It Could Happen Here - The Japanese Anarchists Part 1

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

We're joined by Margaret Killjoy, host of the new podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, to talk about the history of anarchism in Japan.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that is my podcast now. I'm your host, Margaret Kildroy, and with me is the Webby Award winning Sophie Lichterman as our producer, as well as the actual hosts of the show who go without mentioning because I don't see any reason to include them. Can that just be the intro to every episode from now on?

This is better than all of our regular intros. Oh, I loved that. Yeah, so what are we talking about today? Also on podcast Garrison Davis and Christopher Wong. Hello. So today we are talking about the

sort of long and incredibly tragic history of Japanese anarchism well okay i should specify this japanese anarchism before world war ii because after world war ii was an entirely different story and uh as much as i love people in construction helmets just like beating the shit out of cops with large sticks uh that story is extremely complicated if you want to hear me uh talk more about that story a little bit uh the third part of my Nobosuke Kishi episode has a lot of people in construction helpless with sticks. But, you know, this is, you know, the history of anarchism generally is the history of tragedy. But even by anarchist standards, the history of Japanese anarchism is just an absolute welter of heartbreak and loss.

the history of Japanese anarchism is just an absolute welter of heartbreak and loss. Out of all of the people that we're going to talk about today, exactly one of the non-Russian anarchists is going to live to see the end of World War II, and he's Korean. Every single other person is either going to be executed by the state, assassinated, kill themselves, or drink themselves to death. So this is an extremely bleak story in a lot of ways good to have one of those optimistic episodes every once in a while yeah you know i mean uh i think the the as long as no one gets thrown down a well uh well okay it's it's unclear whether anyone got thrown down i'm sorry i'm skipping ahead and i don't actually know we will get to the wells

uh yeah i also okay so there's a lot of japanese anarchists and we don't have that much time so if you're like in a sawa uh sakitaro stan um i'm sorry uh we can't cover all of them and the other thing about the history of anarchism in japan that is weird is that the beginning of the story predates they're actually being anarchists in japan or specifically they're being japanese anarchists um there's this huge degree of sort of like cultural exchange and influence running between japan and russia by virtue of the fact that they are you know next to each other um and especially in the 1870s and 1880s this is one of the sort of this is important again because russia in this period is like a hot this is like the hotbed of

anarchism right like they're they're killing the czar they're they're they're doing all the things they're going to the countryside they're the The Russian anarchists are sort of on the move. And a lot of famous Russian anarchists wind up, like, in Japan. Bakunin is there for, like, he, like, he has some extremely complicated arrangement. He, like, sneaks on a boat, and he, like, gets out, and he beats one of the sort of, like, samurai, like, Meiji restoration revolutionaries, and they chat for a bit, and then he leaves. So, he, you know you know but he's not this is when he was escaping siberia yeah well i think yeah he's escaping siberia and then he somehow convinces like the american embassy or something to like let him on a boat to japan it's a very weird story it's like all things Bakunin are. But the most prominent anarchist to spend time in Japan is Lev Meshnikov. Meshnikov is like – he's like a pretty big deal in Russian revolutionary circles. Like he's considered like – okay, so the big sort of like anarchist left-wing movement in Japan is the populist, right?

It's called the Rom dicks um and there's two big figures in it there's uh nikolai ternashevsky and uh this guy uh lev menchikov and you know he's uh menchikov like he knows everyone he knows like he's friends with just like every single person and we will get to more of his friends later but like he's friends with just like every single person and we will get to more of his friends later but like he's a counterpart of bakunin um he he has he has a very similar career to bakunin in a lot of ways where he just sort of like runs around especially like eastern europe he's like runs around the world being in revolutions um which is good work if you can get it yeah yeah it's pretty exciting and And he doesn't die, which is sort of incredible. Love that for him.

So he's still around? By his old age. Aww. Yeah, this is very sad. You know, well, I mean, look, this is the goal of Russian Cosmism. No, is it actually Cosmism? I have no idea.

The cosmonaut people? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they bring back all the dead people oh no i don't know about this i only know a weird thing where there was like anarchist cosmonauts in like 1920s russia yeah yeah so the their their whole thing was like i okay so they they they thought that the anarchists had like been defeated in the revolution because they were insufficiently committed to bringing the dead back to life. And that, that,

that, you know, their whole thing was like, they, they like, they're, there's some of the people who were involved in like the Soviet, like rocket programs.

And they're doing this because they want to colonize the moon and Mars so they can fit all of the dead proletariat. They're going to bring back to life. Wait, are you telling the truth to me? Yeah, this is, this is all true.

