Anarchist Modernity

Harvard East Asian Monographs 356

 Anarchist Modernity

Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian

Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan

Sho Konishi

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center

Distributed by Harvard University Press
Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2013
© 2013 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Printed in the United States of America

The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japa nese
Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further
scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center
also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Konishi, Sho
Anarchist modernity : cooperatism and Japanese-Russian intellectual relations in modern
Japan / Sho Konishi.
pages cm. — (Harvard East Asian monographs ; 356)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-07331-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Anarchism—Japan—History.
2. Cooperation—Japan—History. 3. Japan— Relations—Russia—History.
4. Russia— Relations—Japan—History. I. Title.
HX947.K584 2013
335'.83—dc23
2012050450

Index by Eileen Doherty-Sil

Printed on acid-free paper

Last figure below indicates year of this printing

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
For Anika
 Contents

Illustrations viii
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xii
Notes on Style xiii

Introduction 1
1 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin: The Emerging Vision of
Cooperatist Civilization 29
2 Anarchist Religion: Translation and Conversion beyond
Western Modernity 93
3 The Nonwar Movement in the Russo-Japanese War:
The Invention of the People without the State 142
4 The History Slide 209
5 Translingual World Order: Language without Culture 258
6 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature: Phagocytes,
Dung Beetles, and the Cosmos 296
Epilogue: Culture Turned Upside Down 329

Bibliography 353
Index 385
 Illustrations

1.1 Lev Mechnikov in samurai dress, circa 1876 49

1.2 Tattooed laborer in Meiji Japan 52
2.1 Fragment of a church mural in the village of Tazov,
Kursk Province, Russia 94
2.2 Tokutomi Roka with Lev Tolstoy and Tolstoy’s daughter
Aleksandra Tolstaya, Iasnaia Poliana, Russia, 1906 134
3.1 The “society of cliques” pushing a peasant into war.
Cartoon in Heimin shimbun, January 17, 1904 163
3.2 Yamamoto Kanae’s Ryōfu (Fisherman), published in
Myōjō, July 1904 170
3.3 Sleepy fisherman. Usen cartoon from Hikari,
October 15, 1905 173
3.4 Workers at rest. Usen cartoon from Heimin shimbun,
April 10, 1905 174
3.5 Farmers relaxing. Usen cartoon from Heimin shimbun,
January 24, 1905 174
3.6 Monkey Trainer from Tōwa Shinpō. Usen postcard, 1908 176
3.7 Transnational heimin. Cartoon from Heimin shimbun,
January 17, 1905 186
3.8 “Eternal Rest.” Cartoon in Sudzilovskii-Russel’s Nagasaki
newspaper Volia 6 (May 7, 1906) 202
4.1 Social Studies Circle led by Arishima Takeo 250
5.1 Vasilii Eroshenko wearing a Russian peasant’s blouse
in Japan, 1916 286
5.2 Nakamuraya sweetshop, 1909 289
 Acknowledgments

The following archives, libraries, and institutions were especially helpful

and generous in offering assistance and materials for this project: the
State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy Manuscripts Department and Library;
the Historical Library Periodicals Collection and East Asia Collection in
Moscow; the State Archive of the Russian Federation; the Russian State
Archive of Literature and Art; the Hokkaido University Slavic Research
Center Library; the Seki Kansai Memorial Museum and Archive; the
Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace Archives at Stanford
University; the Niseko’s Arishima Takeo Memorial Museum Archive;
the Japan Esperanto Institute Library; the Japanese Foreign Ministry
Archive; the Hokkaido Municipal Archive; Hokkaido University North-
ern Studies Special Collections; the National Diet Library Newspaper
and Journal Collection; the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Cen-
tennial Collection; the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago;
and the Oxford Bodleian Japanese Library.
This book has also relied on archival treasures and other materials
preserved by the following institutions: the Kanagawa Prefectural Li-
brary of Modern Literature; the Tokutomi Roka Museum Collection;
the Meiji Newspaper and Journal Collection of Tokyo University; the
National Archive of Japan; Haverford College Quaker and Special Col-
lections; the Miyazawa Kenji Museum; the Ogawa Usen Memorial Mu-
seum; the Setagaya Literature Museum; the Hokkaido Museum of Lit-
erature; the Museum of Modern Literature in Hakodate; the Yamamoto
Kanae Museum; the Tokyo Municipal Library, Archive Section; the
x Acknowledgments

Franz Boas Papers Collection of the American Philosophical Society;

and the Chicago Field Museum, Archival Section.
This work’s incorporation of diverse fields of study and geographic
areas would not have been possible without the generous funding of the
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the
Esperantic Studies Foundation, the Social Science Research Council/
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign Research Board, the U.S. Library of Congress Flor-
ence Tan Moeson Fellowship, the Association for Asian Studies NEAC
grants, the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago,
and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. I am very grateful for
their support. I would also like to acknowledge the Reischauer Institute
of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the
Center for Japanese Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Mos-
cow, Russia; and the Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University in
Japan, which kindly extended fellowship affiliations to me.
My article “Reopening the ‘Opening of Japan,’ ” The American His-
torical Review 112, no. 1 (2007): 101–130 appears in some portions of
Chapter 1 with permission from the University of Chicago Press and the
American Historical Association. My article “Translingual World Order,”
Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 1 (2013): 91–114, an earlier version of
Chapter 5, appears with permission from Cambridge University Press.
Parts of “Tolstoian Religion in Meiji Japan,” pp. 233–266 in Converting
Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity, edited by
Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart, 2007, appear with the per-
mission of Brill. The earlier conceptual grasp of the significance of the
Nonwar Movement found in “The Absence of Portsmouth in an Early
Twentieth-Century Japanese Imagination of Peace” in The Treaty of
Portsmouth and its Legacies, pp. 98–105, edited by Steven J. Ericson and
Allen Hockley (2008), appears in Chapter 3 with the permission of the
University Press of New England.
Finally, I wish to express my appreciation to a number of individuals.
I thank Harriet Shelley, the only one to have read this book throughout
its various stages of metamorphosis. She offered countless questions and
criticisms from the eyes of a nonspecialist. This volume is the result of my
attempt to answer and respond to them. I wish to express my gratitude to
Professors Tetsuo Najita and Sheila Fitzpatrick of the Department of
 Acknowledgments xi

History at the University of Chicago. I recall enjoying their divergence in

style in the first-year graduate seminars I took with them. I thank Profes-
sors James Ketelaar and Mark Bradley, who kindly agreed to be on my
Ph.D. committee at different stages. I feel fortunate to have been able to
work with them all. I also owe thanks to the two anonymous readers of
the manuscript at Harvard University Press, who lent clarity to the sig-
nificance of this book.
 Abbreviations

GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State

Archive of the Russian Federation)
GGS Gaimushō gaikō shiryōkan (Japanese Foreign Ministry
Archives)
KKM Kokuritsu kō monjokan (National Archive of Japan)
NGM Nongovernmental movement
ORGMT Otdel Rukopisei Gosudarstvennogo Muzeia L. N.
Tolstogo (Department of Manuscripts, State Museum of
L. N. Tolstoy)
RGALI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva
(Russian State Archive of Literature and Art)
SAC Sapporo Agricultural College
TSFL Tokyo School of Foreign Languages
 Notes on Style

The names of well-known places and people are spelled according to

English-language conventions (e.g., Tokyo instead of Tōkyō; Herzen
instead of Gertsen; Tolstoy instead of Tolstoi) except in my translitera-
tions of bibliographic information.
Japanese names are written according to Japanese convention, with
surname first, followed by the given name. Names of famous Japanese
figures are the only exception to this. Well-known Japa nese are often
widely referred to by their given names rather than by their surnames.
I have tried to follow this practice, and so, for example, Ogawa Usen is
referred to as “Usen” rather than by his family name, “Ogawa.” Similarly,
Nakae Chōmin is referred to as “Chōmin,” and Andō Shōeki is called
“Shōeki” in the text.
Long vowels in Japanese are marked by a macron, for example, ō, ā,
ū, ī.
 Introduction

In 1861, in the little port town of Hakodate, one of several cities recently
opened by the Japanese government to foreigners, an American captain
bustled about his ship, preparing for a dinner party that would ring in
the arrival of a new cosmopolitan era in Japan. His honored guest was
Consul General I. A. Goshkevich (1814–75), head of Russia’s first diplo-
matic mission to Japan. The captain was eager to introduce Goshkevich
to a Russian compatriot whom the captain had just agreed to transport
to San Francisco. The Russian passenger peered self-consciously at Gos-
hkevich. Sporting a wild stock of hair and high-voltage energy, the ec-
centric related that he had just that day slipped into Hakodate from the
eastern coast of Russia. The intrepid traveler was Mikhail Bakunin
(1814–76), the notorious revolutionary who was to become one of the
Russian Populist movement’s leading strategists in the 1870s and one of
the most recognized anarchists in world history. Riding piggyback on
the newly opened Vladivostok-Hakodate shipping route, he had escaped
from Siberia after over ten years’ imprisonment and exile. He would
spend over a month wandering about revolutionary Japan before joining

1. Shimoda and Hakodate were opened by treaties with the United States and Great
Britain in 1854; in 1855, the Treaty of Shimoda with Russia opened Nagasaki. Several
years later, Kanagawa, Hyōgo, and Yokohama were opened as well.
2. See Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pp. 570–71. Sketches of Bakunin’s time in Japan
may also be found in Sakon, “M. A. Bakunin no nihon raikō”; G. D. Ivanova, Russkie v
Iaponii, pp. 43–44; and Billingsley, “Bakunin’s Sojourn.”
2 Introduction

fellow Russian émigrés in Europe. Bakunin’s escape from Siberian exile

into Japan and his sensational around-the-world odyssey propelled him
to legendary status, and radical groups across Europe made him an object
of reverence well into the twentieth century. He was the first of a num-
ber of exiles, prison escapees, and émigrés from Russia to enter Japan on
their way to revolution from the second half of the nineteenth to the early
twentieth century.
Bakunin’s arrival in revolutionary Japan reveals the coinciding of
revolutionary movements in Russia and Japan in the wider world con-
text. In the mid-nineteenth century, Russia and Japan fully realized
their physical proximity as neighbors with the concretization of mutual
borders. With Russia’s annexation of the Amur region from China in
1858 and 1860, Russia and Japan literally came face-to-face with each
other across the Sea of Japan. The founding of Vladivostok in 1860
marked the development of the Russian state’s interest in its expansion
eastward, linked to the opening of diplomatic relations with Japan and
Amur territorial gains from China. Russian exiles to Siberia began mak-
ing use of the transportation route to the east of Russia as soon as it was
created. The Siberia–Japan–San Francisco path of escape for Siberian
exiles first forged by Bakunin was to become a well-trodden road used
by other Russian radicals and revolutionaries by the turn of the century.
First imprinted by Bakunin’s travels, it would become invested with the
meaning of a path from repression to revolution. In turn, by the end of
the Meiji (1868–1912) period, Japanese intellectuals would look on this
same route in reverse order as both the physical and the symbolic path
out of Western modernity. A new route, opened for official trade and
transportation between Russia and Japan, simultaneously invited non-
state, often antistate, cross-border activities.
With the “Opening of Japan” to the world (Kaikoku) in the 1850s and
1860s, multiple thoughts and values from outside Japan came in contact

3. Alexander Herzen received a letter dated October 15, 1861, from Bakunin in San
Francisco. “Friends,—I have succeeded in escaping from Siberia, and after long wander-
ings on the Amur, on the shores of the Gulf of Tartary and across Japan, I arrived today
in San Francisco. Friends, I long to come to you with my whole being, and as soon as I
arrive I shall set to work; I shall work with you on the Polish-Slavonic question, which
has been my idée fixe since 1846.” Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pp. 570–71.
 Introduction 3

with Japanese domestic ones with more speed and intensity than ever
before. These ideas and moral vocabularies merged, clashed, and negoti-
ated, giving birth to new cultures. The new cultures were constantly
forming and re-forming, of course, but in patterns decodable by histori-
ans. The chance meeting in 1861 between Consul General Goshkevich
and Bakunin in revolutionary Japan represents the beginning of an an-
archist vision of progress founded on principles of mutual aid in Japan
that would color Japanese intellectual and cultural life for well over half
a century. It developed out of Japanese-Russian nonstate transnational
intellectual relations whose emergence coincided with the initiation of
Japanese-Russian diplomatic relations in the 1860s and 1870s.
This book explores Japanese-Russian nonstate transnational intellec-
tual relations since Kaikoku as a fresh approach to disclose an entirely
new current of modern Japanese intellectual life. By examining their re-
lations, it reveals a transnationally formulated temporality and corre-
sponding order of knowledge and practice that I call cooperatist anar-
chist modernity. It uncovers how those who belonged to cooperatist
anarchist modernity managed the expansion of knowledge in modern
Japanese cultural life in spheres as diverse as language, history, religion,
the arts, literature, education, and the natural sciences. I suggest that
cooperatist anarchism, which involved some of the most distinctive and
popular cultural phenomena during this period, was a major current in
Japanese intellectual and cultural history from the mid-nineteenth to
the early twentieth century. The discovery of this knowledge universe
explains arguably the most puzzling intellectual phenomena in Japanese
history, which have long evaded historians’ conceptual grasp.
Indeed, the history of cooperatist anarchism poses a fundamental
challenge to some of the most established views in historiography on mod-
ern Japan, with wide-ranging implications regarding the very nature of
history writing. The idea of Western modernity has been the starting
point for much historical scholarship on modern Japan in any field—
cultural, intellectual, social, political, diplomatic, scientific, medical, envi-
ronmental, or religious. Moreover, it has served as an internal logic for
much of that historiography. This logic has connected the sources of
knowledge or evidence, the methods of exploration, the conceptual vo-
cabulary, theory, and the resulting historical narratives. Within these con-
ceptual contours of history writing, the people, thoughts, and practices
4 Introduction

that do not fit this logic have often been forgotten or categorized as

products of antimodern, nativist counterurges against the Western gaze.
The more historians have expanded the ways in which they have looked
at Japan’s relations with the wider world and the kinds of materials they
have used, the more they have solidified Western modernity as the mas-
ter narrative for international history involving modern Japan. Although
this practice has contributed tremendously to the volume of historical
knowledge, it has also led them to overlook the phenomenon under ex-
amination all the more. In the grammar of Western modernity that has
ordered the historical knowledge of modern Japan, breaking one link in
its chain of logic necessitates breaking all links at the same time. Doing
so has made it possible to reconstruct an independent logic of history writ-
ing to make sense of this particular intellectual and cultural current.
The object of this book is not to provide a single overarching char-
acterization of the rich and variegated history of Russian-Japanese
relations in modern Japan. Many informative studies in Russian, Japa-
nese, French, and English have documented aspects of their encounters,
their literary, artistic, and religious influence, their mutual perceptions, and
their diplomatic relations. Rather, I have traced, step-by-step, Russian-
Japanese transnational interlocking networks and resulting thought and
practices as a method for doing intellectual history. It was only through
this process of tracing the formation of transnational relations on the
nonstate level beyond Western modern constructs that I was able to con-
nect, make sense of, and give historical significance to, if not entirely

4. For example, Rimer’s edited volume A Hidden Fire is an illuminating collection of

essays by twenty scholars from Russia, Japan, and the United States. Although it unveils
the rich cultural relations between Russia and Japan from 1868 to 1926, what remains
unanswered in the volume is why their cultural relations were so extensive as a whole in
this period. Numerous studies in Russian and Japanese by Japanese Russianists and So-
viet Japanologists have similarly recorded facts about individual encounters and the
Japanese reception of Russian cultural figures. Examples of the many studies of indi-
vidual aspects of their relations include the collection of essays in Hara and Togawa,
Surabu to Nihon; Sawada, Hakukei Roshiyajin to Nihon bunka; Wada, Nikorai Rasseru;
and Kominz, “Pilgrimage to Tolstoy.” Work by Russian scholars since the 1990s has re-
flected a renewed interest in the history of the relations of the Russian Orthodox Church
with Japan and East Asia. See, for example, the reports based on archival findings in
Belonenko, Iz istorii religioznykh, kul’turnykh i politicheskikh vzaimootnoshenii.
 Introduction 5

revise understanding of, some of the most influential and popular cultural
phenomena in modern Japan.
In macro historical perspective, the Russian cultural presence in Japan
from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century was, for inter-
pretive purposes, comparable to that of the Chinese cultural presence in
the intellectual life of Tokugawa Japan before 1860 and the American
cultural presence in the intellectual life of Japan after the Asia-Pacific War.
It would be difficult for any student of modern Japanese intellectual life
to overlook the immense Russian cultural presence in Japan when, for
example, Tolstoy was by far the most translated foreign writer in the
entire history of modern Japa nese translation practice. Between 1868
and 1950, Russian writers constituted the largest proportion from any one
country of the top ten foreign writers translated into Japa nese. In all,
almost three hundred Russian writers were translated into Japanese in
this period.
Japanese and Russian nonstate actors have also had a long and inti-
mate record of direct intellectual associations, friendship, and travel. Some
of the most recognized intellectuals and popular cultural figures of the
time, such as Saigō Takamori (1827– 77), Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910), Peter
Kropotkin (1842–1921), Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), Arishima Takeo (1878–
1923), Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), Vasilii Eroshenko (1890–1952), and
Tokutomi Roka (1868–1927), increasingly sought to solidify private cross-
border ties with one another on the nonstate level through letters, travel,
and networking, even when their respective states were in diplomatic
conflict and at war. The beginnings of transnational interlocking net-
works between underground revolutionaries from Japan and Russia can
be traced to Saigō’s secret invitation to Bakunin’s close colleague, the anar-
chist revolutionary Lev Mechnikov (1838–88), to come to Japan in 1874
(see Chapter 1). Saigō was one of the most famous leaders of the revolu-
tionary era and the “last samurai” who headed the last civil war against
the new Meiji government in 1877.

5. Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), and

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) are in the list of the top ten foreign literary writers most
frequently translated into Japa nese. Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) comes in close at eleventh
place. Nobori and Akamatsu, Russian Impact on Japan, p. 113.
6 Introduction

Curiously, this was also the period in which Russian-Japanese diplo-

matic relations were at their worst. How is one to understand this strik-
ing incongruence between poor state and rich cultural and intellectual
relations between Japanese and Russians? Furthermore, why were Russian-
Japanese nonstate relations so intense from the mid-nineteenth to the
early twentieth century? If modern Japanese intellectual history is viewed
as a process and a culture of multilateral transnational knowledge ex-
changes and translation practices, it follows that historians have largely
neglected one of the most important aspects of modern Japanese cultural
and intellectual life. The answer to these puzzles lies in resolving a much
larger question, that of modernities.
My tracing of Russian-Japanese transnational networks and the
thought and practices of participants in these networks has led to my
formulation of an anarchist history of modern Japan. The phrase “anar-
chist history” here does not mean simply a history about anarchists.
Rather, it expresses a view of modern global history as simultaneously
existing, multiple imagined and lived ideas of progress, or “modernities”
absent teleological and hierarchical ordering. This book suggests that the
concerted attempt to synchronize global time in Meiji Japan failed to
permeate the everyday life and historical consciousness of the majority
of people, including many of Japan’s leading intellectuals and cultural
figures. Abandoning the understanding that temporalities in Japan and
elsewhere were being synchronized into a single global time, this intel-
lectual history examines the rise of a distinct temporality that developed
throughout the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth
century in Japan, which was structured by the terms of anarchist prog-
ress and civilization. This temporality, based on a concept of progress
toward an imagined future, coexisted with and simultaneously coun-
tered the temporality of Western modernity.

6. The historian Stefan Tanaka has written a wonderful study of the conflicted and
contradictory transformation of time in Meiji Japan. Tanaka shows the effects of the
state’s imposition of a modern temporality in Meiji Japan. He characterizes the process
as part of the synchronization of global time, “a moment in the creation of the interna-
tional, an expanded world that coordinated diverse societies into a singular temporal
order.” Tanaka, New Times, p. 19.
 Introduction 7

The term “modernities” used throughout this book refers to the ways
in which progress and civilization have been imagined and lived, the
particular modes of and urges to change, talked about and experienced
within various discursive communities from the second half of the nine-
teenth to the early twentieth century. In a way reminiscent of Reinhart
Koselleck’s conceptualization of temporality as lived experience, moder-
nity is discussed as a qualitative rather than a chronological category, a
historical consciousness of time and space as realms of constant progres-
sion toward a better future. Koselleck brought to the historical field a
way of looking at history not as simple facticity, but as possibilities, “more
precisely, past possibilities and prospects, past conceptions of the future:
futures past.” Koselleck’s understanding of temporality as a lived time
distinct from but coinciding with chronology that is itself “the outcome
of the structure with which we endow lived events” is helpful in under-
standing the development of diverse cultural expressions vital to late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese cultural and intellectual
life. However, if Koselleck’s history, which is based on Western European
historical experience, is taken as the model for understanding intellec-
tual history and temporality around the world, one can easily overlook
the rich array of imaginations and experiences of time that existed in the
world outside the particular historical-geographic area of Western Europe
and North America.
This book offers a concrete historical case of different localized pres-
ents described by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, each with its
own temporality. However, it fundamentally contradicts Althusser’s
molding of time and the local by unifying Marxist structures. This book
avoids reading the history of thoughts and practices according to Marx-
ist structures determined by “the mode of production” largely within a
national space. Anarchist imaginations of time and progress failed to

7. Koselleck, Futures Past. See also Osborne, “Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a

Chronological, Category.”
8. Carr, Review, p. 198.
9. Tribe, “Translator’s Introduction,” p. xi.
10. Osborne, “Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category,” p. 43;
Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, pp. 110–12, 114–16.
11. Althusser writes, “Merely reading Capital . . . shows, for example, that the time
of economic production is a specific time (differing according to the mode of production),
8 Introduction

belong clearly to any unifying category of temporality proposed in Marx-

ist thought. On the contrary, simultaneously existing local imaginations,
ideas, and corresponding lived experiences of modernity suggest a histori-
cal time and space free from Marxist determinism of the material basis
for historical developments.
Rather than viewing discussions of mutual aid by cooperatist anar-
chists along Marxist lines as surviving remnants of the past, this book
views these apparent continuities retrieved from both the past and the
present in cooperatist anarchism as entirely integral to the lived modern
itself. Instead of identifying in people’s everyday habits the source of dis-
sonance with the present, Japanese anarchists viewed people’s reliance
on the ethic of mutual aid as a source of cultural invention and expan-
sion of human social relations for modern progress and civilization. For
those who belonged to cooperatist anarchist modernity, tradition thus
no longer lay in Japanese people’s everyday habits, but rather in the
forced attempts by the state to eradicate those habits in order to instill a
Western modern temporality from above.
The turn from “modernization” studies to “modernity” studies has
contributed much to historical understanding of the often contradictory
and conflictive process of becoming modern in the non-West. However,
although existing explorations of an “alternative Japanese modernity”
have attempted to see how Japanese reconfigured, negotiated, and re-
translated Western modernity into “indigenous” or “Japanese” national
forms as historical difference, the modernity of the West nonetheless has
remained for historians the sole condition and source of modernity in
Japan. Studies of the diverse trajectories of alternative modernities in
the non-West have tended to speak in the idiom of hybridity between
two ultimately incompatible elements, an oil-and-water mixture between
the traditional and the new, or East and West. Moreover, the so-called

but also that, as a specific time, it is a complex and non-linear time—a time of times, a
complex time that cannot be read in the continuity of the time of life or clocks, but has
to be constructed out of the peculiar structures of production.” Althusser and Balibar,
Reading Capital, p. 112.
12. See, for example, Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability,” pp. 47, 52.
13. On this attempt, see Tanaka, New Times.
14. See, for example, the important work by Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity.
 Introduction 9

multiple modernities in the non-West have qualified as such by the

indigenous development or reconfiguration of major modern elements
already defined by the West and its historical experience, such as the
public sphere, capitalism, and liberal democratic political institutions.
This book’s identification of a modern temporality entirely distinct from
those temporalities socially and intellectually constituted by the Western
European historical experience diverges from other projects that seek to
identify so-called multiple modernities in the non-West as hybrid blends
of native cultural traditions with liberal capitalist and democratic po-
litical institutional development. In this sense, cooperatist anarchists’
embrace of diverse cultural expressions by a range of social groups and
circles within a vision of civilizational progress fueled by symbiotic
relationships should be distinguished from the postmodern practice of
multiculturalism, which has often been reduced to divisive identity
politics.
Although the following points, interlinked characteristics of histori-
ography, are by no means exhaustive, they indicate why historians have
been unable to see the thoughts and practices under exploration. These
interlinked characteristics share in the logic of Western modernity that
has framed historians’ study of modern Japan from the very outset. They
therefore serve as suggestions to create a set of interlinked conceptual,
methodological, and archival strategies to view Japanese history outside
the fold of Western modernity. I have attempted to apply and reflect
these strategies in this book in order to challenge this dominant over-
arching paradigm of modern Japanese history.
Historians have long defined anarchy, the absence of state gover-
nance and legal order, as characterizing the most primitive stage of
human progress and civilization. By extension, discussions of nineteenth-
century anarchism have often conceived the anarchist movement as an
intellectual and cultural inheritance of the social fury of the French
Revolution and have thereby associated it with terrorism and the formless
dreams of utopianism. Similarly, historians have described anarchism
in Japan as a reactionary impulse against the Western civilizational
order, expressing an emotional preoccupation with “traditional” and

15. For example, Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Eisenstadt, Multiple

Modernities.
10 Introduction

“conservative” moral and spiritual values threatened by the West. The

underlying assumption was that anarchists were nationalists in dis-
guise who adopted the cooperative ethos as a native expression of Japanese
traditions.
What is common among these characterizations is the notion that
anarchism, whether in its ideas or in practice, is opposed to modernity.
This almost habitual disavowal of anarchism has persisted in history
writing on modern Japan. The convenient positioning of anarchism and
anarchy in opposition to civilizational progress toward legal, political,
and institutional order is itself a product of the ideology of Western
modernity. Indeed, anarchy has helped define the Western modern as its
antithesis. This book approaches anarchism in Japan not as a political
movement marked by violent clashes with the state, but as a cultural, in-
tellectual, and social movement. Its focus on cultural production within
an anarchist discourse of progress expands the existing definition of an-
archism as the opposition to law and political order. This anarchist his-
tory may be distinguished in meaningful ways from James C. Scott’s Art
of Not Being Governed, one of the latest histories of anarchism. Scott’s
important history of Southeast Asia examines the history of Zomia, an
inaccessible mountainous region cutting across national borders that
served as a refuge for fugitives of the state. His identification of more or
less isolated and remote spheres antithetical to modern thinking and to
civilizational progress as “anarchist” is illuminating, but it also helps re-
affirm the Western modern conceptual framework that has labeled anar-
chism antimodern in the first place. The spheres identified by Scott are
construed in such a way that their history does not ask the reader to tran-
scend bifurcated conceptual categories that bind the state-anarchy oppo-
sition to such familiar oppositional categories as civilized-noncivilized
and modern-nonmodern.
Th is book attempts to overcome those structures of thought that
have prevented us from seeing anarchism as a formulation and expres-

16. See Notehelfer’s important contribution to the history of Japa nese anarchism,
Kōtoku Shūsui. Other more recent works that have similarly described anarchism in Japan
include Hoston, State, Identity, and the National Question, pp. 137–48; and Marks, How
Russia Shaped the Modern World.
17. Scott, Art of Not Being Governed.
 Introduction 11

sion of a notion of progress. Cooperatist anarchists’ networked society

differed from the nomadic, self-peripheralized fugitive communities that
fled to a remote and rugged terrain to escape the state’s modern projects
of organization and control. Many of the strategies adopted in Zomia to
remain stateless may be perceived as antimodern, such as remaining physi-
cally dispersed in a rugged terrain and devotion to millenarian, prophetic
leaders. Yet cooperatist anarchists consciously embraced technology; mass
media; urban society; cultural expressions in art, literature, theater, and
popular song; the latest theories in cosmology and evolutionary science;
and many other expressions normally associated with the modern. They
gave these elements new meaning and created new forms of expression
in accordance with their anarchist concepts of progress and civilization.
Moreover, cooperatist anarchist ideology and the cultural produc-
tions to which it gave rise were widely embraced and practiced in Japan
rather than being isolated in remote, separatist communities. Indeed,
many self-identified anarchists in Japan were often inspired by popular
everyday practices, just as Lev Mechnikov theorized anarchist civiliza-
tional progress on the basis of his encounter with the everyday practices
and thoughts of revolutionary Japan. The most recent dictionary of the
Japanese anarchist movement lists roughly six thousand important intel-
lectuals and cultural figures, many of whom were active participants in
the cultural and intellectual movements during the period under explo-
ration. However, even this expansive dictionary could not include the
countless ordinary people who made these cultural figures popular in
the first place. Japanese anarchists criticized separatism as ill fitting their
engagement with modern society, as seen, for example, in Ōsugi Sakae
(1885–1923) and Arishima’s distinction of anarchist thoughts and prac-
tices from Mushanokōji Saneatsu’s (1885–1976) famous experimental and
separatist commune of intellectuals, the New Village. Indeed, separat-
ism was seen as the antithesis of anarchism.

18. See my attempt to historicize the modern temporality of a community of coop-

erative farmers in Hokkaido: Sho Konishi, “Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist Time.”
19. Nihon Anākizumu Undō Jinmei Jiten Henshū Iiankai, Biografia leksikono de la
Japana anarkista movado. The volume also does not include some of the major historical
actors discussed in this book, such as Konishi Masutarō (1862–1940).
12 Introduction

If anarchists have been understood as antimodern, anarchist tenden-

cies have also been characterized as utopian, expressive of an unrealistic
urge to transcend the present in order to establish a new, perfect society.
Underlying this characterization of utopianism are assumptions of the
realism of the Western modern imagination of future society. The anar-
chist imagination has been seen as fanciful, unattainable, and unsus-
tainable, as opposed to, for example, “globalization,” defined as the
worldwide reach of transnational corporations and their Westernizing
capitalist values and the accompanying transformation of local lives.
This dichotomizing formulation of anarchism as utopian and separatist
vis-à-vis the realism of international relations of nation-states and the
all-encompassing, globalizing nature of Western modernity is deeply
ingrained in Euro-American political ideologies and thus in habits of
thinking.
Japanese cooperatist anarchists conceived Western modernity as uto-
pian in a way that is echoed in formulations of Western modernity by
the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman as a utopia defined by territoriality
and finality. Western modernity at large has been founded on an ideal of
a different and better life that is territorially defined and tied irrevoca-
bly to its delimitation and boundedness by borders, governance by a
sovereign power, and legal order. Bauman aptly calls this the “sedentary
imagination” of Western modernity. Unlike the cooperatist anarchist
imagination of society that reflected the unordered, infinitely expanding
universe, the Western modern imagination has been marked by finality,
a vision of a perfect society that, once achieved, would no longer need
alteration. In the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth
centuries, cooperatist anarchists believed that no set of ideas about the
type and form of future society in Japan was more utopian than Western
modernity. Cooperatist anarchists’ formulation of society was founded
on the actual practices of mutual aid and the voluntary activities of asso-
ciations without the intervention of or need for state governance. The
networks central to its social functioning often developed out of practi-
cal necessity when the state was not doing what was needed to improve
their lives.

20. Bauman, “Utopia with No Topos,” p. 12.

 Introduction 13

There is another reason that the intellectual and cultural phenomena

under investigation in this book have been virtually invisible to histori-
ans. The Japanese nonstate transnational intellectual relations with Russia
examined in this book lie outside the paradigm of East and West that
has been dominant in the historiography on modern Japan in the wider
world. Indeed, these relations transcended the geographic imaginations
of Western modernity from the outset. For example, the Russian figures
who appear in this book clearly departed from Russian Japonisme’s ex-
oticization and aestheticization of a timeless, Oriental “other.” The
thought and practices of figures in this book also fail to fit conceptual
categories that historians have relied on to study modern Asia, such as
nationalisms, pan-Asianisms, colonialisms and postcolonialisms, and
imperialisms. In uprooting the hierarchically ordered divide between
East and West, those who contributed to and participated in this dis-
course elicited a radical new temporal and spatial imagination.
The practices discussed here also do not fit the identification of the
beginnings of modern Japan as the opening to the West. The tendency
to see the West as the sole source of knowledge in modern Japan has led
to countless “influence studies” that have documented the West’s impact
on Japan. In this capacity, Russian thinkers have been understood as a
Western source of influence on Japan. These one-sided influence studies
have largely neglected the multidirectional nature of transnational intel-
lectual phenomena.
The Cold War inspired both Soviet and American scholars of Japan
to document Russia’s influence on the non-West for its relevance to
policy making. There is thus a considerable literature in Russian, Japa-
nese, and English detailing Russian cultural and political influence on
Japan. Scholarship emphasizing Marxist influence on Japan has tended
to begin its narratives with the Russian Revolution of 1917. Scholars have
long emphasized the central role of Russian Marxism and the Russian

21. One example is the Russian symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont’s (1867–1942) ref-
erences to Japan at the turn of the last century. On Balmont and Japan, see Azadovskii
and D’iakonova, Bal’mont i Iaponiia.
22. See, for example, Nobori and Akamatsu, Russian Impact on Japan.
23. For a more contemporary study of Russian influence on the modern world written
from a post— Cold War perspective, see Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World.
14 Introduction

Revolution in the emergence of Japanese proletarian literature, for ex-

ample. However, if one takes note of the longer history of Russian-Japanese
nonstate transnational intellectual relations and the cooperatist anar-
chist cultural productions from which proletarian literature emerged,
the very nature of proletarian literature, and of Marxism itself in Japan,
is cast in a new light.
The transnational history involving Japan and the non-West has largely
focused on spatially ordered categories of political identities, borderlands,
colonized-colonizer encounters, transnational nationalisms (often among
colonized peoples), and the global Western cosmopolitan imagination of
a world divided between West and East, or the West and the Rest.
Nationalisms and pan-Asianisms have long served as convenient catego-
ries of resistance to the West in the study of modern Japan. But to resist
the West and capitalism as a reactive nationalist expression was often to
accept the power of Western modernity and thereby to fail to overcome
it. Historians have benefited tremendously from these scholarly endeav-
ors in the past two decades. However, what has remained as a given in
the innovative studies of transnational contacts has been the particular
temporal order of Western modernity.
Although the anarchist movement in Japan intersected with and sup-
ported the global anticolonial movement, it rejected the cultural and
political primacy of the nation-state in anticolonial movements. As a vi-
sion of progress, cooperatist anarchism was a source of action to create a
cooperatist society without regard either for the nation-state or for de-
structive acts against the state and was thereby distinct from the antico-
lonial movements in the non-West in this period.
Even the geographic boundaries that scholars have drawn to define
their academic departments, fields of study, and curricula, based as they

24. See, for example, Pratt, Imperial Eyes. For a more contemporary view of travel
and translation, see Clifford, Routes.
25. See Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity.
26. In this sense, cooperatist anarchism should also be distinguished from the po-
litical and intellectual current that arose from the coinciding of the global anarchism
and anticolonialism movements introduced in Benedict Anderson’s important work,
Under Three Flags.
 Introduction 15

are on national boundaries and the intellectual constructs of continents,

have served to discourage continental border crossings in the study of
intercultural relations. The lack of a geographic construct that em-
braces both Russia and Japan has made it very challenging for students
to straddle existing area-studies centers and learn both Russian and
Japanese. Academic funding has long been organized around these same
geographic constructs, making it all the more difficult for historians to
identify these phenomena.
Finally, it has been broadly assumed that the Japanese socialist move-
ment, inclusive of anarchism, was a child of European socialism. The
success of European socialism in the form of its socialist political parties
has led global socialist history largely to be modeled after and measured
by the European example. The history of socialism in Japan has also
been viewed from class- and state-focused perspectives of labor and
party politics. The language historians have used to describe and catego-
rize Japanese political movements, such as liberalism and conservatism,
has also contributed to obscuring cooperatist anarchist practices, which
neither were oriented to government politics nor fitted into the West-
ern political spectrum. By examining anarchism through anarchists’
cultural practices, their social networks and transnational relations, and
their understanding of everyday life, this history offers a new way of
looking at socialist currents, beyond government politics and organized
labor movements.
This book pays particular attention to translation as a methodological
strategy. Russian-Japanese and Japanese-Russian translations were inter-
active, mutually responsive, and part of a broad, multifaceted, multidi-
rectional, dialectical process of knowledge exchange and formation in
which both sides of the translation were mutually affected. It should be
noted that their translation practice did not lead to self-colonization, as
one might suppose, but liberated participants from the intellectual con-
structs formulated in the practice of translating the West that led to

27. For a discussion of the conceptual problems of continents as intellectual con-

structs, see Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents.
28. See Foner’s arguments on the history of socialism in the United States in “Why
Is There No Socialism in the United States?”
16 Introduction

self-colonization. The Japanese translation practice of Russian texts

also failed to give rise to the process of self-differentiation from “the
West” and to elicit cultural nationalism. Rather, Japanese translations
of Russian texts often inspired a sense of transnational sympathy, cama-
raderie, common experience, and indignation and outrage over perceived
shared injustices.
This book constructs an independent set of archival and method-
ological strategies for modern history writing in order to see the unfold-
ing of this intellectual history of anarchist modernity. The concepts that
arose to constitute this modernity were as much reflected in actions and
interactions as they were in written expressions (essays, literature, and
other writings). Cooperatist anarchists did not have a central institution
or leader to organize people and to elucidate the ideology that joined
them. As a result, I have relied heavily on tracing networks, which serve
as an essential guide to uncovering this cultural phenomenon. What
would originally have appeared as scattered and disassociated fragments
of cultural expressions have been joined in the process of tracing the
epistemic networks that tied the people who put them into practice.
These networks formed like an organ that was constantly shaping and
reshaping, but with a detectable logic and pattern over time.
Tracing their activities often necessitated unorthodox methods for an
intellectual history, such as extensive use of multinational archives in
order to gain insight into their thoughts and practices. Therefore, this
book relies on materials from an unusual number and range of archives.
Identifying the actions of and interactions among émigrés and escaped
prison convicts, pilgrims and missionaries, students abroad, blind bards
and Ainu ethnologists, and other traveling participants in transnational
networks that often transcended borders and laws necessitated research
in archives scattered across multiple continents, in multiple languages,

29. Readers may find it interesting to compare and contrast not only the nature of
Russian translation in Japan but also the meaning of modernity to which it belonged with
what Lydia Liu has called translingual practice in Chinese translations of modernity. See
Liu, Translingual Practice; and Liu, Tokens of Exchange. For a view of the intellectual his-
tory of modern Japan as translation, see also Howland, Translating the West; and a sugges-
tive conversation on the theme in Maruyama and Katō, Honyakuto Nihon no kindai.
30. On this process of modern Japa nese translation practice, see Sakai, Translation
and Subjectivity.
 Introduction 17

and on many levels: state, organizational, local, and personal. Th is book

uses materials from over twenty-five archives and special collections pos-
sessed by a variety of private individuals, associations, farms, local librar-
ies, museums, universities, villages, cities, nation-states, and transna-
tional nonstate organizations across Russia, Japan, and the United States
in order to open up this new dimension of historical time and space. By
relying on these materials, this book uncovers a previously invisible
plane to make sense of some of the most dynamic but fundamentally
puzzling intellectual phenomena in modern Japanese history.
Russian cultural and revolutionary figures in Japan often served as
hubs around which Japanese belonging to the cooperatist anarchist cur-
rent grouped. In order to identify the Japanese who belonged to this
current, it was often necessary first to trace the networks that formed
around Russians in Japan. By examining doodles and sketches in class
notebooks, newspaper cartoons, photos, tattered slips of paper, rough
notes scribbled on the backs of name cards, postcards, diaries, records
and songbooks compiled and written by farmers for farmers, and un-
published and self-published manuscripts held in archives across Russia,
the United States, and Japan in a diversity of languages, I was often able
to learn for the first time the names of Japanese participants and those
with whom they associated in this discourse.
Participants in these networks represented strikingly diverse cultural
currents. Often, only by unearthing the networks of representatives of
major cultural movements in early twentieth-century Japan could the
shared intellectual ties among these cultural currents be discovered. The
process of tracing these interlocking networks has enabled me to concep-
tually join such intellectual and popular cultural movements as Esperan-
tism, the children’s literature movement, Tolstoyanism, and entomology.
Close friends and colleagues in these cultural currents moved in together
or lived next door to one another, played billiards and drank together,
studied Russian and Esperanto together, borrowed one another’s books,
corresponded with one another, shared lecture podiums, wrote and spoke
about one another, and attended others’ funerals. Until now, their cultural
movements have never been considered, either together or in relation to
anarchism.
Studies of the latest protest movements at the turn of the twenty-first
century reveal that they have been made up not of distinct organizational
18 Introduction

forms with hierarchical lines of command and authority, but rather of

amorphous ties that philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have
likened to rhizomes, the smallest and most extensive roots of trees that
tangle and stretch out in multiple directions horizontally underground.
Deleuze and Guattari have contrasted these latest forms of political re-
sistance with the older vertical and hierarchically ordered forms of politi-
cal resistance organizations, which resemble the aboveground branches
of trees. They claim that the recent and most advanced forms of networks
are more democratic and are preferable to the older forms. Already a
century earlier, similar networks constituted cooperatist anarchist so-
ciety. Members themselves perceived their network society as a more
democratic form of social existence. They formed imagined nonbordered
and often transnational spaces, without attachment to concrete land or
territory.
Historians tracing the activities of the figures involved in this dis-
course would encounter a tension in the archives. Cooperatist anarchists
often sought to make their practices and networks disappear from his-
tory by removing evidence of their own existence. Meanwhile, archives
have often originated as state entities that nation-states have sought to
organize and administer as records of their success and evolution. Often
only the documents of those considered a part of the national narrative
and national identity, and therefore as “national property,” have been
archivally preserved.
However, a number of factors have remedied this potential vacuum in
the archives. First, the extralegal and extranational status of many coop-
eratist anarchist activities led to remarkably extensive documentation of
their practices by governments and their intelligence agencies on both
sides of the Sea of Japan. Second, the popularity and tremendous cul-
tural productivity of the cooperatist anarchists made them cultural
icons in Japan despite (or because of) their opposition to the ideologies
of the nation-state at the time. Therefore, town and village governments,
neighborhood shops, local libraries, town parks and museums, univer-
sities, nongovernmental groups, and even private individuals in Japan
have sought to preserve the historical record of these figures irrespec-

31. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, pp. 3–28.

 Introduction 19

tive of the interests of the nation-state and in contradiction with the ef-
forts of cooperatist anarchists to hide their activities from the historical
record.
That Russian national state archives preserved a number of personal
documents of Russian figures involved in this discourse, including their
correspondence with friends and colleagues in Japan, was not a coinci-
dence. Some of the Russian documents I have relied on to write this
book came from the so-called Prague Collection of the Russian Histori-
cal Archive Abroad, founded in Prague in 1923 by Russian émigrés. This
collection is made up mostly of documents belonging to political émi-
grés who fled from the Soviet regime to Europe following the Russian
Revolution. At the end of World War II, the Czech Communist minister
of culture and education Zdeněk Nejedlý proposed to hand over this po-
litically sensitive archive to the Soviet Union. The USSR immediately
made practical use of it to fulfill the demands of the Soviet secret police
and the labor camps. In 1946 alone, Soviet archivists were able to come
up with a list of eighteen thousand names of “enemies of the state” by
using the Prague Collection.
The secretive nature of interactions among nonlegal entities involved
in cooperatist anarchism served to obscure their relations all the more. I
often had to look into friends’ and relatives’ correspondence and diaries
to learn about figures in this discourse. Hidden private bonds among
anarchist intellectuals often publicly manifested themselves only with
the death of one of them. A particular figure’s death led his associates
and friends to make emotional revelations about his or her significance
for the larger community and their attachments to the deceased. Re-
search, therefore, often had to begin in backward order, starting with
an obituary. Obituaries and last wishes provided detailed evidence of
bonding and thoughts that tied together otherwise-hidden anarchist
practices.
The anarchist theorist Kropotkin, for example, carefully hid any per-
sonal or intellectual relationship to Tolstoy because of the dangers that

32. For a brief history of the Prague Collection, see Pavlova, Fondy Russkogo za-
granichnogo istoricheskogo arkhiva, pp. 5–28. The portion of the archive composed of
materials on anti-Soviet activities is held at the State Archive of the Russian Federation
(Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii, GARF) in Moscow.
20 Introduction

any association with the well-known anarchist would pose to the famous
novelist. Only with Tolstoy’s death did Kropotkin reveal to the public
his relationship to Tolstoy in an outpouring of articles and activities to
memorialize him. Sometimes interpersonal relations were complex. Pride,
intellectual competition, and reluctance to reveal one’s intellectual in-
debtedness to another dissolved only with one’s death. Often only with
one’s death did others in this discourse fully reveal their attachments to
that particular person or to their thoughts. One example is Kropotkin’s
relations with the older Lev Mechnikov. The archives disclose that when
Mechnikov died, Kropotkin headed an association of Russian émigrés
to gather funds for a memorial to him in Switzerland (see Chapter 1). A
further difficulty in identifying the nature of anarchists’ activities is that
many of those involved in this discourse adopted pseudonyms and
aliases both to hide their identities and to reflect their beliefs. Mech-
nikov, for example, used at least five comic pseudonyms and aliases in
order to evade censors and secret agents and to express irreverence for
intellectual and social elitism.
The history of cooperatist anarchism has the potential to lead scholar-
ship down new paths that call into question the teleological presumptions
of historians about the inevitability of Western modernity. Although
participants lived according to a distinct temporality and spatiality from
Western modernity, they did not seek to resist the West. After all, anar-
chists were among those most interested in interacting with, and learn-
ing from, those from Euro-America. It seems that “the West” and its
modernity did not quite culturally colonize the intellectual life and ex-
perience of time in Japan during this period after all.
The book is organized chronologically around key intellectual phe-
nomena in modern Japanese intellectual and cultural history. These
phenomena marked periods of momentous change and development in
socially shared knowledge. In focusing on these intellectual phenomena,
each chapter challenges longstanding assumptions in our historiography
on the intellectual life of these key periods. Chapter 1 examines the Rus-
sian revolutionary and anarchist Lev Mechnikov’s encounter with Japan
in the 1870s. It situates this underground Russian-Japanese revolutionary

33. Mechnikov’s pseudonyms included Garibal’diets, Leon Brandi, Emil’ Denegri,

and Leon Goranda. Koz’min, “L. I. Mechnikov,” p. 389.
 Introduction 21

encounter within the larger global revolutionary context of the mid-

nineteenth century. The historical development of modern Japan has long
been defined by Japan’s opening to the West (Kaikoku). The centrality of
this opening for Japan’s modern history in all spheres, including culture,
thought, science and industry, agriculture, labor, politics, and social re-
lations, has never been questioned. Chapter 1 initiates this book’s chal-
lenge of this assumption by reexamining the very meaning of Kaikoku
itself. It explores Mechnikov’s encounter with revolutionary Japan and
reveals that Kaikoku was a moment of opening that enabled different vi-
sions of the future and of civilizational progress to emerge and encounter
one another. One of these visions challenged the very centrality of the
West and its master narrative of progress and civilization. It developed
out of the transnational exchange of knowledge between Japanese and
Russian visitors to Japan.
Historians have rarely questioned one aspect of the birth of modern
Japan: Japan’s opening to the West (Kaikoku) and the resulting initiation
of civilization and progress. The chapter challenges that conception and
reexamines the meaning of Kaikoku by exploring Mechnikov’s private
encounter with revolutionary Japan on the nonstate level beyond the
imagined East-West divide. I argue that at the very moment when Japan’s
borders opened to negotiation with the West and to the concomitant
narratives of civilizational progress, they opened to different visions of
progress.
Mechnikov saw the Meiji Ishin (“Meiji Restoration”) as Japan’s mod-
ern revolution. He gave the Ishin world historical meaning as a major
impetus for the advancement of humanity in accordance with cooperat-
ist anarchist principles. Based on his observations of the functioning of
mutual aid in Ishin Japan and his conversations with Japanese revolution-
aries, Mechnikov constructed a theory of civilizational progress toward
universal liberty. His colleague Kropotkin, considered today a father
of world anarchism, appropriated Mechnikov’s theory at Mechnikov’s
death. Th is multidirectional traveling of knowledge, with knowledge
being altered and added to at each turn, is typical of the intellectual rela-
tions examined in this book. It took the discovery of private letters be-
tween Kropotkin and Mechnikov’s widow, Olga, to fully understand
how Mechnikov’s time in Japan influenced Kropotkin and his theory of
evolution.
22 Introduction

One of the most immediate consequences of Russian-Japanese revo-

lutionary encounters in this period was the development of a distinctive
Russian translation culture in Japan. The last section of Chapter 1 dis-
cusses this intellectual phenomenon. The appearance of a Russian trans-
lation culture was instrumental in the rise of the modern language revo-
lution and the writing of the so-called first modern novel in Japan by the
author Futabatei Shimei. Futabatei mastered the Russian language in
the program that Mechnikov established in Tokyo. In that program, fel-
low Russian Populist revolutionaries of Mechnikov taught Futabatei
through the study of Russian Populist literature. Futabatei’s later craft-
ing of a modern Japanese language in his fiction was often done via his
translations of Russian literary language from Russian Populist novels
into Japanese. He actively selected Russian revolutionary writings for his
source language. Futabatei’s translation practice thus consciously departed
from the practice of “translating the West” and its modernity. The history
of Futabatei’s critical translation practice leads to an understanding in
Chapter 1 of how his student Yokoyama Gennosuke’s (1871–1915) profes-
sional documentation of the “social problem” contributed to the birth of
the social sciences in Japan.
It was also in the context of the Russian translation culture formed
from Russian-Japanese revolutionary encounters that Tolstoy became by
far the most translated figure in the entire history of Japanese translation
practice in modern Japan. Chapter 2, which covers the years 1885–1904,
traces the emergence of the massive nationwide phenomenon of Tol-
stoyanism in late Meiji Japan. Historians have never accounted for this
phenomenon despite its profound cultural presence in early twentieth-
century Japan. I argue that Tolstoyanism was a religious discourse of
anarchist modernity. The chapter offers a fresh conception of both trans-
lation and conversion practice in modern history to make sense of this
intellectual phenomenon. It looks at how and why the Russian writer
who was publicly excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church
became one of the most popular intellectuals in Japan through the ef-
forts of the leading Japanese figure in the Orthodox Church of Japan.
The chapter reveals the transnational making of what anarchist Peter
Kropotkin called Tolstoy’s “New Religion” and what Japanese partici-
pants began to call “anarchist religion” (shūkyōteki anākizumu) by two
 Introduction 23

friends, Tolstoy and the dean of the Orthodox Seminary in Tokyo,

Konishi Masutarō.
Religious conversion has been one of the most destabilizing factors in
human history. The chapter argues that although Japanese translations of
Tolstoyan religious thought were couched in Christian vocabulary, they
began to change the meaning of the term shūkyō (religion), from its exist-
ing meaning as a modern religion of Christianity in Western modernity
to an anarchist idea of virtue, toku, to meet the demands of anarchist
progress. The popular conversions to Tolstoyanism in Japan were the con-
sequence of a Japanese-Russian translation practice that transfigured the
very meaning and value of religion for modernity. This challenges one of
the most established views in the historiography on Meiji Japan, that it
was Christianity and its assumed Westernization of converts that pro-
vided the necessary critical basis for protest against the given political and
social order. Japanese popular conversions from the Christianity of the
West to Tolstoyan anarchist religion were self-conscious political acts
that challenged the contemporary social-intellectual order. Here, the
Christianity of Western modernity was an object of critique, not its source.
In this intellectual environment, “the people” (heimin) themselves began
to be viewed as the source of modern renewal, renovation, and innovation
without intervention from any institution or the state.
Th is notion of “the people” as the subject of historical change and
progress became much more politically salient during the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904–5, when Tolstoy was strategically used as the face of the
people. Chapter 3 looks at the Nonwar Movement during the Russo-
Japanese War as an intellectual phenomenon. The movement revolved
around the activities of the Heiminsha, or the so-called People’s Associa-
tion. Historians have yet to acknowledge the significance of this move-
ment for Japanese intellectual history. This chapter makes clear the move-
ment’s role in the development of early twentieth-century Japanese
thought. During the war, a number of people shared the view that the
war represented a retrogression of human progress and civilization. Their
thought provides the key to understanding the Nonwar Movement as

34. See Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan.
24 Introduction

what the historian Hyman Kublin saw half a century ago as one of the
most successful cases of antimilitarism in modern history. The partici-
pants’ thought contrasted with the Western modernity that sanctioned,
if not heroicized, Japan’s entry into the community of nation-states as a
result of its victory in war and its empire building. The chapter thus
challenges the sole historical meaning given to the war, which has been
viewed as a major turning point in Japan’s quest to be recognized as a
modern nation-state. I argue that the war simultaneously clarified and
concretized a universal vision of human progress and civilization based
on cooperatist anarchist principles in Japan.
The Nonwar Movement is an important symbol for peace and world
order today and has served as the inspirational model for various peace
movements in Japan ever since the Russo-Japanese War. The movement
revolved around the notion of heimin as both the subject and object of
the movement. Dissecting the language of heimin, the chapter argues that
the movement invented “the people” without the state. This intellectual
practice of inventing the people denaturalized the construct of “interna-
tional relations” centered on the nation-state as a system of knowledge
and its resulting practice embodied in the war. I contend that the inven-
tion of “the people” as a vehicle of history would have a significant impact
on the intellectual life of early twentieth-century Japan. The chapter ex-
amines numerous wartime materials that fail to fit the existing historical
paradigm about the war as a major event in Japan’s development as a
modern nation-state.
After the war, Tolstoy began to be paired with Kropotkin on the Japa-
nese intellectual and cultural scene, to the extent that this phenomenon
may be called a Tolstoy-Kropotkinist movement. Chapter 4 suggests that
Tolstoy-Kropotkinism was an expression of a shift in historical con-
sciousness that came about with the war from a history that justified the
adoption of Western modernity to an anarchist historical consciousness.
History was narrated into the anarchist future, and the modern present
was perceived as backward and in need of immediate rectification and
change. History became akin to a theory of social change in the here
and now. A new generation of those who came of age during the war and

35. Kublin, “Japa nese Socialists,” pp. 322–23.

 Introduction 25

experienced this shift in historical consciousness carried the anarchist

movement through the early twentieth century. As a methodological strat-
egy to show the breadth of the ideological shift brought about by the
Nonwar Movement, the chapter focuses on the most unlikely candidate
to become an anarchist at the time, the promising young Western cosmo-
politanist Arishima Takeo. With the broad slide in historical conscious-
ness, Arishima converted to anarchism immediately after the war. His
anarchist conversion helped propel him to the position of a leading public
cultural figure in Japan.
The year 1906 also marked the sudden popularization of Esperanto,
examined in Chapter 5. Leading Japanese newspapers could not help but
notice this phenomenon, and Asahi shimbun reported that Esperanto was
the biggest popular cultural fad in Japan that year. By 1928, Japan had the
highest number of registered Esperanto speakers by far of any non-
European country, including the United States. The history of Japanese
Esperantism offers a rare opportunity to understand early twentieth-
century popular conceptions of world order. The chapter challenges his-
torians’ understanding of the thoughts and practices of internationalism
in Japan during this period.
The near-perfect contrast between the popularity of Esperanto as a
language without culture and the absence of any discussion of Esperanto
in historiography on modern Japan is striking. Esperanto was often re-
ferred to as minsaigo (interpeople’s language), and its meaning and usage
in Japan contrasted with English and French as kokusaigo, the “interna-
tional languages” of the modern nation-states of Western modernity.
The chapter introduces the Esperanto movement as the first direct con-
sequence of the wartime intellectual practice of the invention of the
people without the state and the resulting slide in historical conscious-
ness. The language movement had its own logic specific to the popular
historical consciousness of Japan immediately after the Russo-Japanese
War. Whereas sociolinguistic Darwinism projected the elimination of
the weaker cultures and languages by elites of the more advanced cul-
tures, Esperanto was understood in Japan as a liberation of the vernacu-
lar from that Eurocentric cultural hierarchy.

36. Forster, Esperanto Movement, p. 24.

26 Introduction

I approach the intellectual history of the Esperanto movement as a

nongovernmental movement (NGM) rather than a nongovernmental
organization (NGO). As an NGM, the movement was locally based and
motivated and escaped the cultural imperialism embedded in the organ-
izational composition of many of the existing international NGOs of
the day. The chapter traces the huge popularity of the blind Russian
Esperantist and children’s literature writer Vasilii Eroshenko and sug-
gests that Eroshenko was emblematic of grassroots internationalism in
this period.
It was at this time that a number of supporters of worldism also turned
to reading the writings of the microbiologist Ilya Mechnikov (1845–1916).
Mechnikov, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1908
for his work on phagocytes and microorganisms, was the younger brother
of Lev Mechnikov. Curiously, this sudden rise of a shared interest in Ilya
Mechnikov and other natural scientists marked the turn to anarchism
by the new generation of self-identified anarchists in Japan. What was it in
the latest scientific findings on phagocytes, insects, and cell life that so
inspired Ōsugi, Arishima, and Kōtoku from the very moment of their
turn to anarchism? The turn to anarchism was embedded in a merging
of nature with culture that contradicted the Western modern trajectory
of civilizational progress away from nature. The dissolution of this distinc-
tion of nature and culture was a key expression of the cooperatist anar-
chist notion of progress.
Chapter 6 examines what I characterize as the scientific turn among
Japanese anarchists. It explores how ideas of historical progress came to
inform Japanese interpretations of and interest in the latest writings by
natural scientists, and how ideas of progress in the natural sciences were
simultaneously applied to ideas of culture. The chapter asks how and why
anarchist translations and introductions of four natural scientists with
contradictory perspectives on the origins and development of the natural
world, Kropotkin, Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–
1915), and Ilya Mechnikov, made them the most discussed and popu-
larized scientists in early twentieth-century Japan. The entomologist
Fabre, who was little known in his home country of France, became

37. See, for example, Tyrrell, Women’s World/Women’s Empire.

 Introduction 27

massively popular in Japan. Indeed, Fabre and his dung beetle, known
in Japanese as funkorogashi (dung-ball roller), are universally shared cul-
tural icons of childhood in Japan. Young readers of his work were in-
spired to enter the fields of entomology and other natural sciences and
continue to shape the direction and form that these fields have taken in
Japanese academia. This reverse flow of knowledge from popular science
to the elite halls of the university was typical of the flow of knowledge
production by anarchists in this period.
I attempt an analysis of the logic of anarchist translations of Fabre
and other natural scientists. Only with knowledge of the anarchist no-
tion of progress and Russian-Japanese nonstate transnational intellectual
relations does anarchists’ dynamic role in translating and popularizing
these four scientists make sense. Anarchists discovered in the writings of
Mechnikov the functioning of symbiosis within the human body as es-
sential to survival. The idea and meaning of the human body coalesced
with their thoughts on human history. I argue that anarchists saw in the
findings of Fabre, Mechnikov, Kropotkin, and Darwin scientifically
based arguments against Malthusianism and social Darwinism. Through
natural science, anarchists removed the distinction between high and
low, nature and culture. The originality of their interpretations of these
world-class scientists thereby naturalized anarchism.
The Epilogue introduces a variety of other cultural movements inspired
by cooperatist anarchists that developed in early twentieth-century Japan
without a conductor to orchestrate their activities. From day to night,
institution to noninstitution, state to nonstate, high culture to popular
culture, and cultural hierarchy to the multiplicity of cultures, the very
idea of culture was overturned. I use the term “anarchist cultural revolu-
tion” to refer to the effective interventions by anarchists to alter the mean-
ings and values of a number of spheres of modern culture without violence
or direction from the state on a broad scale. Their practices encompassed
fields ranging from literature, art, and music to education and agricul-
ture, as well as science and language, discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. They
involved some of the best-known figures in Japa nese cultural history
from this period, such as the artist and People’s Arts Movement propo-
nent Yamamoto Kanae (1882–1946), the massively popular songwriter
Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942), and one of the most loved literary writ-
ers in Japan today, Miyazawa Kenji. Childhood, for example, became a
28 Introduction

particularly potent realm of intervention. Those who belonged to anar-

chist modernity understood that in the child, the original, naturally arising
source of universal human virtue that was essential to an anarchist future
could be identified and nurtured. It was in this context that Miyazawa,
a writer of children’s literature, delved into the study of natural science,
astronomy, and Esperanto.
The Epilogue further demonstrates how this cooperatist anarchist
transformation of the concept of culture led to a new discourse on demo-
kurashī (democracy) in the 1910s and 1920s. Anarchist “democracy” was
put into practice with the spontaneous formation of grassroots associations
and other nation-scale civic movements in the decades before World
War II. This challenges historians to look beyond the received view of
the emergence of spontaneous organizing (and “civil society”) as a product
of the postwar U.S. occupation. The anticapitalist discourse on democracy
and the “people” in the cultural revolution would have a lasting intellec-
tual legacy. Indeed, the once-banned dung beetle managed to remain a
hero in popular culture, outlasting any political party or ideology of impe-
rial Japan.
 ch apter 1
Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin:
The Emerging Vision of Cooperatist
Civilization

In 1874, a little over a decade after Bakunin’s travels through Japan, the
Russian populist and international revolutionary leader Lev Mechnikov
sailed to Japan in order to observe and participate in the Meiji Ishin,
commonly known in English as the “Meiji Restoration.” Japan was still
in the throes of disorder and conflict when he disembarked in Yoko-
hama. Comparing the Ishin with revolutionary movements in Europe,
Mechnikov called it a “complete and radical revolution, the kind we
know of only in history.” Seeking to correct a common understanding
among many in the West of the causes of the Ishin, he described it as
being of native origin. He argued that the Ishin was not simply a politi-
cal reaction to pressure from without to partake in Western civilization
and its capitalist development. More important, it was a complex revolu-
tion from within that was based on centuries of social, cultural, and in-
tellectual developments and was only further propelled by disturbances
from abroad. Mechnikov would eventually give the Ishin global signifi-
cance for human progress in a different direction altogether from West-
ern modernity.

