made. If an election meeting was to be held in a village, the next day an “activities group” was sure to turn up the evening before, often fighting its way through a blizzard that seemed impenetrable by any living creature, and begin distributing leaflets to each house, pasting them up on doors and telegraph posts.
The members of the Osawa Peasant Union, as the central figures of this conspiratorial activity, drew down upon their heads the wrath and repressive measures of the authorities. Very often there were groups of arrested freezing all day in the local police station. Just before the elections, in February, the reprisals and police measures were heightened. A speaker hardly had time to utter the opening phrase of his speech before he was arrested and hauled off on a rope from one police station to another, miles and miles in the snow and storm.
Both the president and agitator of the Peasants’ Union were arrested a day or two before the elections. The police actually tried to lay their hands on the candidate himself, on Hamamato, but the “activity group” interfered.
The police arrived late for an election meeting at a tiny mountain hamlet, half-buried in snow-drifts. The speaker from Tokyo hastened to profit by this and opened the meeting of a hundred persons with the words:
“Comrade peasants! Do you know thirteen slogans? I’ll explain them to you to-day, comrades! They are the slogans of the Communist Party. These slogans go straight to the point.
