Kawakami Hajime

Kawakami Hajime (born Oct. 20, 1879, Iwakuni, Japan—died Jan. 30, 1946, Tokyo) was a journalist, poet, and university professor who was one of Japan’s first Marxist theoreticians. While working as a journalist after his graduation from Tokyo University in 1902, Kawakami translated from the English E.R.A. Seligman’s Economic Interpretation of History, the first analysis of dialectical materialism to appear in Japanese. In 1913 he went to Europe for further study. Upon his return in 1915...