1. In this chapter, only when I am referring to how nineteenth-century Russians

described the events surrounding the overthrow of the Tokugawa feudal regime do I
use the term “revolution.” Elsewhere, I use the Japa nese term “Ishin.” On the problem
of rendering the Meiji Ishin as “Meiji Restoration” in translation, see, for example,
Najita, “Japan’s Industrial Revolution,” pp. 19–23.
2. Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” p. 76.
30 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

Historians have rarely questioned one aspect of the birth of modern

Japan: Japan’s opening to the West (Kaikoku) and the resulting initiation
of civilization and progress. This chapter attempts to reexamine the
meaning of Kaikoku by exploring Mechnikov’s private encounter with
Ishin Japan on the nonstate level beyond the imagined East-West divide
and introduce the larger resulting vision of cooperatist anarchist civiliza-
tion and progress. At the very moment when Japan’s borders opened to
negotiation with the West and to the concomitant narratives of civiliza-
tional progress, they also opened to alternative visions of progress. As
will become clear, Mechnikov would give the Ishin as Japan’s modern
revolution world historical meaning as a major impetus for the advance-
ment of humanity under cooperatist anarchist principles. The emerging
idea of cooperatist anarchist progress would emphasize cooperative hu-
man relations, not social Darwinist competition, and spontaneous free
associations of peoples, rather than rule of law and state governance, as
foundations for the advancement of human life. It would be based on
the premise that human difference formed an essential basis for coopera-
tive human society, providing a possibility for a modern subjectivity that
incorporated individual and collective simultaneously.
It took his encounter with Ishin Japan for Mechnikov to refashion
anarchism from a Bakuninist ideology of primordial and violent de-
struction of the existing social and political structures to an evolutionary
construct of civilizational development based on mutual aid. Mech-
nikov identified in Japan a dynamic model of civilizational progress that
transcended the provincially bounded idea of the Russian commune.
Mechnikov was struck by the practices of cooperative self-organization
among commoners during the Ishin. Cooperative practices served to give
economic and social stability to commoners’ lives at a time of tremendous
political instability, lack of organizational guidance from above, and sud-
den displacement to urban areas. He observed commoners’ consciousness
and pride in their contribution to the larger society, with recognition in

3. Although Mechnikov had conspired with Bakunin in revolutionary activities

in the 1860s, he acknowledged that his relations with Bakunin were fairly negative.
L. Mechnikov to Vasilii Danilovich, January 29, 1884, box 183, folder 34, B. I. Nicolaevsky
Collection, Hoover Institution of War and Peace Archives.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 31

turn of others’ contributing role. Japanese called this organizing ethic

for the conduct of everyday life “mutual aid.” He observed that the prin-
ciple of mutual aid had the capacity to extend beyond the confines of the
immediate family, the neighborhood, and even the nation, and that this
capacity was indicated by the intensity of learning from and interaction
with the outside world that he encountered on many levels of society. It
would be this ethic that Mechnikov would see as the foundation for
the advancement of human civilization at large. The developing vision
of progress and civilization inspired by the encounter between ideas
of Ishin and revoliutsiia would later become an intellectual basis for
Kropotkinism, a leading current of modern anarchism.
Not only does Mechnikov’s encounter serve as a reminder of the open-
ness and unsettledness of the early meanings given to the “beginnings” of
modern Japan, but it also indicates the salience of alternative meanings
given to those beginnings for further action. Japanese intellectuals would
turn the vision of cooperatist progress into one of the most important
conceptual foundations for modern cultural life in Japan.
This chapter approaches Japan’s “opening” by examining underground
interlocking networks of revolutionaries and other radicals that formed
on the nonstate level, beyond the cultural construct of the encounter be-
tween West and non-West. The Russian-Japanese revolutionary encounter
was entirely alien to the mid-nineteenth-century culture of international
relations of Western nation-states. It thereby provides a new lens to read
Kaikoku as a moment of rupture, thereby giving it new historical mean-
ing and value.

European Revolution Failed

Standing within the fold of Western modernity, Europeans and Ameri-
cans in Japan during the Ishin believed that it was the civilizing presence
of the Western nation-states that was responsible for the beginnings of
modern Japan. Merchant Francis Hall (1822–1902) observed the events
largely through the lens of his business interests in Japan and the Western

4. On this culture of international relations, see Jahn, Cultural Construction of Inter-

national Relations.
32 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

diplomatic activities that supported them. When he described the prog-

ress that foreigners brought to Japan as an eventual “good,” he meant the
degree of capitalist development as the measure of that progress. From
another perspective, Isabella Bird (1831–1904) was one of the very few
Westerners who traveled widely through Japan in the early years of
Meiji. She described in minute detail the technologies of everyday life
during her forays through Japan in 1878, revealing the “hopeless dark-
ness” of the Oriental peasant’s primitive lifestyle. Her descriptions re-
ferred to a hierarchy of peoples based on their level of development in
science, technology, and Christianity. From a diplomatic perspective,
measuring modern progress by a nation’s capacity for empire building in
the international arena, British Embassy secretary Ernest Satow (1843–
1929) assessed during the Ishin that Japan would never “get beyond a
third or fourth rate position.” Satow saw the general populace as a major
cause of Japan’s inability to advance in international ranking because
they “seemed to be too much mere imitators, and wanting in bottom.”
This assessment of Japanese desire to learn from the outside world as a
sign of backwardness starkly contrasted with assessments by Russian
observers, discussed later in this chapter. Hall, Bird, and Satow provide
examples of how Europeans and Americans, male or female, private or
public, partook in the vision of Western civilization and progress com-
posed of the elements of state and empire building, rationality via sci-
ence and technology, capitalism, and Christianity.
In contrast to American and Western European observers of the
events in Japan, Mechnikov gave tremendous meaning to the intellec-
tual accumulation of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). He saw progres-
sive aspects of the Ishin as products of social and cultural developments
already apparent in Tokugawa Japan. As someone who had been directly
involved in revolutionary movements across Europe, Mechnikov was
uniquely positioned to compare the Ishin at the moment of its occur-
rence with radical movements in the West. His fascination with the
“revolution in Asia” led to his meticulous examination of the Ishin and
the cultivation of an extensive network of personal relations with Ishin
participants and intellectual figures in Japan. Mechnikov further stood

5. Hall, Japan through American Eyes, pp. 414–15; Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan;
Satow, “Letter to F. V. Dickens,” p. 298.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 33

out because of his preparedness in Japanese. Having attained fluency in

Japanese before he went to Japan, Mechnikov studied historical texts,
literature, popular pamphlets, and scholarly work unmediated by trans-
lation to deepen his knowledge. Furthermore, because he distanced
himself from the diplomatic and merchant communities of the treaty
ports, his observations of Ishin Japan were based on his experiences as a
private visitor essentially without citizenship or national belonging at a
time when Westerners arrived in Japan under strict diplomatic protec-
tion and patronage. This cosmopolitanism, based on a sense of national
homelessness shared among the Russian revolutionaries who would come
to Japan as prison escapees or exiles, offered a distinctive basis for Russian-
Japanese transnational relations.
Mechnikov’s Ishin was both rooted ideologically in Russian radical
thought and influenced by the perspectives of those in Japan who had
lived through it. Thus, just as Western interpretations of the Ishin were
particular to the historical time and space from which they came, Mech-
nikov’s accounts warrant historicization.
Mechnikov had been instrumental in forming the larger discursive
space of Populism, Russian radical thought of the 1860s to 1880s. With
the heightened state of political repression in Russia at the time, Russian
political dissidents residing in Europe served as the mouthpiece for Pop-
ulism. Mechnikov was a leading organizer of this small but active com-
munity of émigrés. He served as a tactical organizer of the community’s
dissident activities and an articulator of its ideas through his many writ-

6. Mechnikov also had an ancestral tie to Japan. He was a direct descendant of

Nikolai Spafarii (“Wielder of the Sword,” or “Mechnikov”) (1636–1708), a Moldavian
warrior who made the first serious attempt to provide Japan’s geographic position to the
Russian government. Spafarii was assigned as Peter the Great’s diplomatic envoy in 1675
to China, where he was instructed to collect information on Japan from the Chinese.
He provided Russia with some of its first knowledge about Japan in a long history of
Russian-Japanese relations. Spafarii now graces a Romanian coin, issued in 2011 on the
375th anniversary of his birth.
7. In 1869, Mechnikov undertook his first attempt to return to Russia, an attempt
assisted by Ilya Mechnikov, Lev’s brother and later a Nobel laureate (see Chapter 6), in
arranging a return with the border guards. Although Lev wrote to his mother that he
sorely wished to return, he finally decided not to because of the certainty of being im-
prisoned. Mechnikov’s police fi le is now located in the Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossi-
iskoi federatsii (GARF) archival collection in Moscow.
34 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

ings. The Russian secret police considered Mechnikov’s writings as dan-

gerous as Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s (1829–89) “What Is to Be Done?,” the
so-called bible of the Russian narodniki (Populists). Police reports stated
that “What Is to Be Done?” and Mechnikov’s autobiographical story
“Bold Stride,” published together in one issue of the journal Sovremennik,
caused the landmark journal to be shut down. Mechnikov’s actions also
expanded far beyond the immediate Russian community, and in the
1860s and early 1870s he participated in or assisted revolutionary move-
ments and uprisings in Poland, Spain, France, and Italy, where he fought
and was wounded as a lieutenant in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s military cam-
paign for Italian unification. Although Mechnikov reacted negatively to
Bakunin’s overzealous and often tactless revolutionary activities, Bakunin
relied heavily on Mechnikov as part of his secret society. Mechnikov par-
ticipated in a number of Bakunin’s conspiratorial activities upon his re-
turn to Europe in the early 1860s.
Impressed with the young radical’s insights, the widely read émigré
social critic Alexander Herzen (1812–70) frequently had him contribute
to his journal Kolokol’, which had been banned in Russia. Mechnikov
headed the opening of the journal’s branch in Switzerland. Instrumental
in maintaining the émigrés’ direct underground ties to intellectual life in
Russia, Mechnikov created and ran an illegal publications transport route
from Europe into Russia that provided Russian readers with works from

8. Mechnikov often served as a leading figure at key moments of the émigré com-
munity’s activities. For example, he led the important meeting among Russian émigrés
to discuss their plan of action about the crisis of the Nechaev affair, a scandalous mur-
der publicized across Russia that implicated a member of their revolutionary circle.
9. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii, Moscow (hereafter GARF), f. 6753,
op. 1, d. 383, l. 34; Mechnikov, “M. A. Bakunin v Italii,” p. 824; Lishina and Lishin, “Lev
Mechnikov,” p. 463.
10. Mechnikov writes of his relationship to Bakunin in a letter in the Nicolaevsky
Collection, box 183, folder 34, Hoover Archives. For Mechnikov’s memoirs on Bakunin,
see Mechnikov, “M. A. Bakunin v Italii.” Bakunin also mentions Mechnikov in several
of his personal letters, e.g., Bakunin to Herzen and Ogarev, March 4, 1864, in Bakunin,
Pis’ma, p. 258.
11. Herzen publicly praised Mechnikov’s writing and speeches as early as 1863. Mech-
nikov’s speech defending the Polish uprising in 1863 led Herzen to identify it as “the fi rst
utterance of the awakened Russian conscience.” Mechnikov, “Tochka Povorota.”
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 35

the émigré community. Mechnikov’s steps were recorded in detail and

maintained in a thick file kept by the tsar’s secret police. He adopted a
number of irreverent pseudonyms to further attenuate his relations to
the state, hoping “to remind the Russian government as little as possible
of my existence.”
The larger community of Russian intellectuals in which Mechnikov
participated questioned the narrative of civilizational progress in the
West. Widely sharing the perception of a hierarchically bound Europe,
Russian intellectuals increasingly believed that the revolutionary move-
ment in the West was incapable of succeeding in creating an equitable
and free society. If some had anticipated the possibility for a new social
order with the initiation of the Paris Commune in 1871, the Commune’s
violent suppression solidified the belief that much of Europe was imma-
ture and ill prepared for a successful revolution toward social equality
and justice.
Herzen’s influential writings had earlier provided a devastating analy-
sis of the virtual impossibility of a revolution in much of Western Eu-
rope, where a hierarchical order and a massive centralized government
structure to rule over it were in full motion, instituted over centuries of
development. The problem with Europe lay not in the institutional cre-
ation of freedoms, which the Russian intelligentsia generally considered
successful, but in the ingrained customs of daily interaction, which were
difficult to alter. Mechnikov’s account of his disenchantment with the
revolutionary movement in France echoed recollections by the older Her-
zen of his experiences with the revolutions in Europe decades earlier. In
a handwritten report Mechnikov submitted to an unnamed addressee in
Japan, he described a French society hopelessly divided by hierarchy. He
discussed the suppression of the Paris Commune by a public made up of
a privileged class that sought to maintain power and an uneducated,
tradition-bound rural mass. Coming from two generations of Russian
intelligentsia, the literary and theoretically oriented “fathers” and the
action-oriented “sons,” Herzen and Mechnikov’s ideas represented a

12. Bakunin, Pis’ma, p. 258.

13. GARF, f. 5770, op. 1, ed. khr. 156. See also Lishina and Lishin, “Lev Mechnikov,”
pp. 478– 79.
14. Mechnikov, “France sous Mac-Mahon.”
36 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

broad swath of Russian revolutionary experience in Europe. “The Eu-

ropean revolution failed” had become a cliché among Russian intellectu-
als by the early 1870s.
For many, the source of a new revolutionary lifestyle lay within Rus-
sia. Beginning with Herzen’s suggestion in 1855, Russian everyday life
identifiable with the Russian agricultural commune came to provide a
core principle of future development and revolution. Russia in their view
had a state that was a foreign import introduced by force, with no roots
in native tradition. The path to revolution in Russia could thus be much
simplified. Although the Russian commune provided an indication of
alternative development for the Populist movement, it would be in Ishin
Japan, with its radical openness to technological change and new ideas
from abroad, that Mechnikov would identify a universal possibility for
cooperatist anarchist human progress, transcending the provincialist
claims of Slavophiles. After his stay in Japan, Mechnikov would ac-
knowledge the severe limitations of the Russian commune as a model for
socialist everyday life. In 1881, he would criticize the idealization of con-
temporary Russia as a “good kingdom of limitless communalism.”
For Mechnikov in the early 1870s, the revolution in Japan provided
both a real and a metaphoric alternative to the conservativeness of “old
Europe.” He responded to the ongoing developments in Japan with sud-
den determination. “The horizon, which had hung over Europe with a
heavy foulness, shone in the Far East with an unexpectedly bright light.
We had been accustomed to considering [Japan] as an eternal bulwark
of immobility, inertia, and stagnation. . . . Japan suddenly stirred, awak-
ened, and with unexpected life came to meet ‘white civilization,’ despite
the unwise actions of Europe.” Having freed itself for revolutionary
activity, Japan provided the potential to overcome the instilled customs

15. The expressions “fathers” and “sons” come from Ivan Turgenev’s popular novel
on the social problem in Russia, Fathers and Sons (1862), which depicts two generations
of Russian intellectuals. Mechnikov and Herzen mutually respected each other. Her-
zen said that Mechnikov was “the only one capable of thinking and writing.” Mech-
nikov, in turn, often said of Herzen, “No man had left a deeper impression on his life.”
Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, 28:10; and Olga Metchnikoff, Life of Elie Metchnikoff, p. 47.
16. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, 24:184, 6:7.
17. Mechnikov, “Obshchina i gosudarstvo,” p. 227.
18. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 23.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 37

and traditions that had restrained social progress in Europe. “The image
of an entire people, awakening from torpidity and bravely going to meet
a new life, refreshes one better than any poetical and luxurious virgin
distant land.” Mechnikov criticized Orientalizing constructs of Japan
as an unreal and distant realm of poetic fantasy and preferred to view
the people of Japan instead as the very real subjects of history.
Mechnikov’s travel to Japan coincided with the Populists’ famous V
Narod (“To the People”) Movement in Russia by the same members of
the émigré community of which he was a part. In this movement, members
of the intelligentsia who subscribed to Populist notions went out into the
Russian countryside to learn from the peasants’ practices and spread revo-
lutionary ideas. However, his resolve to go to Japan was not an attempt
reminiscent of the movement, in the sense that he was not traveling to
enlighten a backward mass and stir its revolutionary instincts. In contrast,
Mechnikov was interested in studying the dynamics of a progressive
revolution accomplished in the East.
Other Russians who visited Ishin Japan similarly described it as an
unprecedented modern revolution in Asia. Generally sharing a moral
apprehension at the conduct of foreigners in Japan, Russians saw the
Western presence as having disturbed, as much as fueled, the progress
that ensued. They described Western Europeans in Japan, from sailors to
diplomats, as holding misguided understandings of civilization and
progress that failed to incorporate social justice and brotherly love in
their idea of universal development. Even Archbishop Nikolai, the
leading Russian Orthodox missionary in Japan, who theoretically stood
on the opposing political shore from Mechnikov, had remarkably simi-
lar views about the Ishin. On the basis of his exceptional knowledge of
the Japanese language and Japanese history and his experiences in Japan
during the Ishin, Nikolai observed the “revolution” as a particular be-
ginning of a new era of progress predicated on religious faith, in which
the West played a peripheral role. For Nikolai, the Ishin was both a vio-
lent overturning of an old sociopolitical order and a natural product of
a developed commoners’ society. Nikolai wrote that the “democratic”
order of Japanese life had not only developed over centuries on popular

19. Ibid., p. 24.

20. See Bartoshevskii, Iaponiia; Veniukov, Puteshestvie, pp. 271–80.
38 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

soil but was also more advanced than the most powerful Western na-
tions. Like Mechnikov, he described the Japanese to Russian readers as
one of the most educated and cultured people in the world, with a highly
developed popular culture rooted in centuries-old traditions of peasant
education.
Russian observers who were in the midst of national soul-searching
over the largely failed emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 saw the
Ishin as representing the most radical overturning of the ruling class and
the hierarchical social order in the world. It was thus thought to be a
model worthy of study for social reform. Russian writers used the Japanese
case as a veiled criticism of the current social and political system in Rus-
sia. The twenty-six-year-old Mikhail Veniukov (1832–1901), a geographer
of Populist leanings who stayed in Japan in 1870, admiringly noted that
in contrast to Russia, the new order’s requisitioning of lands from the
vassal lords “was so natural, so lawfully done, that no one complained.”
Nikolai Bartoshevskii, who stayed in the homes of four Japa nese
families during his travels through Japan before the start of the civil
war, published his observations about Japan in 1868, the official year of
the Meiji Restoration. Bartoshevskii, like Veniukov, was fascinated with
Japa nese social life and paid particular attention to issues of class. He
remarked on the unequal and rapacious social interactions of Europe-
ans with Japanese. In the eyes of Japanese law, “all classes of Japanese
inhabitants are equally accountable,” he wrote. Japanese of all classes,
he observed, in contrast to the tremendous social and cultural divide
between aristocrats and plebes in Europe, maintained a surprisingly simi-
lar domestic life. They left no room for distinction in quality of daily life
between that of a government official and that of a farmer. He also noted
the equal education that was given to men and women. In this context
of “preparedness” of the general population for progress toward social
equality, Bartoshevskii predicted an intellectual and political revolution
in Japan.

21. Nikolai, “Iaponiia s tochki zreniia khristianskoi missii,” pp. 221–22.

22. Veniukov, Puteshestvie, p. 283. Like Mechnikov, Veniukov contributed to Her-
zen’s journal Kolokol’.
23. Bartoshevskii, Iaponiia, 32, 35, 45.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 39

Grigorii Blagosvetlov (1824–1880), editor of the Populist journal Delo

in St. Petersburg, believed that Mechnikov could provide an account of
Ishin Japan that would prove stimulating to his journal’s broad reader-
ship. In a letter to Mechnikov, he wrote:
Leaving behind old Europe with her routines and prejudices, you are setting
out for a country that is beginning a new period of life. In Japan, everything is
being re-created anew. Her awakening is a great and particularly interesting
one for European observation. . . . Of most importance for Delo would be to
give a good general view of those deep-seated reforms that Japan has achieved
in recent times. Brought to a general analysis and well explained, they would be
edifying for us.

Responding to the Japanese meaning of the term ishin as a vision of con-

structing everything anew, Blagosvetlov contrasted revolutionary Japan
to old Europe. Meanwhile, Euro-American concepts of progress relegated
the geographic space of the East, which often included Russia, to the tem-
poral position of backwardness. Karl Marx, for example, objectified the
“East” in his thought as an eternally stagnant entity. He wrote in Capital
that a true picture of ancient or feudal economies in Western Europe
could be deduced from a close study of the “primitive forms” found in
contemporary Russia and Japan.
By redirecting the faculty for progress away from the West, Russian
intellectuals in the 1870s began to redraw the map of development and
hierarchical order. When Japan was observed as a locus of tremendous
progress, the divide that marked the geography of difference between a
stagnant East and an advanced modern West appeared to dissolve.

A Transnational Revolutionary Encounter

Mechnikov’s establishment of relations with Japanese counterparts
would lead to a meeting of Ishin and revoliutsiia in Japan. A physical
meeting occurred between the Russian revolutionary and Japanese radi-
cals. Simultaneously, a dialectical relationship emerged, a meeting be-
tween the meanings of Ishin and revolution. As will be discussed in the

24. Grigorii Blagosvetlov to Lev Mechnikov, December 11, 1873. GARF, f. 6753, op.
1, ed. khr. 43.
25. Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 237–39.
40 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

next section, a new understanding of the Ishin as an expression of coop-

erative civilization would develop, culled from these revolutionary net-
works. This new historicity provided a vision of human society that was
projected to follow. In turn, the future vision of Ishin society gave shape
to how one was to make sense of the past and the present.
In the years before his departure for Japan, Mechnikov had formed
close ties with a number of former shishi, or revolutionary samurai of the
Ishin, who had been sent to Europe to learn about the outside world.
Mechnikov’s self-identification as a wounded veteran of Garibaldi’s war
in Italy, graphically illustrated by his pronounced limp and wooden
heel, helped to convince his acquaintances that he was an international-
ist and populist revolutionary. His relations with the shishi were estab-
lished on an interpersonal and unofficial basis. Mechnikov recalled, “I
conducted all my agreements with Japanese in Europe exclusively in
verbal fashion, outside any official setting, and without accompanying
witnesses.” He was given a private and under-the-table invitation to go
to Japan for ser vice under Saigō Takamori, a famous shishi who had be-
come a charismatic leader in the new Meiji government. Mechnikov was
assigned to work personally under Takamori, who would serve as his
sole supervisor and patron. As part of the invitation facilitated through
Saigō’s family network, Takamori’s younger brother Saigō Tsugumichi
(1843–1902) invited Mechnikov to live with him in his Tokyo home
throughout Mechnikov’s stay in Japan.
Mechnikov’s level of preparedness in language and knowledge set
him apart from other Europeans in Japan and provided him with direct
contact with Japanese counterparts and texts, unmediated by interpreta-
tion. His access to untranslated and unmediated knowledge enabled
him to avoid Western languages of modernity conveyed in European
translations of Japanese texts. Mechnikov went to the Sorbonne to attend
the only Japanese program in Europe. Dissatisfied with the slow pace of
learning there, he immediately left Paris in 1872 to seek out Ōyama Iwao
(1842–1916), whom he had heard was in Switzerland, for one-on-one

26. Kido, Diary of Kido Takayoshi, 2:337, 3:145.

27. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 45.
28. Ibid., pp. 44–45.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 41

study. Ōyama was a Satsuma shishi who had participated in the Meiji
Ishin and was a cousin of Saigō’s. He had been sent there by the Meiji
government to study military affairs and French.
Ōyama and Mechnikov quickly became close personal friends. Im-
pressed with the revolutionary’s understanding of the events in Japan,
Ōyama made the unorthodox decision to study the French language and
French affairs from a Russian revolutionary. The former shishi and the
revolutionary got along so well that within two weeks of their meeting
they planned to move in together. Ōyama introduced Mechnikov to
Ishin leaders, including members of the Iwakura mission then visiting
Switzerland. Through these contacts, Mechnikov received an invitation
to Japan to serve as a teacher of revolutionary ideas and values.
At the time he invited Mechnikov, Saigō Takamori had been protest-
ing the Meiji leadership’s policies of undignified bureaucratic assault on
the samurai as excessively harsh, particularly on the already-poor coun-
try samurai. Representative of the unsettledness of the Ishin’s accom-
plishment in the minds of Japanese contemporaries, Saigō claimed that
by attacking the warrior class that had fueled the spirit of the revolution
and by implementing overly ambitious Westernization projects with in-
creasing centralization of the state bureaucracy, the Meiji leadership had
betrayed the idealist motives at the root of the Ishin. In an attempt to
revive spiritual dignity and idealism in Japan’s future leaders, Saigō cre-
ated a special school in Tokyo, the Shūgijuku, to develop warrior ethics
and teach foreign knowledge simultaneously. The school was intended
to be a linkage point between the national future and the dead of the
revolutionary past. Saigō applied his annual stipend rewarded for his
leadership in the Ishin to the founding of the school. He declared in the
school’s charter that there could be no more appropriate way to use his
stipend than to support a school to honor the memory of those who had
died and to help prepare the living to follow their noble example. In
accordance with this ideal, Mechnikov was invited to be an integral part

29. Ibid., p. 25.

30. See Ōyama’s diary entry of August 16, 1872, pp. 130–31, in Ōyama Gensui Hen-
san Iin, Gensui Koshaku Ōyama Iwao.
31. On the school, see Ravina, The Last Samurai, pp. 194–45.
32. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 28; Saigō, Saigō Takamori zenshū, 3:333.
42 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

of a project to revive the Ishin’s revolutionary spirit. Mechnikov was

aware of his assignment to organize under Saigō’s patronage and guid-
ance a special school for former warriors of the Ishin and their children.
“I was invited for the organization in Japan’s capital of a private school
using funds that were given by the government to samurai . . . of the
Satsuma kingdom in reward for their participation in the revolution of
1868.” Saigō planned for his students to study Western science and
foreign languages in combination with character training in revolution-
ary virtue. Mechnikov seemed to be able to teach all three.
As an accomplished revolutionary, Mechnikov was invited to serve as
director of the school. In the eyes of the Japanese shishi who had met
him, Mechnikov appeared to possess the kind of idealist virtue that had
originally fostered the Ishin. In turn, Mechnikov described his patron
Saigō as a populist and patriotic revolutionary leader of commoner per-
suasion. He recalled him as having given up his immense power to
voice his opposition to the policies of the Meiji government and as hav-
ing adopted instead a simple agrarian lifestyle. Saigō’s turn to an agricul-
tural way of life as an expression of his belief in the Hotoku agricultural

33. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” pp. 27–28.

34. Mechnikov possessed high qualifications in math, the arts, and foreign lan-
guages. He had attended medical school in Russia before switching to the Near East-
ern Studies Department at St. Petersburg University as an undergraduate. An avid
painter, he had also taken classes at the Academy of Art in St. Petersburg and had
traveled to Italy in order to study painting before getting caught up in the liberation
movement under Garibaldi. He had earned a degree in mathematics in Switzerland
just before leaving for Tokyo, ostensibly to enable him to earn his keep in Japan. He
was also multilingual and a quick self-learner of languages, as evidenced by his rapid
pace in acquiring Japa nese. GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 37, l. 5. See also Evdokimov,
“Predislovie,” pp. 6– 7.
35. Tetsuo Najita traces the intellectual history of the idealist strand vis-à-vis bu-
reaucratism in Japa nese politics in his Japan.
36. As is often the case with heroes of any society, Saigō became a mythical figure in
Japan. The dead have been used for a variety of purposes by the living. Indeed, the
majority of the accounts about Saigō in Japa nese are about the myths of Saigō as “his-
tory.” On Saigō as a mythical figure, see, among others, Igarashi, Meiji Ishin no shisō,
pp. 243– 96. For a critical biographical treatment of Saigō in English, see Yates, Saigō
Takamori. See also Morris, Nobility of Failure.
37. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” pp. 44–45.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 43

cooperative movement seemed to fit with Mechnikov’s expectations of

revolutionary leadership rooted in democratic and populist ideals.
The two revolutionaries would never meet. When Mechnikov arrived
in Japan in late May 1874, he was stunned to find that his intended patron
had already resigned from the Meiji government and returned to Kago-
shima (formerly Satsuma). Saigō relocated and reestablished Shūgijuku
in Kagoshima under his supervision as a military academy for disaffected
samurai. Soon after Mechnikov came to Japan, Saigō would be pro-
pelled to the head of the infamous Satsuma rebellion, in which he led
forty thousand troops to overthrow the Meiji government.
Mechnikov would fulfill his assignment to inspire revolutionary ideal-
ism among his students instead as an instructor of Russian at the Tokyo
School of Foreign Languages (TSFL), the national center for foreign-
language training. During his time as an instructor at the TSFL, Mech-
nikov developed extensive relations with those whom he called “the most
important leaders of the Japanese progressive movement.” These were
leaders of the developing Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū
minken undō) for social equality and popular political participation then
gaining momentum throughout Japan. Within a few years of Mech-
nikov’s departure from Japan, activists in the movement would organize
almost two hundred political societies across the country. One of the
most prominent of those with whom Mechnikov likely related was the
foremost theoretical leader of the movement, Nakae Chōmin (1847–
1901), president of the TSFL while Mechnikov taught at the school.
In their private interactions with Mechnikov, members of the Free-
dom and People’s Rights Movement provided him with a unique source
of knowledge about their movement. As he himself would acknowledge,

38. See, for example, Ōyama Gensui Hensan Iin, Gensui Koshaku Ōyama Iwao, pp.
357– 71. This aspect of Saigō’s thoughts and activities between 1873 and 1877 has been a
neglected part of scholarship on him. Scholars have treated Saigō during this period as
either preparing for civil war or completely retiring. Yates suggests that his intention to
retire and adopt an agrarian lifestyle was quite serious. See Yates, Saigō Takamori, pp.
161– 62.
39. Ravina, The Last Samurai, p. 194.
40. Berton, Langer, and Swearingen, Japanese Training and Research, p. 16.
41. Mechnikov, letter to Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, n.d. (1881–1883), in Iakovlev,
“Pis’ma pisatelei k Saltykovu,” pp. 361– 62.
44 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

much of Mechnikov’s understanding of Ishin Japan would depend both

on his direct observations and on his private relations with a broad swath
of Japanese friends and acquaintances. His interpretation of the Ishin
thus would come as much from his acquaintances as from his own expec-
tations and personal experiences. Mechnikov described the extraordinary
care his Japanese friends took to guide him in developing his knowledge
of Ishin Japan. “I guarded [my acquaintances] every day with affection
and exploited them unscrupulously for the profit of my studies.” His
relations with Japanese from a nonhierarchical perspective shaped his
knowledge of the event as a revolution from within and informed him of
the corresponding expectations among many in Japan, rooted in revolu-
tionary ideals, for equality and cooperative relations on the individual,
societal, and international levels. In this way, Mechnikov’s original idea
of revoliutsiia, formed from the claims of Russian Populism, fused with
the actualities of the Ishin and was further shaped by the understanding
of the Ishin among those who had led or experienced it. The cultivation of
a network of acquaintances would permit Mechnikov to write thousands
of pages on contemporary developments in Japan, as well as on Japanese
geography and history.
In turn, the TSFL Russian program would contribute knowledge
about the Russian revolutionary movement to the Freedom and People’s
Rights Movement. Mechnikov’s directorship of the TSFL Russian pro-
gram was followed by a series of former Populist prisoners and political
exiles from Russia who would take teaching positions there. Sixty-five
works on Russian Populism were published in Japan in the years 1881–84
alone. One of the best-selling books in Japan during this period was an
account of the Russian revolutionary movement written by Mechnikov’s
close friend Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii (1851–1895) and translated for
the movement in Japan. Mechnikov’s student of Russian, Muramatsu
Aizō (1857–1939), would lead one of the most infamous incidents of the
movement, the Iida uprising. Participants in the Freedom and People’s
Rights Movement linked their own movement to resurrect the perceived

42. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” pp. 32–34; Mechnikov, Empire Japonaise, p. iv.

43. Crump, Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan, p. 38.
44. Watanabe, “Mechinikofu to Muramatsu Aizō.”
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 45

unfulfilled promises for equality in the Ishin to the revolutionary move-

ment in Russia.
What was for Saigō an Ishin of domestic pertinence had become in-
ternationalized in significance through his invitation of Mechnikov to
Japan. Saigō’s concern with restoring the spirit of the Meiji Ishin had
assumed, by virtue of his invitation to the Russian revolutionary, a whole
new internationalized meaning of human progress and civilization. In
both the physical encounters of Russian and Japanese radicals and the
resulting coalescing of meanings, Ishin met revoliutsiia. This novel meet-
ing arose in the particular historical juncture of the Meiji Ishin and the
Russian revolutionary movement in the wider world context. It emerged
beyond the imagined divide between a backward and traditional Orient
and a progressive and civilized West.
The interpretation of the Ishin arising out of the Russian-Japanese
informal dialogue polemicized the dominant ideologies of the new Meiji
order that was based on assumptions of a West-centered cosmopolitan
world order. Just as there arose in the intergeographic spaces of early
Meiji Japan an internationalist vision of the Ishin as a cataclysmic event
fusing Japan with the vehicle of Western civilization and progress, so
there arose a Russian-Japanese internationalist interpretation of the
Ishin in conflict with those values. Where does national history end, and
where does international history begin? In light of this major current in
modern Japanese cultural life arising from Russian-Japanese transna-
tional intellectual relations, national was international, and international
was national.

“The Most Complete and Radical Revolution”

Mechnikov embarked on a voyage around the world in order to reach
his coveted destination, Ishin Japan. He first traveled from Switzerland
across the Atlantic to New York City, where he purchased an official cer-
tificate of U.S. citizenship for two dollars. This document of citizenship
was his passport into Japan. Mechnikov describes his proof of citizen-
ship with humor in an autobiographical sketch: “A gilded and decorated

45. The U.S. certificate of citizenship, obtained just several months before Mech-
nikov arrived in Japan, may be found in GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 17.
46 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

certificate, supplied with all the necessary stamps and seals, for the af-
fixture of which [I] raised two fingers to the sky and paid two dollars, as
it’s done in official places on that side of the Atlantic.” He continued
back eastward to Europe across the Atlantic to gather his remaining be-
longings and to say good-bye to family and friends.
In the spring of 1874, Mechnikov walked with Ōyama onto the deck
of a steamship in the Mediterranean port of Marseilles. Ōyama had ac-
companied him all the way from Geneva to see him off for his departure
to Japan. Agents of the Russian secret police, the Third Section, simulta-
neously taking note of Mechnikov’s departure from Switzerland, were
convinced that this experienced conspirator had used the Japan trip
merely as a ruse to organize further subversive activities. An agent re-
ported that Mechnikov “actually went to Paris, where he joined Cauca-
sus revolutionaries . . . with whom he has continued their revolutionary
activities.” Mechnikov recalled that as he and Ōyama stood together
on the steamship that was to transport him to Ishin Japan, Ōyama pro-
vided him “with very detailed instructions and a thick letter in the name
of Saigō Takamori’s younger brother.” The packet Ōyama gave to
Mechnikov was a supplement to the unofficial invitation to go to Japan
for ser vice under Saigō Takamori. From Marseilles, Mechnikov set sail
down the Suez Canal, down and around the globe, and across the rocky
waters of the Sea of Japan, arriving in Japan in early summer. It was here
that he hoped to find a renewed vision of revolution after his depressing
experiences with the failed uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871.
His first days in Ishin Japan were a shocking encounter with total
instability. The newspapers were filled with reports on the eruption of
uprisings in the South. A number of Ishin leaders with whom Mech-
nikov had associated in Switzerland were involved. He learned at that
moment that swordsmen had slashed and badly wounded Iwakura To-
momi (1825–83), head of the Iwakura mission that Mechnikov had met
in Geneva, in an assassination attempt related to the uprisings. “My situ-
ation was made all the more desperate by my complete lack of knowl-

46. Mechnikov, “Na vsemirnom poprishche,” p. 3. The Russian government refused

Mechnikov a passport because it considered him an extreme threat.
47. Lishina and Lishin, “Lev Mechnikov,” p. 145.
48. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 45.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 47

edge, my inability to orient myself,” Mechnikov wrote of the chaos he

found in Japan. What he knew about the Ishin and Japanese history
from his readings of European books and journals failed to prepare him
for what he witnessed and experienced in Japan, he recalled.
Mechnikov would be led to describe the Ishin as a conflict-ridden and
multilayered experience, full of contradictions and competing claims
about its meaning for Japan’s future. Out of these observations would
come his particular fascination with what he saw as the social founda-
tions for a revolution from within, the nature of which seemed opposed
to the path of centralization and bureaucratization taken by Japanese
political leaders. Mechnikov described Japanese elites “strolling down
Parisian boulevards” and their leaders, “erecting progress and centraliza-
tion according to the Napoleonic model,” as “having hardly any under-
standing of the details and particularities of Japanese life.” Out of the
dialectical interaction of knowledge among experience, expectation, and
cross-national contact, the Ishin came to be understood as a revolution-
ary fulfillment of Mechnikov’s anarchist construct of human progress.
Mechnikov’s discussions of the historical developments within Japan
leading up to the Ishin were remarkably detailed. His unconventional,
nonhierarchical relations with revolutionaries and Freedom and People’s
Rights Movement participants in Japan brought him intimate knowl-
edge of the Ishin. It appeared to Mechnikov that in contrast, restricted
spaces of knowledge that enclosed many Europeans and Americans in a
constricted place of privilege in Meiji Japan colored their knowledge of
the Ishin. Immediately upon disembarking in Yokohama from Switzer-
land, Mechnikov observed that the majority of Westerners remained
protected and unexposed to life in Japan, not venturing to leave the re-
fined foreign cantons of Yokohama and other port cities. Bored after a
day spent in these isolated pockets, he left Yokohama to seek knowledge
elsewhere.
Mechnikov viewed Japan’s revolution as offering the West a model for
radical social reform. For Mechnikov, the Ishin was the revolution of the
century. He saw in the Ishin the social and institutional elimination of
hierarchical class structures and the creation of vast arenas of social

49. Ibid., p. 45.

50. Ibid., pp. 31–32.
48 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

mobility for commoners. He further noted that access to new knowl-

edge had opened up on a vast scale. After travels across Japan, staying
at rural homes and the plebeian quarters of Tokyo and visiting factories
and the Ashio copper mine, Mechnikov noted: “It is impossible not to
be surprised at her unusual transformation. Th is is a complete and
radical revolution, the kind that we know of only in history. . . . Not a
single branch of social and political life has remained untouched in
this revolution.”
He concluded that the Ishin was largely a revolution from within. He
believed that the Ishin arose out of a domestic accumulation of dissatis-
faction and strife that was only further irritated by the foreign pres-
ence. He noted that commentators had exaggerated the influence of
American and European interference in Japanese affairs. He also refuted
the testimonies of other foreign witnesses who explained the Ishin as
simply a reactionary eruption against trade agreements with foreigners.
No one could explain the progressive reforms that followed the victory
of so-called reactionaries against the West, he pointed out.
Rather, Mechnikov believed that the Ishin was a conscious response
from a broad-based constituency to the need for progressive, liberal re-
forms, which they believed would be instituted with the overthrow of
the Bakufu. The so-called patriots, or shishi, arising from the educated
class, had a defined goal to overthrow the shogunate and the entire po-
litical order bequeathed by it. He told his readers that the shishi came
from a variety of economic backgrounds and were distinguishable from
others mainly by their literacy and education. Mechnikov pointed out
that they shared a social consciousness and were willing to give up their
status for the betterment of society as a whole (see Figure 1.1). The lead-
ers of the revolution were committed to “change and replace not only the

51. See, for example, ibid., pp. 67– 68; Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,”
pp. 76– 77; Mechnikov, “Era Iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,” pp. 122–23.
52. Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” p. 76.
53. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” pp. 46–47; Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Ia-
ponii,” p. 88.
54. Reclus, Nouvelle géographie universelle, p. 847; Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Ia-
ponii,” pp. 92–93. On the development of Tokugawa-era literary networks that would serve
to unite radicals and revolutionaries across status lines, see Ikegami, Bonds of Civility.
Fig. 1.1 Lev Mechnikov in samurai dress. An examination of Mechnikov’s encounter with Ishin
Japan suggests his identification with Ishin samurai not as relics of Oriental difference, but as
cohorts for revolutionary change. Photograph courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian
Federation (GARF), 6753-1-95-6.
50 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

political structures but also the very social essence of Japanese life.”
The Ishin was thus not just about a single leader seizing power or a coup
by self-serving elites, as most Westerners believed, but a social and politi-
cal revolution with attendant demands and expectations.
At the same time, the revolution necessitated successful social evolu-
tion. Japan’s emergence onto the scene of world civilization was not an
arbitrary act or a historical accident but “an unavoidable result of Japa-
nese life itself.” For example, throughout his various writings about the
Ishin, Mechnikov repeatedly drew on Ōshio Heihachirō’s (1793–1837)
1837 “democratic” uprising, as he called it, as a symbolic action that dis-
closed the long-term intellectual accumulation in Tokugawa Japan. It
was not the result of a collision between a primitive and isolated society
with an advanced civilization, he said, but the result of centuries-long
historical developments from within Japan.
Amid tremendous political and social chaos, Mechnikov discovered
that common people’s lives continued to function without direction
from above. He noted that physical laborers in Japan held a remarkably
developed consciousness of social participation equal to that of other
parts of society. One of his strongest impressions was of the proud and
confident boatmen who greeted his ship when it first arrived. They were
“brilliantly tattooed and stately figures, whose naked bodies were cov-
ered with bright white, blue, and red images of female faces, dragons,
flowers, fossilized in fantastic arabesques.” Body tattoos (irezumi)
had become popu larized in the seventeenth century among laborers.
Usually expressing a story in their multicolored designs, they were a
response to Tokugawa feudal laws that dictated clothing styles based
on class. Common laborers who wanted to express uniqueness often re-
placed government-sanctioned commoners’ clothing with the absence of

55. Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” p. 80. Mechnikov’s self-identification

with samurai revolutionaries should not be confused with the exoticization and con-
sumption of samurai images by many European and American contemporaries. On
American tourism and collecting in Japan in the late 1860s and 1870s, see Guth, Long-
fellow’s Tattoos.
56. Mechnikov, “Era Iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,” pp. 116–117, 134.
57. Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” p. 86; Mechnikov, “Era Iaponskogo
prosveshcheniia,” p. 117.
58. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 37.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 51

any, except for tattoos covering the body. Mechnikov found in the tat-
toos an expression of wit, aesthetic taste, and social pride. He conveyed
to his readers that these were not the legendary repressed and cowering
dark masses of Oriental despotism but vocal commoners, enthusiastic
individuals with pride in their labor for society. Figure 1.2, an illustra-
tion of a vibrantly tattooed commoner for the entry on Japan in Élisée
Reclus’s (1830–1905) encyclopedia of geography, Nouvelle géographie uni-
verselle, which relied heavily on Mechnikov’s contributions after his re-
turn to Switzerland, demonstrates this view. Mechnikov seemed to have
stumbled on the bright masses of revolution in Japan.
This view of a developed social and political consciousness among
commoners during this period is echoed in more recent studies of com-
moners’ participation in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement.
Historians Irokawa Daikichi and Roger Bowen attribute substantial
popular organization and participation in the movement to political
consciousness and a desire for social and political equality.
The voluntary cooperative associations Mechnikov encountered across
Japan further evidenced that social revolution was the result of cumulative
social and intellectual evolution. He saw urban voluntary associations of
people rooted in their home region that supported a lively network based
on mutual aid. In these voluntary support networks, Mechnikov saw the
rootedness of cooperative practice in everyday existence. When the new
Meiji government failed to support institutionally the demographic shift
to urban centers, the economy depended on these informal local networks
to help those in need, he observed. Students far from home benefited from
voluntary cooperative associations in their hometowns, which pooled vil-
lagers’ money to support their studies. The expressions of mutual aid that
Mechnikov saw as integral to the revolutionary emergence of modern
Japan were, as he indicated, rooted in Tokugawa intellectual traditions.

59. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” pp. 55–56. Meanwhile, American and British

travelers to Japan largely saw the tattoos as an exotic, savage custom reminiscent of an
uncivilized, if idealized, Nature. Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos, pp. 142–58.
60. Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period; Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji
Japan.
61. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” pp. 67– 68. For suggestive essays on cooperatives
within the Japa nese context, see Najita, “Political Economy in Thought and Practice”;
and Najita, “Past in Present.”
Fig. 1.2 Tattooed laborer in Meiji Japan. Source: Reclus, Nouvelle géographie universelle, p. 769.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 53

Mutual aid as a progressive tendency in Japan was indicated by the

tremendous will in Ishin Japan to learn and to actively acquire new
knowledge and techniques from others. The act of learning was thus not
an expression of inferiority in relation to the object of study, but an indi-
cation of progressiveness of thought. Mechnikov described the active,
fearless, and selective acquisition of European methods and ideas as
manifesting a cooperative ethic that, through a will to learn from the out-
side world and to open mutually beneficial relations with others, was
instrumental for civilizational progress. He emphasized that acquiring
knowledge was a conscious act that the learner selectively manipulated
as a tool for national well-being rather than an inevitable, divine flow of
Reason from civilized to uncivilized, West to East. Ishin Japan’s rapid
modernization, rather than serving as a model for Westernization, served
as a model for selective development in which scientific, technical, and
intellectual advances were rooted in cooperative values.
Back in Geneva before his departure for Japan, Mechnikov had
chanced to meet with Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), Iwakura Tomomi,
Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), and other members of the Iwakura mis-
sion while they were visiting Switzerland. Kido, then serving as minister
of education, took a particular interest in Mechnikov and even visited
him at his home in Geneva. Mechnikov perceived that Kido and Ōkubo
represented two different schools of learning from Western government.
Ōkubo sought to learn from centralized government in France and its
Napoleonic laws, but Kido was fascinated with the communal system in
Switzerland as being most appropriate for the large variety of regional
and historical differences within the small country.

62. See, for example, Mechnikov, “Era Iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,” p. 108; Mech-
nikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponiia,” pp. 102–3.
63. Mechnikov’s observations reflected widespread practices of cooperatist self-
organization among commoners. Cooperatives would expand in various forms after
industrialization in Japan. Every town and village in Japan would possess some form of
cooperative association. In 1923, for example, fourteen thousand cooperatives existed in
Japan, with almost three million members nationwide. In 1935 in Hokkaido, 40.7 per-
cent of all households were members of a cooperative, while in the Eastern Mountain
region, 83.2 percent of all households were in cooperatives. Recognizing their role in the
economy, the Japa nese government actively supported cooperatives. Fisher, “Coopera-
tive Movement in Japan,” pp. 478, 483–84.
64. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 27.
54 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

A number of Mechnikov’s observations echoed interpretations of the

meanings of the Ishin then circulating among Japanese, from common-
ers to intellectuals. Historian Irokawa Daikichi claims that millions of
commoners believed that the Ishin was a revolution from within that
would negate all divisions, attain equality of all classes, and institute a
new world order that included equality among nations. Moreover, the
idea of long-term evolution appears to have circulated widely even among
Japanese commoners during the time Mechnikov was in Japan. Ishin-era
commoners studied the history of political protests in Tokugawa Japan,
focusing on the Ōshio uprising that Mechnikov cited in his writings.
Like Mechnikov, these commoners used such incidents to question the
assumption that the concept of popular rights was a recent import from
the West.
Furthermore, Japanese commoners used the commoners’ language of
mutual aid to give moral meaning to the Ishin and simultaneously to
open up and secure a moral role for themselves in the new Meiji sociopo-
litical order. A widely circulated 1869 pamphlet on international com-
merce by the Osaka merchant Katō Sukeichi expressed this idea. Using
commonsense ethical vocabulary shared by many in Japan at the time,
Katō’s pamphlet argued for the moral value of international commerce.
For Katō, trade was a mutual supplement (oginau) of goods that expressed
mutual aid (ai tasukeau) as the truth or essential principle of human
action (hito tarino dōri). To trade surplus goods was to provide “strang-
ers with what they need, and thus fulfill the duty of benevolence,” Katō
wrote. Other countries were described as partners in mutual assistance
through economic exchange. In this way, his original text conveyed nei-
ther a sense of the foreignness of international trade nor the superiority
of the West.

65. Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period, p. 60.

66. Ibid., 48.
67. Katō Sukeichi, Kōeki kokoro e gusa. Although Katō’s pamphlet circulated widely
at the time of its publication, surprisingly little is known about Katō himself. A local
historians’ association of Yokohama has uncovered some details about his earlier life
(see Kaikō e no bakushin ryochū nikki ), but further study of him is overdue.
68. Katō Sukeichi, Kōeki kokoro e gusa, p. 4.
69. Ibid., pp. 5– 6.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 55

The references in Kato’s treatise to language from the Charter Oath,

an Ishin document issued to the public in the name of the emperor in
1868, reflected an interpretation of the Ishin as an ongoing revolutionary
experience imbued with moral promise for the new sociopolitical order.
The Charter Oath promised a series of revolutionary changes. The docu-
ment would become a touchstone for much of the political contention in
Japan in the following decades. By borrowing language from the oath,
Katō gave to his discussion the weight of revolutionary meaning associ-
ated with the Ishin document. His text emphasized that Japan’s opening
should be in harmony with the just laws of nature, language reminiscent
of the Charter Oath. International trade was to be practiced in accor-
dance with the perceived promises of the Ishin, that is, in a consciously
moral manner as an expression of mutual aid. Katō thereby framed mu-
tual aid as a means to fulfill the Ishin’s promise for an equitable social
order as commoners perceived it in 1869.
Katō’s pamphlet simultaneously served as a treatise on the new place
of the merchant community in the new Meiji era. In this respect as well,
Katō kept alive the promises of the Charter Oath, which avowed in its
second article that “the high and low shall all unite in carrying out vig-
orously the administration of economic and financial affairs.” Read sin-
cerely from the perspective of commoners like Katō, this article prom-
ised social recognition and a new important role in international trade
for the “lower” class of merchant commoners. His pamphlet’s purpose
thus appears to have been not only to encourage the nation to support
the development of foreign trade as a form of international mutual aid
but also to give moral value to and thereby lay claim to the new equal
social status of the previously lowest class of merchants. Using the lan-
guage of mutual aid, Katō had turned their newfound role in interna-
tional trade into a virtuous one.
A comparison of two translations of this Ishin-period text, one into
Russian by Mechnikov and one into English by the prominent British

70. de Bary, Gluck, and Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 671.

71. We can see in Katō’s practice an echo of the Tokugawa-era Kaitokudō mer-
chants’ academy in Osaka studied by Najita that sought to overturn existing moral as-
sumptions about a greedy and unreliable merchant class in Tokugawa society by im-
parting the language of virtue to their practices. Najita, Visions of Virtue.
56 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

Japanologist Lord William George Aston (1841–1911), demonstrates

how each translator accentuated in his translation a competing direc-
tion of progress that Japan’s “opening” implied, and thereby gave added
meaning to the text. Mechnikov emphasized mutual aid throughout
his translation as a basis for Japan’s postrevolutionary development in-
dependent of the Western model of capitalism. Aston, on the other hand,
interpreted the text as Katō’s assertion of Japan’s embarkation on the
path to join the community of civilized capitalist nation-states as an
expression of a universal law of progress. Both Aston and Mechnikov
appear to have translated the text conscientiously in a manner as true
to the original as possible, but through only slight variations in their choice
of words, they produced very different texts on the historical meaning of
Kaikoku.
Meaningful contrasts may be found throughout their translations. A
brief sample of their translations conveys a sense of the different futures
projected in their texts.
Aston translated one particular passage as follows:
Our Mikado has become convinced of the necessity of upholding the policy of
commercial relations, and has caused our friendly intercourse and trade with
foreign countries to be established on a liberal scale. This is the only course by
which we can take our place in the community of nations, and remain true to
natural principles of truth and justice.

According to this version, “natural principles of truth and justice” are

achievable only by joining the community of nation-states and by par-
ticipating in capitalist relations with the limited community of the West.
This referred to the Western model of the modern nation-state as the
protector of the liberal values of freedom of the individual and the rights
of private property. For Aston, who would serve in British consular of-
fices in Japan for twenty-three years and would become the first British
consul general to Korea, the liberal state of the West served as the basic
unit for peace and order in the international arena. In its maintenance
of free trade through support of international law and preservation of
private property, the Western political model was the embodiment of

72. Aston, “Remarks on Commerce,” 20:118.

 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 57

“natural” (and therefore universal or “true”) principles of liberty and

“justice.”
Mechnikov translated the same section into Russian as follows:
Our Mikado has become convinced of the necessity to conduct friendly rela-
tions with them; only with this course can we take our proper place in the row
of other nations, without backing down from the principle of mutual aid and
equity.

This version posed the alternative phrase “mutual aid and equity” as the
principle of truth and justice that needed to be defended despite Japan’s
participation in that Western community of nation-states. This implied
that the international community of Western nation-states and the po-
litical and economic code of behavior that community depended on
were neither natural nor just. In the process of clarifying for his Russian
readers Katō’s departure from Western understandings of international
trade and relations, Mechnikov had given Katō’s text added polemical
meaning.
Furthermore, in Aston’s version, free trade by virtue of its existence
naturally leads to the mutual benefit and prosperity of everyone involved.
In Mechnikov’s version, trade is beneficial for the parties involved only “if
it is done according to the demands of fairness and mutual aid.” Mutual
aid was something to be consciously achieved and practiced rather than
being simply a natural outcome of capitalism. Far from an automatic at-
tribute of foreign trade, as translated by Aston, mutual aid for Mechnikov
had to serve as a “guiding principle of all human activities.”
Aston remade Katō’s pamphlet into a treatise on the emergence of the
nation on the path to Western-style capitalism. Aston translated:
At present, there is every reason to believe that any petition asking permission
to form companies after the European model, will, if presented to the proper
authorities, be favorably received as a proposal eminently conducive to the

73. On the invention of the “state of nature” and its influence on the practice and
idea of the international in the West, see Jahn, Cultural Construction of International
Relations.
74. Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” p. 99.
58 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

prosperity of the people of Japan. There is nothing to prevent such associations

from being durably established.

Mechnikov translated the same passage as follows:

Now, if someone requests from the government permission to establish trade
associations based on the European model, then the government not only will
not refuse but will be very happy, because the time has come when Japan
must have its own system of durable associations, founded on the principles
of mutual aid and equity. Only in this way can our commercial development
expand.

For Aston, Katō’s pamphlet illustrated Meiji Japan’s readiness to enter

the community of civilized nations on their terms. For Mechnikov, Katō’s
pamphlet expressed a broader popular consciousness of the objectives of
the revolution toward the ultimate achievement of cooperative anarchy.
According to the latter view, shared between Mechnikov and Katō, eco-
nomic power, linked with political, social, and intellectual power, arises
from a culture of international cooperatism, the most advanced stage of
human progress.
Emphasizing the idea of mutual aid and equity, Mechnikov placed
these terms strategically at the end of many of the paragraphs in Katō’s
text, to which his Russian readers’ attention would most strongly be
drawn. This linguistic tactic is particularly effective in Russian, where
the emphasized intent of meaning can be placed at the end of a sentence.
Written text becomes visual text in this regard.
Furthermore, Aston’s translation expresses Japan’s desire to become a
part of the wider community of nation-states, but Mechnikov’s transla-
tion emphasizes the one-sidedness and conflictiveness with which Japan’s
relations with Europeans began:
Aston: “We have now entered into friendly relations with the coun-
tries beyond the sea, and their subjects are incessantly visiting Japan: we
have become acquainted with the character of the natives of each.”
Mechnikov: “We did not need to have relations with the countries
beyond the sea, but their citizens started coming to us, asking for friendly

75. Aston, “Remarks on Commerce,” 20:119.

76. Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” p. 100.
77. Aston, “Remarks on Commerce,” 20:118.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 59

relations with us, to trade with us and marvel at the richness of our
nation.”
Aston’s translation conveyed the inevitability of Japan’s opening up to
capitalism and the modernity of the West. For the most part, his language
represents the usual interpretation of Kaikoku and Ishin until today.
Mechnikov removed the inevitability of merging with the West’s moder-
nity and put the focus and meaning of future development in another
arena altogether.
Out of this dialectical interaction of knowledge among experience,
expectation, and transnational contact, Mechnikov came to see the Ishin
as a revolutionary fulfi llment and model for his developing vision of
human progress. The finding of the roots and possibility of cooperatism
in Japan enabled Mechnikov to determine a universal solution beyond
the particular historical and geographic circumstances of Russian com-
munal life. Ishin Japan emerged for Mechnikov as a model for cooperative
society and, by virtue of its location in Asia, opened up the possibility of
its realization on a global scale. For Mechnikov, the notion of revolution
was now inseparable from social evolution.

Sociability as the Measure of Man

Evolution has a goal . . . and a law of the future of human kind— anarchy.
—Mechnikov, “Revolution and Evolution”

Mechnikov returned to Switzerland in 1876 with an intellectual key

that would open the door to a new era, a beginning for a new human
history. He expressed the progressiveness of the revolution in Japan in
books and several series of articles for influential journals in Russia and
Europe during the 1870s and 1880s. With the publication of his histori-
cal and ethnographic studies, most notably the book L’Empire Japonais,
and his contribution to the chapters on Japan and China in Élisée Rec-
lus’s authoritative encyclopedia on world geography, Nouvelle géographie

78. Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” p. 99.