This is, this is amazing. I've been, I've been trying to fight for um the anarchist necromancer league for so long which our slogan is um raise the dead to fight like hell for the living that's that's incredible but yeah no like uh the russian cosmism it's a weird one cosmism it's like a weird mix of like like natural philosophy quote unquote which is just like different films of like folk magic or whatever and like religion

and spiritual stuff but also it's like a predecessor to like the modern transhumanism um it's an it's an interesting little collection of of ideas that was popular at like the very beginning of the 20th century it's part of my thesis that uh no one normal has ever been involved in the production of a rocket like i mean jack parsons you have yeah cosmists are like on the soviet end and then there's just like the nazis and it's like oh zero normal people i have no counter argument there was that because there was the guy who did all the multi-stage rocketry, the nihilist who killed the czar,

who built the bomb that killed the czar. He like, when I talk about this in my podcast, Oh, probably already listened to this. You have a podcast. Whoa. Yeah.

I really just, I'm here. I'm going to plug this every like five minutes on this episode. Um, you could learn about the bomb maker who killed the Tsar and what he brought to the world in terms of rocketry and manned rocket travel.

Anyway, please continue. On what show, Margaret? Well, okay. Is this podcast that I'm recording on right now? When does it come out? When are you listening to it, dear readers? Okay, well then next Monday, you can listen to cool people who did cool stuff,

which is my podcast. Yeah. I'm so good at my job. Anyway, my job is to interrupt you with, please tell me more about the cosmos and how they relate to Japan. The cosmos actually have nothing to do with this. Unfortunately.

Oh, okay. But yeah, but, uh, uh, Lev, uh lev uh lev meshnikov like he also he like fights with garibaldi to reunify italy he's just like all over the place but he he's an interesting guy because okay so there's like a lot of foreigners who go to japan

but he like makes japanese friends and like learns japanese before he goes there which makes him like utterly different than like 99 of the people who are writing like westerners who are writing about japan this period who like don't speak very good japanese and never leave their houses so nothing has changed yeah yeah well except weirdly this one guy's doing better oh no i mean nothing has changed from now oh yeah yeah we're no westerners actually they just pretend to care about japan okay yeah it's a it's time there's actually that's one of the burning themes of these two episodes is like there's a lot of stuff about this about anarchism and about japan just like don't change but you know so one of the

things that uh meshnikov winds up doing is he winds up spending two years teaching at this thing called the tokyo school of foreign languages and this has a bunch of major impacts one of which is on meshnikov himself who he becomes heavily influenced by by the major restoration which he thinks of as like this like he looks at this as like as a revolution like this is an anti-fetal revolution this is the most successful social revolution of the 19th century it's like he thinks that it's like destroyed the sort of stratified class system and creates this like possibility of like mass social mobility for commoners and okay so this is like not the best interpretation of what's going on

with with the meiji restoration where i mean so the major restoration sort of ends the fuel system in in japan it does a lot of other bad things what is it like i don't know that much about this yeah yeah so maybe the audience doesn't either okay so the major restoration is a thing that happens where so so japan has been ruled by a shogun for like a long time and the shogun runs a field system it's very elaborate everyone has all these sort of hierarchical casts but eventually there's this kind of um like there's there's this sort of like there's there's this sort of it's complicated it's this kind of nationalist movements by a bunch of um like a bunch of the samurai clans who uh this is this is happening in the 1860s and they mobilize to overthrow

like the shogunate and basically like restore the emperor to power the emperor's been like a puppet head like figurehead guy for like 200 years and they bring him back to power i because i'm a hack of a fraud and a fraud i'm forgetting their exact slogan it's something it's something like it's revere the emperor and i can't remember what the other part of the slogan is it's very similar to the boxer rebellion slogan it's it's this sort of i mean there's a lot of things going on here it's kind of a reaction to so in the in the 1860s like japan is sort of forcibly opened to the world by like commodore perry showing up with a bunch of like the largest gunboats anyone has ever seen um and this like this forces japan to sort of like abandon its

isolationist positions and yeah and you know and you forces Japan to sort of, like, abandon its isolationist positions. And, yeah, and, you know, and you get this sort of class of intellectuals who are looking at this and are going, like, okay, if we don't do something, like, we're gonna get colonized. Mm-hmm. And so they do, and the thing that they do is that they do this revolution and they overthrow, um, they overthrow the shogunate there's all this like there's what there's like a trillion anime set in this period because there's like there's there's like like there there are there are squads of samurai swordsmen like running around like stabbing each other in tokyo and like kyoto and like it's it's wild it is it is a it is a time and and this sort of this is what sort of consolidates the modern japanese nation state um you know i've talked about this in my kishi episodes like it sets off this wave of colonialism they like they conquer hokkaido they conquer the ryoku islands they do all this horrible colonialism stuff but there's there's it's really unclear what the revolution

is actually going to mean because like there has been a revolution right like the the sort of like feudal like class system has been swept away there's all of this sort of there's all this this energy in the masses there's like one of the things that uh uh meshnikov finds is like he so he gets to japan in like this in like the 18th 1870s um and he's seeing like the first signs of discontentment with with the the sort of the, the, the, the major restoration, um,

which is the restoration of the emperor. Um, because there's a lot of people who look at this and we're like, oh, Hey, we're going to, we finally like defeated the sort of oligarch class that like rules all of us.

