Kazuo Nimura
Ohara Institute for Social Research: People and History

70 Years of the Ohara Institute for Social Research

1 The Ôsaka Period

Foundation

The Ôhara Institute for Social Research (OISR) was founded on February 9th, 1919. At the time, there were a number of academic research institutes in Japan in natural science fields such as the Infectious Diseases Research Institute (1892), the Ôhara Agricultural Research Institute (1914), the Kitasato Research Institute (1915), and the Physics Research Institute (1916), but the OISR was the first in the field of the social sciences.

The name Ôhara is that of Ôhara Magosaburoo, President of the Kurashiki Cotton Spinning Company in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture; the Ôhara Museum of Art in Kurashiki is also named for him. He set up the OISR with his own money and supported it himself for nearly twenty years. Even after that support ended, the Institute was able to maintain itself on the interest earned by a trust fund created through the disposal of the land and buildings which Ôhara had obtained or had had built in the Tennooji district of Ôsaka. For thirty years until the Institute became part of Hoosei University (Tookyô), it continued to enjoy the financial support of the Ôhara family.

Magosaburô, born in 1880 the second son of the Kurashiki entrepreneur Ôhara Kôshirô, was a public- spirited man. Under the influence of Ishii Jûji, the founder of the Okayama Orphanage, he had become a Christian and in accordance with Ishii's last wishes, he succeeded him as head of the Orphanage.
    It is noteworthy that in the social issues with which he concerned himself, Ôhara Magosaburô did not only devise and implement practical solutions, he also recognized the importance of fundamental theoretical research. For example, as the head of a major landowning family, he not only set up a rice products assessment council for small farmers to improve the quality of rice-growing and employed specialists to give advice to small farmers in the use of agricultural machinery, in 1914 he established an agricultural research institute.
    Similarly, in the field of social entrepreneurship, over two years before he founded the OISR, he embarked on research into social issues. This was the Relief Work Center, located in the Ishii Memorial Aizen'en (Settlement House), a foundation he established in 1916. At the opening ceremony for the Settlement House, he made the following remarks about the Relief Work Research Center: "I hope that some time in the future, this [center] can be greatly enlarged and, independent of Aizen'en, will be able to contribute to the progress and development of Aizen'en, although at the moment I cannot make any concrete announcements about this. I do, however, ask for the support of everyone to make it a reality as soon as possible". He thus clearly imagined at that time an independent role for a social enterprise research center or social issues research center, and the Relief Work Research Center at Aizen'en can therefore be regarded as the forerunner of the Ôhara Institute for Social Research.

From his experience as head of the Okayama Orphanage, Magosaburô gradually began to feel that there were limits to what was achievable in social enterprise work. He concluded that for the eradication of poverty there was a need for scientific study of social issues and for the clarification of policies to that end. It is believed that the reasons for these conclusions were due to the indirect influence of a friend from his elementary school days, Yamakawa Hitoshi and from his reading of Binbô Mnogatari (Tales of Poverty) by Kawakami Hajime.

In the founding of the OISR, the Ôsaka municipal authorities commissioned the participation of Ogawa Shigejirô�Ca well-known social entrepreneur, Kawata Jirô�Ca professor at Kyôto Imperial University, and Yoneda Shôtarôo, a lecturer at the same university, while advice was given by Tokutomi Sohô and Kawakami Hajime. However, an important role in determining the character of the Institute was played by Tôkyô Imperial University professor Takano Iwasaburô.
    Takano was a pioneer in the field of social statistics and a founder member of the Shakai seisaku gakkai (Society for Study of Social Policy). He had also played the leading role in setting up an independent economics faculty at Tôkyô University; economics had previously been under the wing of the Faculty of Law. In the year the Institute was founded, he was appointed by the government as official labor delegate to the first general meeting of the ILO. His elder brother, Takano Fusatarô, was a founder of Japan's labor union movement, and many union leaders at the time, including Suzuki Bunji, were his students. Iwasaburô was also a member of the council of Yûaikai (The Friendly Society); he regarded his appointment as ILO delegate to be a positive development for the labor movement and accepted the appointment accordingly.
    However, while continuing to esteem Takano as a friend of the workers, labor unions did not budge from their policy of firm opposition to government appointees as ILO delegates, believing that such delegates should be selected by the unions. Takano thus had to to refuse the ILO appointment and at the same time, to take responsibility for this, he resigned from his post as professor at Tôkyô University. Subsequently, Takano Iwasaburô devoted himself to the management of the OISR and in March 1920 he was appointed Director of the Institute.

Under Takano's leadership, Kushida Tamizô, Morito Tatsuo, Takada Shingo, Gonda Yasunosuke, Ôbayashi Sôji, Hosokawa Karoku, Kuruma Samezô, Toda Teizô became research Fellows, and studies were also commissioned from Ôuchi Hyôe, Kitazawa Shinjirô, and Hasegawa Nyozekan. That a newly-founded institute, and moreover one located in Ôsaka, a city not known for its scholastic achievements, should draw such talent was due mainly both to the attraction of working under the academic leadership of Takano and to Ôhara Magosaburô's financial support, but the effects of the 'Morito Incident' of 1920 ought not to be overlooked. 'The Morito Incident' occurred when professor Morito Tatsuo of the newly established Faculty of Economics at Tôkyô Imperial University published in the first issue (Jan.1920) of the economics department's journal Keizaigaku kenkyû (Economic Science Research) an essay titled 'Study on the Social Thought of Kropotkin'. The article was held by the authorities to be a violation of Article 42 of the Press Law of 1909 (treasonous defiance of the constitution), and both the author and the well-known editor, Professor Ôuchi Hyôe, were put on trial and found guilty. As a result, both professors were made to resign from Tôkyô Imperial University. Kushida, a lecturer at the same university, and Gonda and Hosokawa, both readers, strongly criticized the attitude of the professorial council during the affair and resigned from the university, successively joining the staff of the OISR. This array of talent attracted a number of young researchers: Uno Kôzô, Hayashi Kaname, Kawanishi Taichirô, Maruoka Gyô , Ueda Tamayo (Miyajirô Tamayo), Yamamura Takashi, Yagizawa Zenji were taken on as assistants.

Changes in the System of Research

In the first years after its establishment the Institute underwent a series of major changes in its organizational structure. It is almost forgotten today but initially, there was a dual structure in place. In other words, the research institute associated with the name of Ôhara was not only a center for the study of social issues; it was also a research center for relief work. The Relief Work Research Center was founded three days after the Institute for Social Research, on February 12, the reasons for which remain unclear. Most likely, the Ôhara Relief Work Research Center was seen as a direct follow-on and development of the Aizen'en Relief Work Research Center, incorporating the ideas of Ogawa Shigejirô and others. However, plans to combine the two soon emerged, and in July 1919 the Institute for Social Research took over the Relief Work Research Center and became the Ôhara Institute for Social Research, with a dual structure, the one section focusing mainly on labor research and the other on the study of social work. This dual system came to an end in March 1920, after which, at first, it was decided that one part of the social work research section, the social welfare department headed by Terutoshi Yoshito, should be relocated as a research office to the Kurashiki Cotton Spinning Company's Manju Factory, where it would function as the 'factory insurance and welfare information office'. Not long afterwards, this factory insurance and welfare information office became completely independent of the OISR, and in July 1921 this led to the formal establishment of the Kurashiki Labor Science Research Institute, which, as is well-known, was the forerunner of today's Institute of Labor Science Research.
    In the period after the establishment of the OISR, Magosaburô was personally responsible for its management, but Ôhara and Takano agreed on establishing a foundation, and in December 1922 the Ministry of Education gave formal notification of permission for this.

Facilities

At first, the OISR offices were based temporarily in the relief work center of the Aizen kindergarten at Aizenbashi-nishizume, in Shimoderachô 4-chôme, Minami Ward, Oosaka. Library facilities made use of a room at the head office of the Kurashiki Cotton Spinning Company.

In May 1920, a year and a half after foundation, new offices were built at 24, Reijinchô in Osaka's Tennôji Ward, and the move there was completed by July. The new premises were a two-storey building of 673 sq. meters with a three-storey annexe (327 sq. m.) for storage of books and documents. The cost of construction was 150,000 yen. The main building consisted of a reading room, study rooms, an office, a filing room, an editing room, a source materials room, and a meeting room. Later, an additional three-floored storehouse annexe (535 sq. m.) and a two-floored lecture room (92 sq. m.) were added, making the whole an area of 1,627 sq. meters. The land measured 3,188 sq. meters and had been bought for 100,000 yen. An office was also opened in Tôkyô, where at first, Gonda Yasunosuke and Uno Kôzô worked, and then from the end of 1925, Kushida Tamizô. The Tôkyô office was first located in a room at the Statistics Association at 6, Yamashirochô in Kyôbashi ward. Several moves followed - from premises at the Dôjinsha Co. at 7, Surugadai Nishikôbaichô in Kanda ward to 122, Dôzaka in Hongô ward in July 1920 then back to Dôjinsha. On 26th January 1922 came another move, to 311, Ôkubô Hyakuninchô and finally, with Kushida Tamizô's job relocation, a second move back to Dôjinsha.

People in charge at OISR

Those who advised Magosaburô at the time of the founding of the OISR were especially Professor Kawada Jirô of Kyôtô University, who was recommended by Tokutomi Sohô and Kawada's colleague, Yoneda Shôtarôo. The fact that the founding prospectus was written by Kawada (and one section by Yoneda) shows that staff from the Economics Department at Kyôtô University were at the center of the process that launched the Institute.
    However, the situation changed considerably with Takano Iwasaburô's resignation from Tôkyô University and his assumption of the headship of the Institute and then, after the 'Morito Affair', the fact that a series of young scholars from the Economics Department at Tôkyô University came to join Takano at the Institute.

The OISR became the focal point of the progressive wing of the Economics Department of Tôkyô Imperial University. The effect of the Morito Affair contributed to the hardening tendency on the part of senior academics and education officials to regard research into socialist and labor issues as taboo. The OISR responded to this by becoming a real collection of researchers keen to engage positively with such issues and who pioneered an impressive body of work in various fields.
    Notably lively was research into Marxism and especially Marxist economics, which led to the production of a number of works that became prominent in the history both of Marxist studies and of economics in Japan. Kushida, Ôuchi, Morito, Kuruma, Hosokawa and others all published their research on the materialist view of history, the theory of value, theory of land rents, and theory of recession and depression, as well as translating and introducing "The History of Studies of Surplus Value", "Capital Vol. 1", and "The Poverty of Philosophy".

In addition to research into Marxism, significant translations into Japanese under Director Takano's supervision of books by Sidney and Beatrice Webb - The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain (or The Decay of Capitalist Civilization?), The Consumer's Cooperative Movement - were important aids to Japanese scholars and activists for their understanding of the British labor movement with its long history. Besides these works, a series of vanguard studies in various fields was published such as Gonda Yasunosuke's studies of leisure activities based on social surveys, Takada Shingo's research into childhood issues, Hosokawa Karoku's study of the rice riots, Morito Tatsuo's studies of the early years of the Japanese socialist movement and of the women's movement. A little later, Kasa Shintarôo's work on inflation drew much attention. All these research results were published in Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo sôsho (The OISR Research Bulletin), Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo pamfuretto (The OISR Bulletin), and in Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo zasshi (The Journal of the OISR), the first issue of which came out in 1923. The volumes of the Nihon rôdô nenkan (the Labor Yearbook of Japan), first published in 1920, provided valuable documentation of the activities of the labor union movement and of the labor movement in general, which was only just getting underway, and also of labor issues. 70 years later, the production of the Yearbook had become one the Institute's central tasks. Despite the interruption of the wartime and immediate post-war periods, the Institute has continued to edit and publish the Yearbook, providing a consistent and objective record of the path taken by Japan's labor movement.

What made such activity possible has been the staff of the Institute's library and archive. Head librarians Morikawa Takao and Naitô Takeo as specialist library staff not only organized a huge archive of materials from Germany and England, which had been gathered by Kushida, Kuruma, and Morito, but Naitô also built up collections of materials relating to Japanese socialism and Marx/Engels in Japanese translation. Also worthy of note is the establishment of an archive room in 1923. Today, numerous research institutions have archive departments in additon to libraries. However, in the Japan of the early 1920s, the OISR was very likely in the van in this regard.
     The archive has collected, naturally enough, the institutional journals and magazines of labor union and social activism groups that are necessary for the Labor Yearbook of Japan, various kinds of flyers, pamphlets, and conference materials. Today, the fact that the OISR has a larger collection of official journals from a wide variety of groups than other universities, research institutes and national libraries is due to the Institute's first director Takano Iwasaburô who, having recognised early on the importance of gathering and preserving such a collection of source materials, made possible the establishment of an archive; to Gotô Sadaharu, responsible for the resource archive, who followed Takano's lead and energetically set to work to build up the collection, and to the efforts of the many people, their names unknown, who were engaged in the humdrum work of collating and organising the materials. Director Takano greatly appreciated the work of these people who quietly carried on with such work and he later introduced a specialist system in which Head Librarian Naitô and Head Archivist Gotô, while continuing in their posts, were treated, in effect, as research Fellows.

2 The Move to Tôkyô

OISR: to be or not to be....

The first 10 years after its establishment were, so to say, the developmental period of the OISR, when it ploughed its own furrow as a research institution, opening up a series of new, previously unexplored fields of research. Under Takano's leadership, there were many ways in which the nature of the Institute - which, if anything, emphasized academic research - did not conform to what Ôhara Magosaburô hd been hoping for when he established the Institute: a combination of theory and proposals for practical policy. However, he stuck by his intention to "put up the money and keep my mouth shut" and left Takano in sole charge of the management. Nevertheless, with the Great Crash, the Depression and the consequent worsening of the economic conditions for the enterprises with which Magosaburô was connected, the number of those around him increased who urged him to drop the OISR, and he himself gradually inclined towards closing it. This intention surfaced in March 1928 at the time of the so-called '3.15 Incident', when the Institute was the subject of an investigation by the authorities. Takano and others strongly opposed the policy of closing the Institute, and for the next eight years negotiations went on between the two men over the issue of continuation or closure. Eventually, in July 1936, they agreed a) that the Institute should move to independent management in the future and relocate to Tôkyô, and b) that the costs of relocation should be borne by selling off the Institute's grounds and buildings. In February 1937, the OISR left Osaka and relocated to 896, Kashiwagi 4-chome, Yodobashi Ward (today, North Shinjuku in Shinjuku Ward). The property and buildings in Tennôji, together with part of the collection, were handed over to the Osaka City authorities.

