13 ff.

⁷⁷ See, for example, Inomata, Gendai Nihon kenkyū, 113, 148–9; Uchida and Nakano, Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō 19–20; and Yamakawa, “Seiji-teki tōitsu,” 180–1.

⁷⁸ See Inomata, Gendai Nihon kenkyū, 113–4, 157, 165–8; Inomata, “Nihon musan-kaikyū undō ni kansuru teize. I. Nihon shihon-shugi no gensei,” 13; Inomata, “Nihon musan-kaikyū undō ni kansuru teize. II. Seiji-teki jōsei,” 24–25; Yamakawa, “Seiji-teki tōitsu,” 180–1; Tsushima, “Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō” shiron, 56, 57; Inomata, “Nihon musan-kaikyū no ippan senryaku” (November 1927) [The General Strategy of the Japanese Proletariat], in Nihon puroretariaato no senryaku to senjutsu, 9–10; and Uchida and Nakano, Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō, 21.

⁷⁹ Inomata, “Nihon musan-kaikyū undō ni kansuru teize. II. Seiji jōsei,” 25–26.

⁸⁰ See Tsushima, “Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō” shiron, 63–64.

⁸¹ Ibid., 80–81.

⁸² These included the 1922 Draft Program of the party, which remained a draft because police forces caused the party to be dissolved before the draft could be accepted officially by the party; the 1926 Moscow Theses, the 1927 Theses, and 1931 Draft Political Theses, and the 1932 Theses. Of these documents, only the 1926 and 1931 theses approached the argument that Japan's state was already under the domination of the “imperialist” bourgeoisie. In all other cases, the state was said to rest on the shared power of bourgeois and landlord (feudal) forces.

⁸³ See “Nihon Kyōsantō kōryō sōan” [Draft Program of the Japanese Communist Party] (1922), in Kominterun Nihon ni kansuru teize shū [Collected Comintern Theses on Japan], Ishidō Kiyotomo and Yamabe Kentarō, comps. (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, Aoki Bunko, 1961), 5–9;Jōkichi, Kazama, Mosukō to tsunagaru Nihon Kyōsantō no rekishi [History of the Japanese Communist Party in Relationship to Moscow], Manabu, Sano and Sadachika, Nabeyama, eds. (Tokyo: Fumansha, 1951), 86–87; and Uchida and Nakano, Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō, 48–49.

⁸⁴ Hirotake, Koyama and Eitarō, Kishimoto, Nihon no hikyōsantō Marukusu-shugisha: Yamakawa Hitoshi no shōgai to shisō [Japanese Non-Communist Party Marxist: The Life and Thought of Yamakawa Hitoshi] (Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1962), 141–3.

⁸⁵ Hirano Yoshitarō, “Meiji ishin ni okeru seiji-teki shihai keitai” [The Form of Political Rule in the Meiji Restoration], in, vol. 1, 19n–20n [hereafter cited as “Ishin seiji”], of Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu shi kōza, 7 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1932–1933).

⁸⁶ Because of space limitations, only a general sketch of these accounts can be offered here. For much more detailed analyses of the work of these and other Kōza-ha scholars, see Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, chs. 5–9.

⁸⁷ See Yoshitarō, Hirano, Burujoa minshu-shugi kakumei: sono shi-teki hatten [The Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution: Its Historical Development] (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōron-sha, 1948), 85–88.

⁸⁸ Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 3–4, 4n; and Yoshitarō, Hirano, Nihon shihon-shugi shakai no kikō [The Structure of Japanese Capitalist Society] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1934), 227, 228n.

⁸⁹ Gorō, Hani, “Bakumatsu ni okeru seiji-teki shihai keitai” [The Form of Political Domination in the Late Tokugawa Period], [hereafter cited as “Bakumatsu seiji”] of vol. 1, 30–33 in Nihon shihon-shugi hattatsu shi kōza [Symposium on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism], 7 vols., (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1932–1933).

⁹⁰ ibid., 33–34.

⁹¹ Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, 105. This, was, according to Marx, one of the early stages of capitalist production. See Marx, Karl, A Critical Analysis of Capitalistic Production, vol. 1, ch. 14 of Capital.

⁹² Shisō, Hattori, “Ishin shi hōhō-jō no sho mondai” [Methodological Problems in the History of the Restoration] (04-07 1933), in Shisō, Hattori, Hattori Shisō chosakushŭ [Collected Works of Hattori Shisō, 7 vols., vol. 1, 98–99, 102–3, 117–20 [hereafter cited as “Hōhōjo no sho mondai”] of Shisō, Hattori, “Meiji ishin no kakumei oyobi hankakumei” [Revolution and Counter-revolution in the Meiji Restoration] (02 1933), in Nihon shihon-shugi hattatsu shi kōza, vol. I: 4 –8, [hereafter cited as “Kakumei oyobi hankakumei”].

⁹³ Shisō, Hattori, “Manyufakuchua ronsō ni tsuite no shokan” [Thoughts on the Manufacture Debate] (07 1952), in Hattori, , Hattori Shisō chosakushū, vol. 1,316;Hattori, “Ishin shi hōoeōjō no sho mondai,” vol. 1, 127–78.

