ABSTRACT
The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia exercised a great influence on the minds of intellectuals in Japan, an influence intensified by the idea of a ladder of civilization. Through the Association of New Men this influence was spread all over Japan among both intellectuals and young men aspiring to intellectualism. The Comintern, established in 1919, made contact with the leftist movement in Japan in 1920. The Japan Communist Party was formed in 1922 by socialists of a variety of persuasions, including some who had been engaged in anti-war activities during the Russo-Japanese War, and others who were survivors of the Grand Treason Incident. But their eclectic socialist theories and their ‘rules of thumb’ drawn from their own experience were disdained by the younger men, who were proponents of new ideas and theories imported directly from what they now saw as the Western country most advanced in ‘civilization’, socialist Russia. These young intellectuals saw the contemporary situation in Soviet Russia in terms of pure theory, and thus viewed the country as necessarily an impeccable society, the only fatherland of the working classes of the world. All the later trials of the original revolutionary leaders-Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Radek, and Zinoviev-were given a justification, and not a particle of doubt was expressed by these socialist theorists.
