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Workers Vanguard No. 1139
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7 September 2018
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In Memory of 平田素 (Hirata Motomu)
1947–2016
(Letter)
Dear comrades,
We recently learned that Hirata Motomu, a founding member
of the Spartacist Group Japan, died in September 2016. Though we lost
touch with him a few years after he resigned from the SGJ in 2005, we
mourn his death and extend condolences to his wife, Toshie, and to his
son, Ayumu.
Hirata became radicalized in the early 1970s as a college
student, during a time of massive worker and student protest against
the Japan-U.S. security treaty and U.S. imperialism’s war against
Vietnam. He joined the pseudo-Trotskyist Fourth International Japan
(FIJ). Japanese Trotskyism was crippled from birth, rejecting Trotsky’s
characterization of the Soviet bureaucracy as a contradictory caste and
refusing to militarily defend the USSR against imperialism and internal
counterrevolution. Hirata was among those who formed a faction within
the FIJ centrally based on defending Trotsky’s position on the Russian
question.
After splitting from the FIJ, the faction underwent
further fights and splits. The comrades who would go on to be the
founding members of the SGJ formed the study group Rekken (Historical
Science Research Group), which began a serious, years-long study of
Marxism. In the mid 1980s they discovered a pamphlet containing the
Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League/U.S. in a leftist
bookstore in Tokyo and contacted the international Spartacist tendency
(soon to be the International Communist League). Written discussions and
an exchange of visits culminated in an Interim Preliminary Agreement
for Common Work in Japan (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 41-42, Winter 1987-88). In the summer of 1988, Rekken fused with the iSt to form the SGJ.
As Hirata stated at the fusion conference:
“For us the question of the defense of the Soviet Union
was the biggest stumbling block to our coming together with the iSt. I
also come out of the FIJ, and so I at least had read the basic documents
of Trotskyism, Trotsky’s works, the works of the first conferences of
the Comintern. And, so, I had thought that I had a familiarity with the
basic tenets of Trotskyism.…
“It was only after much frustration and hard work that
we eventually came over to the present position of defense of the
Russian workers state.”
Hirata had a long political history. His parents were
around the then-Stalinist Japanese Communist Party (JCP) during World
War II; one of his brothers joined the JCP; and the other became a
member of the left wing of the social-democratic Socialist Party.
Unconventionally, his sister married into a family of Burakumin (Japan’s
caste of “untouchables”). Being a child of the American Occupation,
Hirata became a blues and jazz aficionado, and, with his bottle of
whiskey and pack of Hi Lite cigarettes, he frequented clubs where
legendary jazz greats such as Yamashita Yosuke or Watanabe Sadao would
make surprise appearances. His interest in blues had led him to study
the American black question, and he became a strong defender of the
oppressed. In the SGJ, he always motivated publishing propaganda in
defense of the Ainu (indigenous people), the Korean minority and the
Burakumin. The SGJ’s first public event was a presentation to the Buraku
Liberation League’s Osaka branch, a meeting that Hirata arranged.
Hirata was an artist. For many years, he made his living
as a book and publication designer, and he was able to draw building
blueprints by hand. He designed the “Hammer and 4” masthead for the SGJ
newspaper and banners. Sadly, he never made the leap to computer design
and was condemned to working in low-paying, non-union jobs.
Comrade Hirata had an in-depth understanding of Japanese history. He made a significant contribution to the article in Spartacist, the ICL’s quadrilingual theoretical journal, “The Meiji Restoration: A Bourgeois Non-Democratic Revolution” (Spartacist
[English-language edition] No. 58, Spring 2004). Leading comrades of
our tendency, such as Jim Robertson and Joseph Seymour, had long been
interested in the Meiji Restoration of 1867-68. But it required
extensive research in both Japanese- and English-language sources as
well as considerable discussion to produce the article, which also dealt
with the origins of Japanese communism and the debate over “two-stage
revolution,” as well as World War II and the American Occupation. As
part of preparing the article, Hirata was one of the comrades who gave
an educational presentation for the SGJ. The article was published in Spartacist Japan Pamphlet No. 9.
Hirata was also crucial to circulating the Japanese translation of the 1997 Spartacist
article, “The Origins of Chinese Trotskyism,” looking for every
opportunity to intersect the Chinese population in Japan and introduce
them to a Trotskyist understanding of revolutionary struggle in China.
One of the finest articles he wrote was an obituary of Ozaki Hotsuki,
brother of heroic Soviet spy Ozaki Hotsumi, who was executed along with
Richard Sorge by the WWII Japanese government. We had met Hotsuki, a
writer, during our annual trips to Tama Cemetery to honor these heroes.
Hirata was extremely proud to be a member of a
democratic-centralist international Trotskyist organization. On sales,
he would introduce our newspaper as the publication of the SGJ but would
always add: We are the Japanese section of the
International Communist League. As a party member, he held many
posts—from minutes secretary and composition chief to Tokyo associate of
the Spartacist League’s Prometheus Research Library. He was a wonderful
educator.
Hirata was curious and observant, easygoing and cheerful.
He said what he thought and let comrades fight with him to work through
the political issues. In heavily male-chauvinist Japan, where a man
typically expects his wife to look after him and the children, Hirata
was made of a different fabric. In his own life, when his wife became
chronically ill, he devoted himself to caring for her and their young
son. We will miss him.
Comradely,
The Spartacist Group Japan
https://www.icl-fi.org/print/english/wv/1139/hirata_motomu-ltr.html
The Spartacist Group Japan
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