Draft:Ikkokushakaishugi

Ikkokushakaishugi (一国社会主義) was the name of an ideological line that emerged within the Japanese Communist Party in the 1930s. It focused on the idea that the JCP should separate from the Comintern to develop a socialist movement exclusive to Japan, centered on the national particularities of the Japanese proletariat.

History
In June 1933, two important leaders of the Japanese Communist Party, Manabu Sano and Sadachika Nabeyama, who had been imprisoned after the April 16th incident, announced their conversion to nationally oriented communism through the so-called Letter to the co-defendants (共同被告同志に告ぐる書). In August 1934, several outside prison activists, including Saiki Nishiyama, Toshitada Tateyama, Gonosuke Kawachi, and others, made contact with several communists in prison and began working on developing small circles and intellectual groups with the aim of spread their ideas in the labor movement. Around December of the same year, they launched the "Central Leadership" and created the "Ikkokushakaishugi Thesis". On 15 June 1935, they collaborated with Ryūichi Inamura, a Labour-farmer, to publish a newsletter. The Nihon Seiji Shimbun was inaugurated.

In addition to Nishiyama, Tateyama, Kawachi, and Fusako Kutsumi, who were out of prison, Sano Nabeyama, Sadaki Takahashi, Shiro Mitamura, Seigen Tanaka, Jokichi Kazama, Katsuo Nakao, and other prominent communists joined this movement. In the inaugural issue of the Nihon Seiji Shimbun, the background behind the Ikkokushakaishugi movement is addressed, which is, among other things, the imminent danger of war that demands urgent reform on the agenda of the socialist movement. In this first issue of the Nihon Seiji Shimbun, the ideologues of national communism argue for the need to promote a movement of workers who "represent more seriously the social and national interests of the Japanese people." It was argued that the current Japanese Communist Party, given its commitment to the Comintern's international project, had begun to disassociate itself from the real life and consciousness of Japanese workers. Supporters of the Ikkokushakaishugi believed that due to the adverse effects of the ruling party and the sectarianism of the Comintern, the JCP had ceased to be a "Japanese workers' party" to a mere "Japanese branch" of a larger international workers' party. Based on this belief, it was demanded that the Japanese Communist Party should be redirected along a national line that would allow it to return to being a Japanese workers' party and thus reconnect with its own proletariat. In short, the JCP should first care about the workers of its own country and their needs and then worry about the workers of other nations. It was then concluded that the organization should focus its attention on the common nationality and achieve the independent development of Japan.

In addition to this, the supporters of the Ikkokushakaishugi idea, believed that internationalism, if it were to occur, should first occur with Asian workers before workers from any other nation. The nationalist communists of Japan believed that the interests of the European proletariat were right now aligned with European colonialism, therefore their interests violated the interests of the colonized Asian and Japanese proletariat. For this reason, they believed that the interests of the Japanese class were more represented by a "socialist pan-Asianism" than by "full internationalism". They further believed that the communist revolution in Japan would lead to "great power socialism", where Japan would have a central role in an Asian socialist union that would include China, Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan, similar to the one the Russian SFSR had over the rest of the Soviet Republics.

On the other hand, regarding the evaluation of the Imperial system, the intellectuals of this movement were passive, affirming that as long as the masses of workers and farmers felt identified and represented by the figure of the Emperor, the demand for the abolition of the monarchy it would not be a realistic proposal in a Japanese socialist project. Although they did not consider themselves monarchists, they believed that the relationship between the Russian monarchy and the Russian proletariat was not the same as that between the Japanese monarchy and the Japanese proletariat, but as long as the Japanese workers felt represented by the figure of the emperor, ending this figure would go against the interests of the workers. How the Royal House and a Soviet-type socialist system could coexist with each other was never clearly explained.

Despite the claim that this movement best understood and represented the feelings shared among the worker and peasant masses of Japan, the truth is that they developed little real influence in the worker and peasant movement, limiting themselves mainly to attracting young intellectuals. Furthermore, the expectations of movement participants that they would be able to escape government oppression if they did not advocate "overthrowing the imperial system" and transforming themselves into a legal movement did not materialize. After the February 26 Incident, the authorities launched a new campaign of political repression against political radicals, in which the national communists were equally affected, leading to the progressive dissolution of said trend.

References and further reading

 * Akira Ito, Conversion and the Imperial System: Japanese Communist Movement in the 1930s, Keiso Shobo, 1995 ISBN 4326300957
 * Michitoshi Takahata, "Ikkokushakaishugi - Manabu Sano, Sadachika Nabeyama" Scientific Study Group on Thought, "Joint Research Turning" (Part 1), Heibonsha, 1978 (revised and enlarged ed.)
 * Takahiro Fukuie, "From Ikkokushakaishugi to Socialism in Democracy: The War and Postwar Periods of Manabu Sano and Sadachika Nabeyama", Civilization Structure Theory, Kyoto University, No.9 (2013)