Editing Uchiyama Gudo (section)

=== Anarchist Communism, “Superstition,” and Violence ===

Uchiyama's most developed political program appears in Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei 無政府共産革命 (Anarchist Communist Revolution), a pamphlet clandestinely printed in late October 1908. Addressed particularly to tenant farmers, it advocates common ownership of land and wealth, abolition of taxation and military conscription, organization of workers, rejection of the emperor's divine ancestry, and ultimately the elimination of government. It identifies states as a principal cause of war and combines the gradual organization and awakening of workers with an explicit willingness to employ revolutionary violence.<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, ''Nyūgoku kinen: Museifu kyōsan kakumei—naze kosakunō no seikatsu wa konna ni kurushii ka'' 入獄記念・無政府共産革命――なぜ小作農の生活はこんなに苦しいか (1908), translated in Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism''; Shields, ''Against Harmony'', 156–60.</ref> The pamphlet also attacks the ideological mechanisms by which inequality is naturalized. Uchiyama dismisses as “superstition” (''meishin'' 迷信) the claim that tenant farmers suffer poverty because of karmic retribution from previous lives.<ref>Uchiyama, ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'', translated in Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism''.</ref> In his 1908 essay on a contemporary adultery scandal, he similarly identifies the belief that one's wife is one's possession as a ''meishin'', locating marital possession within a broader “system of private possession” (''shiyū seido'' 私有制度).<ref>Uchiyama Gudō, 「伊藤中將姦通觀」, ''Sekai Fujin'' 世界婦人, no. 21 (1 January 1908): 7; [[UG08ITO-T|English translation]].</ref> “Superstition” thus becomes a recurring term through which Uchiyama challenges beliefs that present contingent relations of property, hierarchy, and domination as natural or necessary.

This critique extended beyond particular “superstitions” to the ideological foundations of social and political authority. In his clandestine edition of ''Museifushugi dōtoku hininron'' 無政府主義道徳否認論 (Anarchism and the Repudiation of Morals), an adaptation of Ōishi Seinosuke's translation of a work by Max Baginski, declarations added to the covers proclaim that “property is theft” and that the state and law protect stolen property, followed by the striking assertion that “morality and religion serve as the head clerks of thieves.” Other declarations attack hierarchical education, submission to government, and representative government itself. Religion here appears not simply as false belief but as part of the social machinery through which property and authority are maintained.<ref>[Sanada citation here; perhaps Kashiwagi as well.]</ref>Yet ''Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei'' contains relatively little explicit Buddhist doctrine. Its arguments are primarily social, economic, anti-militarist, and anti-statist rather than an attempt to deduce anarchist communism directly from Buddhist teachings.<ref>Rambelli, ''Zen Anarchism'', 13; Shields, ''Against Harmony'', 156–61.</ref> The distinction is important: the Buddhist language of equality prominent in Uchiyama's 1904 socialism remained part of his intellectual formation, but his mature anarchist program drew upon a wider and increasingly eclectic range of political and religious resources.