Obituary: Ono Tozaburo (1903–1996)

Ono Tozaburo was born in 1903 in the Japanese town of Osaka which was experiencing transformation into one of the great industrial centres. This, of course, was accompanied by great industrial and economic unrest. He attended Tokyo University in 1920, dropping out after 8 months because of his objections to the authoritarian forms of education there. He then came in contact with the growing anarchist movement. He started contributing to the new paper Aka to Kuro (Red and Black) in 1923 writing anarchist poetry for it, which was suppressed in 1924. He founded his own paper Dam-Dam, a Dadaist-anarchist publication, which he was only able to produce for one issue. No publisher would print his collection of poems Hanbun Hiraita Mado (A Half-Opened Window) so he printed it himself in 1926. He published another anarchist magazine Dando (Trajectory) with anarchist poet Kiyoshi Akiyama which they were unable to publish for a year (1930–31). By about 1934 he had moved to a Marxist-realist position, but his poetry continued to be filled with social criticism. He was one of many active in the cultural wing of a vigorous anarchist movement.(See our pamphlet on the Japanese Anarchist movement by John Crump).