79. Russian scholars on Mechnikov have asserted, in contrast, that Mechnikov
viewed the Ishin as an incomplete bourgeois revolution. See, for example, Kartasheva,
Dorogi L’va Mechnikova, p. 23; and Shcherbina, “L. I. Mechnikov,” pp. 3–22.
80. Mechnikov became ill with tuberculosis and was forced to leave Japan in 1876.
60 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

universelle, Mechnikov became recognized as a leading Japanologist in

Europe.
Simultaneously, he provided an intellectual foundation for the devel-
opment of a leading current of modern anarchist thought. At this mo-
ment, Mechnikov shifted anarchism’s focus to a distinct vision of uni-
versal human evolutionary development. He first placed anarchism in a
modernist framework in the years after his stay in Japan, arising out of
his observations and experience in Japanese society. His thought differed
in its modernist approach from Bakunin’s anarchism, which saw revolu-
tion as an immediate possibility based on the instinct of revolt, the impulse
to liberty shared by the working masses. Bakunin strongly rejected the
view of Karl Marx that social change depended on the gradual maturation
of objective historical conditions. For Bakunin, by teaching the working
masses such theories, Marx would succeed only in stifling the revolution-
ary ardor possessed by every man. Mechnikov, however, placed anarchism
in a modernist vision standing at the end of human civilizational devel-
opment, an attainment earned only by a mature and civilized human
society. He shifted anarchism’s focus from Bakuninist ruthless destruc-
tion of the old order to a vision of universal human evolutionary devel-
opment. For Mechnikov, revolution was a real and urgent stepping-stone
toward anarchism, but its success depended on epochal societal change
over historical time. Unlike Bakunin’s vision of raw human liberty, Mech-
nikov saw a future cooperatist anarchy that was hard won and dependent
on a highly developed culture on all levels of society. And whereas Marx
saw revolution as being possible only among a mature proletariat in the
most advanced industrial nations of the West, Mechnikov understood
revolution as dependent not on a nation’s material development, but on
its social and cultural achievements.
In the late 1870s and 1880s, other leading anarchists spoke of evolution
in social Darwinist terms. Anarchist theorist Reclus defined evolution

81. Documentation of Mechnikov’s achievements in Japanology may be found in his

personal archive in GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, d. 36 and 38. See also Reclus, Nouvelle géogra-
phie universelle, pp. 685–863 (especially Reclus’s acknowledgment of Mechnikov’s con-
tribution on p. 863), and Reclus, “Predislovie Elize Rekliu,” p. 219. For an account of
the broader context of European anarchist geography to which Mechnikov contrib-
uted, see Ferretti, Mondo senza la mappa.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 61

for those in the West as the rising consciousness of the masses toward
solidarity to overthrow the ruling classes in an impending violent strug-
gle. Viewing Western Europe as at the highest level of social evolution,
Reclus identified progress for the rest of the world as its inevitable Euro-
peanization and homogenization. At this time, anarchism had become
synonymous with violence and terrorism, used by anarchist elites as a
means to attempt to stir the masses to revolt. Peter Kropotkin and Rec-
lus supported terrorist acts of “propaganda by the deed” and popu lar
expropriation of property by force.
Mechnikov’s contributions to anarchism, which have been entirely
forgotten in the history of anarchism, were inseparable from his inter-
pretations of the Ishin. For Mechnikov, revolution was a real stepping-
stone toward anarchism, but the cooperatist anarchist civilization he
envisioned was to be achieved through the widespread development of a
cooperatist consciousness and corresponding social practices. He under-
stood the Japanese revolution as having resulted from the long-term de-
velopment of people’s everyday life that had made the formation of a
new government possible. For Mechnikov, the revolutionary ideal of
politics being the source and implementer of social change in a new
revolutionary order was bound to fail. Revolution, rather, was made pos-
sible through evolution based on a constant dialectical relationship be-
tween human subjectivity and everyday interactions.
In 1789, French revolutionaries had envisioned that an enlightened
government was to fashion a new people according to grand abstract
ideals. According to this idea, the rational being had the right to rule
the less rational and thereby make history. In contrast, “philosopher
kings” had no place in Mechnikov’s understanding of Ishin as the new
vision of the future world. Mechnikov believed that the “old order” lay
in unexpected places, in the self and in one’s everyday interactions with
others. The accomplishments of a successful revolution ultimately

82. Mechnikov, “Revolution and Evolution”; Reclus, Évolution et révolution.

83. Fleming, Geography of Freedom, pp. 180–83.
84. Even works on Russian anarchism do not mention Mechnikov’s name. See, for
example, Avrich, Russian Anarchists; Cahm, Kropotkin; and Miller, Kropotkin.
85. This understanding may be found, for example, in Mechnikov, “France sous
Mac-Mahon.”
62 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

depended on the mundane, on people’s struggle for existence, rather

than on self-sacrifice for abstract moral or political causes. Rather than
the grand illusions of utopia, Mechnikov looked to achievements in pro-
saic life. Change came about through people’s responses to necessity that
fostered a cooperative ethic. Human agency arising out of basic human
needs in daily life was for Mechnikov the source of progress for human
civilization.
Viewing social Darwinism as merely the straitjacketing of Darwin’s
discoveries in a Malthusian framework of competition for limited re-
sources, Mechnikov criticized Marx and other contemporaries for echo-
ing Malthus’s ideas in their views of society. On this point, Mechnikov
was part of a wider sphere of Russian intellectual efforts, particularly in
the scientific world, to discredit the Darwinist metaphor of competi-
tive survival of the fittest as the engine for natural evolution. This anti-
Darwinian understanding was so common among Russian intellectuals
that Daniel Todes has termed it a “national style” of reaction to Darwin.
Russian biologists, including Lev Mechnikov’s younger brother Ilya
Mechnikov, who would win the Nobel Prize for his phagocytic theory
of inflammation, sought to reveal a law of evolutionary development
in the animal and plant world that was fueled not by competition and
struggle but by cooperation. At the time of Lev’s scholarship on Japan,
this effort remained within the fields of natural science. Lev integrated
the basic ideas of cooperation in evolutionary development among
animals into his studies of culture, society, and civilizational develop-
ment. Although very few letters remain between Lev Mechnikov
and his brother Ilya, what survives in the archives suggests that the
two brothers were well aware of each other’s scholarship. In a letter
from Ilya to Lev in 1888, for example, Ilya talks about an article on
tuberculosis he is working on and his decision to move to the Pasteur

86. Mechnikov, “Revolution and Evolution,” p. 430.

87. Todes, “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor,” p. 538.
88. Mechnikov, “Revolution and Evolution”; Mechnikov, “Shkola bor’by,” pp. 186–
92; Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, pp. 238–53. Mechnikov refers to ichthyologist K. F. Kes-
sler’s landmark talk on the “law of mutual aid” in nature. Kessler, “O zakone vzaimnoi
pomoshchi.”
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 63

Institute in Paris. He also asks Lev about the progress of his work,
Civilization.
It took Lev Mechnikov’s encounter with the progressive revolutionary
society of Ishin Japan for him to fashion the idea that existed in the Rus-
sian natural sciences into an anarchist law of human civilizational devel-
opment. According to the new Ishin-centered historicity, civilization
was progressing by means of cooperation among human beings in the
world. Cooperation was a nonhierarchical foundation for international
human society. For Mechnikov, the measure of man was sociability.
Mechnikov concluded that the cooperative aspect of human nature
was stimulated by natural surroundings. The more difficult and danger-
ous the surroundings and the greater the obstacles to survival, the more
developed was human consciousness of the necessity of social coopera-
tion in order to overcome those obstacles. Survival of the fittest, then,
was accomplished not through individual or collective competition, but
in social cooperation to overcome the obstacles put before humans.
Mechnikov wrote, “Nature puts before its inhabitants a choice: death or
solidarity. There are no other paths for humanity. If humanity does not
want to die, then people must unavoidably resort to solidarity and mu-
tual, collective work. . . . In this concludes the great law of progress and
the law of the successful development of human civilization.” In this
way of thinking, human civilization was not attained through the elimi-
nation of the weak to enrich the strong. Mechnikov redefined culture as
human achievements attained through mutual aid.
This tendency for cooperation was fully natural not only to human
beings but also to the animal world, Mechnikov observed. He claimed
that both human beings’ and animals’ associations for food or self-
defense generally had a far more social character than a competitive one.
Human agency reduced to the smallest denominator, arising out of the
most basic needs in daily life, was for Mechnikov the source of both bio-
logical evolution and the progress of civilizations. Mechnikov’s idea of

89. Ilya Mechnikov to Lev Mechnikov, 17/29 March 1888, GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, d. 58,
ll. 3–4.
90. Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, pp. 273–82.
91. Ibid., p. 443.
64 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

cooperative nature in the animal world would later find further develop-
ment in Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid.
Mechnikov had observed in Japan that a collaborative response to the
challenges of nature provided a major impetus for cultural and social
creativity. As he described it, the mountainous ranges so divided the is-
land nation into a multitude of different communities that Japanese dia-
lects widely differentiated across various regions, to the point that what
was spoken in one region could not be understood elsewhere. Those di-
visions of the island had also forced its inhabitants to develop a political
order that for millennia had consisted of small autonomous federations.
In addition, the ruthlessness and violence of the ocean had compelled
the people to develop a highly cooperative and therefore highly devel-
oped culture.
According to Mechnikov, the individual maintained her or his capa-
bility for cooperation only by maintaining her or his own unique tal-
ents. In turn, individual uniqueness was maintained in the act of coop-
eration because cooperation required the incorporation of various
capabilities and thoughts to succeed. This view of human existence be-
came the basis for Mechnikov’s thoughts on freedom and social equality.
According to him, freedom arose in an individual’s acts of doing for the
benefit of others as part of oneself. The very act of doing to benefit others
was a selfish act of self-preservation that simultaneously depended on the
corresponding doing of others. According to this understanding, private
everydayness was essential to the success of revolution toward human
development.
In this idea, the individual merged with others in the act of doing
without negating individual uniqueness. Mutual aid as a factor of mod-
ern civilizational development depended on one’s capacity to express
multiple talents and thereby to play multiple roles in society. Coactors
were infinite, and therefore, so were the possibilities for mutual gain.
The further the sphere of mutual assistance extended and the more var-
ied the capabilities and backgrounds of participants were, the greater the
mutual benefit. Time and progress were significant elements in this con-

92. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” pp. 29–31, 39.

93. Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, pp. 85– 99.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 65

struct. As a society advanced over time, the spheres where mutual aid
could be practiced would broaden.
What was society for Mechnikov? He severely criticized what he termed
the “Struggle school” of sociology. Adherents of this view categorized soci-
eties as stable entities defined by ethnicity, race, or class, ordered along a
hierarchy of civilizational development. In describing a never-ending
competition for existence, they implied the eventual disappearance of
the weaker social elements. For Mechnikov, human society and culture
were continuously evolving expressions of the laws of nature. He divided
the world into three spheres of activity, inorganic, biological, and socio-
logical, each with its particular set of natural laws. The inorganic sphere
consisted of physical and chemical processes explainable by Isaac New-
ton’s law of gravity. The biological sphere was defined by expressions
of the desires of hunger and sex and incorporated the world of plant
and animal individualities, which competed and changed according to
Darwin’s law of the struggle for existence. Mechnikov proposed a new,
third sphere of development that he termed “sociological.” This incor-
porated the world of associations and networks, the world of interests
beyond the boundaries of individual biological existence. He defined
this as the sphere of cooperation, which included both human and non-
human interactions.
According to Mechnikov, each sphere followed another in order of
increasing complexity and variety of process and form. In turn, he de-
fined society as increasingly complex and expanding varieties of coop-
erative associations and networks. Society, therefore, did not exist as a
stable, concrete entity or entities primordially defined, but rather con-
stantly formed and re-formed in a progression of social life. This coopera-
tive sphere existed as expanding possibilities for associating with and
doing for others.
Finding the roots and possibilities of a progressive culture of mutual
aid in Japan had enabled Mechnikov to develop a global application for
cooperatist civilizational development. This essentially decentered the
world away from the West and gave centeredness to what had always been

94. Mechnikov, “Shkola bor’by.”

95. Ibid., pp. 164– 65.
96. Ibid.
66 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

the referent of backwardness. The “West,” then, suddenly became back-

ward with regard to the demands of progress and civilization. Western-
ers arrived in Japan simply ill prepared to meet the Meiji Ishin on coop-
erative terms. Commodore Matthew Perry’s (1794–1858) initiation of
peaceful relations through the persuasion of force was a barbaric intro-
duction of Western “civilization,” Mechnikov wrote.
By reimagining the source of progress as sociability and mutual aid,
Mechnikov reconceptualized the global ordering of peoples and nations.
However, although the West lost its inherent superiority, a new problem
emerged. Mechnikov had created another hierarchy by using Ishin Japan
as a model of revolutionary achievement. If time created hierarchy on
the basis of its measurement of progress, nature might be able to level out
that hierarchy by creating difference, that is, different paths to the attain-
ment of cooperatist civilization colored but not determined by human
relations to various environments. In nature lay the source of human
freedom to determine a society’s path to cooperatist development beyond
primordial identifications of ethnicity and race. Nature provided Mech-
nikov with the possibility for a variety of developmental forms.
The dominant concept of nature and history in the West during the
last decades of the nineteenth century had come to embody a hierarchical
order that Mechnikov sought to overturn. He severely criticized racially
ordered versions of social Darwinism, which took an extreme form among
eugenicists who proposed that the building of a new, just social order
was possible through natural selection of a special race of people. Mech-
nikov went beyond the assumptions of nineteenth-century anthropolo-
gists who treated human races as different species, either in actuality or
in essence. For him, ethnic or racial amalgamation in a particular society
was a progressive quality that had characterized and contributed to the

97. Mechnikov, L’Empire Japonaise, p. ii; Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” pp. 67– 68;
Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” pp. 76– 77; Mechnikov, “Era Iaponskogo
prosveshcheniia,” pp. 122–23.
98. Mechnikov differentiates his work from geographic determinism in Tsivilizatsiia,
pp. 262, 323.
99. Ibid., pp. 290–310.
100. According to John S. Haller Jr., Charles Darwin explained the phenomena of
races as “various human types that ‘remained distinct for a long period.’ In such cases,
the varieties might just as well be called species.” Haller, “Species Problem,” p. 1327.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 67

great civilizations of the past. Mechnikov observed that Egypt, India,

and Mesopotamia were civilizations built on considerable ethnographic
and cultural mixing. “Generally speaking, the great historical civilizations
were the result of the cooperative work of the most complex meld of dif-
ferent ethnological elements, a meld in which it was impossible to even
roughly determine and sort out the participation of ‘whites,’ ‘yellows,’ or
‘blacks.’ ” In his use of externally visible traits to identify various peoples,
Mechnikov applied nineteenth-century scientific approaches to study
racial origins, but his conclusion that racial and ethnic mixing was natu-
ral and was linked with cultural development departed from those scien-
tific traditions. Combining his observations of body structures, facial
features, and skin color with his hypotheses about the origins of cultural
practices among Japanese, Mechnikov identified people in Japan as pos-
sessing diverse interethnic origins. For example, he observed that the
widespread predilection for public nudity in Japan was a practice absent
elsewhere in East Asia, indicating the possibility of alternative, interethnic
origins of Japanese. “In connection with several other indications, this
naturally led me to think that the ancestors of this teeming crowd before
me must have come not at all from the Asian continent, but from the
tropical islands, populated to this day with diverse and little-studied in-
terethnic Malay-Polynesian tribes.” The diverse features and variety of
skin tones that he saw further struck him. He concluded, “Based on
my observations, the Japanese type represents a much greater variation
and fluctuation than the population type of any European country, and
just this can already sufficiently reveal that today’s Japanese nation came
from multiple tribal elements.”
Mechnikov also emphasized the influence of surroundings on the
behavior of humans, which accorded with European trends in social sci-
ence at the time. However, his approach and conclusions differed from
what Paul Rabinow has described as the shared interest of “regulating
the normal” among social scientists in late nineteenth-century France.

101. Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, p. 300.

102. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 54; Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Ia-
ponii,” p. 103.
103. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 56.
104. Ibid., p. 57.
68 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

According to Rabinow, French sociologists’ examinations of surround-

ings were a response to the need to provide a powerful social glue to re-
duce class antagonisms. The sociologists sought to identify ways the state
could organize and thereby regulate the collective behavior of society,
whether of the French working class or its colonial peoples. Mean-
while, Mechnikov emphasized human agency, people’s creative ability to
overcome adverse surroundings. Rather than seeking the creation of an
environment to control human behavior directly, he sought to reveal
how human beings use their wit and strengths amid a powerful natural
environment to create positive conditions for the collective good.
Mechnikov came to see the oceanic cultures of port cities and islands,
where the powerful forces of the ocean and the wrath of its storms made
existence precarious, as likely sites for advanced developments in coop-
erative society. This idea could be affirmed by studying areas then con-
sidered primitive or undeveloped. Between his departure from Japan in
1876 and his death in 1888, Mechnikov traveled to other island nations
and ports across the Pacific, including San Francisco, Hawaii, Thailand,
Indonesia, Vietnam, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Singapore, to explore
this idea further.
In his final culminating work, Civilization and the Great Historical
Rivers, Mechnikov ordered space and time to reveal the general progres-
sion of human beings from coerced cooperation among early civiliza-
tions toward increasing levels of voluntary mutual aid in the form of free
associations. He observed that the achievement of freedom had been inte-
grally associated with human societies’ relations with water as the source
both of life and of hardship and struggle for survival. Only through co-
operation, not competition, were human beings capable of surviving and
harnessing water and producing thereby increasingly complex and ad-
vanced societies. Although peoples like the Cossacks were undoubtedly
free, Mechnikov wrote, they lacked mutual cooperation and therefore
represented a primitive form of human civilization. From the river civi-
lizations to the civilizations on the seas, finally ending with oceanic

105. Rabinow, French Modern, pp. 1–16, 170– 73.

106. See, for example, Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, p. 262.
107. GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, d. 38; GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, d. 67, ll. 1–2.
108. Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, pp. 259– 62.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 69

civilizations, where people’s everyday lives revolved around the most

dangerous and inhumane bodies of water, humans developed more ad-
vanced, cooperatist societies. In this picture, although technology itself
was not a measure of human progress, it was a frequent companion to
progress when it was used cooperatively for survival.
His new construct of civilizational progress incorporated existing ide-
als of progress predicated on a hierarchy of social competition and capi-
talism as a mere stage in world progress toward increasingly complex
cooperative human relations. He divided world history into several peri-
ods, each characterized by a corresponding sociopolitical type. He char-
acterized what he called the River Period, when the Euphrates and the
Tigris, the Indus and the Ganges, and the Yellow River and the Yangtze
became the cradles of civilization, as having had unprecedented despo-
tism. The second major period, what he called the Sea Period, began
with the appearance of cross-sea trade and the cultural interactions of
the Greeks and the Romans. Oligarchy became the fundamental form
of government among these societies. The most recent, modern period,
the Ocean Period, began with the declaration of rights of humans and
citizens. Mechnikov divided the Ocean Period into two segments: the
Atlantic Era, which spanned the opening of America to the beginning of
the gold rush on the American Pacific Coast and Russia’s colonization of
its eastern region, and the latest, the Global Epoch. This was to be the
period of the greatest human cooperation and anarchy, given impetus by
interactions across the Pacific toward the end of the nineteenth century
and the rising internationalisms among people on the nonstate level.
Before his death in 1888, Mechnikov had anticipated writing two more
volumes of Civilization as an expansive exploration of free associations
in the formation of transoceanic international society as the most ad-
vanced known stage of human development.
Mechnikov took pains to overcome cultural, racial, and geographic
determinism by showing how the character of a civilization and its social
composition depended on how its people adjusted to their surround-
ings through cultural production and social orga nization. In writing a

109. Ibid., pp. 258–59, 263– 70, 325–443.

110. Ibid., p. 338.
111. Reclus, “Predislovie,” p. 221; Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, p. 446.
70 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

nature-centered history that focused on the influence of bodies of water

on human societies, he broke the hierarchical divide between East and
West. This was a modernity that constructed a variety of develop-
ments and styles toward the universal attainment of cooperative beings
and their associations. The result of this intellectual practice was that the
West was no longer inherently civilizationally backward in relation to
Japan. In attempting to solve the problem of hierarchy, Mechnikov’s
thought had substituted it with unevenness in the global attainment of
cooperatism. Yet in his theory of social evolution’s identification of mu-
tual aid as a principle of progress for human civilization, Mechnikov
delegitimized the naturalization of competition and aggression that had
undergirded hierarchically arranged categories of race, class, gender, and
nation under social Darwinism. At the same time, he saw cooperatist
civilization as a progressive, modern expression of human life.
Although Civilization and the Great Historical Rivers was prohibited
in Russia, it was widely read in intellectual circles. Thinkers as classically
distant in beliefs as the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900), the
“father of Russian Marxism” Georgii Plekhanov (1856–1918), and the
anarchist Reclus strongly recommended it to the public. In fact, the ap-
pearance of Mechnikov’s Civilization marked the moment when Rus-
sian radical thought shifted from Populist belief in a divergent Russian
path to the single path of world development envisioned by Russian
Marxists. Although as an anarchist Mechnikov had clearly opposed
Marx, Plekhanov was intrigued by Mechnikov’s idea of universal devel-
opment beyond the East-West divide and used it to propound his crucial
monist view of history for the applicability of Marxism in Russia. In key
essays defending Marxism, Plekhanov expressed his excitement about
Mechnikov’s work and urged his readers to study it. He wrote that
Civilization was the work that answered some of the most fundamental

112. Mechnikov directly critiques the East-West paradigm of civilizational develop-

ment in Tsivilizatsiia, pp. 276– 77.
113. Plekhanov, “O knige L. I. Mechnikova,” p. 28. For Plekhanov’s references to
Civilization in his defense of Marxism, see also Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works,
1:415, 475, 610, 699; and 2:147, 651.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 71

intellectual problems of the day. For Plekhanov, the work resolved the
problem of perceived inequality in world progress between geographic
areas through its scientific study of the effects of nature on social rela-
tions. Mechnikov had constructed a view of universal world progress in
which sociability was foundational for progress and civilization. He had
thereby shifted the capacity for progress beyond the Western world.
It is an irony, given Mechnikov’s anarchist leanings, that his Civiliza-
tion helped Plekhanov as the “father of Russian Marxism” substantiate
Marxism as a theory for modern progress appropriate for Russia. Marx
had argued that Russia served as the example of a separate, uniquely East-
ern and stagnant, nonprogressing economic system. In contrast, Mech-
nikov after Ishin Japan intellectually realized the possibility of universal
progress beyond the East-West divide. Plekhanov praised Mechnikov’s
study for succeeding in going beyond the geographic and racial deter-
minisms of other geographic approaches to the history of civilizations. It
is not surprising, then, that Civilization was one of the two works re-
viewed in the opening issue of Plekhanov’s journal of Russian Marxism,
Social Democrat. When Mechnikov passed away, Plekhanov wrote his
obituary. Asserting that Mechnikov was the best symbol of a generation,
Plekhanov wrote, “Mechnikov was one of the most amazing and kindest
representatives of that generation of the 1860s, to whom our social life,
our science, and our literature owe so much.” Plekhanov was not the
only one to have thought of Mechnikov as the symbol of a generation.
He and the other leaders of the Russian Marxist group the Liberation of
Labor contributed money to erect a memorial stone in Switzerland for
Mechnikov’s grave. About 120 Russian émigrés across Europe gave money
for the memorial and participated in its design, which was open to a vote
among contributors. Other well-known figures in the revolutionary
movement who organized or contributed to Mechnikov’s memorial in-
cluded Peter Kropotkin, Reclus, Vera Zasulich (1849–1919), and Peter
Lavrov (1823–1900).

114. White, “Despotism and Anarchy,” p. 410; Plekhanov, “O knige L. I. Mechnikova,”

p. 15.
115. Plekhanov, “O knige L. I. Mechnikova.”
116. Plekhanov, “L. I. Mechnikov,” p. 327.
117. GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 86.
72 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

Reclus, who committed himself to completing the unfinished Civiliza-

tion when Mechnikov died, wrote that the book “opened a new era in the
history of science” by “founding a truly scientific morality.” Kropot-
kin, who was on his way to becoming the leading anarchist theorist, also
closely echoed Mechnikov’s ideas in his own work. He made Mech-
nikov’s construct of cooperatist civilizational development a foundation
of his anarchist theories of ethical human progress. With dedication and
respect, Kropotkin also worked on completing Civilization after Mech-
nikov died, at the very moment when, according to historian Martin
Miller, Kropotkin began to “move beyond criticism of the present order
to a more detailed consideration of the future society.” At this time,
Kropotkin was part of the committee overseeing the collaborative effort
to erect Mechnikov’s memorial. According to private correspondence be-
tween Kropotkin and Mechnikov’s wife, Olga, Kropotkin even worked
on a biography of Mechnikov, whom he called “the purest, most beauti-
ful expression” of the Russian populist movement, a sentiment shared by
many others in the Russian émigré community. Letters between Kro-
potkin and Olga suggest that the biography was going to devote consid-
erable space to Mechnikov’s experiences in and scholarship on Japan.
Kropotkin’s biography of Mechnikov seems never to have been published,
but Kropotkin worked on it for quite some time. Olga even moved from

118. Reclus, “Predislovie,” p. 221; Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, pp. 219–443.

119. Mechnikov worked with Reclus in orga nizing financial and political support for
Kropotkin while he was imprisoned in France, and he became a close friend of the
Kropotkin family. Professionally, the two corresponded about their mutual work in the
anarchist movement. Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace Archives, B. I.
Nicolaevsky Collection, box 183, folder 34, ll. 6– 9; GARF, f. 1129, op. 3, ed. khr. 285, ll.
1–2; GARF, f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 1747, ll. 1–15.
120. Miller, Kropotkin, p. 192. According to papers in GARF, Kropotkin had asked
Mechnikov’s family to keep him in mind for sorting through the deceased’s papers and
to complete Mechnikov’s unfinished writings, the most important of which was Civili-
zation. In the end, Élisée Reclus took over responsibility for the completion of the vol-
ume that we now know as Civilization and the Great Historical Rivers. Reclus, “Predis-
lovie Elize Rekliu.” p. 219.
121. GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 9, l. 18.
122. Ibid.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 73

her home in Switzerland to live at the Kropotkins’ home just to help him
write it.
It was not a coincidence that Kropotkin simultaneously dedicated
himself to writing his famous anarchist study, Mutual Aid. The earliest
appearance of part of this work was an 1890 article on the animal world
for the Nineteenth Century, titled “Mutual Aid among Animals.” How-
ever, the fully developed work on civilizational progress we now know as
Mutual Aid appeared only in 1902. Kropotkin did not fail to echo Mech-
nikov’s voice in his writing of Mutual Aid in an essential way, in that he
defined the engine of human progress and civilization as mutual aid. He,
like Mechnikov, viewed Darwin’s “struggle for existence” among human
beings as dependent on mutual aid, not competition, for success. Further,
he viewed sociability as a basic instinct among humans. These key ele-
ments of an ethical anarchism based on scientific findings that incorpo-
rated a vision of civilizational development would give so-called Kropot-
kinism wide appeal in Japan.
Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, which provided the historicity of modern
cooperatism, found its way onto the desks of great numbers of Japanese
readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapter
4). Mutual Aid quickly became a symbolic text for many social and cul-
tural movements in Japan. Ideas spawned in the meeting of revoliutsiia
and Ishin traveled once again back to Japan, embraced by those who
sought an alternative to the narrative of Western civilization and prog-
ress. Kropotkinism as a restoratory historicity cut through the grain of
Japanese society in the first quarter of the twentieth century and became
a veritable phenomenon in cultural life.

The Emergence of Russian Translation Culture

Only in the context of transnational revolutionary encounters can we
make sense of the appearance of an enduring Russian translation culture
in Japan in the early Meiji that lasted until the Asia-Pacific War. This

123. GARF, f. 1129, op. 3, ed. khr. 285, 286; GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 9; GARF,
f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 1749, Olga Mechnikova to Peter Kropotkin, 10 August 1889.
124. Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid among Animals”; Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.
74 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

distinctive school of Russian translation practice that emerged at the begin-

ning of Meiji Japan was an immediate product of the meeting between
revoliutsiia and Ishin. Mechnikov and a number of Russian revolution-
ary colleagues who followed him as teachers at the Tokyo School of For-
eign Languages (TSFL) introduced Russian and translations of Russian
works into Japanese in Japan as tools of revolutionary knowledge pro-
duction. This negotiation of knowledge between meanings of revoliutsiia
and Ishin both reflected and helped shape ideas and emotions. From the
outset, Japanese translators of Russian at the TSFL focused on Populist
and revolutionary literature, both fiction and nonfiction. At the height
of popular unrest during the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement,
Russian translations in Japan further ignited people’s anger over political
injustices.
The translations of nineteenth-century Russian literature first intro-
duced the notion of the “social” (shakai), defining it as a problem (mondai)
from the very moment of the word’s introduction in Japan. Well before
the social scientific pursuit of facts and figures for the “objective” knowl-
edge of “society” that was to be understood, grasped, and governed for the
development of the modern nation-state, “society” began to be defined
in this context as a problem of unfettered capitalism. The contemporary
scholar Janet Walker demonstrates how the writer Futabatei Shimei’s first
novel, Ukigumo, was a reflection of Russian literature as social criticism.
She claims that Futabatei emulated Russian authors in order to create a
historically situated narrative by striving to give a concrete sense of his-
torical time and place for the novel’s setting, with its characters serving
as social-historical types. Futabatei’s translations of Russian literature
conveyed the same sense of placement in historical time and place that
he sought to emulate in his own literature. This historicist effect of the
social as a temporal phenomenon within a given historical moment may
be found throughout translations of Russian literature in Japan. Readers
of translated Russian literature and of Futabatei’s work discovered a new,
modern sense of the “social” as a historically and spatially specific problem
in need of a solution. Implicit in this problem consciousness were the
possibility and necessity of change. Underlying this production of knowl-

125. Walker, “Russian Role in the Creation of the First Japa nese Novel.”
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 75

edge through translation was the evocation of sympathy and compassion

for those of another nation, language, and culture. By evoking transbor-
der sympathy and a historicist sense of the social, translations of Russian
literature promised to give birth to a humanistic revolutionary subjectivity.
These emotions, cultural products of the intellectual meeting of Ishin
and revoliutsiia, were symbolically recaptured and ignited time and again
in Japan throughout the first half of the twentieth century, in repeated
references to motifs, heroes and heroines, authors, and scenes from Japa-
nese translations of Russian literature inspired by the Populist revolution-
ary movement. The TSFL Russian program founded by Mechnikov was
an originating knowledge-production site for Russian translation culture,
and Futabatei was the program’s most recognized graduate. Through Fu-
tabatei and its other lesser-known students, the TSFL Russian program
colored the nature of Russian translation practice in Japan for much of
the following half century.
The practice of Russian translation during this period departed from
historians’ existing understanding of modern Japanese translation prac-
tice. Japanese translators selected Russian writing for translation in order
to depart consciously from the norm of “translating the West” as histori-
ans understand it. In other words, they chose to depart from translating
a Western modern subjectivity. Russian Populist literature painted a wide
variety of critical portraits from Russian social life, featuring heroes and
antiheroes who ranged from revolutionaries and assassins to urban poor
folk and peasants, superfluous intellectuals, and numerous other victims
and representatives of serfdom, social hierarchy, bureaucracy, and autoc-
racy. This democratic urge to portray “people” in all their various forms
was simultaneously a conscious departure from Western European litera-
ture in that many Russian writers sought to realistically reproduce life
that was true to a particular Russian existence that could not be found
in Western European literature.
Within this conceptual contour, both Russian literature and nonfic-
tional accounts were translated in Japan. The former featured “heroes”
who were largely low-level government clerks, prostitutes and other
“fallen women,” poor folk, the insane, moneylenders, aimless students,
murderers, assassins, and peasants, the downtrodden, pathetic, superflu-
ous, and largely irrational members of society who went mostly unnoticed
among elites. Representative literary works translated in this period
76 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

included, for example, Nikolai Gogol’s (1809–52) Portrait of an Artist

and Diary of a Madman, Turgenev’s Rudin and Fathers and Sons, and
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Translated nonfiction accounts
featured heroic adventures and persecutions of well-known revolution-
ary figures in the Russian Populist movement, such as Kropotkin, Vera
Figner (1852–1942), Sofia Perovskaya (1853–1881), Vera Zasulich, and
Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii. Whereas the feats of persecuted Russian
revolutionaries were commemorated to give emotional power to the
Freedom and People’s Rights Movement of the 1880s, the literature of
the invisible, powerless, and often pathetic or humorous nonhero in
Russian literature equally powerfully gave rise to social critiques and
the emergence of the social scientific and ethnographic studies in Japan
that found their beginnings in the effort to study the lower strata of
society. These heroes in narrative form criticized both power and the
state, on the one hand, and social injustice and the problems of liberal
capitalism, on the other. Historian Lynn Hunt has documented the effect
of literature’s encouragement of empathy across class and gender lines in
her tracing of the rise of a discourse on “human rights” from the eighteenth-
century novel’s evocation of empathy across traditional social boundar-
ies in Western Europe. Likewise in Japan, translated Russian literature
inspired readers not only to imagine the “social” but also to identify
emotionally with the diverse representatives of society as fellow human
beings.
The following examination of the emergence of the Russian transla-
tion culture in Japan focuses on Futabatei Shimei in particular as the
leading Russian translator in Japan to demonstrate the process by which
even a nationalist anti-Russian position was altered in the intellectual
environment of the TSFL. Futabatei not only was a translator but also
was noted as the writer of the “first modern novel in Japan,” as well as
the creator of the modern Japanese language through his development of
genbunitchi, the unification of the written and spoken languages. Far
from being peripheral to modern Japanese cultural life, Russian transla-
tion was at the heart of the development of modern Japanese language
and literature. Therefore, a reconceptualization of Russian translation

126. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, pp. 35– 69.

 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 77

practice from that of “translating the West” to translating distinct world-

views that arose out of the Russian historical context means revising
the core assumptions of modern Japanese intellectual life. In this context,
I argue that Futabatei’s translation was not a product of the impact of
the West, as has been conceived by historians. Rather, his practice should
be seen as a direct consequence of the Russian-Japanese revolutionary
encounter outside the epistemological limit of the East-West divide.
Futabatei sought to produce a modern language and literature that would
provide a progressive consciousness for social equality and justice.
Understanding Futabatei’s development of his translation practice
necessitates going back to his formative years in the Russian program
at the TSFL. As the nation’s premier training center for foreign lan-
guages, founded in 1873, the TSFL was the only place in the nation
where one could seriously study Russian outside the Orthodox Church’s
Russian-language school, established around the same time. By putting
into practice his understanding of his original assignment to revive the
revolutionary ideas of the Ishin at the school, Mechnikov directly con-
tributed to the rise of a distinct Russian translation culture in Japan. The
TSFL in this context became an important revolutionary site of knowl-
edge production that developed out of the historicity and global mean-
ing that Mechnikov gave to the Ishin as a revolution toward cooperatist
progress.
As the director of the new school, Mechnikov organized a curriculum
that sought to educate students via language studies in Populist-anarchist
perspectives on history and literature. He was followed by a series of
revolutionaries and political exiles from Russia, some of whom he was
apparently acquainted with. They continued to teach history and litera-
ture from Russian revolutionary perspectives. The Russianist Watanabe
Masāji, who teaches in the Russian program at the TSFL (renamed the
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), refers to the culture of the Russian
program as “Populist spirit” (narōdoniki seishin).

127. Mechnikov’s contract is held at the Kokuritsu kō monjokan (KKM), Kobun-

roku monbusho no bu: Two Years’ Contract, 2A-25-1193, June 15, Meiji 7 (1874). For the
document extending Mechnikov’s contract, see 2A-25-1441, April 23, Meiji 8 (1875).
128. Watanabe, “Tokyo Gaikokugo Gakkō.”
78 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

Student notebooks preserved in prefectural archives show that Mech-

nikov provided a lens to see history, one that attempted to place the
“people” as an important subject and object of historical development.
Mechnikov extensively examined the reform activities of Peter the Great
and his times in the classroom. Around the same time, he criticized Eu-
ropean journals for mistakenly conflating the powerless Meiji emperor
with the authoritarian Peter the Great and gave a very different picture
of the deep-rooted social origins of Meiji political reforms. He pointed
out that Peter’s forced transformation of politics and society in Russia
would have been impossible in Meiji Japan, given its advanced stage of
sociopolitical achievements. According to one student’s notes taken from
Mechnikov’s lectures on Near Eastern history at the TSFL, Mechnikov
discussed history from the “bottom up,” introducing the dualistic char-
acter of religion in the Near East, divided between a people’s religion
and a state religion. In Greek history, he focused on democratic practices
in which slaves were treated as beings as intelligent as their masters. He
also taught his students ethnology and folklore as essential to under-
standing history. Mechnikov’s understanding of history as demon-
strated in his teaching of various places and periods indicates a populist
historical problem consciousness that had echoes in his historical ac-
counts of Japan. This historical consciousness was forming in dialogue
and in response to his encounter with revolutionary Japan.
After Mechnikov’s departure from the TSFL, the series of former
prisoners and political exiles who replaced him at the school furthered a
populist and revolutionary historical consciousness in the Russian pro-
gram initiated by Mechnikov over the following decade and a half. In
the curriculum he established, students regularly read Russian literature
expressive of Populist ideas. Andrei Kolenko (1849–?), for example, who
served at the TSFL for over six years (1878–84), had students regularly

129. Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 46.

130. Kojima Kurataro Archive, 10–38, 9–36, 38. See also Watanabe, “Tokyo Gai-
kokugo Gakkō,” p. 4. For Mechnikov’s thoughts on ethnography and folklore in his-
tory, see Mechnikov, “Kul’turnoe znachenie demonizma.”
131. KKM, 2A-26-2543, March 12, Meiji 12 (1879); March 2, Meiji 12 (1879). On the
further extension of his contract, see 2A-26-2665, September 24, Meiji 13 (1880). See
also Watanabe, “Tokyo Gaikokugo Gakkō.”
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 79

commit to memory radical poems written by his fellow Russian exiles.

Kolenko had participated in radical student circles in the 1860s. Before
coming to Japan, he had been arrested by the Third Section, the tsar’s
political police, had been imprisoned in Petropavlovsk fortress, and then
had been placed in exile under police surveillance. He left for America
as a political émigré in 1871 and from there went to Japan, where he was
employed at the TSFL.
Focusing on a number of banned writers in Russia, Kolenko’s stu-
dents became well versed in poems that cursed tsarism, expressed thirst
for social justice, protested despotism, remembered the Decembrists and
other political exiles, and experienced the yearning for action of the po-
litically bound Russian intellectual. In an essay he wrote for Kolenko,
TSFL student Kojima Kuratarō (1860–1895) quoted such subversive Rus-
sian proverbs as “It is better to receive evil from truth than good from a
lie,” and “It is as bad to give a child riches and a knife as it is to give a sly
man power and strength.” According to Kojima’s meticulous course
notebooks, Kolenko also lectured on the sociohistorical background of
the literature being covered. The tragic biographies of many of the writ-
ers persecuted by the tsarist government and discussed in Kolenko’s lec-
tures were often told over and over among Russian intelligentsia, consti-
tuting in many ways their shared identity. Kojima’s notebooks are a
rare resource from one of Mechnikov’s and Kolenko’s students, offering
insight into the formation of emotions, and the ideas that gave rise to
them, in early Japanese encounters with Russian literature. Futabatei
and other translators of Russian similarly evoked cross-cultural empathy
and even anger against the various injustices and social ills narrated in
translated literature in a receptive late Meiji audience.

132. Shilovyi and Karnaukhovaia, Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 618.

133. Works covered in Kolenko’s class included songs of Decembrists Aleksandr
Bestuzhev (1797–1837) and Kondratii Ryleev (1795–1826), Aleksandr Odoevskii’s (1802–
1839) “In the Depths of the Siberian Ore,” Nikolai Ogarev’s (1813–1877) “Public Tavern,”
Aleksandr Polezhaev’s (1804–1838) “Four Nations,” and Vasilii Kurochkin’s (1831–1875)
“Two-headed Eagle.” Watanabe, “Tokyo Gaikokugo Gakkō.” Most of these writers were
exiled, sentenced to hard labor or executed for their political actions and views.
134. Kojima Kuratarō Archive, 14–42.
135. For example, Herzen tells of Tsar Nikolai I’s cruelty through his narrative tale of
A. Polezhaev’s life sentence to military ser vice. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pp. 17–20.
80 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

Mechnikov and fellow revolutionaries at the TSFL taught Russian

language, literature, and history as tools to view society, politics, and cul-
ture in a manner that easily led to critique of the social injustices of capi-
talist development and the Meiji government that was heavily responsible
for that development. It appears that as a result of their emotionally im-
bued teaching of a critical view of politics and society, Russian-language
study at the TSFL gained a new body of loyal followers. One hundred
students were added to the student body of the Russian program during
Mechnikov’s tenure there alone, for example. This newfound interest
in Russian studies has been recalled in documents left by TSFL alumni.
Andō Kensuke (1854–1924) wrote that with the new teacher, Mechnikov,
“overflowing with energy” (genki ōsei), “students in the Russian program
were really fascinated and studied extremely hard.” He recalled that
students all became unusually active in their studies “[Hijō ni kakki wo
obitekita].” It was in this context that TSFL Russian students would
become core participants in the cooperatist anarchist movement for de-
cades to come and would later develop close ties with anarchists like
Kōtoku Shūsui and Ōsugi Sakae. In all, during its first period of exis-
tence, 1873–84, the Russian course had a total of 567 students enrolled in
its normal five-year program. Although the Russian program made up
only one-eighth of the total student body, with many fewer students than
the French and German programs, it provided 30 percent of the total
number of graduates of the TSFL between 1873 and 1884. Despite the
fact that the Russian program was the most rigorous one at the TSFL,
leading many to drop out, it produced a much higher percentage of stu-
dents committed to completing the program. The program came to have
the highest graduation rate of all language programs. The emphasis on
language through literature in the Russian program by a committed and
energetic teaching body staffed in its advanced levels by Russian revolu-
tionaries made the program relevant to the contemporary experience of

136. Berton, Langer, and Swearingen, Japanese Training and Research, p. 16.
137. Andō recalls the early years of the TSFL program in Andō, “Gakkō kaikodan.”
Kojima Kuratarō’s materials on Russian studies at the TSFL, located at the Hokkaido
Monjokan archive, were also helpful to gain a sense of student experiences in the
program.
138. Berton, Langer, and Swearingen, Japanese Training and Research, p. 16.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 81

the post-Ishin era. Through their post-Ishin-era encounters with an en-

thusiastic student body, the Russian revolutionaries at the TSFL created
a space of foreign studies entirely unconventional in historians’ under-
standing of Meiji education.
Futabatei’s career as a translator and literary writer and his relations
with émigrés from Russia were fundamentally shaped in this intellectual
space that emerged from the meeting of Ishin and revoliutsiia. Futa-
batei first came to the TSFL to study Russian as a language of the enemy,
with hopes of eventually working for the Japanese military. However, while
he was a student at the school, his original interest in national security
turned into dedication to the study of Russian language and literature as
cultural weapons of critique. “In the class on literary history we had to
read representative works by representative Russian authors. In the pro-
cess, without my being at all aware of what was happening, I fell under
the influence of Russian literature. . . . An interest in literature moved
along side by side with my excessive chauvinism. At first neither was stron-
ger than the other, but soon my nationalistic fervor was quieted and my
passion for literature alone burned on.” Futabatei describes how Rus-
sian literature reoriented his nationalism and chauvinism toward a con-
sciousness of social phenomena and problems (shakai mondai): “I did
not love literature in the ordinary, literary sense. Instead, I became fasci-
nated with the observation, analysis, and predictions of social phenomena
or problems that the Russian writers treated—things that had never oc-
curred to me to consider in my earlier preoccupation with the problems
of the nation as a whole.”
As a student of the Russian émigrés Nicholas Gray and Kolenko at
the TSFL, Futabatei studied the modern novel form through his readings

139. On Futabatei’s relations with Bronisław Piłsudski, see Chapter 5. For accounts
of his interactions with others from Russia, see Yasui, “Futabatei no robun shokan” and
“Futabatei Shimei no Roshiajin Polandojin to no kōshō.”
140. Futabatei, “Yo ga hansei no zange,” pp. 267– 68. Translation by Ryan, “Com-
mentary,” pp. 19–20.
141. Although the vocabulary of shakai mondai did not possess meaning as the prob-
lem of capitalism within Western modernity until later, Futabatei used this language in
his autobiographical writings as a way of recalling his experience with Russian literature.
142. Futabatei, “Yo ga hansei no zange,” pp. 267–68. Translation by Ryan, “Com-
mentary,” pp. 19–20.
82 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

of Russian novels. Although Gray’s real identity remains unknown, his

use of an American alias had the markings of a political exile. Uchida
Roan (1868–1929), a well-known writer himself and a close friend of Fu-
tabatei’s, believed that Gray changed the course of Futabatei’s career.
Uchida recalls what he had heard about Gray from his friends in the
Russian program: “When [Gray] lectured on Russian literature, he ana-
lyzed a work in the minutest detail. . . . Gray’s lectures enabled the stu-
dents to rise above the limitations of language lessons and savor the
wonder of literature. It would have been impossible for anyone not to
learn to love literature after hearing him.” Futabatei would initiate the
development of a new, much larger Russian translation culture first fos-
tered by Mechnikov at the TSFL as a result of his encounters with early
Meiji intellectual life.
Working on Ukigumo soon after his graduation from the TSFL, Futa-
batei approached the writing of the novel as a translation practice from
Russian. Finding no adequate modern Japanese literary language to give
expression to his ideas, Futabatei famously first wrote many of his original
passages in Russian and then translated them into Japanese, thereby con-
structing a new, modern Japanese written language in the process.
Futabatei read the massively influential Russian literary critic Vissar-
ion Belinsky (1811–1846) with enthusiasm. Belinsky identified Russian

143. The identity of Gray remains a mystery. Ivanova suggests that Gray may have
been the revolutionary Nikolai Tchaikovsky (1851–1926), a close friend of Peter Kropot-
kin and Stepniak. Tchaikovsky’s alias was also Nicholas Gray. Ivanova, Russkie v Iaponii,
pp. 105–7. Tchaikovsky was an acquaintance of Mechnikov’s, a leading Russian revolu-
tionary in the Populist movement, and a leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries. His
name graced the famous Tchaikovsky Circle of young revolutionaries in Russia. How-
ever, my readings of Tchaikovsky’s letters during the period in which Gray was in Japan
reveal that he was likely not Gray. For example, a letter dated December 3, 1885, from
Tchaikovsky to Stepniak is addressed from England. This was during the time Gray was
in Japan. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive
of Literature and Art, RGALI), f. 1158, op. 1, d. 498, l. 1. Ivanova also suggests that Gray
may have been Felix Volkhovskii (1846–1914), who traveled through Japan on his way
out of Siberian exile. However, Volkhovskii’s letters reveal that he was still in Siberian
exile while Gray was in Japan. See Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 1:334–38.
144. Uchida, Futabatei no isshō, p. 354. Futabatei’s other friends also vividly recall
Gray’s influence on Futabatei’s literary development. See, e.g., Tsubouchi, “Futabatei
no koto.”
145. Futabatei, Ukigumo; Futabatei, Japan’s First Modern Novel.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 83

literature as intimately tied to organic society and a powerful source of

ideas on social equality. He believed that a truly Russian writer must
produce works that were “original” and “non-European.” Russian writ-
ers and critics like Belinsky tended to view their country’s history as
different from that of Europe and nativized their country as uniquely
Russian. Parody through extensive violations of “Western” aesthetic
forms came to be the definition of Russian literature before the Russian
Revolution of 1917. The twentieth-century Russian literary critic Viktor
Shklovsky writes that modern Russian literature refused to be respect-
able or conventional. In a sense, Russian literature was antiliterature.
On the basis of his new understanding of the role of literature in the
Russian revolutionary movement as simultaneously a product organic to
its culture and social life and a stinging weapon used to change people’s
consciousness on a wide scale, Futabatei decided to become a writer to
effect the transformation of society and its state of mind. He did so in a
manner that spoke directly to the Freedom and People’s Rights Move-
ment, which was at its peak when he began his literary career. Futabatei
wrote:
The government of Russia at that time being bigoted and tyrannical, in all mat-
ters a heavy oppression lay on the people. Whereas politicians studied this as a
political problem, novelists studied it as a human problem. Oppression appeared
in their books as something with blood and tears, and one small work by Tur-
genev is said to have influenced the freeing of the serfs. There were men who
went to the execution block because of a single novel; there were men who were
sent to Siberia because of a single poem. . . . Just as we in Japan, when reading
the works of someone like Yoshida Shōin, are brought sharply in contact with
human life and cannot help but be excited, readers in Russia were struck by the
same emotions as those of the author and ground their teeth in anger. Every writer
risked his life and was so deadly serious that some radical people carried bombs.
To awaken the people, they had made the pen into the point of a spear. There
was a difference of only one step between the pen and a bomb.

146. Belinsky, “Thoughts and Notes on Russian Literature,” p. 11.

147. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works, pp. 350, 363.
148. Morson, Literature and History, p. 25.
149. Futabatei, “Rokoku bungaku no Nihon bungaku,” pp. 283–84. Italics in the
original.
84 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

The manufacturing of a written vernacular through Futabatei’s liter-

ary translations from Russian was integral to his endeavor to transform
society and its state of mind. Nineteenth-century Russian writers strove
to reflect the situation of the Russian people realistically and critically
with the high expectation that their literature would transform society.
They often relied on vernacular language to produce the sense of realism
and immediacy that they needed, creating thereby a sense of situated-
ness in the immediate historical present in their literature. Beginning
with Futabatei, Japanese writers and other intellectuals studied Russian
literature as a distinctive source of critical expression and a more demo-
cratic language and style of writing. Not only were Russian literary de-
vices and themes reflected in the literature Futabatei created, but also the
very language that he used was a creation out of the merging of the Rus-
sian language and a Japanese popular (heimin) colloquial language.
Futabatei’s first literary project was a translation of Nikolai Gogol’s
work. Futabatei was most strongly drawn to the works of Gogol in his
attempts to create a new literary language that unified the colloquial
with the written language (genbunitchi). This was because Gogol pro-
vided a model for a democratic style of language and writing that un-
masked the realities of social life through satire. Futabatei identified an
analogue in the colloquial language used by the lower classes of Tokyo,
on which he based his translations. The attempt caused his fellow writer,
Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), to view Futabatei’s translated language as
too coarse and vulgar. Futabatei had recycled the late Edo (1603–1868)
culture of the subversive in order to express the satire and scathing criti-
cism of society in Gogol’s work. His second attempt at translation, a par-
tial translation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, was retitled The Spirit of
the Populists (Kyomutō katagi). The revolutionary ideology behind these
translations resulted in the production of a new language. It simultane-
ously attracted a wide readership.

150. See, for example, Brooks, “Readers and Reading,” pp. 100–102.
151. Scholars presume that the work Futabatei translated was The Inspector General,
although no remains of the translation have been found. Hatano, “Russian Literature,”
p. 49.
152. Ibid., pp. 49–50.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 85

By retrieving and intertranslating the language of urban Japanese

commoners and of Russian literature, both of which were foreign to the
Japanese literary tradition, Futabatei revolutionized the written Japanese
word. He created a new, standardized written language on the basis of a
combination of his translations of nineteenth-century Russian literature
into Japanese and his recycling of Tokugawa urban commoners’ collo-
quial language. Through his simultaneous translation from the past and
from beyond national borders, Futabatei crafted a modern Japanese
language that was not other, but an expression of a modern self rooted in
the past. This was neither a cosmopolitan self that was Western or for-
eign nor an archaic native self, but a modern self. Many contemporaries
would recall Futabatei’s Russian translations and fiction as surprisingly
accurate reflections of their own emotions and subjectivity.
Through his translations, Futabatei inspired interest in and helped
formulate the “social problem” in Japan. He wrote in his memoirs, “As I
was upholding socialism as my credo at that time and eagerly reading
Belinsky’s essays, my ambition was to depict the dark side of [modern]
Japanese culture.” The problem of capitalism and issues of social equal-
ity were themes running through Futabatei’s translations and writings. He
openly attributed his views to socialism, but his socialism was the human-
istic socialism of Russian Populism rather than Marxism’s materialistic
view of human life. He was a close reader of Kropotkin and Bakunin,
along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and it was to Kropotkin and Herzen
that he attributed his socialism, indicating its cooperatist anarchist tint.
By 1900, Futabatei often talked about sōgo fujo, the mutual aid of coop-
eratist anarchism, and Kropotkin and Herzen. He was one of the earli-
est Japanese intellectuals to expressly favor notions of cooperatist anarchist
progress.
Inspired by literature and at the same time hoping to find inspiration
for his literary and linguistic production, Futabatei sought to document
the problems engendered by capitalism in his urban surroundings. In-
deed, the early Japa nese social scientist Yokoyama Gennosuke likened
Futabatei’s literary work to “sociological” and “ethnographic” studies

153. Futabatei, “Yo ga hansei no zange,” pp. 267– 68. Translation by Nakai, “Futa-
batei Shimei,” p. 15.
154. Tsubouchi, “Futabatei no koto,” pp. 35, 50.
86 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

rather than novels. After completing his studies at the TSFL, Futa-
batei rented a room near the Yotsuya Samegahashi slum in Tokyo, one of
the most notorious slums of the time. When he returned from his work
in the department of the government gazette (kanpō-kyoku), he would
change from his Western suit into typical laborers’ dress, blending in as
a resident there. This practice was entirely consistent with the spirit of
his literature. He went to bars frequented by laborers and poor prosti-
tutes. He followed the spirit of his thought even in his married life, mar-
rying a prostitute whom he met during his wanderings. This everyday
life that he chose provided Futabatei with material for his study of urban
social problems emerging from capitalism. These were the people whose
language he was attempting to integrate into his literature. He attempted
to find an expression for the feelings of the inhabitants of the slum as a
modern condition. He was convinced through his reading of Russian
literature that he could locate the “warmth of the human heart” rather
than the materialism of capitalist development. During a period of
disillusionment with his ability to render a literature capable of produc-
ing real change, Futabatei translated reports that introduced social and
labor problems in Western Europe and Russia published by the Cabinet
Information Office. Kinoshita Naoe (1869–1937), who would become a
leading socialist, said that Futabatei’s articles were an extremely precious
source of information for him.
Journalists and close observers of the urban poor Yokoyama and Ma-
tsubara Iwagorō (1866–1935) may be considered early social scientists.
They were also students and friends of Futabatei who had been inspired
by his example and emotionally drawn to his translations of Russian
literary depictions of the poor and downtrodden urbanites of St. Peters-
burg. Yokoyama and Matsubara produced their own social scientific
studies of Japan’s laborers as a social critique. They both viewed Futa-

155. Yokoyama, Untitled article.

156. Uchida, Omoidasu hitobito, pp. 326–27.
157. Kinoshita, Kami, ningen, jiyū, pp. 339–40; Yokoyama, “Shinjin Hasegawa Ta-
tsunosuke,” p. 207.
158. The best-known work to be written in this context was Yokoyama, Nihon no
kasō shakai. Yokoyama received Futabatei’s financial support.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 87

batei as a revolutionary. Yokoyama’s resulting close and objective exami-

nation of social problems represents an origin of Japanese social science
in these non-Marxist Russian-Japanese nonstate intellectual relations.
The historical epistemology of the rise of this early social science in Japan
can be traced to the moment of revolutionary encounter and correspond-
ing travel of emotional engagement with the injustices of capitalism, social
inequality, and the illegitimate power of the state.
Many intellectuals of late Meiji reacted emotionally to their readings of
Futabatei’s Russian translations and fiction. When the translations came
out in the widely read journal Kokumin no tomo, many young aspiring
writers memorized them by heart. The writings’ revolutionary way of ex-
pressing things closely coincided with how people felt. Tokutomi Roka,
for example, admired Futabatei’s style so much that he hand-copied Aibiki,
Futabatei’s translation from Turgenev’s Hunter’s Sketches, to learn it by
heart. Other young writers, rising celebrity writers like Shimazaki Tōson
(1872–1943) and Tayama Katai (1871–1930), also memorized Aibiki and
told of the great astonishment they felt when they read it.
Whereas so-called translations of the West produced in this period
seemed to be about others, a temporary experience of another’s life, many
felt that Futabatei’s writings expressed their own subjectivity. Shimamura
Hōgetsu (1871–1918), leader of the widely popular Geijutsu za theatrical
group, for example, said that Futabatei had read his mind at that moment
and time. Another important thinker, the popular poet Ishikawa Taku-
boku (1886–1912), said famously, “I am Rudin,” referring to the main
character of Turgenev’s work by the same name, translated by Futabatei.
Here, readers expressed anger against social injustice and also identified
with the characters who inspired those emotions. The fresh new style of
writing introduced by Futabatei impressed many young writers and was
largely influential in the development of a new style of written Japanese
widely used from the late Meiji. For many, Futabatei’s moving translations
were simultaneously their first encounter with Russian culture and their
first foray into the creation of a Russian-Japanese language of a non-Western

159. See Yamada, “Futabatei to Matsubara Iwagorō.”

160. Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908) also wrote his work Musashino under the inspira-
tion of Futabatei’s style. Nakai, “Futabatei Shimei,” p. 56.
161. Shimamura’s obituary of Futabatei, “Hasegawa Futabatei shi toku.”
88 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

modern. This first encounter would have long-lasting repercussions for

many, like Tokutomi Roka and Ishikawa Takuboku, and thus for intel-
lectual history of the Meiji and Taishō (1912–1926) era.
Leading intellectuals in Japan, in a period spanning the late nineteenth
and the first half of the twentieth century, continued to be emotionally
drawn to the translations of Russian literature. In the late 1890s, for ex-
ample, Yokoyama was led to turn from law and politics to the occupation
for which he became known by Futabatei’s translations of Russian litera-
ture and his reports on laborers in Russia and elsewhere. This emotion-
filled embrace of Russian literature and nonfictional accounts of Russian
social life and revolutionary movement was a common denominator
among those who later turned to anarchism and socialism.
Futabatei’s translations emerged in the context of a rising interest in
the 1880s in the Russian revolutionary movement among participants in
political movements in Japan who identified themselves as inheritors of
the revolutionary legacy of the Ishin. For example, in an attempt to put
into print the expression of that revolutionary spirit, in 1884 Miyazaki
Muryū (1855–89) adapted and translated the famous account of the Rus-
sian Populist movement Underground Russia by Stepniak-Kravchinskii,
first published in English in 1882. Miyazaki was a propagandist for a
radical current of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. His work,
titled Kishūshū (Demons’ tears), which led to his imprisonment, was writ-
ten in reference to the Kaba Mountain incident, which occurred several
months before. In the incident, members of the Freedom and People’s
Rights Movement prepared antigovernment acts. Intending to join up
with the local peasantry, they planned to incite an uprising in the central
region of Japan. Miyazaki’s rewriting and publication of Underground
Russia in the Freedom and People’s Rights newspaper Jiyū shimbun,
which made Stepniak-Kravchinskii’s work widely popular, was only one
of several invocations of the Russian revolutionary movement by mem-
bers of the Japanese movement. Miyazaki lamented and heroicized those
who had fought and died in the incident through a retelling of Stepniak-
Kravchinskii’s heroic account. The story focused on three Russian revo-
lutionaries, Kropotkin, Sofia Perovskaya, and Vera Figner. Miyazaki’s

162. Yutani, “Nihon no kasō shakai of Gennosuke Yokoyama.”

163. Miyazaki, Kishūshū; Stepniak, Underground Russia.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 89

translation of the narrative therefore provided added meaning and impe-

tus to the efforts of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement in Japan.
The lasting emotion of anger at injustice done to those who sought to
improve society was powerfully conveyed not only by the translation of
Russian revolutionary narratives and the corresponding new vernacular
language but also by images of heroines like the executed Sofia Perovs-
kaya, who served as martyrs in Japan.
Miyazaki’s translation had a direct personal linkage with Mechnikov
that suggests that Mechnikov’s presence continued to be felt in Japan
long after he had left. Mechnikov had been largely responsible for the
publication and dissemination of Stepniak-Kravchinskii’s work, which
was a direct result of Mechnikov’s collaboration, assistance, and transla-
tion into English. The huge success of Stepniak-Kravchinskii’s work
outside Russia was due in great part to Mechnikov’s efforts. Mechnikov
provided for his younger friend’s financial security, arranged for Stepniak-
Kravchinskii’s new émigré life when he was forced to emigrate to Swit-
zerland, translated Underground Russia into English, and secured a path
for its publication by introducing it to English publishers and by using
his other substantial contacts in England. The two figures in the Rus-
sian revolutionary movement formed one tie in an expanding interlock-
ing network.
This particular mode of collective emotion traveled via narrative form
not just over geographic space but also over time. Tremendously popular
in their time, Futabatei’s translations of Russian literature and Stepniak-
Kravchinskii’s accounts of the Russian revolutionary movement were
called on over and over again in later decades in order to revive the emo-
tions spawned in their original readings. Japanese anarchists and social-
ists frequently referred to Russian literature to bring back the desire for
social and political justice lost with the suppression of the Freedom and
People’s Rights Movement. When the movement was suppressed, for
example, Tokutomi Roka used the symbolism of Russian Populism in

164. See the letters between Mechnikov and Stepniak in Taratuty, “Iz perepiski s S.
M. Stepniakom-Kravchinskim.”
165. Stepniak and Peter Kropotkin had close relations as well and maintained their
friendship until Stepniak’s death. Kropotkin recalls Stepniak in his Memoirs of a
Revolutionist.
90 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

an 1896 article for Kokumin shimbun to recall the spirit of the Japa-
nese movement. Roka based his article, “Sutsuru inochi,” on Stepniak-
Kravchinskii’s Life of a Nihilist. The anarchist Kōtoku used Muryū’s
work to symbolize the betrayal of revolutionary ideals when his socialist
newspaper Heimin shimbun was shut down. Published in the last issue
of Heimin shimbun, the reference revealed the extent to which the sym-
bolism of Muryū’s work was widely shared. It is well known that Kanno
Sugako (1881–1911), the feminist anarchist executed with Kōtoku in 1911
in the Daigyaku incident, in which twelve people were executed for alleg-
edly conspiring to assassinate the emperor, similarly referred to her emo-
tional attachment to and sympathy for executed Russian female revolu-
tionaries. Similar intellectual practices of recycling translated Russian
Populist literature and accounts to invoke the desire of the Freedom and
People’s Rights Movement for freedom and social justice and the sense
of betrayal of the Ishin’s revolutionary ideals would continue throughout
the Meiji and Taishō periods.
Chapter 3 discloses how rural poetry and reading circles invoked Futa-
batei’s translations of Russian literature at the height of the Russo-Japanese
War as an expression of frustration with the state’s use and abuse of com-
mon people in its project of war and imperialist expansion. The tracing
of emotions through literary expression and, in this case, translation offers
intellectual historians a useful methodological tool. The emotions dis-
cussed here were inseparable from cognitive processes and very much a
part of intellectual history. Literature as the conveyer of emotion traveled
across borders and across time via translation through different historical
and cultural contexts, providing historians with a clue to identify and trace
emotions as cognitive and conceptual phenomena.
The Russian program at the TSFL continued to produce student radi-
cals and supporters of cultural revolution in later decades. From behind
the scenes, the program quietly supported the development of modern
anarchism in early twentieth-century Japan. Three decades after Mech-

166. Later, in 1902, the publication of Kemuyama Sentarō’s (1877–1954) work Anar-
chism was the first introduction of anarchism in Japan. Kemuyama, Kinsei museifushugi.
167. Kōtoku wrote, “This very month, this very day, Heimin shimbun is dying. Dev-
ils cry [oni shūshū], the Gods are offended. . . . There are bloody tears in the depths of
their eyes.” Kōtoku, Kōtoku Shūsui zenshū, 5:561.
 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin 91

nikov established the program, a number of its students became key

members of the first self-claimed anarchist group in Tokyo in 1908, as
Kōtoku revealed in a personal letter to his friend Kropotkin.

