The Cannery Boat/The Monument
The Monument
by
Sanji Kishi
The Monument
[What is written here applies to the whole of Japan, and not merely to a certain district or village.—Author.]
Osawa is a mountain village in the province of Shiga. In the winter it is half-buried in deep snow-drifts. It contains five hundred houses, and about two thousand inhabitants.
In this village there are a hundred and seventy homesteads of “despised peasantry.”[1] They settled here more than forty years ago, on the high valley to the west of the village, and formed a closely-knit society of their own. The place where they live is called “Yotani,” or “the hermit’s valley,” and is held in low repute by the whole village.
But suddenly radio-active springs gushed out in Yotani.
About a hundred and fifty of the houses in Yotani were let to tenants.
Igari Ihei was the hereditary elder of the village and at the same time a big landowner. A hundred and fifty peasants rented land from Igari. Igari grew fat and round on the rent they paid. He moved to Kyoto, so that no one should call him the man from the “hermits’ valley,” and built a big house in the foreign style at Shimo-Kamo, and sent his daughter to a boarding-school for the daughters of gentry.
Of course the radio-active springs gushed out on the land of Igari.
Igari sent “professors” especially from Kyoto to examine them. After this the newspapers raised a great noise about the new mineral springs, which in radio-activity occupied the fourth, or maybe it was the fifth or sixth place in the world. And in less than a year the whole story had become a matter of life and death for the people of Yotani.
Igari Ihei had sold all his land in Yotani to other people. And these other people lost no time in forming a limited company for the exploitation of the Yotani springs. And a hundred and fifty tenants suddenly received notice from the new company to “vacate the land in connection with the transfer of the ownership into other hands.”
Naturally this aroused a storm of indignation. Three hundred persons plunged down the mountain-side in the thick snow-drifts to the Tokaido high-road to Kyoto, and crossed the bridge Kara, till they arrived at Otsu. From there they took the train to Kyoto, to Igari.
Igari admitted that he had made a mistake in selling the land without giving the tenants notice, and promised to give them a hundred thousand yen, at the same time asking their pardon.
A hundred thousand yen!
The univited guests were overwhelmed at the idea of such a sum.
True, they had held the land from one generation to another, but the money paid them for quitting would amount to a sum such as they had never even dreamed of. Each would have something like six hundred and sixty yen!
This was considered to settle the matter. … But it was not long before they realized that they had been fooled. Once they had left the land they did not know what to do. It was impossible for them to live in Yotani.
“If you are in difficulties, why not try working in Igari’s factory in Kyoto? I’ll arrange it all for you myself.”
And so Tauboi Zangoro, the former bailiff of Igari, sent about fifty families to Kyoto. They all began to work in Igari’s aniline plant, in the suffocating fumes of dyes and chemicals.
Only a hundred families remained in the village of Osawa.
The excavators and workers of the new company invaded Yotani and began mercilessly to blow up the land that the peasants had looked after for decades as tenderly as if it had been their own bodies. This they did in the very eyes of the remaining peasants.
The fields were turned into roads and building lots. A clearing in the forest was made and a building in the foreign style put up. This was the hotel for the springs.
A delicatessen store, a department store and twelve small restaurants were built in Motomura, or the “main village,” as the central part of Osawa was called.
All these enterprises flourished.
The company began to buy up, at double price too, the straw huts of the remaining peasantry, which were not even fit for fuel, and the land under them.
The few peasant farmers who were working on their own land acted as agents in these transactions, as well as our friend Tsuboi. Having sold their houses and land, the peasants went to Kyoto and the neighbouring villages. Now there were only eighty homesteads left.
These tenants had long ago spent the six hundred and sixty yen compensation they had received.
In the meantime Motomura had become a regular little town and seven splendid hotels had been built in Yotani.
Buses ran between Otsu and Motomura and the company made an automobile road between Motomura and Yotani.
“So long as the Suihei still have huts in the ‘hermits’ valley’ it will be difficult to get visitors to the springs.”