And then there's a new oligarch class and they're like, wait, hold on. And so there's, there's like, there's a series of like ex samurai rebellions. There's this whole sort of like, like he, like, like, he like uh meshikov literally like gets there in the middle of an uprising and he's just like in this reason he has no idea what's going on because the guy he'd been talking

to winds up being in the uprising and you know so he gets there but what what he sees also is he sees his upheaval but he sees that this enormous network of like cooperative movements um and he sees a bunch of mutual aid groups he sees like villages who are like pooling all the resources they can send kids to like school in the cities he sees like he sees the government failing to provide services for people because there's an uprising going on and also that the government and so people are sort of people are taking care of each other and this has an enormous influence on him. And he starts to, you know, like the way he thinks about anarchism changes. He starts to think about sort of like anarchism as cooperation, like mutual cooperation between people.

Mutual aid enters this sort of lexicon. Okay, so there's a modern historian named Sho Konoshi who writes this book called Anarchist Modernity Cooperatism. Wait, hold on. Yeah, Anarchist Modernity Cooperatism in Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan. And he makes the argument basically that like – It's a really catchy title. Yeah, there's two. He makes the argument basically that like- It's a really catchy title. Yeah, there's two.

It's a better title than I'm reading it because there's two. There's like a heading and like a subheading. I just read it straight because I'm a clown. But he's making the argument that this is like, this is actually like something that's very important in the development of narco-communism because this guy, he knows everyone.

Like the anarchist geographer, like elise rick loose i can't pronounce his name i think it's like clue for clue yeah i think so but i i can't not with a gun to my head i'm not sure yeah anyway yeah like they're roommates like they're like they live together for like a while and like he he writes the japan entry and like the encyclopedia uh he's friends with kropotkin and after after his his sort of like thought starts to change about mutual aid you start to see a lot of the same stuff like you know like this is like he's there before kropotkin writes mutual aid and then you see you see all the sort of mutual aid stuff popping up kropotkin and you know i i don't know how seriously to take the

argument that like you're sort of seeing like that that a lot of this theory is sort of a rebound of reflection of what they were seeing in japanese society but it's interesting and i think i should mention it because i don't know like there's there's this whole sort of intellectual sphere of people who were like associated with anarchism the other thing that happens in this period is that like um so there's a bunch of like meshnikov like has a bunch of friends in russia who all got arrested because they were in like terrorist groups and he he's able to get like a whole bunch of these people to like he's able to get them like exiled and their exile is they go to japan they teach with him and so suddenly okay there's like there's like a bunch of people who

are now like these people these populists are like writing stories about like the stuff they were doing and like all the people who are still fighting in russia so there's suddenly there's all these people who are like reading about the russian populists uh in japan and and you know and this is there's there's this kind of like anarchist cultural sphere that exists in japan like before there's anarchists um like the other example is anarchists yeah yeah for japanese anarchists they'll be like one like yeah there's like a couple of russian anarchists and like yeah but uh like uh mashikov leaves at one point the other big thing with this is tolstoy who is like tolstoy in in like the the 1880s 1890s like early 1900s he's like he's the like he i think he's like the most

translated author like on earth in japan and it's they're not just reading his like literary work they're reading his like theology his political work which is important because tolstoy is like a christian anarcho-pacifist right yeah and and this influences this there's this kind of like there's there's a lot of sort of like left-wing anti-imperial strains of christianity that pop up in japan and this is one of the reasons for it because everyone's reading tolstoy and so you you get the seeds of this anarchist movements that eventually sprout into a man named uh oh god this guy's name is actually hard kotaku shusui i i'm butchering the last part of it i'm sorry my japanese does not extend to this many u's and i's in a row but kotaku kotaku he's he's an interesting guy because so he doesn't

so he has like a whole career before he becomes an anarchist. He's a very primate journalist, intellectual. He writes in a newspaper. It's very famous. Everyone reads it. And he's the heir apparent to this other like very famous sort of liberal journalist who, again, because Lev Meshnikov knows literally everyone, was like a friend of Lev Meshnikov. He just knows every single person on earth it's incredible yeah I know that rules

that's like goals you know unless he ever turned if he ever snitched to be terrible apparently he never did yeah yeah no I mean he's still around so I mean he still could snitch he's still around he still has the chance oh I guess everyone he would sn around, so. I mean, he still could snitch. He's still around. He still has the chance.

Oh, I guess everyone he would snitch on is dead, so. Eh. Makes it harder. The epics get blurrier, yeah. Yeah. So Kotaku is like, he's kind of like a standard liberal, but he gets involved with the anti-war movements. Specifically, this is the anti, well, it's anti a lot of wars wars because Japan is fighting an enormous series of wars in the early 1900s. Yeah, they kicked Russia's ass at that point.

