1. A Close Neighbor but Worlds Apart

There is no country that has a more complicated relationship with China than Japan.

Throughout history, China has influenced Japan more profoundly than any other country.

Japan learned a great deal from China: from ideographic characters to weiqi chess, from the Analects by Confucius to the Lotus Sutra.

But no country has ever inflicted greater pain on China than Japan.

Every war against China since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 has involved Japan. No other atrocity committed by other imperialist countries bears comparison to the Nanjing Massacre¹⁹ perpetrated by the Japanese.

The complicated relations between China and Japan, their friendly and hostile interactions alike, owe all to the simple fact of being close neighbors. Mutual contact and influence come easily between neighbors. Neighbors also make an easy target to attack and pillage.

Japan too has been the victim of invasion. In fact, it was always more worried than China by the prospect of being invaded and plundered. In 1837, Tokugawa Nariaki, a feudal ruler, warned that Japan would become the first target of Western aggression. China was too big; he suggested, Korea and the Ryukyu Islands were too small. Japan was just the right size for British warships.

Nariaki saw danger coming long before the Qing Emperor Daoguang had the slightest inkling of danger.

Three years later, danger arrived, just as Nariaki had predicted. But it first came to China, a nation already brought down to its knees by opium.

Still, the Opium War²⁰ impacted Japan greatly. The Opium War was the subject of many books, describing the ambitions that the West harbored as it met the Eastern world. The failure of China's Qing government was a terrifying warning to the Japanese. They urged the Tokugawa shogunate to take action and avoid Japan repeating China's fate.

The poet Yamada Hokoku captured the anxiety of his time in these lines:

No time for complacence as the shoals offer no defense.

The fall of China is a wakeup call.

Only water separates Japan from Zhejiang,

And there they are, the monstrous ships from Europe.

Japan was still learning from China at the time, but it was learning from China's crisis.

And trouble was not long arriving.

On July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, a US naval officer in command of the East India Fleet, visited Japan on a mission to open up Japanese ports to American trade. He came with four warships: the Susquehanna, the Mississippi, the Plymouth and the Saratoga.

In 1854, America's gunboat diplomacy paid off and the Treaty of Kanagawa was signed. The convention assured the opening of two Japanese ports to American trade, Shimoda and Hakodate.

In 1855, Russia forced Japan to sign the Treaty of Shimoda that defined Japan's borders with Russia along the Kurile Islands and forced the opening of Shimoda, Hakodate and Nagasaki to Russian trade.

In 1856, the Netherlands forced Japan to sign the Treaty of Peace and Amity that demarcated Dutch interest in Japan and Dutch consular jurisdiction.

In 1857 and 1858, the US signed two Treaties of Amity and Commerce with Japan, determining concession land and consular jurisdiction. Japan also conceded control over customs tariffs.

After 1860, Britain forced Japan into many similar deals.

From 1863 through 1864, joint naval forces of the US, Britain, France and the Netherlands bombarded Shimonoseki, demanding war indemnities, customs control and the right to build military bases in Japan.

Japan was facing the same fate as China.

Japanese society before the Meiji Reform of 1868 was stagnant, stuck in a time warp, just like China. In 1864, after reading about the French Revolution, Koji Sugi, a professor at the Kaiseijo, a predecessor of Tokyo University, marveled: “Has human society really changed so drastically? How terrifying!”

This is a clear indication that the moribund society had shaped people's thinking and outlook very profoundly.

There were two things that truly opened up Japan's eyes to the outside world - the gunboats from the West and Wei Yuan, a writer from China.

Lin Zexu commissioned Wei to write The Illustrated Treaties on the Maritime Kingdoms, A Military History of the Qing Dynasty and A Brief Account of the Overseas States. These books made little difference in China, but when introduced to Japan after the Opium War their impact was earth-shaking. They were the first sources of information on the outside world that the Japanese government and intellectuals had ever acquired and they made Wei's name much more famous in Japan than in China.

As they closed Wei's books and looked beyond their own boundaries, the Japanese found China in flames. Anglo-French joint forces had burned down the Summer Palace, the private retreat of the Manchu ruling house. Japan must do something, lest the same fate befell them too.

Hence the 1868 Meiji Reform or Meiji Restoration.

