24 Facts About Ikki Kita

Ikki Kita was a Japanese author, intellectual and political philosopher who was active in early Showa period Japan.

Sado island, which used to be used for penal transportation, had a reputation for being rebellious, and Ikki Kita took some pride in this.

Ikki Kita studied Chinese classics in his youth and became interested in socialism at the age of 14.

Ikki Kita met multiple influential figures in the early socialist movement in Japan but quickly became disillusioned; the movement was, according to him, full of "opportunists".

Ikki Kita first outlined his philosophy of nationalistic socialism in his book The Theory of Japan's National Polity and Pure Socialism, known as Kokutairon and Pure Socialism, published in 1906, where he criticized Marxism and class conflict-oriented socialism as outdated.

Ikki Kita instead emphasized an exposition of the evolutionary theory in understanding the basic guidelines of societies and nations.

Ikki Kita's second book is titled An Informal History of the Chinese Revolution and is a critical analysis of the Chinese Revolution of 1911.

Ikki Kita traveled to China to assist in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty.

Ikki Kita joined Okawa Shumei and others to form the Yuzonsha, an ultranationalist and Pan-Asianist organization, and devoted his time to writing and political activism.

Ikki Kita gradually became a leading theorist and philosopher of the right-wing movement in pre-World War II Japan.

Ikki Kita's last major book on politics was An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan.

Ikki Kita asserted Japan's right as an "international Proletariat" to conquer Siberia of Far East and Australia, whose peoples would be granted the same rights as Japanese would, because social issues in Japan would never be solved if problems of international distribution were not decided.

Ikki Kita strongly opposed a war against America, which was a popular opinion at that time, because the British Empire would join the war and the Japanese navy would not defeat them.

Ikki Kita thought China and the Soviet Union would join the war on the side of America.

Ikki Kita's proposal was that Japan should form an alliance with France and combat the Soviet Union.

Ikki Kita thought that an alliance with France would contain the British Empire, and that Japan and France shared Anti-Russian sentiment because the Russian Empire had not paid massive debt to France.

Walter Skya notes that in On the Kokutai and Pure Socialism, Ikki Kita rejected the Shintoist view of far-right nationalists such as Hozumi Yatsuka that Japan was an ethnically homogeneous "family state" descended through the Imperial line from the goddess Amaterasu Omikami, emphasizing the presence of non-Japanese in Japan since ancient times.

Ikki Kita argued that along with the incorporation of Chinese, Koreans, and Russians as Japanese citizens during the Meiji period, any person should be able to naturalize as a citizen of the empire irrespective of race, with the same rights and obligations as ethnic Japanese.

Ikki Kita's younger brother Reikichi Kita, political philosopher who studied for five years in the US and Europe and was a member of the House of Representatives, later wrote that Kita had been familiar with Kiichiro Hiranuma, then Chief of the Supreme Court of Justice, and in his paper in 1922 he had fiercely condemned Adolph Joffe, then Soviet Russian diplomat to Japan.

In 1919 Ikki Kita advocated that the Empire of Japan should adopt Esperanto.

Ikki Kita foresaw that 100 years after its adoption the language would be the only tongue spoken in Japan proper and the vast territory conquered by it according to the natural selection theory, making Japanese the Sanskrit or Latin equivalent of the Empire.

Ikki Kita thought that the writing system of Japanese is too complicated to impose on other peoples, that romanization would not work and that English, which was taught in the Japanese education system at that time, was not mastered by Japanese at all.

Ikki Kita asserted that English is poison to Japanese minds as opium destroyed Chinese people, that the only reason it did not destroy Japanese yet was that German had more influence than English and that English should be excluded from the country.

Ikki Kita was inspired by several Chinese anarchists he befriended who had called for the substitution of Chinese for Esperanto at the beginning of the twentieth century.