The Institute in Kashiwagi was housed in the former residence of Yamauchi Tamon, a famous painter in the Japanese style. It was a property of 1850 sq. m., of which the house itself occupied 500 sq.m., and was enlarged by the construction of a 250 sq. m. storage annexe. All this was about half the scale of the area occupied in Osaka. At the time of the relocation, many of the staff resigned, and just seven remained: Takano, Morito, Kuruma, Gotô, Naitô, Suzuki Kôichirô, Kimura Sadamu - a fifth of the personnel complement of the glory days of the 1920s. (The following illustration shows the staff during the Kashiwagi period: front row, from the left - Morito Tatsuo, Takano Iwasaburô, Kuruma Samezô, back row - Naitô Takeo, Sasai, Ôuchi Hyôe�ANagata Toshio, Gonda Yasunosuke, Kurada Shumpei.

Although there were hopes that the move to Tôkyô would give the Institute a new lease of life, it found it difficult to carry out its activities, due to financial limitations and the suppression of academic freedom during the war years. The edition of the history of the Japanese labor movement, planned as the first new undertaking after the move, could not be completed as Institute Fellow (and trustee of the Foundation) Oouchi Hyôe, who had suggested the project, was arrested in the Jinmin Sensen Incident [1937, when hundreds of leftists and leftwing intelligentsia were arrested on suspicion that they were cooperating with the 7th Convention of the Communist International - trans.]. Furthermore, the Labor Yearbook of Japan, which, before the relocation to Tôkyô, had been the Institute's only actual ongoing project, had to be abandoned with the publication of the 21st volume in 1941 due to the decline of the labor movement following the disbanding of trade unions and the forced cessation of the publication of labor statistics, which were regarded as military secrets. In this difficult period, the Institute put all its energies into the publication of The Collected Classics of Statistical Studies. This was a translation of the works of the western classical statisticians Ernst Engel, Georg von Mayr, William Petty, Karl Knies, John Graunt, and Wilhelm Lexis. Publication began in 1941, the first year of the Pacific War, and went through 11 volumes until the end of the war in 1945. In 1949 a translation of Suessmilch's Divine Order was published. Also, in addition to these, just before a work by Wagner was due to be published the Institute suffered in the bombing of Tôkyô, and the work could not appear. The The Collected Classics of Statistical Studies is a rich work, and despite the wartime difficulties, the first edition of each volume sold 2000 copies; some of them were repeated editions, and both the Institute and the publisher, Kurita Books profited beyond their expectations. Besides this, the Institute produced a summary of the history of social science research under the title The Social Sciences at a Time of Critical Struggle and weathered a crisis over its translation of a report on Nazism by the American National Industrial Council.

On 25th May 1945, after two days of bombing by the US air force, Tôkyô was a sea of flames. Oouchi Hyôe and his wife, who were living at the Institute due to compulsory evacuation orders, and Morito Tatsuo and others, who had evacuated their homes to come to the capital, fought desperately to put out nearby fires, but they could not stop them spreading to the Institute, and except for a single stone-built storehouse, the entire Institute was completely destroyed. Yet, as a strike of luck amid calamity, the most valuable documents, original source materials and the most important writings in the collection escaped the flames. At tht time of the move to Tôkyô, the presence of a solid storehouse had attracted the Institute to purchasing the property; that prescience had a most fortunate result in 1945.

3 The Post-War Years

The Seikei Building Period

With the end of the war, conditions for the Institute changed utterly. Academic freedom was guaranteed, and the problem of external limitations on the Institute's activities suddenly disappeared. Meanwhile, Japanese society was rocked by labor issues and the labor movement - the very subject of the Institute's research. Less than a year after the end of the war, in June 1946 the number of union members had increased to 3,680,000, a ninefold increase on the pre-war maximum, and a year later, rapidly expanded to reach 5,690,000; 45.3% of the national workforce was now unionized. There had never before been a period in which labor studies research was of such pressing importance.

However, with the loss of its buildings and part of its materials collection in the bombing, and the closure of its bank account, prospects for the restart of the the Institute's activities seemed dim. Furthermore, having survived a wintry period for the Institute, its staff were being called on by Japanese society in the aftermath of defeat to apply their expertise in various fields outside the Institute. In 1945 Oouchi Hyôe returned to the Economics Department at Tôkyô University and became a leading figure in its reconstruction. The following year, Takano was appointed Chairman of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) and he was greatly aided by Gonda Yasunosuke becoming Chief Administrator at NHK. Morito Tatsuo participated in the founding of the Japan Socialist Party and in the general election of 1946 was elected a member of the House of Representatives in the Diet; in June the following year he became the Minister of Education in the Katayama administration. Hosokawa Karoku was chosen as a candidate by the Japan Communist Party for the Upper House of the Diet and became the leader of the party's group of Dietmembers.

In May 1946 the Institute was rehoused after a year-long interval. It rented a room at the former East Asia Studies Institute in Surugadai, a few minutes from Ochanomizu station. Because the East Asia Studies Institute had been founded during the war to carry out research deemed necessary for the purposes of national policy-making, there was concern that the Occupation authorities would order it to close. To forestall this, in March 1946, the Institute voluntarily dissolved itself, and the members of its employees' union led the way in organizing internal reforms with the aim of transforming it into a new think-tank to serve policy-making in a democratic Japan. This was so that the new organization could become an umbrella research institute that included a number of other, formerly existing institutes which had taken up office space in the East Asia Studies Institute building, including the OISR, which was the first to do so, and was followed by the China Studies Institute, the Global Economics Institute, the National Economics Research Council, and the Japan Agricultural Research Institute. The chairman of the preparatory committee tasked with establishing the Institute for the Study of Political Economy was Suehiro Gentarô, while Oouchi Hyôe and Kuruma Samezô attended the committee on behalf of OISR.

