A Letter from Prison

In January 1911 twelve people, among them the socialist writer Kōtoku Shūsui, were hanged after a secret trial for an alleged plot against the Emperor. While the trial was still running, Kōtoku wrote a long statement from his cell to his defence lawyers, explaining calmly what anarchism meant to him and what he understood by revolution.

The poet Ishikawa Takuboku, then a proofreader at the Asahi newspaper, secretly copied that statement by hand and prepared it with his own impassioned preface for a series he called V Narod, "To the People". It could not be published in his lifetime.

This book presents both: Takuboku's preface and Kōtoku's letter, a rare first-hand document of the High Treason Incident and of the end of the Meiji era.