Kawakami, Hajime

(1879–1946)

   After graduating from the Law Department (politics section) of Tokyo Imperial University in 1902, Hajime Kawakami lectured in agriculture and wrote newspaper articles on economics for a major daily newspaper. He became a lecturer at Kyoto University in 1908 and traveled for two years in Europe (1914–15). In 1916 he was made a professor but quit his position in 1928 in order to become a full-time activist. With Kunio Oyama he formed the Labor-Farmers Party (Rodo Nomin To) but split with the party after moving to Tokyo in 1930. He joined the underground Japanese Communist Party in 1932 but was questioned by the police in the following year and briefly imprisoned. He quit politics, began writing Chinese poetry and retired to Kyoto. During his academic and political career he published several famous works on wealth and poverty, but is best known for introducing Marxist economics into Japanese including translating Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Capital).