Born into a family associated with the old Tokugawa shogunate, Hatta was denied access to education from an early age and began working in order to pay for his schooling.
[3] There he found it easier to acquire a job, taking a position at the post office in Taipei, but he quickly lost it after an argument with his employer.
[10] By March 1915, he had converted twelve people in a rural village of Gifu Prefecture, which he reported was suffering from such extreme poverty that local tenant farmers were increasingly forcing their daughters to train as geisha.
[15] About forty people attended his church, where he gave sermons and cultural lectures with such eloquence that he was compared favourably to the period's leading evangelists, Toyohiko Kagawa and Uchimura Kanzō.
Some members of his congregation expressed regret that more people were not there to here him speak, describing his rhetorical style as "like the Bible talking in the spirit of pure socialism".
While his sermons were particularly popular with the young people in his congregation, many in the older generation worried that their priest was antagonising the city's wealthy and powerful.
[16] He began to use his church to support the local labour movement and came to advocate for the abolition of capitalism and the state, gradually moving away from Christianity and towards the political philosophy of anarchism.
[18] After the murder of Ōsugi Sakae, Hatta organised a memorial service in his honour, which prompted both the city authorities and his own church's clerical hierarchy to order his banishment from Hiroshima.
He managed to earn a small amount of money translating books such as Peter Kropotkin's Ethics: Origin and Development and Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State, but his income from this front was limited.
[21] During this period, Toyohiko described Hatta as an "incredibly sorry figure", wearing shabby clothes, covered in a rash and often drunk on sake.
"[23] Despite his alcoholic and violent temperament, Hatta gained popularity as a prolific writer of anarchist theory, passionate public speaker and enthusiastic labour organiser.
Kei Mochizuki wrote that he could quickly recover from an alcoholic stupor the moment people gathered to hear him, upon which he would give an animated speech.
This prompted him to develop a form of anarchist communism that he called "pure anarchism", which he believed constituted a complete break from capitalism.
[30] In desperation at the situation, Hatta's later writings reversed his previous intransigence and argued for the integration of pure anarchists into the labour movement.
[23] Hatta called for the abolition of capitalism, along with the exploitation of labour, national chauvinism and centralisation of power inherent to the capitalist system.
[37] He argued against the perceived neutrality of the scientific method, which he considered to be a product of capitalism, as well as "artificial organisational theor[ies]", which he believed ran counter to free association.
He came to consider syndicalism to be a reflection of the capitalist system and that it could not provide an alternative to it, as he felt a syndicalist economy would inevitably replicate the division of labour and economic inequality inherent to capitalism.
He thought that such a society couldn't be brought about through elections or traditional class struggle, but would require a social revolution by the "propertyless masses", particularly tenant farmers.
"[41] In 1939, Toyohiko Kagawa published his autobiographical novel Taking a Stone As My Pillow, in which he depicted Hatta through the character of "Yagi Shūzō", a "renegade clergyman" who left his wife and children in Hiroshima for a life of poverty in Tokyo.