socialist leader and one of the founders of the Japan Communist Party.

Originally a schoolteacher, Sakai became a reporter and in 1903, together with Kōtoku Shūsui, started a weekly paper, the Heimin shimbun (“Peoples News”). Arrested for the espousal of pacifist beliefs shortly before the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), he was finally released after the conflict and in 1906 helped organize the Japan Socialist Party. After starting several small magazines, he was attracted to Marxism as a result of the Russian Revolution of 1917. For helping to found the Japan Communist Party (1922), he was imprisoned again in 1923. In his later years he opened an agricultural school in his native district.