Sakai was born as the third son to a
samurai class family in what is now
Miyako, Fukuoka. He attended what is now the
Kaisei Academy where he studied the English language. However, he was expelled from the prestigious No.1 Higher Middle School for failure to pay his tuition, and worked as a tutor and a journalist in
Fukuoka and
Osaka while studying literature on his own, and writing works of fiction. He was invited to
Tokyo by
Suematsu Kenchō to stay at the residence of the former
Mōri clan to help edit a history of the
Meiji Restoration. Afterwards, he went to work for the
Yorozu Morning News, where he began to support social justice causes and
pacifism. In 1903, Sakai established the
socialist organization Heiminsha, together with Shūsui Kōtoku and
Uchimura Kanzō. With the start of the
Russo-Japanese War,
Yorozu Morning News adopted a pro-government stance, and Sakai quit to form the weekly
Heimin Shimbun together with Shūsui Kōtoku, which was critical of the war and decried the high taxes which the war was causing. It also published a Japanese translation of the
Communist Manifesto in its November 13, 1904, issue. Sakai was sentenced to two months in jail. Sakai was also a strong supporter of the
Esperanto movement, helping create the Japana Esperanto-Instituto in 1906. In 1906, Sakai became one of the founding members of the
Japan Socialist Party. He was arrested in the 1908
Red Flag Incident and was sentenced to two years in prison. Following the end of the
First World War he participated in
Rousoukai group. In 1922, he became one of the founding members of the
Japan Communist Party and was elected to a seat in the Tokyo City Assembly in 1929. Sakai translated many works related to socialism, as well as
utopian literature into Japanese. In June 1932, he was admitted to a hospital after an incident of
domestic violence under suspicion of insanity, and died of a
cerebral hemorrhage on January 23, 1933. His grave is at the temple of
Sōji-ji in
Tsurumi-ku, Yokohama. , Toshihiko Sakai,
Sanshirō Ishikawa and Kōjiro Nishikawa. ==See also==