Shusui Kotoku's name may be known to the reader. Gudo Uchiyama's probably isn't. They represent a disgraced ideal: anarchy.
Kotoku, born in 1871 in a small city in Shikoku, was a journalist. Uchiyama, born in 1874 in a village in Niigata Prefecture, was a Zen Buddhist priest.
An industrial revolution is a dreadful thing to live through. Japan's early 20th century, so rich in hope for a brighter future, was dismal enough for the toiling masses who would never see that future. Four decades into the modernizing drive of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Japan bristled with new factories humming with new machines churning out new goods in unheard-of profusion. Who manned the machines? Those with the least share in the wealth they generated — peasants turned workers, herded into cities to shed rural poverty for urban poverty, soon to learn how much worse the latter can be.