Six years earlier, in 1862, China had quietly started a campaign called “Self-Strengthening Through Foreign Learning.”

The Meiji Reform was inspired by China's crisis and Wei's writings, but also by its own domestic crisis. China's “Foreign Learning” campaign provided Japan a model to copy.

The three main figures of the Foreign Learning campaign in China were Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang and Li Hongzhang.

The Meiji Reform had its own three heroes: Saigo Takamori, Kido Takayoshi and Okubo Toshimichi.

The Chinese campaign's motto was “Learn from the foreigners. Acquire their technology and use it against their aggression.” The ultimate aim was to free the country from the powerful menace of the West with its “stout ships and piercing canons.”

The watchword of the Meiji Reform was “Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians.”Its goal was also to save the country from its national crisis and repulse foreign intruders.

But whereas the Chinese campaign failed, the Japanese effort paid off. Assessing the two reform efforts the American scholar Mary C. Wright describes the Chinese one as not a coup d'état, nor a revolution. It was not the beginning of a new era, but a collective effort of the Confucian elite desperate to bring about a brief warm period before cold weather inevitably set in. It was merely the last stand of Chinese conservatism.

The Meiji Reform, which began in 1868, was a different story. Emperor Meiji started top-down sweeping reform to imitate the West. By his order: “Deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by public discussion,” and “evil customs of the past shall be discarded” and “knowledge shall be sought throughout the world.” Under the policy of promoting industries, capitalism was jump-started in Japan. Cultural initiatives promoted science, modern technology and education. And as part of the effort to “enrich the nation and strengthen the military,” the Meiji government built its new armed forces and police force, following Western role models. The reform was a thoroughgoing overhaul that redesigned everything in the country, its politics, economy, defense, legal system, education, transportation and culture.

These radical reforms ultimately set Japan onto the path of territorial expansion through wars.

And China and Japan went their separate ways.

And at this fateful split of their hitherto shared road, the most note-worthy Japanese figure was not Emperor Meiji, nor Saigo Takamori, Kido Takayoshi or Okubo Toshimichi. It was not Ito Hirobumi, the architect of Japan's modern political system, either. The individual who above all others deserves our attention is Yukichi Fukuzawa a writer and educator who was dubbed “Japan's Voltaire” and “the teacher of all Japanese people.” His image graces the 10,000-yen bill to this day.

In his Gakumon no Susume, or Encouragement of Learning, published in 1872, Fukuzawa wrote: “All men are created equal,” a rather revolutionary statement for a feudal, hierarchical Japan. The idea earned him his position in history as an enlightenment thinker in Japan. In 1875, he published An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, in which he argued that any form of government can and should be welcomed by the people provided that it serves the purpose of developing civilization. The method it employs to serve that purpose is irrelevant, he maintained, and society would accept such a government in any event. This is where Fukuzawa's thinking took a wrong turning and his argument would eventually be used to justify war as a means to a noble end.

Fukuzawa's best known work is Abandoning Asia, published in 1885. The article has guided political practice in Japan for more than a century and to this day enjoys wide respect. Its thesis: “The answer to today's question is to stop waiting in vain for our neighbors to achieve civility and enlightenment and to join us in the work of rebuilding Asia. We would do best to break away from them and go with Western civilization instead.”Regarding relations with Asian nations, Fukuzawa wrote, “China and Korea are Japan's neighbors. We don't have to go out of our way to be kind with them, but instead can deal with them the way the Westerners do.”

No Japanese today will admit any connection between Fukuzawa's thinking and their country's embrace of fascism not long afterward. But his idea that wars were justified elaborated in An Outline of a Theory of Civilization and that the strong had a right to subjugate the weak stated in Abandoning Asia later became the intellectual origin of Japanese militarism.

Fukuzawa's ideas very quickly proved palatable to the Japanese government.

The first step was to tear the Ryukyu Kingdom apart.

In 1874, one year before Fukuzawa published An Outline of a Theory of Civilization,Japan invaded Ryukyu and Taiwan. It forced Ryukyu to stop adhering to Chinese era titles as a way to identify years and to convert to the Japanese era name Meiji. Yielding to Japanese demands, Ryukyu also severed its tributary relationship with China, while Japan forced the Qing government in Beijing to sign an agreement.

