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{{DISPLAYTITLE:Uchiyama Gudō, ''Anarchist Communism''}}
[[Uchiyama Gudo|Uchiyama Gudō]] (内山愚童) (1908). 『無政府共產』 [Anarchist Communism], 「入獄記念――小作人ハナゼ苦シイカ」 [In Commemoration of Imprisonment—Why Do Tenant Farmers Suffer?]. ([[UG08MKK|Original Japanese here]].)

== Translation ==

'''Anarchist Communism'''

'''In Commemoration of Imprisonment—Why Do Tenant Farmers Suffer?'''

:Uchiyama Gudō

Tenant farmers! You produce food, the most important thing human beings need and something we simply cannot live without. And yet, although you have worked with all your might throughout your lives to produce this most essential of human necessities, just as your parents and ancestors did before you, year after year you end up without enough. What terrible misfortune!

Is this, as Buddhists say, evil retribution carried over from a previous life?<ref>Gudō writes 前世からの惡報 (''zense kara no akuhō''), literally “evil retribution from a previous existence.” The expression invokes the popular Buddhist understanding that present suffering may result from karmic actions in a previous life. Gudō immediately rejects such an explanation as “superstition” (''meishin'' 迷信), shifting the explanation of poverty from karmic causation to existing social and economic relations.</ref> But friends, today, in this worldwide twentieth century, if you continue to be deceived by such superstitions, in the end you will have no choice but to become like oxen and horses. Would that make you happy?

Year after year you live in poverty, lamenting that you don't have enough. If this were because, in the cold of winter, you took your aged parents with you to Zushi, Kamakura, Numazu, or Hayama, wandering about to escape the cold, then perhaps you could resign yourselves to it. If, in the heat of summer, you took your ailing wife and children to Hakone or Nikkō to escape the heat, and this left you a little short that year, then perhaps you could find some consolation in that.

If this year you sent your eldest son abroad to study in Germany, your younger son to university, and enrolled your daughter in a higher girls' school, and as a result had to sell a ''chō'' of woodland or mortgage five ''tan'' of farmland,<ref>''Chō'' 町 and ''tan'' 反 were units of land measurement. One ''chō'' was approximately 0.99 hectare (2.45 acres), and one ''tan'' approximately one-tenth of a ''chō''. Gudō's examples deliberately invoke expenditures and assets far beyond the ordinary circumstances of the tenant farmers he addresses.</ref> then you could look forward to future happiness, and your nighttime conversations with your wife would not be so bitter.

But friends, when you say year after year that you haven't enough, haven't enough, it is certainly not because of luxuries like these. New Year's comes, and Bon comes, but you don't even get a single new garment. They say that the art of building has advanced in this civilized twentieth century, but no news of that has reached your homes. Your houses are just as they were five hundred or a thousand years ago. Yet there is nothing surprising about this. Clothes require money paid to the cloth merchant; a house requires wages paid to a carpenter. And sadly, you have no money. So your clothes are always in tatters and your houses are like animals' dens.

But food—you produce that yourselves. So surely you eat the very best? Not at all. The best rice is taken by the landlord, while you yourselves eat millet and barley, even though you work harder than either landlords or merchants.<ref>Gudō addresses the pamphlet specifically to tenant farmers (''kosakunin'' 小作人), cultivators who farmed land owned by landlords and paid a substantial portion of the harvest as rent, often in rice. His argument repeatedly contrasts the labor of the cultivator with the landlord's legal ownership of the land and claim upon its produce.</ref> And despite all that, year after year you still say, “Not enough, not enough.” Tenant farmers, that is the fate imposed upon you throughout your lives.

Why on earth should this be?

