Japanese Anarchist and Painter in Paris in 1923
Before WWII, there were some communists, socialists, and anarchists in the Empire of Japan.
However, as the war against the US started with the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1941, most of them were arrested and put into prisons. But some were even executed fairly before WWII.
Sakae Osugi (1885 – 1923) was a radical Japanese anarchist. He published numerous anarchist periodicals, helped translate western anarchist essays into Japanese for the first time, and created Japan's first Esperanto school in 1906. He, Noe Itō, and his nephew were murdered in what became known as the Amakasu Incident.Osugi started to sail to France in 1922 under a false Korean name to attend a conference of European anarchists as he received a letter of invitation. Though this conference planned to be held in Germany was finally cancelled, Osugi, good at French, delivered a speech in a May Day meeting held in the suburb of Paris.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakae_%C5%8Csugi
However, the Imperial Government of Japan sent police detectives to Paris to overwatch Osugi. And eventually the French police arrested and deported Osugi from France. In 1923 Osugi returned to Japan. But, after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, he was arrested by the military police and killed in a jail. Then, Sakae Osugi became a legend.
While Osugi was in Paris, he had some troubles to find a comfortable hotel to stay. Since his acquaintances in Paris were poor and radical people, they simply recommended Osugi a cheap hotel near their office. But there were many drunken men, wild men like savages, and ugly prostitutes on the street and inside the hotel.
What Osugi was afraid of most in the dirty corner of Paris was ugly prostitutes. So, he changed a hotel several times. But, he wrote that he also saw pretty women, a kind that was often presented in some media at the time. However, Osugi could not understand how to communicate with them well.
Around 1922 when Osugi was in Paris trying to desperately attend an anarchist conference and observing and communicating with various nationalities living in Paris, the notable Japanese painter Tsuguharu Fujita was expanding his career in Paris, too.
Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita (1886 – 1968) was a painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings.In 1920s it is said that about 200 Japanese painters and art students lived in Paris. The most prominent one was, of course, Tsuguharu Fujita. As Fujita's father was an army doctor of the Imperial Japan, the Army asked Fujita to monitor Japanese living in Paris. Paris is the center of international activities of communists, socialists, and anarchists. And, the Imperial Army of Japan regraded them as its enemies. So, there was a possibility that Fujita heard about Sakae Osugi, a notorious Japanese anarchist, though no concrete evidence was left.
In 1910 when he was twenty-four years old Foujita graduated from what is now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. His paintings during the period before he moved to France were often signed "Fujita" rather than the gallicized "Foujita" he adopted later.
Three years later he went to Montparnasse in Paris, France. When he arrived there, knowing nobody, he met Amedeo Modigliani, Pascin, Chaim Soutine, and Fernand Léger and became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Foujita had his first studio at no. 5 rue Delambre in Montparnasse where he became the envy of everyone when he eventually made enough money to install a bathtub with hot running water. Many models came over to Foujita's place to enjoy this luxury, among them Man Ray's very liberated lover, Kiki, who boldly posed for Foujita in the nude in the outdoor courtyard. Another portrait of Kiki titled "Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy," shows her lying naked against an ivory-white background. It was the sensation of Paris at the Salon d'Automne in 1922, selling for more than 8,000 francs.
His life in Montparnasse is documented in several of his works, including the etching A la Rotonde or Café de la Rotonde of 1925/7, part of the Tableaux de Paris series published in 1929.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuguharu_Foujita#Paris
Anyway, it looks like true that Osugi met pretty women in Paris Fujita might have used as models.
Or, if Osugi loved pictures more than the anarchist theory, he might have survived even WWII like Fujita who however abandoned the Japanese nationality to live in Paris after WWII, since he was regraded as a collaborator of Japanese war criminals after WWII.
Now, which do you want to be rather, an anarchist doomed to be slaughtered in his own country or a painter to live long in a foreign country?
Christ Jesus said that you should not go to foreign countries, but also said that a prophet could not be accepted in his home town.
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Luk 11:17 But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.
Luk 11:18 If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out devils through Beelzebub.
Luk 11:19 And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your judges.
Luk 11:20 But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.