Background
Samezo Kuruma was born on September 24, 1893.
Samezo Kuruma was born on September 24, 1893.
Samezo Kuruma was drawn to the study of political economy at an early age, influenced by Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. in Germany he began to study Marx seriously, beginning with Theories of Surplus Value.
Samezo Kuruma worked briefly for Sumitomo Bank in Osaka, where he had been led to believe he could engage in economic research. He very quickly grew disillusioned with the job, and the Rice Riots that spread Japan in the summer of 1918 provided an impetus to leave the bank and also influenced his move towards socialism and Marxism.
In the 1920s, Samezo Kuruma contributed a number of articles and translations to the Journal of the Ohara Institute for Social Research, and taught a course on the history of political economy at Doshisha University in nearby Kyoto. His primary interest at the time, however, was Marx’s theory of crisis, and he presented a series of articles on the subject at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1936, the Ohara Institute moved its offices from Osaka to Tokyo, and Kuruma also settled in the capital city. In the late 1930s, leftwing thought was increasingly subject to state censorship, and this new climate of repression curtailed the activities of scholars at the Ohara Institute. In this period of reaction and war, Samezo Kuruma continued his research on capitalism, closely examining Marx’s ideas, although he no longer publicly had a public forum to present his ideas. In particular, he was interested in Marx’s theory of money and the phenomenon of inflation, which he recognized would be rampant in Japan following the war.
In 1947 Samezo Kuruma became managing director of Ohara Social Problem Research Institute and when in 1949 that institute was amalgamated into Hosei University he was appointed its director.
In the early postwar years, Samezo Kuruma published two books that brought together his prewar writings on crisis-theory and the history of political economy. He also participated in a series of monthly study meetings on Marx’s Capital that brought him into contact with the developing ideas of Kozo Uno, who would later exert a great influence on the Japanese New Left.
The last two decades of Kuruma’s life were taken up with the editing of Marx-Lexikon zur Politischen Ökonomie, which grouped together passages from Marx and to a lesser extent Engels concerning a number of key topics (competition, method, materialist conception of history, crisis, and money). In carrying out this massive project, which resulted in fifteen separate volumes, Samezo Kuruma relied heavily on the note cards that he had patiently accumulated. Marx-Lexikon was published by Otsuki Shoten in collaboration with the Ohara Institute, beginning in 1968, with both the original German and the Japanese translations. Kuruma had just completed three of the volumes on Money in September of 1982 when he was hospitalized for lung cancer.On October 20 of that year, he died at the age of 89.