That’s what they said in Motomura.
“Since we agree to pay proper compensation for you to quit, it is to our mutual interest to settle things,” the company told the remaining families. “Only think, if you get good money for quitting you could go somewhere else and go in for peddling and the like.”
Such a proposal was sheer mockery. It must be refused. A struggle must be waged.
Such was the decision come to by six peasant farmers and forty-one tenants.
Forty-seven homesteads from Yotani (“The Hermit’s Valley”) sought out the local branch of the Suihei (“Despised Peasants”) in Otsu, and set up a branch in the village of Osawa.
The peasants who did not join the organization because they were dazzled by the big price of one thousand yen offered them by the company to quit (the average price prevailing at that time being two hundred yen), rapidly came to terms with the company and bade farewell to their friends and left the village.
The company offered the remaining peasants a small plot of land each to build on in the hamlet of Shimaji, three hundred yen each for leaving Yotani and more land at rent for thirty years in Shimaji.
This offer roused great argument. Thirty-six persons wanted to accept it, and eleven were against it, and these eleven were the very poorest of all the tenants.
“Your lives are different from ours, that’s why you’re so obstinate. We have to keep big families, old parents and children. How are we to live here? Think it over!” said Todoroki, his president of the Suihei branch, with tears in his eyes.
“I have a family of nine. I even wanted to sell my daughter to the Otsu brothel, to keep things going for a while. I told Kattyan of Motomura I would, but she said fourteen years is too young. How are we to live? If it goes on like this we shall die of hunger.” Grandfather Kisida sniffed.
All were silent.
All heads were bowed.
Miesima, who was against the majority, looked around and said quietly: “Good. I am bound to admit that what you say is just. We have been struggling for three years. But I mean to go on. You are right in saying my life is different from yours. There are only three of us—myself, my wife, and my mother. The argument is over. All those who have accepted the company’s offer will go to Shimaji. Those who agree with me will remain.”
“We will stay,” answered Kurose and Ozawa, both together. Others also in the same group raised their heads and said in once voice, “We will stay.”
Miesima turned to Todoroki: “Hand over the banner of our union.”
The banner brought by Todoroki was handed over to Miesima, to the eleven. A sob was heard.
II
So it was that eleven families were left in Yotani.
Very often they had to ward off surprise attacks from the company. When they were abused in insulting language the fathers of families joined together and attacked the company, but they were always defeated.
The Suihei district committee in Shiga mobilized three hundred of its members in the provinces of Yazu, Koga, Gamau and Aichi, and sent them to the village of Osawa. They seized the offices of the company in Yotani and demanded the immediate discharge of employees who had beaten up the peasants, and compensation for eleven who had been wounded, together with the publication of an official apology in the press. If the company refused, the Suihei members threatened to destroy all the health-resort buildings.
The company’s officials and employees ran away.
The next evening fifty police arrived from Otsu, Kusanu and Moriyama, after the demonstrators had already left Yotani, and nothing was to be seen in the darkness but the white ruins of the office.
The police arrested all the eleven members of the local branch, and took them to Kusani, corded together.
Then the Shiga district committee of the Suihei organized a mass demonstration in Kusanu. The Kyoto committee sent a special section to the home of Igari Ihei, who had already managed to become a shareholder in the company.
Three of the eleven—Miesima, Kurose and Ozawa—were sentenced “under clause 216 of the criminal code” to ten months’ hard labour, after they had already spent two months in prison.
A year later, when the three turned up in Yotani, they found a garage and a new restaurant there. The sounds of the Samisen[2] floated to their ears. They sensed the spirit of a new town.
The eleven peasant homesteads crouching on the other side of the valley seemed to have been passed over by time.
III
Miesima and Ozawa scraped together the small sum required for travelling expenses and set off with their banner to the national conference of the Suihei.
The popular Socialist college-teacher, Doshi sha Hamamato Sendzo, came to the conference and made a speech of welcome.
