On the History and Politics of Political Economy in Japan: The Debate on Capitalism in Prewar Japan and Uno Kozo’s Theory of Capitalist Crisis

This paper discusses the contemporary political meanings of the history of key questions comprising the famous debate on capitalism among Japanese intellectuals between the years 1928 and 1932, paying particular attention to the thought of Uno Kozo, renowned Marxist political economist during the wartime and postwar decades in Japan. Uno's methodology for a specifically Marxist political economy is discussed in relation to the historical debate on capitalism in Japan during these years, paying particular emphasis to Uno's analysis, in his "fundamental principles of political economy," of the peculiar relationship that capitalist crisis expresses, namely that of, "excess capital coexisting alongside surplus populations." How does this relationship become particularly meaningful in the historical "stage" of imperialism, and what does it reveal about the peculiar commodity of labor power in history of capitalism in Japan--and beyond? Revisiting the debate on capitalism in Japan during the late 1920s and early 1930s and Uno Kozo's peculiar relation to this debate sheds light on the contemporary meaning and legacies of surplus populations, capitalist crisis, and the history of labor migration in the Japanese empire.