Main Body
The Popular Front Against Fascism and Kawai Eijirō
In which the author returns to the Genri Nihon assault on Tōdai, most noticeably on Kawai Eijirō. The authorities used the Comintern’s adoption of Popular Front tactics (1935) and Japan’s war in China as pretext to crack down on dissent. Kawai continued his criticism of Japan and refused to allow his books to go out of print (the authorities had hoped he would agree). In October the authorities acted to ban Kawai’s four books. Direct pressure on university president Nagayo proved unavailing, at least in the short term. The author suggests that Kawai’s defense against the charge that he backed the Popular Front was disingenuous.
Criticism of Liberalism
On February 1, 1938 Professors Ōuchi, Arisawa, and Wakimura were arrested. This, the second Popular Front Incident (or Faculty Group Incident), became the occasion for all-out attack on Kawai by government officials and the right wing. At the time of the emperor-organ issue, Diet member Ida Iwakuzu had been in the vanguard of the attack on Minobe, and on February 16, in a plenary session of the House of Peers, Ida stood up once again and raised the university issue—why this evil omen at Tōdai? He traced its roots for nearly three hours, from morning into afternoon, spanning the lunch recess; his long-windedness was part speech, part question.
Ida asserted that having been taken over by the “anti-fascist Popular Front struggle” under the direction of the Comintern, Tōdai had betrayed the kokutai and become a den of liberalism, democracy, and anti-statism; word for word, his speech echoed assertions Minoda had developed earlier in Genri Nihon. In fact, at virtually the same time as this speech, Genri Nihon published State and University: A Scholarly Critique of the Democratic, Anti-State Thinking of the Faculty of Law of Tokyo Imperial University,[1] assembling all of Minoda’s attacks on Tōdai up to that point; this speech was taken from that book. In the speech Ida named Kawai, Suehiro, Yokota, Tanaka, Miyazawa, Yanaihara and used direct quotations from their books to attack them. And he did attack: “Two Tōdai faculties—Law and Economics—are the Popular Front ‘on parade.’” “In fact, the Tōdai Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Economics are the den, the training ground, the research institute of the anti-statists.” The attack on Kawai was particularly tenacious, holding that the third-stage liberalism Kawai espoused (the first stage was liberal laissez-faire; the second, social betterment) aimed at the realization of socialism, and charging that it was only a hair’s-breadth away from communism. The society it aimed for was the same; the difference lay merely in Kawai’s rejection of violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kawai said, “In Japan, too, providing it abandons violence, the Communist Party should be permitted political activity,” and Ida deemed that inexcusably pro-communist. Moreover, Kawai’s sharp criticism of