Issue:

January 2023

The extraordinary life and times of Seigen Tanaka

Courtesy of Eiichiro Tokumoto

In the annals of Japan's 20th century, the story of Seigen Tanaka (1906-1993), a controversial figure who led a checkered and tempestuous life, stands out as a rarity. 

While still in his early 20s, Tanaka rose to the leadership of the Japan Communist Party. Well known to the authorities as a leftwing extremist, he struggled to foment revolution, leading a series of major strikes and battling with the police – actions that landed him in prison for 11 years. While incarcerated, he made a complete break with communism, performing an about-turn to emerge as a rightwing fixer who engaged in anti-communist activities in Japan and overseas.

Tanaka later entered the oil business, negotiating with royal families in the Middle East and major petroleum firms, working successfully to secure an energy supply for his resource-poor country.

While many Japanese viewed Tanaka as a patriot and hero, others labelled him a traitor and a poser. But from the viewpoints of both friends and foes, those who knew Tanaka acknowledged his truly amazing vitality, and marveled at his remarkable life. 

Seigen Tanaka was born in March 1906 in a village outside the city of Hakodate on Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido. As Japan began to emerge from over two centuries of national isolation from the mid-19th century, Hakodate was designated one of the treaty ports opened to foreign traders and, like its counterparts Yokohama and Nagasaki, thrived as an exotic locale with numerous foreign residents, churches and restaurants. Tanaka was exposed to foreign culture from an early age.

In the late 1920s, Tanaka gained admission to Tokyo Imperial University, and soon became entangled in politics. He became a member of the fledgling Japan Communist Party, which had been secretly established in July 1922, one year after the launch of its equivalent in China.  

This was a period when the fervor of Russia's Bolshevik Revolution still lingered, and many young Japanese, fueled by anger towards the grotesque disparity between rich and poor, found appeal in the idealism offered by communism. The party in those years was illegal, and under the draconian Public Peace Preservation Law enacted by Japan's Diet in 1925, the authorities swooped down and arrested party members and sympathizers. Then came the New York Stock Exchange crash in October 1929 and subsequent Great Depression. It was around this time that Tanaka – who also happened to be a karate expert – was elected chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Japan Communist Party at the young age of 23. Arming party members with guns and knives, he sought to achieve revolution through bloody armed struggle.

In July 1930, Tanaka was arrested and incarcerated at Tokyo's Kosuge Prison, where he would spend most of the next 11 years. Years later, he would reflect on those times, saying: “I don’t think I was deceived by communism and Marxism. Under the prevailing social conditions, it was quite natural for youth to be disaffected by social problems and want to take action to correct them. When they were confronted with what they saw as bad things, it was natural to try to put a halt to them.”

But Tanaka would issue a statement from prison declaring his complete break with communism – a decision that followed the suicide of his mother, Ai.

While working as a nurse in a Hokkaido hospital, Ai had fallen in love with a male patient and became pregnant. But the man’s mother strongly opposed their marriage, and the two went their separate ways. Ai gave birth to Seigen at her parent’s home. As a single mother, she brought up her son while working as a midwife in Hakodate. 

Detectives at the local police station were dispatched to question Ai over the whereabouts of her son, and she was shaken to learn that Seigen and his comrades were wanted fugitives for having shed police officers’ blood. Under intense psychological pressure, Ai decided to convert to Christianity and joined a protestant church in Hakodate. 

Mentally exhausted over her son's activities, Ai killed herself by ingesting poison in February 1930. She left a note for Seigen, in which she wrote: “You betrayed me, and I’ll die for you. You became a communist and a blasphemer, causing great trouble to people. I’ll devote myself to making amends for what you’ve done. I beg of you to be a good Japanese. Don’t make my death meaningless.”

Months later, when he read his mother's final note in prison, a shocked Tanaka broke down in tears. 

“My mother quietly died by her own hand, despite my having betrayed her,” he later wrote. “This was an act of absolute love. And what about myself, on the other hand? I was prepared to die for the cause of proletarian revolution. But that was nothing more than heroism. My mother taught me how to love people. I now know that to forsake one's self is to love others.”

Through her death as a Christian, it appears that Ai succeeded in weaning her son off communism and bringing about his rebirth. 

After he was released from prison in the spring of 1941, Tanaka made his way to Ryutakuji temple in Mishima City, Shizuoka Prefecture, a quiet mountain retreat where he received training as a Buddhist monk, detached from the secular world. 

During his years at Ryutakuji, Tanaka came to detest blind faith in any ideology, as reflected in his remarks to the effect that in this world there is no perfect person, no absolute justice, and no completely evil or totally correct way of thinking.

