A Poverty Story By Hazime Kawakami Summary

There was a seeker who pursued an absolute truth heart and soul as a mission by himself with no care everything. After writing for a daily newspaper, he attained a professorship in economics at Kyoto Imperial University, increasingly inclined toward Marxism. It was because the passion for seeking a road to truth that he could not restrain himself. ‘A poverty story’ by Hazime Kawakami appeared on other newspaper serialized in 1916 amid the First World War, when Japanese people didn’t satisfy the rustic nationalism and careerism in Meiji era, worrying about the dismal social situation growing around them at the same time. He was just at the turning point, which would change his thought from humanism to Marxism while writing this book, though not still reached Marxism then. Nevertheless, he didn’t agree with the theory of classical economics that came after Adam Smith, especially with the standpoint that it would accept selfhoods at least. It was because that he had an awareness of a problem keenly, what is called ‘a poverty within a poverty’, in other words, it was main issues of the same age over the world that poor people even were increasing, not decrease on the contrary along with the economic development, and because how these problems could actually be solved. “It was surprised that people out of number were currently living in poverty in civilized countries.” “Although the civilized main Western countries and a few other ones achieved prosperity indeed, but the

“Anyway Smith was a moralist originally. From the view of economic, he pushed out all the people’s activity out of a moral low in a sense by allowing a working of selfhoods in the end, while the moralist try to resolve economic problems as a moralist, and then, established the economics as a science independently, became the founder of