Background
Sakae Osugi was born on January 17, 1885 in Aichi, Japan. He was the eldest son of Kusui Yutaka and Japanese military captain Osugi Azuma. Little is known of his siblings except for the youngest, Ayame.
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大杉 栄
Sakae Osugi was born on January 17, 1885 in Aichi, Japan. He was the eldest son of Kusui Yutaka and Japanese military captain Osugi Azuma. Little is known of his siblings except for the youngest, Ayame.
In his early teens, Ōsugi enlisted in Cadet School but was a poorly motivated, rebellious student. He was reprimanded often and nearly expelled more than once. On one occasion it was implied that he took part in illicit homosexual behavior with a younger cadet; he was held in the school stockade for 10 days for this and received 30 days of confinement. Later he participated in a knife fight; fighting unarmed, fearing he'd injure his opponent, he received injuries which required a fortnight's hospitalization. After this incident he was finally expelled.
He was entered the Foreign Language School and became a friend of Shusui Kotoku, Toshihiko Sakai and other noted socialists and anarchists.
Osugi still held military aspirations as a matter of practicality, since he had no other career ambitions. But a military career became impossible in 1906, when he was arrested during a demonstration-turned-riot against increasing trolley fares. In prison he took the time to fully study socialism and its tenets, and completed his transition to socialist. His interest in science would lay the groundwork for his eventual shift to anarchism. He also taught himself languages including Italian, Esperanto, Russian, English, French, and German.
After the aforementioned trolley-fare protest riot, he was arrested for violating press laws in connection with two articles he published in late 1906 and early 1907. He served two more terms in 1908 for violating the Peace Police Law on two occasions, the early-1908 Rooftop Incident (Yane-jo jiken) and the late-1908 Red Flag Incident (Akahata jiken).
While in prison, Kotoku, now an avowed anarchist, encouraged him to research the work of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. Osugi was particularly receptive to Kropotkin's scientific approach to anarchy, and he translated Kropotkin's autobiography in 1920.
His arrest as part of the Red Flag Incident handed him his heaviest prison term, but it saved him and others convicted at the time from being associated with the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku Jiken) of 1910. At the trials, twelve anarchists, including Kotoku Shusui and one of the few anarchists found not guilty during the Red Flag trials, were found guilty of conspiracy to assassinate the Emperor and were sentenced to death. Ōsugi encountered the defendants in prison but was afraid to speak to them too loudly. Kotoku, nearly deaf, was unable to hear him. Osugi also encountered their executioner, who retired after their executions.
After this experience, he never challenged the state with open calls for violent revolution, and his future essays instead focused on individualism and criticisms of capitalism. He would not be arrested again until 1919: for assaulting a police officer, for which he received a 3-month term. He was also briefly held in detention in France in 1922 before being deported to Japan.
On September 16, 1923, in the chaos immediately following the Great Kantō earthquake, Osugi and his lover/partner, Noe Ito, and his 6-year-old nephew, Munekazu Tachibana, were arrested, beaten to death, and thrown into a well by a squad of military police led by Lieutenant Amakasu Masahiko.
The killing of such high-profile anarchists along with a child became known as the Amakasu Incident and sparked surprise and anger throughout Japan.
After his mother's death, his depression led him to search for a spiritual outlet in Christianity. He attended several churches, never fully accepted the miracles of the faith, and "believed that God is something within the self". He was eventually baptized when others assured him he would understand the religion more if he did, but he later wrote that he was never fully satisfied.
Later exposure to criticisms of Christianity from prominent socialists led him to question his faith, but it was not until the onset of the Russo-Japanese War that he fully cut his ties to the religion. When his local church began to merge its sermons with patriotic and pro-war sentiments,[citation needed] he felt this was a betrayal of his spiritual principles and left permanently.
Osugi was married to Hori Yasuko in September 1906, but later pursued a relationship with Kamichika Ichiko and author Noe Itō as part of his philosophical and political beliefs in egoism and free love.
