Fumiko Kaneko sits on her knees wearing a striped kimono with her hands clasped in front of her, staring intently ahead. c. 1925, author unknown [Wikipedia]
Fumiko Kaneko, born on this day in 1903, was a Japanese anarchist, nihilist, and opponent to Japanese imperialism in Korea. Fumiko is perhaps best remembered for her "The Prison Memoirs Of A Japanese Woman", written while imprisoned after being convicted of high treason against the Japanese government.
Together, Fumiko and her Korean partner Pak Yol published two magazines which highlighted the problems Koreans faced under Japanese imperialism and showed influences of their radical politics. Sometime between 1922 and 1923, they also established a group called "F"utei-sha (Society of Malcontents)", which Fumiko identified as a group for direct action against the government.
These activities soon brought Pak and Fumiko under government scrutiny. In September 1923, the Japanese government therefore made a number of arrests, mostly Koreans, on limited evidence, and among those arrested were Pak and Fumiko.
After lengthy judicial proceedings, Fumiko and Pak were convicted of high treason for attempting to obtain bombs with the intention of killing the emperor or his son. They were both sentenced to life in prison, however Fumiko allegedly committed suicide in her cell in 1926.
Here is a short excerpt from one of Fumiko's interrogations while imprisoned (text by Max Res from theanarchistlibrary.org):
Q: Your class?
A: A divine commoner.
Q: How are you employed?
A: My job is tearing down everything that currently exists.
The Prison Memoirs Of A Japanese Woman
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They're both also books that come with homework you'll wanna assign yourself after too...one with real history and one with fake history that is informed by real history in super neat ways. They both really open up a whole rabbit hole. If you're enjoying Moby Dick keep reading it and hold off on LOTR, if it's a bit of a slog LOTR is a lighter read, a lot of the dense is more alluded to and available in other texts instead of going on long tangents about what they thought whale biology was at the time and stuff. LOTR has an appendix where Moby Dick writes the appendix into the text. So I'd say it's a mood thing. Moby Dick pairs well with theory but LOTR is a good break from theory and if you wanna be intellectual about it in more than a crass Marxist contrarian reading you also get to do research that's less theory oriented like mythology and folklore but also sorts theory relevant stuff like irl midevalism, and having in the last couple years gotten into mideval history from a class conscious angle, it's a massively useful insight into the formation of the modern period thst created capitalism. I rawdog adhd myself and doing all this has taken about 15 years of serious reading and another 5 of casual reading as a kid/teen. I don't have deadlines and just kinda pursue whatever my flight of fancy compells me to dive into and I keep a keen eye out for intersections between them. I'm good at putting all this in a mental blender and coming out with a decent smoothie so I just kinda roll that way. It makes for a longer learning process but it's thorough and widespread over a weird variety of topics that I can piece together but it's an admittedly blunt and inelegant way of learning shit. But it works for me. I'm basically my own hardass English teacher and assign myself a bunch of random books and then every once in a while assigns myself a staring at a wall assignment of piecing them all together coherently.