Matsumoto Jiichiro (1885–1966), “Subaltern Internationalist”
This month we feature a special contribution from Professor Ian Neary, an Emeritus Fellow of the Nissan Institute and St. Antony’s College at Oxford University. This post is below:
In a recent special issue of the Journal of World History, Rachel Leow, Su Lin Lewis, and Carolien Stolte cover a range of conferences that characterised the Afro-Asian Era apart from the famed Bandung conference: the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing of 1952, the Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon in 1953, and the Conference for the Relaxation of International Tensions (CRIT) in Delhi in 1955. As a Japanese socialist involved in the World Peace Movement, Matsumoto Jiichiro was one of the rare figures who was invited to all three, and also traveled to Bandung. He thus became part of the amorphous group of what Leow refers to as ‘subaltern internationalists’. I want in this brief piece to outline his activity.
By the end of the 1940s Matsumoto Jiichiro was a high-profile left-wing politician. Before the war he had achieved prominence as the leader of the Suiheisha, an organisation created by and for Burakumin, the former outcast community. Formed in 1922 it campaigned for their ‘liberation’ from discrimination and prejudice not finally succumbing to government pressure to disband until 1941. In 1936 Matsumoto was elected to the national Diet in which he served throughout the war.
He was a founding member of, and is reputed to have provided most of the funding for, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) when it was created in November 1945. In 1947 he was re-elected to the Diet and became the first deputy speaker of the Upper House where he used his position to promote the Japan Civil Liberties Union, the re-creation of a movement for Burakumin and to criticise the emperor. This latter outraged Japanese conservatives and was contrary to the policy of the US occupation. As a result, at the start of 1949 he was forced to step down from the Diet and cease all political activity. A nationwide protest movement demanded his reinstatement but to no avail.
For the next two years he focused on re-energising his construction company, the Matsumoto-gumi, which was the basis of his wealth. His purge order was lifted in August 1951 and he was re-elected to the Diet in 1953. In late 1948 he had had plausible ambitions to become the leader of the JSP but by 1953 his moment had passed. However already he had turned his attention to international matters and was taking part in the international peace movement and promoting the reconciliation of Japan with China.
Presumably on the basis of his reputation as a left-wing member of the JSP, he was invited to attend the preparatory committee of the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in June 1952. He was, however, not permitted to leave Japan. That summer he was selected as leader of Japan’s 60 strong delegation to the A-P PC but again the government refused to issue them with passports. Japan was represented by a small delegation of 14 composed of people who had either travelled to Beijing illegally or who were already living there in exile.
The left wing of the JSP — the party had by now split into two distinct organisations — was determined to send a delegation to attend the Asian Socialist Conference held in Rangoon in January 1953 and Matsumoto was invited to be one of its 18 members.
This time he was granted a passport and, once free from the control of the Japanese state, he went from Burma to visit India, Pakistan, Czechoslovakia, and finally Beijing. Along the way he met many of the peace activists who had been at the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference meeting in October 1952 including, while he was in Prague, Jan Lafitte who was the secretary general of the World Peace Council (WPC). Lafitte had written to Matsumoto in November the previous year inviting to become a member of the WPC. Meanwhile he was invited to visit Beijing by the Chinese People’s section of the WPC and while there he met Zhou Enlai.
This was the first of six visits that he would make to China over the next 15 years, on most occasions meeting Zhou. On his return from this visit he was elected the chairman of the Japan-China Friendship Association (JCFA), a position that he held until his death in 1966.
In October 1954 he visited Beijing to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the formation of the PRC and went on from there via Moscow to Stockholm where he took part in a WPC conference. The following year he was leader of the 60 strong Japanese delegation at the CRIT meeting in Delhi. While he was there he met with members of the movement who were fighting for the rights of the harijan.
From there he went to Bandung to participate in the fringe meetings surrounding the conference and then on to Rome where he spoke at a May Day rally, Paris and London. Back in Japan for just less than a month and he was off again to the World Assembly for Peace conference in Helsinki.
In March 1956 he visited Paris in part to renew his friendship with Josephine Baker but also to attend a conference of the movement she supported, the Ligue Internationale Contre Anti-Semitisme (LICA). He seems to have had an ambition to create links between this group and the Buraku Liberation League of which he was the leader. Thereafter, taking seriously the idea of Afro-Asian solidarity as expressed at the Delhi Conference for the Relaxation of International Tensions (CRIT) and the Bandung conference, he undertook a risky two week visit to Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco which were in the throes of their decolonization.
In October 1957 he paid his ‘usual’ visit to Beijing as leader of the JCFA but cut his visit short in order to attend the South Australia Peace Convention in Adelaide and address perhaps as many as 70 peace group meetings there and in New Zealand. At this point his health began to fail. He made a brief visit to Beijing in 1958 and a final visit in 1964 to attend 15th anniversary of founding of the PRC when he met both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.
Matsumoto’s internationalism had several strands and cross-cutting motivations. He usually began his presentations overseas with an apology on behalf of the Japanese people for the aggressive war fought in their name. It is tempting to see his involvement in both the peace movement and organisations cultivating links with China as being connected to feelings of personal remorse for having collaborated with the wartime regime. More positively he frequently talked about his ambition to create a ‘Suiheisha for the whole world’. What exactly he meant by this is unclear but it included developing solidarity between the outcasts of Japan and India as well as those who suffered discrimination in Europe. He was also very attracted by the notion of Afro-Asian solidarity and urged Japan to take a lead not in support of one or other of the Cold War powers but along with the non-aligned world.
His contribution to the development of the Buraku liberation movement in Japan is widely acknowledged. His international activity has received much less recognition by scholars but there is, I feel, more that could be discovered about his activity that exists in the archives of the Japan Socialist Party and the peace movement.
For more on Matsumoto, mainly focusing on his domestic activity, please see Ian Neary The Buraku Issue in Modern Japan: the career of Matsumoto Jiichiro, Routledge, 2010
For more on the Suiheisha, see J P Bayliss On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean identity in prewar and wartime Japan, Harvard, 2013.