When they got back the delegates made a detailed report to their comrades.
Next summer, the summer of 1921, Miesima noticed on his way to work a man of middle height clad in a light kimono. He recognized him as Hamamato Sendzo, who had spoken at the conference.
“Hamamato!” he exclaimed, removing his hokabura,[3] “You are Hamamato. I am a member of the Suihei in this village.”
Hamamato stopped.
“Really! Where are you from?” he said.
“From over there.”
Miesima pointed towards the huts huddled together in the valley.
“I was at the conference last year and recognized your face.”
“I’m staying at the Hotel Tekisuikaku. Come and see me.”
Miesima bowed and thanked him. Hamamato strode on with big steps. After he had gone a little way he stopped and called out:
“What’s your name?”
“Miesima Sigekiti.”
Hamamato bowed and went on. Miesima followed him with his eyes.
But although Hamamato invited Miesima, Miesima had no time to go. He had become a day-labourer, accepting the worst-paid work that came his way, and often walking as much as twenty kilometers to work.
It rained for a week after the day of the meeting with Hamamato.
One night when Miesima was lying on his mat, shivering with cold, a man in a thin white kimono suddenly appeared at the door of the hut.
“Where does Miesima live?”
Miesima, recognizing Hamamato’s voice, leapt up from his mat and threw on his kimono in the dark.
“Here I am. We have no electricity, that’s why it’s dark. Let’s go to Ozawa.”
Miesima and Hamamato set off for Ozawa’s house. He was the only one of the eleven who had electricity.[4]
While Hamamato and Miesima were talking in Ozawa’s house, their host went out to tell the other members of the local organization of Hamamato’s arrival, and soon seven of them were gathered in a circle around the dim electric bulb.
Hamamato, who seemed unaccustomed to sitting, began to speak standing up.
“The Suihei movement will very soon find itself in a blind alley.”
“Why?”
“In the first place because it is not going far enough in the struggle. A certain equality will be gained. To this extent the movement is right. But the condition of the peasants will not be improved in the slightest as a result of the Suihei movement. In three or four years you will have solved all the problems raised by the Suihei and there will be nothing more to do. No doubt all of you realize that the Suihei has gone no further that the solution of its original aims. That is why a change in the whole direction of the movement is now necessary.”
Tense and weary, all turned their sun-burnt faces towards Hamamato.
“You don’t seem to have quite understood me. All right, then, let’s have questions and answers. Who wants to ask something?”
Hamamato swept his glance over all present.
“They call us the despised ones,” replied Ozawa in dropping accents.
“Is that all? Who else wants to speak?”
“Despised and poverty-stricken,” said someone else, it might have been Isin.
“Poverty-stricken? That’s true. But how—poverty-stricken?”
Hamamato again scrutinized their faces.
“You still don’t understand? Then let me ask you something. Are you all tenants?”
“No. We have no land at all,” replied Miesima, thinking of old grievances.
“Good. People like you are called the agricultural proletariat, or, if you like, you are agricultural labourers. This class is at the very bottom of the social scale. There are other poor peasants as well as you, however. There are peasants renting a tiny plot of land, and almost starving on it. These two classes compose eighty per cent. of the agricultural population of our land. And so the poor peasantry and agricultural workers cultivate rice”—here Hamamato suddenly raised his voice—“and the landowners, who don’t do a stroke of work, get half the crop for nothing. The landowners don’t work themselves. Until we drive them out of the countryside, because they’re absolutely useless people, there will be no way of improving our own conditions. You, the agricultural proletariat, without even rented land, must be the first to seize the landlords’ lands.