Let me put it in a little song:

 Why are you so poor?
 If you don't know why, I'll tell you.
 The emperor and the great landlords grow rich:
 there are ticks sucking human blood.<ref>The Japanese reads 天子金もち、大地主。人の血をすふ、ダニがおる. Gudō's image of “ticks” (ダニ) collapses the emperor, the wealthy, and great landlords into a parasitic social order living from the labor of others. 天子 (''tenshi'', literally “Son of Heaven”) is Gudō's usual term for the emperor in this pamphlet.</ref>

Friends, think about this carefully. All year long you sweat and labor to produce your crops. Half of what you produce is taken by the thief called the landlord. With the half that remains, you have to buy sake, soy sauce, salt, fertilizer, and everything else. But sake, fertilizer, and every other thing you buy carries taxes taken by that great thief called the government. And on top of that, the thieves called merchants take their profits. Thus people like you tenant farmers, who possess no land of your own and labor honestly, can never escape poverty for as long as you live.

And if that were all, it might still be bearable. But when you have a son, you raise him for years amid poverty. Just when you rejoice that now, at last, he can cultivate another plot of field and perhaps help you get out of debt, he turns twenty-one and—whether you like it or not—is taken away as a soldier. For three years you send him spending money while he is forced to learn something you have no desire even to hear about: how to kill people. And when war comes, he is dragged off to some blood-soaked place where he must either kill someone else or be killed himself.

There have even been fathers who, while their sons were taken away for three years as soldiers, were left at home with their wives and children and had to go out begging. The son who has become a soldier receives no money from home because his family is poor; without money he is bullied by the veteran soldiers, and how many have hanged themselves, thrown themselves into rivers, or killed themselves on the railway? No one knows.

When tenant farmers are tormented like this, you may rise with the first cockcrow in the morning and work until darkness falls at night, but you and poverty will never part company.

Why should this be?

Although all of us are born equally human, someone born into the household of a landlord or a rich man can remain at school or travel abroad until twenty-four or twenty-five—even thirty—and when he returns home, he escapes the summer heat in some cool place and builds a house on a warm seacoast for the winter. He spends his life amusing himself. Without plucking so much as a single mulberry leaf himself, he wraps his body in silk garments, indulges himself amid pools of wine and forests of meat,<ref>酒池肉林 (''shuchi nikurin''), literally “a pool of wine and a forest of meat,” is a conventional expression for extravagant and decadent luxury, derived from accounts of the legendary excesses of the last Shang ruler in ancient China.</ref> and passes his entire life in idleness. Perhaps you don't know this.

They say that a great landlord or rich man can spend two or three thousand yen all by himself during thirty summer days amusing himself in Nikkō or Hakone. Three thousand yen! Friends, even if you worked without rest and without eating from the age of twenty until the age of fifty, you could never accumulate three thousand yen. And people like that don't even have to serve as soldiers.

Tenant farmers! Surely you too would like occasionally to enjoy the luxuries enjoyed by today's rich men and great landlords. Surely you would like once in a while to take some time off and eat something delicious. The reason you cannot do so is that you hold to a certain superstition.<ref>迷信 (''meishin'', “superstition”) is the organizing concept of the pamphlet. Gudō shortly defines it as “cherishing and preserving a mistaken idea” (マチガツタ考へを大事本ぞんに守つておる事). The term encompasses not only conventional religious beliefs but assumptions concerning property, taxation, military service, and imperial authority that Gudō argues have been inculcated by the state.</ref> Because you have treasured this superstition since the days of your parents and ancestors, you cannot even dream of enjoying the luxuries of landlords and rich men. But if you listen to what we have to say and cast away that superstition right now, you will become people who are truly at ease and free.

But if you abandon this superstition, the emperor and the rich will no longer be able to live idly and luxuriously. That is why, since ancient times, emperors and daimyō have made this superstition out to be something indispensable and sacred, and have used it to deceive you. So never forget that, from the standpoint of your own interests, today's emperor and ministers, just like the Tokugawa and the daimyō of the past, are enemies against whom grievances have accumulated since the days of your ancestors.

It is exactly the same today in the Meiji era. The government works with all its might, employing everyone from university professors at the top to elementary-school teachers at the bottom, to make sure that you never abandon this superstition. And you, in turn, regard it with gratitude. That is why you can never escape poverty—not for your whole lives, nor even in the generations of your children and grandchildren.

What, then, are these superstitions that elementary-school teachers and others instill in you and your children? A superstition is simply the cherishing and preservation of a mistaken idea. I will leave until later the question of why you have held these mistaken ideas since ancient times. First let us consider what these mistaken ideas actually are.

