In the Japanese labor movement of the early twentieth century, no one captured the public imagination as vividly as Osugi Sakae (1885- 1923): rebel, anarchist, and martyr. Flamboyant in life, dramatic in death, Osugi came to be seen as a romantic hero fighting the oppressiveness of family and society.

Osugi helped to create this public persona when he published his autobiography (Jijoden) in 1921-22. Now available in English for the first time, this work offers a rare glimpse into a Japanese boy's life at the time of the Sino- Japanese (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese (1904-5) wars.

It reveals the innocentand not-so-innocentescapades of children in a provincial garrison town and the brutalizing effects of discipline in military preparatory schools. Subsequent chapters follow Osugi to Tokyo, where he discovers the excitement of radical thought and politics. Byron Marshall rounds out this picture of the early Osugi with a translation of his Prison Memoirs (Gokuchuki), originally published in 1919.

This essay, one of the world's great pieces of prison writing, describes in precise detail the daily lives of Japanese prisoners, especially those incarcerated for political crimes. (Amazon.co.jp)

"Not only an important literary work but one of the major documents dealing with the development of the left-wing movement in modern Japanese politics." (Fred G. Notehelfer, author of Kotoku Shusui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical)

Sakae Osugi (January 17, 1885 – September 16, 1923) was a radical Japanese anarchist. He published numerous anarchist periodicals, helped translate various western anarchist essays into Japanese for the first time, and created Japan's first Esperanto school in 1906. He, Noe Itō, and his nephew were murdered in what became known as the Amakasu Incident. (Wikipedia.org)

Read The Autobiography of Osugi Sakae Online

Translated with Annotations by
Byron K. Marshall
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1992 The Regents of the University of California

Chapter 1  First Memories to 1894
Chapter 2  Childhood 1894-1895
Chapter 3  A Young Hooligan 1895-1899
Chapter 4  Cadet School 1899-1901
Chapter 5  A New Life 1901-1902
Chapter 6  Memories of Mother 1902-1904
Chapter 7  Life in Prison 1906-1910

Translator's Introduction
Osugi was a Modern Japanese Rebel

Osugi Sakae was a central figure in the left-wing radicalism of early twentieth-century Japan. Labeled a "pioneer of freedom" and "the shogun of anarchism," he was admired by some of his fellow Japanese before and by many more after World War II for his rebellion against an overbearing state and an oppressive society.

Osugi became a political activist while a student of only nineteen. Two years later, in 1906, he was arrested in a street demonstration protesting the economic oppression of the working class. This led to his first prison sentence at the age of twenty-one. He would be arrested three more times in the next two years alone, serving a total of almost thirty-six months in prison before he was twenty-seven years old. This government suppression, when combined with factional disputes within the radical movement and its inability to attract popular support, halted the momentum of the political left. After the 1910 show trials that condemned to death such prominent activists as Kanno Sugako and Kotoku Shusui for plotting the assassination of the emperor, even the nonviolent left was forced into a period of near dormancy.

By the time the movement reawakened at the end of the First World War, Osugi had reaped a certain notoriety from a 1916 scandal involving two of the most famous women radicals of the day, Kamichika Ichiko and Ito Noe. Concurrent adulterous affairs with the two women led to a published denunciation by his wife, who then divorced him, and to a sensational trial for Kamichika, who spent two years in prison for assaulting Osugi with a knife. It was this scandal, as much as his essays on free love, that earned him the sobriquet of "the erotic anarchist." ...

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