summary
＊In a manner of speaking, he is a “self-proclaimed leftist,” but he’s pretty iffy.
＊A real leftist once said to me, “You don’t call yourself a leftist!” I’ve been told that. (more than once)
∟ I’ve learned my lesson, so I often call myself a “former leftist” these days.
＊I don’t know what terms like “alienation” and “reification” mean when I read leftist books.
＊I’m increasingly unfamiliar with the fashionable modern thought that’s so popular these days.
＊But I can sing “International”.
＊I get excited when I see the police in groups.
＊Former activist with three arrests (all uncharged)
＊Stopping in front of the helmet section of a home improvement store.
＊When you’re talking about something you’re good at, and they tell you the original story, it makes you want to kill them.!(^^)!
＊I’ve found myself arguing in the comments section of other people’s diaries.
∟ I’m really sorry. It won’t happen again.
＊I once tried to read Capitalism and failed because I couldn’t figure out the length of woolen antiquities.
All you idiots leftist of all nations, stop “pretending” you understand and unite!
Wise leftists, don’t threaten us!
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About the pen name “Kosuke Soka (草加耕助）”
When I started speaking on the Internet, I used the name “Jiro Soka,” an old terrorist who had not yet been arrested, in an attempt to be popular with leftist hobbyists, but it was so old-fashioned, no one knew who he was, and, if you think about it, very bad taste and inauthenticity that I decided to change my name.。
The name “Kosuke” came to me naturally, as I thought of the word “help(助)” for “cultivate(耕)”. I named it first of all with the Sanrizuka struggle in mind, but also with the hope that this personality born on the Internet would be of help to people all over the world who are cultivating various things.
Former career as a left-wing activist
I was an activist in the BFCL(Battle Flag Communist League). Although he never belonged to the Alliance, he was a member of its subordinate organization, the Communist Youth League (KIM), served as a branch cap for the mass organizations, the Socialist Students League (Shakugakudo) and the Congress of Workers’ Co-operatives (Rōkyō Kyōto), and participated in the Alliance’s district headquarters meetings.
He was active from the early to late 1980s. Main activities were: support for democratization of South Korea, Japan-Korea solidarity struggle, fight to prevent Kim Dae-jung from being executed, denunciation of the Gwangju Incident, fight to prevent Jeon Doo-hwan from coming to Japan, and fight against Sanrizuka Airport. Solidarity with the one-week struggle to stop the transport of jet fuel wagons, the smashing of the Narita water supply, the anti-war and anti-nuclear struggles of the 1980s, the Yokosuka struggle to stop Enterprise, the Tokiwa Bridge struggle to stop Reagan from coming to Japan, and the revolutions in Nicaragua, Central America, and elsewhere. Solidarity with the Iranian revolution in the Middle East, solidarity with the Nicaraguan revolution in Central America, etc. He has been arrested twice (both times pending prosecution).
It was …… After I became “Kosuke Soka,” I was sitting in the waiting room of the courthouse for something related to Sanrizuka, doing nothing (following the instructions of the staff!). When I was sitting in the waiting room of the courthouse, the public security police suddenly came and said, “Please come here for a moment. I then realized that I was under arrest. I was eventually released 48 hours later.
What did that mean? Apparently, the policy at the time was to arrest all activists in court, but some people’s lives are changed by such things. How carefree can you be! And so it finally came to “three arrests”.
Self-formation during high school
Family environment, etc.
I entered a high school that is nationally known as a preparatory school. When I was in junior high school, people who knew my usual grades said it was a miracle (I think so too).
In high school, I might have looked like a stoic young man of literature, reading Akutagawa and Dazai in class. However, I thought of myself as a typical child of the common people, more like a dropout. My family was quite poor, but thanks to my parents’ love and hard work, I was able to grow up without feeling too miserable. I am sincerely grateful to them.
Death of a classmate
One of the things I remember most from those days was that a classmate who was being bullied was hospitalized and died of “unknown” causes. I was never close to him, but he was the kind of person who happily went to school while taking care of his sister, who suffered from pediatric paralysis, was a fan of Eikichi Yazawa, and in short, was a very normal high school student. I was always unable to do anything about it, even though I saw the bullying taking place.
The day I returned home from his funeral, I blamed myself and cried. I cried every night for about a week. The day after the funeral, instead of feeling sorry for myself, I clenched my fists when I saw the people in the bullying group laughing and giggling while imitating his pediatric paralyzed sister. It was not against them. It was against my own powerlessness to pay attention to them. I felt more sorry for the bullying group than angry at them.