Yeah, yeah. They fight Japan. Fight Japan. Sorry, they fight China. Yeah. Do you know who else is fighting China? I don't know. I'm afraid to know.

The products and services that support the show are we supported by american nationalism apparently yes question mark welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. time listen to nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and we're back with the first rush with the first actual japanese anarchist so in 1900 kotaku writes this book called imperialism monster of the 20th century which is like there's a better title good title yeah yeah great he rules and this is significant for a number of reasons one of which is that like this is one of the first major like books about imperialism like there are some other western writers who stuff like predates this but like this is 1900 this is before lenin has written about imperialism this is before like hobson this is before luxembourg and i'm just gonna read a

little bit from it because it rules so So this is from the first section. It's called Imperialism, a wildfire in an open field. Imperialism spreads like a wildfire in an open field. All nations bow down to worship this new God, sing hymns to praise it, and have created a cult to pay it adoration. Look at the world that surrounds us. In England, both governments and citizens have become fervent acolytes of imperialism. In Germany, the war-loving emperor never loses a chance to extol his virtues. As for Russia, the regime has long practiced a policy of imperialism.

France, Austria, and Italy are all delighted to join the fray. Even a young country like the United States has recently shown its eagerness to master this new skill. And finally, this trend has reached Japan. Ever since our great victory in the Sino-Japanese War, Japanese of all classes burned with fervor to join the race for an empire like a wild horse freed from its harness. So, you know, the one thing that he got incorrect is, as I understand by spending a lot of time on Twitter, is that actually only the United states is imperialist and any actions especially by russia i was very confused that he included russia as the i can't finish this sentence with a straight face um what russia would be also how could it be imperialism

if lenin hadn't yet defined the term for us oh this is okay this is the whole thing okay so so kuroko gets like a lot of shit from this book because for like from later on from japanese leftists because they're like he's insufficiently materialist it's like yeah he is mostly just talking like the book's mostly about like how patriotism and nationalism like create this stuff it doesn't look at economics much but like oh no okay there's a whole problem here which is that if you try to apply lenin's definition of imperialism to japan it doesn't work because like like when japan is invading china they have like i think it's like 50 total factories yeah like the the everything's

completely backwards yeah like it's like yeah and like you know like like like lenin's imperialism is supposed to be like the highest stage of capitalism but then you go to japan japan's like barely started the transition to capitalism like if lenin's imperialism is supposed to be about like debt exports right but japan is just conquering countries while they're just literally like borrowing yeah massively from other states to fund their industrializations everything does nothing none of it works and kotaku gets like again he has he has like a lot of shit for this but it's like no he's right like lenin is lenin is wrong lenin's analysis if you try to apply it japan does not work and codicil does so imagine yeah

and you know and kotoko i think like he's keyed into things that the marxists aren't but like specifically about like about the power of nationalism because you know i mean like obviously if you go a bit later it's like well all these people who are like oh imperialism is the highest age of capitalism and then all of their parties vote to go to war with each other in world war one like you know okay kotoko i think like gets this because his relationship to socialism and anti-imperialism are like backwards from the marxist right where the marxists arrive at anti-imperialism like from their marxism but kotoko like becomes a socialist because he sees it as a way to stop wars like that's like his big thing is he's in the anti-war movement he wants his wars to stop and that's the right direction to do shit yeah you should do shit

because like you don't pick the label because what's cool you pick you figure out what you believe and then you pick the label that fits what you believe instead of the other way around you know yeah and and you know and it means that he's less sort of like he's less dogmatic than like his successors because you know i mean because because he he because he's working off of his actual principles versus sort of like this like dictation stuff. And I mean, he's he in 1903, he publishes The Essence of Socialism, which is like this is like the first like socialist like book written by a Japanese person. It's like one of the I think there's maybe like one or two other ones that are before. This is like the first big one. OK.

And he he's also like he's involved in founding the japanese socialist party and then he gets like arrested and sent to the u.s and something happens when he's in the u i don't know there's i've seen like six conflicting accounts like i've seen accounts to say he joins he joins the iww i i don't know i've seen other people say he lived he lived in a commune like he definitely read kropotkin he like becomes an anarchist let's decide he did all of these things yeah lived in a commune and tried to organize the commune with the iww yeah but you know i mean he this guy is enormously influential in the history of japanese left like he is the guy when he comes back in 1906 he's the guy who introduces the concept of the general strike to japan yeah like he's the first guy to write about it he's very cool he also like yeah you know he

starts pushing this and start this he starts pushing anarchism and sort of direct action this is like instead of like doing parliamentary stuff and he translates like kropotkin's work in japanese he translates the like the communist manifesto he does labor organizing he's just like all over the place and you know like labor and the anti-war movement are like two of the like big currents that are producing anarchists but the the other like big current that's making anarchists period is feminism because okay so i stop me if this is in any way surprising but the late 1800s and early 1900s are not a time to be a woman in japan what really yeah it's not a good time like anywhere but it's not not even now it's

