The Morito Affair of 1920: University and Politics in Taishō Japan

Abstract

Morito Tatsuo, assistant professor at Tokyo Imperial University, published an article in the journal of the university’s economics club titled ‘Research on Kropotkin’s social thinking’. In his article he introduced the famous anarchist thinker’s ideas on a just society together with his own comments. The paper caused a scandal. The Japanese Ministry of Justice found that it had violated certain articles of the Peace Preservation Law and Press Law, and it filed a criminal report. Morito was not only fired from his job but was also sentenced to three months in prison.

The present article examines the background and consequences of this affair. Changes in the world of Japanese state universities during the 1910s constitute an important part of the background and must be mentioned. Due partly to the wartime boom and partly to the fading of Meiji-era traditions, university education became available to a broader segment of Japanese society, and the growing amount of students called for an increase in the number of teachers. Those changes clearly contributed to the admittance of new ideas to the academic world, while the emergence of students and staff with lower social standing sparked interest in and sensitivity to the fate of the masses. At the same time, economics developed as a distinct discipline, gaining independence from legal studies, which reshaped it free from the restrictions of being a ‘study of state’. This led to the proposal of new questions, and in the case of some scholars, like Morito, the problems of social welfare and justice were brought into the discourse.

Moreover, there is a connection to the unique political world of Taishō Japan and the fledgling far-right: the centre-right cabinet of Hara Takashi, leading the country at the time of the affair, sought alliances with political forces standing further to the right from them in the struggle to quell tensions caused by leftish movements. An interesting point of the Morito case is that, in sharp contrast to the Tomizu affair of 1905, when even the rival Kyōto University sided with the Tōdai, it did not lead to a united stance in the academic world. Still it had long-lasting effects on the factional infighting within the economics department that would ignite a series of scandals in the 1930s.

The article is an attempt to examine the academic world of Taishō Japan and its connection to contemporary society and politics, an academic world that had already left behind its Meiji-era traditions but was yet to find its place in a modernising Japan. In that atmosphere the struggle for freedom of research and university autonomy were closely intertwined with questions of liberty and freedom of expression in general.