△ You are allowed by the landlord to cultivate his rice fields and dry fields, and therefore, in gratitude, you must give him rent in rice.

△ Because there is a government, we farmers can work in peace; therefore, in gratitude, we must pay taxes.

△ If the country had no military forces, we farmers would be killed by foreigners; therefore, we must send our healthy young men away as soldiers.<ref>These are Gudō's three explicit examples of “mistaken ideas” or “superstitions”: the supposed obligations to pay rent to landlords, taxes to the government, and sons to the military. His argument is therefore directed not merely against particular economic burdens but against the beliefs that make those burdens appear legitimate, reciprocal, and necessary.</ref>

Because these three mistaken ideas have become deeply embedded in you, no matter how poor you become, you are incapable of opposing the payment of rent, the payment of taxes, or sending your children away as soldiers. If someone says, “You don't have to pay rent. You don't have to pay taxes. You don't have to send your beloved children away as soldiers,” you immediately call that person a rebel or a traitor. You refuse even to listen to or read something that would actually bring you ease and freedom. This is precisely where I want you to think very carefully about what you are reading.

Why, then, is it all right not to pay rent to the landlord?

Tenant farmers, leave the fields you cultivate alone from spring until autumn. Don't put a plow into them, don't sow any seed, don't fertilize them—just leave them alone and see what happens. When autumn comes, not a single grain of rice will have been produced. When summer comes, you won't harvest even half a grain of barley.

Doesn't this make the matter perfectly obvious? Rice is produced in autumn and barley in summer because you farmers have worked without rest throughout the year, pouring out your sweat. If that is so, then the rice and barley produced by your labor belong—all of them—to you farmers. What sort of absurd reasoning says that you must hand half of them over to a landlord?

The land existed naturally. Our ancestors cleared it and made it capable of producing food. Why should anyone who cultivates that land and takes what it produces for himself be called a rebel?

Tenant farmers! For a very long time the landlords have been robbing you. Now that you have finally awakened from this delusion,<ref>Gudō shifts here from the noun 迷信 (''meishin'', “superstition”) to 迷 (''mayoi'', “delusion”): 此迷がさめて見れば, literally “once you awaken from this delusion.” The language of awakening from delusion carries a recognizable Buddhist resonance even as Gudō redirects it toward recognition of economic exploitation.</ref> you have the right not merely to refuse to hand over the annual rent, but—in repayment for these long, long years of grievance—to take back the barley, money, and everything else stored in the landlords' storehouses. Taking everything in the landlord's storehouse is certainly not theft. It is the honorable work of recovering what has long been stolen from you and from us.

Next: why is it all right not to pay taxes to the government?

Tenant farmers, there is no need for difficult arguments. How much ease has the existence of this thing called government actually brought you? If you can name even one thing about it for which you can say, “This is where the honorable government has benefited us,” then go ahead and name it.

Since ancient times people have said, “You cannot prevail against a crying child or a magistrate.”<ref>泣く子と地頭には勝たれぬ (''naku ko to jitō ni wa katarenu'') is a proverbial expression meaning that there is no use resisting those against whom reason or argument is powerless. The ''jitō'' 地頭 were medieval land stewards; by Gudō's time the proverb conveyed the more general sense of arbitrary or irresistible authority.</ref> Isn't unreasonable oppression precisely what those above us have always made their business? Tenant farmers work honestly and become poor in order to pay taxes merely to keep such a troublesome thing alive. This is the height of stupidity.

Friends, stop paying taxes to this ridiculous government and destroy this troublesome thing as soon as possible! Then let us take back the government's property, which has been unjustly stolen from us since the days of our parents and ancestors, and make it the common property of everyone.<ref>みんなの共有にしやう, “let us make it the common possession/property of everyone.” Gudō's positive economic program is thus not merely redistribution to individual cultivators: property seized by the government is to become commonly held. This anticipates his concluding description of the desired society as 無政府共產, “anarchist communism.”</ref> This is your natural right. People who value justice should take the initiative and resist the government for the freedom and well-being of all people.

