ABSTRACT
The philosophers, the idea-mongers, of the movement were Ikki Kita and Seikyo Gondo. They were not a team; they may not even have known each other; they are brought together because their teachings furnished the movement with its thin coating of political idealism. Kita was young and Gondo old. Their philosophies had been taken down from different trees in the European forest. Gondo was a library follower of Prince Peter Kropotkin, the old Czarist exile on whose gentle books the dust now lies thick. Kita’s spiritual father was Marx, and his creed a mixture of communism and nationalism. Both were borrowers but more than mere copyists; they understood their Japan and knew how to adapt imported ideas to the Japanese situation.
