Mosaburō Suzuki

Mosaburō Suzuki
鈴木 茂三郎
Suzuki in 1953
Born	(1893-02-07)February 7, 1893 Gamagōri, Aichi, Japan
Died	May 7, 1970(1970-05-07) (aged 77) Tokyo, Japan
Nationality	Japanese
Occupations	Journalist essayist politician

Mosaburō Suzuki (鈴木 茂三郎, Suzuki Mosaburō, February 7, 1893 – May 7, 1970) was a Japanese journalist, essayist, and socialist leader.

Biography

Mosaburō Suzuki was born on 7 February 1893, in Gamagōri, Aichi Prefecture. His family was poor, and he worked as a newspaper boy, shined shoes, and pulled rickshaws. He graduated with a degree in political economy at Waseda University in 1916. He worked as a newspaper reporter and covered the Japanese intervention in Siberia.

Suzuki moved to the United States in 1919, where he met Sen Katayama and Tsunao Inomata, who were both Leninists. He went to the Soviet Union as a correspondent for Yomiuri Shimbun in 1921, and returned to Japan in 1922. He unsuccessfully tried to organize miners in Kyushu. In 1922, he became a member of the newly-founded Japanese Communist Party (JCP). He became an economic expert for Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, but was fired in 1928 for being too political. Suzuki was selected to serve as Secretary General of the Proletarian Masses Party in 1928. The party was a reconstitution of the Labour-Farmer Party, which was dissolved after the March 15 incident.

As Japan became increasingly militarist, Suzuki devoted most of his energies to the socialist movement starting around 1928. With Katō Kanjū, he formed the Proletarian Workers' Conference in 1936 and the Japan Proletarian Party in 1937. However, Suzuki became an increasingly prominent target of the government, and he was arrested in 1937 under the Peace Preservation Law as part of the Popular Front Incident. Suzuki was elected to the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly in 1937. He was arrested again after Japan declared war on the United States and was imprisoned for a trial that never occurred.

Following Japan's surrender in 1945, Suzuki participated in the formation of the Japan Socialist Party. In 1946, he won a seat in the House of Representatives; he became party secretary in 1949 and chairman in 1951. As chairman of the lower house's Budget Committee in 1948, Suzuki passed a veto over Katayama Tetsu's proposed budget, which later led to the downfall of the cabinet. Later, in his inaugural speech as party chairman, he famously said "Young men, do not take up arms; young women, do not send your husbands and sons to the battlefield" which caused a huge political stir and became a rallying cry of the pacifist movement in Japan, although it was only intended to rebuke Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru's attempt to secure aid from the United States to rebuild the military of Japan.

After the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951, the Socialist Party split into left and right wings. Suzuki remained chairman of the left wing, which had only 16 seats in the House of Representatives; in the 1955 elections, it jumped to 89 seats, thanks to support from the General Council of Trade Unions and popular support from a war-weary electorate that largely agreed with the party's principle of unarmed neutrality.

The two socialist parties reunited that year to form a united front against the emerging right-wing conservative Liberal Democratic Party, but the issue of whether or not to participate in the Anpo protests reignited the left-right tension within the Socialist Party. In 1960, right-wing leader Suehiro Nishio left the party and formed the Democratic Socialist Party. Taking responsibility for the party split, Suzuki resigned as chairman.

During the 1960s, Suzuki gradually pressed the Socialist Party to the left, but it continued to languish as Japan's economic recovery sped up. He retired from politics in 1967. Thereafter, he collected socialist literature and other materials, establishing a "Socialist Library" which he later donated to the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature. Suzuki died of liver cirrhosis in 1970.

Sources cited

• Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674984424.
• Kotobank. "Suzuki Mosaburō". Kotobank (in Japanese). Retrieved April 11, 2024.

Works cited

• Cole, Allan; Totten, George; Uyehara, Cecil (1966). Socialist Parties In Postwar Japan. Yale University Press.
• Scalapino, Robert (1967). The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920-1966. University of California Press.