not the best yeah i mean i will say it could be improved i will say it's it's it's better than this this is like sure like the the major regime is sort of like consolidating stuff as it's consolidating itself it gets like progressively more like patriarchal misogynist i'm gonna i'm gonna read from the book uh reflections on the way to the gallows which is this is a great book it's it's also a collection of yeah well so that that's uh oh god i forget one of the japanese anarchists who's about to die, that's the title of a piece that she wrote. And this book is like a collection of Japanese feminist writings, mostly from people who get killed by the state because that's what happens when you're a feminist in Japan in this period. Oh.

Yeah, it's bad. All right. Okay, so I'm going to read the quote from this. In 1892, the government forbid women to make political speeches, and in 1890 made it illegal for women to participate in political activities whatsoever. Women were forbidden to even listen to political speeches. The police security regulations of 1900 reinforced these strictures. Article 5 of the regulations prohibited women from forming any political organization whatsoever. Jesus. political organization whatsoever jesus yeah it's like that's like a level of restriction that like i'm not sure i've ever seen like that explicit level of no you can't do this

yeah i feel like it's usually implicit in a lot of western countries and then also like one of the things that really strikes sticks out to me about that is that i'm so used to thinking about i think people tend to think about like this like linear progress model where like you go back really far like all women and all other oppressed categories had it terrible and then just slowly gets better or whatever but if they're passing these laws in 1900 there's an implicit it was a little better before 1900 oh yeah yeah it very specifically gets worse um like so one of the things with the the 1898 legal codes is that it like it literally just legally enshrines like patriarchal control the households and this this is this is a massive reactionary shift in jack in sort of jeopardy is

like domestic and political culture like this like that that kind of patriarchal control the household was like a thing in some samurai families, but like it wasn't a thing for there. There's a huge number of popular classes that just that didn't exist and they just legislated into existence. And like, you know, I mean, like the things that the things that they're applying here, like women need consent of their father to marry is for this. Another quote for the book. One of the provisions held that quote cripples and disabled persons and wives cannot undertake any legal action fucking hell uh-huh yeah so this is this is this is an incredibly reactionary state and there's also like there's a lot of sex trafficking going on like like actual like there's a lot of people just being grabbed off the street

um it's a it's a it is a disaster and it it is into this patriarchal mess that like several generations of japanese narco-feminists step into um the most famous of the first round is kano sugako who's she's a socialist author who converts to well she's originally socialist and she converts anarchism which is like a thing that happens a lot in this period and she she's working as a journalist and you know she she's she's like she's a very sort of controversial figure the government like hates her so she meets kotaku and they have an affair and this is like one of the other things that keeps happening here is there's a lot of like free love stuff going around the japanese anarchist circle this time

and this this has two consequences one is a lot of men use it to be really shitty and two means there is like there is a again this is this is this is the big like nothing has ever changed the anarchist movement there are so many relationship drama things nothing has changed there are so many time is the flat circle like like there are two different times when the most famous japanese anarchist man and the most famous Japanese anarchist women wind up in a relationship. It ends with them splitting the movement and them both dying in prison. Like, this happens twice. That exact sequence happens twice.

It's nuts. Like, they're just doing polycule shit. Like, it's... They just need better mediators yeah yeah well i mean this is this is a thing with like the japanese like so the japanese anarchist movement like has a huge feminist wing but like the men still suck like they just keep being bad and so you know the other thing about this is that Kano Sugako is, like, enormously more militant than, like, almost any other anarchist that's alive in Japan at this point. And so, in 1910, she gets involved with the plan to assassinate the emperor. And this becomes known as the High Treason Incident.

And the state, like, gets wind of this. They arrest her. They arrest Kotaku. treason incidents and the state like gets wind of this they arrest her they arrest uh uh kotaku and they arrest like 22 other i think 22 yeah 22 other anarchists um now like five of these people are like even tangentially involved in this plot um but they this is okay so i i i can't say that the the japanese government only does this to anarchists because they do this to fascists like once but like they do this thing where okay so they have a bunch of people that they want to execute right so they they find one person who's like an ideological figure and they're like okay you're now in the middle of this and you're the

link between like this group and this other group you want to kill this other group you want to kill this other group you want to kill and so they convict uh like shusio um and uh kanasagaku like they all get convicted they all get executed yeah and so this case is also interesting because there's a bunch of people who the the state like wanted to kill but they couldn't because they'd already arrested they'd already did like this is like two years after like a mass arrest of like half of the japanese movement and so they have all these people who are in prison and it's like even by like the standards of the japanese state it's like okay how are we going to convict all of these people who have been in prison for two years of trying to of like being a part of this plot to kill the emperor that was like organized outside

