Oct 9 01:03 AM US/EasternNAHA, Japan, Oct. 9 (AP) - (Kyodo) — Okinawa's anti-U.S. activist and former Japanese Communist Party vice chairman Kamejiro Senaga (1907-2001) has left two handwritten prison memoirs stating his belief against U.S. military rule of Okinawa and for Okinawa's reversion to Japan, informed sources said Tuesday.
Senaga's relatives had found the two notebooks while sorting out his personal effects on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, June 10, the sources said.
In the memoirs, Senaga puts book reports on Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" and publications on international law that he read while in prison in 1955.
In the notebooks, Senaga puts such beliefs in Japanese as "From enslavement to independence" and "No peace without independence."
Both notebooks carry the title of "memo" and the signature of "Senaga," dated April 20, 1955, and April 25 the same year, respectively. One of them adds the subtitle of "Kapital," referring to the Marx publication.
Senaga was one of the founding members of the Okinawa People's Party, a local leftwing party established in 1947, and a member of the Legislature of the Government of the Ryukyu Islands, the local assembly, when Okinawa was under U.S. military rule. Ryukyu is another name of Okinawa.
As the Okinawa People's Party merged with the Japanese Communist Party in 1973, he became JCP vice chairman.
Since 1970, when Okinawa people were allowed to take part in Japan's national elections for the first time since World War II, he had been elected seven times in a row as a House of Representatives member.
He retired from politics in 1990 due to health reasons. He died Oct. 5, 2001, in his home village of Tomigusuku, Okinawa Prefecture.
In 1954, when he was the secretary general of the Okinawa People's Party and a member of the assembly, Senaga was arrested for allegedly giving shelter to two party members the U.S. civil administration ordered to leave Okinawa.
A military tribunal sentenced Segawa to two years in prison. He was in prison for a year and a half.
Senaga wrote the memoirs while in prison on Miyako Island, some 300 kilometers southwest of Okinawa's main island.
He was later sent to another prison in Naha, the main city on Okinawa Island, for medical treatment.
After being freed in 1956, Senaga was elected mayor of Naha that year but was unseated a year later after being stripped of his eligibility for election.
Chihiro Uchimura, 62, a daughter of Senaga, says her father was a great reader and accepted more than 80 books while in prison.
A list of books Senaga's relatives sent in to him while he was in prison includes guides to the San Francisco peace treaty and the U.N. Charter, statistical publications on Okinawa, and a commentary on the life of Fyodor Dostevsky authored by leading literary critic Hideo Kobayashi (1902-1983).
Uchimura says her father's memoirs will be put on display along with letters and other personal effects at an exhibition to be held in Naha in November.
Posts