Every research institute was in financial difficulties, so it was likely imagined that such a new umbrella organisation would be able to access financial support from the government. In the end, however, the Institute for the Study of Political Economy got underway in October 1946 without this plan being realized. Nevertheless, during the process of reconstruction of the East Asia Studies Institute, the establishment of a library for members of the Diet was projected, which would later become the Diet Library. /p> Ultimately, the OISR had to take its own reconstruction in hand. However, the few Institute staff members that had remained during the war were now involved in various important tasks outside the Institute. Those remaining were Kuruma Samezô, who had been a member of the executive since the Institute moved to Tôkyô in 1937 and who became Administratative Director after Morito Tatsuo was appointed Minister of Education in June 1947. However, soon after the office moved to the East Asia Studies Building, Kuruma too found himself in no position to be able to work on a regular basis at the Institute because in October 1946 he was appointed professor of Economics at Hôsei University and became involved in the rebuilding of the university; he also took up a position as relief professor at Aichi University. At that point, Uesugi Sutehiko, who had been employed as a researcher since May 1946, became assistant to Kuruma, and work restarted on preparations for the next issue of the Labor Yearbook of Japan. The Institute's first post-war publication came out in May 1947. Chijô no risôkoku suisu (Paradise on Earth - Switzerland) by Abe Isô. The autobiographical preface was written by Gonda Yasunosuke, who had actually been taught by Abe at Waseda University Middle School. This book was the first of 10 volumes in the first series of Nihon shakai mondai meicho sen (Selected Famous Writings on Social Issues in Japan), which aimed to inform the Japanese people after the war that socialism had put down early roots in Japan. The following year, 1948, saw the publication of the second volume in the series, Shin shakai (New Society), by Yano Ryûkei, with an introduction by Miyake Haruki, but Abe's Shokko jijô (Worker's Conditions), Yokoyama Gennosuke's Nihon no kasô shakai (Japan's Lower Classes), Jiden (Autobiography) and Nihon no rôdô undô (The Labor Movement in Japan) by Katayama Sen, and Nihon shakaishugi undôshi (The History of the Japanese Socialist Movement) could not in the end be published. Also, Saitô Yasuaki joined the Institute as a researcher in 1947 and was followed by Funabashi Naomichi in 1948, and with the help of many paid part-time students, the Institute was able properly to resume its research survey activities, the first result of which was the "OISR Series", of which Shugyô kisoku to shokuba kiritsu (Employment Regulations and Workplace Rules) by Uesugi Sutehiko, Chingin tôsei to chingin tôsô (Wage Controls and Wage Disputes) and Saitei chinginsei no igi (The Significance of Minimum Wage Systems) by Funabashi Naomichi, and Sengo no kakei chôsa (A Survey of Post-War Family Finances) by Saitô were published from 1948 to 1949. In August that year the long-delayed Labor Yearbook of Japan was published in a special post-war edition. Thus, research work once more got underway, but the Institute's financial situation continued to worsen. The 30,000 yen a year of financial assistance extended since 1943 by Ayukawa Yoshisuke's Gisaikai Foundation had ended in 1946. At the close of that year, Ôhara Sôichirô had contributed 30,000 yen, and 75,000 yen had been received from the Ministry of Education. There had been expenses paid by the Economic Planning Agency for surveys it had commissioned, and Kurita Books had paid 5000 yen a month for editing costs of the Yearbook. But faced with the severe inflation of those years, all this income amounted to pouring water on hot stones. In 1949 the back numbers of the Kokka gakkai zasshi (Journal of the National Academic Council) were sold to the Hoover Institute. The prospects for the OISR's survival looked bleak. (Amalgamation with Hôsei University) At this critical point the Institute was thrown a lifeline from Hôsei University. In June 1949 discussions began with a view to amalgamation with the University and in July the documents providing for this were formally signed and sealed. On August 23rd, the Institute moved from Surugadai to the Hôsei University campus. On October 16th, the last committee meeting of the OISR Foundation was opened by Ôuchi Hyôe at his home, the Foundation was formally dissolved, the amalgamation with Hôsei was confirmed, and on Dec. 8th it was recognized by the Ministry of Education. Thus, exactly 30 years after its establishment, the Ôhara Institute for Social Research was terminated and then reappeared as the Ôhara Institute for Social Research, Hôsei University. The tie-up between the two institutions did of course have a particular background. In March 1947, with the move to democratize educational institutions, Nogami Toyoichirô was appointed President and Managing Director of the University and at the same time, Takano Iwasaburô was asked to be an academic affairs adviser, while Ôuchi Hyôe joined the University managerial board. It so happened that the Nogami family and the Takano family were related by marriage, and during the war both families had been evacuated to the university village at Kitakaruizawa, where they had got to know each other well on a daily basis. Moreover, in October 1946, Kuruma, Office Manager at the OISR, was appointed professor of Economics at Hôsei, and in 1948 research Fellow Uesugi resigned from the Institute and took up a post at Hôsei as assistant professor. With the affiliation to Hôsei, the Institute's financial situation was stabilized and the staff complement replenished. Just before affiliation, in April 1949 Tomizuka Ryôzô was employed and he was joined by Ôshima Kiyoshi in September, Usami Seijirô in October, and Tanuma Hajime in March 1950. In 1952 Tomizuka moved to Fukushima University and was replaced as assistant the following year by Hara Kaoru. Ishijima Makoto (April 1949) and Nagata Toshio (September 1949) were employed as office staff and were joined in 1950 by Hayashi Haruko�CTaniguchi Akiko�CSuzuki Hiroshi�Cand Tomizuka Teruyo. Numbers were still nowhere near those of the pre-war heyday, but there now as many as ten specialist researchers and if one includes parallel posts, fourteen staff; the Institute was finally getting into a position to be able to recommence a substantial program of activities. In this period, the main project was the annual production of the Labor Yearbook of Japan. Owing to a lack of resources, the 22nd volume, published at almost the same time as the affiliation with Hôsei, could not be more than a record of the activities of labor movement in the past year, but with the 23rd volume, it was possible to return to the previous three-part format: 1st part - workers' conditions; 2nd part - the labor movement; 3rd part - labor policy. All the Institute's researchers were involved in the writing of the Yearbook, and from outside the Institute there was input from Uesugi Sutehiko�CUeda Masayoshi�CUjihara Seijirô�Cand Nakabayashi Kenjirô. The Yearbook was published by several different companies during this period: Vol. 22 - the Daiichi Publishing Company, Vols. 23-28 - the Jijitsûshin Company, Vols. 29-35 - the Tôyôkeizaishinpô Company, and from Vol. 36 on - the Rôdôjumpô Company. There were some minor changes in the content and arrangement and the period of data collation during these years, but until the present the Yearbook has in principle been published annually and by 1988, had reached its 58th volume. In addition, with the inclusion in Yearbook volumes of Labor Conditions during the Pacific War (1964), and The Labor Movement during the Pacific War (1965), by 1988 sixty pages had been devoted to the war years, which had previously been a blank. Labor yearbooks are also produced abroad, and in Japan were published by such organizations as the Harmonization Council (Kyôchôkai). However, there are no comparative examples of such a continuous record, spanning seventy years, of the progress of the labor movement as is presented by the OISR's Labor Yearbook of Japan. For a long time, it was almost impossible to purchase the entire series of volumes, but the reprinted pre-war published volumes are available from Hôsei University Press and the post-war volumes from Rôdôjumpô. Along with the Yearbook, in the 1950s and 60s the Institute devoted its energies to survey-based research into labor issues and the labor movement. Almost annually, surveys were carried out all over the country at the behest of the Economic Stabilization Board, the Economic Planning Council, the Economic Planning Agency, and the Fisheries Agency, or else assistance for research was received from the Ministry of Education. This work resulted in the publication of such individual reports as Shitsugyôsha no sonzaijôtai (Living Conditions of the Unemployed), Chûshôkigyô rôdôsharon (Workers in Small and Medium-sized Companies), Chûshôkigyô no chingin to rôdô (Workers in Small and Medium-sized Companies - Wages and Labor), and KInzokusangyô rôdôkumiai no soshiki to katsudô (Organization and Operations in Metalwork Industry Unions), and in the first publication, in 1953, of Shiryôshitsuhô (Archival Report). (The Move to the Post-Graduate School) In January 1953, with the completion of the '53 Building (the postgraduate school building), the Institute moved from the Shinkan (New Building) to part of the 5th floor of the '53 Building. The total floor space was 156 sq. m., which comprised the Director's Office, office space, research rooms and storage space. This was only a tenth of the space occupied by the Institute in the Osaka days, but eight years after losing the Kashiwagi premises, the OISR had finally succeeded in gaining a solid base equipped with the necessary facilities. A task it now faced was the restoration and reorganization of the materials that had survived in the storeroom at Kashiwagi. Most of the materials were precious western books and relatively few articles. The reorganization went smoothly, and by 1960 the hard work of Rachi Tsutomu, then a lecturer in the Economics Department, had completed the cataloging of all the western books that had been published before 1880. What to do with the institutional journals and original source materials was a different matter. Many of these were still in the secure crates that they had been put in for the move to Tôkyô, and considering they had been left like that for a long time, they were still in good condition. But they had been piled from floor to ceiling in that 50 sq. m. storehouse, and new storeroom and office space notwithstanding, it was completely impossible to accommodate the transfer of all of them. Furthermore, the daily work on the production of the Yearbook and the ongoing surveys left no hands spare. It was decided to progress the work by moving the non-cataloged materials into the new offices bit by bit and to transfer the post-war materials that were not needed for the present into the old storehouse, work which had to be done in the main by relying on post-graduate students working in their spare time and by unpaid volunteers. As there was no overall specialist in charge of the work, no clear guidelines for the reorganization, and the work depended on postgraduate students, it not only progressed very slowly, but it was difficult to avoid confusion whenever those doing the work dropped out or new people joined in. Nevertheless, from 1955 some of the now cataloged materials began to appear in printed form, such as Nômin undôshi shiryôo - Historical Documents of the Farmers' Movement, and Rôdô undôshi shiryô - Historical Documents of the Labor Movement, and by the end of the 1950s, the work of reorganization and cataloging was finally underway. Great progress in cataloging original source materials was especially made from 1960 to 1963, when Ministry of Education grants for science research enabled the publication of Wagakuni rônô undô ni okeru shakaiminshushugi no kenkyû (Socialism in the Workers' and Farmers' Movements in Japan). 4 The Period after the 50th Anniversary (New Developments) In April 1966 Kuruma Samezô, who had been a research Fellow at the Institute since its founding, a committee member, an executive committee member, managing director, and as Director of the Institute had steered it through its most difficult period after the war and since then, retired from his post as Director on the grounds of old age and became a Research Associate Emeritus. He was succeeded as Director and Chairman of the Board by Usami Seijirô. The 1960s brought not just a new Director but a major change in personnel. In 1963 Tanuma Hajime, the research Fellow who had been responsible for the editing of the Labor Yearbook of Japan since vol. 24, moved to the Sociology Department, and Nagata Toshio who, as librarian, was responsible for the organization of the library and also produced Honpô kaishashi mokuroku (A Catalog of Japanese Company Histories) and Sengo rôdô kumiaishi bunken mokuroku (A Catalog of Documental Materials relating to the History of Post-war Labor Unions), retired; his place was taken by Koreeda Yô in 1965. 1966 saw the retirement of Nakabayashi Kenjirô, who had worked for almost 20 years as general manager and accountant since the days of the Seikei Building; Karatani Nobuo was appointed to the post. Nakabayashi Kenjirô in 1965, and Kobayashi Kenichi and Nimura Kazuo in 1966 joined the Institute as research Fellows. All had other posts outside the Institute at first, but after a year, Nakabayashi and Nimura transferred to the Institute to become full-time research Fellows. In 1968 research Fellow Hara Kaoru transferred to the Economics Department. In the 1960s the Institute was faced with a number of difficult issues, one of which was the 'reconstruction' of the Labor Yearbook of Japan. The costs of producing the Yearbook had risen greatly, and owing to a fall-off in prospective buyers, a large reduction in the number of pages was unavoidable from Vol. 31, but as the number produced for Vol. 35 did not reach a thousand copies, in 1962 the situation was such that the publisher refused to publish. Led by Director Usami and by research Fellow Nakabayashi, who was responsible for the edition of the Yearbook from Vol. 36, all the Fellows put their energies into finding a way out of the situation. They improved the content by first gathering information about the labor movement and then holding weekly research meetings where researchers reported on the section of the Yearbook for which they were responsible; only then would they write up the material. In the final stages of editing, the Director and the research Fellows would then go on a retreat where they would examine and arrange the contents together. In 1965 the publisher with whom the Institute had been having problems was changed to the Rôdô Jumpô Company, and with that company's positive engagement, the number of copies increased threefold. Also at this time, the cataloging and organizing of original source materials, which had not been going smoothly, now gradually began to make real progress to the point where the materials were in a useable condition. What really helped this process along was the acquisition in 1967 of a large space for cataloging and reading of library materials in the vacant Azabu Campus as a result of the closure of the No. 1 Engineering Technical School. With the establishment of this branch department of the Institute at Azabu, all the library books, documents and materials piled up in the Kashiwagi storehouse, as well as all those stored in the OISR itself, could now be shelved and easily examined. For budgetary reasons, new shelving could not be purchased, but fortunately, bookshelves were available for purchase at knockdown prices from other universities which no longer needed them, and this provided a temporary respite. Besides the sudden availability of this space, what also helped to progress the work of cataloging materials was the changeover from side-job workers being responsible for the cataloging of the pre-war materials to a full-time research Fellow taking it on. At first, it had been Nimura Kazuo, who had mainly done this work on the pre-war materials as a volunteer from 1956, but from 1970 it was taken on by Taniguchi Akiko. In 1967 and 1968, the cataloging of library books and journals was under the supervision of Ishijima Makoto and Koreeda Yô, who traveled to and from the storehouse, which had neither heating nor electric light. The result of their work was the collation of Hôsei daigaku ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo shozô bunken mokuroku (senzen no bu) (Catalog of Materials in the Archive of the OISR, Hôsei University - the Pre-War Period). With this, the Institute's entire stock of books, other materials and series of publications which, since the fire in 1945, had been in a disorganized state for nearly 25 years, was clarified and rendered easy of access. Researchers gradually came to realize the value of this catalog; as Nishikawa Masao writes in Yôroppa rôdô undôshi kenkyû ni tsuite (On the History of the Labor Movement in Europe): "It's dark at the base of a lighthouse" [a proverb: i.e. it's easy to overlook what's close at hand - trans.] Before falling asleep confused in some European library, one would do well to consult this "Catalog"." After the 50th Anniversary In 1969 the Institute celebrated its 50th anniversary with the assistance of the Asahi Newspaper Company by holding a commemorative public lecture meeting and exhibition. The public lectures were given on May 22nd in Asahi Hall in Yurakucho to a packed auditorium. Director Ôshima Kiyoshi spoke on "Half a Century of the Social Movement and the Ôhara Research Institute", the address by the Governor of Tôkyô, Minobe Ryokichi, was titled "The Ôhara Research Institute and I", while Ôuchi Hyôe, former President of Hôsei University, spoke on "Japan in the World". The exhibition opened the following day in the Grand Hall on the 7th floor of the Nihombashi branch (formerly Shiragiya) of the Tôkyû Department Store and ran for six days. It was titled "Half a Century of the Social Movement - Oppression and the People's Resistance" and showed the progress of social movements in Japan through a display of items from the Institute's collection of materials. About 2000 people visited the exhibition over the six days, and all 3000 copies of the specially prepared photo-illustrated booklet were sold so that more had rapidly to be printed to meet the demand. Besides the exhibition, two 50th anniversary commemorative publications were produced: Shozô bunken mokuroku (Catalog of Archive Documents) and Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo gojûnenshi (Fifty Years of the Ôhara Institute for Social Research). Gojû nenshi, published in November 1970, was an enlargement of Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo sanjûnenshiI (Thirty Years of the Ôhara Institute for Social Research), adding a description of the course of events since 1954 when 'Thirty Years' was published. Both the 1954 and 1970 publications were written by Institute Fellow Ôshima Kiyoshi. About the time of the 50th anniversary, the scope of the Institute's activities gradually expanded. In the 1950s and 60s, the two main pillars of its work had been the Labor Yearbook of Japan and the operation of surveys into existing labor conditions, but from the end of the 1960s two major new projects were added: the compilation of the Marukusu keizaigaku rekishikon (Marx Lexicon of Political Economy) and Fukkoku shiriizu - nihon shakai undô shiryô (Reprint Series - Historical Documents of Social Movements in Japan). Furthermore, the Institute now functioned as a specialist library and archive in that its collection of books and materials, previously only accessible by University and Institute staff, was opened for viewing by the public. The Marx Lexicon of Political Economy is a collection of quotations, in Japanese and original languages, from original and translated works by, and letters and posthumous writings of Marks and Engels that are useful for an understanding of important concepts and issues; they have been arranged and edited in five topics: competition, methodology, the materialist view of history, economic crises, money. The project was essentially based on a card index built up throughout his professional career by Institute Fellow Emeritus Kuruma, and the first volume was published in April 1968. Publication continued at the rate of about one volume a year until completion in 1985 with Vol. 15. Those who worked on this project included Dr. Kuruma himself, and from the Institute's staff Usami Seijirô and Institute Fellow Ôshima Kiyoshi; from outside the Institute there was Kawanabe Masatoshi�CKuruma Ken�COgata Ken�COkada Hiroyuki�CÔki Keiji�Cand Ôtani Teinosuke. Endô Shigeo�CKonishi Kazuo�CMaehata Yukihiko joined the project on the editing committee. The Lexicon earned a high reputation at home and abroad and won a number of awards, including the Asahi Award for Academic Excellence in 1970 and the Noro Eitarô Prize in ??????? the publishers Ôtsuki Shoten awarded it their cash prize at the Moscow International Book Fair in 1975. At one point, pirate editions were appearing in West Germany and elsewhere, and later, four West German companies applied for the rights to bring out German editions. Eventually, it was published by the Auwermann Company, well-known for its reprints of socialist literature. Later, publication moved to Topos Verlag, with which Auwermann had merged. The Reprint Series - Historical Documents of Japanese Social Movements was published to be of use to scholars and activists and consisted of reprints of original materials collected by the Institute such as the journals of labor unions, proletarian political parties, and youth groups, as well as conference information, records of meetings, circulars, reports, letters, and flyers. There are many other examples of reprints of newspapers and magazines, but this project was put together with the intention of providing a) a near complete set of originals with no numbers missing, b) accurate explanatory notes, c) detailed indices and lists of contents, and at the same time, with the aim of clarifying the origins of those documents which were written under a pen name or else unsigned, which itself would be of value in academic research. The work was published by Hôsei University Press, beginning in March 1969 with Shinjinkai kikanshi demokurashii/sakigake/dôhô.narôdo (The Journal of the New People Group - Democracy/Pioneers/Comrades/ Narod [The People]) and including Seiji hihan (Political Criticism) (Feb. 1989), an edited collection of journals totalling 192 volumes; the single edited volume of original materials Seiji kenkyûkai/musanseitô soshiki junbi iinkai (Political study groups and Proletarian Party Organisations' Committees); Rôdô nômintô (The Workers' and Farmer's Party) (5 vols.) - a grand total of 198 volumes. Nimura Kazuo was responsible for editing the project as a whole, while part-time Fellows at the Institute Ôno Setsuko�CUmeda Toshihide�CYokoseki Itaru did the groundwork on the project; Institute staff, Koreeda Yô and Furutani Yôko worked on the compilation of content lists and indices�Chelped by Matsuo Taga�CSuzuki Yûko�Cand Shikino Shizuko from outside the Institute. Work on the topics of each volume progressed with the cooperation of many specialists from outside the Institute. Work on the cataloging of books and materials went ahead smoothly after the establishment of the branch department at Azabu. From April 1971 it was possible to make the collection available for viewing two days a week. This was extended to five viewing days a week in 1973. Keen requests from users that the collection be jointly accessible with that of the Harmonization Council resulted in the OISR administering both collections. (The 60th Anniversary) 1979 brought the Institute's 60th anniversary. The Labor Yearbook of Japan, which had been the central project of the OISR since its founding, reached its 50th issue in 1980. To commemorate the anniversary and also the 100th anniversary of Hoosei University, which was coming up the following year, the Institute selected about 100 items from its complete collection of materials - European books, documents, and original manuscripts - for a special exhibition. The 'Treasures of the Ôhara Institute for Social Research - Special Exhibition of Rare Books and Manuscripts' was held for six days from November 12th at the Yaesu Book Center in front of Tôkyô Station and attracted many visitors from all over the country, including academics and researchers in the fields of the history of social movements, the history of social philosophy and of economic history. During the exhibition, a public meeting was held on November 14th at the Japan Trust for the Advancement of Private Education Building (Nihon shigaku shinkô zaidan biru) to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the OISR and the publication of the 50th volume of the Labor Yearbook of Japan. Over a hundred people attended, many from the academic world and from the labor union movement, to hear speeches by Nakamura Tetsunori, the President of Hôsei University, Morito Tatsuo, Sakisaka Itsurô, Ariizumi Tôru, Ujihara Seijirô, Saitô Hitoshi. Other celebratory events for the 60th anniversary year included the editing and publication of Shashin de miru meidei no rekishi (The History of May Day in Pictures) which made use of the Institute's archives, and Institute Fellow Okamoto Hideaki published Daiei shakaishugi shakai no kôsei, his revised translation of the Webbs' Cooperative Movement in Great Britain (1891). Also in 1979, with the aid of a research grant from the Ministry of Education, work was begun on Sambetsukaigi no kansuru kenkyû (Studies on the Congress of Industrial Labor Unions of Japan). This research project on the organization that played such an important role in Japan's labor movement in the early post-war period was based on archival materials at the Institute that had formerly been stored at the head office of the Sambetsukaigi, and supplemented by material from additional sources and interviews with participants; the project went forward under the overall supervision of Institute Fellow Hayakawa Seiichiro, assisted by Yoshida Kenji, Hirai Yôichi, Matsuo Yô, Sakurai Kinue, and Kinoshita Takeo and is still in progress at the time of writing [1989]. In 1980, a series of public lectures entitled "Issues in the Contemporary Labor Union Movement" was held to round off the celebrations of the 60th anniversary year. This was the first such event, and subsequently, similar public lectures series were held once a year. The first themes in these lectures had a strongly educational flavor in that they addressed issues relating to the labor union leadership, but from the 4th series (title: A Fresh Look at the Enterprise Unionism Debate), the event changed to a symposium format. Topics selected were computerization issues and themes relating to the ILO agenda for the year. (The Second Move) During the ten years that followed the 60th anniversary, the Institute went through the second period of upheaval in its long history. There were two or three dimensions to this upheaval; the first was literally an upheaval, a physical movement, in that during this period the Institute had to relocate twice. The second upheaval was organizational; the Hôsei University Ôhara Institute for Social Research Foundation was terminated, and the Institute resumed work as a research institute affiliated to Hôsei University. Thirdly, the opportunity was taken at this time to restructure the Institute's internal organization and management. Many changes now occurred in terms of both research projects and of personnel. The first changes came in March 1981 with the move to the newly built "1980 Building" on the Fujimi campus. The third floor of this library and research center building was now home to the Institute's offices, reading rooms and research rooms, while fully shelved storage space was provided on the second and third basement floors of the same building. This meant that the Institute's archive, which had been until then in three different locations - the postgraduate school, the Azabu campus and the old storehouse at Kashiwagi - were now all together in one place, finally giving the Institute a real physical coherence for its resources. However, not long after this development, in 1982, the university's Economics and Sociology Departments decided to move to the Tama campus and requested the OISR to move there with them. The new location in the 1980 Building was convenient for commuting, its facilities were all new, and moreover, it was used by many people outside the university, so a move to Tama was not necessarily seen as desirable. However, the storage space in the 1980 Building had all been filled up from the beginning, so that some books and regular publications had had to be housed in the old library and on the Kawasaki campus. Room for expansion at the Fujimi campus was very limited, so although some inconveniences would have to be tolerated, a move was ultimately inevitable. After much discussion at repeated meetings by the Fellows, the Institute's Board and of the staff, it was finally decided to accept the request of the Economics and Sociology Departments, and the move to the Tama campus duly took place in March 1986. The administration offices, reading rooms, researchers' offices, reference materials shelves, and project rooms of the new Institute occupied the fifth (top) floor of the library and research office block together with a conference