Hajime Kawakami, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Hajime Kawakami

Japanese economist, activist and writer

Date of Birth: 20-Oct-1879

Place of Birth: Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan

Date of Death: 30-Jan-1946

Profession: poet, economist, translator, university teacher, agronomist, journalist, novelist

Nationality: Japan

Zodiac Sign: Libra

Hajime Kawakami (?? ?, Kawakami Hajime, October 20, 1879 – January 30, 1946) was a Japanese Marxist economist of the Taisho and early Showa periods. Born in Yamaguchi, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University.
After writing for Yomiuri Shimbun, he attained a professorship in economics at Kyoto Imperial University.
Increasingly inclined toward Marxism, he participated in the March 15 incident of 1928, and was expelled from the university as a subversive.
The following year, he joined the formation of a political party Shinroto.
Kawakami went on to publish a Marxist-oriented economics journal, Studies of Social Problems.
After joining the then-outlawed Japanese Communist Party, he was arrested in 1933 and sent to prison.
Following his release in 1937, he translated Das Kapital from German into Japanese.
Kawakami spent the remainder of his life writing essays, novels, poetry, and his autobiography Jijoden.
Jijoden was written secretly between 1943 and 1945 and serialized in 1946.
It became a best-seller and was "extravagantly praised as being unprecedented in Japanese letters."