On this day in 1911, the Japanese government executed twelve anarchists, including radical journalists Kanno Sugako and Kōtoku Shūsui (shown), as part of a widespread crackdown on left-wing activism. Among those executed were Uchiyama Gudō, a Buddhist priest and socialist who spoke out against the Meiji government for its imperialism and advocated for conscripted soldiers to desert en masse.
The pretext for this crackdown was the “High Treason Incident”, a plot to assassinate the Emperor of Japan. The incident began when police searched the room of Miyashita Takichi, a young lumbermill employee, and found materials which could be used to construct bombs, concluding that there was a broader conspiracy to harm the imperial family.
On the basis of this plot, the Japanese government rounded up leftist activists from all over the country. 24 of the 26 defendants actually brought to trial were sentenced to death, despite the evidence against nearly all of them being circumstantial.
Among those executed anarcha-feminist journalist Kanno Sugako (some sources say she was executed on January 25th). At the age of 29, Kanno became the first woman with the status of political prisoner to be executed in the history of modern Japan.
Prior to his execution, Kōtoku Shūsui etched this message on the wall of his cell: “How has it come about that I have committed this grave crime? Today my trial is hidden from outside observers and I have even less liberty than previously to speak about these events. Perhaps in 100 years someone will speak out about them on my behalf.”
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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
Eh it’s good advice for some people but trying to draw up a category of “things I cannot control” can lead to its own form of madness. What about things I probably can’t control, or have very little control over, do I aim to eradicate those from my attention just because they’re long shots? What’s the cutoff? What about things which can be affected quite certainly but only if enough people do the same thing as me, voting for example? To what extent is my individual decision correlated with those of other similar people?
This isn’t just abstract philosophical nonsense, it has real consequences apart from individual psychology. If no one does anything that has a low chance of working we lose out on occasional miracles that, although rare, can affect the course of history. If we adopt a decision theory which completely isolates us from others we end up reasoning that voting isn’t worth the effort because a single vote won’t affect the result and everyone stays home. Maybe a bad example since voting often isn’t worth the effort for other reasons but imagine you lived in an actually functional democracy.
If you need to adopt a radical acceptance type attitude to function then by all means do so, but personally I find this to be impossible. And, frankly, I do pay a price in terms of happiness, but I tell myself it’s worth it for the tiny bit of extra sanity and cognitive consonance.