room shared with the comparative economics and statistics institutes. The storage space in the third floor basement was equipped with electrically-powered mobile shelving, and at 2,200 sq. m., the largest since the years in Ôsaka, it provided the Institute with the most extensive and best-equipped facilities in its 70 year-long history. (Organizational Changes) The second upheaval was one of organizational change. The request for the move from the Economics and Sociology Departments was not just for relocation by the OISR but also for organizational changes in the Institute so that it could play a more positive role in promoting research activities within the university as a whole. This problem had been considered in the Institute some time before, but no conclusions had been reached, so in February 1983, at the same as it informed the two departments of its acquiescence with their request, the OISR also outlined what organizational changes would be possible for the time being. The upshot of these were that the number of part-time research staff would be slightly increased, their periods of appointment would be decided, and furthermore, the increase in part-time staff would open up the Institute more to the outside world. The focus of organizational change at the OISR was the question of whether or not to retain its institutional status as the Hôsei University Ôhara Institute for Social Research Foundation - an organization formally separate from Hôsei University. At the time of the amalgamation with Hôsei University in 1949, the Institute had terminated its separate existence as a foundation and had become an affiliate of Hôsei University, but the following year it reformed its organization to revert to separate legal status from the university as the Hôsei University Ôhara Institute for Social Research Foundation. The reason for this change in status is unclear but it is likely that it was a means of facilitating the receipt of grants from the Ministry of Education and elsewhere. However, with the passage of time, circumstances changed markedly. Although private universities began to receive grants for operating expenses, assistance for private research institutes had gradually become more limited over the years. As a result, the OISR found itself in something of a dilemma: despite being maintained by Hôsei University, it was unable to receive any grants for operating expenses for its research Fellows and staffers. A solution for this problem was the establishment in 1973 of the Social and Labor Issues Research Center as an affiliate institute of Hôsei University. The research Fellows and staff were all employed in the institute and were paid by the university while at the same time being taken on as researchers and staff of the Ôhara Institute. Of course, the Center was not established in order to qualify for grants; it had its own function as a facility which was jointly used for the archive of the Harmonization Council held by the university library and for the OISR archive. However, while it is undeniable that, with regard to budgeting and personnel, the Ôhara Institute and the Social and Labor Issues Research Center were two different organizations, the situation can not be described as normal. Yet on the other hand, being an autonomous foundation in charge of its own planning and management also made it easy for the Institute to develop its own activities in a resilient and flexible manner. There were various opinions as to whether this 'dual organization' should be left as it was or whether the Foundation should be wound up and the Institute fully incorporated within the university as an affiliate. The options were carefully examined at Fellows' meetings, and eventually, it was agreed to dissolve the Foundation on the occasion of the move to the Tama campus, to affiliate the Ôhara Institute for Social Research fully with Hôsei University and to resume work on that basis. This plan was confirmed at the Institute Board Meeting and trustees' meeting, both held on June 8th 1983, and the Director's proposal to "resume work as an affiliate of Hôsei University on the occasion of the move to the Tama campus" was resolved upon with unanimous agreement. An interim board meeting and a trustees' meeting were held on March 31st 1986 at which, again with unanimous agreement, it was decided to "dissolve the Hôsei University Ôhara Institute for Social Research Foundation and transfer its assets to the Corporation of Hôsei University." Accordingly, application for dissolution was made on the same day to the supervisory authority, the Ministry of Education, and the Minister's permission was obtained on March 13th. The Foundation's assets were transferred to Hôsei University, and in April that year the Hôsei University Ôhara Institute for Social Research became an affiliate of Hôsei University in name as well as fact. When the Foundation was dissolved, the prime responsibility for management of the Institute passed from the Board to the management committee. Committee members were appointed from the whole group of Institute Fellows and from staff of each university department. Research Fellows' tasks were to share the daily duties of the Institute and to organize and supervise various research projects. Committee members not only had to attend committee meetings; they too had to organize some kind of project or else take part in them. The system of paid part-time Fellows that existed during the OISR Foundation years had required young researchers to share out certain specific duties that related to each person's research interests, which had served both to energize the Institute's work and to motivate each person in his or her research over the long term. These older systems were now supplemented by a new system of unpaid commissioned researchers and visiting researchers. Specially commissioned researchers - specialist academic researchers from within the university and other researchers from outside the university - were expected to join project teams and cooperate in the various activities undertaken by the Institute, and at the same time offer the Institute their frank criticism and opinions about the way it was being run and also serve as a pool of extra talent alongside the part-time Fellows and management committee members. Visiting Fellows were able to work with the specialist researchers from inside and outside the university who were using the OISR to do their research. One might be inclined to think that allocating work between full-timers, part-timers, commissioned researchers and visiting Fellows would be too complicated for a small institute, but precisely because it was a small institute in a private university with only a very small number of full-time researchers, it needed to draw on the strengths of a variety of people, and it was thought that, in doing so, the Institute would be able to increase its own energies and expand its area of activity. (Changes in Personnel) The third significant change in the 1980s was the movement of personnel that occurred in that decade. In March 1983 Professor Ôshima Kiyoshi, former Director, chairman of the executive board and part-time Fellow, retired and became a Research Associate Emeritus. Professor Saitô Yasuaki also retired, on grounds of ill health. His post was filled in July 1983 by Associate Professor Satô Hiroki. In March 1985 former Director, chairman of the executive board and part-time Fellow Usami Seijirô also retired and became a Research Associate Emeritus. In April 1987 Associate Professor Satô moved to the Department of Management Studies; Associate Professor Igarashi Hitoshi was appointed his successor. There were a number of personnel changes among the other staff at the Institute during this period. Makishima Keiko and Karatani Yoshio both retired, while Fuku Rei Mei�CKumazawa Nori�CInoue Sadayo were all transferred to the Institute from other posts in the university, and were transferred again a few years later. Tachibana Yûichi was transferred from the library of the Engineering Department to become the Institute Office Manager, and Kojima Hanae and Wakasugi Takashi were employed as secretaries. The Institute was also shaken by the loss of a number of senior colleagues in these years. Former Director Kuruma Samezô, who had been a Fellow since the founding of the Institute and had given his all in keeping the Institute afloat during the hardships of the post-war years, passed away in October 1982. A severe blow in May 1984 was the death of Ôshima Kiyoshi, who, as Director, chairman of the executive board and part-time Fellow, had worked so hard during the decades after the war to rebuild and re-energize the Institute. The same month also saw the passing of Morito Tatsuo, who had carried the Institute as full-time Fellow and chairman of the board from before the war and on through the early post-war period. In 1986 came the sudden deaths in January, of Nakabayashi Kenjirô, Fellow and Trustee, who had done such sterling work in rebuilding the Labor Yearbook of Japan, and in August, of Ôno Yoshimi who, as general manager in charge of the archives, had twice given such energetic service in charge of the Institute's relocations. The same decade saw the passing of a number of other eminent individuals who had been very much involved with the work of the Institute; these included Ôuchi Hyôe, Matsukawa Shichiro, Kimura Sadamu�CArisawa Hiromi�Cand Karatani Yoshio. (The Development of New Activities) The move to the 1980 Building and then to the Tama campus made possible the development of new activities on the basis of solid and reliable facilities. These included one project into which the Institute literally put all its effort, namely, the compilation of Shakai rôdô undô dai-nenpyô (Chronological Tables of Social and Labour Movements). This had been planned as a project to commemorate the Institute's 60th anniversary, but work on it was only actually able to get underway with the formation of an editorial committee in 1983, after the relocation to the 1980 Building. Shakai rôdô undô dai-nenpyô chronicled the progress of the labor movement and social movements in Japan during the approximately 130-year period from 1858, the critical year for the opening of Japan, until 1985. It was work on a really large scale, its 1500 pages divided into four volumes in total: the pre-World War Two period in one volume, the post-war period in two volumes, and citations and sources in a fourth volume. The two main topics were social movements and the labor movement, while there were separate sections on legislation that related to these movements, on economic management, and on social culture. The international section, naturally enough, featured developments abroad which had an influence in Japan as well as accounts of social and labor movements in other countries and the background to those movements, and also worldwide social and labor movements. The work aimed to be a comprehensive chronicle of modern Japan as seen from the viewpoint of the people. The characteristics of the project were that a) all sections showed source references, b) concise commentaries were included in each of the 3500 more important entries, c) citations were given a volume to themselves, d) the annual Labor Yearbook of Japan was revised and enlarged in the same format, which made it in various ways much easier for readers to use. The selection and editing of the commentaries was done primarily by an editorial committee consisting of 11 Institute Fellows, while over 250 specialists in various fields assisted in the selection and writing of the entries themselves, and in the writing of commentaries. During the period of the work's composition, the editorial committee met regularly once a month without fail, over 300 times in total, reviewing each volume and each section a number of times. Fortunately, the Shakai rôdô undô dai-nenpyô was widely praised and soon after the publication of the completed work in March 1987, it won the first Okinaga Prize. The project played a great part in rejuvenating and energizing the Institute, because it was clear that to complete the task would be beyond the capacities of the Institute's full-time and associate Fellows; younger researchers would have to be taken on as part-time Fellows. They proved not only capable of providing the energies needed to complete the Nenpyô successfully, but also demonstrated their capabilities in various fields of work within the Institute, including the formation of new project teams and the revision of the Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo zasshi (The Journal of the OISR). Until this time, the Institute had been conducting surveys on various themes and, with support from Ministry of Education science research grants, had been engaged in joint research projects or had held conferences as the need arose. However, most of the participants had been full-time or part-time Fellows, and a certain rigidity unavoidably tended to set in. To deal with this situation and to further open up the Institute, part-time Fellows took on more of a central role from about 1981 onwards; specialists from outside the Institute and also from outside the University were invited to form project teams on specific research topics, and these teams would be backed by the Institute. A series of new projects got underway, including the 'Aging Society Study Group' led by Prof. Kobayashi Kenichi in 1981, Institute Fellow Funahashi's group on 'Employment and Wages in the 1980s' in 1982, the QWL (Workers' Quality of Life) Study Group led by Institute Fellow Rei Gaku in 1983. These study groups, the largest of which had about twenty members and the smallest three, gathered documentary materials, held seminar meetings to hear reports from specialists and practitioners, and carried out surveys. Results were published in the Journal of the OISR as and when necessary, and also as the Hôsei daigaku ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo kenkyû sôsho (Hôsei University Ôhara Institute of Social Research Research Studies Series). By the end of 1988 the following six volumes had been published: 1. Funahashi Naomichi ed., Gendai no keizai kôzô to rôshi kankei (Labor Relations and the Structure of the Modern Economy)(1983, Sôgo Rôdô Kenkyûjo) 2. Hayakawa Seiichiro, Ogoshi Yônosuke, Sôda Toshio eds., Denki sangyô ni okeru rôdô kumiai (Labor Unions in the Electrical Industry)(1984, Ôtsuki Shoten) 3. Hôsei University Ôhara Institute for Social Research ed., Gendai no kôreisha taisaku (Modern Policies for the Ageing Society)(1985, Sôgo Rôdô Kenkyûjo) 4. Hôsei University Ôhara Institute for Social Research ed., Rôdô no jinkenka (The Humanization of Labor)(1986, Sôgo Rôdô Kenkyûjo) 5. Nimura Kazuo, Ashio bôdô no shiteki bunseki - kôzan rôdôsha no shakaishi (The Ashio Riot of 1907 - A Social History of Mining in Japan (1988, Tôkyô Daigaku Shuppankai) 6. Nakamura Keisuke, Satô Hiroki, Kamiya Takuhei, Rôdô kumiai wa hontô ni yaku ni tatte iru no ka (Are Labor Unions Really of Any Use?) (1988, Sôgo Rôdô Kenkyûjo) Research groups such as the Congress of Industrial Labour Unions of Japan Study Group, the Long-Term Labor Statistics Project, and the Labor Front Reconstruction Study Group all carried on their work with the aid of Ministry of Education research grants. Something else which deserves a special mention is the late Sakisaka Itsurô's donation to the Institute of the 70,000 books of his library. This not only at one bound greatly increased the Institute's archive quantitatively, but also was important because of the quality of the works donated. A detailed description of the content of the library and of the process of its cataloging and organization have been described elsewhere, so I shall not go into that here, but it is worth mentioning that the gift of the Sakisaka collection in itself played a positive role in spurring on the automation and computerization of the Institute's collection as a whole, a development which will be described further. During this ten year period, the Institute's work expanded rapidly in the following ways. There was, naturally enough, a corresponding increase in the responsibilities of the Fellows and of the staff. It was impossible to arrange and catalog the 70,000 volumes of the Sakisaka collection using previous methods employed. Basically, more specialist staff were needed, but given the university's financial constraints at that time, this was clearly not an option. The next best policy was a temporary increase in staff and the introduction of computers. The acquisition of the Sakisaka collection gave the impetus for work to begin on computerization and for the compilation of a computerized database starting from this year [the year of writing - trans.]. (Activity after the Move to Tama) All the above-mentioned activities, except for the Shakai rôdô undô dai-nenpyô (Chronological Tables of Social and Labour Movements) have continued up to the present time of writing [1989], and new projects began after the move to the Tama Campus. These included a) improvements to the Institute's journal, b) revision of the Labor Yearbook of Japan, c) the computerization of the cataloging and arrangement of books and of the compilation of documental materials, d) the commencement of work on the compilation of a database of labor-related material, e) preparations for the compilation of source materials on post-war labor and social movements. The Nihon shakai undô shiryô (Historical Documents of Japanese Social Movements) already referred to, project teams, the research series, the Sakisaka collection - to explain each of these is to give an outline of the Institute's current situation. 1) improvements to the journal of the Institute ..... Since 1953 the Institute had produced a monthly journal Shiryô shippô (Documental Report), and after the founding of the Social and Labor Issues Research Center, the Institute and Center together edited and published Kenkyû shiryô geppô (Research and Documents Monthly). However, the contents amounted to no more than a single essay written by the Fellows in turn with a labor diary added. To improve on this, the June 1984 issue was opened up to contributions from various quarters, and rather than just being an Institute bulletin, the intention was now that the journal become a research medium of communication for researchers in the field of labor issues. This intention gradually took on real substance, and from the April 1986 issue, the journal was renamed Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo zasshi (The Journal of the Ohara Institute for Social Research) and the layout and contents were completely revamped. Since then, a number of special issues have been produced that have included updates from the Labor Yearbook, and the number of thoroughly prepared contributions from younger researchers has increased, with a resulting improvement in the journal's reputation in society. 2) the revision of the Labor Yearbook of Japan ..... Following the 18th volume in the pre-war period, for a long time the Labor Yearbook of Japan had consisted of three parts: a) workers' conditions b) the labor movement c) labor policy. However, that format had made it difficult to accommodate an important topic in the field of labor issues in Japan, namely, labor-management relations, and there had been much discussion of how to improve matters with regard to this problem. Accordingly, from Vol. 57 (1987) onwards, a five-part format was introduced: a) labor economy and workers' livelihoods b) management labor policies and labor relations c) labor union organization and the labor movement d) labor unions, politics and social movements e) labor and social policy. National labor union organizations had previously been addressed by reports on conferences of the various organizations; these were now covered in such a way as to facilitate an overall grasp of the situation by a study of each organization's structure, aims, relations with political parties, international activities etc. The previous 'Labor Diary' was similarly revised into a six-heading format like the Dai-nenpyô and added to the Dai-nenpyô as a supplement. 3) computerization of library and archive cataloging and of compilation of source materials.....With the relocation to Tama, a switch was made from manual cataloging of the library and archive to the use of personal computers. By 1986, when the process was still at an experimental stage, significant results had been achieved, beginning with the registration of newly arrived reading matter, the compilation of the content lists of such newly arrived materials and the retrieval on PCs of all card details for each book or text. An unexpected level of progress in cataloging the Sakisaka collection was achieved by contracting out the job of inputing basic data relating to the materials in the collection. On the basis of these experiments, with the improvements in the capacities of PCs and peripherals and the remarkable progress made in software packages, 300,000-500,000 volumes could easily be stored on a standard PC, and the Institute was able to embark on its own program of PC-based library management. The present time of writing [1989] is still one of transition in this respect; title, author and subject category cards are still being accessed manually so there is as yet not that much labour-saving here. However, eventually the changeover to a card-less system will be complete, enabling a significant increase in efficiency. 4) commencement of work on the compilation of a database of labor-related materials..... Since 1960 the Institute had been producing the Rôdô kankei bunken getsuroku (Monthly Digest of Labor-related Documents), which was used by both scholars and activists. As a specialist documental index for labor-related issues, the digest was highly regarded as an incomparable source of information, since it included many references to union journals that were not normally included in other specialist bibliographies as well as non-commercially available statistical data from union survey departments and specialist labor issues survey bodies. However, although as a monthly publication it contained the very latest data and was thus a valuable research tool, it was not suitable for access over the long term. Consequently, there had long been discussion about compiling a specialist database of labor-related documents, which would be based on the actual experience of compiling and cataloging all the Rôdô kankei bunken getsuroku. Fortunately, an application with this aim in mind, made to the Advancement of Academic Research Trust Fund of the Advancement of Private Universities Foundation, was successful, and work on the project began in 1988. 4) preparations for the compilation of Sengo shakai rôdô undô shiryô (Source Materials on Post-war Labor and Social Movements)..... As the project to commemorate the Institute's 70th anniversary, in 1989 preparations began for the compilation and publication of Sengo shakai rôdô undô shiryô. (International Activities) One of the great changes in this ten-year period was the development in relations with individuals and institutions overseas. Previously, foreign researchers had been welcomed at the Institute as Visiting Fellows on long-term visits, but with the move to the 1980 Building, the acquisition of a full range of facilities, and the fact that the Institute had now become Japan's largest specialist archive for labor-related issues, the number of visitors from overseas rapidly increased. Many scholars from countries all over the world, such as the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, the USSR, Australia and others, visited the Institute to use its resources and were thereby able to do some good work. In the last few years dozens of people have been visiting the OISR every year and some three or four of them have been accepted as Visiting Fellows. Not only have foreign scholars come to the Institute, OISR Fellows have taken part in joint research projects overseas and have been invited to give an increasing number of presentations at academic conferences and seminars. Moreover, in accordance with the keen wishes of a former Visiting Fellow, Duke University in the USA and Hôsei University agreed on a mutual exchange student program; the role of the Institute in the context of the internationalization of Hôsei University as a whole has thus been growing and will doubtless grow still further in the years to come. (Towards the 21st Century) Once again, it goes without saying that this review of the 70 year-long history of the OISR is not intended as an exercise in breast-beating about the past. What we are now tasked with is how to continue to develop this venerable Institute, what direction to map out for it so that it can continue to be worthy of its good name. This of course is easy to say but difficult to put into practice. The environment within which the OISR has existed has changed greatly over the past 70 years. At the time when it was founded, a time when there was no similar research institute anywhere in Japan, in every field of research in which the OISR engaged - Marxism, the history of socialism, women's labor, childcare issues, leisure studies - it did pioneering work. Compared to that time, the situation of research institutes today could hardly be similar, when the number of institutes that do social studies research work is in the dozens, that of public and private institutes researching social and labor issues is in double figures, and there are also the many specialist groups of researchers working in various disciplines in government departments, hundreds of universities throughout the country, and R & D centers in private companies. Before the war, as the peak number of 420,000 union members shows, the labor movement, which was the object of the surveys and collation of materials for the compilation of the Labor Yearbook of Japan, was on a much smaller scale. Consequently, a single private research institute could carry out surveys on labor unions every year entirely on its own. Today, the number of union members, at 12,000,000, is 30 times higher than before the war. Furthermore, social problems of all kinds have developed, which has led to a huge expansion of activist groups seeking to tackle those issues. The number of OISR researchers studying social problems in the Institute's pre-war heyday totaled 40 staff: 10 full-time Fellows, 15 library staff, and 15 office staff. By comparison, at today's OISR there are three fulltime Fellows and seven office staff - a quarter of the pre-war total. Given this situation, the path left to us is, in my view, to create a research institute that, while on a small scale, has a strong character redolent of the OISR. It should not aim to be a general research institute as is possible for institutes of social studies or humanities at major national universities, but rather, should focus on labor issues and in that field aim to become the center of research in Japan. The preconditions for this are already there. What previous generations of OISR researchers have bequeathed to the present staff is by no means inconsiderable: a history of 70 years and the number of large scale projects over that period, including the Labor Yearbook of Japan, carried on in the well-respected name of the OISR, functioning as a specialist library and archive based on a collection of resources that has enabled the solid achievement of the compilation of the Rôdô mondai bunken getsuroku, and the newly developed, steadily growing database of labor-related research documentation. By a steady but sure concentration of efforts, still greater progress can certainly be made. (This essay first appeared in Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo zasshi (The Journal of the Ôhara Institute for Social Research) No. 363, February 1989 The Ôhara Institute for Social Research Before and After its Relocation to Tama During the Tokugawa period (1603-1867) Kurashiki was a fief under the direct control of the bakufu (shogunate), so there were no local samurai families there. Normally, such fiefs (tenryô) were relatively free compared to other fiefs that were directly controlled by clan heads (hanshu), and land taxes tended to be lower. Daimyô who ruled their own domains controlled their populations tightly and usually imposed heavy taxes. Tenryô fiefs, by contrast, were administered by magistrates or governors who were shogunal officials appointed for a limited period. They did not want any stains on their record, and their administration tended to be relatively mild so as to enable them to get safely through their period in office with a minimum of complications. Kurashiki itself was a small village, and the regional magistrate's office was also responsible for all the shogunal lands in Bitchû, Mimasaka and Sanuki, its main task being the gathering of rice for transport to Osaka. According to one account, the name 'Kurashiki' comes from the rows of storehouses (kura yashiki) belonging to the daimyô, in which were kept rice and ginned cotton. Although ostensibly only a village, Kurashiki thus had an important role in sending the products of the bakufu lands in the Chûgoku and Shikoku regions and in surrounding areas on to Osaka and Edo (Tokyo). It therefore had numerous merchants and was clearly wealthier than ordinary villages. Akiyama, Ôhara, Yamakawa, Ôhashi and Uno all left to pursue their studies in the capital, but they were enabled to do so by the fact that there were so many wealthy families in the village. Another factor was the evident respect felt by people in Kurashiki for learning and the arts. Needless to say, this respect arose because there were so many in Kurashiki with the time and money available to pursue such interests. It is hard for culture to grow in a situation where people are having to struggle for food to eat.