“Next, those peasants cultivating tiny plots of land must see that they get more from the proprietors’ land. And then they must demand lower rent. If you work beyond your strength and give up half your crops gratis, you are condemning yourself to starvation. There can be no victory without a struggle. You must join an organization that will struggle for you, you must join the Peasants’ Union. The very poorest peasantry and agricultural labourers in the country, by setting up the Japanese Peasants’ Union and drawing up a joint programme, have spread the united front throughout Japan. If these demands are not fulfilled, the members of the Union must put up a fight against the counter measures of the landlords, such as ‘taking away the land,’ ‘forbidding work on rented land,’ and the like. The only way to the emancipation of the poorest peasantry lies in the creation of peasant unions, for the carrying out of this struggle!”
The faces of all had become firm and austere. Wide-eyed glances were directed at Hamamato, from whose lips fell scathing words.
“Further … the landowners in the countryside are not the only tyrants. They are hand-in-glove with the capitalists in the town. To the capitalists in the town belong all the plants and factories, with their huge output and millions of workers. They take all the profits themselves. So you see the relations between the landlord and the poor peasant in the country are just the same as the relations between the capitalist and the workers in the towns.
“And the workers have to struggle with the capitalists for higher wages, and other improvements in working conditions, through their trade unions and by means of strikes. The labour movement in Tokyo and Osaka just now is blazing up. There are two or three strikes a day at Osaka, and it is usually the workers who win them. But the peasant movement lags far behind the workers’. By developing the peasant movement, and linking it up with the workers’ movement, we shall form a united front of the masses in town and country, for resisting our common oppressors, the landowners and the capitalists!”
Hamamato suddenly clutched at his chest, with shining eyes. He broke off his speech abruptly, took out his handkerchief and pressed it to his lips. He coughed, and blood appeared on the handkerchief. Ozawa ran in a fright to get some water. He hurriedly scooped up a cup of water, but when he turned round again Hamamato was prostrate on the mat, with Miesima, Komaka and Kurose surrounding him and chafing his back.
IV
The next day, in the rain, Ozawa, Miesima and Kurose went off, for the first time in two years, to visit Todoroki in Samajee. Their whole conception of the world had changed since the evening before. There was no longer that feeling of strain which they had felt before parting with Todoroki.
“So you’ve come to talk about the Peasants’ Union? If the Union begins to function properly, you will be our saviours, the whole eleven of you.”
“Not us—Hamamato. Last night he had a hæmorrhage and he’s in a hotel now.”
When they began to talk about Hamamato’s illness all four of them, as if by common consent, put down their cups of sake.[5]
“No, thanks. Let’s stop that.”
Todoroki pushed away his cup.
“You’re right. I’ll stop too”—and Miesima, following his example, also pushed away his cup.
Todoroki threw a straw cloak over his naked body and tied the strings of his straw hat under his chin, and ran out in the rain to call the rest. By noon about twenty persons were gathered together. Night fell, but no one went away.
It was very late when the three from Yotani, and six representatives from Simaojzi returned to Yotani. The Osawa Peasant Union already existed.
Hamamato lay on his bed with a cold compress on his head in the Tekisuikaku Hotel.
Nine men, followed by the dissatisfied glances of the hotel servants, crowded up the stairs to Hamamato’s room. The waitresses under the stairway were alarmed to see these strange personages in a respectable hotel, and wondered what they had come for.
They left behind them in the entrance a heap of wet straw cloaks, from which an unpleasant smell arose.
“Long five the Osawa Peasant Union!”
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”
Loud cries suddenly resounded through the whole hotel. The waitresses ran off in a fright. The servants from the restaurant came crowding up the stairs with anxious faces.
Hamamato, clad in nothing but his night-kimono, was seated on a padded quilt, surrounded by a crowd of people. A happy smile played over his weary, green-tinged face.
“Comrades! Just a minute. I want to teach you a fighting peasant song. I’ll sing it, and you’ll learn if off by heart, won’t you?”
Moistening his lips and casting a laughing glance around, he began to sing:
“If we didn’t pay our taxes
We’d be thrown into the road.
Thirty per cent. this year,
Fifty per cent. next year,
And so on till they take the whole crop.
What girl would think of marrying a man
Who knows nothing about the Peasants’ Union?”