Mechnikov saw the Meiji Ishin as the revolution toward global coopera-
tist anarchist society. Through Russian-Japanese encounters in the wider
world context, an idea of cooperatist anarchist civilization and progress
emerged that made the Meiji Ishin, or Revolution on the Pacific, an impe-
tus for world human progress. Thus, at the very moment at which Japan’s
borders were opened to negotiation with the West and to the concomi-
tant narrative of civilizational progress, they were also opened to ideas of
progress and civilization and ways to link Japan to the wider world inde-
pendent of Western modern ideals. The transnational flow of ideas and
the international transsemination of thought occurring on the nondiplo-
matic level provide a fascinating instance of transnational intellectual
relations. The vision discussed in this chapter was the result of a novel
meeting unique to revolutionary Russia and Japan in the wider world
context, beyond an imagined divide between a progressive West and a
tradition-bound East. Only via the examination of Russian-Japanese non-
state revolutionary encounters can one see the emergence and formulation
of this independent vision of modernity.
Russian-Japanese revolutionary encounters also gave birth to a Russian
translation culture and Futabatei’s crafting of a modern Japanese lan-
guage based on Japanese vernacular language and his translations from
nineteenth-century Russian Populist literature. Literary critics agree that
the Japanese novel as a literary genre began with Futabatei’s Ukigumo,
which Marleigh Grayer Ryan introduced as Japan’s first modern novel.
Ryan wrote that Futabatei’s translations of Russian fiction brought the
power of Western literature to an entire generation of young Japa nese
writers. Although Ryan’s work was published in 1965, the general
understanding of Futabatei’s work as a product of Western influence has
never been questioned. The tendency to typify “Russian” as “Western”
in discussions of Japan’s relation to the West is problematic, however.
Ryan’s statement assumes that Russian writers identified themselves and

168. Kōtoku to Kropotkin, December 26, 1908. GARF, f. 1129, op. 2, khr. 1418, l. 21.
169. See Ryan, “Introduction,” p. xiii.
92 Revoliutsiia Meets Ishin

their own works as “Western,” and that the Japanese writers also identified
Russian works as such. It also adopts the premise of the Western impact
on post-1868 Japan as the conceptual foundation for modern Japanese
history. But a closer examination of Futabatei’s Russian translation prac-
tices that led to Ukigumo reveals that the so-called first modern Japanese
novel was actually a product of a Japanese-Russian revolutionary encoun-
ter and a resulting Russian translation culture in Japan that translated
Russian literature and language in polemic with Western modernity.
Through this Russian translation culture, the understanding of the “social”
emerged.
In the context of Russian translation culture in polemic with Western
modernity, the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy emerged as the most translated
foreign writer in the entire history of modern Japanese translation prac-
tice. The following chapter explores the peculiar place of Tolstoy in Japa-
nese cultural and intellectual life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
 ch apter 2
Anarchist Religion:
Translation and Conversion beyond
Western Modernity

At the turn of the last century, a wall-sized mural of the novelist Lev
Tolstoy was hung in Kazan Cathedral, one of the most prominent build-
ings of the Russian Orthodox Church, located in the center of St. Peters-
burg. Painted and hung after Tolstoy’s notorious excommunication from
the Orthodox Church in 1901, the massive portrait in Figure 2.1 depicted
in grand detail and vividness Tolstoy burning in the flames of hell. Th is
image was reproduced and hung in churches around Russia. The writer’s
anathematization of Russian Orthodoxy was a tumultuous and emotional
event for the church and for the Russian public in general.
Curiously, at the moment at which Tolstoy became a dangerous apos-
tate of the Russian Orthodox Church, he was gaining a widespread reli-
gious following in Japan, where many regarded him as a prophetic reli-
gious thinker and a saint. If he was a satanic voice for the Russian
Orthodox Church, in Japan Tolstoy had become a voice from God by the
early 1900s. A follower from Kōfu, Japan, told him, for example, “The

1. The Holy Synod disseminated its official judgment on Tolstoy’s excommunication

across Russia, and it was published in almost all newspapers in the country on February
24–25, 1901. After the excommunication, Tolstoy received numerous threatening letters
and even death threats from the general public. At the same time, on February 24,
thousands of people demonstrated in Moscow against the synodal decision. For more
information on Tolstoy’s excommunication, see Pozoiskii, Lev Tolstoi i tserkov; and Po-
zoiskii, K istorii otlucheniia L’va Tolstogo.
Fig. 2.1 Fragment of a church mural in the village of Tazov, Kursk Province, Russia.
Source: Pozoiskii, K istorii otlucheniia L’va Tolstogo.
 Anarchist Religion 95

truth you advocate comes to my mind convincingly, as if it came from

Heaven. . . . I can say it is a revelation in the true sense of the term.” Like
the Kōfu admirer, many used Christian vocabulary to refer to and make
sense of Tolstoyan thought in this period.
Equally striking was the fact that the person who introduced Tolstoy
to Japan as a religious thinker was the dean of the Orthodox Seminary in
Tokyo and a leading religious thinker in Japan, Konishi Masutarō. Ironi-
cally, it was in the process of Konishi’s attempt to translate Orthodoxy
into Japanese terms that he introduced Tolstoy’s religious ideas. The re-
sulting conversions to what was called “Tolstoyan religion” (Torusutoi no
shūkyō) or “religious anarchism” (shūkyōteki anākizumu) in Japan occurred
in the total absence of the converter, that is, without a missionary or church
institution.
In the larger context of Meiji Russian translation practice introduced
in Chapter 1, Tolstoy was the most translated figure in modern Japan. The
degree of Japanese interest in Tolstoy was remarkable not only within
the Japanese context but also on the world scale. To borrow the phrase of
the Russian scholar Kim Rekho, “In terms of the breadth and depth of the
study of Tolstoy’s works, Japan without question occupies a special place
among other countries. . . . Nowhere, except Russia, have the works of
Tolstoy been published as many times as in Japan. Nowhere outside Rus-
sia have they written about Tolstoy so much as in Japan.” For example,
Tolstoy’s collected works, ranging from ten to forty-seven volumes, have
been published at least thirteen times in Japan. If one looks at Japanese
intellectual history as a history of translation practice, the absence of his-
torical interest in Japanese Tolstoyanism presents a major lacuna in the
historiography.
Tolstoy has never been given more than a passing glance in Western
scholarship on Japanese intellectual history. He has been mentioned oc-
casionally as just another proverbial Western novelist, and sometimes as

2. K. Shiraishi to Tolstoy, May 20, 1910, Otdel Rukopisei Gosudarstvennogo Muzeia

L. N. Tolstogo (ORGMT), f. 1, inv. 2314. Emphasis in Shiraishi’s original letter.
3. Rekho, “Lev Tolstoi i Vostok,” p. 6. Rekho points out that by 1970, for example,
Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace had been published twenty times by different Japa nese
translators and publishers. In Germany, with the second-highest number in the world,
War and Peace had been published about fourteen times, and in England, eight times.
96 Anarchist Religion

a Christian. There are a number of problems with this description. First,

it fails to explain why his religious and philosophical works made him
the most widely read foreign writer in modern Japan. Second, and per-
haps more important, it does not explain why Tolstoy always seemed to
appear on the late Meiji-Taishō cultural stage arm-in-arm with the well-
known anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Third, Tolstoy was distinctly identified
in Japan as a Russian thinker rather than as a so-called Western thinker.
Moreover, if Tolstoy was the most popular Christian thinker in Japan,
this in turn does not fit the historiographical paradigm that Christianity
was a major force in the Westernization and modernization of Meiji
Japan. The answer to these mysteries lies in resolving a much larger prob-
lem, that of religion and modernities in late Meiji Japan.
The following points will serve as guides through the transnational
intellectual terrain. First, the widespread turn to Tolstoyan thought was
a religious conversion, but one that does not accord with the existing
understanding of it as part of a larger Christian conversion of the West.
I argue that although Japanese Tolstoyanism was couched in the vocab-
ulary of Christianity, it was in fact a critique of late nineteenth-century
Christianity. Religious conversion, perhaps one of the most destabilizing
factors in human society, was an active practice of self-transformation
rooted in the transformation of knowledge in Japanese-Russian transla-
tion practice. Tolstoy and Konishi’s mutual project to fashion and dis-
seminate a new anarchist religion stimulated among converts an active
imagination and expectation that they had adopted a universal religion
for future human progress.
Historians have developed an understanding of the translated char-
acter of the term shūkyō, or modern religion, as the Christianity of the
West, thanks to the work of James Ketelaar, among others. That is, it was
a concept of a modern religious institution translated from Western

4. The question whether Russia was “Eastern” or “Western” has been endlessly de-
bated. Whether or not Tolstoy, or “Russia” at large, was “Western” or “non-Western” is
not the interest of this book, which is rather how Japa nese and Russians themselves
identified, constructed, and translated Russian culture and thought and on that basis
formed a relationship that was beyond the East-West hierarchical relationship founded
on a Euro-American-centric temporal construct of progress and civilization.
5. See Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan.
 Anarchist Religion 97

Christianity that served to unify and empower the nation-state by lending

it the credibility of civilization. Peter van der Veer has shown how the mod-
ernizing project of the secular state in fact gave religion a strong new
impulse. The meaning of religion thereby became coupled with Western
modernity and in this way held tremendous authority. In return, religion
became the defining feature of the nation. A departure from the Western
modernizing project, then, depended on the transformation of modern
religion as so defined.
Tolstoyan or “anarchist” religion uprooted some of the dominant
tropes of Western modernity. This was achieved by radically transfigur-
ing Christianity from an ideological basis for the modern nation-state
and Western modernity into an anarchist theology that came to be a
nonhierarchical and noninstitutional religious thought independent of
Western civilizational discourse. This can be contrasted with an existing
understanding that it was Christianity and its assumed Westernization
of converts that provided the critical basis for protest against the given
political and social order in late Meiji Japan. In the case of conversions to
Tolstoyan religion, the Christianity of Western modernity was an object
rather than the source of critique.
Any cross-cultural knowledge exchange involves translation. Meth-
odologically, I will pay particular attention to the practice of translating
Tolstoy’s thought as a way to illuminate the phenomenon of religious
Tolstoyanism in Japan and thereby provide a new understanding of the
interworking of translation and subjectivity during this period. Histori-
ans have often reduced the question of subjectivity in modern Japan to
being the product of, or a reaction to, translating the West. Translating
the West has been described in the literature on modern translation prac-
tice in Japan as translating the foreign, leading to a so-called divided self
among Japanese intellectuals. Yet the translation of Tolstoyan religion

6. Veer, Imperial Encounters.

7. Although the historical context and the nature of intellectual practices here differ
from those found in postcolonial studies of religious conversion, the theme may be
further explored in comparative perspective. For a reexamination of religious conver-
sion in transcultural relations between India and Great Britain, see Viswanathan,
Outside the Fold.
8. See the important contribution by Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest.
98 Anarchist Religion

discussed in this chapter was never a translation of Western metaphysics

or of Western modernity. Translation in this case was a rearticulation of
an existing social practice and intellectual current in Japan that fails to
fit the phenomenon of “translating the foreign.” This chapter thereby
problematizes historians’ reliance on the trope of translation as a unidi-
rectional transfer of knowledge from West to non-West, whether in the
form of direct influence, indigenization, self-colonization, or reconfigu-
ration. In the historiography of modern Japan, this exchange of knowl-
edge on unequal terms appears self-evident, but only within the bounds
of an almost exclusive focus on the cultural articulators of Western moder-
nity, the elite intellectuals of imperial institutions and government rep-
resentatives. Meanwhile, historians have assumed that their articulations
produced either a Westernizing modern subjectivity among the larger
populace or a reactionary cultural nationalism.
The Russian translations produced by Konishi and other graduates of
the Orthodox Church Seminary merged with the translations produced
in the neighboring Tokyo School of Foreign Languages to create the unique
phenomenon of a Russian translation culture in modern Japan. Established
by Mechnikov and continued by fellow Russian revolutionary exiles, the
Russian program at the TSFL also taught Russian translation as the trans-
lation of knowledge and thought independent of Western modernity. This
was a dynamic convergence between the church and revolutionaries on
Japanese soil.
The conversions to Tolstoyan religion were products of the dialectics
of knowledge exchange beyond the East-West hierarchical divide. This
production of knowledge relied on mutual translations and retransla-
tions as action and reaction, utterance and response, definition and re-
definition, in which moral vocabularies were negotiated between lan-
guages to produce new languages. Translation was thus multidirectional
and dialectical, blurring the distinction between “original” and “trans-
lated.” Rather than a form of unequal power relations, translation in this
discourse was a transnational exchange conducted on equal grounds
that implied a nonhierarchical world order beyond the epistemological
limits of East-West relations. It was only in this way that translated

9. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity.

 Anarchist Religion 99

knowledge led to conversion on the scale and depth seen in this case.
Simply put, conversion was a product not of Tolstoy’s influence but of
the interactive relationality that defined Japanese-Russian mutual trans-
lation. Translation thereby became a dynamic and novel articulation of
the previously unexpressed self on universalistic terms. This history of
translation and conversion will show how people in late Meiji Japan artic-
ulated themselves and reactivated their future participation and expecta-
tion in the modern world.
One of the lasting tropes in histories of Meiji Christianity has been
the positing of Japanese nationalism in stark contrast to Christianity in
Japan, a presumably rationalizing force for the creation of the modern
cosmopolitan subject. Yet the promotion of Christianity among Japa-
nese religious leaders was often couched in nationalist terms. One of the
main examples of liberal Christian leadership in Japan has been Niijima
Jō (1843–1890), founder of Dōshisha Christian University in Kyoto, who
trained in the United States. His leadership among Meiji Christian con-
verts has been considered the source of protest against state ideologies
and nationalism in Japan. But Niijima sought to spread Christianity in
Japan as an expression of his urge to civilize and modernize the nation
and thereby make it an equal in the international order through West-
ernization from within. Christianity here served as an instrument of na-
tional advancement into the community of the “civilized” nation-states.
Meanwhile, the religiously rooted practices discussed here that neither
embraced the West as a model for national progress nor posited a nativist
counterresponse have been ignored. It follows that this largely unnoticed
trend of Tolstoyanism was a turn toward neither Western assimilation-
ism nor nationalist pan-Asianism, but toward a possibility of an anti-
hierarchical, moral society beyond either school. Historians’ long-held
assumptions about Western liberalism as the source of resistance to na-
tionalism and conservatism in modern Japan appear to need rethinking.
In sum, there is a reminder here of the significance of looking beyond
the binary world of knowledge exchange between “colonized” and “col-
onizer” or “East” and “West” toward a fresh conception of knowledge
making rooted in multilateral relationalities in wider world perspective.

10. Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest, pp. 181–87.

100 Anarchist Religion

Japanese Orthodoxy’s Heterodoxy

Konishi Masutarō has been described as a heretic of Orthodox Christi-
anity. This presupposes that Japanese Orthodoxy had a single unified
position against which one became either a believer or heretic. On the
contrary, Konishi expressed the Russian-Japanese Orthodox cultural en-
vironment in Meiji Japan at one end of its intellectual spectrum. “Chris-
tianity” was an evolving project in the Meiji context. An examination of
Konishi’s activities therefore requires reading outside a strict heretic-
follower bifurcation of the Japanese Orthodox religious world and of
Christianity in Japan at large. In this way, one can make sense of his
otherwise-inconceivable conversion of a national Orthodox Christianity
to “religious anarchism.” An introduction to the Orthodox mission where
Konishi trained to become a religious leader will aid in understanding
Konishi’s conversion, both of Christianity and to anarchist religion, as a
product of Russian-Japanese transnational intellectual relations.
From its earliest years, the Orthodox Church in Japan where Konishi
was trained identified itself by its difference from the West. The success
of the Orthodox mission in Japan that the priest Nikolai (Ivan Dmit-
rievich Kasatkin) (1836–1912) founded in the early 1870s created excite-
ment among some in Russia because of its symbolic achievement of
universal humanism rooted in Eastern Orthodox ideals. For example,
the mission represented the novelist Dostoevsky’s understanding of the
way in which Eastern Christianity would provide a solution to the mod-
ern ethical crisis faced in the wake of capitalism, industrialization, and
unbridled individualism. In 1887, Vladimir Solov’ev, who would be-

11. For a discussion of Konishi as a heretic, see Yanagi, Torusutoi to Nihon, pp. 31–40.
Although I do not disagree with the label “heretic,” I argue that the historical analysis
based on that bifurcation hides the extent to which Konishi inherited his desire to remake
Christianity in Japanese form from the Japanese Orthodox intellectual environment.
12. In 1880, Dostoevsky paid a visit to Nikolai’s room in Moscow, where Nikolai was
staying during his second and last trip to Russia from Japan. Dostoevsky had excitedly
prepared for his chance to talk with Nikolai, a highlight of his rare trip to Moscow
from his hermetic existence in St. Petersburg. For Dostoevsky, Nikolai had put into
practice his thoughts, reflected in the historic speech Dostoevsky was giving the next
day at the citywide Pushkin celebrations. The speech commemorated Alexander Push-
kin (1799–1837) as the symbol of a new universal culture emerging from Russia, based
 Anarchist Religion 101

come one of Russia’s most recognized philosophers, applied to be a mis-

sionary in Japan under Nikolai. Solov’ev eventually attempted to de-
velop a universalist philosophy that unified elements of Eastern (Russian)
and Western philosophical traditions. The mission’s overwhelming
success in Japan suggested to Russian observers the universal possibility
of Orthodox Christianity as a religion that did not seek the rational God
of Western metaphysics, but rather was based on an ethical notion of
human interdependency. But if the vision of a universalistic moral prog-
ress lay with the privileging of the spirit of Russian Orthodox Christian-
ity, that vision remained penned within the powerful institutional au-
thority of a church closely aligned with the nation-state.
Nikolai’s vision played a tremendous role in forming the particular
ideological framework for Orthodox Christianity in Japan, a framework
that made it unique in a number of ways among the Christian missions
in Japan. The Orthodox mission’s policy was to relate to the church in
Japan as an independent national entity equal to the church in Russia.
This was a unique position that reflected the Orthodox belief that every
church is ontologically equal, and that no church or bishop, including
the one located in Rome, has authority over another church. This notion
of parallel jurisdiction among all churches emerged from the Orthodox
belief that the Spirit of God himself is within and living in all churches.
In this context, the converted were given considerable latitude to define
Japanese Orthodoxy and the meaning of its mission for the future. This
opened up an intellectual space for various debates, practices, and intel-
lectual developments within the church.
In a similar vein, an Orthodox vision to civilize the inferior in Japan
was largely absent. Nikolai’s vision was rather to lay a framework for
Orthodoxy that was based on and preserved essential aspects of existing
religious thoughts and cultural traditions in Japan. The historicity be-
hind this conceptual development was rooted in part in Nikolai’s under-
standing of the Meiji Ishin (Restoration) as a modern revolution. Niko-
lai was a serious student of Japanese history, which his students recalled

on the spiritual values of humility and world brotherhood and rooted in a people ide-
ally located between East and West.
13. Others, like Sergei Rachinskii (1833–1902), professor at Moscow University, ex-
pressed a similar attraction to the mission. Rachinskii, Introduction.
102 Anarchist Religion

was Nikolai’s favorite class to teach at the seminary. As noted in Chapter

1, on the basis of his studies and his experiences in Japan during the most
turbulent years of the Ishin, Nikolai saw the Ishin as a radical change
that was a product of Japan’s internal developments. He accorded to Ja-
pan its own history and thereby its own modern identity. He observed
the Meiji “revolution” as a particular beginning of a new civilization and
progress in which the West played a peripheral role. Here again, Niko-
lai saw the impetus for this development as coming from within Japan.
Nikolai’s goal in publishing a brief history of Japan for Russian read-
ers in 1869 was “to give the key to understanding the contemporary
Japanese revolution . . . written on the basis of Japanese histories: Daini-
honshi, Kokushiryaku, Ishi and Nihongaishi.” He claimed that whereas
the Japanese were relegated in the European imagination to eternal
childhood, as a comic-book figure “in a robe, with a little pigtail on his
crown, humorously squatting and giggling,” he sought to depict the ma-
ture accomplishments and development of a nation’s people over time.
Nikolai saw the Ishin as a natural product of a developed commoners’
society. He also believed that the democratic tendencies he observed had
deep roots, having developed over many centuries from the ground up.
“As for the people, they have a much greater condition for the realization
of their civic freedoms than the people of many states in Europe.”
For Nikolai, Japan’s modern development was to be fueled by religious
faith as a source for ethical human society. Instead of changing and
transfiguring the local into the Western model of culture, Christianity
would adapt itself to the traditions and existing ethical foundations of
the locality in which it was to take root. Orthodox Christianity was thus
to undergo a degree of indigenization and merging with the existing
foundations of religious faith in Japan. In order to adequately facilitate
the transformation and merging of religious faith in Japan, Nikolai inten-
sively studied the Japanese language and Japanese culture, history, and
art for over ten years before seriously embarking on his missionary activi-
ties. He translated numerous texts on the Gospels and Orthodox religious
teachings from Russian into Japanese and published considerable research

14. Nikolai, “Seoguny i mikado,” 84, no. 11, pp. 207–8.

15. Ibid.
16. Nikolai, “Iaponiia s tochki zreniia khristianskoi missii,” p. 221.
 Anarchist Religion 103

on Buddhism. Together, he and Mechnikov may be considered the first

serious Russian Japanologists. He also searched for points of religious
union and common language between Orthodox Christianity and Bud-
dhism, as well as Shintoism. He encouraged the various Japanese Ortho-
dox journals and societies to choose names that evoked a sense of Chris-
tianity’s rootedness in existing Japanese religious traditions. Nikolai’s
approach was reflected in the theological seminary’s entrance examina-
tion, which required all students to have a firm grounding in Chinese
classics. Religious indigenization was already inherent in the policy of the
converter.
In line with Nikolai’s understanding of Orthodoxy as a spiritual and
cultural expression of a nation’s people, the Orthodox Church in Japan
was established to develop into Japan’s national church. From its very
earliest years, the new national religion in the making was called Japa-
nese Orthodoxy (Nihon seikyō). The idea of the Russian Orthodox com-
munity bounded by the nation-state under the tsar was transferred to the
Orthodox mission in Japan. Under Nikolai, it became a pluralistic vision
of parallel religious developments and national progress in which no
particular geographic location or culture monopolized religious author-
ity. Rather, authority was found within each national church and in the
scriptures. Ultimately, in Nikolai’s vision, the Orthodox national church
was an institution to serve the nation under the authority of the Japanese
tennō (emperor). It was this last point that would help lead to Konishi’s
split with the church.
Nikolai instilled in his students the idea that the church in Japan was
to be independent of the church in Russia. Japanese Orthodoxy would be
the national church, which, as a hybrid new religion, would incorporate

17. For example, the name of the Orthodox women’s society Shōkei reflected this
idea. The naming of the society and its monthly magazine Uranishiki provides insight
into Nikolai’s approach to his mission. The name Shōkei is taken from a classical Con-
fucian text called the Doctrine of the Mean. It refers to the teaching of a Chinese wise
man that speaks of the virtue of wearing silk over brocade in order not to glitter and
show off one’s riches. The term uranishiki comes from Christian teachings in the First
Epistle of Peter, which reflects ideas on beauty very similar to those in Confucianism
that true beauty lies in the interior and is usually not apparent to the eye.
18. On indigenous movements in Japan other than Orthodox Christianity or Tol-
stoyanism, see Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan.
104 Anarchist Religion

and express Japanese cultural and historical tendencies along with uni-
versalistic aspects of Christian teachings. It was not to be a product of
the West but rather was identified in terms of its difference from the
Western religious traditions. In an expression of the church’s orienta-
tion, students of its theological seminary studied kangaku (Chinese stud-
ies) as a required part of their curriculum.
The Japanese Orthodox Church also presented an identity of distinc-
tion from the other Christian bodies. Before coming to Japan, Nikolai
had believed that he represented a religion of the West, and the most
advanced branch at that. The more he encountered the other branches of
Christianity in Japan, however, the more he differentiated himself and
Orthodoxy from the West. Identity became difference, and difference
became Nikolai’s identity. The production of knowledge in his Ortho-
dox schools became predominantly a discourse of non- and sometimes
anti-Western civilization.
Out of Orthodox heterodoxy, Konishi Masutarō emerged as one of
Nikolai’s leading students. He was schooled for six years (1880–86) at the
Orthodox Seminary and the Orthodox School of Russian Language in
Tokyo. Highly trained in Orthodox Christian theology and the Russian
language, he was a student of everything that made Nikolai’s mission
unique. Yet Konishi would turn from the church to initiate the formation
of an anarchist religious discourse that countered not only the authority
of the church but also the Western modernity in which it participated.

Toward Moral Progress: The Lao Tzu Translation Project

In 1886, Father Nikolai invested precious resources to send Konishi to
attend Kiev Theological Seminary. During the forty years of the Tokyo
seminary’s existence, Konishi was one of only eighteen out of a thousand
young Japanese seminarians to have the privilege of being sent to Russia.
Konishi was to bring back select elements of Russian theology to create
a Japanese Orthodoxy that would unify essential aspects from Japanese
traditional religious practices with the Orthodox Christianity of the fu-
ture. At least, this was how Konishi understood the project he was un-
dertaking during his long, searching stay in Russia from 1886 to 1893.

19. See Naganawa, “Japa nese Orthodox Church,” p. 160.

 Anarchist Religion 105

While he was in Russia, Konishi discovered the apparent point of unifi-

cation. The moral theology of the ancient Chinese work Tao te ching,
attributed to the ancient philosopher Lao Tzu, emerged for him as the
point of unification with Japanese Orthodoxy and the best source for its
further development in Japan. What was a bit un-Orthodox about
his finding, however, was that the thought of Tao te ching had no room
either for the authority of the nation-state or for the institution of the
church.
Konishi’s search for a modern religion relevant to Meiji Japanese ex-
perience in the ancient thought of Tao te ching was an attempt to express
religious subjectivity independent of Western modernity. In Moscow, he
set about introducing Tao te ching to his Russian audience, probing for
reactions to his newfound notion of the mergeability of the theology and
ethical system in Tao te ching and Orthodox Christianity. He began by
introducing Tao te ching while he was a student at the prestigious Kiev
Theological Seminary, where he wrote an essay, “The Philosophy of Lao
Tzu and His Logic,” with the plan to develop his final graduating thesis
on the topic. Not surprisingly, the seminary rejected the topic proposal.
The fact that Konishi then moved to Moscow University for further
studies on the topic of Lao Tzu suggests that he already took Lao Tzu
extremely seriously, more so, perhaps than the Orthodox theology that
he was in Russia to study. In Moscow, he found a warm response to his
interest in Tao te ching that eventually led to his friendship and collabo-
ration with Tolstoy on the topic. In this intellectual environment, he
found a radical conclusion to the question “What form should modern
religion take in Japan?”
Konishi’s intellectual collaborations in Russia revived the ancient Tao
te ching as a fresh voice of criticism of social Darwinism and civiliza-
tional hierarchy, which placed Christianity at the apex of all religions
and identified Christianity as the religion befitting the most advanced

20. Lao Tzu (“Old Master”) is said to have been a sage of the sixth century bc in
China. However, the identity of the true author of Tao te ching and its date of composi-
tion are still debated.
21. Konishi recalled that the seminary rejected the proposal because it had no one
who could be his faculty adviser on the topic. Konishi Masutarō, Torusutoi wo kataru,
p. 11.
106 Anarchist Religion

civilizations. Out of his intellectual encounters in Russia, Konishi would

return to Japan to give a theological voice to anarchist modernity.
Konishi’s exchange with Russian intellectuals significantly lacked the
structure of unequal relations that his “voyage to the West” might pre-
suppose. In Moscow, Konishi found considerable enthusiasm over his
discussions about Tao te ching. At Moscow University, Konishi’s adviser
Nikolai Grot (1852–1899) immediately took it on himself to support in
every way the development of his studies of Tao te ching. Grot was a lead-
ing intellectual in the development of philosophy as an academic disci-
pline in Russia. In this capacity, he had just founded the journal Ques-
tions in Philosophy and Psychology in 1889 in response to a marked easing
of censorship of philosophical writings in Russia. The timing of Koni-
shi’s arrival in Moscow was significant because it coincided with an ex-
citing time for philosophical studies there. Only three years earlier, the
government had officially approved the teaching of secular philosophy
in Russian academic institutions. Grot was determined that in this cru-
cial period of loosening state controls over the teaching of secular phi-
losophy in Russia, his society, the Moscow Psychological Society, and
his journal would be at the forefront of Russian secular philosophy and
psychology. Grot told members of the society in 1893 in a speech com-
memorating its one hundredth meeting that the occasion represented a
victory of thought and spirit over routine and ignorance. In this way, it
was an important mark for the future “enlightenment of the nation, the
uplifting of the Russian spirit, and the development of Russian thought
and self-knowledge.”
It was at this very moment that Grot became heavily involved in en-
couraging and helping Konishi publish on Tao te ching. Grot published a
number of Konishi’s articles in Questions in Philosophy and Psychology
and also began to participate in Konishi’s proposed translation of Tao
te ching into Russian. Konishi was becoming a recognized specialist of

22. Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii year 4, vol. 2, no. 17 (March 1893): 118.
23. Grot eagerly located for him rare Chinese ancient texts of Lao Tzu preserved in
the Rumiantsev Library in Moscow. He also escorted Konishi to the library and intro-
duced him to the head librarian to arrange for privileged access to its special collection.
Grot was intending to edit Konishi’s translation as well until his good friend Tolstoy
came to town.
 Anarchist Religion 107

Asian thought in Moscow. He was one of only four foreign members of

the society and the only foreigner to serve in the closed sessions of the
society. Participation in the closed sessions gave Konishi voting rights
over the admission of new members to the society, which included
prominent academics, journalists, and other cultural figures during the
time Konishi was there.
In January 1893, twenty-nine of the leading scholars of philosophy in
Russia gathered to listen and comment on a lecture given by the twenty-
six-year-old Konishi on the ethical and metaphysical system of Tao te
ching. The Lao Tzu talk that Konishi gave was part of a lecture series of
the Moscow Psychological Society as an important center of Russian
intellectual life at the time. In this capacity, the society was made up of
141 active members, among whom were such leading Russian thinkers as
Tolstoy, leading Slavophil philosophers Vladimir Solov’ev and Prince
Sergei Trubetskoi (1863–1905), Sergei’s brother Evgenii Trubetskoi (1863–
1920), and the former mayor of Moscow, historian and philosopher Boris
Chicherin (1828–1904). This particular evening, the lecture was conducted
by Konishi as one of its newest and youngest members. The lecture was
a successful part of Konishi’s efforts to introduce the radical thoughts of
the Chinese classic to Russia.
The turnout and the response to Konishi’s Lao Tzu lecture reflected
the excitement that the topic received among those seeking a direction
for the development of philosophy in Russia. Th is particular evening, it
was noted that an extraordinarily large audience from the general public
had come to hear Konishi’s talk. Also in attendance were such leading
figures in the society as L. M. Lopatin and the previously mentioned
Vladimir Solov’ev and Sergei Trubetskoi. That the audience of thirty
society members lacked specialists in Asian language or thought suggests

24. Konishi’s participation in the society’s closed sessions is evidenced, for example,
in the March 13 and May 1, 1893, sessions of the Psychological Society. The list of mem-
bers of the Society and their backgrounds is in Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii year 4, vol.
2, no. 17 (March 1893): 124–29.
25. Lecture on Lao Tzu, January 30, 1893, Moscow Psychological Society. The report
on this lecture in Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii is preserved at the Moscow Historical Li-
brary, Periodicals Section. Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii year 4, vol. 2, no. 17 (March
1893): 114–16.
26. See Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii year 4, vol. 2, no. 17 (March 1893): 114.
108 Anarchist Religion

that the conference was considered of shared significance not for the
study of an exotic other, but for the urgent development of Russian thought
itself.
Konishi found a nurturing space for claims of parallel religious devel-
opment between East and West. He also found an audience supportive
of his argument that the essence of religious thought in Tao te ching,
which was an all-encompassing divine Good, universal brotherhood,
and self-knowledge, made up a theological system as universal as Chris-
tianity. Moreover, he argued, it was one that emerged autonomously and
even preceded Christianity’s emergence in the West. On the home
ground of the converter, the Christian convert here made the radical
claim of the relativity of Christianity to Tao te ching.
Konishi’s discussions incorporated the theological and social aspects
of Tao te ching into a populist, even anarchist, moral thought that re-
jected the need for institution or state to organize people. Lao Tzu, hop-
ing to save Chinese society from destructive warfare and insincere hu-
man relations, advocated a simple life in small associations of
self-governing cooperative communities. In these communities, people
would give up luxury items and rigid rituals in social relations. The psy-
chiatrist N. N. Bazhenov (1857–1925), superintendent of the first psychi-
atric hospital in Moscow, commented after Konishi’s presentation, “Lao
Tzu’s ethical views are interesting. He appears to be a predecessor to
Rousseau; for him everything in the natural state is good. Sometimes he
appears as an anarchist and very often a nihilist.”
Given Konishi’s discussion, it is not surprising that members of his
Russian audience became interested in Lao Tzu as an “anarchist.” But
Konishi described him not as a radical who sought to violently overthrow
the government, but as someone whose moral system would serve to up-
root the given social order. The main thrust of Konishi’s argument was
that if there was any text that could have saved the Chinese from the

27. Ibid., pp. 124–29.

28. Konishi Masutarō, “Filosofiia Laosi,” 3(18), p. 42. Konishi’s attempts to speak to
his Russian audience about Tao te ching as a religious system that was equal in develop-
ment to Christianity appears to have led to mistranslations of terms into Russian, such
as the Russian term for a “single God,” which is absent in Lao Tzu’s text.
29. Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii year 4, vol. 2, no. 17 (March 1893): 116.
 Anarchist Religion 109

impoverishment of moral life that their embrace of Confucianist ethics

produced, it was Tao te ching. Tao te ching’s “revolutionary ideas should
have turned the course of Chinese history onto a path of civilizational
progress.” Instead, the embrace of Confucius’s ideas led to what Koni-
shi called “the reversal of Chinese historical progress.” “Confucius had a
deadly influence on the development of the Chinese people, and in this
relationship [to Chinese history] does not deserve our sympathy. . . . Lao
Tzu was humble and had a love of humanity. Confucius was proud and
vain. . . . Confucius, with a powerful arm, turned backward the devel-
opment of Chinese people and stopped it.”
For Konishi, history had gone wrong. He believed that with a revival
of the ideas in Tao te ching, history could be rectified. Like Nikolai, Koni-
shi largely defined historical progress as the moral and religious devel-
opment of the people. History was moved by the spontaneous and
voluntary masses of people, not from above. Modernization here was thus
dependent not on government policies but on the natural capacity of
people to act ethically. Konishi attributed the poor effect that Confucian
thought had on Chinese progress and civilization mainly to the con-
struction of an ethical system based on secular dogmatism and utilitari-
anism rather than belief in a divine truth, or Virtue, shared among all
beings. Tao te ching represented a new direction of human progress for the
future.
In an article on Tao te ching published that year in Questions in Phi-
losophy and Psychology, Konishi explained that Lao Tzu overturned the
traditional norms governing conduct between people formally catego-
rized by their social positions by giving people a “completely natural
moral teaching.” He produced an original philosophical system that
“uprooted the proposed evil of the governing morals of the people at the
time.” In contrast, Confucius, according to Konishi, merely mouthed
the traditional moral thinking of his time, expressing existing beliefs in
duty toward superiors and equals within hierarchically structured and
highly ritualized social relations. By 1890 in Japan, with the Imperial
Rescript on Education, Confucianism had become the ideological basis

30. Ibid., p. 115.

31. Ibid.
32. Konishi Masutarō, “Filosofiia Laosi,” p. 34.
110 Anarchist Religion

of the imperial order in Japan, built on the Confucian family as the

main building block for loyalty to state and emperor. Konishi’s intro-
duction provided a severe criticism of the ethical “system” promoted by
the Japanese state at the time, a criticism possible only in the Russian
context. He found that the interest among Russian intellectuals in revo-
lutionary ideas provided a convenient supportive atmosphere to explore
his own interests in a thought mergeable with Japanese Orthodoxy that
could shake the moral order promoted by the Meiji government.
For Konishi, nature served as a focal point in understanding Lao
Tzu. As Konishi explained, for Lao Tzu, the natural state of human
beings was the state closest to the divine Virtue, Truth, or in Lao Tzu’s
language, the Way (Dao). Tao te ching as introduced by Konishi reconcep-
tualized Hobbesian nature from segmentation and competition, chaos
and disorder, to the unification of all beings as the original state of nature.
According to the text, “It unites among themselves the smallest particles.”
Konishi conveyed this notion of divine nature to his audiences. There-
fore, in Tao te ching, nature itself embodied Virtue (“the Way”) or, in the
words of the postmodern philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, “God without
Being,” or “Gqd.” This was an ungraspable yet omnipresent divine beyond
the knowable God of logic and Western metaphysics. By translating Tao
te ching, Konishi ensured that the God of Western metaphysics would be
dead.
According to Konishi, Lao Tzu’s text preserved the freedom of individ-
ual judgment and responsibility for action, not within a theory of rational
existence, but within a theology of universally shared virtue. According
to this theology, conscience, the voice of divine Truth, comes naturally
from within each individual and gives decisive judgment on every human
action. Free human action without unnecessary and restrictive rituals
and societal norms thus formed the foundation of the thought in Tao te
ching. Although Tao te ching’s Way is ineffable and indefinable, “to know”
it is in all of us. However, it is the moral choice of each individual whether
to attempt to realize it. This is because the voice of Truth or the Way is
decisive and severe, Konishi said. The Way is realized with difficulty and
is easily deafened by the voice of a lie, he told his audience. Because of

33. Marion, God without Being.

 Anarchist Religion 111

the natural, internal origins of knowledge of the good, dogmatism was

the largest obstacle to moral perfection in Tao te ching. By adhering to
doctrine, people only stifled the Way innate in each human soul. “When
doctrine is eliminated, there will be no sorrow,” Konishi quoted from Tao
te ching.
The anarchist theology in Tao te ching provided for the deconstruc-
tion of hierarchies through a moral system that radically overturned
conventional notions of virtue and social worth. In these writings, the
most highly positioned in the given social order possessed the least vir-
tue, and vice versa. Because the commoners were closest to the ground,
both literally and figuratively, they were in the construct of Tao te ching
the highest in moral worth. In turn, according to Tao te ching, the Way,
located within and knowable by all human beings, is higher than all be-
ings. For Konishi, the Way was the lord of all existence because it stood
as the commonest denominator among all: “The reason that the sea is
the king of the multitude of rivers and streams is because it is located
lower than them,” Konishi quoted.
For Tolstoy, the news of Konishi’s translation project meant the ap-
pearance of a long-awaited collaborator for his endeavor to radically de-
part from the Church of Christianity and found a new religion based on
a return to the original teachings of Christ and other ancient religious
thinkers. Tolstoy responded immediately to the news of Konishi’s proj-
ect and asked Konishi whether he could help in the editing of Konishi’s
translation of Tao te ching into Russian. “I cannot help but be excited
that we can now have a better translation in Russian than French, En-
glish, and German,” Tolstoy told him. Tolstoy’s home became their
shared work place, and the two met regularly over five months to col-
laborate in translating Tao te ching into Russian from classical Chinese.
It is evident from Tolstoy’s private diaries and letters that the Chinese
classic helped Tolstoy express and concretize his radical critique of

34. Quoted in Konishi Masutarō, “Filosofiia Laosi,” p. 366.

35. Konishi Masutarō, “Filosofiia Laosi,” p. 369.
36. Details in Tolstaya, Tolstoy, a Life, p. 330; and Konishi Masutarō, Torusutoi wo
kataru, introduction.
37. Quoted in Konishi Masutarō, Torusutoi wo kataru, p. 28.
112 Anarchist Religion

Christianity. He believed that the philosopher’s writing better ex-

pressed his conception of religion and morality in a universal language
of common reason. About a month before he met Konishi, Tolstoy was
still slowly working on his own translation of Tao te ching from French
and German, an ongoing project he had begun a decade earlier. Both
were drawn to each other by their common interest in the nonchurch,
nonhierarchical, universal (according to them), “rational” religious com-
moners’ voice in Tao te ching. Their joint project to translate Tao te ching
represented and reflected their common thoughts. Therefore, it was ex-
pressive of Russian-Japanese transnational intellectual practices beyond
the East-West divide. Their resulting labor was the first Russian-language
translation of Tao te ching. First printed in Grot’s journal Questions in Phi-
losophy and Psychology in 1894, it was republished in book form in 1913.
The book’s first two editions immediately sold out in Russia, reflecting
its unusual popularity for a work of classical Chinese philosophy.
It should be noted that far from attempting to illuminate an essence
of the “East,” Konishi and Tolstoy sought to reveal a practical source of
religious identity, a knowledge that would simultaneously reconfigure
Christianity, elements of Western modernity, and, for Konishi, the im-
perial Confucian moral order in Japan. As a product of their collabora-
tion, they created a new meaning of the ancient philosophy that pro-
vided a thought for the modern world.
A recurring question for specialists on Tolstoy has been why Tolstoy
turned to Tao te ching at this time. Konishi’s introduction of Tao te ching
in Russia fitted perfectly with Tolstoy’s practice of uprooting Christian-

38. Even in the last years of his life, Tolstoy continued to refer to Lao Tzu in his
thoughts and writing. On May 5, 1909, he wrote in his diary, “My reading of Lao Tzu
was very meaningful for me. I even had a horrible feeling that directly opposes Lao Tzu’s
thought: the vain wish to be Lao Tzu himself. He says it so well, that the highest spiri-
tual condition always comes with the fullest calm.” Tolstoy, Sobranie sochinenii, 20:334.
39. Tolstoy later compiled a calendar book of morals for every day of the year that
included thirty-three selected quotes by Lao Tzu. He asked Konishi to translate and
publish the book in Japan. Tolstoy also published a separate selection of his favorite
aphorisms by Lao Tzu in 1909. Tolstoy, Izrecheniia kitaiskogo mudretsa.
40. Tolstoy to Sofia Tolstaya, September 21, 1893, in Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochine-
nii, 84:196– 7.
41. Lao Tzu, “Tao te king Laosi”; Lao Tzu, Tao te king, ili pisanie o nravstvennosti.
 Anarchist Religion 113

ity’s religious hegemony. The elements of Tao te ching that came to form
the expression of Tolstoy’s new religion were a simple language geared to
commoners, expression of a consistent faith in human reason (rather
than mysticism or the supernatural), concern with human moral con-
duct, and a nonhierarchical conception of human relations. Finally, it
was devoid of any reference to or need for church or state, providing in-
stead a universal language of reason applicable to all faiths. All these ele-
ments embodied the ideas that Tolstoy had in mind for overturning the
religious lives of people. For Tolstoy, the writings embodied his ideal of
religion as a moral religion “within the boundaries of mere reason,” to
borrow Immanuel Kant’s words. Some of the elements in Tao te ching
that Konishi found significant in renewing and even overturning con-
temporary society in Japan through his introduction of new religious
thoughts were translated into those that Tolstoy adopted as expressions
for his new religion. It is not that either influenced the other, but each
articulated the other’s thoughts in a new language.
As his daughter and closest assistant Alexandra Tolstaya observed,
Tolstoy’s close work with Konishi on Tao te ching significantly helped her
father answer some of the central questions in his thinking about reli-
gion at a critical time in the development of Tolstoy’s religious thought.
Anarchist Peter Kropotkin would later call his religious teachings Tol-
stoy’s “new universal religion.” Tolstoy and Konishi’s mutual rearticu-
lation of Tao te ching via translation led Tolstoy to the further develop-
ment of his thought, from an attempt to reform Christianity by departing
from the institution of the Church and its teachings, to an endeavor to
create a new universal religion. Tolstaya would emigrate to Japan to live
in the Konishis’ home after the Russian Revolution, an indication of
just how close Konishi and her father had been. She lived in Japan for a
number of years.

42. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.

43. Tolstaya, Preface, p. 3.
44. Peter Kropotkin, “Lev Tolstoi,” manuscript in GARF, f. 1129, op. 1, d. 836, ll.
32–40.
45. On Tolstaya in Japan, see Konami, Bungō no musume; and Tolstaya’s account of
her time in Japan, Tolstaya, Out of the Past.
114 Anarchist Religion

It is clear that Konishi originally sought a revolutionary philosophy

that would accord with his understanding of Japanese Orthodoxy. Indeed,
one of the first things he published upon his return to Japan in his ca-
pacity as the new dean of the Orthodox Seminary in Japan was a lengthy
feature article on Tao te ching. The early issues of Shinkai (Expanse of the
mind-heart), the Tokyo Orthodox Seminary’s journal of philosophy and
theology and the face of Orthodox Christianity in Japan, were domi-
nated by the article on Tao te ching that extended over ten issues and that
sat side-by-side with an article on Tolstoi’s religious theory. Konishi
already demonstrated at this moment his radical belief that the anar-
chistic thoughts in Tao te ching were not only entirely compatible with
but also essential to his vision of a newly constructed religion for modern
Japan.
For Konishi, the view of a virtuous human interiority in Tao te ching
expressed a selfhood independent of the state and of Western modernity
that became a foundational element in his introduction of Tolstoy’s reli-
gious writings into Japan. At the same time, Tolstoy’s articulations that
reconfigured Christianity were enabled by his collaboration with Koni-
shi to translate Lao Tzu’s ancient writings into a new modern language
intelligible in the Russian context.

Uprooting Western Modernity: The Translation of

Tolstoyan Religion
Konishi returned home to introduce Lao Tzu through Tolstoy to Japan.
He introduced Tolstoy to Japan not as a literary writer, but first and fore-
most as the composer of a coherent body of religious thought that came
to be called “anarchist religion” in Japan. But what was most significant
about Tolstoy’s thought for Konishi was that it echoed the ideas in Tao te
ching. Konishi identified the idea of universal virtue that he originally
valued in Tao te ching as being central to Tolstoy’s idea when the Russian
writer echoed essential ideas voiced in the ancient writings of Tao te
ching. Indeed, he found that the expression of the Divine as the Way in
Tao te ching fitted so well with his own imagination of the Divine that he
sometimes used the word “the Way” instead of “God” in his writings.

46. Konishi Masutarō, “Rōshi tetsugaku ippan”; “Torusutoi haku no shūkyōron.”

 Anarchist Religion 115

Konishi translated Tolstoy’s religious thought into a familiar notion

of human virtue (tokugi) that belonged to everyone. It was this idea of
tokugi that was echoed in later Japanese discussions of Tolstoy. After his
return to Japan, Konishi continued to develop his translations of Tolstoy
as the voice of a new philosophy for the people (heimin). Tolstoy’s reli-
gious thought offered a contemporary critique both of the Japanese lan-
guage of shūkyō (religion) as translated from the West and of the values
of Confucian loyalty and filial piety as a foundation for the imperial
nation-state.
In Russia, Tao te ching’s provision of an ideal theology to negate the
state-sponsored ideology of Confucianism and Western modernity could
be openly discussed and explained, but in Japan such an open discussion
of its meaning was unlikely. Public critiques of the given neo-Confucian
ideological order were largely censored or disciplined in Japan. The min-
ister of education relieved the Christian schoolteacher Uchimura Kanzō
(1861–1930) of his position at the First Higher Preparatory School in Tokyo
when he refused to pay homage to the Imperial Rescript on Education in
1891. Written largely in Confucian language, the Imperial Rescript had
become a pillar of national ethics promulgated by the imperial nation-
state. In this context, Tolstoy’s writings criticizing the Christian church
proved to be a convenient substitute for a direct criticism of the use of
Confucian and imperial ideas to create obedient citizens.
Konishi wrote in a private letter to Tolstoy of his unending joy at hav-
ing arrived at a new conception of Christianity following their mutual
collaboration on Tao te ching. His religious turn did not make everyone
happy, though. “It is true that Nikolai cannot stand me at all because of
my views of Christianity and on life, but this does not sadden me at all,”
Konishi wrote in the same letter. Konishi’s departure from official Or-
thodox views of Christianity was a serious problem for Nikolai. Ironi-
cally, the problem was all the more critical for Nikolai because Konishi
had become the most publicly recognized Japanese figure in the Ortho-
dox Church upon his return to Japan. As the dean of the Orthodox
Seminary in Tokyo, Konishi presided over the grounds of the tallest and
one of the most familiar landmarks in Tokyo, Nikolai Cathedral, often

47. Daniil Konissi to L. N. Tolstoy, May 10, 1896, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 157/3, l. 1.
116 Anarchist Religion

nicknamed Gangandō (Ding Dong Church) by Tokyoites. Nikolai was

bitter, calling Konishi a deceiver who had no loyalties. He wrote in his
diary: “Ignatii Kamei, the catechist in Ogawa, writes that Daniil
[Masutarō] Konishi is interfering in church affairs there. He was edu-
cated at the Kiev Seminary to serve the church, and since his return
from Russia has been trying to soil Russia and the Church, as if he were
educated for that. What can you do! There are barking and biting mali-
cious dogs everywhere.” Konishi was not the only dog biting at Niko-
lai. Just months earlier, Nikolai had similarly called Tolstoy an “anathe-
matizing heretic, a malicious dog.”
His agitation was not surprising. Konishi had not just broken with
the church but had transfigured the Meiji idea of modern religion
(shūkyō) itself, setting the tone for a nationwide conversion to Tolstoyan
religion in Japan. What Nikolai did not realize was that his own thoughts
had helped foster this turn of events. In encouraging the fashioning of a
new indigenous religion, he had left room for a radical rejection of the
institution of the church among the Japanese Orthodox Church’s own
leaders.
Konishi found upon his return that Russian literature had experi-
enced a rapid rise in interest while he was gone, due in part to the trans-
lation efforts by Futabatei and his fellow graduates of the TSFL’s Russian
program and the Nikolaidō Russian School. This provided a welcom-
ing atmosphere for the translations of Tolstoy in a substitution act (suri-
kae) of one anarchist thinker for another. Konishi’s substitution, how-
ever, involved adding new meaning to Tolstoy’s thoughts. In the process
of translation, Konishi adapted them to the context of late Meiji Japan
in the world.
Konishi seamlessly merged his translations of Tolstoy’s writings into
the existing base of a critical Russian translation and reading culture in
Japan. He first translated Tolstoy’s story The Kreutzer Sonata as an indi-
rect critique of the Confucian ethical system. The narrative attributes a
man’s jealous murder of his wife to the systematization of abuse and
objectification in everyday gender relations sanctioned by the church

48. Nikolai, Dnevniki, entry of September 19, 1903, p. 304.

49. Ibid., June 28, 1903, p. 266.
50. See, for example, Konishi Masutarō, “Torusutoi haku no shoi shūkyō ni tsuite.”
 Anarchist Religion 117

and society. Although the Russian government had banned the work
because of its radical take on gender relations and the institution of mar-
riage, Tolstoy entrusted the unpublished manuscript to Konishi so that
he might translate and publish it in Japan. Typically, the works that were
officially banned in Russia and anathematized in the Russian Orthodox
world were the very works that were widely disseminated and popular-
ized throughout Japan. The manner in which Tolstoy’s illegal manu-
script came into Japan was representative of the intellectual and physical
exchanges in the Russian-Japanese network of participants beyond the
control of the state that would follow in the development of cooperatist
anarchist modernity. Those caught carrying Tolstoy’s illegal writings in
Russia were arrested and exiled. Despite the bodily dangers to himself,
Konishi brought the illegal work across the border with him into Japan
and promptly translated it with the help of the celebrity writer Ozaki
Kōyō (1868–1903) and published it in the widely read journal Kokumin
no tomo (Friend of the nation’s people) in 1895. The translation was so
popular that it was reprinted as a book a year later. Nobori Shōmu
(1878–1958), himself a leading translator of Russian from the Orthodox
Seminary, recalled that their translation caused much widespread inter-
est and excitement in literary circles. Tolstoy’s graphic story implicated
the church and society in women’s psychological, social, and sexual re-
pression in the modern institution of marriage. In the Japanese context,
Konishi’s translation also provided an indirect criticism of the state’s
Confucian emphasis on filial piety and loyalty to the nation and the
tennō (emperor).
Konishi then undertook an intensive translation project of Tolstoy as
a religious thinker. In 1894 alone, he wrote a number of articles focus-
ing on Tolstoy’s philosophy and religious thought: “Russia’s Tolstoy,”
“The Philosophy of Russia,” “Tolstoy’s Religious Ethics,” and “Tolstoy’s
Worldview.” He published his articles and translations in the most in-
fluential Christian journal Rikugō zasshi (The cosmos journal), Koku-
min no tomo, and the leading Orthodox Christian journal, Shinkai, as

51. The doctor Mariia Mikhailovna Kholevinskaia (1858–1920) was arrested and ex-
iled in 1893 when she responded to Tolstoy’s request that she pass his illegal writings to
a mutual friend. See Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 84:198.
52. Nobori and Akamatsu, Russian Impact on Japan, p. 37.
118 Anarchist Religion

well as the Orthodox women’s journal Uranishiki (The brocade lining),

Seikyō Shimpō (Orthodox news), and Kiristokyō shimbun (Christian
newspaper). The range of Meiji Christian institutions and tenets re-
presented by the Christian periodicals in which he published is
remarkable.
Konishi was immediately recognized as a leader of Christian thought
and was invited to give his thoughts on philosophy and religion at numer-
ous functions, such as the meeting of the Philosophical Society of Japan
and the sixth annual conference of Christian leaders at Hakone. The
conference aimed to unite religious thinkers of eastern and western Japan,
and represented the national unity of Japanese Christians. It expressly
sought to lead the direction of Japan’s historical development through
the intervention of Christian thought. Konishi spoke side by side with
the Christian leaders Uchimura Kanzō and Matsumura Kaiseki (1859–
1939), both of whom would come to embrace nonchurch Tolstoyan Chris-
tianity. At this and other talks, in his capacity as the Japanese leader of
Japanese Orthodox Christianity, he spoke about the relevancy of Tolstoy’s
un-Orthodox religious thought for modern Japan.
In a letter to Tolstoy preserved in the basement of the Lev Tolstoy
Museum in Moscow, Konishi recounted how his work translating Tol-
stoy as a religious figure had already led some Japanese to describe Tol-
stoy as a prophet:
Here I write about you and your views on Christianity and on life, and trans-
late your works (I’ve already translated Two Old Men, Where There Is Love,
There Is God, Kreutzer Sonata, and at this moment I am translating The Death
of Ivan Ilyich and Religion and Morality into Japanese). For this, they are calling
me Tolstoy’s apostle. I can honestly say that there are very many of your admir-
ers here. . . . [But] I have one request for you. I cannot manage to get anywhere

53. The conference, called “Kohan ronshū” (The lakeside lectures), took place in
1894. Konishi Masutarō, “Torusutoi no sekaikan ni tsuite”; Konishi Masutarō, speech
to the Philosophical Society. Untitled article in Tetsugaku zasshi.
54. Uchimura and Matsumura were two of the first indigenous Christian leaders in
Japan. See Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan, pp. 54– 94.
55. In Konishi’s letter in the ORGMT, the words “Tolstoy’s apostle” are underlined.
However, it is not clear who underlined these words: Konishi, Tolstoy, or someone else
who later read the letter.
 Anarchist Religion 119

your writings My Religion, The Gospels, and My Confession. If possible, I would

be so grateful if you could send these to me.

Tolstoy responded by asking Konishi to continue introducing Japanese

readers to his religious writings. He offered to send Konishi the manu-
script he was working on as soon as it was completed. Tolstoy wrote:
You have translated my works, such as The Kreutzer Sonata, etc., but I very
much wish to make the Japanese public familiar with true Christianity, as I
think its founder conceived it. This, as far as I could, I expounded in my book:
The Kingdom of God Is within You. I think these books or, at least, an exposition
of their contents might be of interest to the Japanese people. They might show
the audience that Christianity is not a collection of miracle narratives, but a
very strict exposition of that idea of human life, which gives rise neither to de-
spair nor to indifference about one’s conduct, but which leads to a most definite
moral activity.

As a token of their intellectual and personal bonds, Tolstoy sent

Konishi his own Bible that he had studied in writing his translation and
investigation of the Gospels. This precious gift was filled with Tolstoy’s
notes and comments and was a demonstration of their friendship, based
on a shared devotion to translate and write a new religion.
During the mid-1890s, Konishi continued to introduce Tolstoy as a
religious and ethical thinker for the future. His translations transfigured
the notion of Christianity as the defining entity for shūkyō. Through the
reconstruction of Christianity and its language, a new religion emerged
in Meiji Japan. This transfiguration was made obvious in the Tolstoy
translations that many in Japan had been anxiously waiting for.
When Konishi first visited Tolstoy’s home during one of his weekly
evening gatherings, the young seminarian recorded his surprise at seeing
Tolstoy’s house filled to capacity with people peaceably coming together
from so many strata of Russian society, from aristocrats and laborers to
scholars and peasants. Konishi called them heimin, a term that has been

56. Daniil Konissi to L. N. Tolstoi, May 10, 1896, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 157/3, l. 2.
57. L. Tolstoy to D. P. Konissi, September 30, 1896, in Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie so-
chinenii, 69:152.
58. The Bible that Tolstoy gave to Konishi survives today as part of the Nozaki Fam-
ily Collection. It was exhibited in the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art February
24–April 8, 2012.
120 Anarchist Religion

translated and understood in the West to mean a separate class of com-

moners. In Konishi’s reconceptualization of the term in translation,
however, heimin included all people and denoted their equality and di-
rect interdependency on one another. It was the particular language of
“people” given new democratic meaning in the translated Russian context
that formed a key concept in Konishi’s translation of Tolstoy’s thought
into a people’s religion that transcended not just class but Western mo-
dernity’s hierarchical ordering of the world at large.
In Konishi’s view, Tolstoy’s increasing popularity lay in what he called
Tolstoy’s “tokugi no sekaikan” (worldview of virtue). According to Koni-
shi’s translation of Tolstoy, not only does divine virtue belong to everyone,
but also everyone can participate in virtuous conduct through his or her
actions in the mundane everyday. Each individual is endowed with a
divine virtue from within that he or she is compelled to return in the
form of performing virtue as a gift to society and his or her world. Accord-
ing to Konishi’s translation of Tolstoy, if virtue exists in everyone, it is our
choice to attain it in the particular form that each one received. Human
freedom is in this way defined as the striving to realize each person’s divine
virtue. Moral obligation here just “happens,” and one only needs to learn
how to sense and realize it. Sounding remarkably like the ideas of Tao te
ching that Konishi and Tolstoy had translated and that Tolstoy had used
to articulate his own thoughts, Konishi had slipped ancient concepts
from Tao te ching into his public discussions of modern religion.
Konishi’s translation of Tao te ching into the language of Tolstoyan
virtue opposed the imperial Confucian moral order. In the national
moral order, the emperor and the nation stood at the top of a social hier-
archy, and each individual was relegated to a determined role of ser vice
to nation, family, and society within that order. This order was apparent,

59. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, this inclusive usage of the term would become
fully apparent in the Nonwar Movement in the Russo-Japanese War, which newly in-
vented “the people” (heimin) as historical subjects irrespective of the nation-state.
60. Konishi Masutarō, “Tokugi to shite no shūkyō.”
61. I use here the phrase “Obligation happens” coined by John Caputo, a contempo-
rary philosopher who has attempted similarly to put common everyday ethical action
into theology. Caputo, Against Ethics, p. 6.
 Anarchist Religion 121

for example, in the writings of the leading scholars of ethics during this
period, Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933) and Inoue Tetsujirō (1856–1944), both
of whom held highly respected positions at Tokyo Imperial University.
Both Nitobe and Inoue conceptualized the words “individuality” and
“personality” in terms of jinkaku, which was made up of two characters,
jin (person) and kaku (rank). Inoue’s Commentary on the Imperial Rescript
on Education, published in 1891, was the most orthodox interpretation of
the document in Japan. In Inoue’s case, as linguist Kyōko Inoue has
shown, jinkaku implied a hierarchical construct of social order played
out in human ethical relations, defined by Confucian ideas of duty to
emperor, nation, and family.
It is worth noting in light of this competing moral knowledge pro-
duction that Inoue was extremely unpopular even among many of the
students at the university. Historians have tended to focus on such prom-
inent academics as representative of “Japanese thought.” I suggest, on the
contrary, that their writings were relatively isolated within the restricted
spaces of the university and upper echelons of the government and had
little to do with the thought and knowledge circulating throughout the
larger populace. Historians’ understanding of “modern Japanese thought”
in Euro-America has been based primarily on the writing of academics
employed by imperial institutions of higher education for their articula-
tion of political ideologies for the nation-state. Other, much more widely
influential voices outside these ideologies have been ignored in the
historiography.
Konishi observed this failure of academic thought to engage the wider
public. He believed that Tolstoy’s thought signaled the emergence of a
people’s theology that could be commonly understood and shared by
everyone on all levels of society (heimin). A critical problem with mod-
ern thought, Konishi told his audience at Hakone, was the departure of
philosophy as an academic discipline from how people experience and
live everyday life. Tolstoy’s provision of a popular “people’s philosophy”
signaled a reversal of Western-centered trends in the field of philosophy
toward a new dynamic center in the periphery. Konishi noted that this

62. Kyōko Inoue, Individual Dignity in Modern Japanese Thought, pp. 12–57.
122 Anarchist Religion

was in contrast to the kind of esoteric influence that Kant and Hegel had
among philosophers and academics.
Tolstoy had radically redefined essential concepts of Christianity and
thereby had completely transformed it. Practices of religious faith for
Tolstoy were based on a universally shared human “reason,” as he called
it. However, this was not the same notion of reason as in the Western
sense of rationality. If human beings could not know Gxd through their
five senses, he believed, then Gxd was also beyond their capacity for ra-
tional philosophy. That is, Gxd was beyond the cognitive certainty of
Western metaphysics. This echoed to a certain degree both the Ortho-
dox theologians and Immanuel Kant, who indicated an end to onto-
theological speculation in the Western theological tradition by replacing
it with a theology of ethics. For Tolstoy, reason was moral, a kind of
commonsense knowledge of virtuous conduct coming from within each
individual. He equated divine reason with human conscience, what he
called “the rational conscience.” Religious reason was likened to simple
geometry in the sense that it did not take a scholar-theologian or a saint
to come to a sense of virtuous action. Not only was it accessible to all,
but also everyone practiced it daily in his or her life as a matter of Gxd-
given nature and intuitive knowledge.
Tolstoy found no room for biblical or other religious miracles but
only for “reason” alone. He concluded that religious institutions,
churches, and priests of all faiths had essentially corrupted the essence of
human religious belief for the sake of power. Christianity as it was being
practiced, he argued, had become full of superstitions, witchcraft, and
mythologies that held people under institutional power and thus led
people astray from their capacity for moral religious life through moral
reason. It was therefore not up to the church, emperor, family, or any
other authority to sanction the virtue of individual practices. The only
authority was the divine truth and virtue located within each individual.