Kurashiki was created on land newly reclaimed from Kojima Bay, so its history goes back only a few centuries at most. Such places tend to be freer from old established traditions and customs. In particular, as Kurashiki enjoyed a lighter burden of taxation and was required to respond to the needs of the local shogunal office, its commercial hinterland was extensive. Furthermore, the surrounding region was well-known not only as a rice-growing area but also for its cotton and rush matting products, while land reclaimed by sand in-fill required fertilizer - all of which made it an excellent place for business. It can well be imagined that enterprising people eager to get on in life would move there and seek to carve out their own destinies.

From the mid-18th century autonomous relief organizations (gikura) had existed in Kurashiki to aid the poor. These organisations were run by more prominent members of the community. Unlike the shakura groups, which feudal clans would create, the gikura organizations enabled villagers and townspeople to sustain their own livelihoods without having to depend on the feudal authorities above them; it was a system that would not have developed without people of an autonomous, independent-minded character.

The thesis to which I hold is that as Japan had no free cities of the European type but had only castle towns, where the population were under the direct control of the samurai class, craft guilds and craft unions did not develop in Japan, and consequently, labor unions emerged largely on a company basis. Nevertheless, it does seem to be the case that, like Nagasaki and Kyoto, Kurashiki was an unusual community that broke the mould. One might go so far as to say that it came close to having the European-style character of a 'free city'. This is not my own insight; I owe it to my teacher at postgraduate school, former University President Nakamura Akira, who wrote a paper for the 45th anniversary of the OISR entitled Bakumatsu Kurashiki no chishikijin-tachi (Intellectuals at Kurashiki in the last days of the Tokugawa Shogunate) which was based on a lecture he had given at Kurashiki; the paper was published in No. 173 of Shiryô shishitsuhô (Archive Bulletin). According to Professor Nakamura, Kurashiki became a town of wealthy merchants because kokugaku, the study of the Japanese classics, prevailed there rather than that of Confucianism, the philosophy preferred by the samurai. Like Confucianism, kokugaku was antipathetic to Buddhism, and so areas where kokugaku was dominant during the late Tokugawa period tended to be more receptive of Christianity. I feel Professor Nakamura's thesis to be on the mark. Incidentally, Professor Nakamura Akira is the grandson of the painter Uragami Gyokudô of Okayama, and relations between the Ôhara family and Uragami Gyokudô were close. Ôhara Magosaburô's great-grandfather was a close friend of Uragami's and as a result, the Ôhara family accumulated many of Gyokudô's works. Magosaburô himself liked his paintings and built up his own personal collection; he even published some of Gyokudô's book of paintings. It may seem to be straining the point but I feel it could well be maintained that the Ôhara Museum of Art was built in Kurashiki because the town that had cultivated Uragami Gyokudô was a place that held the arts in high regard.

The Ôhara Family

The Ôhara family that gave birth to Magosaburô in this small merchants' town of Kurashiki, had moved there 300 years earlier from Kataokamura in Kojima County, Bitchû Province. In Kurashiki they ran the successful Kojimaya shop business, dealing in cotton. The land around Kurashiki had long been one of Japan's many cotton-growing areas. It was no accident that the Kurashiki Spinning Company was established there. 200 years earlier, Kojimaya, was already adding money-lending to its already prosperous rice and cotton wholesale business. The Ôhara villa on the banks of the Kurashiki river is an historical building and a state-designated site of cultural importance. It was built by the third generation head of Kojimaya at Kurashiki. I was shown around it last year, and it is certainly a splendid building, eloquent testimony to the fact that the Ôharas were already a very wealthy merchant family 200 years ago.