The man behind all these arrangements was Toshimichi Okubo, Japan's foremost politician of the Meiji era, who was dubbed “the Bismarck of the East.” As the Japanese envoy in the negotiations with Beijing, Okubo sneaked these words into the settlement, “Given that the unsubjugated aborigines of Taiwan took unlawful actions and murdered the vassals of Japan.…” This language established the political status of Ryukyuan sailors as Japan's vassals, and laid the groundwork for Japan's invasion of that island nation. Seeking peace and stability, the Qing government paid Japan 500,000 taels of silver in indemnity in return for the withdrawal of the Japanese troops. The gesture was interpreted as implicit recognition of Japan's claim of suzerainty over the Ryukyu Kingdom. Japan won big time.

As a matter of fact, at that time, Japan had only about 30,000 soldiers in its regular army, 4,000 navy personnel and 15 warships, of which most were too damaged to go to sea. It lacked the combat capacity to take on the Qing Dynasty if the two countries had gone to war. But the Qing government stuck to its usual path, choosing to stay out of the fight and exposing its weakness to Japan. Okubo's British legal counsellor said that the luckiest outcome of the 1874 Japanese-Qing settlement was that the Qing empire recognized Japan's sovereignty over Ryukyu. Another British commentator was even more candid, saying that from the Western point of view, the Taiwan incident amounted to the Qing empire announcing to the world that there was a rich empire willing to pay indemnities instead of going to war.

Being willing to pay indemnities but not to go to war was the start of big trouble for China henceforth.

In April 1878, Japan abolished the Ryukyu Kingdom and made it a Japanese prefecture.

In 1879, Japan dispatched troops and police force to Ryukyu, now renamed Okinawa, and moved the Ryukyuan royal family to Tokyo. The kingdom of Ryukyu became Okinawa Prefecture, part of Japan

After annexing Ryukyu, Japan turned its attack against China.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 rewarded Japan handsomely: China lost Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan and paid the latter 200 million taels of silver as indemnity. When Russia, Germany and France intervened, China kept hold of Liaodong, but had to pay Japan a further 30 million taels of silver. Seizaburo Shinobu, a Japanese historian, wrote, “The indemnity for the Sino-Japanese War helped fund the establishment of the gold standard and raised the position of Japanese capitalism in the global economy. The wars with Qing and Russia helped Japan transform from a potential victim of colonialism to a colony-owning imperialist power.”

Seizaburo's remark revealed one secret: Japan secured the seed money for its capitalist venture from wars.

And this was Japan after the Meiji Reform.

The once mighty Qing empire had had its butt kicked by the Western powers, but now it lost territory and had to pay indemnities to an Eastern country, a tiny one at that. It was an unprecedented humiliation and hard to swallow.

The war sent the Chinese ruling elite into some painful soul-searching, which brought them to the realization that China's failure resulted, not from “inferior equipment,” but from “inferior systems.”

The Meiji Reform led to Japan's big victory against China in 1894.

That defeat opened the door for the Hundred Days' Reform in 1898.

In 1898, Kang Youwei submitted his A Study of the Reforms in Japan to Emperor Guangxu and proposed that China learn from Japan, its powerful enemy, and initiate an overhaul of its political and societal institutions.

Kang was the first of the Chinese elite to suggest learning from Japan.

The reforms, however, were quick to fail.

But there was no reining in the burgeoning interest in learning from Japan.

The first batch of Chinese traveling to Japan in search of answers included royalists: Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and like-minded contemporaries.

But the second batch included revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen, Huang Xing, and Song Jiaoren.

And then came those who would eventually turn to communism, for example, Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu, Peng Pai, Zhou Enlai and Wang Ruofei.

Meiji Japan became an Asian entrepot for the exchange of ideas.

Mao Zedong said progressive-minded Chinese from Hong Xiuquan²¹ to Sun Yat-sen turned West in their search for truth. But the West was too distant from China and Japan was just across the water. So the Chinese looking for truth in the West turned instead to Japan. As Zhou Enlai put it: “Set sail and bear east, in search for a cure for this land.”

This is why Marxism landed in China via Japan even before the Russian Revolution.

That was more than a century ago. The first people to bring Marxism to China were actually foreign missionaries. But it was Chinese students in Japan and members of the Chinese Revolutionary League, or Tongmenghui, who associated Marx with socialism and introduced Marxism to China as a theory of popular revolution.

