Hatta Shūzō

Hatta Shūzō (Japanese: 八太 舟三; 1886–1934) was a Japanese anarchist communist, known as the one of the principal theorists of anarchism in Japan and the main proponent of "pure anarchism" in the movement.

Born into a family associated with the old Tokugawa shogunate, Hatta was denied access to education from an early age and began working in order to pay for his schooling. While working as a paperboy in Taiwan, he converted to Christianity and returned to Japan to train as a Presbyterian minister. After completing his theological education, he preached in rural villages throughout Japan, before settling in a congregation in Hiroshima. There he became involved with the nascent labour movement, through which he renounced Christianity and became an anarchist.

He went to Tokyo, where he lived in extreme poverty and began to suffer from alcoholism. Despite the conditions he lived in, he became a prolific anarchist writer and public speaker, using the rhetorical skills he developed as a preacher to convince people of anarchist communism. A staunch anti-capitalist, he was critical of other anarchist tendencies that he believed were susceptible to capitalist influence, particularly that of anarcho-syndicalism. He called for the establishment of a "pure anarchism", purged of any capitalist or statist influences.

By the 1930s, the anarchist movement was being fiercely repressed by the Imperial authorities and Hatta's health was deteriorating. In desperation, he attempted to mend the divide between the pure anarchists and the syndicalists, but this - combined with his re-conversion to Christianity - alienated his remaining anarchist comrades. After his death, he was remembered as one of the leading voices of anarchism in Japan and as an influential theorist in the development of anarchist communism.