The next turning point in his life came in the winter of 1945, when Japan found itself in a spiritual vacuum following its defeat in World War II. The Japan Communist Party, whose existence was legalized under the Allied Occupation, became increasingly radical. Some members, demanding the overthrow of the emperor system, converged on Tokyo's Imperial Palace amidst a sea of red flags. 

During these tumultuous days, Tanaka, who had been featured in a weekly magazine, attracted the notice of aides in the palace, who secretly summoned him for an audience with Emperor Hirohito. There, he pledged to protect His Majesty and the Imperial Household, even if it cost him his life. 

Recruiting a small army of gangsters, survivors from the Tokko-tai (Kamikaze Corps) and other hardened young men, Tanaka dispatched them to the palace, where they waded into the crowd and began attacking the communist demonstrators. This was the moment when Tanaka completed his conversion from radical leftwing activist to rightwing fixer, leading his former comrades to condemn him as a traitor for the rest of his life. 

By the late 1960s, Tanaka made an appearance in Abu Dhabi. Owing to Japan’s high economic growth, its appetite for petroleum, particularly for thermal power generation, had been increasing rapidly. Through his personal relationship with Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, the founding father and first president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Tanaka was successful in obtaining a share of offshore Persian Gulf oil concessions from British Petroleum.

Tanaka also nurtured a relationship with Indonesian president Suharto, endorsing the coup that overthrew his predecessor, Sukarno, and arranging to ship rice and other food assistance to Indonesia. The grateful Suharto agreed to increase oil shipments to Japan, and after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and subsequent oil embargoes, the UAE and Indonesia became Japan’s key oil suppliers. Ironically, this enabled Japan to ride out the energy crisis and rescue its business establishment through the efforts of a former Communist Party leader. But it also added to Tanaka's public image as an avaricious and shady éminence grise. 

It is true that Tanaka, as a business consultant, earned generous commissions on the oil deals, which led to his being depicted as a villain in contemporary works of fiction and films. He would also survive a near-fatal shooting by a yakuza member, further tarnishing his reputation. 

His controversial reputation notwithstanding, Tanaka continued to expand his circle of personal relationships with powerful and influential people in Japan and abroad. Among them were Kazuo Taoka, godfather of Japan’s largest underworld syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi; Archduke Otto von Habsburg of Austria, the last heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne; Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping; and Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich August von Hayek. Tanaka had come to be seen as an enigmatic fixer, and earned the nickname “The Tiger of Tokyo”.

After the dissolution of the once-mighty Soviet Union in 1991 brought the Cold War to an end, Tanaka devoted himself to seeking solutions to global environmental problems and to reforming capitalism. Tanaka had foreseen the end of the age of oil-based energy as early as the 1980s, and had begun advocating the development of solar and hydrogen energy. But solutions to the world's environmental problems would demand changes not only in people’s lifestyles, but to capitalism itself. With this in mind, Tanaka issued repeated invitations to Hayek to visit Japan, and arranged for him to meet a Japanese biologist and Zen priests in Kyoto.

What was his motivation? After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism – an ideology that emphasizes efficiency and growth through privatization and market deregulation – took the world by storm, and Hayek was regarded as one of its founding fathers. But neoliberal policy has also been criticized for fostering the profit-as-purpose approach, widening social inequality and aggravating climate change. In the new millennium, calls have grown for the reform and renewal of capitalism. Tanaka appeared to have tried to sow the seeds of that movement by harmonizing “Asian” principles such as co-existence and attunement with the ideas of Hayek and capitalism.

Tanaka, the former communist, made it clear he had no time for extreme capitalism. “Is it really liberalized economics that is being carried out in the first place?" he asked. “In reality, it is no more than authoritarianism by plutocrats in the guise of democracy and liberalism. If that's the principle of capitalism, then I reject capitalism outright.”

He added: “We should attempt to revitalize the world by harmonizing the principles of Asia with the Western rationalism that has come to an impasse. Wouldn't that be the greatest contribution that we in Japan can make to humankind?"

Seigen Tanaka died in December 1993 at the age of 87. His life's journey had taken him from radical communist to rightwing fixer, oilman and environmental activist. His astonishing life story still evokes a mixture of unease and admiration. But, viewed through another lens, it could also be seen as a journey of redemption that Tanaka embarked on out of love for his mother and the powerful words she had written shortly before her death.


Eiichiro Tokumoto is an author and journalist living in Tokyo. His new book about Seigen Tanaka (田中清玄 二十世紀を駆け抜けた快男児) was published by Bungei Shunju in August 2022.