of the jail and so this this is the thing that saves like a huge portion of the japanese anarchist movements that saves it from literally so like this the hydrogen incident kills like most of the famous anarchists in japan but it leaves like like a couple alive and that's why they're alive because they were all in prison oh god wait how are they gonna kill the emperor i the plant didn't get very far i think they were trying to use a bomb but the police got wind of it like very very early not class so they never really got much past the planning stage. Okay. This is a shame. Yeah, yeah. Do you know what else never gets very far past the planning stage

when they're trying to assassinate the Emperor of Japan? Is it the ads? Because they don't know how to do direct action because they're too enmeshed in capitalism? That is actually exactly what we were talking about, Margaret. Thank you so much. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. I was genuinely trying to see if I could, like a company that had tried to kill the Japanese emperor, and I couldn't think of one. And I was like, hmm, this says something about society.

This does. This is a real solid critique we have here. I really hope that 10 years from now, this all seems very dated. Of course someone's major company has tried to. Never mind. Please continue. One can dream.

So Kano Sogoku is dead. Kotaku is also dead. And this means that it's time for sort of like another generation of anarchists to try to fill in the gaps. Wait, so they're executed? Yeah, yeah, they're dead. Like they just die. They kill like 22 of the anarchists or something okay and i mean this is this is a huge purge but they wind up executing

just like there's just like a like a sympathetic like buddhist priest gets executed um uh when is this uh this is 1911 sorry okay yeah this is 1911 um and actually there's another interesting thing about this uh kano sugaku becomes the first woman ever executed by the japanese state uh she will not be the last like oh boy um feminist icon yeah i mean equal rights equal fights there's another like very influential anarcho-feminist uh who's emerged slightly after like just like in like 1914-1915 um

is Ito Noe she's an egoist anarchist who eventually yes finally finally we bring it up that's all I have to say buddy but that's like almost all i have to say she she takes over the editorial position of this uh this magazine called blue stocking magazine which is like japan's i think it's like this is like the most important feminist magazine in japan and she takes over the editorial staff about it and

her work is really interesting in a lot of ways because it just. It just straight up is contemporary feminism in a way that like a lot of the stuff in this period isn't like if you go and read the arguments she's having, she's arguing that sex work should be legal and that everyone should be able to get abortions because women should have autonomy over their bodies. Yeah, it's like keep winning keep winning well sometimes this is this is not gonna end well for her but you know what that is also it doesn't end well for any of us in a long enough timeline you know like all that matters is the time what we do with the time we are particularly bad okay fine yeah so yeah and i think so she's able to do this for like a year and the japanese state looks at this it is like absolutely not and shuts the magazine down um and so she gets forced to move on to other things and the other thing she moved on

she moves on to is uh being extremely heavily involved in the free love movement of course yeah yeah and and but also and this is the thing that's that's interesting about this sort of period of japanese uh anarchism is that like the egoists are all also syndicalists yeah so yeah yeah yeah yeah and she so she's like heavily involved in labor organizing and this is how she comes into contact with her partner who she's like cheating on her imprisoned husband who will later form the japanese communist party oh wow that is that's a lot of stuff happening there's there's so much there's so much beef uh this is it's incredible there's there's this like we haven't even gotten

to the wild part of this relationship yet okay which. So, okay. So she comes into contact with her partner, a person who will become her partner, Osagi Sakai, who is like dating another very famous Japanese narco-feminist who she stabs him in the neck over the fact that he's in multiple relationships at once. So this wasn't really a free love situation from her point of view. Yeah, this is the thing that keeps happening with free love in this period. It's like, you gotta like, you gotta lay lay down you gotta make sure everyone's okay with everything they sure seem to say the right things in theory but then in practice they sure yeah sure do fall apart huh isn't that funny yeah and this too divides the the japanese but did she win did she succeed did she kill him or did he survive that no he survived okay yeah i'm just i have a there's a special place in my heart for uh slit throats of patriarchal men yeah anyway so osugi sakai is also very heavily involved in

labor organizing and he he's one of the guys who like turns anarchist labor into like a serious political force okay which is maybe it's good that he survived yeah like it's probably net good but all of the guys in this story like suck except do i have an except here what about the korean guy who um oh yeah yeah we'll get to him yeah he's he's i kind of like i think he's actually fine yeah i think maybe the end of his story gets weird yeah we'll we'll get to that in a second um but yeah so osagi sakai has like he has he has this like fusion of like egoism and syndicalism where like the individual ego will be liberated through like collective action but the goal of the workers movement is not to just like end poverty it's

to like liberate the individual and give them self-development and he's also this like incredibly fierce like like one of his big thing is that like he does not want intellectuals anywhere in the workers movement like okay okay i'm into this no absolutely not yeah and this is because like again he's been around for ages like he becomes an anarchist around the time when um kotaku doesn't like that's no six so he's been like around and he's one of the guys who survives the high treason incident because he was already in prison um okay all right i tell you he like he's one of the people who like keeps the sort of flame of anarchism alive after like their question 1911 but unfortunately for him