Magosaburô's father Yohei was the fifth generation head of Kojimaya. A very enterprising man, he had come through the turbulent years at the end of the shogunate and the beginning of the new modern era and had risen to become village headman. Meanwhile, many of the former old Kurashiki families, such as that of Yamakawa Hitoshi, had become impoverished. On account of its success in frequently providing the shogunate with finance, in 1861 the Kojimaya family was allowed to take a surname and adopted the name Hara. This was because their ancestors had at one time lived in Sanuki Ônohara, a name which goes back to Ônohara in Kagawa Prefecture. The following year (1862) the name was changed to Ôhara. In the same way, the Naitô family had become the Ôuchi, and the powerful Mori family had changed their name to the Ômori. This then was the origin of the name 'Ôhara' in the Ôhara Institute for Social Research. The 'Mago' (grandson) in Magosaburô was also in honour of his illustrious grandfather Yohei, the head of the 5th generation of Kojimaya.

Magosaburô's father, Ôhara Kôshirô was of the Confucianist Fujita family from the Ikeda clan of Okayama and entered the Ôhara family as the husband of Yohei's granddaughter. He seems to have been a cultured man who had studied at Morita Sessai's private school, Kanjuku. For that period, he was a very rationalist-minded man, and according to his grandson Sôichirô, with the spread of mechanization in rice-growing, Kôshirô bought up unwanted millstones on the cheap and used them as garden paving stones. It was said in those days that "those who use millstones as paving stones will suffer the consequences" but he was not at all bothered, saying, "what is wrong with making good use of waste material?" Also, rumors spread that he was being miserly in plastering walls with cheap red hillside earth mixed in the plaster, but Kôshirô ignored such views, saying "it looks brighter this way".

This habit of relying on one's own judgment without being bound by the customs and values of the past was clearly passed on to Magosaburô, who was proud of the fact that the Ôhara family had no traditional family rules and dicta. For him, "those people who are hopeless who insist on holding fast to the fixed ideas and sayings of the past. Succeeding generations should improve on their ancestors". He told his son Sôichirô, "It is your duty to study carefully the weak points of your ancestors, criticise them and improve upon them." Such words may have been prompted by his own feeling that he was a man with many faults, but equally, they also sound as if he was challenging his son to go beyond him.

Idolized by ambitious young men eager to develop the region, in 1888 Kôshirô became the head of the newly established limited liability company, the Kurashiki Spinning Company. This was to be the fount of a nationwide cotton spinning industry, though at the time it had just 5000 reels and was only the 20th largest company in the provinces. The company boosted the fortunes of the Ôhara family from being a provincial landowner to one of Japan's wealthiest families. The family's properties grew from 104 hectares in 1877 to 300 hectares ten years later, and by Magosaburô's time (in 1924) had reached 500 hectares.

Ôhara Magosaburô

Magosaburô was born to father Kôshirô and mother Ei in July 1880. As his name makes clear, he was actually the third son, but the brother immediately above him had died soon after birth, so that Magosaburô was officially entered into the family register as the second son.
    The year after he was born, the 18 year-old eldest son also died so that not long after his birth Magosaburô became the Ôhara family heir. With his father almost 50 and the early deaths of his two brothers, Magosaburô literally became his family's last hope, and as he was sickly as a child, he was brought up with great care. Already temperamental by nature, and brought up very indulgently by his grandparents and parents, the young Magosaburô became a self-centered 'young gentleman'. Such children cannot abide schools with all kinds of restrictions and become what are today called truants. He dropped out of Kurashiki primary school and studied for a while at the Okayama clan school at Shizudani but dropped out of that too and at 16 moved to Tokyo, where he entered the Tokyo Senmon Gakkô (Tokyo Special School), the forerunner of Waseda University. However, here too he hardly attended classes and apparently plunged into a hedonistic lifestyle, going to the theater, music halls and the Yoshiwara red light district. His allowance from home being completely inadequate to support this lifestyle, eventually he resorted to loan sharks to finance his 'studies' at the 'University of Yoshiwara', where he proved to be a particularly 'gifted' student. One of these loan sharks, a certain Mr. Okuno, apparently travelled to Kurashiki to demand his money back. Magosaburô's father politely thanked him for "being so good as to lend such a great deal of money to a young fellow from the provinces and for trusting the Ôhara family" and treated him to a lavish meal. Magosaburô was indeed a self-indulgent son.

In biographies of Magosaburô this period of sowing wild oats has been put down to "the influence of bad friends" but that is unlikely to have been the case. He was a man who would not be refused in anything, so it hardly makes sense to ascribe his problems only to the influence of friends. Including the interest, the money owed to the loan shark Okuno totalled the enormous sum of ¥15,000. It is not easy to compare how much ¥15,000 of that period would be worth in today's money, but in those days the starting salary for a primary school teacher or a policeman would be around ?10, the highest paid technician at the Kurashiki Spinning Company would have earned ?30 and a university-educated bank clerk, around ?35. At that time, 'university-educated' meant graduates of Tokyo Imperial University only, and they constituted a top elite cadre of just 300 men a year from all faculties. In other words, ¥15,000 represented 430 months' pay for a member of the most educated people in the country, or 120 years' salary for a new primary school teacher. Today, it would certainly be in the hundreds of millions. One cannot but be amazed by the nerve of a young fellow, not yet an adult, who spent such an enormous amount on the pleasures of the flesh. For an ordinary family, it would have meant the whole family having to commit suicide.

Nevertheless, I believe that precisely because he was this kind of man, Magosaburô was able to found the OISR. That he was bold enough to spend so much money at just 17 years of age or thereabouts meant that he was well able to invest ¥1,850,000 in a research institute. Of course, if he had not had the money to spend, nothing would have come of it; it was not just pluck or guts or an extravagant nature; the wealth of the Ôhara family and Magosaburô's genial ability as an entrepreneur were also indispensable. However, there were plenty of other wealthy men around at the time, and the fact that only Magosaburô chose to invest his money in this way was, I believe, not unrelated to the way he had been endlessly indulged from childhood. If he had been brought up strictly all those years and trained not to squander his money, it is hard to imagine he would have invested in a nebulous research institute that could be seen as neither fish nor fowl.

Furthermore, the talent he displayed as an entrepreneur is also related to the way he was brought up and to the fact that he always did just what he wanted. The growth of the Kurashiki Spinning Company came during his time as president of the company, and he showed formidable qualities of leadership in pushing his way forward regardless of the fears of those around him, forcibly reforming the hanba (lodge) system and effecting rapid growth in the scale of the enterprise. He was helped by the vigorous economic growth that came with the First World War, when the Kurashiki Spinning Company grew by leaps and bounds. His sure touch as an entrepreneur was all too evident in that period, spurred on at the same time by the natural daring that had been the result of his particular upbringing. If he had been the teacher's pet at school, he surely would not have developed such a talent. The fact that those who are good students in their schooldays do not always turn out to be successful in society shows all too well that education is no easy matter.

At any rate, the affair of the giant loan was the cause of Magosaburô having to return home, where he was 'confined to quarters'. The Autobiography of Yamakawa Hitoshi records that Yamakawa informed his father of the situation in a letter: "Mr Ôhara sent Mr. Hara Kunisaburô to the capital to report on the situation. I hear he has since brought Magosaburô home and returned to the capital." The Hara Kunisaburô mentioned here was Magosaburô's brother-in-law. On top of having to take responsibility for the loan affair, Magosaburô now had to cope with another shock on learning that Hara Kunisaburô had died of a sudden illness in Tokyo, having been sent there to deal with the crisis Magosaburô had caused. The news filled him with remorse, and now, at what proved to be the turning point in his life, came his meeting with the famous Ishii Jûji.

Ishii Jûji

If Magosaburô had not met Ishii, it is likely there would have been no Ôhara Institute for Social Research. After Ishii's death, in memory of him, Magosaburô founded the Ishii Memorial Aizen-en Foundation which was responsible for running a night school and kindergarten for poor children from the slums of Osaka. From the very beginning of this venture, the Aizen-en (Settlement House) included a relief study center, which turned out to be the actual forerunner of the OISR. The meeting to found the OISR, which was opened 75 years ago today, was held at the Aizen-en. Indirectly then, Ishii Jûji can also be said to have been one of "the founders of the Ôhara Institute for Social Research".

Magosaburô may have been an unusual man, but Ishii Jûji was even more unconventional, a difficult person for ordinary thinking to comprehend. Because he was such a man, it is perhaps not so surprising that Magosaburô was prepared to listen to him. Born in 1865 in Hyûga (Miyazaki Prefecture), Ishii was 15 years older than Magosaburô. No mere social entrepreneur, he was an ardent Christian, in fact a fanatical and dynamic man of religion. He had entered Okayama Medical School intending to become a doctor but by chance ended up bringing up an orphan Before his graduation, believing it his mission in life to help orphans, he founded the Okayama Orphanage. It may be difficult for us to imagine, as we live in such a child-centered society today, but the problem of orphans was a very serious issue in those days, when there were so many orphans and abandoned children. They may have lost both parents from illness, especially in epidemics, in which case they became orphans as a matter of course if there was no-one else to look after them, or they may have been abandoned by a single parent who was unable to cope. At that time birth control was not widespread, abortion was a crime, and unmarried mothers were looked down on, so it is hardly surprising that there were so many abandoned babies.

Ishii Jûji ran the Okayama Orphanage on the basis of his religious zeal and willpower and ignored all rational calculations. This was the reason why he was successful, but occasionally he did run into difficulties and several times had to change his objectives. He often put this down to divine revelation and surprised people by completely disregarding conventional wisdom. For example, in severe financial difficulties in 1895, he abandoned the idea of depending on donations, which had sustained the orphanage until then and issued a 'declaration of independence' which stated that "we shall sustain ourselves and grow by depending upon our Heavenly Father and upon the work of each one in the Orphanage. Consequently, we shall no longer accept donations." This principle meant hard labor for the children and staff of the orphanage and became untenable during the cholera epidemic that occurred at that time. Ishii himself was struck down by this and lost his wife to it; she had been his greatest helper. In the famine that broke out in northern Japan at the end of the Meiji Emperor's reign, Ishii completely ignored the limits of the Orphanage's facilities and declared he would take any number of children, with the result that the Okayama Orphanage became Japan's largest, with 1200 children.

A number of people involved in the founding of the OISR were associated with Ishii Jûji. One such was Kakihara Seiichirô, whose mother was Ishii Jûji's cousin. Recuperating from an illness that had forced him to terminate his studies at Tokyo University, he joined the Kurashiki Spinning Company on Ishii's recommendation and became Ôhara Magosaburô's secretary and adviser; in this capacity he was especially involved with improving personnel management. When the OISR was founded, as Ôhara's representative he negotiated on his behalf all over the country and also supervised the Institute's adoption of foundation status. Another was Washizu Shigeyoshi, who had worked at the Chausubara school, a branch of the Okayama Orphanage, and who was present at Ishii's death. When the OISR was founded, he became the general manager and accountant and was a key behind-the-scenes pillar of the Institute's work. When the Institute moved to Tokyo, he became a civil servant with the Osaka local government and devoted himself to the maintenance and management of the Institute's materials that were handed over to the Osaka city authorities. After the war, he was appointed general manager and then head of the Ishii Memorial Aizen-en.

Hayashi Genjûrô

What kept the largely ramshackle Okayama Orphanage going was Ishii's extraordinary energy and the support of his many helpers, mostly Christians, both inside and outside the orphanage. He had many such supporters in the local area of Okayama Prefecture, one of whom was Hayashi Genjûrô, who managed his family's traditional apothecary's shop in Kurashiki. Hayashi was none other than the brother-in-law of Yamakawa Hitoshi, the husband of Yamakawa's eldest sister Ura. Also a Christian, Hayashi had studied at Dôshisha University and in his work was a man of real integrity, much respected by his local community. Yamakawa records in his autobiography that he was amazed how, when he was recommended to move up to Tokyo as editor of the Nikkan heimin shimbun (People's Daily News), his brother-in-law was the only one who promptly agreed and encouraged him to do so, and how years later, reading through his diary, he understood why. In his autobiography he cites a passage from the diary, which admirably portrays Hayashi Genjûrô (pseudonym Fuzô). The following section leaves a deep impression.

Though I am not quite sure what exactly Hitoshi's intentions are, what he would like to do is to devote himself to the betterment of society. The results will depend on God's Will. He seeks to do what he believes in and tries to achieve his goals without caring whether he is defeated. However, I fear that if his hopes were dashed, it would be like forcing him to die spiritually. (loc. cit., p.245)
"His past is full of pain and suffering. He does not fear even a whip of iron, but when emotional demands are made upon him within the family he readily succumbs to them, sacrifices himself and tends to make mistakes. This is his weak point at the present time. To exploit this weakness in the face of emotional demands and make him deceive himself and others would be like throwing him into a deep dark abyss. There is nothing worse on the path of life than this regret. What value is there in seeking to maintain a peace in the home that is in fact only a pretence? If the family gives Hitoshi the freedom to say what he thinks then even if I do not agree with it, I shall sacrifice my will so that he can realize his goals. (loc. cit. pp.245-6)

In the history of Japan's socialist movement there are many examples where people's love for their family is used as a means to pressure them into doing something or refraining from doing it. By contrast, though he did not agree with Yamakawa's principles, Hayashi respected his intention and did not want him to deceive himself by reacting to his family's entreaties in such a way as to make a mistake that he would regret for the rest of his life. He did not value 'family harmony' that was based on merely superficial peaceableness. Whether it be the Hayashi family or the family of Ôhashi Hiro who allowed her to divorce and then go to America to study, there was among the wealthy families of Kurashiki a certain rare spirit that respected the individual and was willing to grant individuals a degree of economic freedom.

If I may be permitted a digression, there is also the case of Ishii Jûji's splendid attitude when, after the Red Flag Incident, Yamakawa Hitoshi was imprisoned a second time. Ishii apparently said to Yamakawa's nephew, that is, Hayashi Genjûrô's eldest son, "You don't need to worry about Yamakawa. He'll live to be a hundred, so you shouldn't be worried about him now." (Yamakawa Hitoshi Jiden - The Autobiography of Yamakawa Hitoshi, p.483).