Eventually, the bullies began to target me as well. I needed a new “paciri” to replace him after he died. When I refused his request, he beat me severely. When he fell down, he was kicked in the face and his face swelled up. My school cap was trampled and my shoes were thrown away. Such conditions continued every day. Even so, I continued to refuse.
As I began to feel myself being violated, I wondered what I had been afraid of or hesitant to do. The feeling grew that the person beating me looked like an incredibly pitiful person. So it wasn’t even a little bit painful. I was even glad that I was the one being hit and not the one doing the hitting. They became more and more agitated and escalated their violence against me, as they looked at me with pity, beating me and beating me, beating me and beating me, beating me and beating me.
I had come to want to save them at some point, to make him realize what we had done to him when he was dead. But there was nothing I could do. I sometimes wonder if they are still living somewhere, married and loving their children, sometimes being considered “good people” and looking like human beings, even though they have turned into beasts. At least they would not have become leftists.
Anyway, I think it was during this period that antipathy toward “people who don’t consider people as people,” “people who use other people for their own benefit with impunity,” “people who look down on people with violence, power, money, etc.,” “snobby elitism,” empathy for “weak people who are oppressed without reason,” and “guilt for oneself who can do nothing,” as well as for people who are oppressed for no reason, were developed. I believe that these feelings were nurtured at that time.
The best thing about my experience as a leftist activist.
I’ve learned (?) “dialectical thinking.”
It was good to see the idea confirmed again and again, especially in relationships, that you cannot change the other party (jintese) without changing yourself (thesis).
In an organization, “Nothing changes simply by trying to change the other person in the direction you think is right or convenient. Acknowledging and learning from the other person’s previous life and struggles, and seeking a common direction between the other person and yourself by growing yourself (Aufheben) is a mass movement and the organization of the masses”.
But this in itself is one thesis. It also sets up and further cessates the zinthesis that “mass movements are not a game, that they must use technique, talk, and sometimes even sophistry and trickery, or they will be destroyed in politics.
This kind of thinking and practical experience can be applied to a wide range of issues, from business and store management to relationships and family problems. In the case of the bullying group in high school mentioned earlier, if you wanted to change them, you would not have blamed them and played the “righteous side” by yourself, but you would have first had to look at your own subject matter and change it in the process.
Do not be deceived by unscrupulous business
Apparently, I’m the type of person who easily falls for unscrupulous business practices because I have a hard time pushing people away or refusing them, and I listen to what people have to say while trusting them anyway.
However, wealth = value in this world (or in a country) can only be created through labor. The only way to increase value is to increase productivity through labor. A country’s money is merely a commodity that represents the total value of the country.
The only way to obtain value without labor is to become a capitalist who exploits the labor of many others, or to take advantage of the imbalance between supply and demand and sell a commodity for more than it is worth, or to speculate on the value already in the market, in other words, to “gamble” on bubbly stocks, etc. The only way to do this is to “gamble” on bubbly stocks and the like. Value can never increase without labor, and everything else is a gamble (unequal division of equally collected value according to game-like rules). A bad business is one in which the rules of the game are unfair or unilaterally favorable to the organizer.
As long as you keep this in mind, even a weak-minded and gullible person like me will be able to immediately recognize that “this is a vicious business” and will be able to denounce the other party in the opposite direction. Well, this is not necessary for those who can denounce people from the top of their heads (I am not being sarcastic).
Helpful for management sense
Being in a position where I could be arrested, imprisoned, or even killed if I made a mistake, has been very useful to me as I have moved to the management side of the company. (I can’t go into too many details.)
Other
I am less angry. I can stay calm. When I should be angry, I can flip a switch and get really angry. I am more resilient to stress. I am no longer afraid of the yakuza or the police (although I am afraid of my wife). I can now believe that no matter how bad things get, I will just die. I don’t give in to undue pressure (but I do give in to the begging of my children). I am able to reflect on myself without blaming others. I am now able to acknowledge others.
However, these are not so much “leftists” as they are the result of a kind of special “organizational activity,” and may be the result of “stepping into the shura with ideals,” so to speak.
academic background
Graduated from Yasumoto Music Kindergarten, Kyoto Municipal Fukakusa Elementary School, Kyoto Municipal Daigo Junior High School, and Rakunan High School. Graduated from Ritsumeikan University (Law Department, Faculty of Law) while working after leaving the organization.
(Last revised as of 4/12/2008)
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