Kawai Eijirō

Kawai Eijirō ( Japanese 河 合 栄 治郎 ; born February 13, 1891 in Tōkyō ; died February 15, 1944 there) was a Japanese advocate of a socially liberal society.

Live and act

Kawai Eijirō studied political science at Tōkyō University and taught at his alma mater from 1920 to 1939. Kawai was partly influenced by the theses of the English idealist Thomas Hill Green , who had emphasized the importance of individual self-realization.

As a student, Kawai encountered the poor conditions under which industrial workers in Japan had to work. To support their welfare, he worked as a factory inspector for the Ministry of Agriculture and Trade. When his superiors rejected his position paper, which he had written for the first conference of the International Labor Union (ILO) in 1919, he left the ministry and became a university professor.

Kawai advocated an extensive takeover of basic utilities, similar to the line followed by the British Labor Union and in contrast to the line of Marxists, communists and fascists. He did not stop raising his voice against the increasingly totalitarian Japan with the beginning of the 1930s. In 1938 he was forced to give up his position in a university faculty because of the dissemination of dangerous ideas from Western countries under the Publications Act of 1893. The "Kawai Eijirō case", the largest legal process in Japan at the time, in which it was about freedom of thought, lasted six years and ended with a conviction of Kawai. He died soon after.

Kawai left behind numerous publications, including "The Mind of Thomas Hill Green" (ト ー マ ス ・ ヒ ル ・ グ リ ー ン の 思想体系) in 1930, "Critical Biographies of Thinkers on Society" (社会 思想家 評 伝) in 1936. His "Collected Works" (河 合 栄 治郎 全集, Kawai Eijirō zenshū) were published from 1967 to 1970 in 23 volumes and an extra volume by the "Shakai Shisō Kenkyūkai" (社会 思想 研究 会).

Kawai had numerous followers, both in the scholarly world (see Yasui Takuma ) and in the business world.

literature

• S. Noma (Ed.): Kawai Eijirō . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993. ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 762.

Web links

• Biographies Kawai Eijirō in the Kotobank, Japanese
• Literature by and about Kawai Eijirō in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus, Kawai is the family name, Eijirō the first name.