63. Konishi Masutarō, “Torusutoi no sekaikan ni tsuite”; Konishi Masutarō, Untitled.

64. The particular rendering of the term “Gxd” for God without being and beyond
rational knowing is inspired by Marion, albeit in reference to a very different intellec-
tual and historical context. Marion, God without Being, e.g. p. 46.
65. Tolstoy, Kingdom of God Is within You, p. 368.
66. Ibid., pp. 48–84.
 Anarchist Religion 123

Acting on this divine but commonly knowable “reason” was the very
expression of one’s religion.
Tolstoy accordingly translated and annotated the four Gospels with
the goal of freeing them from all mystical and metaphorical elements.
Essential Christian concepts of confession and resurrection were recon-
ceived from this point of view. They were no longer massive spiritual
events that had occurred thousands of years ago with the Messiah or
happenings occurring only through the medium of the church author-
ity, but central events occurring only within and through the acts and
self-realizations of each individual. A resurrection was for Tolstoy some-
thing that occurred within one who repented and turned to a newfound
virtuous life, and it did not require the interference of the church.
In line with his thought, Tolstoy sought to express the idea of reli-
gious reason in an easily readable fashion that was accessible to every-
one. He wrote folktales in a simple language readable by the barely liter-
ate and even children, a style reminiscent of that found in Tao te ching.
Konishi first undertook to translate this kind of story, not only incorpo-
rating Tolstoy’s religious ideas but also expressing them in the same
simple writing style, upon his return to Japan. The first folktale he trans-
lated was Where There Is Love, There Is God (1885) for Kokumin no tomo.
The folk story about a poor country boot maker in search of “God” had
originally served as part of a basic reader for Russian peasant and child
literacy that Tolstoy had compiled. It outlined the essence of Tolstoy’s
religious idea that Gxd reveals itself not in the heavens or through
church sermons, but in the practice of tokugi, the spontaneous everyday
acts of humanity that individuals do for one another.
In accordance with a universally shared and universally knowable
virtue as the essential element of a religious system, Tolstoy rejected the
idea of absolute good and evil. He wrote that he did not believe that
evil was an innate aspect of life given to human beings as original sin, or
that God was committed to punish sin, or that people went to either
heaven or hell after death. For him, belief in absolute evil led to the

67. Ibid., pp. 278–368.

68. Tolstoy, Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated; Tolstoy, Short Exposition of the
Gospel.
69. Tolstoy, Kingdom of God Is within You, p. 189.
124 Anarchist Religion

imagined necessity of religious institutions and political authority in lo-

cating Good over Evil. Yet no external authority existed that was capable
of defining evil in a manner that was acceptable to all. Claiming that
committing violence against other men and women was against univer-
sal moral reason, Tolstoy adhered to the principle of not resisting evil by
force. He strongly opposed state authority, which relied on acts of war
and other forms of violence for its preservation.
Considering that the root of much harm among human beings lay in
their attempt to claim possession and rights over the Good, Tolstoy iden-
tified a solution to this problem in Tao te ching. He used the language
of the Way found in Tao te ching to refer to and to replace the language of
the Good, which Tolstoy believed had been distorted and corrupted over
many centuries by religious and political authorities. He wrote of the
Way as existing beyond secular morality, frequently delineated by religious
institutions as doing good for self, family, nation, state, or church. Ideas
of Good and Evil could only be nonuniversal, Tolstoy believed, because
they reflected conventional moralities oriented toward the betterment
of par ticu lar entities rather than a much greater encompassing, univer-
sal Way.
Konishi’s translation of Tolstoyan religion in Japan moved the Chris-
tian God from a higher transcendent rational being beyond human
reach to a spirit or “Way” that existed in all human beings. Tolstoy said
that human interiority was thus little different from the Kingdom of
God itself. The unnamable and unconceptualizable divine force already
existed, as shared within and among human beings on earth. This
brought Gxd from exteriority to human interiority.
Tolstoyan thought represented not only a moral teaching but also a
leveling of the world. As Konishi translated it, it could be grasped as the
product of a transnational reinvention to cure Christianity by carefully
disengaging it from the dressings of Western modernity that had claimed
Christianity as its religious and moral counterpart. The new moral

70. Ibid., chaps. 1, 2, and 8.

71. Ibid., chap. 12.
72. See, e.g., ibid., pp. 98, 355.
73. This notion is illustrated, for example, in Tolstoy’s story Where Love Is, There God
Is Also. Tolstoy, Gde liubov’, tam i Bog.
74. Tolstoy, Kingdom of God Is within You, pp. 48–84, 108.
 Anarchist Religion 125

vocabulary of shūkyō as everyone’s religion (tokugi) had emerged. Suddenly,

the word “religion” in Meiji Japan, heavily laden with images of foreign-
ness, authority, and dogma, became the word denoting everyday practice
that was familiar and natural and therefore no big deal. Tolstoyan religion
as Konishi introduced it had made Inoue and Nitobe’s use of the language
of jinkaku altogether untenable.
The translation of Tolstoy leveled Christianity in two ways. First, it
eliminated the hierarchy of power that was inherent in the church, in
which the church supported the hierarchy of God to church, church to
state, state to human, and human to nature. This hierarchy was based on
a notion of the right of access and knowledge to a so-called divine law
and truth given to a privileged few belonging to the institution of the
church. Second, it put Christianity on a par with other religions such as
Daoism and Buddhism. Religion (shūkyō) in this picture no longer was
about the Christianity of Western modernity that served as the moral
foundation for an international hierarchy of nation-states; instead, it was
a people’s religion of everyday ethical practices. By retaining a general
framework of Christianity, however reconstructed and unrecognizable it
was, this new religion maintained the possibility of a universally shared
religion and thus the internationalist ideals associated with the Meiji
Ishin.
In his translations of Tolstoyan thought, Konishi first identified it in
terms of a departure from Western modernity. In this sense, Konishi’s
translations merged with the other Russian translation practices in Japan
exemplified by Futabatei Shimei, discussed in Chapter 1. To be “Russian”
in this context was to be defined largely outside the Western historical
experience. In the same way in which Russia was taking its own lead in
developing away from an old and matured Europe, Japan, too, would
form its own innovative path, Konishi told his audiences at the Hakone
conference on Christianity. Konishi attempted to reposition contempo-
rary views of the world when he said simply that “Russia is Russia, and
Europe is Europe.” Russia should not be thought of as “passing into
adulthood,” he wrote; rather, it should be considered a growing adoles-
cent in the process of modernizing in its own way. Here, Konishi spoke in

75. Konishi Masutarō, “Torusutoi no sekaikan ni tsuite.”

76. Konishi Masutarō, “Rokoku to Yōroppa.” See also Sugii, Meijiki kirisutokyō no
kenkyū, p. 436.
126 Anarchist Religion

terms of modern progressive development and civilization that simulta-

neously embraced and functioned according to the continuity in human
ethical beliefs. This embrace of continued practices in the present was in
contradiction to a “return” to traditions and a native past.
Any thought that furthered Japan’s civilizational progress would have
to speak to the wider populace and to people’s daily ethical actions in the
modern world. Whereas Tolstoy’s thought overturned philosophy with a
“people’s philosophy” of ethical action, Western thought was in crisis,
floundering in its excessive emphasis on rationality, individualism, and
materialism, Konishi told audiences. He problematized what he charac-
terized as the separation between philosophy and people’s everyday lives
in the lofty and esoteric discussions in Western thought. He introduced
the thesis of his colleague from the Moscow Psychological Society, the
philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev, “The Crisis of Western Philosophy,” along
with Tolstoy’s philosophy, as valuable for contemporary Japan.
This intellectual context helps in understanding the first introduction
of Nietzsche in Japan. It has been commonly accepted among scholars
that Nietzsche’s thought was introduced to Japan by German thinkers,
originally via an anonymous outline of an article by the supposedly Ger-
man thinker N. Grot. The identity of the anonymous Japanese writer of
the first publication about Nietzsche based on Grot’s article has been
unknown to scholars, but the details of the article point to Konishi.
A number of facts indicate that the first Japanese article on Nietzsche
was by Konishi and that it arose in the context of Russian-Japanese,
not German-Japanese transnational intellectual relations. To begin with,

77. Konishi Masutarō, “Torusutoi no sekaikan ni tsuite.” See also Konishi Masutarō,
“Rokoku shisō.”
78. Konishi Masutarō, “Rokoku shisō.” Suggestive of the way in which knowledge
reappeared in different expressions and circulated in this transnationally forming dis-
course, Solov’ev, as mentioned earlier, had applied to serve as a missionary in the Or-
thodox mission in Japan. A few years later, he positively reviewed Mechnikov’s work
Civilizations.
79. For example, the scholar of Japanese philosophy, Graham Parkes, repeats this view
on the basis of information in the work by Becker, Die frühe Nietzsche-Rezeption in Japan.
See Parkes’ discussion of the early introduction of Nietzsche to Japan, Parkes, “Early Re-
ception of Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Japan,” p. 197. See also N. Grot, “Nravstvennye ide-
aly nashego vremeni”; “Ōshu ni okeru tokugi shisō.”
 Anarchist Religion 127

Konishi’s Russian friend, the earlier mentioned Nikolai Grot, wrote the
original article on which the Japanese article was based. Secondly, the
German version of Grot’s article was a reprint of Grot’s Russian original
in Questions in Philosophy and Psychology, the same journal that was pub-
lishing Konishi’s articles in 1893. Furthermore, the Japanese article on
Nietzsche and Tolstoy appeared in the Orthodox journal Shinkai while
Konishi was president of the Orthodox Seminary, and was essentially an
outline of Grot’s article published in Moscow just before Konishi left
Moscow University. Only a matter of months separated the original
Moscow publication and its published translation in Japanese. Further-
more, Grot’s article in German appeared in Berlin in 1897, four years
after the Japanese and Russian versions appeared. Finally, in contrasting
Nietzsche negatively with Tolstoy, the nature of the article appears quite
consistent with Konishi’s attempt to introduce Tolstoy as an important
ethical thinker.
That it was Konishi who translated it from Russian in order to better
acquaint readers with the thought of Tolstoy in contrast to contempo-
rary thought in Europe revises a general understanding that Nietzsche’s
early introduction in Japan came from Germany. In fact, this first
publication about Nietzsche in Japan occurred on the playing field of
Russian-Japanese transnational intellectual relations. Konishi’s intro-
duction of Nietzsche was straightforward. The article used Nietzsche to
emphasize the difference between Tolstoy’s values and those of decadent
European thought. Nietzsche was discussed in this translation as the
most radical example of Western moral decadence, as a materialist and a
preacher of the worst kind of individualism. On the very pages of the
Orthodox journal Shinkai, the article contrasted this with Tolstoy’s
humanism, which it argued contributed to the moral development of
human beings. The first introduction of Nietzsche can be understood
as part of this broader practice among Japanese intellectuals of translating
Russian thinkers to criticize Western modernity. In this case, the criticism

80. Grot was born and raised in Russia. His father, Ia. K. Grot (1812–1893), was a
well-known philologist in Russia.
81. Parkes, “Early Reception of Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Japan.”
82. “Nitsushe shi to Torusutoi haku.”
128 Anarchist Religion

of Nietzsche was used to highlight the attractiveness of Tolstoy as the

formulator of a people’s religion.
In later years, Nietzsche was mobilized again in the context of Russian-
Japanese relations as a voice for anticapitalism in Japan. At Tokyo Impe-
rial University, the Russian professor Rafael von Keber (1848–1923) taught
Nietzsche in order to criticize Western modernity and nationalism. A
number of Keber’s students published early essays on Nietzsche, among
whom were well-known intellectuals like Takayama Chōgyū (1871–1902),
Hasegawa Tenkei (1876–1940), Watsuji Tetsujirō (1889–1960), Anesaki
Masaharu (1873–1949), and Abe Jirō (1883–1959). How Nietzsche was in-
troduced differed from Grot’s straightforward criticism of Nietzsche as
an expression of the decadent West, but the way Nietzsche was used to
criticize the values of liberal capitalism was the same.
In the 1930s, representatives of the Kyoto school relied on Nietzschean
ideas to express their call to overcome Japan’s dependence on the modern
West, as exemplified by liberalism, capitalism, and democracy. These later
thinkers appropriated both Nietzsche’s critique of Europeans’ overreliance
on historical culture and his appeal for “eternalizing forces.” If these
thinkers were “overcome by modernity,” as Harry Harootunian describes
them, then Konishi was consciously modern in a manner distinct from
Western modernity. Konishi translated Grot’s critique of Nietzsche to sup-
port a progressive imagination of social development that revolved around
an anarchistic religious and moral subjectivity, distinct from the rational
individual on which Western modernity depended.
Thus the translated term shūkyō was retranslated in the process of
Japanese-Russian intellectual practices. The translation of Tolstoy was
an intellectual practice that aimed not to translate Western metaphysics
or Western modernity, but to undermine and uproot Western modernity
through the transfiguration of Christianity into an anarchist religion.

Converting to Anarchist Religion

Konishi’s translations of Tolstoy reduced Christianity to a familiar reli-
gious idea of divine virtue for all. In the process, it completely trans-
formed Christianity by removing the essential church doctrines and the

83. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, pp. 37–39.

 Anarchist Religion 129

authority of the church itself. Back in Russia, in response to Tolstoy’s

radical departure from all tenets that the church held most sacred, the
Russian Orthodox Church in 1901 publicized across Russia its decision
to excommunicate him.
[Tolstoy] preaches with fanatical fervency the subversion of all doctrines of the
Orthodox Church and the very essence of Christian belief. He rejects the per-
sonal Living God in the glorious Holy Trinity of the Creation and the Eternal
Spirit, rejects the Lord Jesus Christ— Godman, Redeemer and Savior of the
world, who suffered for us human beings and for our salvation and was resur-
rected from the dead, rejects the virgin, conception by a human being of Christ
God and virginity before birth and in birth of the Purest Mother of God, the
Virgin Maria, does not recognize life after death, rejects all mysteries of the
Church and Grace and their activity of the Holy Spirit.

Meanwhile, Konishi’s act of transfiguring Christianity via Tolstoy

proved extremely attractive to progressive intellectuals in Japan who
were waiting for a radical undoing of the authoritative idea of shūkyō as
a rational modern religion to morally undergird the development of the
nation-state modeled after the West. Konishi’s direct translations of
Tolstoy from Russian soon led to many other translations by Katō Naoshi
(1873–1952), Uchida Roan, Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), Ivan Senuma (Senu-
ma’s Orthodox Christian name), otherwise known as Senuma Kakusaburō
(1868–1953), and Nobori Shōmu, among others. Religion as tokugi that
had shifted the very meaning of shūkyō realized a new self, distinct from
the modern individualized self of liberal capitalism, and thereby invited
broad public participation. Katō recalled that the effect of making Tol-
stoy’s work available to a wider audience through translation was “almost
like a revolution. . . . Thanks to this light, people found their own reli-
gion, emerging from the depths of the soul, not inculcated by the outer
world under the name of the church and its dogmas. ‘Religious conscious-
ness’ became the most popular expression soon after the appearance of
Tolstoy’s books. Before this time, religion was somehow outside our col-
lective ‘I.’ It was somehow something that we studied and learned, but
never experienced.”

84. Reprinted in Burlaka, L. N. Tolstoi, p. 346.

85. Katō Naoshi, “Tolstoi v Iaponii,” pp. 74– 75. Italics are mine.
130 Anarchist Religion

Shūkyō had turned from something that served as a necessary dressing

to be adopted for Western modernity into a new possibility for selfhood in
the world. Numerous private letters sent to Tolstoy from Japan, preserved
with no catalog, list, or easy access in the Tolstoy museum archive in Mos-
cow, all voiced sentiments echoing Katō’s. People began reading Tolstoy’s
writings like the Bible. The translations of Tolstoy were widely consumed
as religious gospel in Japan and as the new representative of modern
“Christian” thought. Only much later would he be studied as a literary
writer as well.
Two events further affected the spread of Tolstoy’s thought among a
wider population in Japan, his excommunication by the Russian Ortho-
dox Church and his symbolic role in the Japanese Nonwar Movement
(Hisen undō) during the Russo-Japanese War (see Chapter 3). The degree
to which the Japanese public expressed interest and concern over the
matter of a foreign writer’s excommunication reveals considerable identi-
fication with the Russian writer’s religious thought by the first years of
1900. Uchida Roan, a close friend of Futabatei Shimei who translated
Tolstoy’s provocative novel Resurrection with Futabatei in 1901 in polemic
against the excommunication, recalled that Tolstoy’s excommunication
had made him the talk of the times in Japan. Resurrection expressed Tol-
stoy’s religious and ethical ideas in literary form. Its publication in 1899
had served as the basis for the Holy Synod’s excommunication of Tolstoy
in 1901.
In the year of Tolstoy’s excommunication, Uchida sought Tolstoy’s
essays at the Maruzen Bookstore in Tokyo, known for its foreign-language
collection. Although Maruzen did not have anything by Tolstoy, the book-
store decided with some hesitation to use Uchida’s help in finding and
ordering several thousand copies of a cheap available English-language
paperback collection of Tolstoy’s religious and philosophical essays. Uchida
recalled everyone’s surprise that people bought up Tolstoy’s religious and
philosophical essays in a craze, compared with the much slower pace of
even the more popular foreign dime novels:
At that time the novels of Dickens and Lytton sold well as “dime novels,” but
other novels sold hardly more than a few hundred copies, and there was grave
concern over the prospect of selling several thousand copies of Tolstoy’s essays.
The outcome of the matter, however, was quite unexpected. The stock of several
thousand copies was quickly sold out and the book had to be replaced several
 Anarchist Religion 131

times. In the space of one year nearly twenty thousand copies of this book had
been sold in Japan.

In 1902 and 1903, Katō responded with his translations into Japanese of
Tolstoy’s religious books, What Is My Religion?, My Confession, What Men
Live By, and Short Exposition of the Gospel. The translations created an-
other sensation. Ivan Senuma, Konishi’s replacement as dean of the
Orthodox Seminary, even wrote a letter to Tolstoy in 1903 letting him
know that they had finally been published in Japanese. Senuma con-
fessed to Tolstoy that he had long been waiting for the appearance of these
translations in Japan. Katō recalled, “It was interesting to observe how
Tolstoy’s religious thoughts penetrated into every crook of the Japanese
mind and, like powder hidden in the crack of a rock, exploded with great
power, shaking to the foundations all existing theories and principles.”
The translations surfaced in tandem with the Russo-Japanese War and
greatly increased the Russian writer’s popularity. The feminist Hiratsuka
Raichō (1886–1971) recalled in her autobiography:
I thought I was the only person obsessed with the ultimate questions of human
existence, but to a greater or lesser degree, other young Japanese were also
searching for a new philosophy of life. Indeed, from about the time of the war
with Russia, a youthful vibrancy and romantic spirit had enlivened the world
of thought as intellectuals were increasingly drawn to religious and ethical is-
sues. . . . Thinkers vied with one another to propound their ideas on religion
and ethics and recent converts to Christianity also translated works like Tol-
stoy’s My Confession and What I Believe.

Reading Tolstoy’s religious works, one person recalled that he had

experienced a “revolution” in his own thoughts. “Yesterday I read your
works ‘What Is Religion,’ ‘Why Religion,’ and ‘Christian Teachings’ from
beginning to end. How I reached the essence of Christianity! All ques-
tions that remained unclear and always tormented me have now suddenly

86. Akamatsu Katsumaro, “Russian Influence on the Early Japa nese Social Move-
ment,” p. 94. See also Kimura, Maruzen gaishi, pp. 202–3.
87. I. A. Senuma to L. N. Tolstoy, 1903 (without date), ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 239/64, l. 1.
88. I. A. Senuma to L. N. Tolstoy, August 12/25, 1902, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 239/64, l. 3.
89. Katō Naoshi, “Tolstoi v Iaponii,” p. 74.
90. Hiratsuka, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, p. 76.
132 Anarchist Religion

been resolved.” Watanabe Misao, a young student from Tokyo, wrote

to Tolstoy that “I want to realize exactly your opinion in my life.” The
publisher Enomoto Shūson wrote in a personal letter to Tolstoy in 1909,
“I am a hearty worshipper of you, and since about ten years ago, I am
reading your noble works everyday as the Bible. Now I am eagerly trans-
lating your works as my whole life work for Japanese readers. . . . You are
my ideal great man whose character I cannot forget even for a moment.”
It turns out that Enomoto was a former student of the Orthodox Semi-
nary in Tokyo who left the church because of disagreements over church
principles with seminary dean Ivan Senuma. However, neither Enomoto
nor Senuma knew that they shared a tremendous interest in Tolstoyan
thought, and Enomoto did not know that Senuma himself was in close
touch with Tolstoy.
Consider also a letter from the Christian pastor Shiraishi Rinosuke in
1910 that told of his preaching Tolstoy’s antichurch Christianity. Shirai-
shi heretically preached Tolstoy’s antichurch ideas within the very build-
ing of his church. Shiraishi wrote, “It is many years since I have read
your excellent works, Resurrection, My Religion, “What Is Religion?,”
“The Slavery of Our Time,” “The Russian Revolution.” . . . Sometimes I
speak of your stories in my church and my audience are very pleased and
inspired by your lofty thought of humanity.” In another letter, he
wrote, “I fancy I see the dawn of a new era in which humanity prevails.”
Correspondence from remote villages of Japan expressed similar devo-
tion to Tolstoy’s thoughts. A postcard sent from Sagawa Ichisuka in the
village of Nishimura, Yamaguchi Prefecture, read, “I am the most ar-
dent reader of your works and send you a humble picture of my neigh-
borhood and ask you about your recent health.”

91. Tamura, “Vliianie na menia Tolstogo,” p. 344.

92. Watanabe Misao to L. N. Tolstoy, February 6, 1907, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 1380, l. 1.
93. Enomoto Shūson to Tolstoy, July 14, 1909. ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 1741. l. 1. Enomoto
worked for the publisher Shinkoronsha.
94. See Senuma’s letters to Tolstoy, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 239/64. This, of course, did
not mean that everyone in the Orthodox seminary followed Tolstoyan thought.
95. Shiraishi Rinosuke to L. N. Tolstoy, February 4, 1910. ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 2315, l. 1.
96. Shiraishi Rinosuke to L. N. Tolstoy, May 13, 1910, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 2314. l. 1.
97. Sagawa Ichisuka to L. N. Tolstoy, November 17, 1907, ORGMT, f. 1, inv.
1102/27, l. 1.
 Anarchist Religion 133

Literary writer Tokutomi Roka’s much-talked-about pilgrimage to

the Tolstoy estate in 1906, immediately after the war, nailed down the
dominant sentiment about and meanings given to Tolstoy in Japan.
Roka, an emerging celebrity writer who was a close friend of Konishi
and the younger brother of the publicist Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957),
underwent his own “resurrection,” as he called it, in a spiritual experi-
ence at the top of Mt. Fuji in 1905. He began to read exclusively the
Bible and Tolstoy’s works and withdrew from his urban home in Tokyo
for a life of manual labor on a country farm estate, where he attempted
to put Tolstoy’s ideals into his everyday life. He made plans for a reli-
gious pilgrimage to all the holy sites of the Christian world, which he
undertook in 1906. The pilgrimage from Jerusalem to Nazareth to Con-
stantinople ended with the highlight of the whole trip, a visit to the
modern-day holy site, Tolstoy’s home in Iasnaia Poliana. That his pil-
grimage ended in Russia at the home of the symbolic figure of the Non-
war Movement in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War
was Roka’s demonstration against the Western order that had validated
Japan’s victory. Here, at the home of the person Roka called the prophet
of the twentieth century, Roka baptized himself in what he called the
“holy water” of the Voronka River where Tolstoy took his morning swim
(see Figure 2.2).
Roka became widely known as “Japan’s Tolstoy” after his trip, about
which he published a book upon his return, Junrei kikō (Notes of a pil-
grim). The public followed every step Roka took on his pilgrimage through
his autobiographical account. Roka had successfully turned his inner-
most private pilgrimage into a very public and social conversion. Many
followed his stories as a conversion narrative, which drew them to make

98. Roka was one of a group of young Christian leaders who invited Konishi to tell
them about Tolstoy in 1894 at a party in Kyoto. A number of them, including Toku-
tomi Sohō and Yokoi Tokio (1857–1927), either began a correspondence with Tolstoy
or, in the case of Sohō, actually visited Tolstoy’s home with Konishi’s letter of
introduction.
99. Tokutomi Roka, Junrei kikō, pp. 503– 7. For an English translation of Roka’s ac-
count of his pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s estate, see Tokutomi Roka, “Five Days at Yasnaya
Polyana.” For Aleksandra Tolstaya’s recollection of the visit, see Tolstaya, “Chichi To-
rusutoi to Tokutomi Roka kaiken no omoide,” and Tolstaya, Torusutoi no omoide, pp.
328–32.
134 Anarchist Religion

Fig. 2.2 Tokutomi Roka with Lev Tolstoy and Tolstoy’s daughter Aleksandra Tolstaya, Iasnaia
Poliana, Russia. Photograph courtesy of Tokutomi Roka Kōshun-en.

their own pilgrimage to the converted one, Roka, in a wave of conversions

after the Russo-Japanese War. His adoption of Tolstoy’s religious thought
became well known among intellectuals, and a number of youths made
pilgrimages to gain wisdom from Roka as part of a Tolstoyanism move-
ment. Many attempted to infuse translated Tolstoyan religious thought
into their everyday lives. Arishima Takeo, Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880–1958),
Ishikawa Takuboku, and numerous other cultural figures who will appear
in the following chapters, coalesced as converts to Konishi’s translation
of Tolstoyan religion.
Christianity had been redefined in an essential way in the translations
of Tolstoy that not only put Christianity on a level with all other religions
but also boiled it down to essential elements that were shared by all reli-
gions. This suggested the foundation for an alternative internationalism
expressed in the practice of religious faith, for if one believed in and prac-
ticed these essential elements of religion, one purportedly merged oneself
with the religious faithful throughout the world. In an exchange between
Tolstoy and a University of Tokyo student, Tolstoy emphasized that all
 Anarchist Religion 135

religions, not just Christianity, were the revelation and recognition of all
life based on universal human reason (conscience). The student G. S.
Tamura recalled receiving this response, “This brought me inexpressible
happiness. I understood that my belief in its essence coincided not only
with Christianity but with the religions of the entire world.” Tolstoyan
religion’s transfiguration of Christianity gave expression in a coherent
contemporary language to what some had been attempting to find words
for. When Tolstoy responded to Tamura’s questions, Tamura wrote, “I
was delighted. These were my own thoughts expressed by the greatest re-
ligious authority in the world.” The legacy of the translations of Tol-
stoyan religion in Japan was indicated in the campaign organized by the
Home Ministry in the decades after the war to ban the consumption of
Tolstoy in schools and public spaces on the ground that he was a cor-
rupter of national morals.
The treacherousness of Nikolai’s opening of religious conversion to
local reconstructions and interpretations was highlighted by the scan-
dalous opposition to the Orthodox Church that Konishi’s intellectual
and personal ties with Tolstoy suggested. Once again, Russian-Japanese
nonstate transnational intellectual relations frequently ran counter to
the institutions that originally made their contacts possible. When Kon-
ishi left the Orthodox Church, he did so on very poor terms with Father
Nikolai. Tolstoy, on the other hand, responded to Konishi’s news of his
break with the church with joy. He wrote to Konishi, “I was most
pleased to know, that your views on orthodoxy have changed. It always
seemed strange and incredible to me, that such a thoughtful and non-
superstitious people as the Japanese could accept and believe all those
absurd dogmas, having nothing in common with Christian truth, which
constitutes the substance of ecclesiastic Christianity, both of Catholi-
cism, Orthodoxy and Lutheranism.” Konishi subsequently became

100. Tamura, “Vliianie na menia Tolstogo,” p. 342.

101. Ibid. Some Buddhist groups also embraced Tolstoy’s religion. In 1903, Senuma
sent Tolstoy a copy of a Japa nese Buddhist journal that had Tolstoy’s picture on the
cover page. I. Senuma to P. A. Sergeenko, 10/23 November, 1903. ORGMT, f. 1, inv.
66356, P. A. Sergeenko Archive, l. 1.
102. Tamura, “Vliianie na menia Tolstogo,” p. 342.
103. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, p. 171.
104. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 69:152.
136 Anarchist Religion

professor of Russian studies at Kyoto University and Dōshisha Univer-

sity in Kyoto, where he continued to use the Russian-language Tao te
ching that he and Tolstoy had translated as his textbook for the study of
Russian.
Although some in the Japanese Orthodox Church strongly disagreed
with the anarchistic and antichurch writings of Tolstoy, others followed
Konishi’s work in translating Tolstoy with fervor. This reflected the di-
versity in opinions and ideas about Christianity within the Orthodox
Church. It also reflected the degree to which Konishi’s understanding of
Christianity was not as heretical to Nikolai’s construct of Japanese Or-
thodoxy as Nikolai himself claimed it was. Nikolai had carefully ap-
pointed Ivan Senuma to replace Konishi as dean of the Orthodox Theo-
logical Seminary in Tokyo. Senuma had been a fellow graduate of Kiev
Theological Academy with Konishi and a close colleague. What Niko-
lai was unaware of, however, was that Senuma’s idea of Japanese Ortho-
doxy was as open to a radical reconfiguration of Christianity as Koni-
shi’s had been.
Senuma’s steady personal correspondence with Tolstoy appears to
have begun in 1902, in tandem with the widespread public reaction to
his excommunication. In his first letter, Senuma innocently introduced
himself as Konishi’s “friend from Kiev Theological Academy.” The open-
ness with which Senuma identified simultaneously with both Tolstoy
and the church is remarkable. He reminded Tolstoy that Konishi, upon
his return to Japan, had become the “proselytizer here of your name,”
revealing his characterization of the Tolstoy-Konishi relationship as
based in shared religious rather than literary interests. As the new
dean of the seminary, Senuma wrote to Tolstoy in 1902, “I pray to Lord
God, that He long maintain your health for the affirmation of truth, the
zealous preacher of which you are! Much has been written here about
your excommunication from the Russian Church. I do not understand

105. In 1896, top graduates of the Orthodox seminary in Tokyo, including Konishi,
Senuma, and Sergei Shōji (1869–?), founded a Russian-language school in Tokyo. The
school quickly attracted two hundred or so students. Ushimaru, Nihon seikyōshi, p. 70.
Shōji was one of the handful of elite graduates of the seminary in Tokyo whom Nikolai
sent to Russia to study Orthodox theology.
106. Senuma to Tolstoy, April 13, 1902, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 239/64, l. 1.
 Anarchist Religion 137

such a decision. Can it really be that your teaching is so contrary to true

Christianity? I myself am a Christian, and belong to the Orthodox Church.
So what has happened with you in the affair of the church strongly trou-
bles me.” Senuma went on to express his regret that he was unable to
translate Tolstoy’s religious works because, he said, he had not been able
to obtain those works in Japan. Of course, he did not mention any-
thing about their implications for the church. Senuma’s puzzlement over
Tolstoy’s excommunication reveals that his own view of Christianity was
not far at all from Konishi’s.
During the Russo-Japanese War, Senuma considerately compiled a
package of existing Japanese publications about Tolstoy as a religious
figure and sent it to the Tolstoy estate. Obviously, he continued to see
no contradiction between what he was attempting to do through Japa-
nese Orthodoxy and Tolstoy’s religion. Both Senuma and his wife, Kayō,
who had trained at the Japanese Orthodox women’s school, became
leading translators in Japan of Tolstoy’s major literary works. In a rare,
unpublished manuscript submitted in Russian to Tolstoy’s disciple P. A.
Sergeenko, Kayō wrote that she considered herself merely a follower of
Futabatei’s established project of translating Russian literature. That is,
she perceived herself to be writing in Futabatei’s tradition of translating
Russian Populist literature in order to criticize Western modernity and
to redirect Japanese society and culture. Here, Kayō reveals in Russian,
in a forlorn manuscript kept in the Russian state archives, what she
could not otherwise acknowledge in Japan as the wife of the dean of the
Orthodox Seminary in Tokyo.

107. Senuma to Tolstoy, August 12/25, 1902, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 239/64, l. 2. Senuma
sometimes double dated his letters to Tolstoy to reflect the Julian calendar, which was
used in Russia, and the Gregorian calendar, which was used in Japan and many European
countries at the time. The Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar.
108. Several months later, Senuma happily informed Tolstoy in a letter that his
works My Religion and Confession had been translated and published in Japa nese. Se-
numa to Tolstoy, January 16, 1903, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 239/64, l. 1.
109. Senuma to P. A. Sergeenko, November 10/23, 1903, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 66356, P.
A. Sergeenko archive, l. 2.
110. Senuma Kayō, “Vlianie Russkoi literatury na Iaponskuiu,” unpublished manu-
script in RGALI, f. 355, op. 1, ed. khr. 85.
138 Anarchist Religion

In seeking a Japanese Orthodox future to link Japan to the wider

world, Konishi ended up eliminating the “Japanese” part of Japanese
Orthodox Christianity as a national entity. Konishi’s search for a “mod-
ern religion” appropriate to modern experience in Japan thus ended in
his translation of a nonchurch, nonstate thought that expressed in words
for the first time many people’s own forming sentiments and experiences.
A final irony reveals the independent manner with which both parties
came to the intellectual negotiating table. Although many in Japan were
increasingly drawn toward Tolstoy as a kind of apostle of the new age,
Konishi himself rejected the growing tendency toward Tolstoy’s idoliza-
tion. Aleksandra Tolstaya recalled Konishi’s dissatisfaction with parts of
the movement decades later. Konishi expressed to Aleksandra his and
his wife’s sorrow over their own son’s ascetic devotion as a Tolstoyan.
His dissatisfaction lay in the idolization of the mortal Tolstoy as a god
figure.
Indeed, Konishi came to see in Father Nikolai’s conduct of daily life
a purer model of the virtuous life of “Tolstoyan religion” than perhaps
Tolstoy himself. In Konishi’s recollections of Nikolai, he remembered
Nikolai fondly and with great respect as someone who was the greatest
example of “a holy life on earth.” Despite their irreconcilable differ-
ences over the relation of the church to the nation, Konishi related with
respect to Nikolai’s lifetime devotion to the development of moral life
abroad, often against the political interests of his own nation-state and
the Japanese state. He saw Nikolai’s everyday conduct of a modest life-
style mixed with an active engagement with the larger world around him
far beyond the borders of his own nation as being in true accordance
with the concept of a good life. This was perhaps something that Count
Tolstoy’s aristocratic life, preserved on his inherited country estate, ulti-
mately could not do.

The phenomenon of conversion has been observed here on two levels.

On one level, a conversion of meaning was achieved when the meaning
of “modern religion” (shūkyō) was changed via translation practice to

111. Aleksandra Tolstaya, Out of the Past, pp. 247–48.

112. Konishi Masutarō, “Nasha Iaponskaia missiia,” p. 391.
 Anarchist Religion 139

anarchist religion. The second conversion was the nation-scale religious

conversion to anarchist religion, the public response to the conversion of
meaning. Enthusiastic acts of self-conversion to anarchist religion chal-
lenged the efforts of Christian missionaries to convert people to Western
modern religious institutions and civilize them in the process.
The act of translating Tolstoy in Japan was a conscious translation
practice that aimed not to import expressions of Western modern sub-
jectivity through Western literature, but to use a thought on universal
human virtue in which knowledge of the Good no longer belonged to a
privileged civilized few. This case can be compared, for example, with
Lydia Liu’s analysis of translation practice in China during the 1930s.
Liu suggests that Chinese intellectuals’ translations of Western moder-
nity through their literature invited self-colonization.
The Konishi-Tolstoy collaborative translation practice altered the
meaning of shūkyō to mean a virtue possessed by all. Konishi’s transla-
tion of religion as toku or tokugi (tokugi to shiteno shūkyō [religion as
virtue]) suddenly changed the meaning of shūkyō to divine virtue that
everyone equally possesses from within. The dynamic phenomenon of
conversion to Tolstoyan religion in Japan was based on this transfigura-
tion of knowledge and the resulting new selfhood. In the process of re-
ducing Christianity to a religious idea of divine virtue for all, Konishi
and Tolstoy completely transformed Christianity by removing the es-
sential church doctrines and the authority of the church itself. To con-
vert oneself to Tolstoyan religion was thereby to participate in the up-
rooting of some of the major tropes of Western modernity, including the
imperial moral order, a hierarchical construct of social order played out
in human ethical relations, as in the term jinkaku that tied morality
( jin) with social rank (kaku).
In response to the translations of Tolstoyan anarchist religion, self-
conversion expressed a new possibility for modern selfhood in an imag-
ined nonhierarchical world. Translated anarchist religion and subsequent

113. Liu, Translingual Practice, pp. 45–51.

114. See Konishi, “Tokugi to shite no shūkyō.”
115. For a close examination of the term jinkaku, see Kyōko Inoue, Individual Dig-
nity in Modern Japanese Thought.
140 Anarchist Religion

practices in late Meiji-Taishō Japan thereby made a simultaneous negation

of authority by departing from both nativist nationalism and Westerniza-
tion, as represented in Christianity. The new religion represented by
Tolstoy provided an ontological basis for a subjectivity independent of
power and state in imperial Japan.
This took place before the larger backdrop of Russian-Japanese trans-
national intellectual relations, beyond a bifurcated East and West as both
spatial and temporal categories. Seeing this history from the perspective of
transnational relations gives a view of activities beyond the two-way
transactions of “colonizer” and “colonized” or “East” and “West.” Again,
there is a reminder here of the importance of examining international
history not only at the nonstate level but also from nonorganizational
perspectives. Here, the source of conversionary religious thought was
identified from the start in terms of its difference from the authority of the
West, and the converted took a fully active and willing role in their self-
conversion. Conversion did not take place without apparent contradiction
or irony. Japanese Orthodoxy in the making helped prepare some of those
best trained in Orthodox theology and the mission’s ideals to turn to
anarchist religion as the logical end of Japanese Orthodoxy’s own iden-
tity as a unifier of existing Japanese religious thought with the Orthodox
Christianity of the future.
The effects of conversion to Tolstoyan religion have largely been hid-
den from historical accounting of manifest “events.” Nonetheless, reli-
gious conversion remains one of the most destabilizing factors in society.
This most private of events, religious conversion, would become much
more politically tangible in the Nonwar Movement of the Russo-Japanese
War, when the figure of Tolstoy would be mobilized as a symbol of world
order. Many Japa nese would couple Tolstoyan anarchist religion with
anarchist historicity in a theory of active participation in the world at
hand.
By the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, the leading Tolstoyan from
Russia would introduce Peter Kropotkin to Japanese seeking out anar-
chist views on the impending war. In 1903, Tolstoi’s close friend and the
leading proponent of Tolstoyan religion, Vladimir Chertkov (1854–1936),
brought visitors from Japan to see Kropotkin in London. Chertkov wrote
to Kropotkin in December 1903 that his “Japanese friends . . . dearly
wish to meet with you” on a most serious matter. Chertkov and his
 Anarchist Religion 141

friends wanted to listen to Kropotkin’s opinion on the latest developments

in international affairs involving Russia and East Asia. This private
meeting of Russian and Japanese Tolstoyans with Kropotkin on the eve
of war was indicative of the impending broader shift in Japanese intellec-
tual and cultural life toward a historicist, or Kropotkinist, understanding
of anarchism, and of the role of anarchist religion in fueling that very
shift.

116. Vladimir Chertkov to Peter Kroptokin, December 23, 1903, GARF, f. 1129, op.
2, ed. khr. 2759, l. 27.
 ch apter 3
The Nonwar Movement in the
Russo-Japanese War: The Invention
of the People without the State

The awarding of the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize to U.S. president Theodore
Roosevelt (1858–1919) for his part in negotiating the end of the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904–5 represented the territorially formulated utopian
vision on which many of the international institutions of the century
would be founded. His Nobel lecture spoke of a vision of peace and
world civilizational order anchored to the territorial space of the sover-
eign nation-state that had been and would continue to dominate world
politics and policies throughout the twentieth century. In the name of
peace, Roosevelt urged the building of a core community of civilized
nation-states or world powers adjudicated by international law and an
international court of justice, peace treaties that declared the mutual
recognition of the integrity of national territory and sovereignty among
member states, and the formation of a League of Peace among key world
powers as an international policing force to “prevent, by force if neces-

1. Indeed, Charles S. Maier argues that the most recent historical epoch, from about
the 1860s to 1980, is best characterized by the emergence, ascendancy, and subsequent
crisis of territoriality. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History.” The adop-
tion of the so-called Paris System at the end of World War I would shift international
politics founded on dynastic legitimacy and state sovereignty under the nineteenth-
century Vienna System to a focus on populations, a category that incorporated and
allowed for the civilizing mission, self-determination, minorities and majorities, man-
dates, and genocide. Weitz, “From Vienna to the Paris System.” Nonetheless, the sover-
eignty of the nation-state anchored to a bounded territory remained the core category
around which international problems and their solutions were conceived.
 The Nonwar Movement 143

sary,” the breaking of peace by “others.” At a banquet in his honor fol-

lowing his acceptance of the prize, he added to this vision a now-familiar
civilizing mission: civilized nations had a responsibility for the steward-
ship of barbarous ones until they developed to such a point that “anar-
chy” could be replaced by “peace” and “prosperity” by way of the erection
of a modern national government. Together, the two speeches elucidated
his vision of international progress toward a more peaceful and stable
world. Roosevelt’s Nobel addresses outlined the utopian promise of peace
in the spatial order centered on the civilized nation-states of the West
that was embedded in the construct of “international relations.” If, as
Zygmunt Bauman has noted, Western modernity is characterized by the
utopian imagination of a different, alternative world founded on terri-
toriality, the Western modern notion of “peace” and “justice” in that
utopia has been inseparable from the geographic space of the modern
nation-state.
Curiously, another definitive occasion for the ideological formulation
of “peace and world order” arose concurrently in the Russo-Japanese War.
The Hisen undō, or what I have translated as the “Nonwar Movement,”
emerged in the critique of the war. The movement is viewed today as a
watershed moment for antimilitarism and has served as an inspirational
model for peace movements in Japan ever since. Strikingly, however,
neither the Portsmouth Peace Treaty brokered by Roosevelt nor the
Nobel Peace Prize consequently awarded Roosevelt was a part of the
discussions of peace among participants in the Japanese Nonwar Move-
ment. Indeed, the movement kept the so-called international commu-
nity of governments in the West at arm’s length in its project for peace.
One could even say that members of the movement were disinterested
in the peacemaking achievements of the international community in
ending the war between Russia and Japan. Despite participants’ seeming
reticence in relation to the international community, the movement’s
ideological redrawing of the concept of peace attracted many people in

2. Roosevelt, “Theodore Roosevelt—Nobel Lecture.”

3. Bauman, “Utopia with No Topos.”
4. Just-war theory, the moral code of the international community of civilized sover-
eign nation-states that has been integral for twentieth-century assessments of just con-
duct in the waging of war, is premised on the sanctity of the sovereign nation-state.
144 The Nonwar Movement

Japan. Given the status of the Nonwar Movement as a symbol of peace

in modern Japan, how is one to read the movement’s silence over the Ports-
mouth Treaty and the Nobel Peace Prize in its articulations of peace and
world order?
It is the very absence of these major symbols of peace that is signifi-
cant for understanding the Nonwar Movement. Behind this absence lay
a competing vision of peace and justice founded on “the people” (heimin),
detached from the territory of the nation-state. For anarchists in Japan,
the well-being of the individual and the larger society was impossible
without a reordering of the existing understanding of international society
from one centered on the nation-state to one centered on the individual
exchanges and social networks of the people.
This chapter gives a fresh interpretation of the Russo-Japanese War
period. I argue that the war was the pivotal event that made salient a
conflict in competing visions of human progress and world order in Ja-
pan. A body of intellectuals in Japan shared the view that the war repre-
sented a retrogression of human progress and civilization. Their view
sharply contrasted with the ideology of Western modernity that sanc-
tioned, if not celebrated, Japan’s entry into the community of nation-
states as a result of its victory in war and empire building. The experience
of the war helped solidify a cooperatist-anarchist historical conscious-
ness that would take the form of social action. Having thus far evaded
historians’ conceptual vocabularies, the intellectual history of the Non-
war Movement challenges existing historiography that has emphasized
the sole meaning of the war for modern Japanese history as a decisive
moment for Japan’s entrance into the elite group of nation-states of the
Christian West. This leads to arguably one of the most challenging ques-
tions in the historiography of modern Japan in the world: how is one to
understand the paradox that Russian-Japanese nonstate cultural and in-
tellectual relations were most intense when diplomatic relations were at
their worst and their nations were at war? This chapter vividly answers
this question.

5. In recent historiography, two collaborative attempts have focused on the cultural

perspectives of their relations: Rimer, Hidden Fire; and Wells and Wilson, Russo-
Japanese War in Cultural Perspective. Both volumes have identified the intense cultural
contacts that existed between Japan and Russia. Although Rimer noted the puzzling
 The Nonwar Movement 145

Answering this question makes it possible to make sense of the war-

time birth of a new imagination of “the people” without the state as both
the subject and object of the movement, which countered the system of
thought of Western modernity behind the war. Indeed, the Nonwar Move-
ment revolved around the language and imagery of heimin (people). Hei-
min was invented during the war as the subject of international relations
and of historical progress itself, in direct contradiction to kokumin,
“the nation’s people” as the subject of the nation-state, who, according to
Western modernity, were the subject and the supposed beneficiaries of
the war effort against Russia. As indicated by the organ of the Nonwar
Movement, Heimin shimbun (People’s newspaper), heimin was the repre-
sentative banner for the movement. Heimin, composed of the characters
hei (plains, level, or horizon) and min (people), served to replace social,
national, and ethnic hierarchies with a concretized notion of humanity
that extended beyond race, ethnicity, and the territory of the nation-
state. The intellectual practice of Nonwar thinkers may best be described
as an invention of the people without the state. By dissecting the mean-
ings of this widely used term for “the people” that emerged with the war,
this chapter provides a fresh understanding of the intellectual life of this
period in Japan. This invention of the people without the state may be
contrasted with revolutionary America, for example, where “the people”
were invented as the participatory subjects of representative national
government.
The reconception of “the people” as heimin led seamlessly to a recon-
ceptualization of “international society” as the sphere of individual ex-
changes and transnational social networks. The Nonwar Movement criti-
cized international relations as state-to-state relations. It problematized
the utopian premise of the modern ideology of “international society”
founded on the idealized spatial construct of the liberal nation-state and
naturalized in the understanding of international order and world peace.
The movement denaturalized these constructs through the ideology of
heimin and its subsequent respatialization of the imagined international
arena.

misalignment between Russian-Japanese state and nonstate relations, the volume as a

whole did not explain the phenomenon.
6. Morgan, Inventing the People.
146 The Nonwar Movement

The existing historiographical assumption has been that Western mo-

dernity was somehow the only reality in modern Japan. This book seeks
to demonstrate the coexistence of other lived realities and experiences.
The ideology of heimin certainly shared the same space and chronologi-
cal time of international relations as reality. However, if “international
relations” represented an imagined future progress founded on a con-
struct and imagination of a society of nation-states, heimin represented
for Nonwar Movement participants an imagined but realistic possibility
for future international society.
Intellectual and cultural historians have paid too little attention to
such a distinctive and influential phenomenon as the Nonwar Move-
ment. Its very alienness to the teleological construct of Western moder-
nity, the linear historical narrative of the progress of the nation-state
(“history”), has led it to go unnoticed. This fact draws attention to the
limits of that more familiar history and its concepts and imaginations of
the national subject. As historians have expanded the historical materials
used to look at the war in recent years, they have often reaffirmed the
narrative of Japan’s modernization and Westernization as the historical
meaning given to the war. Although there have been benefits from these
efforts to materially expand the historical sources and the volume of
historical knowledge, the consequence may have been to further solidify
the ideological prevalence of Western modernity as an interpretive frame-
work for history writing. This chapter examines numerous wartime mate-
rials that fail to fit that paradigm.
This chapter critically engages with the existing understanding that
socialism imported from the West provided the political platform for
Japanese pacifism during the Russo-Japanese War. It also problematizes
historians’ tendency to view Japanese socialists’ and anarchists’ reliance
on moral arguments against the war and against capitalism as conserva-
tive and traditionalist. The tendency of Japanese Meiji socialists to make
moral arguments against liberal capitalism, as opposed to “objective,”
“social scientific” approaches to the problems of capitalism, such as those
of Marx, is well known. Historians have conceived of this tendency to
privilege social harmony over class struggle as an indication of the con-

7. Duus and Scheiner, “Socialism, Liberalism and Marxism.”

 The Nonwar Movement 147

tinued strains of traditionalism and thereby the relative backwardness

of Japanese socialism, as opposed to the conflict-oriented view of pro-
gressive society found in the empirical social and economic analyses of
Marx. This comparative view of Japanese socialists presumes that Japanese
anarchists’ selective endorsement of Japanese/“Oriental” intellectual tra-
ditions and moral justification for Nonwar were remnants from the tradi-
tional past, that was yet to be modernized after the European radical
model. A fresh interpretation is that these thinkers and the participants
in the Nonwar Movement at large radically transcended the historio-
graphical construct of a dilemma among socialists between Western liber-
alism and Japanese traditionalism/nationalism.
I have chosen to translate the term Japanese participants used for
their movement, Hisen undō, as “Nonwar Movement.” References to the
movement have translated Hisen undō as “Antiwar Movement” without
distinguishing it from the more contemporary Japanese term Hansen
undō. This translation not only fails to reflect the intellectual universe of
the movement but also may be misleading because the term hansen as it
has been used in the period after the Asia-Pacific War refers to an op-
positional position against a particular war. It was used, for example, for
the Anti-Vietnam War Movement (Betonamu hansen undō). Also, the
Hisen undō of the Russo-Japanese War did not express a philosophical
position of pacifism, the absolute negation of violence.
In fact, hisen was a term historically specific to the Russo-Japanese
War, and the war was the only time at which the term would ever be
used. Inherent in the language of hisen was a construct of civilization
and progress that was distinguished from Western modernity. Accord-
ing to the movement’s construct, imperialist wars were not a part of that
modernity and therefore were hi (absent). Therefore, this movement can
be conceived as an intellectual phenomenon for a given understanding
of progress and civilization rather than against a particular war or against
violence in absolute terms.

8. Kōtoku Shūsui has been described as one caught between his emotional ties to
traditionalism and nativism and his rational preference for Western-style progressive
thoughts, a dualism that essentially limited his possibilities as a revolutionary. See
Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui. For a similar treatment of anarchist intellectuals as nativist
nationalists, see Hoston, State, Identity, and the National Question, pp. 137–48, 169.
148 The Nonwar Movement

If, as Hyman Kublin suggested half a century ago, Russians and Japa-
nese during this period provide one of the most successful cases of anti-
militarism in a time of war in modern history, this can be explained only
by looking at the specific historical phenomenon of Japanese-Russian
transnational intellectual relations. Although the degree of “success”
depends on how this intellectual phenomenon is defined and under-
stood, there is little doubt that the Nonwar Movement played an impor-
tant role in the development of intellectual life in Japan. Indeed, the
movement was influential in making the decades between the Russo-
Japanese War and the Asia-Pacific War one of the most innovative and
dynamic periods in modern Japanese intellectual history.

Fighting for the Utopia of International Relations

Japan’s sensational success in the Russo-Japanese War was one of the
first major global moments of the twentieth century, in which ideas and
hopes about the universality of Western modernity were projected from
around the world onto Japan’s victory over Russia. The war earned Japan
recognition as a civilized nation-state from many parts of the Western
international community and beyond by enabling Japan to demonstrate
its military might, successful industrialization, national unity, and po-
litical consciousness. Numerous illustrated English-language pamphlets,
coffee-table books, and serials were produced in Japan and disseminated
in the West during the war, which depicted the military capabilities and
patriotism that were necessary elements of a unified and independent
nation-state. The government’s concerted effort to present itself to the
West during the war as a civilized nation-state highlighted its campaign

9. Hyman Kublin points out that even before social democracy had taken deep root
in either country, Russian and Japa nese intellectuals were the “crowning success of so-
cialist internationalism during the twenty-five-year life-span of the Second Interna-
tional.” Kublin, “Japa nese Socialists and the Russo-Japanese War,” pp. 322–23.
10. See, for example, Russo-Japanese War Fully Illustrated, no. 1 (April 1904)–no. 10
(September 1905); Russo-Japanese War (Tokyo: Kinkodo, 1904–5); Russo-Japanese War
(Tokyo: Sonokichi Hasegawa, 1904); Russo-Japanese War: Fourth Army; The Album,
Containing the Photographs and Pictures Regarding the Russo-Japanese War; and Picture
Book of Japanese War with Russia. There was even an illustrated children’s book in English
on the war published in Tokyo. Russo-Japanese War, 1904– 5: A Children’s Story. The
Meiji emperor had by that time replaced his traditional garb with a Western military
 The Nonwar Movement 149

of cultural diplomacy from within Japan for foreign visitors. The govern-
ment took great pains to demonstrate to foreign media that its humane
treatment of Russian prisoners of war housed in camps across Japan was
a sign that Japan’s civilized behavior extended beyond the battlefield.
These wartime domestic policies were designed to impress visitors from
the West. Victory would be the ultimate assurance of Japan’s newly
gained status among the civilized nation-states.
Located within this same intellectual universe, perhaps somewhat
ironically, many Asians and even some groups of African Americans saw
in Japan’s victory the victory of the dark races over white civilization.
For them, Japan’s military defeat of Russia shone the way for the recog-
nition of the “darker-skinned” peoples as no longer inherently inferior.
Such perceptions reflected and are a reminder of the important concep-
tual linkage between race and civilization at the turn of the last century
in the international arena. Although the global order of nation-states
categorized by race and ethnicity may have been symbolically destabi-
lized when Japan defeated Russia, Japan had earned world recognition
as a civilized nation-state only by fighting out a place of power within
the same Eurocentric hierarchical order of international relations.
Despite the racially charged meanings that Japan’s victory repre-
sented, ordinary Americans celebrated the Japanese defeat of Russia in
the war with excitement. For a number of Americans, Japan’s victory
over the Russian autocratic state was a convincing demonstration of the
universality of the progressiveness of Western modernity so recently in-
troduced into Japan. Americans’ support for Japan’s military victory in
the Russo-Japanese War would seem to contradict the widespread racial
fears of Japan’s geopolitical expansion, aptly named “the yellow peril,”
that simultaneously existed in the United States. In fact, the seemingly

uniform, producing a striking image of military prowess circulated for both domestic
and international consumption through the medium of modern photography.
11. On the treatment of Russian POWs, see, for example, Rotem Kowner’s study of
the public relations campaign that the state directed toward Western observers during
the war. This campaign included tours for foreign observers to draw attention to the
state’s humane treatment of Russian POWs. Kowner, “Becoming an Honorary Civi-
lized Nation.” For an experientially based account of life in the POW camps, see Kup-
chinskii, Geroi tyla.
12. See, for example, Gallicchio, African American Encounter with Japan and China.
150 The Nonwar Movement

contradictory sentiments of liberal support for the Japanese war effort,

on the one hand, and racist fears of Japanese expansion, on the other
were part of the same ideological universe.
Ira Remsen (1846–1927), then president of Johns Hopkins University,
articulated the intellectual world of early twentieth-century Western
liberalism that unified this apparent contradiction between race and
civilization in American imaginations of Japan. Remsen had mentored
the famous Western cosmopolitanists Nitobe Inazō and Satō Shōsuke
(1856–1939) during their studies in the United States. Satō, like Nitobe,
would become a leading theorist of colonization. He also would serve
as the founding president of Hokkaido Imperial University. In a rare
interview in 1904 for the popu lar Japa nese journal Taiyō, Remsen dis-
cussed his vision of Japan’s role in the world as defined by its perfor-
mance in the war. Underlying his discussion was the moral imperative
of racial tolerance. He urged Americans to overcome their fears of the
Japa nese as a powerful yellow race. Remsen did not dispute the need to
fear a yellow peril at large. Given the real threat of the cultural mon-
golization of Western civilization by an encroaching Orient, he claimed
that Americans’ fears about Japan were fully understandable. None-
theless, he pointed out, Japan had made remarkable civilizational prog-
ress in the past fifty years since its “opening by the West.” Remsen found
that the solution to the reality of the yellow peril lay precisely in Japan’s
political and cultural presence as a civilizing force for the East. By
injecting civilization into backward countries in the Orient like China
and Russia, which continued to maintain despotic rule, the racially
defined threat of a yellow peril could be overcome through civilized cul-
ture. Both Remsen and his colleague, Johns Hopkins professor of his-
tory John Vincent (1857–1939), agreed in the interview that in winning
the war and expanding its power in the region, Japan would contribute
to the making of international peace and world order. The fear of the
yellow peril and the racially tolerant civilizational discourse voiced by
Remsen were two sides of the same coin. Whether Japan’s winning of
the war meant the encroachment of an inferior race and its culture on

13. Morimoto, “Johns Hopkins daigaku sōchō oyobi rekishi kyōju,” p. 207.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 208.
 The Nonwar Movement 151

the West or the advancement of Western civilization in the East, the

shared belief in the absolute superiority of Western civilization over a
primitive East remained.
Remsen’s view of the world as one pulled between the forces of order
and disorder embodied a prevailing notion of the state of nature in
Western political ideology. According to Immanuel Kant, for example,
the “natural” progression toward freedom and equality of advanced hu-
man beings in the form of a global cosmopolitan order relied on the ex-
pansion of developed nation-states. The global order of a federation of
states imagined by Kant was only the end product of a linear trajectory
from originally free and equal but violent and conflictive barbaric com-
munities to an “advanced” state of nature in which civilized peoples main-
tained the natural state of freedom and equality by guarantees of private
property and legal rights under the authority of the sovereign nation-state.
This state of freedom depended on the creation of a “pacific federation”
of sovereign states that collectively preserved the freedom of the individ-
ual through just international and national laws.
This was a dualistic understanding of the states of nature, a natural
existence of free and equal but barbaric peoples inevitably resorting to
violence and chaos, on the one hand, and the natural existence of free and
equal civilized peoples characterized by organized contractual relations
under sovereign state authority, on the other. These dual aspects of the
state of nature were located at opposing ends of a larger linear model of
progression. The widespread understanding of the “international system”
functioned through an expansion of this notion, according to which peace
in the international arena was believed to be achievable only via the attain-
ment of the advanced “natural state” by all nation-states involved. The
community of peace was possible only through this international shar-
ing of the advanced natural state of things.
In turn, the preservation of peace and world order via the functioning
of modern international relations created the necessary conditions for
the flourishing of the utopian dream of the perfected nation-state. Impe-
rialism was embedded in this particular notion of the utopian spatial

16. Kant, Kant’s Political Writings, pp. 105–25; Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,”
pp. 9–23; Fine, “Kant’s Theory,” pp. 612–15.
17. See Jahn, “IR and the State of Nature.”
152 The Nonwar Movement

construct of the nation-state. The utopia of Western modernity, which

took the spatial form of the territorial nation-state, was to be globally
attained and preserved via modern international relations.
Yet most of the world was still, as Roosevelt said, backward. Even
worse, a powerful overarching governing system of adjudication and
policing to protect and organize all nation-states in the international
arena had still not been developed. In his Nobel lecture, Roosevelt lik-
ened the international community to “new and wild communities where
there is violence,” and where “the honest man must protect himself.”
That is, the advanced state of civilization was far from being globally
achieved, and the sphere of international relations remained one of chaos
and violent competition. As peoples incapable of governing themselves
and thereby of working within the existing international system of states,
members of the “backward” parts of the world posed a threat to peace in
the international arena. Those societies that had not yet attained the
advanced stage of organized civilization characteristic of the West could
not be considered sovereign nation-states and could therefore expect
forceful guidance, violence, and domination both within and without by
the states that had achieved the natural state of advanced civilization.
Colonization according to this natural state of things was morally justi-
fied and encouraged as a necessity for the maintenance of peace and order
in the international arena. This model has been central to the theory and
practice of international relations.
There was thus no contradiction in liberalism’s assertion of democracy
within and imperialism abroad. The utopian imagination of progress
toward an advanced state of nature has formed the construct of interna-
tional relations as a system of knowledge shared among the international
community of nation-states. The par ticu lar cultural construct of the

18. Roosevelt, “Theodore Roosevelt—Nobel Lecture.”

19. Jahn has shown how the foundational idea of international relations theory, that
states exist in a presocial, prenatural state of nature, is a cultural construct that origi-
nally emerged in the Spanish encounter with the Amerindians. The notion of the state
of nature foundational to our understanding of interstate relations as the realm of
power, struggle, and accommodation was originally constructed as a justification of the
violence done to the Amerindians by the Spanish, Jahn argues, and has provided the
underlying knowledge construct perpetuating inequality and injustice in the interna-
tional sphere ever since. Jahn, “IR and the State of Nature.”
 The Nonwar Movement 153

state of nature that lay at the basis of Western modernity, and through
this knowledge system the organization and practice of international
relations, were integral to the maintenance of a particular kind of peace
and order in the international arena by the Western nation-states. The
meanings given to the Russo-Japanese War both within Japan and by the
international community were rooted in this understanding. Japan’s vic-
tory over Russia, then, was categorized as the inevitable victory of a more
civilized nation over the tyrannical Russian state, justifying Japan’s colo-
nizing and enlightening presence in the Far East. In this way, the war
perpetuated the construct of international relations as a function of the
utopian ideal of Western modernity. To date, existing interpretations and
writing of Japanese history in the Russo-Japanese War period have fol-
lowed this historical meaning of the war.
Anarchism served as the perfect antithesis of, and thereby the perfect
impetus for, the building of this utopian ideal of international order.
When Theodore Roosevelt assumed the U.S. presidency in 1901 after his
predecessor, William McKinley, was assassinated by the anarchist Leon
Czolgosz, one of the major themes in his inaugural speech was his prom-
ise to bring peace, freedom, and order by rooting out anarchism. Anar-
chism threatened some of the most cherished beliefs of Western moder-
nity: rule of law, stable governance, Christianity, and the sovereignty of
the nation-state. Removing this threat to international order would re-
quire the cooperative treaties of civilized nation-states. Anarchism had
become an impetus for the building of the modern international com-
munity at this crucial moment at the turn of the century.
The historian Frank Ninkovich has observed that Theodore Roosevelt
formulated policy according to his historical interpretation of events as
the process of the global expansion of “civilization.” In dealing with the
implications of Western modernity in his foreign policy, he may be con-
sidered the first modern president in foreign affairs. Roosevelt was a
close observer of world history and sought the key to foreign policy in
the patterns of historical development. Before he became president of
the United States, Roosevelt wrote in his influential history The Winning
of the West, published in 1889– 96, that “the most ultimately righteous

20. Ninkovich, Modernity and Power, pp. xv, 2.

154 The Nonwar Movement

war is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and
inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays
all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer
and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,—in each case
the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foun-
dations for the future greatness of a mighty people.” The knots that
tied Roosevelt the historian to Roosevelt the Nobel peacemaker were
tight and led eventually to his election as president of the American His-
torical Association. Roosevelt’s history, which advocated the righteousness
of wars of ethnic cleansing fought for civilizational progress, was part of
the same logic of modernity as his 1905 adjudication of the Portsmouth
Peace in the war for civilizational advancement between Japan and Russia.
Japanese state formulations of its participation in the war shared in the
same narrative of civilizational progress.

