On this day in 1911, the Japanese government executed twelve anarchists, including radical journalists Kanno Sugako and Kōtoku Shūsui (shown), as part of a widespread crackdown on left-wing activism. Among those executed were Uchiyama Gudō, a Buddhist priest and socialist who spoke out against the Meiji government for its imperialism and advocated for conscripted soldiers to desert en masse.
The pretext for this crackdown was the "High Treason Incident", a plot to assassinate the Emperor of Japan. The incident began when police searched the room of Miyashita Takichi, a young lumbermill employee, and found materials which could be used to construct bombs, concluding that there was a broader conspiracy to harm the imperial family.
On the basis of this plot, the Japanese government rounded up leftist activists from all over the country. 24 of the 26 defendants actually brought to trial were sentenced to death, despite the evidence against nearly all of them being circumstantial.
Among those executed anarcha-feminist journalist Kanno Sugako (some sources say she was executed on January 25th). At the age of 29, Kanno became the first woman with the status of political prisoner to be executed in the history of modern Japan.
Prior to his execution, Kōtoku Shūsui etched this message on the wall of his cell: "How has it come about that I have committed this grave crime? Today my trial is hidden from outside observers and I have even less liberty than previously to speak about these events. Perhaps in 100 years someone will speak out about them on my behalf."
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Theory:
The wiki is wrong. Ungoliant (who is not a demon but a totally unexplained creature that existed since or maybe before the start of the world) fucked 'foul beasts'and Shelob is a descendant of those offspring.
Tolkien says of Shelob, "Most like a spider she was," [emphasis added], and the offspring of Ungoliant differed from normal spiders in respects beyond their enormous size. Bilbo sees the Mirkwood spiders' eyes as "Insect eyes,"and Shelob's eyes are "clustered" and "many-windowed", with "a thousand facets", like insects' compound eyes. However, normal spiders do not have compound eyes. Tolkien may not have been over-concerned with the difference between spiders and insects, as in the same chapter of The Hobbit he refers to spiders as "hunting and spinning insects". Another difference is that when spiders grow, they moult their skins, but Shelob's hide was "ever thickened from within with layer on layer of evil growth". Shelob also had a stinger.
Aside from narrative similies and a metaphor about spiderwebs used by Gandalf in the council of Elrond that seems to imply the existence of small spiders in middle earth but the sentence is
"Yet even the most subtle spiders may leave a weak thread."
It feels like a small spider statement but no guarantee. All of what are referred as spiders in middle earth could very well be eight legged giant monsters with stingers that descend from ungoliant and are only share a name with what we call spiders. They're not taxanomically arachnids