Why is destroying the present government and creating a free country without an emperor not the work of rebels, but rather the work of courageous people who value justice?

Because the emperor, the chief boss of the present government, is not a child of the gods at all, despite what elementary-school teachers and others have deceived you into believing. The ancestors of the present emperor emerged from a corner of Kyushu, murdering and robbing people and destroying fellow bands of thieves such as Nagasunehiko. In other words, they were like Kumazaka Chōhan or Shuten Dōji—bandits who happened to succeed.<ref>Nagasunehiko 長髄彦 is an opponent of Emperor Jinmu in the legendary account of the imperial conquest of Yamato. Kumazaka Chōhan 熊坂長範 and Shuten Dōji 酒呑童子 are legendary outlaw or bandit figures. Gudō's deliberately irreverent comparison reverses the ideological function of imperial mythology: rather than demonstrating divine ancestry and legitimate conquest, the founding narratives become stories of one successful band of robbers defeating others.</ref> A little thought is enough to see that they were no gods.

When you hear that the imperial line has continued for twenty-five hundred years, you may imagine that this somehow makes the emperor a god.<ref>Meiji imperial ideology represented the reigning emperor as the descendant of an unbroken divine imperial line extending back to the legendary Emperor Jinmu. Gudō attacks both elements of this claim: divine descent and the legitimating force of dynastic antiquity.</ref> But generation after generation the emperors suffered from foreign troubles and at home were made playthings by their own retainers.

It has been the same in the Meiji era. The emperor must have suffered continually over domestic and foreign affairs. His suffering is the consequence of his own actions, so that is his concern. But because of it, honest, hardworking tenant farmers like you suffer more with each passing day merely to find enough to eat. However much they tell you that Japan is a divine country, there is nothing in that for you to be grateful for.

These things are perfectly obvious, yet those cowards called university professors and men of learning are incapable of saying or writing them. Instead they deceive others with endless lies while deceiving themselves. Elementary-school teachers, too, are at first at a loss when they have to explain how sacred and benevolent the emperor is. But gradually they become skilled at lying, and on the three great national holidays each year they put on an innocent face and teach you and your children that the emperor is the child of the gods.<ref>Gudō refers to the “three great festivals” (三大祝日, ''sandai shukujitsu'') of the Meiji state, school ceremonies that played an important role in imperial civic education. His immediate target is therefore not simply abstract imperial ideology but its reproduction through elementary schooling and ritual observance.</ref>

You are thereby taught to labor and serve throughout your lives for the descendants of thieves wearing the mask of gods. That is why you can never escape poverty. Having explained matters this far, even you, patient as you are, will surely feel ready to undertake a life-risking movement to recover what has been stolen from you.

Tenant farmers! Because of this long-standing superstition, you have believed that ordinary people could not survive unless the country possessed an army. Certainly, both in the past and today, when war begins a country without an army will inevitably be destroyed by a country that has one.

But that is because there are great thieves called emperors and governments.

Isn't war a quarrel between governments? In other words, ordinary people suffer because thieves quarrel among themselves. If we do away with this thief called government, the thing called war will disappear. And once war disappears, it should be perfectly obvious that there will no longer be any need to send your beloved children away as soldiers.

Thus, if you want to stop giving rent to landlords and stop giving taxes and your children as soldiers to the government, the quickest way is to do away with that great thief called government.

How, then, are we to put this justice into practice?

There are various methods. But first, tenant farmers, join together—even if only ten or twenty of you—and put into practice the refusal to give rent to landlords and taxes and soldiers to the government. Once you put this into practice, justice will gain friends: from one village it will spread to an entire district, from one district to a prefecture, and eventually from all of Japan throughout the entire world. And here there will arise the ideal land of anarchist communism, a land of freedom and well-being.<ref>Gudō's 無政府共產の理想國 (''museifu kyōsan no risōkoku'') is literally the “ideal country/land of anarchist communism.” Because the society envisioned is explicitly stateless, “ideal land” avoids the potentially misleading English phrase “ideal state.” The paired 安樂自由 (''anraku jiyū'') combines ease or well-being with freedom.</ref>