Denaturalizing International Relations

It was in this intellectual universe that the famous 1887 work A Discourse
of Three Drunkards on Government, written by Lev Mechnikov’s close col-
league at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages, Nakae Chōmin, illu-
minated the dilemma of Japan in a world defined by this particular ideal
of world order at the end of the nineteenth century. The following reading
of Chōmin’s work will allow for a new interpretation of both Chōmin
and his disciple Kōtoku Shūsui and of the intellectual dialogue between
them. The work portrayed two ends of a spectrum of paths (mediated by
a third drunk, the professor) that Japan could take as a nation. On one
end was the national course of liberal democracy and peaceful cultural
participation in the international community of the West, expressed in
the figure of the Western cosmopolitanist gentleman. On the other end
was the course of despotism and nationalist self-defense against Western
geopolitical encroachments in the form of imperialist domination in East
Asia, expressed in the figure of Gōketsu (Iron Man). Chōmin’s work
posed the central dilemma of the 1890s facing Japan’s relations with the
wider world: As a small nation with neither resources nor civilizational
prestige, how would Japan avoid being colonized by the West? Would

21. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, p. 29.

 The Nonwar Movement 155

the nation go down the path of democracy, cultural development, and

peaceful relations with the West, or would it follow that of military buildup
and imperialist expansion into other parts of Asia in preparation for a
war of defense against the West? Chōmin’s Gōketsu effectively represented
the yellow peril feared in the West, and the Western gentleman repre-
sented a peaceful path of cultural exchange with the West. His third
voice, the professor, represented the possibility of a middle path, which, it
has been argued, may have been Chōmin’s own voice. Although the two
paths of the gentleman and Gōketsu constructed by Chōmin had been
simultaneously present in Japanese national policy since the Meiji Ishin,
Chōmin separated them as opposing strands of thought and thereby illu-
minated the radical implications of taking either of them to its logical
end, toward peace or war.
The war raised the stakes of Chōmin’s dilemma and made it clearer
that the dilemma could not be about choosing some point along the
spectrum between the two options presented in Chōmin’s work, liberal-
ism/peace and imperialism/war. It appeared that these two ends of the
spectrum had in fact folded into one, and were now merely two sides of
the same coin. With the Russo-Japanese War, it became evident that keep-
ing peace with the international community of Western nation-states
meant having a dominant military and readiness to go to war at any time,
and that possessing highly advanced armed forces and participating in
imperialist expansion advanced both the cause of peace and the modern
civilization of the West. It also became clear that the underside to West-
ern liberalism at the turn of the century was imperialism, and vice versa,
for both were situated on a broader canvas of Western modern ideals of
world order and civilizational progress. The war created a new dilemma,
that the options available were either to accept liberal peace as a path
toward the Western modern imagination of a utopian international space
reflected in the theory and very often the practice of international rela-
tions between nation-states, with all their embedded contradictions, or
to find an entirely different path toward world order and human progress.
The dilemma of Japan in the world at the turn of the century had evolved
to a whole new level as a result of this intellectual development in the
Russo-Japanese War.
The advancement of this dilemma was exemplified during the war in
the shift of thought from the focus on the governance of the nation-state
156 The Nonwar Movement

in Chōmin, a theoretical leader of the Freedom and People’s Rights

Movement for popular parliamentary participation, to a focus on “the
people” (heimin) in the new anarchism of his disciple Kōtoku Shūsui.
Kōtoku was a cofounder and editor of the Nonwar newspaper Heimin
shimbun and one of the leading voices of the Nonwar Movement. Other
active figures in the newspaper and the Heiminsha (Heimin Associa-
tion), the publishing company behind Heimin shimbun and other publi-
cations related to the Nonwar Movement that formulated the voice of
the movement included Heimin shimbun cofounder Sakai Toshihiko
(1870–1933), Abe Isoo (1865–1949), the artist Ogawa Usen (1868–1938),
Kaneko Kiichi (1876–1909), and Kinoshita Naoe. By all appearances, the
anarchist Kōtoku had made a radical break from his teacher, the parlia-
mentarian Chōmin. However, this was far from the case. Kōtoku took
the humanist and democratic ideals of Chōmin’s Western gentleman to
their logical ends in his search for the most viable path to peace in the
international arena and democracy at home.
Chōmin’s gentleman gives light weight, for example, to the perma-
nence of an individual’s nationality, arguing that it is in fact the earth
that is the only possible and true physical home for human beings: “Be-
cause we live today in Country A, we are of that nationality. However, if
we live in Country B tomorrow, we will be of that nationality. It’s just
that simple. As long as doomsday is not yet here and the earth, which is the
home for our human race, survives, isn’t every nation of the world our
homestead?” The Nonwar Movement, led by Kōtoku, echod this idea
in its arguments against the war. The decisive emergence of an anarchist
movement among a new and younger generation in Japan in the wake of
the Russo-Japanese War arose logically from a distinct vision of peace
and world order.
Kōtoku’s role in the formulation of an independent path did not mean
a rejection of the West per se. On the contrary, he sought to use the
humanist ideals he shared, however fragmentally, with Chōmin’s Western
gentleman as a basis for an anarchist transnationalism. This politics of
inclusion led Kōtoku and the Nonwar Movement for which he spoke to

22. Nakae, Discourse by Three Drunkards, p. 51.

 The Nonwar Movement 157

incorporate certain humanist ideals and shared moral vocabulary from

the West into their vision of peace and world order even as they sought
liberation from the utopia of Western modernity. Kōtoku preserved a
certain moral vocabulary from the Western gentleman not because they
were from the West, but because they appeared to be universal. Depart-
ing from Christian moral imperatives against war that have character-
ized pacifist movements, and even more radically from the teleology of
Marxism-Leninism that claimed the inevitability of imperialism and class
war, the Nonwar Movement promoted a vision of progress underpinned
by an idea of shared humanity.
To view the Nonwar Movement as utopian in the sense of being an
unrealistic idealism with a sense of finality is to miss the realism of its
assumptions. Kōtoku and others who decried the war believed that it
was the war effort fought in accordance with a utopian vision of future
civilization that was full of contradictions. They argued that its claims
of attaining the order and well-being of Japan through war were not at-
tainable, and its proposed means were not morally tenable. Kōtoku’s writ-
ings during the war sought to “wake [the people] from their [utopian]
dream,” as he put it, by demonstrating that the utopia of Western moder-
nity was a dystopia on which justifications for the war were based. For
Kōtoku and many others in the Heiminsha and beyond in the Nonwar
Movement, the language of peace as it was used in relation to the war was
not just a jargon of diplomacy to mask the intent of territorial gain. They
believed that peace was a utopian ideal of imperialist expansion.
Kōtoku pointed out that so-called treaties of friendship and peace
created disorder and violence. He looked critically at the media- and
government-applauded Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 that recognized
Japan’s special territorial interests in Korea and assured Japan’s place as
one of the imperial powers in Asia. He believed that the treaty of friend-
ship between Japan and Great Britain had in fact prepared the ground
for Japan’s war with Russia. He argued that the resolution of peace via
treaties was conducted overwhelmingly by means of territorial acquisi-
tion and nation-state alignment. Kōtoku similarly predicted that Japan’s
territorial gains in the Pacific in the war, which were the products of
Japan’s international treaties and alliances, would only lead Japan closer
to an eventual war with the United States over conflicting economic
158 The Nonwar Movement

interests in Pacific territory. Here, Kōtoku dismantled the distinction

between imperialist expansionism and peaceful cooperation within the
international community. For Kōtoku, they belonged to the same intel-
lectual universe of Western modernity, where peace and cooperation
among nation-states were often indistinguishable from war.
Kōtoku unveiled international relations to his readers as an ideology
of peace and world order that manipulated the public to support the
war. He conveyed the invasiveness and magnetic draw of the utopian
promise of international relations as a path toward order and peace when
it pervaded all sources of popular knowledge, from newspapers to songs
and even to children’s fairy tales. Repeated since childhood and dissemi-
nated in children’s stories and songs, the narrative of territorial conquest
spun through the ethical language of heroicism and honor had the power
to shape people’s dreams. “People in their sleep dream of being Momotarō,”
Kōtoku wrote in reference to the modern fairy tale of Momotarō, a heroic
boy who sets out to conquer the island of ogres in order to avenge and
enrich his people. “But they must awake from that dream.” For Kōtoku,
the story of Momotarō manipulated the popular imagination from child-
hood by means of a moral narrative to adopt the utopian dream of inter-
national relations. He called the belief in this narrative “madness.” Those
who were manipulated acted within the commonsense realm of that
dream world. He argued that in the name of war, thought and speech
were both controlled by the state and self-censored, and it was this con-
trol of language and thought that was most harmful to society, not the
publication of Nonwar ideas. Here, the dream was the metaphor for
the utopia of international relations. Grounded in what Kōtoku called
“social reality,” the Nonwar Movement sought to undo the logic that
lay behind the justifications for the war and in this way to wake people
from their “dreams.”
It is possible to discern an internal logic that connected what would
appear at first glance to be disparate discussions found on the pages of
Heimin shimbun and Kōtoku’s discussions in other venues in this period.
This internal logic linked children’s stories to naval theory to rural

23. Kōtoku, “Nichibei kankei no shōrai.”

24. Kōtoku, “Rekkoku funsō no shinsō.”
25. Ibid.
 The Nonwar Movement 159

women’s everyday lives. Even before the war, Kōtoku criticized the influ-
ential theories of Alfred Mahan (1840–1914), who provided the theoreti-
cal basis for military buildup and imperialist expansion to preserve peace
for the nation-state. Mahan, whose writings served as the textbook for
the Imperial Japanese Navy, argued that a strong naval fleet that could
establish command of the sea was essential to prevent war. It could do so
through intimidation, by blocking seagoing commercial activity, and by
destroying an enemy’s fleet in a single decisive battle. Kōtoku discussed
Mahan’s theory that conscription was a foundation for peace as an irony
conducive to tragedy. He observed ironically that Mahan also linked
imperialist expansion with peace by arguing that imperialist acquisition
was fundamental to the strengthening of naval power, which in turn
promoted peace. Kōtoku redirected the meaning of peace to realign it
with the actual everyday lives of the heimin (people). For him, Mahan’s
description of forced military ser vice as peace defined peace in terms of
its relevance to the nation-state rather than to the heimin. For the over-
whelming majority of the population, whose sole breadwinners were
being called away to serve, conscription meant the militarization of ev-
eryday life, economic suffering, and emotional despair.
It is tempting to mea sure the Nonwar Movement’s effectiveness ac-
cording to its influence on national policies. Contemporary critics during
the war, like Kōtoku’s former employer, Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862–1920),
questioned the continued relevance of the Nonwar Movement after it
had failed to prevent Japan’s entry into war. Kōtoku responded to his
critics that the Nonwar Movement was not about the single moment of
a particular war, but about a much larger, long-term issue that Kōtoku
referred to as “eternal truth.” That truth as it was revealed in all its facets
in Heimin shimbun was the intellectual universe of Western modernity
that lay behind the justifications for the war. For Kōtoku, it was adher-
ence to that intellectual universe that was behind the times. He pointed
out that the biggest supporters of the war were the elderly. Indeed, he

26. Kōtoku, Teikokushugi, pp. 54–57. Originally published in 1901 as Kōtoku, Nijus-
seiki no kaibutsu teikokushugi.
27. Ibid.
28. Kōtoku, “Bundan endan.”
29. Kōtoku, “Senji to hisenron.”
160 The Nonwar Movement

argued, “Those receiving the latest education on civilization or those

about to receive it do not believe in celebrating the war. This is proof
that the war is going against civilization and progress. It is a product that
is behind the times.”
The phrase “Shin no shinpo” (True progress) became a mantra in Hei-
min shimbun during the war. It referred to the possibility of an alternative
path of progress from that path which justified and was represented by the
war. But who was to carry the colossal load of true progress?

Inventing the People without the State

Kōtoku and other members of the Heiminsha invented heimin as a new
subject of historical progress and world order irrespective of the nation-
state at the turn of the last century. This section seeks to make sense of
the term heimin by dissecting its meanings in this period. How the term
was constructed and who constructed it will also be examined, as well as
how “the people” were identified without reference to government or the
state. The history of this conceptual invention poses an interesting con-
trast with the invention of the American people in the late eighteenth
century in the fiction of popular sovereignty used by the Founding Fa-
thers to impose a new government on the inhabitants of America.
From the start, the twentieth-century discovery of “the people” as
heimin was deeply implicated in a position opposing the war, interna-
tional relations in theory and practice, and the Western modernity that
enabled them. Over the course of the war, this newly discovered “people”
became disassociated from the territorial bounds of the nation-state
and, by extension, the imagined utopia, the space of finality in Western
modernity. The term thereby functioned in clear polemic with the word
for the subject of the nation-state, kokumin (nation’s people). The notion
of kokumin was widely circulated during the war by the leading mouth-
piece for the war effort, Tokutomi Sohō’s Kokumin shimbun (Nation’s
people newspaper). Heimin would from then on carry with it the defini-
tion of a freely associating body of people irrespective of the state. After
the Russo-Japanese War, heimin, subject and object of the movement

30. Kōtoku, “Nihon no shimbun.”

31. Morgan, Inventing the People.
 The Nonwar Movement 161

and its symbolic banner, would become the subject of historical progress
itself. The term would be widely used in Japan with its new anarchist
meaning from the Russo-Japanese War up to the Asia-Pacific War.
The accepted English translation of heimin is “commoners.” Heimin
shimbun, for example, is known in English as the Commoners’ News-
paper. However, this translation has largely misrepresented the essence of
the term’s meaning in the late Meiji period. The English term “common-
ers” implies both class difference and hierarchy and can be interchanged
with the term “masses.” “Commoners” in this way possesses connota-
tions of an illiterate and generally uncultured mass. However, the term
heimin lacked the sense of class differentiation and hierarchy associated
with the word “commoners”; instead, it encompassed a broad expanse of
individuals. A term that had been used since ancient times in Japan un-
derwent a dramatic shift in meaning during the war. It now possessed
new energy and power to criticize the undesirable present.
The history of this term reveals the shift in understandings about the
nonelite population at different times in Japan. During the Edo period,
heimin had referred to those who belonged to a lower status (kakyū mi-
bun) of society. In this historical context, the term arguably can still be
translated as “commoners” in English. The term also appears to have
been used specifically to refer to a notion of difference from the Ainu of
Ezo (Hokkaido). In this case, heimin referred to something akin to
“Japanese.” Beginning in the late 1880s, “heiminism” as the ideology for
the Minyūsha, represented by Tokutomi Sohō’s progressive magazine
Kokumin no tomo (Friend of the nation’s people), introduced a more
positive understanding of heimin to refer to a vague democratic and
cosmopolitan ideal. Sohō spoke of the need for education, enlighten-
ment, and liberation of the commoners in order for the nation to em-
bark on the path of Western civilizational progress. For Sohō, “the
people” largely referred to the anticipated rise in Japan of a bourgeois

32. Tokutomi Sohō, Jiyū dotoku oyobi jukyōshugi.

33. Although Tokutomi Sohō had formulated “heiminism” to mean democratization
for the sake of Westernization, the ways it was used in his magazine by its numerous
contributors were varied and ambiguous, if not contradictory. Pierson, Tokutomi Sohō,
pp. 77, 177– 79.
162 The Nonwar Movement

middle class within the teleology of modernization. Heimin was of-

ten used interchangeably with the term kokumin, or the nation-state’s
people, to mean the national community of people bound to the sov-
ereign state. Sohō’s writings represented a confluence of the idealiza-
tion of the middle class as the historical subject of “democracy” and
state-oriented national progress. Sohō’s heimin were a people that were
not yet bourgeois, not yet the “cultured” middle-class subject of the
liberal ideal of progressive society. Sohō’s heimin therefore suggested a
lack in the very existence of the “people” that would be remedied only
via Westernization.
The Nonwar Movement newly defined heimin in terms of their rela-
tionship to power. They were identified as those “people” who stood
outside the fold of the “society of cliques,” or batsu shakai, that were al-
lied with the state and benefited from the war. The new language of hei-
min thereby liberated the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of
Japan from the hierarchically ordered category of class. The movement
defined the ruling cliques as six interlinked groups: the Satsuma-Chōshū
clan clique (hanbatsu), the political party clique (tōbatsu), the capitalist-
entrepreneurial clique (zaibatsu), the scholar-intellectuals’ clique (gaku-
batsu), the clique of religious leaders (shūbatsu), and the aristocratic clique
(monbatsu). The war had made the divide between the batsu shakai and
“the people” more distinctive than ever. As illustrated in Figure 3.1, the
movement claimed that the mobilization of the population for war fur-
ther benefited the so-called society of cliques financially and politically.
The war effectively separated the elites from those devastated by the
harsh effects of a war that vacuumed the ablest and strongest members
of rural communities to the trenches and naval ships and left their fami-
lies deprived of economic support. These cliques were widely seen as
representatives of the nation-state and were incorporated under the term
kō, which meant “public” or “official.” Now the “public” (kō) was equated
not with “people” but with batsu shakai, or “society of cliques,” which in
turn represented the kokumin, the nation’s people. Eliminating the com-
mon “people” from the meaning of “public” left the term for “public”
with little substance.

34. Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan, pp. 164– 66.
35. “Nihon shinshibatsu no kaibo,” p. 1.
 The Nonwar Movement 163

Fig. 3.1 The “society of cliques” pushing a peasant into war. Cartoon in Heimin shimbun, January
17, 1904.

The war not only defined “the people” but also contributed to the as-
sembly of “the people” themselves. In this way, the war period redefi ned
“society” from its implicit identification with the nation-state as the
corpus embodying the social, as widely used in the term kokka shakai
(national society), to a new meaning: the space of people’s interactions
and actions, dealigned from the territory of the nation-state. Decades ear-
lier, “society” had been equated with the nation-state, as in kokka shakai.
With the new wartime meaning of “the people” without the state, the
meaning of “society” was separated from the territorialized space of the
nation-state that had bound it.
Not only what Heimin shimbun said but also how the newspaper said
it could be further and more meaningfully read to delineate the moral
and historical meaning given to the heimin. Reading Heimin shimbun in
this way makes it possible to see how the movement sought to achieve
the mutual identity of the disparate members of society as heimin vis-à-
vis the state. The newspaper addressed the various members of the hei-
min in multidirectional speech acts that called out and embraced each
part of the population as distinct elements, rather than as a collective
mass with a single identity. Its method thus was a product of anarchist
thought and reflected how heimin was imagined. Heimin shimbun called
out to each group one by one, article by article, to women, men, children,
the elderly, tenant and smallholding farmers, urban laborers, soldiers,
teachers, students, and other groups, and in that way incorporated each
as the diverse subjects of the movement. Individuals were called on in
164 The Nonwar Movement

the different roles that they played at different times in their everyday
life. An individual might be called on in her role as a mother in one
article, as a wife or widow of a conscripted soldier in another, and as a
tenant farmer, more broadly as a woman, or as a member of the human
race in other articles. These speech acts pulled one to listen in diverse
ways by delineating at different times the different ways in which one
was invested in the movement and inviting one’s response in a variety of
forms.
The ways in which the newspaper called out to women, for example,
reveal the nonclassed, anti-imperialist, internationalist manner in which
the movement constructed the shared identities of disparate mem-
bers of the heimin even as it emphasized members’ unique differences
and the issues specific to them. Heimin shimbun’s criticism of the war was
for many women readers the first time they had encountered a women’s
position on political and international events. As a result, Japanese wom-
en’s identification with the politics of gender was heavily shaped by the
position of the newspaper on international relations. It is hardly a coin-
cidence that the first women’s journal, Sekai fujin, was founded imme-
diately after the war by those who participated in or were influenced by
the Nonwar Movement. The Nonwar Movement thus played a distinctive
role in inspiring a burgeoning women’s movement rooted in nonelite
interests and tied the movement from its foundation with an interest in
the problematization of international relations as they related to gender
inequality.
In turn, women’s issues from the start of the war assumed a crucial
place in the formation of the idea of heimin. In one of the first issues of
Heimin shimbun, the newspaper declared that it would give women’s
issues priority of discussion, for unlike worker’s issues, the newspaper
claimed, women’s social problems had not been given enough attention.
The movement’s attention to nonelite women’s issues clarified its demo-
cratic orientation vis-à-vis the male- and emperor-centered Confucian
hierarchy of nation-state ideology.
It is further illuminating to compare the conceptualization of wom-
en’s issues in the Nonwar Movement with women’s movements in the

36. “Fujin no unmei.”

 The Nonwar Movement 165

United States and Europe. At a time when many American and Euro-
pean feminists supported imperialism as a means to further their politics,
the women’s movement in Japan developed in a new direction with the
reimagination of “the people” as heimin. European feminists supported
imperialism when it offered them an opportunity to align with the state
and claim power based on superior race, culture, and nationality. Simi-
larly, U.S. suffragists, including suffragist leaders Susan B. Anthony (1820–
1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), during this time supported
empire and the U.S. drive for conquest in the Philippines at the turn of
the century. At the start of the twentieth century, many of the younger
generation of Western feminists saw womanhood as racially and ethni-
cally ordered. Empire was viewed as a means to emancipate women, and
women’s liberation in turn was equated with the civilizational distanc-
ing of Euro-American women from nonwhites.
The Nonwar Movement’s sustained critique of ryōsai kembo (good wife,
wise mother) ideology contributed to shaping a modern women’s identity
independent of the state through the idea of heimin. Ryōsai kembo was a
modern construct that idealized women’s role as pillars in the home, with
the modern family conceived as the basic social building block for a strong
nation state. Kōtoku emphasized the negative effects that the gendered
wartime martial culture had on social status and the everyday life of
women. Writing to women readers during the war, Kōtoku revealed how
the war contributed to gendered hierarchies of power. Rather than rais-
ing women’s status, as ryōsai kembo ideology promised, the war privileged
men and masculinity. This in fact dissolved women’s status in the family
and community on the domestic level of everyday life, Kōtoku asserted.
Th is widening gulf between men and women and the corresponding
militarized masculine culture would continue to be felt long after the
men returned home from the battlefields. The spheres of the social and
the quotidian would continue to be central concerns of Japanese anar-
chist thought after the war.
Kōtoku uprooted gendered vocabularies of war that served to distin-
guish men morally as a special class above women. His criticism of the
wartime moral vocabulary of “honor” was an attempt to undermine that

37. Burton, Burdens of History, pp. 2–16.

38. Hoganson, “As Badly Off as the Filipinos,” pp. 12–13.
166 The Nonwar Movement

power ideologically. “Honor” was defined in the war as the dignity

achieved through battle, a distinction reserved specifically for men who
served the state. Moral terms like “honor” served as ideological linchpins
for the cementing of the gendered ties among kokumin/national citizen-
ship, war, and the larger international relations of Western modernity.
Kōtoku demolished the ideological structure that privileged men as the
primary carriers of national citizenship engendered by the war by remov-
ing the moral vocabulary of honor from that structure and revising it as
a linchpin of a new ideological structure.
Kōtoku redefined “honor” as the cultivation of each individual’s
virtue ( jinkaku). He simultaneously radically redefined the notion of
jinkaku as individual virtue. As noted in Chapter 2, jinkaku was made
up of two characters, jin (person) and kaku (rank). At the turn of the
twentieth century, the term implied a hierarchical construct of social
order played out in human ethical relations, defined by Confucian ideas
of duty to emperor, nation, and family. Instead, Kōtoku wrote that to do
one’s given talent, jinkaku, whether it be rice cultivation or any other
kind of work, was to contribute to the larger community, linking one to
the larger cosmological order, and was the true form of honor. He ar-
gued that it was this community that functioned through individual
contributions based on the talents of a variety of individuals of both
genders, each cultivating and practicing his or her own virtue through
his or her particular form of work, that composed the imagined body of
heimin notwithstanding the state. His use of the term “honor” effectively
dissolved gendered hierarchies built on the martial ideal of “civic virtue”
in war. Gender was removed from the moral vocabulary of honor, and in
turn, honor was disassociated from gendered belonging to the nation-
state and was reapplied to individual doing for the society in prosaic ev-
eryday life, unbounded by the state. Honor was no longer about men,
the military, the state, and war. By redefining “honor” as the practice
of each individual’s God-given talents for the larger society as heimin,
Kōtoku separated individual identity from the state.
The redefinition of the moral vocabulary of a community enables the
redefinition of other interlinked conceptions in the life of that commu-
nity. Bit by bit, issue by issue, in a chain reaction of linguistic and ideo-
logical change, one can discern on the pages of Heimin shimbun the
emergence of an internal logic that uprooted the claims of war as a vessel
 The Nonwar Movement 167

for the promise of international relations to achieve utopia. In the move-

ment’s criticisms of the logic of war and international relations, removal
of one part of this edifice of Western modernity necessitated the detach-
ment of other parts adjoining it; this procedure dismantled the utopia of
international relations.
Contributors to Heimin shimbun and other voices of the Nonwar
Movement thus demonstrated how each group was artificially bound to
the state in the war. They then released those groups from those bounds
by denaturalizing that linkage and demonstrating the artificiality of the
state’s claim of their status as a cohesive and collective ethnic kokumin.
Each group was reconnected in the pages of the newspaper as a body of
people, heimin, vis-à-vis the state. In the process, Heimin shimbun called
on its readers to identify themselves with the heimin disassociated from
the state that, unlike the proletariat under capitalism in Marxist teleol-
ogy, retained the multiple roles and identities played by different mem-
bers of society at different times as distinct and equally valuable.

Artistic Representations of the People without the State

Artistic and literary productions in various Japanese wartime publica-
tions represented “the people” as heimin and in this way expressed Non-
war sentiments. These were creative modes of communication, visual as
well as emotional human experiences of ordinary people in an extraordi-
nary time of war, through which readers felt the ideas of heimin. It was
an aesthetic and personalized experience of heimin. As in aesthetic expe-
rience in other extraordinary times, artists played a powerful role in the
invention of the people.
I first turn to the famous antiwar poet Yosano Akiko (1878–1942),
whose place in the history of the war and Japanese militarism needs
radical revision in light of this intellectual history of the Nonwar Move-
ment. In September 1904, Myōjō published Yosano’s famous poem
“Brother, Do Not Give Your Life.” Her poem became one of the most
widely known Japanese antiwar poems after the Asia-Pacific War and

39. Myōjō, September 1904. Poems published in 1904 lamenting the war in other venues
include, for example, Kinoshita Naoe, “Shōshū” (Draftee), and Nakazato Kaizan (1885–
1944), “Ranchō” (Frenzied cadences of discord).
168 The Nonwar Movement

continues to be popular as an aesthetic expression of Japanese Nonwar

thought. Of course, her poem could not have become so prominent
without the agency of its readers. In contrast to her popularity today as a
representative of antiwar sentiment, Yosano was no pacifist and eventu-
ally became a supporter of both the military and Japan’s imperialist ex-
pansion into Manchuria. To ward off nationalist criticism of her poem,
she publicly disavowed the Nonwar Movement in Myōjō two months
after the publication of her poem. In response to criticism of her poem
by supporters of the war, she defended her patriotism by writing in an
open letter, “I tremble at the arguments of such people as those at Heimin
shimbun.”
Yosano’s personal ambiguity in relation to the war is important for
understanding the Nonwar Movement and its invention of the people.
Despite her public rejection of the Nonwar Movement and her vilification
of Heimin shimbun, Yosano had in fact copiously rephrased in poetic
form the arguments already made in Heimin shimbun the year preceding
the publication of her poem, and her poem was a surprisingly well-studied
echo of the ideas of heimin found there. She became a momentary par-
ticipant in the Nonwar Movement when she carefully crafted its argu-
ments into poetry. Such momentary joining is universally characteristic
of sociocultural movements. Any movement relies as much on its “gray
zones,” moments or areas of uncommitted or momentarily committed
participation that are social, sometimes opportunistic, responses and are
temporally limited, as on its committed core participants. Thus the answer
to the question of who constructed the Nonwar “people without the state”
has to include even these unexpected figures who denounced the Non-
war Movement, like Yosano, behind whom stood the nameless readers
who made her poem so popular.
The poem expressed from the points of view of three women, a sister,
a mother, and a wife, the emotional pain and economic hardship pro-
duced in a single family by a young man’s departure for war. Against the
dominant ideologies of the utopian promise of the nation-state and in-
ternational relations supporting the war effort, the poem privileged the
perspectives of heimin over the claims of the nation-state. It questioned

40. Myōjō, November 1904, pp. 98–100. Quoted in Rabson, “Yosano Akiko on
War,” p. 52.
 The Nonwar Movement 169

the definition of peace for the nation-state when that peace produced
only suffering for the common people: “Even as we hear about peace in
this Great Imperial Reign / Her hair turns whiter by the day.” Like Hei-
min shimbun, the poem set the domestic everyday against the realm of
the nation-state and international relations, contrasting the heimin who
were losing their lives, families, and livelihoods in the war with the em-
peror, who remained untouched and untouchable in the war. “Brother,
do not give your life. / His Majesty the Emperor / Goes not himself into
battle.” Furthermore, the poem questioned the relevance of the war and
its ideology for the life of the merchant in Japan. It then exposed the
reality behind the word “honor” in war. “Honor” in the war was in fact
“to kill and die like beasts.” In a final nod to Heimin shimbun, the poem
questioned the relevance for common people of international war prizes,
like Port Arthur, for which the nation-state was fighting. “Brother, do
not give your life. / For you, what does it matter / Whether Port Arthur
fortress falls or not?” Published many months after the war began, the
poem voiced ideas and images repeated throughout the war in the Non-
war Movement.
Historians see Yosano today as a heroic feminine voice of antiwar sen-
timent in a sea of nationalism in wartime Japan who defiantly shocked
her readers and influenced them with her poem. Although the poem is
often read as an example of the “awakening of individualism” in Japan,
it may be more accurate to read it as poetically expressing widespread
popular sentiments and ideas that had already formed the basis of the
Nonwar Movement. Yosano had poetically rendered a broader social
understanding of her time.
Rather than singling Yosano’s poem out, it is further illuminating to
situate her poem’s appearance in the surrounding context of the journal
Myōjō in which she published it. On the pages of this same popular jour-
nal, the well-known founder of the Sōsaku Hanga (Creative Prints) Art
Movement and a proponent of the People’s Arts Movement, Yamamoto
Kanae, published his landmark print Ryōfu (Fisherman) during the war
(Figure 3.2). Th is print is widely considered the emblematic first work
of the Sōsaku Hanga. Produced in the context of the invention of the

41. Translation of Yosano’s poem in Rabson, “Yosano Akiko on War,” pp. 45–46.
42. For example, Rabson, “Yosano Akiko on War.”
Fig. 3.2 Yamamoto Kanae’s Ryōfu (Fisherman), published in Myōjō, July 1904. Photograph
courtesy of Yamamoto Kanae Memorial Museum.
 The Nonwar Movement 171

people without the state in this period, Ryōfu was a wartime print of a
fisherman without reference to the nation-state’s embroilment in war. In
its irrelevance to the war effort, which would have been striking for its
contemporary viewers, the print served to dissipate the intense focus on
the nation in total war. At the height of the war, the print aesthetically
and powerfully represented “the people” as unconnected to the war and
the state’s ongoing project to enter Japan into the circle of Western mod-
ern nation-states. The printing of Yamamoto’s work in this larger context
of the war contributed graphically to the wartime invention of heimin.
Yamamoto would travel through Russia a decade later in 1916, a trip that
would help inspire his founding in Nagano of the Children’s Free Art
Movement and the Farmer’s Art Movement as parts of the broader People’s
Arts Movement. These significant artistic currents were aesthetic expres-
sions of cooperatist anarchism after the Russo-Japanese War.
The image of the fisherman became a minor symbol for Nonwar
participants and later formed an emblem for cooperatist anarchism.
Although the absence of reference to the war was merely suggestive of the
politicized meaning imbedded in Ryōfu, the other creative productions
that surrounded the print in Myōjō clarified its Nonwar sentiment. Ryōfu
shared the pages of Myōjō with a poem lamenting the war, and the follow-
ing month, another Nonwar poem was published. In the third consecu-
tive month, Yosano’s poem appeared in the same journal.
In order to see further the implications of Yamamoto’s Ryōfu, it is
helpful to contextualize it within other wartime artistic productions that
offered a graphic expression of the ideology of the Nonwar Movement.
Images of fishermen and other depictions of heimin reflected the war-
time urge to represent “the people” across the spectrum of society. The
work of Ogawa Usen was most prominent in this wartime artistic pro-
duction. Very little is known about Usen, in contrast to his popularity

43. The rural poet Ōtsuka Kōzan (1880–1911) wrote a wartime poem about a fisher-
man during this period, for example. Several years later, Arishima wrote his short story
The Agony of Coming into This World, based on the life of the artist-fisherman Kida
Kinjirō (1893–1962). The story climaxes on a fishing ship enveloped by the stormy ocean,
an unforgiving nature in the nationless and borderless waters that lay between Japan
and Russia. The fisherman in this story embodied the cooperatist understanding of the
classless, nationless, territoryless cooperative individual surviving in the face of an awe-
some nature. Arishima, Agony of Coming into This World.
172 The Nonwar Movement

then and the kind of admiration he earned from his Heiminsha col-
leagues. Indeed, he was almost single-handedly responsible for establish-
ing the wartime visual context in which Ryōfu was produced. Leading
anarchist thinker Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956) observed that Usen’s
art contributed greatly to the success of Heimin shimbun, and in turn,
the newspaper made Usen massively popular in Japan at the time.
Usen’s images were printed in almost every issue of Heimin shimbun.
They often graced the first page of the newspaper and thus provided the
crucial first impression to the reading public of what the Nonwar Move-
ment was to be about. His often crude cartoons of common folk were
significant for the development and popularization of images of heimin
for the Nonwar Movement. Usen was one of the core founders of Heimin
shimbun, not just an artistic contributor to it. His cartoons often had
humorous or sarcastic captions and often accompanied articles he wrote.
Although art historians have categorized Usen’s artwork as part of the
Nihonga (Japanese painting) genre of art, his work can be better under-
stood within the intellectual framework of cooperatist anarchism, which
celebrated the diverse expressions of the heimin in their everyday life,
without a priori belonging to the nation-state. From the start of the
war, Usen’s visual productions both ideologically and graphically de-
fined the notion of heimin. Far from just responding to the other writers
who contributed to Heimin shimbun, Usen was responsible for outlining
the purpose and orientation of the newspaper against the war from its
first issue. He coauthored with Kōtoku the paper’s introductory first ar-
ticle. An unknown figure in Japanese studies in the West, Usen’s car-
toons and prints in the first half of the century were widely circulated
in Japan and later traveled to the United States. His artistry is largely
characterized by his attempt to convey realistically the everyday life of
heimin.
Usen produced numerous cartoons illustrating the notion of heimin,
which were printed in almost every issue of Heimin shimbun and other
periodicals such as Chokugen and Hikari. Embedded in the war time

44. Ishikawa, “Heiminsha jidai no shakai bungei,” p. 22.

45. See Sho Konishi, “People at Rest.”
46. Ibid.
47. See ibid. for further development of this idea.
 The Nonwar Movement 173

visual imagery characteristic of the Nonwar Movement were expressions

of the virtue of nondoing in the context of war. Usen’s drawings cap-
tured the everydayness and nondoing of heimin in both village and ur-
ban life as a form of peaceful rebellion against the violent exertion of the
war effort. As can be observed in Usen’s cartoons in Figures 3.3. 3.4, and
3.5, the majority of his wartime artworks depict people resting or sleep-
ing in a time of war. It was Heimin shimbun’s regular publication of
cartoons such as these by Usen that graphically represented the Nonwar
Movement. The radicalized sense of nondoing became an underlying
element in his numerous paintings of village and rural life in the first
half of the twentieth century.
It is certainly difficult for twenty-first-century viewers to understand
what Kōtoku meant when he wrote in 1908 of Usen’s “revolutionary
spirit on paper.” Commonness and a humorous awkwardness, perhaps a

Fig. 3.3 Sleepy fisherman. Usen cartoon from Hikari, October 15, 1905, p. 2.
Fig. 3.4 Workers at rest. Usen cartoon from Heimin shimbun, April 10, 1905, p. 3.

Fig. 3.5 Farmers relaxing. Usen cartoon from Heimin shimbun, January 24, 1905, p. 3.
 The Nonwar Movement 175

certain degree of endearing cuteness, but certainly not “revolutionary

spirit,” seem to inhere in Usen’s roughly hewn wartime cartoon figures
and the later human figures in his prints. Indeed, his Monkey Trainer
from Towa Shinpō, a postcard mass-produced in 1908 (Figure 3.6), is
graced by the ever-present rising sun of the Japanese flag. At first glance,
the familiar rising sun might easily suggest that Usen’s postcard was just
one of the many patriotic images produced in imperial Japan.
A closer examination of the humorous postcard, however, uncovers a
radical inversion of the hierarchy embedded in the notion of the modern
nation-state. In the postcard, a female street performer in padded cotton
clothing, a clear statement of her rural commoner identity, trains a mon-
key to do tricks. The monkey is wearing a hat with the national symbol,
the rising sun, and is holding a Japanese fan with the same mark. Here,
the notion of the modern sacredness of the Japanese Empire is not just
subverted but inverted when it is the monkey, the carrier of the metaphor
of uncivilized primitiveness, that is wearing the flag. Moreover, the mon-
key carrying the sacred symbol of the imperial nation-state is being trained
to do tricks by a commoner. The woman’s age cannot be determined
because of the bagginess of her padded clothing. The aesthetic effect of
the print lies in its inversion of the aesthetic representation of the nation-
state, for in its simple, awkward art depicting a simple woman similarly
lacking grace and form, the aestheticized qualities of the nation-state, so
often associated with the young and graceful Japanese female form, are
simultaneously drained away. Whereas the romanticization of Japanese
women can be widely found in nativist self-Orientalizing renderings of a
“Japan” in opposition to the West, artists contributing to cooperatist an-
archism, like Yamamoto Kanae and Heimin shimbun artist Usen, actively
rendered in their work people of both genders and all ages, commoners in
simple form who contrasted with romantic feminine renderings of the
timeless nation. Usen’s artistic method was similar to the use of Aesopian
language by Soviet writers. Russian and Soviet writers often hid subver-
sive meanings behind seemingly innocent forms. The meanings were
concealed enough to allow the work to be published, yet clear enough to
convey the subversive content to readers.
The effect of Usen’s postcard and other works was clear, particularly
in the context in which they were produced. War-period postcards send-
ing the message of a modern civilized Japan were full of active doing for
Fig. 3.6 Monkey Trainer from Tōwa Shinpō. Usen postcard, 1908. Photograph © 2013 Museum of
Fine Arts Boston.
 The Nonwar Movement 177

the nation-state, whether in their depictions of modern warships, battles,

military heroes, and Red Cross nurses providing the most advanced hos-
pital care for the wounded, or in active civilian support of the war effort.
Usen’s wartime focus on the everyday heimin stood in stark contrast to
the cultural nationalism expressed by other Japanese postcards of the
early twentieth century.
By the end of the war, many people understood the meaning of hei-
min in opposition to kokumin. The term kokumin was tied in people’s
minds to the government and its unpopular war, and kokumin became
an undesirable source of identity at the war’s end. Tokutomi Sohō’s fa-
mous Kokumin shimbun had turned from a progressive source of criti-
cism of the government and a self-claimed supporter of the old heiminism
in the early 1890s to the leading mouthpiece for government policies
during the war. The newspaper was closely associated with the Katsura
cabinet in the public eye. When Kokumin shimbun was given the respon-
sibility of announcing the government’s acceptance of the provisions of
the highly unpopular Portsmouth Treaty, the newspaper became an easy
target of the public’s wrath. The well-known Hibiya riots arose as a pop-
ular response to the treaty, and not surprisingly, Kokumin shimbun was
one of its first targets. A mob of up to five thousand besieged and burned
down the offices of the newspaper. Massive riots destroyed police boxes
and other symbols of government authority around Tokyo as well. The
polemicism of heimin vis-à-vis kokumin had become manifest in the war,
not just within a small circle of intellectuals, but among a much larger
public.

Reconstituting International Society as Transnational Heimin

The invention of “the people” in the Nonwar Movement beyond the
ideological confines of the state was also about the recomposition of so-
ciety and sociality. “International society” began to be seen in wartime
Japan as consisting of transborder free exchanges and associations
among individuals and communities on the nonstate level. The Nonwar

48. Morse, Rimer, Brown, and Museum of Fine Arts, Art of the Japanese Postcard,
pp. 77–103.
49. See Pierson, Tokutomi Sohō, pp. 275–85.
178 The Nonwar Movement

Movement extended the expansiveness inherent in the horizon of hei to

an imagined larger transnational community during the war. The image
of a transnational heimin that existed separately from the state and tran-
scended the nation was graphically portrayed and circulated at the
height of the war in both images and literature of the Nonwar Move-
ment. These images of a nonstate transnational community graphically
contributed to the ideological formation of heimin. In turn, the produc-
tion of the understanding of a Japanese-Russian transnational commu-
nity (heimin-narod ) further denaturalized the nature of international
relations as Western modernity.
In order to see the rootedness of the transnational ideas put forth in
the Nonwar Movement in Japanese intellectual history, it is worthwhile
to examine briefly the production of a new language of the “interna-
tional” in the early Meiji. In the heady years of the early Meiji, tremen-
dous effort had been put into translating new terms and meanings from
the outside world. This included translations of particular concepts from
the West. The term “international relations,” with its associated meanings,
was one such case. In the initial decades of its introduction to Japan,
“international relations” was still an unsettled and ambiguous term. Its
translation would help to determine how Japan was to participate in world
affairs. The invention of new terms in the early Meiji referring to “inter-
national relations” suggests that there was an openness to the idea of the
international arena as one of direct nonstate interactions among people.
Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), one of the most cited Meiji translators of
Western terms, introduced “international relations” to Japan in the early
Meiji as gaikoku kōsai in his work Outline of a Theory of Civilization.
Gaikoku kōsai was ambiguous because it failed to distinguish between
public and private in the conduct of international relations. Fukuzawa
derived gaikoku kōsai from his translated phrase for “society,” jinmin no
kōsai. Both terms that Fukuzawa translated from the West were com-
pletely new to the Japanese language. Jinmin no kōsai (society) literally
meant “people’s interpersonal interactions,” referring to private personal

50. Fukuzawa’s autobiography is available in English, Autobiography of Yukichi Fu-

kuzawa. For an interpretive study of Outline of a Theory of Civilization, see Maruyama,
Bunmeiron no Gairyaku wo yomu. For the most recent work on Fukuzawa, see Craig,
Civilization and Enlightenment.
 The Nonwar Movement 179

activities absent the connotation of public that “society” would later

garner.
This idea of interpersonal relations as society became the basis for
participation in international relations as international interpersonal re-
lations. Society as interpersonal interactions merged indistinguishably
with the nation-state in the widely circulating language of kokkashakai
(society as the nation-state). In turn, it was this entity of interpersonal
interactions-as-nation-state (kokkashakai), in which private and public
were indistinguishable, that formed the primary unit of international
relations. Here, nation-state (kokka) and society as interpersonal relations
(shakai or jinmin no kōsai) lost all distinction and became mutually inter-
changeable terms. In this period of the early Meiji, then, international
relations already had embedded in its language a notion of interactions
that was not only state-to-state but also person-to-person. The Osaka
merchant Katō Sukeichi’s treatise on commerce as a form of mutual aid,
introduced in Chapter 1, offers a perspective of merchant commoners that
fits Fukuzawa’s conceptualization of “international society” as a space of
interpersonal interactions. It suggests a broadly shared understanding of
the “international” from the first years of the Meiji period.
By the first decade of the 1900s, the term had settled into two com-
peting definitions. Once state-to-state relations had clearly become the
defi nition of “international relations,” the nature of nonstate relations
became clarified as distinct from that sphere centered on the state. Kōtoku’s
writings in the years before the war show the development of an under-
standing of international society as a “society” of “people” as heimin inde-
pendent of the state’s territory. This ideal of the international was based
on Kōtoku’s questioning of Malthusianism and the law of competition
in social Darwinism in favor of a more ethical human transnational com-
munity predicated on the classical Chinese understanding of the moral,
empathetic nature of human beings. In his work Nijusseiki no kaibutsu
teikokushugi (Imperialism: The monster of the twentieth century), pub-
lished in 1901, Kōtoku made a distinction in the concept of international
relations discussed in the early Meiji between the free associations of
individuals as people on the nonstate level and the relations between
nation-states as the basis for international relations. Just before the start
of the Russo-Japanese War, Kōtoku developed in Nijusseiki no kaibutsu
some of the central ideas of the Nonwar Movement that would be voiced
180 The Nonwar Movement

with increasing frequency, volume, and intensity in the Russo-Japanese

War. He wrote the work in response to Japan’s growing imperialist
tendencies at the turn of the century. Already apparent in Nijusseiki no
kaibutsu’s critique of Western international relations were aspects of the
rough contours of an imagination of “the people” independent of the
state.
Kōtoku emphasized the importance of individual interpersonal rela-
tions, the original meaning of jinmin no kōsai, within a new context of
critique of “international relations.” He criticized such ideas as kokumin,
kokkashakai, and kokusai kankei (international relations as the relations
among nation-states and, ultimately, the people who composed the na-
tion, or kokumin) as problematically forming the conceptual basis for
imperialism. Kōtoku confronted the lack of distinction between people’s
interpersonal interactions and the relations between nation-states as a
major obstacle to liberty in the twentieth century. He made a sharp con-
ceptual distinction between the state as the agency of international rela-
tions and the popular agency of nonstate international relations. Finally,
he began to redraw international relations as interactions among shi, the
personal or individual, skipping the kō, the public or the state, as an in-
termediary role.
Kōtoku sought further to develop a revolutionary consciousness
based on the ever-widening circle of empathy among modern human
beings that would enable nonstate cooperation in the international
arena. For Kōtoku, empathy as a naturally occurring sentiment in all
human beings was the most natural foundation for the conduct of in-
ternational relations. In his writings, Kōtoku used the Japa nese phrase
for compassion or empathy, sokuin dōjō. Borrowing from the intellec-
tual tradition of the Confucian philosopher Mencius (372–289 bce),
sokuin dōjō infers that compassion “happens to you” by and from na-
ture. Kōtoku saw compassion as a natural basis for human identity and
humanity that would further the universal development of liberty and
social progress. Patriotism and nationalism artificially bound and ter-
ritorialized ethics that ought to arise naturally and spontaneously

51. For more contemporary discussions of this revolutionary consciousness fostering

increased cooperation among people of different geographic and ethnic origins, see, for
example, Wright, Moral Animal.
 The Nonwar Movement 181

without regard for the other’s nationality, he argued. On this basis,

Kōtoku and the newspaper Heimin shimbun that he edited launched a
series of epistemological critiques of imperialism and militarism. His
work criticized the state of international affairs in which imperialism
was the dominant force in ordering states’ relations to one another. He
viewed nationalism and imperialism as going against progress and en-
lightenment, which were supposed to embody humanism, justice, and
righteousness. Sentiments like patriotism promoted in individuals by
war were not natural to historical progress, but were what he called
“myths,” products of ideology and human fabrication and therefore
alterable.
Members of the Nonwar Movement hoped not to revolt against the
West but to reimagine the future, to find an alternative universal con-
cept of progress that did not simply incorporate the West but fed on
some of its most cherished ideals and intellectual traditions. Heimin
shimbun relied often on the terms “freedom,” “order,” “justice,” “frater-
nity,” and “equality,” which originated in the West. In its first issue, the
newspaper declared the formation of the new movement of “heiminism,”
which was to be founded on three universal foundations of life: freedom,
equality, and compassion for all humanity. This tripartite motto echoed
the motto of the French Revolution and reflected Kōtoku’s desire to
combine humanist ideals from the West with the humanism of Eastern
classical thought, such as that of Mencius and Lao Tzu. However, the
newspaper made a fundamental departure from the original motto by
omitting the judicial meaning of “freedom and equality.” The motto’s
original reference identified “freedom and equality” with individuals’ and
communities’ relationship to the state via rights, contracts, statutes, and
sovereignty. Heimin shimbun’s use of “freedom and equality” sought in-
stead to develop a revolution in consciousness to further the evolution
of human beings as moral animals without reference to legislation and
state power to order human society. As Kōtoku wrote, “Reason makes us
human. Law makes us go mad.” “Liberty” was described in the newspaper

52. Kōtoku, Teikokushugi, p. 20.

53. Ibid., pp. 16–17. See also “Exploitation in Corea,” p. 7; “Japa nese Victory at Li-
aoyang,” p. 1; “Barbarity of Soldiers,” p. 1; “War Has Broken Out at Last,” p. 1.
54. Heiminsha dōnin, “Sengen.”
182 The Nonwar Movement

as wartime liberation from the state and capitalism rather than liberation
by the state and of economic activity. Liberty and equality were rede-
fined as transcending the territory of the nation-state, so that liberation
included liberty from the borders of the nation-state, and equality encom-
passed all humanity beyond national borders. Departing from the ear-
lier bourgeois heiminism of Tokutomi Sohō, this was liberation from the
imagined utopia of Western modernity. “Equality” was a philosophical
attitude in which all individuals were regarded as equal but different con-
tributors in the making of community, rather than a right protected by
the rule of law.
In the new heiminism of the period, hakuai, the third element in the
tripartite motto, was the Japanese-language counterpart of the French
revolutionary term “fraternity,” but the Japanese term is more accurately
retranslated into English as “compassion” or “empathy.” This also repre-
sented an idea of humanity that was entirely separate from the legalistic
notion of human rights. In this translational disjuncture lay not the
kind of unintended misrelaying of information that occurs in the chil-
dren’s game of “telephone,” but, rather, motive and method. The drafters
of the new heiminism intentionally used hakuai, a term loaded with
Confucian associations, as the translation of the French revolutionary
term “fraternity.” As a premodern term, hakuai was ideal because it was
a word that existed before the nation-state. For the Nonwar Movement,
the classical term meant universal empathy that naturally arises in all
human beings for all other human beings regardless of race, gender, sta-
tus, age, nation, or family relationality. Heimin shimbun consistently
contrasted this term for the impulse of universal empathy with the term
aikoku, love for the nation, or patriotism, throughout the war. This trans-
lation of “fraternity” into a concept from classical Eastern philosophy
was a process that made Western concepts part of the Eastern classical
intellectual tradition. It was representative of translation practice among
figures in this discourse. Figures like Konishi, and now Kōtoku and the
Heiminsha, selectively adapted foreign terms to preexisting Japanese terms
that were taken from classical Japanese or Chinese moral and religious
teachings. This conscious reversal of the practice of translating the West
rendered the Eastern particular as the universal. The translator relied on
the universalistic allure of the Western term to lend modern global mean-
ing to the classical Japanese term, which itself originated in the Chinese,
 The Nonwar Movement 183

even as the act of translation transformed the meaning of the Western

idea in the process. This was a translation practice that precluded self-
colonization and attempted to universalize what would have been con-
sidered “Eastern tradition.”
Heimin shimbun sought to bring about an intersubjective view of
international relations, submitting events to a parallax vision from the
perspective of the heimin. Kōtoku pursued the construction of this view
by altering the position and observational viewpoint of the events and
themes central to the war effort. Heimin shimbun collapsed the spatial
construct that was supposed to divide the kokumin (the nation’s people)
from the subject peoples of colonized territories. The newspaper consis-
tently argued that empire and territorial acquisition did not benefit the
people, heimin, whether they were Russian or Japanese, Korean or Chinese.
In the Russo-Japanese War, the territory of Manchuria was at stake, a
prized territorial gain for Japan. However, Kōtoku argued, whether the
Manchurian people belonged to the Japa nese Empire or the Russian
Empire made very little difference to the well-being of people living in
either Japan or Manchuria. He observed that the condition of being
occupied by imperialist powers differed little whether one was in the Phil-
ippines, occupied by the United States, or in a Korea occupied by Japan.
This dismantling of the territorial, nation-state-centered view of world
events was a significant tool in the Nonwar Movement’s repertoire of
strategies to effect a worldview independent of Western modernity during
the war.
Consistent with the idea of a deterritorialized people, Russians were
conceived by the Nonwar Movement not as the other, the enemy, but as
part of a natural extension of heimin bonded by empathy beyond the
linguistic and cultural community of Japanese. Russians symbolically
represented this humanism in the midst of the war with Russia.
Tolstoy was widely invoked as a wartime spokesperson of peace and
world order alternative to the Western order in which the warring Japa-
nese state was participating. Anarchist Ishikawa Sanshirō recalled that
many young Japanese who were “full of religious emotion” in this period
reacted powerfully to Tolstoy’s criticism of the war on religious and

55. Kōtoku, “Nichiei dōmei to rōdōsha, pp. 368– 69.

184 The Nonwar Movement

ethical grounds. His criticism was printed in his essay Bethink Your-
selves!, which was translated into Japanese and published during the war
in the Nonwar newspaper Heimin shimbun. Tolstoy rejected the author-
ity of church and state over the individual’s power to know virtue and to
act virtuously, and the moral constructs of duty to father, nation, and
monarch, ideas promoted heavily during the war. Bethink Yourselves!
claimed that there was no distinction between Japanese and Russian
soldiers in the sense that both suffered alike under the violence inflicted
by the state.
Heimin shimbun radically widened the popularity of Tolstoy in Japan
by publishing his antiwar thought. The newspaper’s publication of Be-
think Yourselves! was so widely sought out that the newspaper had to re-
print the issue after selling out its print run of eight thousand copies.
These numbers fail to represent the true circulation because the newspa-
per was read by a much wider audience who received the paper as it was
passed from hand to hand. The newspaper Tokyo Asahi republished the
essay during the war, further contributing to its widespread circulation.
Some people who did not have the resources to possess a copy of the
paper resorted to copying the essay by hand. Ishikawa Takuboku, one of
the most popular and influential poets of the time, was one of many
taken with the essay. He copied it in its entirety by hand during the
war. Writer Akita Ujaku (1883–1962) recalled that at this time, “there
was hardly a young man who had not to some extent read Tolstoy and
had not been influenced by his thought.” 
The war expanded Tolstoy’s role as a religious figure and made him a
symbol of antihierarchical cooperatist anarchist internationalism and
moral resistance to the war and Japanese imperialist expansion. Father
Shiraishi Rinosuke wrote to Tolstoy to ask him for his advice on how
people should proceed in resisting the given order: “Then how shall we
begin? If we do not enter the ranks of soldiers, the government will seize

56. Ishikawa, “Heiminsha jidai no shakai bungei,” p. 23.

57. Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves!
58. Tolstoy, “Torusutoi ō no Nichiro sensōron”; “Influence of Tolstoy in Japan,” p. 10.
59. Ishikawa Takuboku’s original handwritten copy of Tolstoy’s essay printed in
Heimin shimbun is preserved at the Kindai bungaku kan.
60. Quoted in Nobori and Akamatsu, The Russian Impact on Japan, p. 38.
 The Nonwar Movement 185

and imprison us till we consent to take the ser vice. Woe unto the Gov-
ernment! Woe unto the State! But the poor people are oppressed to obey
it. Do you think they ought to refuse to obey it, although it surely puts
them to death?” 
Very early in the war, Heimin shimbun promoted the idea among its
readers that the enemy was not the Russian people, whom the newspa-
per conceived as the instruments of exploitative elites and the govern-
ment, but those elements that exploited the people. One week after the
start of the war, Heimin shimbun printed the leaflet that the then largely
unknown Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) had issued
to workers, farmers, and soldiers across Russia, “To the Russian Prole-
tariat.” Lenin’s leaflet promoted the image of solidarity between Russian
and Japanese people and their revolutionary leaders. Lenin called on the
working people to prepare for revolution and the downfall of the govern-
ment that had relied on the absence of rights for the people and on per-
secution and violence against them for its power. Echoing the ideals of
international working-class solidarity of the First International of 1864–
76, Lenin further called on the international brotherhood of all coun-
tries to unite against international capital.
Heimin shimbun responded by publishing the cartoon in Figure 3.7 of
Russian and Japanese workers shaking hands while military generals
representative of the two governments stood on the two workers’ heads
with swords drawn. The cartoon graphically symbolized the presence of
two simultaneous levels of relations with Russia, one defined by the rules
of “international relations” and a second, transnational level of relations
independent of the state. Whereas the battling generals in the cartoon
constituted international society as defined by Western modernity that
relied on the bodily sacrifices of the people for its realization, the friendly
soldiers in the cartoon represented the emerging vision in wartime Japan
of an independent transnational sphere beyond the nation-state.

61. Shiraishi Rinosuke to L. N. Tolstoy, February 4, 1910, ORGMT, f. 1, inv. 2315,

ll. 6– 7.
62. The article on Russian-Japanese solidarity and revolution was republished in
shortened form in Heimin shimbun on May 15, 1904, and one month later in full in
Katayama Sen’s socialist newspaper Shakai shugi (Socialism).
186 The Nonwar Movement

Fig. 3.7 Transnational heimin. The Japa nese worker’s apron has a partial inscription “Socialist
Party,” which did not in fact exist in Japan at the time. The inscription reiterates that the clear
break from party politics by burgeoning cooperatist anarchists like Kōtoku would not occur
until immediately after the war. Cartoon from Heimin shimbun, January 17, 1905.

