Rono Faction

   The Rono Faction constituted one position in a fierce debate, which began in the period 1927–37, between Japanese Marxist economists and historians regarding the nature of Japanese capitalism and the modern Japanese state. The Rono faction argued that the development of Japanese capitalism since the emergence of the modern Japanese state in 1868 meant that a movement toward an immediate socialist revolution was possible, the so-called one-stage revolution theory as opposed to the two-stage revolution proposed by their opponents in the Koza faction. They asserted that the Meiji Restoration in 1868 was a bourgeois revolution. For them, the high payments made by tenant farmers to landlords were not feudalistic transactions but reflected economic competition in a commodity economy between tenant farmers. It also viewed Japan as one of a number of imperialist finance capitalist nations. As such, the Rono faction has been seen as more universalistic than the Koza faction. The Rono faction strongly influenced the non-communist left parties of the prewar period and was the dominant influence on the left-wing of the Japan Socialist Party (1945–1996).