Another example is that of Kuruma Samezô, who was a researcher at the Institute from its founding and after the war became its Director for many years. What brought him to the OISR was hearing about the plans for its founding from Hayashi Keijirô, a friend from his middle school days. He then met his friend's father, Hayashi Genjûrô, who introduced him to Ôhara Magosaburô, and after meeting OISR Director Takano, he was allowed to join the Institute. Hayashi Katsujirô was himself later appointed the OISR's auditor. Yet another example is that of Kojima Torajirô, who put together the collection of art that served as, so to speak, the foundation stone for the Ôhara Museum of Art; his wife was Ishii Jûji's eldest daughter. I have mentioned these connections to show something of the intimate ways in which the people involved in this story knew each other or were related to each other. There were deep connections between the wealthier families of Kurashiki and its environs and one can perceive how a kind of intellectual circle was formed among them.

Ôhara Kôshirô, worried about the future for his son who was ruining his health by his dissolute lifestyle, turned to Hayashi Genjûrô for advice. The young Magosaburô also opened up to Hayashi and studied the Bible under his guidance. Hayashi introduced him to Ishii Jûji, who made a great impression on him. Under the influence of Hayashi and Ishii, Magosaburô became a Christian. At his wedding, Ishii Jûji and Hayashi Genjûrô were the two witnesses: such was the close relationship between the three men.

Ishii Memorial Settlement House (Aizen-en)

After this, Magosaburô did not only support the Okayama Orphanage financially, he also worked for it himself by acting as manager of the funds Ishii collected. When Ishii Jûji died in 1914, Magosaburô became the head of the Orphanage in accordance with the terms of Ishii's will. In fact, the Orphanage was not the only social enterprise in which Ishii had been involved. He had also supervised a number of large-scale ventures in Osaka, a metropolis struggling with a great variety of social problems, and in his hometown of Miyazaki. He believed that his mission was in social enterprises that would represent Japan, and rather than the Okayama Orphanage, he felt that the focus of his activities should be in Osaka, which he regarded as a central point not just in Japan but in Asia. In 1906 he therefore bought some land and property at Deiribashi near Osaka station that belonged to a girls' school and there set up the Osaka office of the Okayama Orphanage. Ôhara Magosaburô provided most of the capital for this acquisition. Whereas in Okayama Ishii's main aim was relief for orphans, in Osaka he focused on relief work in aid of slum children, organizing night schools and kindergartens and creches for infants.

After Ishii's death, Ôhara closed the Okayama Orphanage, but in response to a request from Tomita Shôkichi, who ran the Orphanage's Osaka office, he expanded the Osaka operations, and in November 1916 founded the Ishii Memorial Settlement House (Aizen-en) Foundation Trust. A relief work study center was set up within the Settlement House which became, as I have said, the direct forerunner of our Ôhara Institute for Social Research. The Aizen-en still exists as a social welfare institution employing over 300 staff; it manages a hospital, a kindergarten and a children's center.

Magosaburô set up a relief aid research center because he was concerned about the state of previous social enterprises. Magosaburô was a good student of Ishii's and an enthusiastic supporter but at the same time, he viewed Ishii's social welfare activities with the cool and critical eye of an entrepreneur. He passed the following verdict on them:

It might appear that his work was very successful in the eyes of the world, but frankly, it was an almost complete failure. The beauty of the basic spirit of its social relief work, however, should be regarded as its one great success. (Ôhara Magosaburô Den, [The Autobiography of Ôhara Magosaburô] p.95)

Magosaburô had various criticisms of Ishii's work, but the main one was the fact that the orphanage did not necessarily improve the lives of the children in it. Many children who had left the orphanage were discriminated against just because they had been in the orphanage, and were not accepted by society. They also had a tendency to lack self-reliance. Ishii himself was of course aware of this problem. He would recruit foster-parents, or run a farm at Chausubara in Miyazaki, or else send others to Brazil as emigrants. Another difference between Ôhara and Ishii was that Ôhara relied not on intuition and divine revelation but felt that social relief work ought to be based on scientific research. No doubt the influence of Yamakawa Hitoshi was behind such ideas. There is no solid evidence for this, but there is little doubt that from a distance Ôhara always kept an eye on what his old friend was saying and doing. While not always agreeing with Yamakawa's arguments, he recognized the social contradictions he pointed to and doubtless felt the need to find clear solutions.

The man he invited to head the social relief work at the research office he set up at the Aizen'en Settlement House was Takada Shingo. A graduate of Tokyo Imperial University's Faculty of Law, he was an unusual character who had chosen the path of social enterprise. In relation to the OISR, names often mentioned are those of Kushida Tamizô, Morito Tatsuo, Kurama Samezô, Ryû Shintarô, but men who achieved even more included Takada Shingo, researcher in childhood issues, and Gonda Yasunosuke, with his studies of leisure and entertainment. Besides the relief research office at Aizen'en, a relief and welfare workers' training center was also established, with Takada Shingo as its head. Takada had come to Osaka because he considered it to be in the vanguard of social enterprise at that time. Concrete proof of this was the fact that the Ôsaka Jizen Kyôkai (Osaka Philanthropic Society) and the Kyûsai Jigyô Kenkyûjo (Welfare Enterprises Research Group) had been established in Osaka by Ogawa Shigejirô, who had been appointed advisor to the Governor of Osaka in 1913, and both organizations were hard at work. The relation between the OISR and this Welfare Enterprises Research group as well as the connection with Ogawa Shigejirô deserve further studies.

The Connection with Kawakami Hajime

As Ôhara carefully observed the activities of the Okayama Orphanage, he not only came to have doubts about conventional types of welfare enterprise but also gradually came to the realization that the problem could not be solved by means of philanthropy. There was a need for research into social problems and into fundamental solutions to those problems. Curative approaches to welfare needed to be superseded by preventative ones. This was the new way of thinking behind the establishment of a center for research into social issues.

However, I came to realize that behind Ôhara's decision to establish an institute for social research was undoubtedly the influence of Kawakami Hajime, especially his book Bimbo Monogatari (The Tale of Poverty). I have already given my reasons for this view in No. 360 (Gleanings from 70 Years) of this magazine in the article Ôhara Magosaburô and Kawakami Hajime, so for details I refer readers to that. The Tale of Poverty was above all a call to the better-off to think about how they were using their money.

Those with wealth should actively address themselves day and night to the question of how they can best use their wealth for the sake of society. Eliminating luxury and extravagance goes without saying, but beyond that, they should resolve to offer their previously gained wealth up to the public good.

This is exactly the direction of Ôhara's own thinking at the time he established the research institute. Despite the fact that a Home Affairs Ministry official had told him he should reconsider the name of the institute, as to include 'social issues' in the name was not 'proper', Ôhara stuck to his original intention and went ahead with the name 'institute for research into social issues'. This 'research into social issues' was in fact the title of Kawakami Hajime's magazine.

At any rate, Kawada Shirô and Yoneda Shotarô did take part in the founding at first, whereas Kawakami did not. If he had done so and had become the central figure in the running of the Institute, the enterprise would have had a very different character and might not have lasted more than a decade.

Ôhara meanwhile was especially keen to recruit someone from Tokyo Imperial University, and it was Kawakami who recommended Takano Iwasaburô. Takano swiftly responded to the invitation and took part in the founding.

The Founding of the Ôhara Institute for Social Research and the Ôhara Research Institute for Relief Work

It will have become clear from this account of the process that led up to the founding of the Institute that in the initial stages Kyoto University academics played an important role. This was understandable, from a geographical point of view. It was widely expected that Kawata Jirô, a scholar of social policy, would become the key figure in the management of the Institute, and such was the expectation of Kawata himself. This is clear, for example, from the fact that he drafted the text of the founding charter of the Institute and was appointed one of the executive secretaries, a key management post at the Institute. The other executive secretary was Takada Shingo, which was only natural, as he had been a specialist full-time researcher since the beginning of the Aizen-en Relief Work Research Office.

Those responsible for selecting these researchers were Tokutomi Sohoo and Tanimoto Tomeri. Tokutomi recommended Kawata Jirô and Tanimoto backed Yoneda Shôtarô. Continually invited by Ôhara as lecturers for the 'Kurashiki Sunday lectures' which went on from 1902 until almost 1920, through such lectures Tokutomi and Tanimoto played the part of Ôhara's academic advisors. Ôhara had apparently long referred to Tokutomi Sohô's views on the formation of a research institute for social affairs. It is not known who recommended Kawakami Hajime, which suggests that he may have been Ôhara's own choice. Another individual involved in the process that led to the founding of the Institute was Ogawa Shigejirô, advisor to the Governor of Osaka, whose counsel Ôhara had requested at the time of the establishment of the Aizen'en Relief Work Office. Another participant was Kitazawa Shinjirô, who was recommended by Ukita Kazutami from Ôhara's alma mater, Waseda University. Although he had hardly done any studying at Waseda and did not graduate, because Ôhara invited men such as Ôkuma Shigenobu and Takada Sanae to the Kurashiki Sunday lectures, Waseda designated him a 'friend of the university', and he was later recommended as an 'honored alumnus'.

I mentioned earlier that Ôhara was critical of the idea that relief work was philanthropy, but he did not of course regard relief work as no longer necessary. Instead, he felt it must be reformed, but beyond that, it was not just a matter of helping the poor but of conducting research into how to get rid of poverty altogether. In other words, he saw relief work research as a part of social research. However, the academics he consulted, and most likely Ogawa, insisted that research into social issues and relief work research were different things, so initially, the Institute started out as a double venture.

The Ôhara Institute for Social Research was founded on Feb. 9th, 1919. The founding meeting of the Ôhara Relief Work Research Institute was held three days later, at which research staff and management for the two bodies were decided individually. The Relief Work Research Institute was the direct successor to the Aizen'en Relief Work Research Office, and the specialist research staff there were Takada Shingo, Terutoshi Yoshito, a pioneer in the field of labor science research and founder of the Labor Science Research Institute in Kurashiki, and Ôbayashi Sôji, an experienced Christian priest. Meanwhile, those counted on to carry the research work at the OISR were the sociologists Toda Teizô and Kuruma Samezô as specialist researchers, while research work was commissioned from Morito Tatsuo and Kushida Tamizô, and from Waseda, Kitazawa Shinjirô.

Nevertheless, the two research institutes soon combined, and in September the same year the Ôhara Institute for Social Research formally became one body. However, the new combined Institute began its work divided into two departments, department 1 researching labor issues and department 2 conducting research into social enterprises.

Two Incidents

The Institute was founded by Ôhara Magosaburô, but the man who determined its character was Takano Iwasaburô. One might say that the biological father was Ôhara but the one who brought the child up was Takano. As already mentioned, initially, Kawata Jirô was supposed to be at the helm alongside Takano, but soon after the founding two incidents occurred which led to Takano taking sole charge. If these two incidents had not occurred, the subsequent history of the OISR would have been very different.

The first was related to the question of the selection of delegates to the International Labor Organization (ILO), which had been founded, like the OISR, in 1919. Delegates from Japan were to be chosen to attend the first general assembly of the ILO. Three groups made up the body of delegates from all countries at the ILO: government delegates, labor delegates and employers' delegates. All countries sent labor delegates who were trade unionists, but the Japanese government, maintaining that no union was worthy of representing the workers of Japan, held a national council according to its own criteria in order to appoint Japan's ILO delegates. Five unions, including Yûaikai (The Friendly Society), were allowed to send representatives to the Council, but most of the representatives were men directly selected by large companies; some workers and many office staff were chosen. Union representatives opposed this method of selection, and some boycotted the council meeting, but the appointed Council went ahead and chose three candidates to attend the ILO. The second candidate chosen was Takano Iwasaburô. The first delegate selected, Honda Seiichi, had resigned on Takano's suggestion, and the baton passed to Takano, who after taking various soundings, accepted selection as a delegate. In doing so, he made an error caused by his own conceit. Takano's elder brother Fusatarô was the 'father' of the modern Japanese labor union movement (for details, see The Life of Takano Fusatarô). Iwasaburô himself had given the celebratory speech at the founding of Japan's first modern labor union, the Ironworkers' Union in 1897. As a council member of Japan's largest union, the Yûaikai, Takano Iwasaburô had supported the labor movement for many years, and with the cooperation of Yûaikai had carried out a number of surveys of workers' living standards. Moreover, several of the leading members of Yûaikai, such as Suzuki Bunji and Asô Hisashi, were pupils of Takano Iwasaburô. Takano and his circle therefore believed that labor unions, led by Yûaiaki, would support an ILO delegation that included himself. However, the union side, including Yûaiaki, remained solidly opposed, despite the selection of the much-respected Takano, arguing that "the problem is not so much who is selected as labor delegates but the method of selection itself". Eventually, Takano revoked his acceptance, and taking responsibility for his error, resigned from his professorial post at Tokyo Imperial University. His resignation was submitted in September 1919, and the University's Faculty of the Economics accepted it the following month. Keenly desiring that Takano would head the management of the OISR, Ôhara Magosaburô took this opportunity to ask him to become the Director of the Institute.

It seems that if this incident had been the only one, then Takano and those around him thought that there was a good chance for the situation to be resolved by his resigning from Tokyo University, and then, after a while, returning again. Takano had worked hard to create an autonomous Economics Faculty, and his pupils (teaching assistants) were still there, so he was concerned that if he quit, their futures would be insecure.

However, just a few months after the ILO delegates affair, in January 1920 the Morito Incident occurred. Professor Morito Tatsuo of the newly established Faculty of Economics at Tôkyô Imperial University published in the first issue of the Economics Faculty's journal Keizaigaku kenkyû (Economic Science Research) an essay titled 'Study on the Social Thought of Kropotkin'. The article was held by the authorities to be a violation of Article 42 of the Press Law of 1909 (treasonous defiance of the constitution), that is, an attempt to destroy the organization of the Japanese State, and the affair became a major incident. The journal was banned, and the Economics Faculty quickly moved to punish Associate Professor Morito by suspending him. The affair developed to the point where not only the author Morito but also the editor, the well-known Professor Ôuchi Hyôe, were indicted, and Ôuchi was also suspended from the University. A group of young academics - Kushida Tamizô, Gonda Yasunosuke, Hosokawa Karoku - rallied round Takano to organise a campaign against the Faculty, but it ended without success.

This being the case, Takano decided to accept leadership of the OISR and was appointed Director in March 1920. At the same time, those researchers (Kushida Tamizô, Gonda Yasunosuke, Hosokawa Karoku and others) who had resigned or been dismissed from the Tokyo University Economics Faculty all joined the OISR as specialist researchers. Once out of jail, Morito Tatsuo also joined the OISR and was soon off to Europe to do research there. Work was commissioned from Ouchi Hyôe, and he too went to Europe to do research on behalf of the Institute.