For the most part, the radical Russian movement used a rhetoric
that emphasized class conflict and diverged ideologically from the an-
archism embedded in the Nonwar Movement in a number of other
ways. Whereas anarchist-leaning members of the Nonwar Movement
looked to transcend the nation-state, Lenin called for a war with the
capitalist nation-state in order to erect a new state under the rule of the
proletariat. Th is divergence contradicts existing assumptions that anti-
war arguments in Japan were mere echoes of the Russian revolutionary
movement and Western socialism. The socialist slogan “international
solidarity” was so general that it could incorporate various ideas of
“international,” but the Nonwar Movement brought to the table an an-
archistic vision that, as would soon become evident, clashed with some
of the leading notions of international solidarity, particularly Marxist-
Leninist ones. Nonetheless, the Russian revolutionary movement and
the Nonwar Movement overlapped during the war and participants
cooperated in their war time efforts.
 The Nonwar Movement 187

The revolution that was brewing in Russia during the war positioned
the Russian people against the ruling classes within the rise of what
appeared to be a larger global struggle for social justice. Japanese news-
papers that covered the revolution helped to undermine the idea that
Russia was a single monolithic entity. On the pages of Heimin shimbun, as
well as nationally circulating mainstream newspapers like Asahi shim-
bun, one could often find discussions of familiar figures from the Russian
revolutionary movement popularized during the Freedom and People’s
Rights Movement, like Perovskaya, Zasulich, Kropotkin, and Stepniak-
Kravchinskii. Reports in other newspapers about the revolutionary move-
ment in Russia covered it not as a remote event removed from the more
immediate battles of war, but as a corresponding movement whose par-
ticipants were admired as cohorts. An article in Mainichi shimbun about
the so-called grandmother of the Russian Revolution, Ekaterina Bresh-
kovskaia (1844–1934), for example, was a sympathetic personalized account
of an elderly female Russian revolutionary figure.
The war served to further institutionalize the Japanese love for Futa-
batei’s and others’ translations of Russian literature. Ishikawa Sanshirō
recalls that during the war, the public intensely devoured without critical
assessment the literary works of Tolstoy, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Turgenev,
and Leonid Andreev (1871–1919). During the war, Futabatei capitalized
on his notoriety as Japan’s foremost translator of Russian literature by
translating Russian stories that showed the senselessness and cruelty of
the war as transnational expressions of the Nonwar Movement. Simi-
larly, beginning with the inclusion of Tolstoy’s moralistic folk tales of
peasant and village life in its first issue, Heimin shimbun disseminated
images popularizing the idea of a common moral bond with the Russian
heimin throughout the war. The aestheticization of a transnational hei-
min beyond the territory of the nation-state would continue to be a wide-
spread intellectual practice across the canvas of cultural production long
after the war, enlisting the contributions of a range of cultural figures in
Japan.

63. Arishima, “Rokoku kakumeito no rōjo.”

64. Ishikawa, “Heiminsha jidai no shakai bungei,” p. 22.
65. Nakai, “Futabatei Shimei,” p. 36.
66. Heimin shimbun, no. 1 (November 15, 1903).
188 The Nonwar Movement

The Nonwar Movement as Network Community

Social and aesthetic networks that constituted a social space indepen-
dent of the state developed in response to the war. The more recognized
figures of the Nonwar Movement were as much products as producers of
a broader sentiment of nonwar. Spaces of interaction began to form dur-
ing the war that transcended vertical belonging to the nation-state. The
problematization of the utopian imagination of space that Western mo-
dernity engendered during the war had coincided with the emergence of
a new space of interaction formed by networks. The formation of networks
was inseparable from the movement’s articulation of the people as heimin.
Heimin, the people irrespective of the state, became the core element in
the imagination and formation of the notion of a society that was not
territorially defined. Unanchored from the state’s territory, modernity was
tied instead to the notion of heimin irrespective of the nation-state and
the Nonwar networks formed during this period.
To understand the local emergence and functioning of the Nonwar
Movement, it is necessary to examine the formation and expansion of the
networks that constituted it. Nonwar networks did not materialize sud-
denly in response to the war but were the result of intensification of exist-
ing network activity in response to the war. This intensification of network
activity in extraordinary times is consistent with patterns noted by
scholars in network formation today, in which latent networks activate
and intensify in response to times of need, such as wars or economic
depression, and give rise in this way to extraparliamentary political
movements.
If the network defines the movement, then assessment of whether a
particular person or group was involved in the Nonwar Movement can
be greatly aided by knowledge of whether that person or group was con-
nected to the network. The Nonwar networks that can be observed in
this period reveal that there was no single social base for the Nonwar
Movement and developing cooperatist anarchism. The usual categories
social scientists employ to classify and identify social groups, such as
class and geographic origins, are not as useful here because participants

67. For a contemporary example of this phenomenon, see Saunders, “Comparing

Environmental Movement Networks.”
 The Nonwar Movement 189

in the movement were from the far reaches of northern and southern
Japan and from rural and urban areas and included educated farmers,
merchants, doctors, schoolteachers, urban workers, university students,
and the self-educated, both women and men. The venues for their meet-
ings were often clubs and art and poetry discussion groups.
Local networks were joined to the main hubs of the movement,
which centered on the Heimin shimbun and its successors and later on
anarchist publications like Kindai shisō (Modern thought). Heimin shim-
bun sold 200,000 copies in its first year as the organ of the Nonwar
Movement. However, the newspaper and the other Heiminsha publica-
tions did not merely disseminate Nonwar ideologies to their readers.
They also acted as hubs of information on the groups in various loca-
tions of Japan. The war inspired the establishment of branches of Heimin
shimbun throughout the country. Those who wished to participate in the
movement also held public meetings from time to time in various parts
of the country or often contributed articles or drawings to the publica-
tions and in this way were easily drawn into the hubs of the networks.
The public meetings and regular trips around the country by supporters
of the cause to sell socialist books and subscriptions to Heimin shimbun
were effective in drawing substantial numbers of new supporters. Hei-
min shimbun was behind the holding of 120 socialist meetings in 1904,
including 13 women’s socialist association meetings, and the establish-
ment of socialist organizations in over twenty cities and towns across
Japan.
Besides its regular issues, Heimin shimbun also published many books
and pamphlets. For example, its publication of Kinoshita Naoe’s antiwar
novel Fire Pillar in May 1904 was sold in over ten editions in a few months.
In 1904, Heimin shimbun distributed 39,000 leaflets and published eight
books, with 15,700 copies sold. Heimin shimbun affiliates traveled fre-
quently throughout the countryside during the war, giving lectures and
disseminating Heiminsha literature, a practice that would continue long
after the war ended. In the act of distribution to tens of thousands of

68. Katayama Sen, Labor Movement in Japan, chap. 4.

69. Ibid.
70. For example, both Tokutomi Roka and Arishima traveled to Akita and other
rural areas of Japan to give lectures and draw support for causes like famine in Russia.
190 The Nonwar Movement

readers, the network broadened its reach, and the movement as an intel-
lectual challenge to the ideology of the war intensified.
The tendency of reading and discussion circles to label themselves
with the term heimin offers historians a distinct clue to their ideological
adherence to the Nonwar Movement. Associations with names like Hei-
min Club during this period can be meaningfully traced in order to
identify wider participation in the Nonwar Movement beyond the im-
mediate circle of the well-known founders of Heimin shimbun. A num-
ber of circles are known in urban and suburban centers like Yokohama,
Osaka, Kobe, and Chiba, where branches and circles supportive of the
Heiminsha, such as the Osaka Heimin newsgroup, were founded. There
is also evidence of various activities in rural locations not only in the
south of Japan but also extending to Akita in the far north. In rural
Okayama, for example, the Heimin Reading Group formed during the
war in order to read Heiminsha publications. The original seventeen mem-
bers of the group included a variety of occupations representative of ed-
ucated rural society, such as the owner of a book-lending business,
teachers, students, and doctors. Such groups suggest that local Nonwar
networks formed around and were joined by heimin poetry-reading and
discussion circles throughout Japan.
The war served to link nineteenth-century Russian-Japanese transna-
tional networks that consisted largely of urban intellectuals to an exist-
ing web of local aesthetic networks that dated back to the Tokugawa
period and had become highly politicized in the decades leading up to
the Meiji Ishin. Sociologist Eiko Ikegami has examined these Tokugawa
aesthetic networks that connected rural poetry-reading circles and cut
across social status. In the mid-nineteenth century, the networks became
the basis for rural and cross-status participation in the Meiji Ishin that
led to support for the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement.
The Meiji Ishin of the mid-nineteenth century and the Freedom and
People’s Rights Movement of the 1880s were the first two moments of
intellectual radicalization in modern Japan. The Russo-Japanese War
can be seen as the third such moment, and the first in the twentieth

71. Mizuno, Okayama Meiji shakaishugi undō, p. 104; reported in Heimin shimbun,
no. 47 (October 2, 1904).
72. Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, pp. 204–20.
 The Nonwar Movement 191

century. Heiminism during the war was a significant turning point in

the further evolution of politicized reading and aesthetic networks after
the Ishin. Local poetry groups actively produced Nonwar poetry in a
number of places in Japan during the war and read and discussed Non-
war ideas in so-called heimin reading circles. The war prompted the de-
velopment of the networks into arguably their most corporeal form up
to that point. It established the foundations for the dynamic society and
its spatial belonging that would define cooperatist anarchism after the
war. The wartime formation of active networks gave shape to the Nonwar
Movement as a tangible movement beyond merely a shared sentiment of
discontent with the war.
Self-styled heimin circles during the war evolved out of an extraordi-
narily active local literary arts movement that had already developed a
dense span of networks across prefectures. Awareness of these networks
is indebted to the efforts of local amateur historians in Japan, the intel-
lectual descendants of these networks, who have recorded the history of
their localities. Because each node of the networks arose locally and
spontaneously, it is not possible to speak of the networks in this period
without isolating various elements of them as examples. Therefore, se-
lected examples of network formation in rural areas of Japan in critical
response to the war are examined here. In the northern prefecture of
Akita, far from the national capital, resident Nozoe Kenji documents
what he calls poetry networks’ expansive “iron grill” (aminome) that
crisscrossed his prefecture in all directions in the Meiji and Taishō
periods. “No single space was left open” in the prefecture, Nozoe writes,
in reference to the comprehensiveness of these poetry-reading groups in
which locals met to read and listen to aesthetic productions of haiku,
tanka, and other types of poetry. Some groups published and circulated
locally produced poetry. These existing networks in Akita were par-
ticularly active during the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement of
the 1870s.
The nonstate, nonterritorial vision of the Nonwar Movement appealed
to literary circles that had promoted the democratic and antielitist ideal-
ism of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Heimin circles saw

73. Nozoe, “Akitaken sākuru undō shi nōto.”

192 The Nonwar Movement

themselves as heirs of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement and

used some key symbols and language of the movement in their associa-
tions. The way in which the Bazarov Circle spontaneously formed in a
northern village can give a further idea of the nature of the expansion of
Nonwar networks. The Bazarov Circle was a reading circle named after
the main character in Futabatei’s wildly popular translation of Ivan Tur-
genev’s Russian Populist novel Fathers and Sons. A symbol of the Freedom
and People’s Rights Movement in the late nineteenth century, Fathers
and Sons largely represented the radical departure of the younger genera-
tion (the sons) in pursuit of a new revolutionary ideology from an idealis-
tic older generation (the fathers). The use of the name Bazarov indicated
the circle’s adoption of this Russian revolutionary idealization of a gen-
erational departure and, simultaneously, the circle’s recovery of the sup-
posedly lost idealism of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. The
circle was founded in the years after the Russo-Japanese War by locals in
the village of Tsugaru, located at the remote northern tip of the island of
Honshu in Aomori, another region far from the urban center of Japan.
The idea of “center” fails to apply here because the periphery often became
central in this discourse, and nonelites became the major actors. Regular
participants in the circle crossed occupations and included shopkeepers
and local professionals. Joining ordinary people in extraordinary times,
the circle included a producer and seller of soy sauce and miso, a gradu-
ate of Waseda University who became a manager of an apple orchard and
a farmer-poet, an elementary-school teacher, a physician, a sake brewer,
and other women and men.
The circle originated in the reading habits of Sasamori Shūji. An
elementary-school graduate, Sasamori was employed by a lamppost man-
ufacturer as a night watchman assigned to watch over the streetlights.
He used his job as an opportunity to read all night under the light of the
lampposts. Taking advantage of the cover of the night, his job allowed
him to read radical literature and expand his knowledge. Sasamori gath-
ered many books on socialism. Literate villagers gradually began to gather
around Sasamori to follow his readings of socialist writing, and they

74. Mayama, Aomori ken dokusho undō Meiji-Taishō shi, pp. 113–17.
 The Nonwar Movement 193

eventually formed a regular reading circle. Members of the circle identi-

fied their group with Futabatei’s translation from Russian Populism and
came up with the name “Bazarov Circle.” The circle represents a response
in the most remote rural areas of Japan to developments in Tokyo during
the war, but it also indicates that Tokyo intellectuals were simultaneously
responding to preexisting sentiments that were widely shared across the
literate nonelite population.
The activities of Sasamori Shūichi also reveal the fusing of the culture of
aesthetic networks with the Nonwar Movement. Shūichi, like his brother,
the Sasamori Shūji of the Bazarov Circle, was heavily involved in the
Nonwar Movement during the war and contributed to what became a
Nonwar reading movement. During the war, he sold hundreds of books
for the Heiminsha from a cart in Shimonoseki in a matter of eleven days.
The newspaper Chokugen, Heimin shimbun’s successor, reported in 1905
that as a direct result of his sales, sixty-five people became Heiminsha
associates, and thirteen discussion circles were formed. Sasamori con-
tinued the tradition of aesthetic networks by founding his own reading
group, the Haiku Hakama poetry-reading circle, in the village of Hiro-
saki, Aomori, after the war. Much like the circle formed by his brother,
Shūichi’s groups tended to rely on the works and translations of Futabatei
as texts.
In the Akita village of Yurigun, local farmers formed a Heimin shimbun
reading group that was an extension of their preexisting poetry-reading
circle. Networks expanded further in rural localities through the estab-
lishment of local libraries from reading circles’ collections of nonwar,
socialist, and translated Russian literature at this time. Local people were
invited to come and read the works they favored. A village in Aomori
advertised its open collection of “heimin literature” in Chokugen during
the war, for example, which anyone was welcome to read. Some of these
local libraries spontaneously organized in the war have been maintained
as local lending libraries until today. Poets like Yosano and the local vil-
lage poet Ōtsuka Kōzan rode the wave of Nonwar sentiment by putting

75. Ibid., pp. 159– 68.

76. Ibid., pp. 165– 66.
77. Nozoe, “Akitaken sākuru undō shi nōto,” p. 145.
194 The Nonwar Movement

those emotions into poetic form. Heimin shimbun tapped into these
local aesthetic networks by publishing a section of poems and poetic
expression in every issue.
Wartime networks expressed the mounting frustration with social
and economic inequalities and political and moral ideologies of the state.
The war became a focal point for dissatisfaction with state policies that
had been accumulating long before 1904 in both rural and urban areas.
The Chokkōdan (Direct Action Group) in Tokyo focused on everyday life
as the way to solve the so-called shakai mondai (social problems) in the
urban setting. The socialist group, originally formed in 1903 as a small
group, expanded quickly with the war. Although the group intersected
with the Nonwar Movement and included illustrious figures in the move-
ment like Kōtoku, Ishikawa Sanshirō, and Sakai Toshihiko, its expansive
membership consisted of a variety of people who were not immediately
identifiable as leading figures in the Nonwar Movement. Chokkōdan’s
journal was Chokugen, founded in 1904 and edited by Shiroyanagi Shūko
(1884–1950) from the second floor of the Katō Hospital, later renamed
Heimin Hospital, in Tokyo. Chokugen was a wartime companion to Hei-
min shimbun in expressing socialist and Nonwar ideas, and when censors
shut down Heimin shimbun in January 1905, the monthly Chokugen turned
into a weekly, effectively replacing Heimin shimbun. The two papers
shared a pool of contributors, indicating the frequent networking be-
tween the two hubs.
Chokkōdan provided the impetus for a number of initiatives to solve
the social problem through interventions in everyday life. One of the
earliest associations that emerged directly out of the group was a shōhi
kumiai, an urban consumers’ association, founded in June 1904 by the
anarchist Ishikawa. Following his initiative, the physician Katō Tokijirō
(1858–1930) established the Katō Hospital in Tokyo in 1904. In rural ar-
eas, the reading circles and aesthetic networks largely met in individuals’
homes, but in more urban areas, circles like chokkōdan often met at
night in coffee shops, inns, taishū shokudō (people’s cafeterias), and even

78. The popular journal Shin shōsetsu published Ōtsuka Kōzan’s nonwar poem “Ima
wa no utsushi e” in July 1904.
79. On the Chokkōdan and Katō Tokijirō’s biography, I have relied on Narita, Katō
Tokijirō.
 The Nonwar Movement 195

the hospital. These venues were used during the daytime for alternative
functions, giving new meaning to nighttime culture in this period.
Katō identified his hospital as a means to save “the people” from harsh
economic conditions in wartime. He founded it to assist the urban poor
in order to solve perceived social problems through direct action in every-
day life. Keeping true to the wartime notion of heimin, he defined “the
poor” as essentially everyone in Japan, save for a small elite core of top
government cliques and zaibatsu businessmen. The hospital was origi-
nally founded as a philanthropic effort, but Katō eventually turned it into
a cooperatively run and owned hospital appropriately renamed Heimin
Hospital, indicating its intellectual roots in the Nonwar Movement. The
hospital was not just a place to heal the sick but became a meeting place
for socialists and anarchists, and its second floor became the editorial
offices of Chokugen, the organ for the Chokkōdan. Kōtoku, Ishikawa, and
other members of the Heiminsha, as well as numerous others, met at the
hospital to discuss their activities.
Katō’s hospital arose as part of Chokkōdan’s promotion of urban
associations of mutual assistance as a concrete means to solve people’s
problems. Everyday life became a focal point for Katō’s work, which fol-
lowed the group’s idea of “everyday life” (kurashi or seikatsu) as the object
of intervention by nongovernmental direct action on the local level. The
work of Katō and others in Chokkōdan exemplifies the wartime initia-
tion of urban formations of networks, which were beginning to take
shape as cooperative associations. The hospital was one rhizome that was
conceptually rooted in and socially linked to the Nonwar Movement.
Reports on developments in the hospital and the cooperative associa-
tions appeared from time to time in Heimin shimbun and associated
Nonwar newspapers. Katō gave a public lecture in a Nonwar lecture se-
ries in Tokyo in 1904, “How to Save the Poor in Wartime.” The series
placed him side by side with Ishikawa, who spoke on the topic “Soldiers’
Families,” as well as other lectures with such themes as “War Laborers,”
“The Capitalist Dogs and the War Craze,” and “Civilization and Race.”
In 1911, Katō’s letters to Emma Goldman’s (1869–1940) anarchist journal
Mother Earth were printed in the journal. His letters, one of which was

80. Ibid., pp. 56–57.

81. Ibid., p. 63.
196 The Nonwar Movement

co-authored with the anarchist Sakai Toshihiko, were a response to

Kōtoku’s execution in the Daigyaku Incident and clearly indicate the
doctor’s anarchist tendencies.
Kōtoku’s participation in Chokkōdan suggests that historians' focus
on his supposed conversion to Western anarchist “direct-action” theory
after his trip to the United States misrepresents his adoption of anar-
chism. Kōtoku’s declaration of his turn to anarchism and his call for
“direct action” in his famous speech calling Japanese socialists to turn to
anarchism, “My Change in My Thought,” in 1907 after his return
from the United States is often used to demonstrate the influence of the
Western anarchist movement on Kōtoku. However, Kōtoku’s “direct
action” was a reference as much to the local direct action of mutual aid
promoted by the Chokkōdan as to the labor-union strikes of Euro-
American anarchist direct-action theory.
In rural Tochigi and other parts of the Kanto area affected by the
environmental destruction caused by the Ashio copper mine, the Nonwar
Movement rode the existing wave of discontent fueled by the mines. Al-
though the Ashio conflict was originally not an expression of antimilitarist
and internationalist sentiment, it was fused with the movement, revealing
the capacity of the movement to incorporate existing discontent with the
state, with elites, and with capitalism. The speakers at a local socialist lec-
ture series established for villagers in Tochigi Prefecture who had been
harmed by pollution and land degradation from the mines were often
key figures in the Nonwar Movement. Hundreds of people often came to
the series to listen to the speakers during the war. At one socialist lecture,
four hundred people came. When socialists and anarchists involved in
the Nonwar Movement Kinoshita Naoe, Ishikawa Sanshirō, and Tanaka
Shōzō (1841–1913) came together to speak in 1906, over six hundred people
attended their local lecture in mountainous Tochigi.
The ideological and social interconnectedness of the Nonwar Move-
ment with the ecological movement that grew out of the environmental
destruction caused by the Ashio copper mines was based on a shared idea

82. Katō, “Letter to Alexander Berkman”; Sakai and Katō, “Letters from Japan.”
83. A translation of the speech may be found in Crump, Origins of Socialist Thought
in Japan, pp. 341–51.
 The Nonwar Movement 197

of heimin. This is suggested by the Heiminsha’s financial support for

Ashio rioters exiled to Hokkaido by the government. Heiminsha, the
company that formed on the basis of proceeds from the sale of Heimin
shimbun and its other publications, helped finance and orga nize the
resettlement of those involved in the Ashio copper mine riots in Hok-
kaido. The government had allowed the rioters clemency if they agreed
to settle and farm virgin lands in Hokkaido. The settlers named their
farm Heimin Nōjō (the people’s farm) after the ideals of heiminism that
arose during the war. During its relatively short existence, members of
the farm would contribute to the circulation of anarchist materials in
Hokkaido.

Unexpected Allies: Wartime Transnational Networks

The alternative space of the Nonwar Movement transcended the territo-
rial bounds of Japan during the war. Intersecting Russian and Japanese
ideologies of antiwar or nonwar increased transnational intellectual en-
counters and communication and led to an intensification of transna-
tional networks between Russia and Japan during the war. In this way,
the war helped concretize transnational networks outside the commu-
nity of nation-states in the international arena.
Some of these transnational connections were activated only when they
were needed for a particular project to support the Russian Revolution
then brewing in Russia during the war. Heimin shimbun and other hubs of
the network served to connect Japanese and Russians transnationally. Ties
were often solidified via a third country, such as the United States. Russian
revolutionaries as far away as New York and Europe contacted Kōtoku
directly to ask for his help in disseminating revolutionary literature among
Russian POWs in Japan and among Russian soldiers and sailors stationed
in the Far East. Kōtoku and Heiminsha responded enthusiastically and
became actively involved in facilitating ties between Russian POWs in
Japan and Russian revolutionaries abroad and educating Russian POWs
in socialist ideas.

84. For more on the Heimin Farm, see Koike, Heiminsha nōjō no hitobito.
198 The Nonwar Movement

In this context, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and Kōtoku

corresponded with each other during the war. The transnational collabo-
ration was no secret to Heimin shimbun readers because the newspaper
published news about its ongoing collaboration with Russian revolution-
aries during the war, as well as a list of the hundreds of Russian publica-
tions being disseminated in Russian POW camps across Japan. Unlikely
collaborators emerged in this very dynamic and complex context. The
newspaper invited speakers of Russian in Japan, whether Japanese, Rus-
sian, or of other nationality, to come in and read copies of these publica-
tions kept in the Heiminsha office, further helping radicalize the Japa-
nese Russian-speaking community in Tokyo.
The Japanese government, still unaware of the potency of these net-
works as a transnational phenomenon, actively facilitated the building of
Russian-Japanese networks around transnational hubs at this time. For a
rare moment, the goals of the Japanese government to win the war and
those of the Nonwar Movement to undermine the war merged in a
shared belief that a positive future lay with the Russian Revolution’s suc-
cess in weakening the Russian autocracy. Japanese and Finnish documents
reveal that the Japanese government was actively involved in covert opera-
tions that funded and funneled arms to Russian revolutionaries during
the war. Colonel Akashi Motojirō (1864–1919), stationed in Eu rope,
undertook a sustained campaign to channel funds and arms to socialist
revolutionaries, anarchists, and members of ethnic groups of the Rus-
sian Empire who nurtured a revolutionary and secessionist agenda. The

85. In a letter dated July 7, 1904, Kōtoku wrote to Lenin that he was cooperating
with his request to disseminate socialist revolutionary literature among the Russian
POWs being held in Japan. Similarly, Rose Fritz wrote to Kropotkin in 1906 about
Kōtoku’s role in helping in the dissemination among Russian POWs in Japan of the
revolutionary pamphlets sent from Russian émigrés in the United States. Fritz was an
anarchist from Kiev living in San Francisco who was actively involved in orga nizing
support for the anarchist and Russian revolutionary movement from the United States.
Rose Fritz to Kropotkin, September 3, 1906, GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection, f.
1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 2631, l. 2; Avrich, Anarchist Voices, p. 164.
86. See “News about Russian Comrades.” See also Heimin shimbun, no. 33 (June 26,
1904), which published Lenin’s letter to Heiminsha about the hundreds of materials
that Russian revolutionary émigré groups had sent, asking the Japa nese publishing
company to disseminate them. In no. 63 (January 22, 1905), Heimin shimbun published
a list of the newspapers, brochures, and proclamations sent to it from Russia.
 The Nonwar Movement 199

Japanese government allocated at least a million yen (worth tens of mil-

lions of U.S. dollars today) for Akashi’s activities. The government ex-
tended its reach as far as Russian anarchists during the war. In 1904–5, the
Japanese state still viewed Russian anarchism as a remote threat located on
a far-off shore. Japanese agents even approached Kropotkin during the war
with funds to increase the subversive work of anarchists in Russia at this
time. Although Polish independence leader and socialist Józef Piłsudski
(1867–1935) and other minorities were in the pay of the Japanese to further
their independence movements, Kropotkin refused the funds for the sake
of the reputation of the anarchist movement.
It would take many months from this point for the Japanese govern-
ment to react to both the rapidity of formal anarchism’s expansion in
Japan and the extensiveness of its transnational reach among Japanese
participants. Ironically, the success of the Russian Revolution that the
Japanese government had funded made it anxious that revolution was
also a distinct possibility in Japan. After the war, the Japanese and Rus-
sian governments concluded diplomatic agreements to exchange unlaw-
ful revolutionaries who remained within each other’s borders.
Until that moment of unprecedented cooperation between the two
enemy nations, however, Russian revolutionaries were still allowed sur-
prising liberties in Japan during and immediately after the war. Many
Russians, including a large number of those who were considered the most
dangerous elements exiled to Sakhalin by the Russian government, sud-
denly gained free passage to Japan after the war as part of a larger influx
of Russians when the southern part of Sakhalin was granted to Japan as
part of war reparations. In March 1906 alone, 373 Russians entered Japan,
the largest number recorded from any country except China. The radi-
cals followed the path first forged by Bakunin out of Siberian exile, con-
gregating in Nagasaki to join a network of Russian radicals there. The
network intersected with a Jewish émigré community based in Nagasaki.

87. Kujala, “Attempts at Fostering Collaboration among the Russian Revolutionary

Parties,” p. 138.
88. Woodcock and Avakumovic, Anarchist Prince, p. 357.
89. “Iaponskaia zhizn’.” In March 1906, 2, 503 people emigrated to Japan, of whom
1,408 were Chinese, 373 Russians, 357 Americans, 242 British, 61 Germans, 31 Koreans,
and 31 French.
200 The Nonwar Movement

Those who were leading figures in the Russian revolutionary movement

in the years before and after the war either escaped or were released from
their Siberian imprisonment to gather in Nagasaki, including Grigorii
Gershuni (1870–1908), a founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
and Boris Orzhikh (1864–?1934), an active member of the People’s Will,
as well as the Russian Populist Nikolai Sudzilovskii-Russel (1850–1930).
Sudzilovskii-Russel came to Japan after meeting with his old friend Lev
Deutsch (1855–1941), a Russian revolutionary and founder with Georgii
Plekhanov of the first Russian Marxist group, Liberation of Labor.
Deutsch had similarly escaped to Nagasaki from Siberia before the war.
Russian exile Bronisław Piłsudski, a former member of the revolutionary
group Narodnaia Volia along with his brother, the previously mentioned
Józef Piłsudski, similarly were allowed to roam Japan at will after the
war, a liberty that he used to meet with and carry correspondence and
messages among Russian revolutionaries in Nagasaki and Japanese co-
horts across the length of Japan.
Nonwar Movement supporters assisted the Russian revolutionary
movement through publication efforts, networking, and participation
in the reeducation of Russian POWs, the same soldiers who were viewed
as the nonterritorialized heimin by the Nonwar Movement. In tactical
relation to its fostering of subversive revolutionary activity in Russia, the
Japanese government turned a blind eye to the fostering of revolutionary
thoughts among the Russian POWs. The Japanese government and Rus-
sian revolutionaries had become unlikely collaborators during the war.
Only when the tsarist government appealed to Japan to put a stop to
revolutionary propaganda efforts among the POWs, and Japan and Rus-
sia suddenly allied with each other in the effort to stifle transnational
anarchism and revolutionary socialism after the war, did the Japanese
government intervene in socialist activity among the POWs.
With some ninety thousand Russian POWs scattered in twenty-eight
POW camps across Japan, the camps served as ideal hubs. This con-
trolled space of order, hygiene, medical advances, literacy, and humani-
tarianism was originally created according to the utopian construct of
“international relations” to showcase to the West Japan’s civilizational

90. On Sudzilovskii-Russel, see Wada, Nikorai Rasseru.

 The Nonwar Movement 201

attainment. The Japanese government used the camps as high-profile

sites of cultural diplomacy, inviting foreign media to visit and observe
the advanced level of sanitation, orderliness, and civilized treatment of
the enemy soldiers as an indication of humanitarianism beyond even
humanitarian treatment of POWs in the West. But that space simulta-
neously became a hub for the networked activities of Nonwar Move-
ment activists and their Russian revolutionary counterparts, connecting
for the first time figures such as Lenin, Futabatei, Kōtoku, Bronisław
Piłsudski, Nikolai Tchaikovsky, Sudzilovskii-Russel, and Ōba Kakō (1872–
?1924), a journalist and Russianist who disappeared in the Soviet Union
after being assigned to report there for the Yomiuri shimbun newspaper in
1923. These figures turned the camps into a kind of a liberal arts college,
or a “barbed-wire college,” to use the phrase of Ron Robin (referring to the
intellectual history of reeducation of German POWs in the United States
during World War II), disseminating Russian revolutionary literature
produced by the revolutionary émigré community in Nagasaki and sent
to them by Russian colleagues in the United States. Without charge for
tuition and with free room and board, Japanese socialists and anarchists,
as well as Russian revolutionaries in Japan, treated the camps as ideal cam-
puses to educate captured Russian soldiers.
In the Russian POW camp Matsuyama, the idea of heimin-narod
underlined the educational activities in the camp. Russian POWs read
pamphlets and newspapers like the Russian-language newspaper Volia
(Liberty), which demonized not the Japanese, but the Russian aristoc-
racy. Sudzilovskii-Russel had founded Volia in Nagasaki. The enterprise
was used to support a community of some of Russia’s most notorious
revolutionaries exiled to Sakhalin who had entered Japan in 1906 after
the war, who in turn wrote for the journal as a propaganda tool for Rus-
sian soldiers stationed or imprisoned in the Far East. Hundreds of thou-
sands of Russian soldiers were radicalized by their experiences in the war
and their education in the POW camps. They likely saw, for example, the
May 1906 cartoon in Volia that depicts a Japanese soldier looking on with
shock at a fearful Tsar Nicholas II as he dreams of the beheading of King
Louis XVI (Figure 3.8).

91. Robin, Barbed-Wire College.

92. Volia, no. 6 (May 7, 1906): 3.
202 The Nonwar Movement

Fig. 3.8 “Eternal Rest.” Cartoon in Sudzilovskii-Russel’s Nagasaki newspaper Volia 6

(May 7, 1906).

The Russian POW camps became a kind of contact zone that tran-
scended the original meaning of the word “contact,” conceptually limited
as it has been to that between colonizer and colonized. Although the
state constructed the space of the camp with an aim to “civilize” and
educate illiterate Russian soldiers, the intellectual activities of Nonwar
participants in Japan and Russian revolutionaries in their mutual encoun-
ters with Russian POWs often governed the knowledge disseminated.
Sudzilovskii-Russel, a former Russian Populist enlisted by Russian émigré
revolutionary circles to organize propaganda activities among Russian
POWs in Japan, was a central contact person in the transnational network
at the time. He was heavily responsible for publishing the two important

93. The term comes from Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone.”
94. Sudzilovskii-Russel was a colorful and widely traveled character in the transcul-
tural history of the Pacific Rim. Outside his activities in Japan, he even made his place
in American history as the first elected president of the Hawaii state congress. For a
history of Sudzilovskii-Russel’s activities in the United States, see Emmons, Alleged Sex
and Threatened Violence.
 The Nonwar Movement 203

Russian newspapers in Japan during and immediately after the war, Ia-
poniia i Rossiia (Japan and Russia) and Volia, both of which were widely
disseminated among Russian POWs, soldiers, and sailors. Like the POW
camps, the papers served as hubs that financially sustained the Nagasaki
contingent of Russian revolutionaries. Sudzilovskii-Russel had taken over
the editorship of the Russian-language newspaper Iaponiia i Rossiia from
the Japanese Orthodox Church in Kobe, which had founded it as a source
of education and news for the POWs. The paper was filled with reports
about the war and heralded Russian-Japanese cultural ties to its Russian
readers. Sudzilovskii-Russel himself was well connected with the Russian
émigré network in New York and Europe.
Indeed, the success of the Nagasaki site in both radicalizing Russian
soldiers and serving as an organizational base for Russian revolutionary
activity prompted the revolutionary Tchaikovsky to write in a personal
letter to his friend Kropotkin in 1906 that Nagasaki was now one of the
three international centers of Russian revolutionary activities, along with
Switzerland and London. The radicalization of Russian soldiers during
the war is well known, but how they were radicalized is not. The discus-
sion here suggests that their radicalization was due, at least in part, to
Russian-Japanese wartime transnational relations and the corresponding
rise of a cooperatist-anarchist discourse of modernity in Japan.
The transnational imagination fostered during the war led many Japa-
nese to seek to transgress the sanctity of the boundaries of the nation-state
through improved cultural relations with Russia. Documents in Russian
archives show that the conceptual dissolving of territorialized identities
by the Nonwar Movement inspired people in the most rural areas of Japan
to initiate direct correspondence with Russian anarchists and revolution-
aries like Kropotkin and Tolstoy during and after the war, transcending
even the major hubs of transnational networks like Heimin shimbun.
Letters from various parts of rural Japan hidden in the vaults of Russian

95. GARF, f. 1129, g. 1906, op. 3, d. 461. Tchaikovsky was a very close friend of Kro-
potkin and an eminent figure in the Russian revolutionary community. He had col-
laborated with Mechnikov in order to help obtain Kropotkin’s release from prison in
Paris in the 1880s.
96. One letter to Kropotkin written in 1905 from the village of Arawa, for example,
is located in GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection, f. 1129, op. 3, ed. khr. 1018, ll. 1–2.
204 The Nonwar Movement

state archives suggest a transnational linking of the local networks in

Japan with Russian anarchism.
Kaneko Kiichi, writing in a letter to Tolstoy from the United States
in 1906, introduced himself as a citizen not of any nation, but of an inter-
nationalism rooted in humanist and anarchist ideals: “My dear Mr. Leo
Tolstoy: I am a Japanese by birth but spiritually I am not a subject to any
country. I do not want to belong to any particular nation-state.” Al-
though his letter was sent from the United States, it was written within
the imagined space of Russian-Japanese transnational intellectual rela-
tions. Kaneko accompanied his letter to Tolstoy with a poem that he had
published in the United States in which he simultaneously rejected cul-
tural nationalism and Western cosmopolitanist belonging to the interna-
tional community of nation-states for the sake of anarchist internationalist
progress:
My country is not where beautiful Fuji stands;
It is not where you find the Geisha girl pretty;
My country is not where I was born.
My country is where humanity is uplifted
It is where men and women enjoy their rights . . .
My country is where no one man can rule, no throne, no title,
and no indolent nobles;
It is where man stands as man, simple and pure.
Let nations talk of their flags,
Let races think of themselves as “God-chosen,”
For their own and each others’ sake;
But my country can never be there.
In the geography of human progress
No one nation stands isolated;
All people are striving for one goal;
And there, too, my country I find.

97. Kaneko Kiichi to Tolstoy, March 9, 1906, ORGMT, f. 1, op. 1308, l. 1.

98. Kaneko cut out his poem “Worldwide Patriotism: A Japa nese Man’s View of
Man’s Duty” from a New York newspaper and enclosed it with his letter to Tolstoy.
Ibid.
99. Based in Chicago’s Hyde Park, Kaneko, with his wife, Josephine Conger-Kaneko
(1874–unknown), who was becoming the leading American publicist for feminist so-
 The Nonwar Movement 205

Writing from within the same intellectual universe, Kinoshita Naoe

in his 1904 article “The Face of War” for Shakai shugi asked, “Do we have
anyone equal to Turgenev, Tolstoy, or Gorky? On what basis are we gar-
nering our greatness?” “Russia” had become an idealized counterimag-
ination of the possibility of a transnationally shared peace and civilization
external to the utopia of Western modernity.
Futabatei moved to Russia soon after the war to expand Russian-
Japanese cultural relations. Like many others, with the war Futabatei
turned decisively from the intellectual universe justifying its course. He
expressed a commitment to reject another war with Russia through non-
state, cultural communications. When he set out for St. Petersburg as a
correspondent for Asahi shimbun in 1908, he explained his goal in going
there at a going-away party organized by Uchida Roan after their shared
translation of Resurrection: “The last war was not against the Russian
people, but against the Russian government. Neither of the two peoples,
and indeed no-one in the world, loves wars, hence the only way to avoid
future confrontation is to make a situation where people would not fight
even when the government wanted a war. To achieve this, we must com-
municate with each other. We must let the Russians know what we think
and how we feel. Literature is most suitable for this purpose.” In the
absence of the possibility of direct, face-to-face contact between peoples,
Futabatei believed that translated literature was the most suitable means
to communicate thoughts and feelings transnationally. This transnational
communication via translation in turn was to serve as a means to resist
the government when it waged war.
Futabatei spent the last year of his life in Russia. Precisely because he
was not clearly associated with the Heiminsha, Futabatei’s sentiments

cialism, would found the weekly newspaper Socialist Woman, the first socialist periodi-
cal in the United States dedicated to women’s issues. Renamed The Progressive Woman
in 1909, the Kanekos’ magazine became the official organ of the Women’s National
Committee of the Socialist Party that year. The magazine’s subscription list hit 15,000
at this time, with special issues selling over 100,000. Buhle, Women and American So-
cialism, p. 148; Cane and Alves, The Only Efficient Instrument, pp. 9–10. Kaneko’s in-
volvement in the socialist women’s movement in the United States is suggestive of the
transnational circulation of ideas in this discourse.
100. Quoted in Ivanova, Delo ob oskorblenii trona, p. 148.
101. Futabatei, Futabatei Shimei zenshū, 5:276– 77. Translated in Aoyama, “Japa nese
Literary Responses,” pp. 74– 75.
206 The Nonwar Movement

quoted here suggest the success of heimin ideology propagated in the

Nonwar Movement. The expression of Nonwar ideas by a student of Rus-
sian Popu lism at the TSFL embodied the continuation of the Russian-
Japanese transnational relations rooted in revolutionary Ishin.
The idea of heimin that transcended the boundaries of the territorialized
nation-state would be pursued throughout the late Meiji-Taishō period.
The idea of the nonterritorialized “people” and the societies they com-
posed belied a particular interest in the people of Russia, for this idea owed
much to the now half century of Russian-Japanese intellectual relations
since the Meiji Ishin. Indeed, the preoccupation with Russia in the name
of an alternative transnationalism continued to lead numerous intellectu-
als to make their way to Russia and to initiate correspondence and trans-
national contacts with cultural figures and intellectuals in Russia well
after the war. Not only leading representatives of socialism and anarchism
but also cultural figures and participants in the Japanese women’s move-
ment, the theater movement, the children’s Free Education Movement,
the Esperanto movement, and many other distinctive cultural trends
during this period in Japan initiated nonstate and nonorganizational
transnational relations with Russia, surging precisely during periods of
war and poor Japanese diplomatic relations with Russia.

The shift to an understanding of the new modern subject as heimin

became the foundation of the Nonwar Movement’s systematic criticism
of the state of nature in “international relations” as Western modernity,
defined by the terms of national sovereignty, international law, and free-
market trade based on private property (“civilization”). The founding
ideology of heiminism for the Nonwar Movement, declared in the opening
pages of Heimin shimbun, gave expression to heimin as the newly imag-
ined subject of the movement. The construction of heimin necessitated
the deconstruction of the idea of the people defined by and anchored
to the territorialized sovereign nation-state and “international relations.”
From its founding, this momentous shift from kokumin to heimin made
the Nonwar Movement an intellectual and cultural move beyond the ideo-
logical confines of what participants perceived to be the utopian construct
of “international relations.” This is what Heimin shimbun meant when it
claimed in its opening pages that its position against the war was to be
part of its broader endeavor to realize heiminism.
 The Nonwar Movement 207

By shifting the focus from major diplomatic events to the absence of

them, from leaders and prominent institutions to nonstate intellectual
and cultural production, historians can identify independent sources of
knowledge and practices for progress. Moreover, the Nonwar Movement
was a reflection and inspiration of the development of widespread ideas
that were independent of the peacemaking processes at the uppermost
levels of government. The movement constituted a historical current that
lasted longer and was more deeply embedded in cultural practices and
thoughts in modern Japanese intellectual life than the ephemeral efforts
of nation-states at Portsmouth to achieve peace.
This leads toward a rethinking of the prevailing understanding that
the Nonwar Movement failed because it was unable to stop the war. In
order to better understand the cultural and intellectual life of the Nonwar
Movement, it may be far more beneficial to ask why, on the contrary, the
state was unable to shape culture and opinion in a time of modern total
war. This failure to shape Japanese minds is especially notable in a war in
which the government and the media that supported it had established a
sophisticated wartime propaganda campaign. Scholars have responded
to findings that Russian literature and culture were quite popular in Japan
during the war by explaining that this was because Japanese intellectuals
had “superficial understandings of Russia,” and the Japanese public had
an “unmistakable ignorance . . . about international realities” during the
war. This reverts again to the notion that “international relations,” with
its assumption of “realpolitik,” is more real and less ideologically or mor-
ally motivated than any other idea of a global future.
Antiwar movements have been historically and culturally defined by
the goal of influencing government policies on a war, and their activities
have included demonstrations, protests, and publications to disseminate
information and move policy makers and institutional activities. Their
ability to affect policy has determined their perceived success or failure
in historical assessment of them. However, not only did participants in
the Nonwar Movement not conduct many of these actions, but members
also largely avoided direct confrontation with the government. Nonen-
gagement with the state was fully consistent with Nonwar participants’

102. Akaha, “Review of David Wells and Sandra Wilson.”

208 The Nonwar Movement

formation of a separate sphere of thought and action independent of the

Western modern intellectual universe supported by the state. By focusing
solely on why the movement failed to influence the government, histori-
ans overlook the much broader social, cultural, and intellectual wartime
developments that had long-lasting ramifications for twentieth-century
Japanese thought and culture. The question itself demonstrates the intel-
lectual limitations of scholarship on cultural and intellectual movements
in history.
Nonwar participants did not oppose “the West” or “America” per se, as
in anti-Americanism. Rather, they opposed the particular idea of progress
and temporality that defined the imagined territorial utopia of Western
modernity in which many in the West located themselves. Given that
world leaders like Roosevelt shared a commitment to eradicate anarchism
at the time, it is ironic that probably no school of thought in modern
Japan came closer to peace with America than cooperatist anarchism.
There is even further dialectical irony in the fact that the movement arose
at the very moment at which people throughout the world gazed with
hope and curiosity at Japan’s performance in the war as a prediction of
the forms that conflict, peace, and world order would take in the coming
century, for Nonwar participants moved against the notions of Western
modernity and liberalism that gave birth to these international hopes
laid on Japan.
The thought produced in the Nonwar Movement had a major impact
on the cultural and intellectual life of early twentieth-century Japan. The
following chapters will examine how a slide in historical consciousness
that resulted from the Russo-Japanese War initiated a radical overturn-
ing of the meaning of “culture” that was at the heart of the postwar devel-
opment of cooperatist anarchism.
 ch apter 4
The History Slide

In the year after the end of the Russo-Japanese War, two of the most
popular writers of late Meiji-Taishō Japan, Tokutomi Roka and Ari-
shima Takeo, each unaware of the other’s movements, made synchronous
transnational pilgrimages around the world, tracing the paths of modern
evolutionary and moral human development. Their separate travels
culminated at the respective homes of the Russian anarchists Tolstoy
and Kropotkin. Whereas Roka traced the evolution of religious life to
Tolstoy’s home as the culmination of modern human development,
Arishima’s trans-European pilgrimage experientially recapitulated the
anarchist history of human civilizational progress. Arishima traced the
major sites of inspiration for human evolution in Kropotkin’s anarchist
account of historical progress, Mutual Aid, from medieval relics of asso-
ciationist, self-governing fortress towns to the communal villages of the
Switzerland of his time. The highlight of Arishima’s pilgrimage was his
visit to Kropotkin’s émigré home in London. Roka and Arishima’s voy-
ages each marked significant rites of passage in their rise to popularity. It
was in the period immediately after the Russo-Japanese War that Tol-
stoy was suddenly paired with Kropotkin on the Japanese cultural scene,
to the extent that the phenomenon can best be described as Tolstoy-
Kropotkinism. The sudden and enthusiastic embrace of Kropotkin as a

1. Tokutomi Roka, Junrei kikō, pp. 503– 7.

2. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.
210 The History Slide

theorist of cooperatist anarchist civilization and progress at this particu-

lar moment is the subject of this chapter.
A shift in historical consciousness defined the community of coopera-
tist anarchists in this period. This shift was expressed in an embrace of
the ideas of Tolstoy and Kropotkin. “History” had been that familiar
narrative of the rise and development of the nation-state toward a West-
ern modern form of political and economic liberty, or Hegelian Reason.
Japan was narrated in this history as behind or, in some cases, as “late.”
In 1906, the present as a product of following Western modern progress
and civilization in Japan suddenly came to be perceived as behind and as
no longer morally justifiable. Japan’s winning of the Russo-Japanese War
was reinterpreted. The meaning of the war slid from an achievement of
progress and civilization to retrogression. Gliding from a Western mod-
ern construct of history as a teleological narrative of the rise of the nation-
state that justified the present to a new notion of progress and civilization
based on cooperatist ideas of anarchism, “history” became akin to a the-
ory of social change and moral knowledge and action in the here and now.
The present was now determined as the key moment in time and space
in which members were to actively create and rectify history for a new
direction of progress and civilizational development for the future.
Koselleck’s emphasis on the significance of lived time, or temporality
as an expectation and anticipation of the future, for the understanding
of human history is relevant to understanding this phenomenon. This
chapter focuses on the moment of a major shift from one set of anticipa-
tions of the future to an entirely different set of anticipations. This newly
imagined future was an outcome of a shift in the structure of meanings
with which people endowed lived events. This decisive temporal shift in
historicity, of understanding oneself and one’s actions within that per-
ceived current of historical movement, was at the root of the decisive
adoption of anarchism as a global movement in the immediate aftermath
of the war by prominent intellectuals and popular cultural figures alike,
including Arishima, Kōtoku Shūsui, Ōsugi Sakae, Ishikawa Sanshirō,

3. Duara discusses the role that national histories play in securing for the contested
nation the constructed unity of a national subject evolving through time in Rescuing
History from the Nation.
4. Koselleck, Futures Past.
 The History Slide 211

and many other lesser-known anarchists. Although the thoughts, ac-

tions, and interactions among many people before this moment may be
described as anarchistic, it was only at this moment that many consciously
adopted the term “anarchism” (anākizumu), translated from Kropotkin’s
writings, to describe their movement That some six thousand intellectu-
als are listed in a recent dictionary of Japanese anarchists is attributable
in part to this moment of slide in historical consciousness. The list cer-
tainly does not include countless ordinary people who left no written
record or fame as anarchists. Still, however incomplete the list may be,
many in it can be traced directly or indirectly to this slide of historical
consciousness in 1906.
Anarchism’s beginnings in Japan have been identified as being a direct
result of Kōtoku’s life-changing journey to the United States in 1905. Ac-
cording to the narrative, Kōtoku, heavily influenced by the anarchist com-
munist movement there, not only converted to anarchism himself but also
went on to lead others in Japan to follow him. Implicit in this understand-
ing is the assumption that modern socialism began in the West and spread
to the rest of the world. This chapter suggests instead that Kōtoku’s turn to
anarchism was merely part of a much broader adoption of anarchism
translated from Kropotkin in this period, whose ideology was heavily in-
formed by the Russian-Japanese intellectual encounters in Ishin Japan
discussed in Chapter 1.
Methodologically, the chapter examines the effect of the Nonwar
Movement on Japa nese cultural and intellectual life in subsequent
years by focusing on someone who was neither in Japan during the war
nor an active participant in the Nonwar Movement. Instead, Arishima
quietly observed the war from the United States. As a figure who was
not involved in political orga nization or demonstrations against the
war, Arishima demonstrates the broader ideological transformation it
wrought. His diaries, letters, and publications during and on the war
period offer a revealing glimpse into the thoughts and emotions of one
who was turning to a cooperatist anarchist vision of modernity dur-
ing this time. In his intellectual shift from being a promising young

5. Nihon Anākizumu Undō Jinmei Jiten Henshū Iiankai, Biografia leksikono de la

Japana anarkista movado. It should be noted that this volume also does not include
some of the major historical actors discussed in this work, such as Konishi Masutarō.
212 The History Slide

Western cosmopolitanist in the years before the war to one of the most
recognized and influential figures in the Japanese anarchist movement
in the decade and a half after the war, Arishima presents a more intimate
personal story illustrative of the wider slide in historical consciousness
resulting from the war and the broader turn to anarchism after it.
Arishima experienced many of the intellectual and cultural phenom-
ena discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 and therefore offers an example of the
development of cooperatist anarchism in Japan. At the same time, as
someone coming from a highly privileged family background in Japan,
Arishima was a very unlikely individual to adopt cooperatist anarchism.
His prolific production of diaries, essays, and literary writings exhibits
the thought processes that led someone whose upbringing and education
made him a part of the cliques opposed by cooperatist anarchists to adopt
anarchism and eventually become a leading figure in the Japanese anar-
chist movement. Arishima’s experimentation with cooperatist anarchist
thought in his literature and practices helped mold how people conceived
of the movement in the cultural sphere. A broad reading public would
embrace him. Although this book does not explore at length the fascinat-
ing ways in which Arishima expressed cooperatist anarchism in his litera-
ture and essays, that topic deserves extensive scholarly treatment, given
the reading of Arishima up to this point as a self divided between Japa-
nese tradition and Western modernity.
In an article he wrote during the war, Arishima called on the public
to “rectify history.” His pilgrimage was his personal response to his call
for action. Precisely because he was a very unlikely candidate for the anar-
chist movement, he offers a convincing example of the “history slide”
that occurred at this time in Japan. His case simultaneously reveals the
weakness with which the ideology of Western cosmopolitanism took
hold in Japan during this period. Indeed, if Arishima, one of those best
trained to be a Western cosmopolitanist, never experienced Western cos-
mopolitanism as a conviction, then perhaps Western cosmopolitanism
never really existed in Japan.
I begin with an examination of Arishima’s thought in the years before
the war as it was reflected in his 1904 master’s thesis, written at Haver-
ford College. Arishima had sought to embody the Western internation-
alist ideal by voyaging to the United States. His thesis shows the state of
 The History Slide 213

mind of educated elite Japanese at the turn of the century that furthered
an imagined international spatial hierarchical order in its echoing of the
temporality of Western modernity. The thesis, as a work reflective of
turn-of-the-century ideas of cultural internationalism as Western cos-
mopolitanism, reveals the ephemeral nature of non-Western intellectual
assimilation into that temporal and spatial order. In its failure, the thesis
demonstrates that even the most promising intellectual trained at the
preeminent institutions of American higher education, Haverford Col-
lege and Harvard University, was incapable of subjective integration into
the temporality of Western modernity.

Assimilating History
Arishima’s writing of history is not outlined here as unique, and certainly
not as a stellar example of historical thinking. Rather, this promising
young Western cosmopolitanist’s writing is explored as a lens through
which to read the much larger intellectual universe behind the writing of
history at the turn of the century. Arishima’s history writing serves as a
text through which the intellectual problems of his generation may be
delineated. His work was situated within a much broader pursuit of
turn-of-the-century social sciences. The social sciences empirically mea-
sured and demonstrated the temporality of a single world development
toward participation in capitalism and Western liberal democratic govern-
ment ordered by the constitutional rule of law and sovereign nationhood,
giving temporal order to the chaotic reality of the turn-of-the-century
world in which he lived. Arishima’s history of Japan, written in response
to the demands of Western social science, was an attempt to identify
Japan’s place within this larger universe. In this sense, his study was
part of a broader practice of social scientific writing among societies in
the non-West that sought to bring their nations into the all-encompassing
temporal order imagined in the West. Arishima’s history thesis thus
serves as a rich source of intellectual history.
Shaped by the conventions of Western social science and written
specifically for an American audience, Arishima’s history of Japa nese
civilization was a conscious attempt to shape the Western historical imag-
ination of Japan at the turn of the century and an effort to contribute to
214 The History Slide

the integration of Japan into the Western international order. To achieve

this end, “to build a bridge between the United States and Japan,” in the
famous words of his mentor, Nitobe Inazō, Arishima attempted to fuse
Japan into the temporality of Western modernity by crafting via histori-
cal writing a nation with all the proper civilizational characteristics to
merit its eventual attainment of the utopia of Western modernity. His
thesis may thus be viewed as an expression of Western cosmopolitanist
cultural internationalism, revealing much about the state of intellectual
exchange between the United States and Japan. It embraced liberal ideas
and humanism as universalizing and unifying ideals, but it was ultimately
unable to separate them from the racial and cultural binaries of the Euro-
centric world order. The thesis reveals much about the intense search for
solutions to the dilemma of Japan in the world among educated Japanese
at the turn of the century.
Such practices of history writing appear to be part of the larger,
global process of temporal self-colonization in the non-West in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, in which
intellectuals channeled their subjectivities to merge with a monolithic
Western modern temporal framework for the sake of attaining a higher
place in the hierarchy of civilizational progress. It is ironic that the at-
tempt to decolonize “Japan” and by implication oneself by channeling
Japanese history into the Western modern temporal framework appeared
to lead to self-colonization. Japanese historians’ attempts to channel Japa-
nese history to merge with Western historical processes were the other
side of the same coin as the Orientalizing practices of Oriental historians
in Japan.
However, this temporal self-colonization was still so difficult to achieve
in Japan at the turn of the last century that even Arishima, one of the
most promising young Western cosmopolitanists in Japan, failed in his
endeavors. Arishima had been brought up from an early age to become a
member of the nation’s Western-educated elite. He attended Japan’s first

6. Nitobe’s quote remains engraved on his bust erected in his memory at Hokkaido
University.
7. On cultural internationalism, see Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and
World Order.
8. See Tanaka, Japan’s Orient.
 The History Slide 215

imperial college, Sapporo Agricultural College (SAC), as an undergrad-

uate in the 1890s. One of a select handful of the nation’s young men
with the means and connections to study in American higher education,
Arishima traveled to the United States in 1903 for further study after his
graduation from SAC. Here, he followed the path set by his mentor, the
Western cosmopolitanist Nitobe, an alumnus of SAC who studied at
Johns Hopkins University. After earning a graduate degree at Haverford,
Arishima enrolled in graduate studies at Harvard, where he specialized
in Western history to “master the West.” Arishima’s failed attempt to
merge himself and Japan with the Western temporal order by way of his-
tory writing and his subsequent turn to cooperatist anarchism suggest
that Western cosmopolitanism in Japan during this period was a distant
and alien idea for many. In other words, at the turn of the last century,
even those best groomed to adopt Western modernity were unable to
embrace Western cosmopolitanism. Western cosmopolitanism was a be-
lief in the inevitability and moral goodness of the global spread of liberal
democracy, capitalism, and the Western culture that supported those in-
stitutions, whether through war, imperialism, or cultural diffusion, within
a hierarchical international order of nation-states. It has been widely yet
often mistakenly used to define cultural internationalism in modern
Japan.
Arishima’s thesis, “The Development of Japanese Civilization from
the Mythical Age to the Time of Decline of Shogunal Power,” was tai-
lored from the start to convince his readers that Japan deserved recogni-
tion as a sovereign and civilized nation-state. His desire was simultane-
ously to write Japan into the upper echelons of the Western civilizational
order and to express the Ishin ideal of social parity as universally appli-
cable. Yet by merging this ideal with Western formulations of “freedom”
and “equality,” Arishima was led to echo the inherent paradox expressed
in the Western liberal tradition as formulated by representatives like
John Stuart Mill. According to Mill, the notion of “universal” liberty for

9. Sapporo Agricultural College became a college of Tohoku Imperial University in

1907. In 1918, the college was elevated to university status and was renamed Hokkaido
Imperial University.
10. Morton, Divided Self, pp. 53–54.
11. Arishima, “Development of Japa nese Civilization.”
216 The History Slide

man was applicable only in the domestic arena of civilized Western

nation-states. In Mill’s thought, the ideal of universal liberty was con-
centrated in the West, while in the non-West, universal liberty was be-
yond reach and was relegated to an undetermined future. In the interna-
tional arena, Mill believed that the Western colonial presence, however
tolerant and compassionate it ought to be, was still necessary to coerce
the uncivilized peoples to embrace civilizational progress. The ideals of
“equality” and “freedom” thus were largely inseparable from the larger
framework of civilizational hierarchy and the corresponding necessity of
Western colonial subjugation of the non-West.
During his time in the United States, Arishima succeeded in master-
ing the rudiments of social science. His thesis was a well-studied concoc-
tion of many of the latest trends of social science. His history relied on a
variety of models and social scientific methods to achieve equality be-
tween Japan and the West. Social Darwinism, geographic determinism,
and eugenicist and other racial theories, with added touches of Christian
messianism and utopianism, all were interlocking ingredients in his ex-
position of the development of Japanese civilization up to the Ishin. In
disclosing the universal impulse toward equality as a factor of progress,
the thesis accepted the hierarchical construct of world nations and peoples,
according to which Japan assumed a position among Western white Chris-
tian peoples. This inherent tension between equality and hierarchy in his
thesis remained unresolved in Arishima’s thinking in the years before
the war.
The thesis first attempted to resolve the problem of inequality between
Japan and the West by reorienting the dividing line between progressing
and stagnant civilizations to a North-South divide. Arishima had been
interested in the study of history as a way to resolve contemporary prob-
lems since his studies at Gakushūin High School under Shiratori Kura-
kichi (1865–1942), who would become a leading historian of Oriental
studies (toyōshi) in Japan. In this practice, Arishima echoed what Stefan
Tanaka has demonstrated was Shiratori’s Orientalist history writing,
which constructed and objectified an imagined “China” of the past vis-
à-vis a modern Japan. Arishima’s attempt thus was not unique. It was

12. See Jahn, “Barbarian Thoughts”; and Tunick, “Tolerant Imperialism.”

13. Tanaka, Japan’s Orient.
 The History Slide 217

situated within a larger practice of history writing by academics employed

in national institutions of higher education that served contemporary
politics by constructing a hierarchical temporal and spatial ordering of
the historical world.
Arishima used a historicity that constructed Japan’s progressive dis-
tancing from its ever-backward Orient, made up of Chinese and Kore-
ans to the south and Ainu and Okinawans within, who were relegated to
a stagnant other. It was in the northern continents of both Asia and the
West that monotheism arose, and that great literary and cultural feats
were achieved, Arishima argued. In contrast, the southern continents
had made little contribution to the universal civilization of the world.
Furthermore, although Japan had greatly benefited from its borrowings
from Chinese civilization in the past, it was failing to progress toward a
free and equal society because of the Chinese influence in religion, cul-
ture, and government. In order to show the geographic and progressive
divide within the Orient itself, the thesis attempted to essentialize the
underlying cultural differences between the progressive and liberal-at-
heart Japanese and the hierarchical and illiberal Chinese.
From geographic determinism, Arishima moved on to racial theory
to give Japan the racial foundation to be a civilization equal to the West.
His thesis introduced and used a theory that the Japanese descended
from the Aryan race, which Arishima asserted was the most prominent
race in world history and the originator of world civilization. Accord-
ing to this theory, modern Japanese civilization originated from two
peoples, the Mongolian race and the tribes of the Malay archipelago. He
claimed that the latter people belonged to the Aryan race. In a Dar-
winian struggle for existence, it was the naturally superior Aryan race
that conquered and absorbed the Mongolian tribe on the Japanese archi-
pelago despite the Mongolians’ possession of a civilization of a compara-
tively high type. According to Arishima, it was the Aryans, whose
chief, the direct descendant of the goddess Amaterasu and Japan’s first

14. Arishima, “Development of Japa nese Civilization,” p. 16.

15. Ibid., p. 61.
16. Ibid., p. 20.
17. Ibid., p. 69.
18. Ibid., p. 71.
218 The History Slide

emperor, who were the originators of the Yamato race. A hierarchy of

races therefore existed within Japan. In this construct, at the top of the
hierarchy were the Japanese, who were physically and intellectually su-
perior to the other “savages” in Japan, the Ainu and the Okinawans.
Arishima’s urge to merge with the West was tempered by the urge to
challenge hierarchical ideological constructs. Although the thesis con-
ceded the superiority of the Aryans, Arishima challenged the notion of
absolute racial predominance by citing the cultural achievements of
Eastern civilizations in the past. He criticized European historians who
had treated world history exclusively as a record of the Aryan race, and
he argued for the many achievements of the non-Aryan Orient, particu-
larly Chinese civilization. Arishima conceded that race was not an abso-
lute measure of civilizational capacity. He pointed out that the Ainu had
been strong foes of the Japanese despite the fact that the Japanese were
purportedly a people far superior in mental and physical abilities.
The thesis ended with a final revolutionary image of the Meiji Ishin
that romantically depicted the Ishin heralded by the arrival of Commo-
dore Perry in 1853 and the whiff of Christian song heard from his ships,
and with a vision of Japan’s transformative embrace of the West. In this
ending, Arishima set up the rest of post-Ishin Japanese history for the
narrative of the path to Western modernity as the organizing principle of
his thesis. In assenting to this Western cosmopolitanist construct, Ari-
shima attempted to assimilate himself to a temporality that defined him
by race and national belonging as always behind the members of the
advanced nations of the West and always ahead of the rest.
Arishima’s attempt at Western cosmopolitanism was expressed in the
thesis in the form of a construct of history based on a hierarchy of cul-
tures. This historical construct offered an ideological justification for
Japan’s colonizing presence not only in the peripheral territories of Hok-
kaido and Okinawa, but also beyond in China and other “less civilized”
places to the south.
However brilliantly Arishima made use of the latest social science
theories, the result was ineffective and unconvincing. The thesis was
hardly inspiring and strikingly unsubstantiated. In the end, it failed to

19. Ibid., p. 83.

 The History Slide 219

convince Arishima himself and succeeded only in highlighting the con-

tradiction between the urge for universal equality and freedom, on the
one hand, and the ideological power of racial and national hierarchies of
Western modernity, on the other. Divided between the urge for the im-
mediate attainment of equality in the international arena and the wish
to write “Japanese civilization” into the larger civilizational order of West-
ern modernity, Arishima ultimately failed in his performative history
writing to define Japan as a Western modern civilization. Arishima also
had to forgo the dream of equality and fully accept Japan’s relative back-
wardness in the temporal order of Western civilizational progress, dem-
onstrated in the history that he wrote. Yet the possibility of equality
between elites within a hierarchical world was itself an unavoidable part
of the allure of Western modernity.
Arishima’s thesis was followed several years later by the publication
of Nitobe’s Japanese history book written in English for an American
audience. A significant chapter heading in Nitobe’s book, “Japan as Colo-
nizer,” directly reveals this intellectual construct. The book was based on
Nitobe’s national speech tour of universities and colleges across the United
States under the sponsorship of the Carnegie Endowment for Interna-
tional Peace. Nitobe’s essay on Japan as a colonizer and thereby a con-
tributor to peace and international order was thus a logical continuation
of Arishima’s thesis. Here, the hierarchical order of the “international
community” and the relations among its members were naturalized and
justified by history itself. Both Arishima’s and Nitobe’s attempts can be
categorized as expressions of cultural internationalism, cultural practices
to assimilate one’s nation into the intellectual and cultural universe of
Western modernity.
Arishima’s weak attempt in 1904 to demonstrate historically through
temporal assimilation that Japan deserved to be fully incorporated into
the spatial world order of Western civilization was unsuccessful. Within
months, however, Japan’s military achievements in the Russo-Japanese
War clarified to the world that it had shot ahead of much of the world in
developing along the lines of Western modernity. That demonstration of
temporal progress was simultaneously a spatial reconfiguration that newly

20. Nitobe, Japanese Nation.

220 The History Slide

placed Japan within the community of civilized nation-states. This was

an ideology that arose from the same discursive and institutional intel-
lectual universe in which Arishima stood on the eve of the war.