At first they were all stupefied with astonishment, and then there was a storm of clapping.
“What’s the matter? What d’you want?” said Hamamato, looking angrily at the hotel servants standing in the corridor.
The unexpected meeting between Miesima and Hamamato served as an impetus to the creation, one wild rainy night, in the depths of the district of Shiga, in a forgotten mountain hamlet, of the Peasants’ Union, in 1921, just when the feverish excitement in the town was subsiding, just when strikes were breaking out like fires every day, just when the Japanese trade union movement was passing from the spontaneous, elemental stage to one of organized planning.
V
Seven years passed. And in these seven years Peasant Unions sprang up all over Japan. The Osawa Peasant Union in the district of Shiga became the centre of the movement and about thirty organizations were formed in the district, arising directly out of the struggle. They all belonged to the Japanese Left-Wing Peasant Union. A district council of the Peasant Unions was formed, and the unions grew at a tremendous rate.
The First Year of General Elections
The significance of the general elections in 1928 consisted by no means in the fact that they were “the first general elections in our land” (vide the jubilations of the bourgeois press). What then was their significance? During the winter of the preceding year the Japanese proletarian movement was in a state of transition, a Communist Party had at last emerged, shaking off narrow “sectarian” elements and working within the legal “worker-peasant” party, “Ronoto.” Broad propaganda was embarked upon, using the elections and all legal opportunities.
The Osawa Peasant Union had three times taken up the struggle against the Yotani health-resort company during those seven years. Over twenty of them had been thrown into prison as a result. The Osawa Peasant Union had become the centre of the peasant movement in the district, the motive-power of the whole organization in the Shiga province. Miesima, Ozawa and Kurose had become whole-time organizers.
The day of the elections approached. Miesima, as the secretary of the local Ronoto organization, exerted all his energies to get the central committee to accept the candidacy of Hamamato Sendzo for the electorate of Shiga. Almost all through the elections Hamamato himself was confined to his bed.
The energetic work of the Communist Party made itself felt throughout the electorate of Osawa. Communist Party leaflets were sure to be handed round in halls where election speeches were being made. If an election meeting was to be held in a village, the next day an “activities group” was sure to turn up the evening before, often fighting its way through a blizzard that seemed impenetrable by any living creature, and begin distributing leaflets to each house, pasting them up on doors and telegraph posts.
The members of the Osawa Peasant Union, as the central figures of this conspiratorial activity, drew down upon their heads the wrath and repressive measures of the authorities. Very often there were groups of arrested freezing all day in the local police station. Just before the elections, in February, the reprisals and police measures were heightened. A speaker hardly had time to utter the opening phrase of his speech before he was arrested and hauled off on a rope from one police station to another, miles and miles in the snow and storm.
Both the president and agitator of the Peasants’ Union were arrested a day or two before the elections. The police actually tried to lay their hands on the candidate himself, on Hamamato, but the “activity group” interfered.
The police arrived late for an election meeting at a tiny mountain hamlet, half-buried in snow-drifts. The speaker from Tokyo hastened to profit by this and opened the meeting of a hundred persons with the words:
“Comrade peasants! Do you know thirteen slogans? I’ll explain them to you to-day, comrades! They are the slogans of the Communist Party. These slogans go straight to the point. How shall I put it to you? There is no one else to stand up for the interests of the poor peasantry but our worker-peasant party. And that’s because it is backed up by the Communist Party, the party which is really fighting for the interests of the workers and peasants. Listen! We are against the government of proprietors and capitalists”
Banging on the table with his fist he spoke about the Party which had issued these slogans. But, first of all, he explained the slogan which demands “confiscation of the big properties and the transfer of the land to the poor peasantry.”
This village had the advantage of much fighting experience. The audience rose to its feet and drowned the speaker’s words in applause. The audacious speaker ended up with the words, flung into the packed hall:
“Long live the Communist Party of Japan!”
“Hurrah!” shouted his hearers.