I had originally intended to say more about those people among 'the founders of the OISR' who have been rather neglected until now, but I have had to take up too much time dealing with Ôhara Magosaburô and his circle, so it looks like I shall not be able to say enough about those others. Nevertheless, I would like to discuss them on another occasion when I have a chance. Today, I shall now go on to look at what kind of person was Takano Iwasaburo, the man who cultivated the Institute's development, and I shall conclude with some further observations of Ôhara Magosaburô.

Takano Iwasuburô

Takano was born in 1871 in Ginyachô, Nagasaki, the son of a tailor who was a maker of Japanese, rather than western, clothes. Like Ôhara, though actually the third son, he ended up being registered as the second. His family could certainly not be described as rich, but as his elder brother Fusatarô, the founder of the Japanese labor union movement, was working in the USA and sending home $10 a month, Iwasaburô was able to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University and go on to postgraduate studies, after which he remained at his alma mater in the Law Faculty and became a professor of statistics. His considerable academic achievements came in the area of standards of living surveys, especially social surveys of Tsukishima. However, his real strength was not so much in the area of his own personal research but rather, as a pioneer in the field of economic statistics in Japan, in his contribution to creating the basic conditions that would facilitate a raising of the level of academic research in Japan in general. One such achievement was in gaining independence for the Faculty of Economics from the Law Faculty. The Economics Faculty was founded in 1919, the same year as the OISR. Takano had been the main figure pushing for this and when it was delayed, he applied pressure by tendering his resignation. He was the godfather of all those Economics faculties that now exist in every Japanese university. He was also the man who gave the OISR its particular character. After the war, he became the first Director of the newly-democratized NHK, Japan's national public service broadcaster and established the NHK Cultural Research Center.

Another of his achievements was his training of the many excellent pupils under his wing. The Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University had been a very authoritarian environment, but those opposed to such authoritarianism were readily drawn to the liberal circle round Takano, who founded a study group, dôjinkai (the Common Interest Group). This was the group that moved over to the OISR after the Morito Affair. They seem to have been a group of broadminded, tolerant individuals, who were excellent teachers.

In the estimation of Ôuchi Hyôe, Takano Iwasaburô is one of Japan's three greatest economists, alongside Kawakami Hajime and Fukuda Tokuzô, and as the greatest teacher of the three, is an almost unapproachably eminent figure. However, when we examine his words and deeds, he can be seen to have been a strong democrat of a kind that was rare before the war. When he was asked to head the Proletarian Party before the war, he declined saying, "I am a republican, so (I cannot)". What showed his democratic credentials more than anything was his 'proposal for constitutional revision', which he drafted after the war. The basic principles stated at the head of the document : "In Place of the Monarchy, A Republican System Led by a President". The first article clearly states: "Sovereignty in Japan is to reside in the people of Japan" (Takano Iwasaburô, Kappa no he (Nothing could Be Simpler).

Takano's greatness is evident not only in what he wrote but also in what he did. Take a look at the anniversary photograph of the OISR staff that is included in the Ôhara shakai mondai kenkyûjo gojûnenshi (Fifty Years of the OISR). This is not the usual kind of arrangement of serried rows with the head man seated in the centre; the staff stand where they want. It might seem like an insignificant detail, but in pre-war Japan, with its strong sense of social hierarchy, for a Director of the OISR who was a former professor of Tokyo Imperial University to be photographed in this manner is an important indication of that individual's character. In the photo Takano, is the shortest man, standing third from the left in the front row. On his left, all in white is Morito Tatsuo, while the shaven-headed man seated behind on the right is Gotô Teiji.

Also noteworthy in this connection is the following, which describes the process in which the Economics Faculty gained its autonomy:

Thinking over the events which led to the establishment of the Economics Faculty, I feel it to have been the fruit of the cooperative efforts of a wide variety of people over more than ten years. In other words, from professors and associate professors to office staff such as Kawaminami, Imaoka, Tobe, Kobayashi, to the famous caretaker Nagamine - all pulled together persistently from first to last to achieve the goal in sight.

He says not a word about the fact that he himself had prompted the establishment of the Faculty by tendering his resignation. Furthermore, he completely omits the names of the professors and associate professors but clearly records those of the non-academic office and ancillary staff.

Takano was also a pro-feminist, which was rare before WWII. At the Women's Culture Lecture Series sponsored by Asahi newspapers in Osaka he spoke on the theme of Women's Employment Issues in Our Country, in which he declared that "two great problem areas in modern society are labor issues and women's issues". The way forward, he argued, was that

There is no alternative but to overwhelm the strongholds of the opposition by demanding equal pay for men and women who do the same work, votes for women in the political sphere and equal opportunity in education.

This lecture was given and this call was sounded, in 1925, nearly 70 years ago. I am not aware of the details, but this was not just words on Takano's part; he carried it through into his daily life, as can be seen in the way he managed his household affairs together with his German wife who was not accustomed to Japanese ways. The life of this little man, no more than 1.5 m tall, this 'little giant', is admirably portrayed in Takano Iwasaburô-den (Takano Iwasaburô - A Biography) by former OISR Director Ôshima Kiyoshi, which I heartily recommend to you.

High Level Academic Research - Specialist Library - Materials Archive

The kind of research institute Ôhara Magosaburô originally had in mind was probably one which would examine programmes and policies that would quickly serve to improve and reform Japanese society - what today we would call a 'think tank'. However, Takano Iwasaburô made of it a more academic institution that could carry out social surveys and research. In other words, the OISR became a body that should be called a high level academic research institute in which researchers develop their own individual research themes. These included research into Marxist economics (Kushida Tamizô), the history of the socialist movement and women's issues (Morito Tatsuo), standard of living surveys and leisure habits (Gonda Yasunosuke), women's issues such as the history of wages and abortion, rice riots (Hosokawa Karoku), inflation (Kasa Shintarô). Not a few of these were radical research topics that universities at the time would not have countenanced. An important role played by the OISR in Japanese academic research was its function as a specialist library and archive, which it made available to the public. It held in high regard the work of the librarian and archivist and did not neglect to cultivate that work. The newly established OISR poached from the library of Kyoto Imperial University some of the librarians who were still few in number at that time, and treated them as library managers who were researchers in their own right. One such was Morikawa Takao, a graduate of Kyoto University, who died young but played a leading role in founding the Osaka Libraries Association. His successor as head librarian at the OISR was Naitô Takeo, who also moved from Kyoto University. When he was studying abroad, Takano had Naitô accompany him and compile materials for books he was writing, such as Nihon shakaishugi bunken (The Literature of Japanese Socialism) and Hôyaku marukusu-engerusu bunken (A Translation of Marx-Engels Literature). Takano regarded the collection of all kinds of materials as important not just books. The Institute now has a large and irreplaceable collection of rare materials, and greatly appreciating the work of Gotô Teiji, who played a leading role in gathering such materials, Director Takano trained Gotô in helping him write his books and papers, which resulted in the compilation of Honpô tôkei shiryô kaisetsu (An Interpretation of Japanese Statistical Sources).

What enabled the OISR to play such a vanguard role as a specialist library was indeed Takano Iwasaburô's leadership, but Ôhara Magosaburô too had a clear grasp of the importance of a good library. This is evident from the fact that all the research centers founded by Ôhara put a great deal of effort into building up their libraries, acquired excellent collections and also worked hard to make them available to the public. For example, the OISR accumulated a large number of rare books including the world-renowned Elzbach collection of anarchist literature, while the Labor Science Research Institute bought the Göttingen Collection (History of Medical Science Collection), and the Agricultural Research Institute acquired the Pfeffer's collection (collected by Dr. W. Pfeffer, Professor of Leipzig University. Pflanzenphysiologie). Also of note is the fact that when he founded the Ishii Aizen'en Settlement House, one function Ôhara took care to provide was a 'research center and public library'. He also called for the provision of library and research facilities for doctors at the Kurashiki Spinning Company Hospital. Ôhara was proud of his contribution to library acquisitions, saying, "if I was able to make some direct contribution to scholarship, then it was no doubt in the area of acquiring academic collections from overseas."

In passing, it may be mentioned that, unknown to many apart from locals in the Kurashiki area, among the many unique characteristics Ôhara thoughtfully introduced at the Kurashiki Spinning Company Hospital (later the Kurashiki Central Hospital) were 1) the egalitarian principle that admittance to either general wards or private rooms was dependent on the condition of patients and not on their financial circumstances 2) provision of full nursing care that did not require family members to attend on patients 3) the prohibition of gratuities and gifts to members of staff including doctors 4) the provision of small gardens of tropical plants within the hospital to alleviate the conventional antiseptic hospital atmosphere.

Ôhara Magosaburô The Man

I have spent much time today discussing Ôhara Magosaburô, but in fact I have only spoken about one side of the man. Throughout his life, Ôhara certainly put a great deal of energy into various social enterprises and cultural activities but that does not account for all the fields in which he was active. First and foremost, he was an industrialist, and in industry he was able to display his abilities to the full. In this contribution I have hardly been able to touch on Ôhara as an industrial entrepreneur. He joined the Kurashiki Spinning Company in 1901 and became the President of the company in 1906. It was after this that the company grew so rapidly. He founded Kurashiki Silks, the forerunner of Kurashiki Rayon. He showed his skills in promoting the development of industry throughout Okayama Prefecture by setting up a series of joint ventures not only in the spinning industry but also in the electrical and financial sectors. I would like to be able to take up this other side of Ôhara's life, but time does not permit, and I shall have to leave it for another occasion. Ôhara was a man of great foresight, and his sense of resolute purpose certainly guaranteed his success. He himself took pride in his foresight and said to his son Sôichirô:

"I can see ten years ahead. In ten years' time people will understand what I've done." "When you think of starting something, if two or three out of ten men agree with you, you must go ahead with it. If only one agrees with you, then it's too early, but if five out of ten agree, even if you get it going, it'll already be too late."

Ôhara became a Christian out of a feeling of penitence on meeting Ishii Jûji and he put his energies into various social enterprises and cultural activities but he did not completely abandon his self-centered pleasure-seeking lifestyle. With the development of his business, he had to spend much time away from Kurashiki, was often in red light districts and had a number of mistresses and, it seems, had children by them. Sôichirô took his mother's part and was very critical of his father's behavior. However, eventually he was able to understand his father's contradictory character. I would now like to bring my contribution to a close by reading to you the concluding words from the final article of a series that Ôhara's son Sôichirô wrote for the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper about his father entitled Keidô Jyûwa (Honoring Keidô - Ten Stories - Keidô was his father's pen name). It is rather long but really hits the mark on the subject of Ôhara Magosaburô's distinctive personality.

"My father's self-centered nature and hot-tempered character made him feared by many people and was the cause of many errors on his part. However, deep down he was capable of feelings of great compassion, which were very much awakened by his contact with Ishii Jûji. He felt he had a heaven-sent mission to make Kurashiki 'the Jerusalem of the East', but when he tried to dedicate himself to this sincere ideal, the signs of distraction would show themselves once more when he went into the business world, which often disappointed those people who had prayed for and given thanks for the seeming improvements in his behavior. My father was himself only too aware of this, and strongly criticizing the hypocritical attitudes of the world's philanthropists, he was gradually inclined to place new hopes on scientific research. While thus rapidly expanding his social enterprises in various fields, he daily increased his activity in the world of business.
    However, the often turbulent waters of the early growth period of the Japanese economy made it impossible to avoid the vicissitudes of business downturns, and the swings of the pendulum were often violent. His business and his social enterprises were all severely buffeted, and falling into serious worries, my father was often forced to adopt policies that rowed back on his stated ideals. Each time this happened, thanks to his dauntless grit, he managed to overcome the hurdle somehow, but his ideas always tended to be beyond the limits of his capabilities. Due to this unbridgeable gap, he was repeatedly forced to experience the pain of being unable either to advance or to retreat.
    Although such worsening external conditions did not overwhelm him, a side effect was that they led him to give vent to his difficult nature. My father's original impulse to engage in many of his ventures was rooted in a kind of rebellious spirit, or else a number of them were maintained out of that spirit; many are hard to understand simply on the basis of an idealistic interpretation. His frequent visits to the willow world [entertainment quarter] only increased other people's misunderstandings of him. My father was always highly aware of his own faults and strove to improve himself in all manner of ways, but he was capable of powerful outbursts of emotion which, when they took their natural course, led him back to the behavior of his twenties, which society found unacceptable. However, not for a moment did he lose that youthful spirit of dedication and devotion.
    My father liked his luxuries but at the same time he respected simplicity and deeply despised ostentatious displays of wealth. His feelings were uncommonly sensitive and refined but his ruling propensity was his liking for all things robust and vigorous. Even in his pleasures he could not ignore his inclination for the arts or the ills of society that were reflected in the world of entertainment. While critical of some people who were supposed to be social entrepreneurs, he could not bear to hide away his own ideals. Always dogged by errors that stemmed from things about him that are hard to understand and from his mistaken intentions, my father was a lonely man whose loneliness was of a different nature from that of the "loneliness of the entrepreneur" that is often spoken about these days; it was complex, deep and full of contradictions.
    From time to time, in his reminiscences, my father would say, "my life has been a story of failure", but this was not so much a statement of reflection; it had more the sound of a confession. Behind his words, I somehow always sensed he was holding back the pain he felt about the vows of his youth.
    In the very cold winter of 1943, when fuel was in short supply, my father succumbed to an attack of his old illness. It was January 18th - on that same day, many years before, at the age of 16 he had first traveled up to Tokyo from his hometown".

It is often said that "a father is the best judge of his son", but this is certainly a case of a son being the best judge of his father, or perhaps, better said: "this son is the best judge of this father". This phrase reflects the respect of a son for the father whom he had criticized and tried to understand all his life, or the sentiment a son might write for his father's epitaph. Reading between the lines, one can even feel something of a confessional mood in the words of the writer, who was himself an entrepreneur. This comes across strongly, for example, in the passages "(my father) was often forced to adopt policies that rowed back on his stated ideals" and "my father was a lonely man whose loneliness was of a different nature from that of the 'loneliness of the entrepreneur' that is often spoken about these days".