Katayama, Sen

KATAYAMA, SEN (1859-1933). A founding member of both the American and Japanese Communist parties, Katayama Sen excelled as a Japanese American labor activist, anti-imperialist, and journalist. He was a prodigious writer, contributing regularly to The Heimin and International Socialist Review as well as authoring The Labor Movement in Japan (1918).

Born into a peasant family in Okayama prefecture, Katayama came of age during the Meiji period of reforms. Taking advantage of new educational opportunities, he moved from his home village to Tokyo where he worked as a janitor and a printer while pursuing his studies. In 1884, he journeyed to the United States where he studied progressive and socialist ideas, eventually earning a degree from Yale Divinity School.

At age thirty-seven, Katayama returned to Japan and dedicated himself to labor union activism and journalism. As he later recalled, he aspired to “interpret the grumblings, murmurings, the tumults of the crowds.” During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Katayama embraced pacifism, seeing war as the “mutual slaughter” of workers. At the 1904 International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam, Katayama famously shook hands with Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov before the assembled audience, a demonstration that Daniel De Leon called a “rebuke to capitalism” and an exhibition of “the gospel of practical humanity.”

Anti-war criticisms and Katayama’s work in the growing labor movement in Japan attracted the attention of the police. Following the three-day Tokyo streetcar strike of 1912, he was arrested and imprisoned for eight months. After his release, the police continued to harass him as part of a general effort to incapacitate the labor movement. In 1914, Katayama left Japan for the United States.

An experienced labor activist and journalist, Katayama connected the socialist movement and the struggles of the Japanese American proletariat. In addition to his regular reporting in various radical journals, he organized Marxist study circles for Issei workers. Among these comrades he was known for his ability to draw initiates into the class struggle through the quiet example of his dedication and principled life, rather than flashy oratory. Targeted for these activities during the First Red Scare, Katayama fled the United States, first to Mexico and later to the Soviet Union.

Arriving in Moscow in December 1921, Katayama was accorded the homecoming of a veteran revolutionary, met at the train station by a party including Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. He immediately took up work in the Communist International. At the same time that European Marxists developed new insights in response to the failure of revolution in the West, and along with anticolonial Marxists such as M.N. Roy, Ho Chi Minh, Claude McKay, and George Padmore, Katayama forged a radical vision that emphasized the possibilities of revolution in the colonies and among migrant workers from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. He was a key figure in the Comintern’s anticolonial work, placing empire and white supremacy at the center of a program of world revolution in the 1920s. This last contribution of a long life in the struggle helped set the stage for some of the most vital developments in twentieth-century Marxism and anticolonial thought. His remains are interred at Red Square in Moscow.

Fowler, Josephine. Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919-1933. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Kublin, Hyman. Asian Revolutionary: The Life of Sen Katayama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Yoneda, Karl. “The Heritage of Sen Katayama.” Political Affairs (March 1975): 38-57.

Sen Katayama Archive, Marxists International Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/katayama/index.htm