1st edition. 8vo. x, 227pp. Light grey cloth boards w/gilt title to spine. With dust jacket. Some wear to jackets extremities, particularly head of spine, as well as some light soiling. Front endpapers have been annotated, predominantly in pencil but also a few marks in pen. Contents are bright, clean and complete. All in all, a book in good condition for its age. The first western study of Kotoku Shusui [1871-1911], Japan’s leading left-wing thinker at the turn of the century. His career and ideas had a decisive influence on subsequent radical movements in Japan and also in China. He was a bitter opponent of aggressive Japanese nationalism and militarism, forseeing as early as 1906 that its ultimate consequence would be conflict with the United States. Implicated in a plot against the Emperor Meiji in 1910, Kotoku was executed early in 1911 on the charge of “high treason.”