⁹⁴ Hattori, “Kakumei oyobi hankakumei,” 18–19; Hattori Shisō, “Manyufakuchua jidai no rekishi-teki jōken” [The Historical Conditions of the Manufacture Period], in Hattori, , Hattori Shisō chosakushū, vol. 1, 223–68,passim; Shakai Keizai Rōdō Kenkyūjo, ed., Nihon shihonshugi ronsō shi, 57–58; Hattori, “Hōhōjō no sho mondai,” 129–30.

⁹⁵ In this system of production, the capitalist, usually a merchant, paid a worker in advance in kind with raw materials, in return for which the worker would produce the baskets, cotton cloth or other items to the specification of the entrepreneur. The putting-out system is commonly associated with early manufacture.

⁹⁶ Hirano, Nihon shihon-shugi shakai no kikō, 228–31, 266; Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 4–6; Hattori, “Hōhōjō no sho mondai,” 133–4; and Hani, “Bakumatsu seiji,” 37.

⁹⁷ Hirano, Burujoa minshu-shugi kakumei, 84. Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 11–12, 12n.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 13–16; and Hani, “Bakumatsu seiji,” 38, 46.

⁹⁹ Hattori, “Kakumei oyobi hankakumei,” 19–23.

¹⁰⁰ Hattori, “Bakumatsu seiji,” 39; cf. Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 16n–17n.

¹⁰¹ Hirano, “Jiyū minken,” 13–14.

¹⁰² Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 12, 16n–17n, 19; Hirano, Nihon shihon-shugi shakai no kikō, 264. See also Yamada Moritaro's painstaking description of mutual determination and dependence of the semi-serf system remaining from the Tokugawa era and the encouragement of capitalist growth by the Meiji state in his Nihon shihon-shugi bunseki [Analysis of Japanese Capitalism] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1934; rev. ed., 1939).

¹⁰³ See Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 20n.

¹⁰⁴ See, for example, Shisō, Hattori, Meiji ishin shi (Tokyo: Sanryū Shobō, 1948), ch. 5.

¹⁰⁵ Hirano, Nihon shihon-shugi shakai no kikō, 243, 244, 245n, 264–8; Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 10, 16, 17.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 56n.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 267; Hirano, “Jiyū minken,” 15–17; Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 55.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 9–10; Hirano, Nihon shihon-shugi shaken no kikō, 2 – 3, 267–8.

¹⁰⁹ See Noro Eitarō, “Nihon ni okeru tochi shoyū kankei ni tsuite: nakanzuku iwayuru ‘hōken-teki zettai-shugi seiryoku no kaikyū-teki busshitsu-teki kiso’ no mondai o chushin to shite” [On Landownership Relations in Japan: With Particular Attention to the Problem of the “Class and Material Basis of So-called Feudal Absolutist Forces”], Shisō, no. 84 (May, June 1929), 204–5; and Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 18.

¹¹⁰ Noro, “Ninon ni okeru tochi shoyū,” 203. One of the most characteristic features of the Asiatic mode of production is said to be the unity of rent and taxes, because the oriental despot is said to be the sole or highest landowner in the society.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 205–6.

¹¹² See Uchida and Nakano, Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō, 194, 196–198; and Hirano, Nihon shihon-shugi shakai no kikō, 257n, 258n. Hirano did agree with Noro on the Asiatic characteristics of the old feudal landholding system.

¹¹³ Ibid., 259n.

¹¹⁴ see Yamada, Nihon shihon-shugi brunseki, 74–75; and Uchida and Nakano, “Nihon shihon-shugi ronsō, 217–20.

¹¹⁵ Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 18; and Hirano “Jiyū minken,” 3.

¹¹⁶ Yoshio, Shiga, Kokka-ron [The Theory of the State], Nauka bunko [library], no. 10 (Tokyo: Nauka-sha, 1949).

¹¹⁷ Hirano Yoshitarō, “Wittofōgeru ‘Shimin shakai shi’ ni tsuite” [On Wittfogel's ‘History of Civil Society’], in Hirano, Burujoa minshu-shugi kakumei, 74–75.

¹¹⁸ See Hirano, “Ishin seiji,” 58n–59n for a statistical comparison of the development of capitalism in England and Germany, for example.

¹¹⁹ Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 420-1 (emphasis in the original).

¹²⁰ Ibid., 415, 418.

¹²¹ Turner, Bryan S., Marx and the End of Orientalism (Controversies in Sociology, no. 7) Bottomore, T.B. and Mulkay, M. J., eds. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), 72.

¹²² Ibid.

¹²³ Generally, RНnН-ha scholars tend to stress the universal characteristics of Japan's capitalist industrialization, and thus they have produced some of the most innovative studies available on such concepts as the theory of value and state capitalism. Scholars of the K6za-ha, which has always stressed the importance of a comparative perspective on socioeconomic development in identifying areas of Japan's “backwardness” have concentrated their efforts in comparative economic and political historical studies. See Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development, ch. 9 passim.

¹²⁴ See Hoston, Germaine A., “Between Theory and Practice: Marxist Thought and the Politics of the Japanese Socialist Party,” Studies in Comparative Communism, 20:2 (Summer 1987), 175–207.

¹²⁵ Boron, Atilio, “Latin America: Between Hobbes and Friedman,” New Left Review, 130 (11-12 1981), 50, 52.