Takako Day

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6. Takahashi and Josephine Conger Kaneko

As a member of the IWW, Takahashi also had contacts with the Socialist Party, plus he spent time with known socialist, Kiichi Kaneko. Takahashi visited Kaneko with his friend, Maedako and his cousin, Shizuo Tatsuno, the younger brother of Fumio Tatsuno. Shizuo arrived in Chicago in fall 1906 and worked at Shichiro Yamada’s tea store with Takahashi. Kaneko and his wife, Josephine, began publishing a feminist magazine entitled, The Socialist Woman, in June 1907. Takahashi helped them from New York by donating several times to the magazine’s circulation fund ...

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5. Emma Goldman, Kotoku and Takahashi

In 1907, Mother Earth introduced Kotoku’s new publication, Heimin Shimbun, which he started in Japan, right after he returned from the U.S. in 1906. The announcement they ran read as follows: “A daily revolutionary socialist paper, Heimin Shimbun, is out at Tokyo. If some Japanese American comrade will kindly offer to give us an idea of its contents we shall be glad to send him copies.”¹ It may have been Takahashi who answered the call, because in the fall of 1907, Takahashi went to New York to meet ...

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3. Takahashi’s Life in Chicago

Even before he embarked for the U.S., Takeshi Takahashi had declared himself an anarchist and his comrades called him a “disciple of Kotoku.”¹ It was known by his comrades in Japan that Takahashi was working hard to establish a branch of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Chicago.² Takahashi was a delicate, gentle, well-rounded, shy, and good-looking man, who showed no signs of the violent, stereotypical image of anarchists. It was reported that he looked as if he was always dreaming and when he was spoken to, he dropped ...

1. Introduction

In the period between the Civil War and 1919, Chicago, Illinois very likely experienced more labor upheavals than any other city in the U.S., in the number of protests, and their breadth, intensity, and national importance.¹ Chicago was a mecca in America’s radical labor movement, especially after the Haymarket Affair of 1886.

In contrast, socialism was imported to Japan, mainly from the United States. The 1894 Sino-Japanese war and the concurrent rapid industrialization of Japanese society helped foment acceptance of socialist politics, economic theories, and active labor movements. Well-known Japanese socialists came to Chicago beginning ...

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5. Floyd Dell

Floyd Dell, an Illinoian and editor of Friday Literary Review, a weekly supplement of The Chicago Evening Post, also played a big role in Maedako’s career as a writer in the U.S. Dell was involved with Friday Literary Review from its beginning in March 1909¹ and was one of the main instigators of the Chicago literary renaissance that set a new standard for Chicago literary criticism.²

Dell was involved with The Progressive Woman as well. He had his own column, “Books and Writers, A Causerie” in The Progressive Woman from ...