This was probably the first time that a crowd cheered the Communist Party on the eve of elections.
But news of this speech got about. The young speaker was seized at Otsu, and put in the police cells, where he remained till the middle of March.
Hamamato Sendzi was returned, much to the alarm of the bourgeoisie.
The elections were over, but not police repressions. The district police administration increased police guards and arrested peasants wholesale all over the province. Houses were broken into and old men, women, and even children were corded up and dragged off to prison. There was not a single family that included members of the union in Osawa which had not suffered arrests. An aged paralytic, all of whose relatives had been taken away, committed suicide. There were three other suicides, all under the influence of terror. Some threw themselves into the well.
Such was the state of affairs just before the fifteenth of March.
A group of peasants from Yotani and Simajzi, just released, was again seized on March 15th, in their sleep, thrown into an automobile, taken to Moriyama, Kusanu and Otsu and kept there some two months. Eleven from Yotani—including Miesima, Ozava and Kurose—were sent up for trial.
The Peasant Union was continually harried by the police. Any prominent member of a local union was thrown into prison directly after being sent up for trial. Its leaders arrested, the fighting front fell to pieces throughout the province.
Spring had not come yet.
In the beginning of April the Yotani Health-Resort Company put a huge advertisement in all the papers.
The seven hotels were full of guests by the beginning of the summer. Exalted old gentlemen with polished skulls emerged from their doors in the evenings, accompanied by two or three young women apiece. Geishas with Marumage coiffures clung to the arms of the fat men. Young girls, looking like tortoises in European dress, walked hand-in-hand beside their worthy mammas, going for excursions into the hills. When the guests met each other they exchanged amiabilities before passing on.
“Isn’t the water splendid?”
“Wonderful! So lovely and cold!”
Automobiles threaded in and out of the crowd.
The hillside and valley were clothed in bright green, and this green was deeply resented by the women and old men left behind in Yotani.
“What next?” they exclaimed. “Our village used not to be a place for idlers and wasters to amuse themselves in. Where are our Miesimas and Kuroses and Ozawas?”
Old man Ogawa was sixty-three years of age. His back was crooked from age, but he was convinced that there would never be any improvement in the life of the peasantry without the Peasant Union. One night, leaning on his stick, he left his hut quietly and dragged himself to the house of Todoroki at Simati.
“Well! Do the police still visit you?”
“They do sometimes, but we only have little children at home nowadays, so they have to go away again.”
Todoroki’s wife, astonished to see the old man, helped him into the house.
“I’ve come to Simati to have a talk with the young ones. They have taken away our best men, at their best age, but that doesn’t mean we must lose all hope.”
“Have you come about the union, father?”
“Yes, I have. What would Hamamato think of us? He brought the union to our village ten years ago. I was fifty-three then, and I went to hear him speak. But I didn’t understand it all. Then we got a Peasant Union in Osawa. It’s been broken up now, but are we going to sit down under it?”
“It’s no good, they’re all in prison and we can do nothing. No one’s left here but boys. And even these have been taken away and have been in in the police cells these three days.”
Old Ogawa well knew, thanks to the experience of March 15th, why the government was so much afraid of them: it was because all the best members of the Peasant Union worked in the Communist Party. The government was terribly afraid that the Communist Party would rise against the landowners again.
The words, “Thirty per cent. this year, fifty per cent. next year, and so on till they get the whole crop,” rang in the old man’s head.
VI
Sixteen-year-old Tetsu, Siro, Yasuki and other lads, left without fathers, often dreamed of setting up the union again. But the police found out about their plans every time and the pioneers of old Simati found themselves time and again in the cells that autumn and winter.
Another year passed. Another spring came. Still greater numbers of visitors came to Yotani for the waters. A group of movie-actors came to take pictures. Rich people came in their own automobiles. The governor of the county himself came, and geishas were called specially from Otsu, tricked out with branches of artificial cherry-blossom.