Nothing can be accomplished without sacrifice. Those who consider themselves ready should undertake a life-risking movement for this justice.<ref>命がけの運動 (''inochigake no undō'') literally denotes a movement or struggle undertaken “at the risk of one's life.” The phrase conveys Gudō's demand for potentially self-sacrificial commitment but does not in itself specify violent action. The pamphlet's explicit reference to revolutionary violence appears later, in the statement on the purpose of publication.</ref>

(END)

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== Statement on the Purpose of Publication ==

This pamphlet has been published to commemorate the imprisonment of the following comrades. On 22 June 1908, in the capital of the Japanese Empire, more than ten of our comrades raised the red flag of anarchist communism and proclaimed their declaration of war against the sovereign power of the Japanese Empire. On 29 August of the same year, they were found guilty:<ref>This refers to the Red Flag Incident (赤旗事件, ''Akahata jiken'') of 22 June 1908, when police clashed with socialist and anarchist demonstrators in Tokyo. The subsequent convictions and imprisonment of leading activists provided the immediate occasion for Gudō's designation of the pamphlet as 入獄紀念 (''nyūgoku kinen'', “in commemoration of imprisonment”).</ref>

 Ōsugi Sakae
 Arahata Kanson
 Satō Satoru

 Momose Susumu
 Utsunomiya Takuji
 Morioka Eiji

 Sakai Toshihiko
 Kimura Genjirō
 Ōsuga Sato

 Yamakawa Hitoshi
 Kogure Rei
 Tokunaga Yasunosuke

This pamphlet has been published in commemoration of the imprisonment of these comrades.

During the absence of these comrades, who will be released two or four years from now, this pamphlet represents the modest missionary work of the small number of comrades remaining in Tokyo.<ref>Gudō uses 傳道 (''dendō''), literally “propagation of the teaching” or “missionary work,” a term commonly used for religious proselytization. The same vocabulary recurs below, where readers are asked to spread anarchist communism to others. Together with his description of correspondence to imprisoned activists as a “gospel” (福音, ''fukuin''), the terminology gives revolutionary propaganda an explicitly religious register.</ref>

Those of you who, after reading this pamphlet, have come to understand that the coming revolution lies in the realization of anarchist communism—

(continued on reverse)

—please send either a postcard or a letter to our comrades who are now in prison. This is the one consolation we can offer the imprisoned comrades, a gospel that will temper the courage of those fighters.<ref>福音 (''fukuin''), “gospel” or “good news,” is explicitly Christian-derived vocabulary. Gudō also employs Christian-inflected terms such as “faith” and the “Kingdom of Heaven” in his January 1908 essay “A View on Lieutenant General Itō's Adultery,” illustrating the eclectic religious vocabulary that coexists with his criticism of “superstition.”</ref>

Letters sent to the imprisoned comrades should be addressed:

 Tokyo Prison, Ichigaya, Ushigome Ward, Tokyo City
 Prisoner [name]

Please clearly write the sender's address and name before mailing it.

This pamphlet must be propagated widely and deeply, so that it may awaken you from the long, long dream of superstition and prevent you from misunderstanding the revolutionary movement that we must undertake in the near future. Therefore, those who understand what anarchist communism means and would not shrink even from throwing dynamite should each spread the teaching to as many people as possible.<ref>This is the pamphlet's most explicit reference to revolutionary violence: ダイナマイトを投ずる事をも辭せぬ, literally “not shrink even from throwing dynamite.” Significantly, it occurs in the concluding statement on the purpose of publication rather than in the main argument addressed to tenant farmers. The body of the pamphlet proposes collective refusal to pay rent and taxes or supply soldiers, beginning with groups of ten or twenty and spreading from village to district, prefecture, Japan, and ultimately the world. The distinction does not make Gudō's willingness to contemplate violence less real, but it clarifies the relationship between revolutionary violence and the collective strategy actually developed in the text.</ref>

But those who still cannot understand after reading this should investigate deeply whether the society that presently exists is truly a just society, and whether our ideal is really to be satisfied with society as it now exists.

== Notes ==
<references />

[[category:Uchiyama Gudo]]
[[category:Translations from Japanese]]