Mochizuki Katsura (1887-1975)

Mochizuki Katsura was born on January 11th, 1887 in the village of Nakagawate in Japan. He was the eldest son of the village headman, who was also a silk farmer. Discovering an artistic talent whilst in junior high school, he dreamed of becoming a painter. Facing opposition from his family over this, he ran away to Tokyo before graduating from high school. After graduating from Tokyo Art School in 1910, he became an art teacher in Nagano prefecture. However, he left the job after six years to run a small printing shop in Tokyo. This did not prosper, and he opened a shaved ice shop in 1915 where he came into contact with young anarchists like Hisaita Unosuke, Watanabe Masataro, and Wada Kyutaro. Hisaita introduced him to Watanabe, considered as the father of the Japanese anarchist movement. He also married that year.

In 1916 he joined the Baibunsha Publishing Society (Scribblers' Society), and from 1917 onwards, the anarchist study group founded by Watanabe that would become the North Wind Society (Hokufū kai). He was one of the first to provide illustrations and comic strips for the workers movement and for anarchist and socialist publications.

Unfortunately , the ice shop failed to prosper, and he moved again, opening a lunch shop offering bowls of rice. This was frequented by both workers, radical activists, poets, and writers, including the thinker, Dadaist, and poet Jun Tsuji, then married to Ito Noe , later to be murdered with Osugi Sakae in 1923. This establishment also failed, with customers being often financially challenged.

In 1917 he set up the People’s Art Association- Heimin Bijutsu Kyokai. He declared that this would be for proletarian art and against commercialism, and that “art should not be for sale”. The anarchist Osugi Sakae became associated with this association, as did the artists’ group Kokuyokai (Black Light group), black signifying adherence to anarchism) between December 1919 and 1921. The Kokuyokai argued that revolution in society and revolution in art were inseparable. Four exhibitions by the Kokuyokai were held, and they have been seen as the precursors of modern art in Japan. Mochizuki wrote the manifesto for the association in 1919, stating, “The art that exists in present-day society is the exclusive possession of certain special individuals, and is generally recognized by way of forms similar to playthings. Where in this kind of art lies the worth according to which we should excuse its existence? We must destroy this kind of thing without hesitation and replace it with that which we have produced ourselves. This is the very reason our organisation was born.”

Mochizuki’s involvement with the anarchist movement resulted in several arrests, the first at a meeting in March 1920. He joined the Socialist Federation of Japan (Nihon shakaishugi dōmei) that had been set up that year, at the initiative of , among others, Osugi Sakae, which united socialists and anarchists. He was one of those, with other members of the North Wind Society, to set up Rōdōsha (The Workers) in 1921. A little earlier, he had founded Kosakunin (The Small Farmers) with Kinoshita Shigeru . He continued to be very active, participating in Subsequently, Mochizuki Katsura was very active: he participated in strike movements, meetings, round tables, giving speeches, in close collaboration with Wada, Furuta Daijiro (hanged in 1925) and the Korean Park Yeol as well as with members of the Levelling Society (Suiheisha) and the Korean Group (Chōsen Gurūpu).

Mochizuki also collaborated with Osugi Sakae on a manga, Manbun Manga, in 1922. However, many of his close anarchist friends were to be killed in the following year, Osugi Sakae and Ito Noe being tortured and killed after the Great Kanto earthquake, whilst Wada Kyutaro, after being arrested for attempting a revenge attack on the perpetrators, being sentenced to life. Hisaita Unosuke had died the previous year of exposure in the mountains.

In 1928, unable to stand the terrible conditions in prison, Wada killed himself. In a final letter he wrote “I want to make a flower bloom from the afterlife.” Mochizuki, who had continued to support Wada during his imprisonment, sprinkled his ashes in his own garden and planted primroses. He later pressed these and sent them to friends, an early example of mail art entitled Flowers from the Other World.

These personal losses and the crackdown on anarchists being carried out by the Metropolitan Police Department, caused Mochizuki to withdraw from the anarchist movement. He got a job with the Yomiuri Newspaper Company, drawing manga under the name of Saikawa Bontaro, using this pseudonym because of the association of his real name with anarchism. In 1933 he went freelance, continuing to produce manga, and illustrating an encyclopaedia.

He directed a cartoon magazine in 1938-1939 .

In 1945, he returned to his home village. There he became active in the farmers’ movement, and at the same time producing social cartoons. He became an official in the Fukushima Farmer Association Federation the following year, and had a key part in agricultural land reform. He returned to being an art teacher in 1955, whilst producing many landscape paintings depicting the beauty of his beloved home region. It appears that he left letters from old anarchist comrades unanswered.
He died on December 13th, 1975.

Nick Heath

Sources:
https://www.tokyoartbeat.com/articles/-/katsura-mochizuki-freedom-fighter-report-202504
https://www.art-it.asia/top/admin_ed_pics/266302/
https://marukigallery.jp/8527/
https://maitron.fr/mochizuki-katsura-pseudonyme-saigawa-bontaro/