The beginning of March. Terrible news reached Yotani through the newspaper—Hamamato Sendzo had been killed in Tokyo.
Old and young in Yotani and Simati fell silent. For half a day they looked at each other’s faces and said nothing.
The murderer was a member of the reactionary “Kakusuivan.” In the whirlpool of events following on March 15th, Hamamato was the only representative of the workers and poor peasantry left in parliament. The “Sosi,” the name given in Japan to persons who will commit any crime for money, had killed Hamamato because he was the deputy of these classes.
It seemed to the old men and women as if the murderer’s dagger had pierced their own breasts. And then their grief gave way to rage.
Twenty-three young people in Samati, thirty-eight old men, forty-nine women, twenty-five children—135 persons altogether—met at the stroke of the alarm bell and spontaneously, without any instructions, went to the houses of Ozawa and Toramatsu in Yotani. In Ozawa’s were only his wife, two little girls and his old mother. The whole population of Yotani was in the streets. Old Ogawa was there, too. Everybody met in front of Ozawa’s house and stayed there without moving.
“Ten years ago our teacher, Hamamato, told us in this house about the union. We have met together to avenge the death of our teachers, Hamamato, and we must revive our union!” cried Siro, climbing up a pine tree near Ozawa’s house.
Siro was eighteen.
A policeman came from Motomura on a bicycle, but what’s one policeman for over a hundred people? He could no nothing but stand and look on.
“Close up the ranks and no one can drive us away; he is the tool of those who oppress us and killed Hamamato in Tokyo. We do not know when they will kill us. I am an old man of sixty, and if they kill me the young ones will have to revive the union with their own hands!” shouted old Ogawa, standing under the tree and trembling with rage.
“Long live the Peasant Union of Osawa!” shouted Tetsu, climbing up besides Siro.
He unrolled a piece of coarse, red stuff which had been wound around his body. It was the union’s banner.
The soiled red flag, made seven years ago, waved in his hand. It was the soiled banner of their fathers and brothers. It was the banner which had been hidden so well that all the threats of the police were unavailing to find it.
“Hurrah!”
Seeing the flag, all raised their hands.
The policeman leant against his bicycle and followed everything with his eyes.
Tetsu shouted: “We’ve got to win! We want to fight! We’ll give the land to those who work it, in spite of all prohibition, in spite of the confiscation of our rented land. There is nothing in these demands that cannot be fulfilled.”
The banner of the union, on its bamboo pole, played long with wind on the summit of the pine tree.
VII
Thus it was that the Osawa Peasants’ Union was unexpectedly revived on that day by boys, old men and women. But none of them, neither old nor young, knew how and whom to fight.
One night the committee of the union, which consisted of the boys and five old men (including old Ogawa) met secretly in the house of Ozawa in Yotani, the place which was hidden best from the eyes of the police. There they held their inexperienced discussions.
“The revival of the provincial council of the Peasant Unions lies on our shoulders,” said Tetsu.
Old Ogawa had an idea:
“Let’s put up a tomb—no, a monument—in honour of the murdered Hamamato, next to Osawa’s house. They say that Hamamato’s funeral procession became a mass demonstration and that the police broke it up mercilessly. If we put up a monument, those scoundrels are sure to fall upon us, too. And they’re sure to break down our monument. But, never mind that, let us with our own hands make a wonderful monument here. Are our hands worth nothing?”
Everybody liked the idea.
The plans were soon drawn up. It was decided after discussion that every homestead should contribute one or two stones and engrave their names upon them. When the stones were ready the foundations would be laid and the monument erected. The inscription on it was to be, “Monument in Honour of Hamamato Sendzo, organizer of the Peasant Union in Osawa.”
Nobody knew how it happened, but the police soon found out about it. One day a posse of police suddenly arrived in Simati, led by the head of the local police station, and disposed their forces in advance about the houses. They worked very hard, looking everywhere for the polished stones and taking them away in a lorry. They even took away the memorial stone from Todoroki’s yard.
