Anyone who truly read Tolstoy could understand why the communist revolution succeeded in Russia.
Communist revolutions only succeed in societies where extreme poverty and structural oppression exist.
This article examines why many Japanese intellectuals from the Taishō to early Shōwa periods were drawn to communism, through literature, history, and civilizational analysis.

That Lenin was able to carry out a communist revolution in Russia is something that anyone who truly read Tolstoy could understand.
2016-12-18
Because Hotsumi Ozaki had become thoroughly immersed in communism, the effort required to recruit and manipulate him must have been minimal.

That many intellectuals from the Taishō period through the early Shōwa era became drawn to communism was entirely natural.
As I have already written, for some reason I immersed myself in reading Ryūnosuke Akutagawa during my high school years.
I have long believed that one factor behind Akutagawa’s suicide was his excessive reaction, as a naïve intellectual, to the establishment of a communist regime by Lenin in 1917.

What about me.
Because by my middle school years I had already finished reading what remains to this day the greatest novel in the world, Anna Karenina, as well as War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, I never became drawn to communism at all.
Another reason was that I felt no instinctive affinity whatsoever toward Germany, while I did feel such an affinity toward Italy and France.
I sensed that Germans overlapped with what one might call the weaker aspects of the Japanese character.
That is why, although I went to Italy and Paris eight times, I never went to Germany even once.
I still have no desire to go.
This feeling is hardly different from why I have no desire to visit China or South Korea.

That Lenin was able to carry out a communist revolution in Russia should be obvious to anyone who truly read Tolstoy.
At that time, Russia still had serfs.
Their condition was utterly miserable.
That I was the first person to inform the world that the Korean Peninsula—one of the poorest regions in the world until its annexation by Japan—was a society ravaged by the yangban aristocracy is something that discerning readers already know well.
The yangban regarded their servants as lifelong possessions.
Women born into such households were treated as the private property of the yangban.
In other words, the Korean Peninsula possessed one of the world’s worst traditions of discrimination and contempt toward women.
That this has not fundamentally changed even today as well.
I was the first to convey these facts to the world in this manner.

That is why a communist revolution succeeded.
Communist revolutions can only succeed in countries that are extremely poor, or where extreme poverty exists.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that communism rested on philosophy of no greater depth than that.
Marxism.
There is no way I would ever read it, instinctively or otherwise.
That my instinctive lack of affinity toward Germany and Germans was correct later became evident when they were manipulated by a foolish journalist from the Süddeutsche Zeitung—perhaps just one individual, but in a way not fundamentally different from being manipulated by Hitler—and newspaper reports revealed opinion polls showing that nearly half the population harbored anti-Japanese sentiment.

To be continued.