The Struggle Without Weapons (1960, Japan)

Aichi Insurance Physicians’ Newspaper

In 1923, immediately after the Great Kanto Earthquake dealt a devastating blow to the Japanese economy, the government of the time began suppressing the working class through the Peace Preservation Law. Kenji Yamamoto, a biologist at Doshisha University, felt a deep need for new sexual education and began promoting birth control to the common people. However, he was met with obstruction from both university authorities and the government.

In 1925, with the arrival of a Soviet labor union representative in Japan, the government detained many liberal-minded students and workers. Yamamoto was also expelled from the university and joined the movement of the Labour-Farmer Party. Witnessing the tragic conditions of the Sayama Village farmers' union dispute firsthand, he realized that before spreading his scientific ideas to the world, political reform was essential.

He was supported and understood by his wife, his sons, and his parents, who ran the family’s traditional restaurant, Hanayashiki. During the Sayama Village struggle, Yamamoto came to know people like Saki and Kiyoshi—a mother and son tenant farmers—Honda, a member of the Communist Party, and Nobu, a young woman who had feelings for Honda.

Soon after, the financial crisis struck, and the ruling class launched wars of aggression. In 1928, under heavy oppression, Yamamoto ran for office as a candidate of the Labour-Farmer Party and was elected to the Diet. On March 15, amid mass arrests targeting the working class, he rose in protest. As the government planned to further tighten the Peace Preservation Law, Yamamoto resolved to deliver a speech opposing it in the plenary session of the Diet. On the night before that decisive day, he was assassinated by a right-wing extremist at Koraikan in Kanda. He was 40 years old.

From that day in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, through long and oppressive years, Japan’s wars of aggression finally came to an end. After the defeat, on the anniversary of Yamamoto’s death, held under a sea of red flags, people were moved by the powerful way he had lived. Eighty years have passed since the time when “Yamamoto stood alone defending the bastion.” Today, with Japan possessing the world’s second-largest military and hosting the violent machinery of U.S. forces, a nationwide effort is urgently needed to defend the pacifist constitution through the “Article 9 Association”—a movement seeking support from the majority of the Japanese people.