um and for ito noe they get caught up in the the kanto earthquake of 1923 which is this like this earthquake between yokohama and tokyo alone kills 200 000 people it is like it is like it is one of the worst like natural disasters it's it's really bad and it immediately gets worse the state wouldn't use a natural disaster to try and further its aims through extra legal means yeah uh so okay i'm gonna start with one of the ways that the uh genocide of korean people in japan at this time starts is so there's a bunch of uh k Korean workers at a longshore union that's been organized by this militant like leftist union guy named Yamaguchi Sakai

and okay so like they're in this longshore union there's this disaster they start doing mutual aid they start going out they start taking care of survivors start giving people food but you know they're like waving red flags and stuff and the Japanese police lose their minds and are like oh my god the Koreans are doing socialism and they just start killing them red flags and stuff and the japanese police lose their minds and are like oh my god they're the

koreans are doing socialism and they just start killing them and they there's this whole thing about like there's these rumors start to like koreans are raping japanese women and it turns into this thing about like looting and then like korean malcontents are supposedly like overrunning police stations and the lynch mobs the lynch mobs are mostly targeting koreans but they're also like if you're chinese if you're from ryokyu islands like they're killing you too um they kill 2 000 koreans in tokyo another 2 000 in yokohama and like 2 000 koreans in yokohama that is half the korean population of the city fuck and these people die like horribly like

because it's not just like so the police is actively hunting them down like the entirety of japanese society like remembers that they really like killing people and they really like fighting and like i mean you have people like taking their like ceremonial swords from like their ancestors who were in the major revolution like they're taking their katanas and going into street and murdering people with them like people just like have fish hooks and they're just murdering people in the street and this goes on for like this goes on for days and one of the things that happens in this is um well okay so the the one of the other things that happens in this period is that the the javis government just starts like arresting random leftists and executing them yeah and that's what was supposed to happen to no way to ito no way

and osagai sakai but they get arrested by a squad of military police led by uh mashihiko amakasu who just he just murders them um there's like conflicting stories of how this happened uh there's there's one version of it where like he kills them and like their six-year-old nephew and throws their bodies on a well there's another version of it where they get strangled and he strangles him in prison and this is like a huge outrage but it's not a huge outrage because he murdered them it's a huge outrage because he was supposed to wait for the trial i mean and yeah and this is one of the things that like this is this is part of how like fascism comes to japan is that like he becomes a hero for the fascist right like he goes to prison for 10 years supposedly but he only serves three and then he gets out he becomes a hero and then he becomes basically the head of like

the the the sort of fascist secret police in the like manchurian puppet state but on the upside he when japan loses the war he kills himself so when i yay with the the story i had heard was the the throne in the well story and i remember it it stuck with me so much because the first time i met uh anarchists from japan they they gave me a zine and it was like japanese anarchist martyrs, you know, like the martyrs of our movement or whatever. And I was like looking through it and stuff because they came and killed not just the grown up anarchists but the baby anarchists or whatever as well

I know that this has happened lots of places but it just really stuck with me so whether it's true or not the story I heard was the story about the well and it stuck with me yeah I mean like the level of repression in japan like it's

it's unlike anything i've ever seen that's not in a country that's literally in the middle of a civil war like they just they just like murder people like constantly yeah and this is one of the other things like one of the things that starts the right wing like turn in japanese society is when is when the earthquake happens and the government is like like they're like the police are being like it's the koreans you need to go fight the koreans and so they do and like i mean yeah like wait they like blame the earthquake on the koreans yeah well, so the other thing is there's this fire. The fire kills like 60,000 people. Uh-huh. Like, it consumes, like, the urban core of, what's the name of that city?

The urban core of Yokohama just goes up in flames. Like, 60,000 people burn to death. And the government needs some explanation for it. Yeah, I mean, it's horrible, but it's like the government needs some explanation for it they're like oh we'll blame the koreans and then suddenly all of these people are just like like the whole of japanese society just goes into this total mobilization like kill mode thing and they just murder enormous numbers of people and this and like this has this enormous sort of like like cultural affection shifting people back to the right and shifting people back towards militarism because now they've like – they've tasted blood.

They've gotten this sort of sense of it. Yeah, it is brutal. And before we go, we're going to kill off one more anarchist. Wait, we're killing off the wrong team. Can we kill off the other team instead? Unfortunately, no. None of them die in this story. It's the worst.

