뉴스레터

Kuno taking a walk in his later years

Kuno Osamu (久野収, June 10, 1910 - February 9, 1999) was born in Sakai City (堺市), Osaka Prefecture, (大阪府) in the Kansai region of Japan. He majored in philosophy at undergraduate and graduate levels at Kyoto (京都) University. After graduation, he taught philosophy at Gakushuin (学習院) University known to have the royal family and aristocrats as students. While his main job was a philosopher and professor, Kuno was also a critic who contributed to the birth of critical journalism in Japan, as well as a social activist who had an tremendous impact on Japan's post-war movements for democracy, peace, and life politics.
With a career as a professor, Kuno may be pictured as a typical upper-class intellectual of Japan, but that is only a part of who he was. A turning point in Kuno's life came in 1933 while he was attending Kyoto University, as Takikawa Yukitoki (瀧川幸辰), a professor of law at his school, was 'suspended' by the Minister of Education Hatoyama Ichiro (鳩山一郎) for the Japanese government had found the professor's lectures and books to be Marxian and rebellious. As a student, Kuno was involved in a campaign to bring Professor Takikawa back to school. And this series of events surrounding the sacking of Takikawa, known as the Takikawa Incident, served as the decisive turning point that would determine the direction of Kuno's life.

Kuno Osamu as a Thinker Who Practices What He Preaches

With the Takikawa Incident, Kuno realized that he should not live in an ivory tower, and this realization led him to the world of journalism. After graduation from university, Kuno was involved in founding the antifascist magazine World Culture (世界文化) in 1935 and the weekly culture magazine Saturday (土曜日) in 1936. These magazines, although not exactly promoting Marxism as the central ideology against Japan's imperialism, certainly did their part in voicing opposition to militarism. Kuno's active involvement in journalism led to his arrest and imprisonment for two years for violation of the Maintenance of Public Order Act, a piece of Japanese legislation enacted during the imperialist period to suppress Korean independence activists among many others.

After World War II, Kuno joined the Association for the Study of Science of Thought whose members included Tsurumi Suke (鶴見俊輔) and Maruyama Masao (丸山眞男), and almost all the other progressive scholars in Japan. When Chu Koron, the publisher of the Association's organ The Study of Science of Thought (思想の科学), was working on the special feature on the Emperor system for the January 1962 edition, right-wing forces put pressure on the publisher and interfered with its editorial rights. When this happened, Kuno as the representative of the Association, having decided that the Association should publish its organ independently, established the publisher Shisounokagakusha and took office as its first president.

Kuno was also an energetic participant in civil society movements for peace, such as Symposium for Peace, and Constitution Society. In 1960, he served as the ideological leader of Citizen's League for Peace in Vietnam (ベトナムに平和を! 市民連合), an organization committed to campaigning against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and the Vietnam War. He remained active as a journalist well into his later years, involving in the foundation of the progressive Weekly Friday (週刊金曜日 (Shukan Kinyobi)) in 1993, and serving as an editor until he died.

Maruyama Masao and Kuno Osamu

For the depth of his academic knowledge, his quality as a thinker who practiced what he preached, and his energy as a social activist, Kuno is underrated, specially in Korea. Compared to him, Murayama Masao, four years his junior and a renowned professor of politics at the University of Tokyo College of Law, is widely known to the Korean academia as one of the world's greatest scholars and a leading intellectual of Japan who opposed the Emperor system.

In this regard, I believe we need to reassess Kuno for who he truly was. Kuno was a philosopher, but also with profound knowledge about economics and politics. He was also a great thinker, who regarded himself as a political thinker and social thinker, and a civic activist who practiced what he preached.

When Maruyama Masao disappeared from the scene of movement after the campaign against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty in 1970, many people denounced him as being stuck in his study. But Kuno thought highly of Maruyama as an ordinary citizen who had participated in political movements despite his many illnesses such as tuberculosis and acute hepatitis. Kuno praised Maruyma as the one who practiced independent academism by separating academia completely from politics and religion for the first time in Japan.

And Kuno himself had no scruples about taking action and practicing what he preached in civic movements. If Ham Seok-heon was the leading intellectual and civic activist of Korea, also a great thinker and avid writer, a symbol of resistance against the dictatorship and movement for democracy in Korea, Japan's equivalent of Ham would be Kuno Osamu as a thinker committed to defending democracy and peace in post-war Japan, and as an intellectual who practiced what he preached through his activities as a critic and journalist.

Citizen, Peace and Democracy

The keyword to understanding Kuno best is 'citizen.' When the streets around the National Diet Building and the Prime Minister's Office building were crowded with people protesting against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty in 1960, Kuno, as one of the participants, tried to make sense of their thought and what it signified. And he perceived them as the 'citizen public.' Kuno's discovery of enlightened citizens was ahead of his time compared to how the Japanese media and the Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke (岸信介) at that time perceived them to be a 'crowd' and a 'mob' respectively.

Kuno denied the definition of a citizen being a human being who earns his living through a job. He insisted that there must be separation between job and life. It is said that from a lifestyle without such separation people of caste emerge, and that from a lifestyle with such separation, civic people emerge. In Kuno's definition, "citizens are people who see politics through life, not vice versa." And it provided an intellectual foundation for life politics movements in Japan.

The basis of Kuno's philosophy about civic movement was formed through the criticism of Japan's democracy. To put his philosophy into practice, he tried to create a peace system for the prosperity of humanity by helping the ideology of the Peace Constitution take root in the real world. Accordingly, his civic movement was not limited to the domestic issues of Japan, but expanded to cover many areas ranging from democracy as a value to be shared in mankind to campaigns against the U.S' nuclear tests.

Kuno stressed that since Japan's democracy was not built on the people's blood and sweat as in the case of the Western world, the people must realize what it took to achieve democracy before Japan could build a true democratic nation. He argued that in Japan's democracy should have specific policies to realize the value of democracy, and politics must ensure the rights of minorities.

He also emphasized that putting up resistance against the strong when they tried to make undemocratic policies by the power of a majority would be the path to true democracy. Kuno died at the end of the last century, but the message he tried to convey through writing and practice throughout his lifetime is still alive and resonating in Japan.