Japan was the ideological launch pad for the Chinese revolutionaries.

When meeting with a delegation of Japanese writers led by Hiroshi Noma on June 21, 1960, in Shanghai, Mao said:

Marxism spread in Japan before it arrived in China. Chinese came across Marx's writings from Japan. They learned Marxist political economics by reading books published in Japan.

Mao revealed a truth about the spread of Marxism from Japan to China.

In January 1906, Zhu Zhixin, a member of the Chinese Revolutionary League, published “Biographies of German Social Revolutionaries” in an issue of Minbao, a newspaper run by the League. In the article, he had excerpts of The Communist Manifesto, including the famous theory put forward by Marx and Engels, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

This was the first presentation of Marxism to a Chinese readership.

Zhu's Chinese version of The Communist Manifesto was translated from the Japanese, a translation by Shusui Kotoku and Sakai Toshihiko that appeared in the November 13, 1904 edition of the Heimin Shimbun newspaper.

It was the earliest version of the Manifesto in Japanese.

These translations were of great significance. For the first time ever, the Chinese public was introduced to the term Gong Chan Dang (Chinese for Communist Party).

The English word “communist” derived from “commune,” the smallest local division in some European countries such as France, Italy and Belgium. A community, therefore, may also refer to a group of people, or nations, who share the same interests or values. Take the European Community for example. Neither “commune” nor “community” conveys the idea of sharing everything you own, whereas the Chinese “gong chan” does. A direct translation would be group of people who believe in the community.

But Japanese translators Kotoku Shusui and Toshihiko Sakai used the Japanese characters 共產党 (literally common property party), and Zhu copied this without questioning it. A term for which many believers gave their lives was thus created. Those who feared this political belief accused it of advocating property- and wife-sharing. Its adherents praised it for the idea of eliminating private ownership. Nobody stopped to think about what was lost in translation.

This all came to light much later. Zhu died in 1919 and was never aware of it.

Japan learned about Marxism 36 years before China. In 1870, Hiroyuki Kato, a Meiji period political thinker, brought Marxism to Japan, not to study it but to critique it. At the time, “the specter of communism” was already “haunting Europe.” Fearing the specter might come to Japan, the Meiji government allowed the study of Marxism in order to stop it. “Know your enemy” so to speak.

Kato, the first man to introduce Marxism to Japan, was one of the staunch opponents of this philosophy. He wrote in his General Theory of True Government Policy, “Communism and socialism as two economic theories… are similar in their general propositions and both advocate the elimination of private property.” Both are “most harmful institutions” to peace and security of a society, he added.

In “Hyakugaku renkon” (Links of All Sciences), Amane Nishi, a Japanese philosopher, warned the emperor against socialism and wrote, “the world leaders must concern themselves with the matter,” and “stand vigilant against it before it happens.”

This was how Marxism was introduced to Japan, being critiqued as a threat to the country.

Emperor Meiji did not understand that Marxism itself was a critical weapon stronger than anything else in history. Criticism was the last thing it feared.

It was a case of “reaping the whirlwind.”

In 1882, Chomin Nakae, “the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the East,” introduced Western ideas such as utopian socialism, Lassalleanism and Marxism to Japan. In 1893, Choujirou Kusaka wrote Marx and Lassalle. In 1903, Sen Katayama wrote My Socialism and Denjiro Kotoku wrote The Essence of Socialism. In 1904, Shusui Kotoku and Toshihiko Sakai translated The Communist Manifesto, and Isoo Abe translated Capital, Volume I. In 1907 Sakai and his colleagues published The Outline of Socialism. Together, these works helped spread Marxism in Japan.

After Sun Yat-sen established the Chinese Revolutionary League in Tokyo in August 1905, his fellow members started translating into Chinese batch after batch of the Japanese publications.

