Katayama, Sen

Sugatoro Yabuki was the second son in the family of peasants Kunizo and Kiti Yabuki. At the age of 19, he was adopted by the Katayama family and adopted the name Sen after his own father abandoned his mother. Adoption allowed him to avoid conscription. In 1876, Katayama went to Tokyo , where he worked as a typesetter. Here he became friends with Iwasaki Seikichi, the nephew of one of the founders of the Mitsubishi company. Iwasaki, who belonged to a wealthy family, was about to go to study in the USA and studied English . This prompted Sen to think also of going to the USA to study.

In 1884, Katayama left for the United States, where in 1892 he graduated from Greenell College ( Eng. Grinnell College ). Katayama converted to Christianity and continued his education at the theological school of Andover, and then at Yale . At the same time, Katayama became a socialist .

In 1896 he returned to Japan. He took an active part in organizing the socialist and labor movement. He was one of the founders of the society for promoting the organization of trade unions and the Union of Metalworkers - the first Japanese trade union ( 1897 ), a society for the study of socialism ( 1898 ).

In 1901, he was one of the founders of the Japanese Social Democratic Party, which was soon dissolved by the government. In 1903 - 1904 he actively collaborated in the Haymin Shimbun newspaper. In 1900, was elected in absentia a member of the Bureau of the Executive Committee of the Socialist International .

In 1904 he participated in the work of the Amsterdam Congress of the Socialist International , which took place during the Russo-Japanese War . After the opening ceremony, the chairperson drew the attention of delegates to the fact that representatives of the socialists of the warring countries — Russian Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov and Japanese Sen Katayama — were elected his deputies. At these words, Plekhanov and Katayama stood up and shook hands in a sign of fraternal friendship between the workers of Russia and Japan.

In 1904 he also attended the congress of the Socialist Party of America in Chicago . Then, for about three years, he lived in Texas , growing rice. In 1906 he returned to Japan. For organizing a strike of Tokyo trams in 1911, Katayama was imprisoned for 9 months. In 1914, due to police repression, he left for the USA, where he joined the American socialist movement, created the first communist groups from Japanese workers to the USA ( 1918 ).

In 1918 he moved through Mexico to Soviet Russia , where he worked in the Comintern. In 1922 he was elected a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI), and then a member of the Presidium of the ECCI. He was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Japan in 1922 . He participated in anti-imperialist congresses in Brussels ( 1927 ) and in Frankfurt am Main ( 1929 ), as well as in the antiwar congress in Amsterdam ( 1932 ).

He graduated from the Communist University of the East. I.V. Stalin .

He died in 1933 . The ashes are buried in a necropolis near the Kremlin wall .

Two children from the first wife Fude, who died in 1903 , and a daughter from the second wife, Hari Tama, whom she married in 1907 .

• Japan and America. - M .: Litizdat NKID, 1925.
• Articles and memoirs (On the centenary of his birth). - M., 1959.
• Memories. - M., 1964.

• One of the microdistricts in the Staropromyslovsky district of the city ​​of Grozny is named after S. Katayama.
• In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk there is a street of Saint-Katayama.

• Father of the proletarian movement in Japan, p. 607-633 // Life devoted to the struggle. Under. ed. I.V. Milovanova, L.N. Chernova - M .: Nauka, 1964.
• From the memoirs of S. Katayama “Three years of revolution in Russia” // Historical archive. No. 6 2006, No. 4 2007.

• Sen Katayama Archive