But this did not cause any special perturbation. The plan was again discussed in the strictest secrecy by the committee. Again the members of the union began to collect stones secretly, hiding them in the most unlikely places, and taking them out at night to polish.
The autumn came, and with it arrests of the committee members. Tetsu and Siro were kept in police cells ten and twelve days, and the lorry came again and took away all the stones.
Siro and Tetsu waited for the wave of reaction to subside and worked out a third plan.
The committee sent its members secretly to visit all the houses. The store of stones in the neighbourhood had become appreciably less, so the work would be that much harder.
The committee thought of a place to hide the stone.
It was the year 1930. In January all agricultural work was at a standstill in the snow-covered home steads of Simati. But work on “the stones” went apace. The committee members went to Yotani through snow and storm to see how the work was getting on.
This time the keystone of the whole monument was hidden in old Ogawa’s house. Uncle Kurose, who was fifty-nine that year, engraved an inscription on the stone with a tool obtained somewhere or other. In the middle of January the leaders of the union, seeing that preparations were over, secretly carried three bags of cement, purchased with a little money scraped together with utmost difficulty, to Ozawa’s house.
Their efforts were childlike. They burned with their whole souls for the common cause, but their activities were nothing but the continuation of those begun by their imprisoned leaders.
VIII
Sixteenth of January. The snow was accompanied by a sharp wind, but all the men and women of Simati had been up since long before dawn. They wore their winter slippers of straw, and straw hats on their heads. Walking separately, each carried on his back the precious stones with their carved signs, wrapped in mats. The boys went in front with waving banners. They were followed by over a hundred peasants, bearing stones on their backs. Some of the front ones sang the childish peasant song, but the women and the old men carried their stones in silence, keeping time with the boys.
The snow never stopped. As the procession passed Motomura, the dawn broke.
From Motomura they ascended the hillside to Yotani. All those carrying stones slowed their footsteps.
As they approached the house of Ozawa in Yotani, shrinking from cold, wind and snow, old Ogawa and other comrades from Yotani met them, cleaning the snow and digging into about half a metre of earth.
When they had hollowed out the earth enough, they threw in smaller stones to strengthen the foundations and placed on them the stones they had brought with them, which they then covered with cement. The boys directed the work.
The snow never stopped.
When the cement had all been poured over, all present removed their hats and bent their heads. The monument was ready.
“In honour of the Father of the Peasant Union in Osawa—Hamamato Sendzo,” such was the inscription engraved by the inexperienced craftsmen.
The monument stood firm, rearing its mass against the never-ceasing snow.
“Long live the Peasant Union of Osawa!”
“Long live the All-Japan Peasant Union!”
“Long live the Communist Youth Section!”
They shouted the slogans one after another, the snow beating into their faces.
“Long live the Japanese Communist Party!”
“Long live the Communist Party of Workers and Peasants!”
At these cries tears came to the eyes of the women. They remembered the murdered Hamamato, their husbands, their brothers and their sons in prison.
The monument became all white under the blanket of snow. Throughout the next few days peasants from Simati and Yotani armed with spades and picks and sticks streamed to the house of Ozawa and guarded their snow-covered monument.
Winter came to an end. The snow melted. Spring approached. The sun melted the snow. The words, “In Honour of the Father of the Peasant Union in Osawa,” gleamed in the sunshine from the top of the monument.
The guard increased to a hundred. Under their straw winter cloaks they hid weapons.
- ↑ There are over three million craftsmen in Japan, engaged in trades that are considered disgraceful, such as tanning. They are contemptuously named “Suihei,” the despised, and are even poorer and more completely outlawed than the rest of the Japanese proletariat.
- ↑ A three-stringed musical instrument.
- ↑ Small towel wound round the head and face while travelling.
- ↑ The lack of electric lighting in Japan, where electricity is so widespread, is proof of the poverty-stricken condition of these people.
- ↑ Spirits distilled from rice.