Dai Jitao was mainly responsible for the popularization of Marxist economic theory. He translated chapters 1-4 of The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, by Karl Kautsky, into Chinese from Japanese. A complete translation of the book was done by Dai in cooperation with Hu Hanmin, Zhu Zhixin and Li Hanjun. For the first time Chinese readers were introduced to Marx's Capital. Dai would later recall, “I wanted to thoroughly study the economic theory of Marx,” adding, “The only way to stop competition between classes is to stop the oppression of one class by another and to get rid of classes. There will be class struggle as long as there is class oppression and as long as there are classes.” To those who objected to these Marxist works being translated he wrote, “How can anyone ban the translation of Marx's works or works that study and critique his theories? How can a ban be possible on such works?” Hu Hanmin translated discourses on historical materialism from the Japanese editions of The Holy Family, The Poverty of Philosophy, The Communist Manifesto, Wage-Labor and Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and Capital. “Of these works, the preface to the Critique is of paramount importance to us,” wrote Hu. “It provides an overview of historical materialism as put forward by Karl Marx. Marx said this provided the guideline to all his later theories. Adherents of scientific socialism treated it as their Bible.” Hu, who later became a KMT right-wing leader, was convinced that nobody before Marx had “managed to explain the real drive behind the progress of human history,”and that the establishment of historical materialism “inspired great revolutions in sociology, economics, historical studies and socialism, and gave rise to a new era.”

The early KMT drew deep ideological strength from Marxism. As they introduced these new ideas to China, they brought some light to their country's ideological landscape that had long lingered in darkness.

This is why Qu Qiubai said in February 1927, “Dai Jitao, Hu Hanmin and Zhu Zhixin were China's first Marxists.”

That the old guards of the KMT did so much work on Marxism was beyond the imagination of the new party elite who came through later.

A great many Marxist political and philosophical terms were introduced to China thanks to their work, terms such as “socialism,” “socialist party,” “communism,” “communist party,” “anarchism,” “dialectics,” “metaphysics,” “materialism,” and “idealism” were introduced to China through Japan. The revolutionary slogans that resonated across China in the 1920s and 1930s such as “the sacredness of labor” and “unity is strength” were first brought back to Asia from America by Japanese revolutionaries Sen Katayama and Fusataro Takano in 1897.

Some Western scholars believe that cultural ties between countries mean events taking place in one country will soon cause reactions in another. Pre-Opium War China inspired the rise of Japanese culture. After the Meiji Reform, Japan in turn became a source of new ideas for China. Early Chinese Communists like Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu, Li Hanjun, Li Da, Chen Wangdao, Shi Cuntong, Shen Xuanlu, Shao Lizi and Zhou Fohai all studied in Japan. Later Communists including Peng Pai, Wang Ruofei, Zhou Enlai, Yang Paoan, Yang Angong and Dong Biwu followed in their footsteps.

Japanese politicians such as Toshimichi Okubo and Hirobumi Ito were the most influential mentors of China's KMT.

For the Chinese Communists, it was Japanese scholars like Shusui Kotoku and Hajime Kawakami.

Kotoku was not only the Japanese translator of The Communist Manifesto, but also a passionate writer. He wrote:

The Revolution has come! For the first time, the Revolution has come! Like wild fire spreading across the plains, the Revolution blazes its way from Russia to Europe, and from Europe to the world. Today's world is a world of revolution. This era is an era of revolution. We, as the children of the era, will never stop until we establish ourselves as revolutionaries!

He also wrote:

All intimidating institutions like cabinets, elections, political parties, universities, arts and religions will become as humble as dust at the moment when the working class revolution across the world engulfs the entire universe. And those pale-faced pundits will be able to do nothing but pray to their gods and run towards the rich and powerful. Their only way out is to join with the working class and throw themselves into the fire of the revolution!

Just like Koji Sugi was “terrified” at the drastic changes in human society when, in 1864, news of the French Revolution (1789-1799) reached him, so must the young Chinese in Japan have been inspired by reading these words by Kotoku.

Kotoku was more than a passionate revolutionary: He was a discerning observer of history too. He believed the ripples set off by the Russian Revolution would not stop with Japan but would reach China as well. Revolution would take place in China after being exposed to Japanese influence. He said:

China is the Russia of East Asia. Just as Switzerland was the school of the Russian revolutionaries, so will Japan become the school of Chinese revolutionaries. And just as the Russian Revolution was violent in character, so will the Chinese take a violent path.

Later events proved Kotoku right. Japan did become “the school of the Chinese revolutionaries” and “the Chinese revolutionaries” did take “a violent path.”

In March 1927, Mao Zedong wrote in his Survey Report on the Peasants' Movement in Hunan, “Revolution means revolt. It is a violent action taken by one class against another.”

