The Tokyo Imperial University Settlement House: Challenging Social Inequality in Interwar Japan
Final Report Abstract
In 1923, professors and student activists based at the University of Tokyo founded a so-called Settlement House in Honjo, a poor workers’ quarter of the city. Their basic idea was that activists and helpers should live right in the middle of the (in their words) “slum”, i.e. the living area of those they strove to aid. Although this Settlement House, which was active until 1938, was in this sense a welfare institution, a concurrent goal was to create an autonomous workers’ movement. Suehiro Izutarō, a Law Professor at the University and main initiator of the Settlement, intended for the proletariat to “rectify social deficits through their own initiative” and “fighty exploitation independently”. The Settlement was financially supported by the Imperial Household and the Home Ministry, among others; nonetheless, most active students were Marxists with connections to the left student group Shinjinkai. The ambitious activities in the Settlement encompassed an evening school for workers, an adult education program, after-school supervision for school children, childcare for preschool children, free legal consultation, free medical services, and a consumer cooperative. There was also a dozen boarding rooms for Tokyo University students, who could thus live in immediate proximity to the proletariat, i.e., in their thinking, the revolutionary subject. The project first centered around workers’ education as an important means of the Settlement to enlighten and mobilize the poor of the city through independent educational means. Yet, this was broadly contextualized within the public and private welfare initiatives of the time as well as Marxist ideas (many of the settlers converted to the right in the 1930s). The most important result of the project is the insight that support of the proletariat in word and deed was no exclusive privilege of the left. It is true that the history of support for the working class cannot be understood without taking into account the ascent and heyday of Marxism in Japan from the late 1910s to the early 1930s. Yet, numerous moderate and even right-wing individuals and forces also embraced this same goal. To understand the divisions in the political landscape of pre-1945 Japan, one must be cautious when employing conventional categories of left and right. In particular, careful consideration of both the prewar Japanese left’s statism as well as the openness of conservative circles for the concerns of the working class helps understand the broad support for fascism in the 1930s, when large parts of the political spectrum saw the opportunity to strengthen the state as the most important agent of desirable social change.