All of the assassination attempts fail. it's the worst all the assassination attempts fail it's so sad yeah i'm sorry that's all right i what i asked you to do is i forgot how depressing this because i i was i was remembering part two of this which is this like absolutely hilarious kind of pointless like ideological battle over like things that are kind of dumb and then i forgot about the first part of the story which is everyone gets executed yeah so the last person who we're talking about he gets executed is is fumiko kaneko who is fumiko kaneko so she she's a nihilist anarchist but she's different from like everyone else we've talked about today so far because when she's a kid she gets sent to live in japanese occupied korea and so she goes there and she gets

like horribly abused by her family which leads to become like leads to her becoming a nihilist but it means that like okay so like a lot of the anarchists like in japan talk a big game about anti like imperialism right and like they will do things like yeah like they will go fight police to try to stop a war from happening but they don't really talk to people in korea very much and from go keniko was like the exception to that because you know she she lived there for a long time um and she she winds up marrying uh pak yo who is a very influential korean anarchist and they they do a bunch of organizing they specifically like their their thing is they're trying to like get they're trying to like end the the japanese occupation and you know they're doing great work and then unfortunately after the earthquake uh she and pak you'll are and uh

stop me if you've heard this one before they are sentenced to death for a supposed plot to kill the emperor wait we now yeah we already did this part you're just repeating yeah yeah they do it again this is the second time like they just keep doing this and this one it's unclear if there was actually a plot and if there was a plot it's unclear to what extent uh fumiho kaneko was like involved with it but while she's getting interrogated she's like oh yeah no like i hate the emperor uh i was absolutely involved in a plot to kill him like i was making a bomb to kill him uh also i'm an anarchist and here's like an incredibly detailed sketch of like all hate the emperor uh i was absolutely involved in a plot to kill him like i was making a bomb to kill him uh also i'm an anarchist and here's like an incredibly detailed sketch of like all of the oppression in japanese society that i'm just gonna tell you like the person who's like like the court examiner who's like and and you know there's an interesting thing

that happens where she and pakio are like they're handed pardons as like the sort of like mercy of the emperor thing and pakio like takes it but frigo kaneko like they hand handed pardons as like the sort of like mercy of the emperor thing and pak yo like takes it but frigo kaneko like they hand her the paper and she tears it to shreds in front of them and it's so embarrassing that like the record of what happened is like sealed until after world war ii because it was a big like um it was like a big media scandal all of the stuff with them being arrested right and i'm i'm based yeah yeah i don't actually know more but i watched a movie once there's a great movie about this called anarchist from colony this part of it yeah yeah and she yeah and like yeah it's this like whole thing and like the government also kind of doesn't want to assassinate them

because it looks really bad that i mean they've they've picked they've they've arrested two random people who like have done nothing and they're just going to kill them but familiar mechanicals like no like i i believe in the things that i believe in and i i will literally like tear up this pardon and die for it and so she tears up the pardon and so she goes to prison and she lives long enough to write like the greatest entry in in the genre of anarcho-feminist uh japanese anarcho-feminist prison memoirs which is an entire genre there's like multiple books because this it keeps happening and these people get arrested and sent to prison

and it's called the prison memoirs of a japanese woman it's great uh everyone should go read it it's it's also extremely depressing because her life sucks but yeah it's it's good um yeah and so now having killed off the leading intellectuals of anarchism again for the second time in a generation uh you would think that this would this would kill the movement like i think i think like 99 of movements like if if you kill their leading intellectuals like all of them like twice in like 11 12 years like the movement collapses yeah that but at the very beginning there was the guy who said keep the intellectuals away from the labor organizing maybe he was right well but this is this yeah the incredible thing about this is no it doesn't it doesn't kill them they they keep going like and they they have they have one last glorious glorious

and absolutely baffling hurrah okay of like infighting extremely weird and funny infighting okay so yeah that that's what we're gonna be talking about uh next episode all right yeah is it time for the plug of the plug yes oh oh margaret you have a new podcast i do about that it's on this very network cool zone media on this very network i have my own podcast is it called cool people who did cool stuff and does it i believe so does it come out on may 2nd and is it produced by the Webby Award winning Sophie Lichterman? Perhaps. And do episodes drop every Monday and Wednesday? I think they do.

That is super, super exciting. And you can find that wherever you get your podcasts, if i remember correctly anywhere you get them like if there's a peddler on the corner who sells you podcasts you're paying get your podcast get your podcast half off today two two for one yeah exactly and where and where can people follow you on the interwebs? Well, for now, you can follow me on Twitter before the mass exodus at MagpieKilljoy. And you can follow me on Instagram, which we've all known for a very long time is owned by evil people. And that is Magpie, no, Margaret Killjoy, because I wasn't clever enough to get my own name in both places.

I don't know why I'm explaining this to you. But you can follow me on social media, and that's where I am. And I post pictures of my dog that keeps barking in the background while I'm trying to record this episode. But if you follow Margaret, you'll see her dog, and you'll understand that it is worth it because he is handsome. Very nice. And agrees. Well, I'm very excited to start listening to CPW DCS, just the best.

Is that the episode? Episode. Is that the episode? Episode. Episode. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.