Twenty years earlier in June 1906, Kotoku had made this declaration:

Let the empowered class shiver in front of the communist revolution. Revolutionaries never shrink from violence in their fight for their cause.

Four years after giving that speech, Kotoku died at the violent hands of the Japanese government.

In January 1911, the Japanese government found Kotoku guilty of high treason and he was to be executed by hanging.

On the day of his sentencing, Kotoku wrote these lines as his last words:

Success or failure, that's nothing that matters.

The hero's spirit goes on and history takes notice.

Thus I came, thus I go:

A convicted traitor, a believer in the dignity of common people.

He was a shooting star that sailed across the ideological sky of Japan at the turn of the century - thus he came, thus he went.

A splendid shooting star.

Where Kotoku was a passionate firebrand, Kawakami was cool and composed.

The first Chinese Communist to propagate Marxism-Leninism in China was Li Dazhao. He took a liking to Kawakami's writings when studying at Waseda University between 1913 and 1916. These books opened his eyes to Marxism.

When Zhou Enlai studied in Japan, the first book on Marxism he read was Kawakami's Tales of Poverty. He applied for an economics course at Kyoto Imperial University just so that he could study under Kawakami. When that failed, Zhou stayed on in Kyoto for a while with Wu Hantao, a former classmate of Nankai University while he looked for ways to meet Kawakami. That effort failed as well but when Zhou returned to China the items in his suitcase he deemed most important were books by Kawakami.

When Guo Moruo was translating Kawakami's Social Organization and Revolution, he wrote to his friend Cheng Fangwu, “Translating this book has turned my life around. It has awoken me from this half-sleep state of mind. It has brought me back from the wrong path where I was wandering lost. It has delivered me from the shadow of death.”

Mao Zedong never went to Japan, but he was very impressed by Kawakami. He read Kawakami's Outlines of Political Economy and the translation by Kawakami of Karl Marx's Wage-Labor and Capital. A copy of each book can be seen on display at Mao's memorial at his hometown in Shaoshan, Hunan Province. Hiroshi Noma, a Japanese writer who visited China in 1960, recalled a conversation with Mao who told him, “Kawakami's books are still useful references today. In Political Economy, he discussed how the old political economy could evolve into the new political economy, which, as Kawakami put it, was none other than Marxist political economy. We reprint his book every year.”

The preeminence of Kotoku and Kawakami had led the Comintern and the Russian Communist Party to have higher expectations about the revolution in Japan than in China. On January 25, 1922, Pravda carried a speech of Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev given at a Far Eastern revolutionary delegations' meeting, where he called Japan “the key to Far East” and said, “any economic revolution in Far East will be but a storm in the tea cup without a revolution in Japan.” Zinoviev believed the Japanese revolution would determine the course of the revolution in China - in the entire Far East for that matter.

Zinoviev was a loyal protégé of Lenin. However Lenin saw things, so did Zinoviev.

After the Revolution of 1911, the focus of Lenin's attention for Asia switched from China to Japan. He anticipated great things for revolution there.

However, though supplying a powerful ideological weapon to progressive people in China, Japan did not embark on the same revolutionary path as China did.

In 1901, Sen Katayama and Denjiro Kotoku founded Japan's first socialist party, the Social Democratic Party, declaring the intent to “eradicate classes” and that “only socialism can solve the labor problem.”

Their party survived just for one day before being suppressed by the Japanese government.

In 1906, they formed the Socialist Party, which lasted a year before being outlawed.

In 1911, the government orchestrated the “High Treason Incident,” thereby hundreds of socialists were arrested and 24 were put to death. Kotoku was among them.

In July 1922, one year after the founding of the CPC, Japanese revolutionaries formed their communist party with the help of Moscow. But the party was never able to overcome the formidable obstacles to its growth.

Though Japanese revolutionaries had established contact with Russian revolutionary pioneer Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov in 1904, they were never able to move beyond theoretical discussion of the revolution and into actual practice of it.

This is because another political idea had gained traction; namely, fascism.

In 1928, Mao wrote Why Is It that the Red Political Power Can Exist in China, but no one in Japan wrote anything to explain why Red political power could not exist in Japan.

Nor why, instead, fascism could run rampant there.