The leading motif of the Japanese socialism which was formulated during the third decade of the Meiji Era (1897-1907), and which took for its model the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (S. P. D.), was “parliamentarism”, to be exercised by the “middle class”. In other words, it was expected that socialism would be brought about by an influential political party similar to the S. P. D. In this sense, socialism required the art of “politics” to obtain a parliamentary majority.
During the next decade, however, the major theme of Japanese socialism shifted drastically from “parliamentarism” to “direct action”, because of the influence of the first Russian Revolution and also because of a growing scepticism towards the S. P. D. This shift was symbolized by Shusui Kotoku's well-known article “The Change of My Thought”. According to Kotoku, socialism could be achieved only through the “direct action” of workers.
At the same time, the political party came to be regarded as useless or harmful for the socialist movement, and thus “politics”, as an art of gaining a majority, was rejected. The “rejection of politics”, to use Hitoshi Yamakawa's term, became increasingly strong along with the disappointment which followed the S. P. D.'s decision to support Germany's participation in World War I.
It was the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 which again changed the attitude of Japanese socialists towards “politics”, and divided it into three directions. The first of these was anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism, which was represented by Sakae Osugi's rejection of Bolshevism and adherence to a “rejection of politics”. The second was state socialism, represented by Motoyuki Takabatake, who identified Bolshevism with state socialism and opposed the “rejection of politics”. The third was Marxism, represented by Yamakawa, who evaluated positively the leadership of the Communist Party in the Russian Revolution and changed his position from a “rejection of politics” to “political confrontation”. This “change of direction”, as Yamakawa called it, along with Osugi's death in 1923, meant that “direct action” or the “rejection of politics”, as the legacy of Meiji socialism, ceased to be the leading motif of Japanese socialism in the Taisho Era.
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