Abstract This article revisits the history of Marxism in Japan and Uno Kōzō’s method for political-economic research from the perspective of Gavin Walker’s book, The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan. Walker’s book not only introduces key debates from the history of Marxism in Japan to a contemporary and English-speaking audience. It also rethinks and develops important concepts, discourses and problematics from the history of Marxist theory in Japan that are global in character and that continue to be useful in the here and now. These include the transition from feudalism to capitalism, primitive accumulation, the production of national difference, and the ‘impossibility’ of the commodification of labour-power.