Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 177, Red Star Over Tokyo, Part 2.

So we left things off last week with an overview of Marxism, what it is, where it comes from,

and how in the final years of the 19th century it started to make its way to Japan for the

first time.

In fairness, the groundwork for radical thought in the Japanese Empire had already been laid

by one of those political movements that, I swear to God, I'll get around to talking about

at some point, the Freedom and People's Rights Movement.

The Freedom and People's Rights Movement was an outgrowth of something we talked about at the

tail end of our series on the Meiji Restoration, the split among the former leaders of the

war against the Tokugawa.

A small fraction of those leaders, you see, embraced an ideology foreign to the more

authoritarian men who had come to lead the empire, that of the French Revolution.

While men like Ito Hirabumi and Yamagata Ari Tomo were enraptured by the paternal authoritarianism

of places like Imperial Germany, the founders of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement

were drawn to notions of individual liberty, popular sovereignty,

and Republican governance, or at least constitutional monarchy.

They always were a motley group and didn't necessarily agree on what exact combination of

these ideas would create an ideal society, but they exerted a powerful influence on the

minds of some in Japan who were

drawn to the idea of having an actual influence over their own lives.

The authoritarian leaders of the government responded to this movement with a combination of

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