Hajime Kawakami

Who was Hajime Kawakami?

Hajime Kawakami was a Japanese Marxist economist of the Taishō and early Shōwa periods.

Born in Yamaguchi, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University. After writing for Yomiuri shimbun, he earned an economics professorship at Kyoto Imperial University. Increasingly inclined toward Marxism, he participated in the March 15 incident of 1928, and was expelled from the university as a subversive. The following year, he joined the formation of a political party Shinrōtō. Kawakami went on to publish a Marxist-oriented economics journal, Studies of Social Problems. After joining the then-outlawed Communist Party of Japan, he was arrested in 1933 and sent to prison. Following his release in 1937, he translated Das Kapital from German into Japanese. Kawakami spent the remainder of his life writing essays, novels, poetry, and the autobiography Jijoden. Jijoden was written secretly between 1943 and 1945 and serialized in 1946. It became a best-seller and was "extravagantly praised as being unprecedented in Japanese letters."