The Wartime Departure from Western Modernity

Arishima’s internal conversations in his wartime diaries reveal that the
war clarified his departure from Western modernity and set the stage for
his conversion to cooperatist anarchism. A close look at the conditions
for Arishima’s conscious adoption of anarchism as a temporal vision of
modernity at the same time as Kōtoku’s adoption of anarchism in 1906,
along with numerous other well-known figures, such as Ōsugi and Ishikawa
Takuboku, suggests a broad departure from the modernity embodied in
Japan’s waging of the Russo-Japanese War. Arishima’s encounters with
“America” as the wartime setting for his conversion, as documented in
his diaries, letters, and autobiographical fiction, also offer an example
of the interplay between U.S. and Japanese encounters at the turn of
the century. Their encounters were not bilateral, for U.S.-Japanese cultural
relations could not be isolated from the cultural intercourse between
Russia and Japan. Likewise, the transnational intellectual relationship
with Russia in wartime Japan developed vis-à-vis the United States, for
it could not be separated from the racial and ethnic hierarchies as-
sociated with ideas of civilization and progress circulating in the turn-
of-the-century United States, which became obvious to Arishima during
the war.
Arishima, like many others, had been drawn to anarchist religion at
the turn of the century (see Chapter 2). When Katō Naoshi’s translation
of Tolstoy’s My Religion was first published in Japan in 1903, Arishima
chased the book down for purchase. Upon reading it, he recorded in his
diary that it brought “a complete revolution” in his religious life in terms
of his understanding of Christianity, and he read it “whenever time al-
lowed.” Arishima was attracted to Tolstoy’s idea of modern religion as
virtue as Konishi translated it. In his diary, Arishima remarked on Tol-
stoy’s idea that with effort, everyone could attain virtue, having been nat-
urally given such a capability. Arishima also read Roka’s book Tolstoy

21. Arishima, Arishima Takeo zenshū, 10:403–5. See also Arishima Takeo zenshū, 3:29,
10:312–15.
 The History Slide 221

in 1903 before his departure for the United States and carried the book
with him as he traveled across the country from San Francisco to Haver-
ford College on the East Coast. Roka had based the book largely on his
conversations with Konishi. The book was thus a direct product of the
Tolstoy-Konishi translation project.
Arishima began to view and experience America’s modernity through
the lens of Konishi’s translation of anarchist religion. His diaries reveal
that his very first weeks of traveling across America were punctuated by
deep considerations of Tolstoy’s moral and religious thought, about
which he had read in Roka’s book. On the way to Haverford, Arishima
made sure to stop in Chicago to see a production of the play Resurrec-
tion, adapted from Tolstoy’s novel written after the Tolstoy-Konishi
project of translating Lao Tzu. The play prompted Arishima, who had
converted to Christianity while he was a student at SAC, to question the
legitimacy of the church to represent Christ’s original teachings, as he
reflected in a letter home. True to Tolstoyan religion, Arishima rethought
the Christian concept of resurrection as taught by the church as only a
mythical tale of the body and its resurrection from the dead. The true
and original Christian idea of resurrection was about the spirit and was
focused on the concept of forgiveness, Arishima wrote in a continuous
echo of Tolstoy’s religious thought. Likewise, Arishima’s diary and a
letter home critically recounting his visit to the Chicago Stockyards re-
ferred to and were colored by Tolstoy’s moral ideas on vegetarianism.
Reflecting the nature of Japanese translation practices from Russian,
Arishima selectively appropriated ideas translated from Tolstoy to inter-
rogate modernity as he encountered it in the United States. Although he
continued to stand within the intellectual and cultural space of Western
modernity throughout most of the rest of his stay in the United States,
his relation to it was schizophrenic. His writing of his master’s thesis
seemed to entirely ignore his conversion to anarchist religion at about
the same time. By the end of the war, however, this unstable state of ex-
istence between two temporalities, the anarchist modern and Western
modern, would be resolved.

22. Tokutomi Roka, Roka nikki, 4:4.

23. Arishima, Letter to home, September 27, 1903, in Arishima Takeo zenshū, 13:55.
24. Ibid. See also Arishima’s diary, ibid., 10:443.
222 The History Slide

Like many Japanese during the war, Arishima identified a transna-

tional, religiously rooted critique of the war in the translated writings of
Tolstoy. In this context, he became deeply disturbed that European and
American race-based fears of Japanese expansion, the so-called yellow
peril, were versed in and justified by what they claimed to be Christian
beliefs.
It is a naked fact that on the whole the other European nations were jealous of
Japan because of her different racial origins and her paganism. Those who did
not go that far looked with interest upon this terrible tragic event of war as a
game. . . . I saw that apart from just one man, Tolstoy, the hearts of people in
the Christian nations are like a desert. Where in them does Christ’s blood flow?
Where in them does Christ’s heart dwell? Is then the present political system
fundamentally incompatible with Christ’s spirit?

Arishima later recalled, “Through the Russo-Japanese War, I saw the other
side of the people of the Christian country.” The war’s clarification of
the interlinkages of racial hierarchy, Christianity, the state, and war as
“civilization” prompted Arishima’s desire to depart from that notion of
civilization and the place of the institution of Christianity within it.
That this desire was felt in the same year in which Arishima completed
his master’s thesis on Japanese civilization suggests the decisive force
that the polemic between wartime ideology and the claims of the Non-
war Movement had in turning educated Japanese away from Western
modernity as a retrogression of progress and civilization.
Labyrinth, Arishima’s autobiographical novel about a Japanese gradu-
ate student at Harvard, climaxes in a revelatory moment of recognition
of his anarchist turn. In the context of the Russo-Japanese War, the
protagonist A, a fictional character based on Arishima, tells himself that
he has become “a vagabond without my nationality. . . . You are not only
a stateless vagabond, but a naked man belonging to no class. . . . You are
still small and weak. But your enemy is not Russia, as that old political
maniac says. Nor is it the propertied class, as that materialist K. says. It
is life itself.” Arishima imagined a cotemporality shared between Japa-

25. Arishima, “Daiyonban jogen,” p. 27; quoted in Morton, Divided Self, p. 61.
26. Arishima, “Daiyonban jogen,” p. 27.
27. Arishima, Labyrinth, pp. 148–49.
 The History Slide 223

nese and the inhabitants of the Russian Empire with which they were at
war. It was a transnational imagination that was particularly striking in
its contrast with his physical presence in the United States during the
war. Interestingly, Arishima visited New Hampshire in 1905, while the
Portsmouth Treaty was being drafted there. However, Arishima was not
there to attend the signing of the treaty. He traveled there to work as a
farm laborer for three months alongside a group of workers from Po-
land. In Labyrinth, Arishima describes the encounter between A and
the Polish laborers at the very moment at which Russia, Japan, and the
United States were holding diplomatic meetings at Portsmouth. Japa-
nese and Polish encountered one another in a shared temporal sphere
entirely independent of the diplomatic negotiations that were in prepara-
tion at that time nearby. The war and diplomacy between their respec-
tive nation-states did not affect them or their relations with one another
on the farm, and their lives of labor went on daily without change as news-
papers reported about the “important events” in foreign affairs. “Once,
one of them grabbed A by the elbow, apparently to tell him, by means of
gestures, that Japan was stronger than Russia,” Arishima wrote. “Yet the
man himself didn’t seem the least interested in the war.” Arishima de-
scribed the Polish workers, somewhat romantically, as “men who seemed
to have been molded from nature herself. . . . Quite honestly, A felt he
had found in these men the starting point of a new civilization. If their
minds developed without their losing what they had now, he believed
that a beautiful civilization, one that might overthrow the present one,
was certain to be born.” In Arishima’s depiction, the sense of freedom
from racial barriers and ethnic hierarchy between the character A and
the Polish workers is a striking contrast with the race relations between
white Americans and the “yellow races” in Labyrinth. For example, A,
believing that he has fathered an illegitimate child with a Caucasian Amer-
ican woman, is tormented by his imagination of how his Eurasian child
would be treated in America:

28. Poland was a territory that for the most part remained divided between the Rus-
sian and Prussian empires until 1915.
29. Arishima, Labyrinth, p. 166.
30. Ibid., pp. 166– 67.
224 The History Slide

A pitiable child would be born. With half its blood of the yellow race, imagine
the contempt and enmity it would be the object of. Its mother would disappear
suddenly under the pretext of travel or illness, but would be hiding in a mater-
nity home, actually a dumping ground and hiding place for many sins. . . . The
poor half-breed would grow up. . . . All eyes turned to him would be scornful.
In exchange for food, he would be required to do the work that only an outcast
would do.

For early twentieth-century Japanese readers, the distress stemming from

the pervasive tension of race relations in Labyrinth would have been a
convincing documentary of the emotional lows of individual Japanese-
American encounters. The absence of racial hierarchy that early twentieth-
century Japanese saw in their cultural relations with those from Russia
was not without contrasting references to the United States, for in the
minds of early twentieth-century Japanese, Japanese-Russian nonstate
relations seemed to be free from the racial barriers they associated with
the Japanese experience in the United States.

The Slide in Historical Consciousness

I felt like Kropotkin explained and clarified for me the very ideal that has been within me.
—Ishikawa Sanshirō to Kōtoku Shūsui, August 13, 1907, in Waseda
daigaku shakai kagaku kenkyūjo, Shakai shugi sha no shokan

If the war solidified Japan’s place in the world at the relative forefront of
the trajectory of Western modernity, it simultaneously stimulated a
widespread turn in Japan to anarchist historicity. This was the result of
an intellectual accumulation from Japanese-Russian transnational intel-
lectual relations since the Meiji Ishin. Participants associated with the
movement increasingly began to express themselves during and after
the war in terms of history and in language discussing the urgent need
to “rectify” or “save” history. In 1905, just a year after he completed his

31. Ibid., pp. 160– 61.

32. Nagai Kafu’s widely read Amerika monogatari (American stories), published in
1908, offered Japa nese readers various anecdotes of life in the United States, including
accounts of white American racism toward nonwhites reminiscent of Arishima’s during
the Russo-Japanese War. Like Arishima, Kafu was enrolled as a college student in the
United States during the war. Mitsuko Iriye, “Translator’s Introduction,” pp. x–xiv.
 The History Slide 225

master’s thesis, Arishima suddenly called for the need to morally “cleanse
and rectify” (kiyome tadasu) history.
The wartime dissipation of Western modern temporality (a sense of
time as a function of the notion of progress) and corresponding utopian
imagination of territorial spatiality inspired Japanese intellectuals to ar-
ticulate the anarchist historicism that had long been implicit within this
discourse. Kropotkin’s anarchist writings were suddenly “discovered” at
this time, and his thought was adopted as a coherent expression of ideas
already circulating in Japan. This section examines how the concept of
cooperatist progress and civilization that first developed out of Russian-
Japanese revolutionary encounters in the Meiji Ishin further evolved
in the late Meiji Japanese intellectual scene into the form of anarchist
historicity that Japanese identified with Kropotkin’s writings. Kropotki-
nism represented a modernist historicity that provided the possibility for
uniting cooperatist anarchist interiority and exteriority through moral
action. It also linked a social ethic rooted in “tradition” with wider world
interests. The present thereby became the locus of urgent action to “save”
history. For participants in this intellectual movement, Kropotkin’s
thoughts made cooperatist ideas and practices universal and modern by
superimposing evolutionary time and transnational space onto a coop-
erative ethic in Japan that simultaneously embraced the individual and
the collective. It was a merging of progressive time and transnational
space with the cooperatist practices and thoughts that Kropotkin’s friend
and mentor Lev Mechnikov had observed in Japan many years earlier in
his own writings.
Cooperatist anarchist historicity offered a position for critique of an-
ticolonialist nativist histories as well. Indeed, these “encountering nar-
ratives” often appropriated the Orientalizing constructs of Western
modernity. In light of the widespread attraction to cooperatist historic-
ity in Japan during this period, there were thus coexisting and com-
peting independent understandings and experiences of lived historical
progress.

33. Arishima, “Rokoku kakumeito no rōjo.”

34. This included the creation of Oriental history from within Japan. Tanaka, Ja-
pan’s Orient. On Orientalism, see Said, Orientalism.
226 The History Slide

It was in the immediate aftermath of the war that a “history slide,”

(rekishi no jisuberi) occurred, a slide of historical consciousness that pro-
duced a reconceived subjectivity of the present as a point of moral action
in the here and now to attain that new future. The event of war, by sym-
bolizing Japan’s victorious membership in Western modernity, decisively
changed the collective imagination. Some perceived their location in the
given human space and time as backward. A noticeable shift in the pub-
lic moral language had already occurred during this period, given inspi-
ration by the conversion to anarchist religion and the construction of a
transnational heimin antithetical to the given state of nature of interna-
tional relations. This shift combined with a massive slide in historical
memory and narrative making. History was narrated into the future,
and the present became the backward past. The present as a product of
Western human progress and civilization was now perceived as behind
and no longer morally justifiable. History thus slid from narratives of
the past to justify the present to a narrated future vision. The “present”
had become the urgent moment to rectify history for the future. Inferi-
ority was now assigned not to a given space but to a belonging to a cer-
tain sense of time.
An appropriation of history occurred, the practice of actively claim-
ing contesting articulations of history by those deeply dissatisfied with
dominant notions of national history (and thus the future imagination).
Their new historical narrative was in polemic with an Eastern (Tōyō)
bounded past, on the one hand, and a Western cosmopolitan past, on
the other. The space of their imagination and corresponding selfhood
and their rendering of the past were located beyond the East-West di-
vide. The phenomenon of what I call the “history slide” was not neces-
sarily unique to this cooperatist anarchist discourse, in the sense that a
slide in historical consciousness can occur as a response to major histori-
cal events, such as war and revolution. However, the spatial imagination
beyond the East-West divide was unique.

35. The slide of historical consciousness that pushes the present into a perceived
backward past may not be unique to this moment in Japa nese history; it has occurred
in many times and places in modern human history.
 The History Slide 227

The language of anarchist progress and civilizational development was

increasingly used in Japan, reflecting the urge to act to change the here and
now as a mirror of historical consciousness. The new historical conscious-
ness that arose during and after the war resulted in new productions of
knowledge that uprooted civilizational narratives of the rise of the modern
nation-state. The intense urge to appropriate anarchist historicity during
this period merged with a long-standing historical interpretation within
Japan that the Meiji Ishin’s promise of social equality had not been realized.
One of the most popular historical understandings of the Ishin in Meiji
Japan was that the event was originally supposed to have initiated democ-
racy and equality. This expectation has been well documented by Japanese
historian Irokawa Daikichi. According to this interpretation, the revolu-
tion was incomplete and had been betrayed by the new Meiji elites.
Taoka Reiun (1870–1912) articulated a historicist critique of Western
civilization and progress fueled by the notion of the “Ishin betrayed” in
his series of essays on hibunmeiron (noncivilization) written between
1900 and his death in 1912. Reiun was an influential thinker at the turn
of the century with close ties to Heimin shimbun and a self-claimed ad-
herent of the idea of Nonwar because of his experiences as a reporter on
the war front. Although largely forgotten even in Japan today, Reiun’s
writings were, as the historian Ienaga Saburō has pointed out, very widely
circulated and read in Japan at the time and were simultaneously banned
by the state because of his sharp critique of power and authority. Hibun-
meiron was neither a simple anti-Westernism nor a nativist wish to return
to an authenticated golden age of the past. Reiun’s critique of Western
modernity was placed firmly in a historicist vision rooted in the “original
ideals” of the Ishin. Reminiscent of Mechnikov, Reiun saw the global
significance of the Ishin as a revolutionary beginning for a new global
era. He looked to a second revolution after the Ishin to usher in the new
age of a transnationally and transracially integrated and equal heimin.
“Although hibunmeiron thought does hark back to ancient times, the
features of the coming age will not be those of the past. What those of us

36. Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period.

37. Ienaga, Suukinaru shisōkano shōgai, p. 3.
228 The History Slide

who call for a rejection of civilization really want is social revolution. . . .

Today what we call for is to get beyond the individual, to get beyond
nationalism and beyond race toward achieving social equality and unifi-
cation for all mankind [shakaiteki jinrui tōitsu].”
For Reiun, heimin culture and consciousness provided the driving
force behind the Ishin as revolution and its global significance. Reiun
studied the blooming and proliferation of an urban culture based on
commoners’ thoughts and education as the basis for the Ishin as a social
revolution to eliminate the monbatsu (aristocratic) system for more egal-
itarian and democratic society. For Reiun, the foremost significance of
the Ishin was that it was an intellectual accumulation on the popular level
that led to a radical breakage of time, or a revolution, that was to have
established a more free, flexible, and equal sociality based on heiminism
and worldism (sekaishugi). As will be discussed in Chapter 5 on the Espe-
ranto movement, this worldism, based on the meaning of the term sekai
(world), had little to do with Western cosmopolitanism or pan-Asianisms
that revolved around Western modernity.
According to Reiun, although the arrival of the Americans had pro-
vided the last spark that started the event, the Ishin had been made
possible by two hundred years of development of heimin culture, thought,
and consciousness during the Tokugawa period. By the Bakumatsu
period, the Bakufu system could no longer accommodate the fully devel-
oped heimin culture, and revolution was the natural result, Reiun wrote.
According to Reiun, the Ishin itself represented human development
beyond the achievements of the Taika Reforms (Taika no kaishin), which
had created a civilization taken from China. Whereas the Taika Re-
forms had placed Japan firmly in Asian civilization, Reiun believed, the
Ishin had made Japan a part of global civilization through the establish-
ment of a democratic civilization based on the heimin. Reiun’s ideas
were strikingly similar to those circulated by Lev Mechnikov in Euro-
pean academic circles twenty years earlier. Given that Mechnikov had
studied closely the thoughts of Freedom and People’s Rights Movement
activists, this similarity indicates the rootedness such ideas had in
Japan.

38. Translation by Loftus, “Inversion of Progress,” p. 203.

39. Taoka, Meiji hanshin den, pp. 13–22.
 The History Slide 229

Reiun himself had been part of the wider religious conversion to an-
archist religion discussed in Chapter 2. Like Arishima and many others
in this period, Reiun underwent an ideological and subjective passage
from religious conversion to spatial reconceptualization to temporal
renovation. Reiun clearly identified Tolstoy as an anarchist thinker and
claimed that his own social thoughts were greatly indebted to Tolstoy’s
emphasis on the ethical aspect of anarchism as daily practice and on hu-
man subjectivity as cooperatist and associationist. Echoing the trans-
lingual practice of the Tolstoy-Konishi collaboration, he identified through
Tao te ching and Tolstoyan writings a natural state of human society that
had been corrupted by capitalism and the rationalism of Western moder-
nity. Reiun had also been a student of ancient Chinese philosophy at
Tokyo Imperial University in the late 1880s, where he had been particu-
larly drawn to the anarchist philosophy of Tao te ching. Again in Reiun’s
writings, there is evidence of the close interlinkage of Tao te ching and
Tolstoyan religion in the minds of Japanese thinkers, due in large part to
Konishi’s translation practice.
Reiun’s history from below conflicted with the major historical proj-
ect on the Meiji Ishin organized by the state’s Ministry of Education at
the turn of the century. Interpreting the Ishin as a political “restoration”
from above, this national history project sought to establish the authori-
tative history of the Ishin as a tennō- (imperial) and kokutai- (national
body) centered event whose main achievement had been to restore impe-
rial rule from above. Under the imperial school of history writing,
with its body politics, the Ishin was reconceived and reemphasized as
“restoration” (ōsei fukko). It sparked other histories that followed, narra-
tives that emphasized the term fukko (restoring the old) to remember the
event and its particular significance.
Reiun, however, claimed that the Ishin was a revolution from below.
For Reiun, the Ishin had occurred in the name of freedom and equality
and had overturned the class system in order to provide for the hei-ken,

40. “My socialism owes more to Tolstoy than to Kropotkin or Marx.” Taoka, Taoka
Reiun zenshū, 5:662.
41. Taoka, Taoka Reiun zenshū, 5:670.
42. Loftus, “Inversion of Progress,” p. 193.
43. See Nagahara, Kōkokushikan.
230 The History Slide

or people’s (heimin’s) rights. Nonetheless, the objective of this revolution

had yet to be completed owing to the emergence of capitalism in the de-
cades after the Ishin. That prevented the achievement of human freedom
and equality. Reiun believed that a “second revolution” was needed to
restore the principle of freedom and equality for which so many had
fought in the Ishin. He claimed that the term fukko (restoration) was
simply a fabrication and only a name, whereas the revolution was the
true flesh and essence of the Ishin. Both Reiun’s “second revolution”
theory and his public popularity were intellectual products of the post-
war shift in historical consciousness of cooperatist anarchist modernity.
Emerging cooperatist anarchists after the war likewise saw them-
selves as the legitimate heirs of the revolutionary tradition from the Ishin
passed on to them via the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. They
saw the Ishin in a light similar to that cast by Reiun and likely were
influenced by his writings. The highly popular young poet Ishikawa
Takuboku expressed this sentiment after the war when he famously called
for a movement “v narod!” (To the people!) reminiscent of the Russian
Populist V Narod movement in the sense that it called not for the enlight-
ening of the masses, but for an adoption of their democratic everyday
practices. Ishikawa Sanshirō contended that the Ishin was a mass-scale,
all-encompassing revolution (daikakumei) that overturned society at its
very roots. Kōtoku viewed the Nonwar Movement and the idea of hei-
min as the legitimate expressions of the original ideals of the Ishin. Accord-
ing to a prevalent understanding at the time, the Ishin had been a radical
and popular revolution that was to have achieved for the people “liberty,
equality and fraternity.” The spirit of the Revolution had been betrayed
by the Meiji oligarchs who had restored a new hierarchy and privilege
through capitalist cliques. The revolution was to be restored by a move-
ment for people’s rights. Many intellectuals and cultural figures saw
their emerging anarchist-socialist movement as the successor to the ideals
of the Ishin expressed in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement.

44. Taoka, Meiji hanshin den, pp. 13–22.

45. Ishikawa and Kōtoku, Nihon shakai shugi.
46. Notehelfer, “Kōtoku Shūsui and Nationalism,” p. 38.
47. Ibid., pp. 34–36.
 The History Slide 231

Reiun’s hibunmeiron marked the embrace of a new heimin-centered

historicity that served as a basis for an alternative modernity in postwar
Japan. Although such historicity had been practiced and embraced in
various ways as lived experiences, this urge to record a commonly shared
understanding of the past in a proper history of Japan was new.
The years immediately after the war were thus marked by a cultural
attempt to internationalize, to render modern and identify transnation-
ally shared expressions of the “indigenous” thought and practices of sōgo
fujo (mutual aid). It is in this context that Kropotkinist language sud-
denly began to be widely used to uproot the notion of time in Western
modernity and to replace it with one that focused on an entirely differ-
ent temporality. These were precisely the years when Kōtoku wrote his
many translations of Kropotkin’s works and began his regular corre-
spondence with the anarchist thinker. As documents in the Kropotkin
manuscripts collection in the State Archive of the Russian Federation
reveal, Kōtoku sent his first letter to Kropotkin in September 1906 via
the Russian American anarchist Rose Fritz. Kōtoku stayed at Fritz’s
home in San Francisco during his visit to the United States in 1906. Of
course, Kōtoku’s practices were merely expressions of a larger developing
phenomenon within Japanese society. As he wrote to Kropotkin in 1907,
all of Kropotkin’s books were already being sold and read in English in
Tokyo and had a rapidly increasing audience.
Kropotkin, echoing Mechnikov’s ideas arising out of his encounter
with revolutionary ideals and commoners’ practices in Meiji Ishin Japan,
had provided the essential historicist counterpart to anarchist religion in
Japan. His work Mutual Aid added evolution, or time, to the religious
anarchist concept of nature as virtue. This completed the reconstitution
of the idea of virtuous nature as integral to civilizational progress. Accord-
ing to the anarchist historicity expressed by both Kropotkin and Mech-
nikov, human civilization, based on the principle of mutual aid, had

48. Fritz introduced Kōtoku to Kropotkin and enclosed a letter from Kōtoku to the
Russian anarchist in 1906. Fritz to Kropotkin, September 3, 1906. GARF, P. A. Kropot-
kin Collection, f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 2631, ll. 3–4. On Fritz, see Avrich, Anarchist
Voices, p. 164.
49. Kōtoku to Kropotkin, May 14, 1907, GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection, f. 1129,
op. 2, ed. khr. 1418, l. 9.
232 The History Slide

progressed from below without the need for central governance. With
this radical overturning of the concept of civilization and progress, social
Darwinism and its application to civilizational progress widely applied
by state intellectuals, or those who contributed to state ideology in Japan,
once again appeared helplessly wrong. The fittest survived not through
competition and violence but through mutual interdependence and assis-
tance. From then on, civilization and progress were no longer understood
to be fueled by rationality, the expansion of capitalism, and a developed
system of state governance and rule of law, but by spontaneous acts of
human cooperation and self-organization.
Central to Japanese anarchist thought was the idea that sociability
and the instinct for mutual aid were fundamental to the very nature of
human behavior. Here, “nature” was neither constitutive of the nation,
nor the barbaric antithesis to civilizational progress, nor the attributive
quality to describe the progressed “natural” state of civilized existence
under state and law. Anarchist “nature” thus departed entirely from the
role that it had played in the ruling political ideologies in Meiji-Taishō
Japan. In Mutual Aid, nature came to be defined by mutual aid. Begin-
ning with the animal and plant kingdoms, the fittest species survived on
the basis of their capacity for mutual help and interdependence. This
revision of nature shifted the source of civilization and progress in the
human world from survival via competition and domination to coopera-
tion as an important factor of evolution, without negating certain as-
pects of competition.
Kropotkin’s historicity provided an articulation of thoughts that had
already begun surfacing, although in a much more limited and sparse
manner, in Japan. In 1900, several years before he began reading Kro-
potkin and before his self-acknowledged adoption of political anar-
chism, Kōtoku had defined a developed civilization by its possession of a
cooperatist society. This was a construct of progress very close in essence
to Kropotkin’s. It reveals the continuation throughout the Meiji era of
the cooperatist current that had originally inspired Mechnikov in his
encounter with the Ishin. According to Kōtoku, advanced societies were
characterized by a highly complicated and organized division of labor
that was not to be found in earlier societies. In Kōtoku’s definition of
progress, division of labor did not reflect competitive and exploitative
capitalist economic organization but was better described as a highly
 The History Slide 233

functioning interdependency among various professions. In a highly

developed cooperative community, the trader depended on the farmer,
who depended on the machinist, and so forth, providing no room for
hierarchies of domination or class division. Rather, each individual si-
multaneously strove to perfect his or her own virtue in order to perform
as one within a larger interdependent whole.
Kropotkin’s anarchist theory implied the removal of the essential di-
chotomy between nature and culture that defined the linear time differ-
ence between barbaric peoples and civilized nation-states. Its conceptual
overturning of natural progress offered the prospective of an alternative
vision of universal progress.
The slide in historical consciousness from a Western modern to an an-
archist historicity at this time depended on the functioning of networks
to disseminate ideas and further develop the alternative society that had
been emerging with the Nonwar Movement. In the years after the war,
the wartime networks had rapidly expanded. The networks efficiently
circulated banned anarchist and socialist writings, and the time-altering
anarchist writings of Kropotkin were most favored for circulation. Through
these invisible nationwide and cross-border networks, participants’ new
shared sense of alternative time, spatiality, and subjectivity became the
basis for the further expansion of networks that enabled the rapid circu-
lation of information and knowledge.
The effectiveness with which illegal materials were passed hand to
hand is evidence of the functioning of the networks. Kōtoku found that
the network community provided the best means to distribute his writ-
ings and translations even before they were officially made available to
the public. Despite government intervention in banning Kōtoku’s works
and all translations of Kropotkin’s works into Japanese, people were still
able to gain access to them fairly easily because they were widely dis-
seminated by hand through network relations. As Kōtoku wrote in a
letter to Kropotkin, “Only one copy of every pamphlet [of yours] I have
is being handed from hand to hand of many young comrades.” In fact,
the network of cooperatist anarchists across Japan functioned so well by

50. Kōtoku, Kōtoku Shūsui zenshū, 2:305–10.

51. Kōtoku to Kropotkin, May 14, 1907, GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection, f. 1129,
op. 2, ed. khr. 1418, l. 9.
234 The History Slide

1908 that when Kōtoku translated Kropotkin’s works, his tactic to get
them out to as many people as possible was first to sell the thousands of
copies that he had printed out via personal networks and only then to
advertise the work and sell it through bookstores after it had already
circulated nationwide. Kōtoku stated in his private correspondence with
Kropotkin, “The police, of course, will try to seize all copies. But too
late!” Numerous intellectuals, even those in the remote territory of Hok-
kaido, were able to access works that were censored or prohibited from
publication and sale but were passed hand to hand in a network of inter-
linked people who shared similar beliefs. Prohibited knowledge traveled
both within and across national boundaries, concretizing interlocking
networks along the way. With the ideas of cooperatist anarchism circu-
lating through many diverse movements and interest groups, no institution
existed to coordinate the members of this larger community. The nonin-
stitutional manner in which informal interlocking networks succeeded
in organizing the activities of those participating in cooperatist anarchist
time reflected the nature of their thought.
Arishima provides one example of these patterns. After he returned to
Hokkaido to teach at his alma mater, SAC, he was able to obtain copies
of Kropotkin’s banned writings from other anarchists and often even
from his students. That ordinary college students, far from the urban cen-
ters of Japan, obtained copies of the works and passed them to Arishima,
who had a personal friendship with Kropotkin, reflects the breadth,
speed, and effectiveness with which the networks functioned in Japan, a
concrete legacy of the formation of the cooperatist networks during
the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese government was forced to declare

52. Kōtoku to Kropotkin, December 26, 1908, GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection,

f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 1418, ll. 18–19.
53. Kōtoku to Kropotkin, May 14, 1907, GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection, f. 1129,
op. 2, ed. khr. 1418, l. 9.
54. The context is unique in this discourse, but the way in which participants in the
discourse circulated knowledge via networks is not unique. Book-lending practices dur-
ing the Edo period, for example, circulated a tremendous amount of information
quickly. On the eve of the Ishin, cartoons depicting the ruling powers as weak and in-
competent were quite popular. Knowledge that competed with that propagated by the
government widely circulated through private hands.
 The History Slide 235

the mere possession of Kōtoku’s translations a crime liable to imprison-

ment. This radical measure suggests how widely Kōtoku’s translations
had been disseminated within a few years after he had first begun his an-
archist translation project, despite the fact that many writings had never
been officially published. That the anarchist writings were popular and
well read despite state censorship suggests the relative ease with which
those participating in the networks could access them.
There are other private letters to Kropotkin from Japan at this time
that form the larger backdrop for Arishima’s pilgrimage to Kropotkin in
1906. One of the letters survives in Moscow’s state archive, a personal
letter written in English to Kropotkin in 1905 by Miyazaki Tamizō in
the local village of Arawa in the southern prefecture of Kumamoto:
Dear Brother, I thank you that I can see great spark of the idea and movement
of humanity in this world taking by your comrades. . . . Now I render you the
Congratulation for standing up of Russian Revolution for emancipation of
mass brothers and sisters and establishing the principle of humanity in great
part on the globe. At present time I am very anxious to know how Russian
Revolutionists have worked and working for freedom of mass under autocratic
power. . . . I with few comrades are undertaking for establishment of equal
enjoyment of all land for all human resources that is, I believe, the fundamen-
tal ground of humanity.

The agrarian thinker and leader of agrarian communalism Etō Tekirei

(1880–1944), originally from Aomori, the northernmost prefecture of
the main archipelago, who became a close acquaintance and neighbor
of the agrarian practitioners Tokutomi Roka and Ishikawa Sanshirō, by
then was one of many people in Japan who read Kropotkin at the war’s
end. Etō’s reading of Kropotkin at that moment became decisive for his
turn to agrarian communalism. Etō was also an admirer of both the radi-
cal eighteenth-century thinker Andō Shōeki (1703–62) and Tanaka Shōzō,
whose ecological cause was fully supported and promoted by the Heimin-
sha in this period.
It was also at this time that Ōsugi Sakae, who would become a major
leader of the Japanese anarchist movement, first read Kropotkin’s works.

55. GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection, f. 1129, op. 3, ed. khr. 1018, ll. 1–2.
236 The History Slide

Thomas Stanley gives 1906 as the year of Ōsugi’s conversion to “social-

ism.” Stanley attributes his conversion to his imprisonment, which ef-
fectively closed off all doors to a normal career in the army and simulta-
neously gave him the opportunity to read anarchist writings from the
West. Certainly prison life provided the externally imposed conditions
for reading socialist literature, as Stanley demonstrates, but the existing
paradigm of the influence of Western socialism on Ōsugi misrepresents
the larger historical processes surrounding his conversion. Placed within
the larger ideological context of the history slide after the war, Ōsugi’s
turn to anarchism in 1906 can be better understood beyond the sudden
and fortuitous exposure to Western socialist writings and the turn in his
personal material circumstances. Arishima’s pilgrimage through Europe
and Ōsugi’s caged turn to anarchism in Japan were both representative
of a much broader slide in historical consciousness.
Arishima’s cooperatist anarchist turn appeared complete when his
historicity was expressed in his diary in 1906: “I hope that America will
wake from the slumber of ancient tradition and van [serve as the van-
guard for] the progress of universal brotherhood. State must go.” Here,
the progressive America that he originally set out to study and through
which he sought to link Japan to the wider world via Western cosmo-
politanism was sharply flipped upside down. Now, America had yet to
“awaken” to consciousness of its means of progress for a better future.
Arishima’s experience of a whole new time led to an entirely new sense of
space. With the changing of knowledge, in this case the intellectual
framework for progress and civilization, the object of observance, Amer-
ica, appeared to undergo a radical metamorphosis that relegated it to a
whole new position in time. His master’s thesis was his last expression of
belonging to the epistemological world of Western modernity. Arishima,
who had traveled to the United States to study in the country perceived
to be at the forefront of civilization and progress, experienced a conver-
sion of understanding of that construct of civilization and progress during
the Russo-Japanese War.

56. Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, 42.

57. Arishima, diary entry, September 1, 1906, in Arishima Takeo zenshū, 9:5. Ari-
shima wrote much of his diary including this entry in English during this period.
 The History Slide 237

The Rectification of History

Arishima’s experience with the war from the United States had drawn
this very promising young leader of Western cosmopolitanism to coop-
eratist anarchism as a newly formed vision of modernity independent
from Western modernity. As was the case for so many others, this was a
historicist turn that led to action. The adoption and merging of a histori-
cist theory of action with an interior anarchist religious sensibility was
articulated and predicted by Kaneko Kiichi (discussed in Chapter 2) in
January 1905 in his article “Tolstoy and Kropotkin” for the farewell issue
of the central branch of Heimin shimbun. Similarly, it was through
Arishima’s appropriation of Kropotkin’s anarchist historicity that the
tension he felt between the urge for equality and the means for its attain-
ment would be resolved.
In 1905– 6, Arishima prepared for a pilgrimage to Europe that would
serve to initiate the process of rectifying history. A pilgrimage is often
a once-in-a-lifetime ritual that realizes a self-conversion to a new self
and the elimination of the old within oneself. Yet even as it leads to self-
conversion, the act of pilgrimage relies on the formation of a new self to
accomplish this act. It can be said that the moment one determines to
undertake the pilgrimage is already the moment of attaining one’s self-
transformation, however invisible this moment may be to the observer. In
a sense, then, the act of pilgrimage is largely completed before it is under-
taken. At this time, Arishima began to speak of the need for history to
be “cleansed and rectified.” This would not be just an exercise of his
thought; his entire being would turn away from history as the narration
of the path taken by the nation-state toward Western modern civiliza-
tional development.
In 1906, Arishima quit Harvard and left the United States for a voyage
across Europe. He prepared for this trip in the months before his depar-
ture by moving to Washington, D.C., where he spent his days at the Li-
brary of Congress intensively immersing himself in the works of Kropotkin,
Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Ibsen. Arishima’s trip can be read as his thoughts
in action. The voyage, a “pilgrimage” in the sense that it was the physical

58. Kaneko, “Torusutoi to kuropotokin.” Kaneko wrote the article while he was
with Arishima at Harvard.
238 The History Slide

embodiment of Arishima’s self-transformation toward a cooperatist

modern subjectivity, traced the historical development of world civiliza-
tions as cooperatist anarchist societies, the most advanced state of civili-
zation. Identifying Kropotkin as the one who had “rectified history,”
Arishima physically traced the reconstruction of human civilizational
progress in Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid, beginning with the European
Middle Ages, in which Kropotkin found Gothic architecture and art
to have expressed mutual aidism. He traveled to Assisi, the home of St.
Francis of Assisi, and to other medieval sites of spontaneously arising
associationist, self-governing fortress towns and their cooperative culture.
He also visited Switzerland, the country privileged by anarchists as em-
bodying a relatively advanced state of progress. The voyage culminated
in Arishima’s visit to Kropotkin’s home in London. Arishima sought
through his travels to identify an alternative early history of human civi-
lization that would set the stage for modernity. In Mutual Aid, Arishima
had discovered the scientific rationalization for the sliding of history al-
ready occurring within him. By this time, Arishima’s cooperatist anarchist
turn was complete.
At the Kropotkins’ home in London, Arishima talked with Kropotkin
in his private study about the ideas of mutual aid and anarchism. Their
conversation served to concretize and widen ties between Arishima
and the members of the transnational anarchist network. Kropotkin
asked Arishima to translate one of his books. He also selectively brought
up names of people with cultural currency in Japanese heiminism: Tol-
stoy, the Russian religious sect, the Dukhobors, Kōtoku, and Japanese
anarchists in the United States. He then gave Arishima a letter to pass
on personally to Kōtoku when Arishima returned to Japan. Although

59. Arishima, Arishima Takeo zenshū, 1:377.

60. Kropotkin asked whether Arishima was networked with the Japa nese anar-
chists in the United States. Daigyaku jiken kiroku kankōkai, Daigyaku jiken kiroku,
pp. 208– 9.
61. A number of Kōtoku’s letters to Kropotkin are held at GARF, P. A. Kropotkin
Collection, f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 1418, ll. 1–23. Kōtoku had been regularly reporting to
Kropotkin about the state of anarchist-socialist activities in East Asia and even in the
Russian Far East, and as a result, Kropotkin was intimately aware of their activities.
Kōtoku wrote Kropotkin of the activities of Japa nese anarchists and socialists in Cali-
fornia and sent him copies of their newspaper, the Revolution, which was intended to be
 The History Slide 239

Arishima had never met Kōtoku, the physical act of passing material
from the Russian anarchist to him by hand would certainly have ce-
mented their ties. This cementing of links via the physical encounter of
silently passing communications hand to hand was a typical method of
network formation.
Arishima and Kropotkin’s meeting was indicative of the nature of the
Russian-Japanese network. In Kropotkin’s method of name-dropping,
indirect introductions to other members of the transnational network,
and hand-to-hand passing of materials, one can sense how the transna-
tional network had been constantly taking shape between Japanese and
Russian intellectuals via unofficial channels since the Meiji Ishin. Re-
vealed by Kropotkin’s careful and strategic dropping of names with Ar-
ishima, the cementing and widening of dependable personal ties among
common members across national lines were the surest ways to ensure
that the community would continue to expand without the structural
foundation of organization and institution that was anathema to it. The
dropping of names imbued with powerful symbolism in shared conver-
sation served to solidify the ties between the two interlocutors, turning
an afternoon tête-à-tête into a moment of the expansion of this invisible
and silent web of personal relations.
Arishima also planned a trip to revolutionary Russia at this time,
where he intended to immerse himself in Russian social thought and
literature. “I want to go to Russia at the earliest and best chance,” Aris-
hima wrote excitedly in his diary in February 1907. “How brightly some-
times my future shines out in my dream!” Arishima voraciously read
Russian literature at this time. His diary entries in the years after the

a temporary voice of the movement, replacing the banned Heimin shimbun. Kōtoku to
P. A. Kropotkin, May 14, 1907, GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection, f. 1129, op. 2, ed.
khr. 1418, l. 10. Kōtoku also reported on the activities of Russian revolutionaries from
Nagasaki to eastern Siberia. Kōtoku to Kropotkin, December 15, 1906, GARF, P. A.
Kropotkin Collection, f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 1418, l. 4. Th roughout their correspon-
dence, Kōtoku reported to Kropotkin on the state of anarchist activities among the
Chinese in Tokyo, with whom he was closely involved.
62. Although there is no documentation of whether Arishima ever gave the letter to
Kōtoku, Kropotkin wrote Kōtoku soon afterward to inquire whether Kōtoku had re-
ceived it. It is certain that the Kropotkin-Kōtoku correspondence continued well after
Arishima’s visit.
240 The History Slide

war are filled with his notes on those readings from Russian anarchist
thought and Populist literature, including Tolstoy, Kropotkin, and
Turgenev.
It should be noted that Tolstoy did not disappear in the postwar de-
cades and was not replaced by Kropotkin. Rather, the two figures began
to coexist on the Japanese cultural landscape as mutual representatives
of an alternative time, space, and ethic. Kropotkin and other Russian
anarchists were at that moment highly interested in the question of the
place of religious and moral issues in anarchist society. At the turn of the
century, Kropotkin refocused his attention on the question of anarchist
ethics and religious belief as a basis for anarchism. He wrote to a mutual
friend of his and Tolstoy in 1905 that “only yesterday I completed my
manuscript about L. N. Tolstoy—for almost two months I studied all of
his moral-religious writings of the last twenty years.”  For Kropotkin,
Tolstoyan religion brought a new dimension to anarchism. Tolstoy’s re-
ligious thought reconfigured anarchism as a product and expression of
the interior, moral realm of human existence. Kropotkin had earlier con-
ceived of religion as a conservative and traditional force outside and
antithetical to civilization and progress. Through Tolstoy’s religious ideas,
Kropotkin found the articulation of anarchist morality that was missing
in his own writings, which looked at anarchism as a social and historical
product belonging to an exterior and objective world. Kropotkin found
in Tolstoy the significance of what he began to call Tolstoy’s “new reli-
gion” or later, in his own words, “ethics.” Although Kropotkin clearly
rejected religious institutions, he found the emphasis on interiority as
Gxd-given virtue, or tokugi in Konishi’s translation practice, that was the
basis of an anarchist ethics in Tolstoy’s writings, significant for the success

63. Records of readings of Russian literature may be found throughout Arishima’s

diaries. Arishima Takeo zenshū, 11:167–239. For example, unpacking his things after ar-
riving in Sapporo, Arishima writes, “Morimoto was kind enough to provide me with
half of his bookshelf. I filled it with my beloved books and felt a great satisfaction to
look at them. On the first row, Tolstoy’s work and that of Ibsen, with some other Russian
stories. The second, Carlyle’s work, correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle, Ruskin’s
Modern Painters, Kropotkin’s Russian Literature.” Arishima Takeo zenshū, 11:172; see
also 11:166– 68.
64. Kropotkin to Chertkov, January 22, 1905. GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection,
f. 1129, op. 4, ed. khr. 24, ll. 4, 6.
 The History Slide 241

of anarchism. The question of ethics and subjectivity would become

one of Kropotkin’s primary concerns in the last two decades of his life.
He would die leaving unfinished his last major work, Ethics, a historical
survey of the development of ethical ideas over the course of human his-
tory, beginning with the essential foundation of virtuous interactions in
the natural world.
While he was working on Ethics, Kropotkin read Tolstoy’s diaries of
1895– 99, which reflected the development of Tolstoy’s thought following
his encounter with Konishi and the Tao te ching translation project in
1893. In a letter to K. S. Shokhor-Trotskii, Kropotkin wrote about the
diaries, “Throughout [Tolstoy’s diaries] is scattered a mass of true and
sometimes subtle thoughts, which are philosophical, artistic, and some-
times simply wise.”
Kropotkin had attributed to Tolstoy as a religious and ethical thinker
the revolutionary awakening of an anarchist consciousness among the
larger public. With the popularization of Tolstoy’s ideas on ethics, “no
one since Rousseau has so deeply influenced the awakening of human
consciousness as Tolstoy,” Kropotkin wrote. Supportive of Tolstoyan
religion’s effect on the larger public, Kropotkin became directly involved
in assisting in the publication of Tolstoy’s religious works in Europe.
Documents in the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art reveal that
in 1903, Kropotkin carefully corrected and edited in close detail Vladi-
mir Chertkov’s English translation of Tolstoy’s How I Came to Believe.
Chertkov sent Kropotkin unpublished manuscripts of Tolstoy’s reli-
gious writings to read for editorial comment. Often, Kropotkin himself
initiated corrections of translations of Tolstoy’s religious writings. For

65. Kropotkin’s discussion of Tolstoy’s new religion can be found in his unpublished
article “Tolstoi,” written upon Tolstoy’s death in November 1910. The manuscript is in
RGALI, f. 2738, op. 1, ed. khr. 19. Further evidence of Kropotkin’s interest in Tolstoy’s
religious development can be found in the cata log of Kropotkin’s personal library,
which contained a substantial collection of Tolstoy’s religious writings. Cata log of Kro-
potkin’s books, GARF 1897, f. 1129, op. 1, d. 14.
66. Kropotkin to Konstantin Shokhor-Trotskii, June26, 1919. Letter reprinted in
Shokhor-Trotskii, “Neskol’ko strok o P. A. Kropotkin,” p. 11.
67. Kropotkin, “Lev Tolstoy,” GARF, f. 1129, op. 1, ed. khr. 836, l. 43.
68. For example, Kropotkin to Chertkov, April 19, 1903. RGALI, f. 552, op. 1, d.
1707, l. 186; Tolstoy, How I Came to Believe.
242 The History Slide

example, he wrote to Chertkov in 1903, “Since Lev Nikolaevich’s [Tol-

stoy] Christian Teachings will probably have a very wide readership, then
don’t you think we ought to carefully check the translation?” 
Although Tolstoy and Kropotkin are associated in Russian historiog-
raphy as Russian anarchists, the fact that Kropotkin was drawn to the
religious ideas in Tolstoy’s writings has been overlooked by historians.
Indeed, Kropotkin’s interest in the cause of the religious sect, the Duk-
hobors, reflected his increasing interest in the question of the role of re-
ligion and ethics in anarchist practices. The Dukhobor cause had first
brought Tolstoy and Kropotkin together for this shared project. Tolstoy
and Kropotkin had organized, with the assistance of the Quakers and
several others, the emigration of tens of thousands of Dukhobors to Cy-
prus and Canada in the 1890s after their persecution in Russia for refus-
ing to serve in the military and for refusing to recognize the authority of
the Russian Orthodox Church and the tsar. That Tolstoy had turned to
this project immediately after Konishi’s departure from Russia suggests
how his involvement in the Dukhobor cause and the Lao Tzu transla-
tion project were born of the same intellectual universe. For Tolstoy, the
Dukhobor sect embodied the religious moral ideas that he had been
hoping to introduce to Russian society through his translation of Lao
Tzu. Indeed, the Dukhobors would have been a model of some of the
ideals of Tao te ching. Just as Tolstoy and Kropotkin were being inte-
grated into the larger Japanese networks, so did they collaborate on the
basis of a shared interest in anarchist ethics and virtue. These had earlier

69. Kropotkin to Chertkov, February 11, 1903. Ibid, l. 176; Kropotkin to Chertkov,
April 9 1903. RGALI, f. 552, op. 1, d. 1707, ll. 182–85. According to Tolstoy’s son, Sergei
Tolstoy, although Tolstoy found Kropotkin’s recognition of revolutionary violence to
achieve his ideals problematic, he did share anarchist ideals with Kropotkin and was
very interested in Kropotkin’s views, particularly his understanding of human progress
in its opposition to Malthusian and social Darwinist constructs. S. L. Tolstoy, Ocherki
bylogo, p. 198.
70. Some aspects of Kropotkin’s relations with Tolstoy are documented in Wood-
cock and Avakumovic, Anarchist Prince, pp. 350–53. Although scholars have overlooked
Kropotkin’s attraction to Tolstoyan religion, the sharing of anarchistic ideals and a
corresponding mutual respect between the two have been noted in Russian-language
scholarship as well. See Markin, “L. N. Tolstoi i P. A. Kropotkin.”
 The History Slide 243

formed the basis for Konishi’s translation practices of Tolstoyan religion

in Japan.
Tolstoy and Kropotkin’s relations functioned only indirectly. They
channeled their communications through a couple of trusted intermedi-
aries in order to avoid police or government interference. Sergei Tolstoy
recalled that when he came to see Kropotkin in London at the behest of
his father, they were followed by a Russian spy. Kropotkin warned him,
“If you want to avoid trouble when you return to Russia, you should stay
away from me.” Tolstoy and Kropotkin used a close mutual friend of
theirs, the previously mentioned Chertkov, to serve as a middleman
through whom messages, information, and greetings were frequently
passed between the two. Kropotkin and Chertkov, who was then the
leading propagator of Tolstoyan thought, met regularly in the late 1890s
and early 1900s, as documented by numerous notes, telegrams and let-
ters between Kropotkin and Chertkov kept by the Russian State Archive
of Literature and Art. Hundreds of pages of correspondence from Kro-
potkin to Chertkov and his wife Anna in which the former mentions or
discusses Tolstoy are also preserved in Russian state archives. Chertkov
was staying in London, where he was involved in organizing the ongoing
translation and publication of Tolstoy’s prohibited religious writings into
English through his publishing house, Posrednik, as well as organizing
help for the Dukhobors at Tolstoy’s request. Back in Russia, visitors to the
Tolstoy home who knew Kropotkin were given messages of greeting to
pass on to Kropotkin.
Mechnikov did not know Kōtoku. Kōtoku did not know Arishima.
Arishima did not know Tolstoy. Kropotkin did not know Konishi. Nakae
Chōmin did not know Kropotkin, or that his friend Mechnikov’s vision
would return to Japan through his disciple Kōtoku Shūsui as Kropot-
kin’s translator. Yet each was related to the others through the sharing

71. Tolstoy, Ocherki bylogo, pp. 188–89.

72. Chertkov resided in London from 1897 to 1907.
73. RGALI, f. 552, op. 1, 1707, ll. 44–100.
74. RGALI, f. 552, op. 1, d. 1708.
75. V. A. Posse recalls that Tolstoy asked him to pass his greetings to Kropotkin in
1909, not long before his death. Tolstoy further said that it was a shame that he would
die before getting to know Kropotkin. Posse, Vospominaniia, p. 96; Woodcock and
Avakumovic, Anarchist Prince, p. 352.
244 The History Slide

and translation of knowledge of anarchist modernity. For Tolstoy, in

Russia, it was Kropotkin with whom he began to work on the anarchist
religious community of the Dukhobors immediately after his Lao Tzu
project with Konishi. In turn, in Japan, Konishi and Tolstoy’s collabora-
tion triggered the spread of an intellectual environment revolving around
religious consciousness that prepared an intellectual ground for Kropot-
kinism. Both the sharing and translation of knowledge and the for-
mation of physical ties interlinked all these individuals and a thousand
others borderlessly in nonstate interlocking networks of knowledge.
Tracing Tolstoy and Kropotkin’s activities for Japanese intellectual
history has revealed what has been relatively hidden within Russian his-
tory: that they viewed their thoughts as intertwined within the same
knowledge system in the global context. They related to each other in a
way that not only provides an example of cooperatist anarchist networks
as a transnational community but also illustrates the interdependence of
anarchist moral subjectivity and historicity in cooperatist anarchist
modernity as it developed in, and was best made sense of via, Russian-
Japanese transnational intellectual relations. In the same way in which
cooperatist anarchist networks in Japan first become apparent to histori-
ans only via participants’ interest in and relations to Russia, only through
the methodical tracing of Russian-Japanese transnational circulations of
thoughts and figures can these Russian interlinkages be illuminated and
made sense of.

Clark’s Board, Arishima’s Chess

Dr. Clark and Arishima Takeo influenced me the most at Hokkaido University.
—College student of Hokkaido University (formerly SAC),
in Keitekiryō shi hensan iin kai, Keitekiryō shi
The revival of Dr. Clark’s Kaishikisha (Intellectual Discovery Symposium) was by far
the most important event of dormitory life in our time.
—SAC student, in Keitekiryō shi hensan iin kai, Keitekiryō shi

Returning to Japan after his pilgrimage, Arishima sought to accomplish

the moral “cleansing and rectification of history” that he had called for
from the United States. On the educational training grounds of the emerg-
ing Japanese Empire, Arishima used his position as a young lecturer at
 The History Slide 245

his alma mater to educate his students in anarchist history, ethics, and
religion and thereby redirect history and modernity at large. SAC, founded
in 1876 as one of Meiji Japan’s earliest flagship schools, was the most
unlikely of all the possible sites of state-sponsored knowledge production
in imperial Japan to challenge the cultural construct of Western moder-
nity because it was the national training site for Japan’s experiment with
colonial expansion and Western modernity.
The project to realize Western modernity for the nation-state was
implemented in the first years of the Meiji era by the Colonization Ad-
ministration’s (Kaitakushi’s) project of colonization through American-
style modern agricultural development and settlement of the northern
island of Hokkaido. This was arranged by granting large tracts of lands
to landlords, who employed as tenant settlers tens of thousands of peas-
ants whom the government encouraged to immigrate to Hokkaido.
It was as part of the project of colonizing Hokkaido that the founding
of SAC as Japan’s first national imperial college can be understood. The
adoption of modern agriculture at the college run by the Kaitakushi was
an educational and physical means of national progression toward a
modern civilized nation-state. The idea of agricultural colonialism pro-
moted at SAC was also closely tied to social Darwinism, which was
broadly used in post-Ishin Japan to promote capitalist development and
imperialist expansion. Military training and agriculture were interlinked
at SAC, one of Meiji Japan’s most prestigious colleges, as a means for the
colonization and national defense of Japan’s northern borderlands.
SAC offered an intellectual space where the vision of Western modern
time was assiduously studied, put into scholarly form, and urged on stu-
dents so they would realize it in their careers. The landmark Sapporo
Clock Tower, placed conspicuously in the college and city center, and
now long dwarfed by more contemporary surrounding buildings, her-
alded the new time represented by the college.
The colonialist practice of expansion through agriculture was strongly
linked to the idea of cosmopolitanism as internationalism emerging from
SAC, the nation’s model school of American progress and enlightenment.
The school’s top students were sent to study in the United States to fulfill

76. For a discussion of agriculture as a project of the state, see Scott, Seeing like a
State, pt. 3.
246 The History Slide

their mission to master the “West” as semiofficial intellectual representa-

tives of the nation-state. Nitobe, the premier spokesperson for Western
cosmopolitanism in Japan, studied at Johns Hopkins University after
graduating from SAC, where he later served as a professor, from which
position he would be promoted to chair of colonization studies at Tokyo
Imperial University. This passage from agricultural studies to coloniza-
tion studies was a natural one in Imperial Japan because agricultural
expansion was used as a means to settle and colonize not only Hokkaido
but also Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria.
Under the guidance of the first vice president and the face of SAC,
the American educator William Smith Clark (1826– 86), the all-male
college was established with the premise that everyone had an equal
opportunity through proper training to become an educated, civilized
man. Clark had been invited to Japan from his former post as president
of Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachu-
setts at Amherst) to serve as the Kaitakushi’s head adviser in its Hokkaido
colonial activities. Under Clark’s direction, SAC adopted a combination
of scientific training, military drill, and daily Christian prayer led by
American educators to create Japan’s future civilized man. Chemistry,
physics, biology, mathematics, and engineering, taught in English, con-
stituted the basic curriculum of the school. The knowledge often tagged
as “Western learning” (seiyōgaku) in the Meiji context served as a mental
tool to categorize and order human progress in a Western-oriented inter-
national order. By the late Meiji, the college became an active part of the
national project to disseminate national ethics to unite the people behind
the imperial throne.
It was at SAC that Arishima put into action his cooperatist anarchist
morals-based understanding of history and civilizational progress. Aris-
hima gave rise to another distinctive current of thought on cooperatist
anarchist modernity at SAC, where he found a receptive audience. His
students became avid followers of his teachings and created a culture
that furthered cooperatist anarchist ethics at the college during and after
his tenure there.

77. For a biographical account of Clark during his presidency of the SAC, see Maki,
William Smith Clark.
 The History Slide 247

The students who studied with Arishima did not consider the two
currents of modernity incompatible; rather, they saw cooperative anar-
chism as a more progressive state of liberalism that followed logically
from the way in which Arishima had reinterpreted ideals disseminated
under American pedagogy. By rectifying history from within the intel-
lectual community of the college, Arishima made his students believe
that cooperatist anarchism was the direction and imagined goal of the
modernity of Clark. Arishima used Clark’s chessboard, the space formed
for the training of Japan’s Western cosmopolitan leaders, for an entirely
different kind of game. The students’ intellectual life came to be cen-
tered on Arishima’s activities of rectifying history. A colleague recalled
that Arishima single-handedly changed the intellectual environment of
the college within a matter of a few years. This testimony sharply con-
trasts with the existing image of Arishima as an impotent romantic intel-
lectual of modern Japan. As instructor of the core course on ethics and the
faculty-in-residence for the only dormitory on campus, he spent consider-
able time with the majority of students at the college and was in a position
to heavily influence the student body’s intellectual development.
From the beginning, Arishima taught subjects in polemic with the
regular curriculum. He was assigned to coteach the required ethics class
at the college, which immediately became a space for competing ideas of
human virtue. He shared the class podium on ethics with Mizobuchi
Shunma; each professor took turns lecturing every other week. Both had
a strong agenda in mind. The Ministry of Education had sent Mizobu-
chi to the college as a special representative to try to harness the radical-
ization of student leanings fueled by Arishima. The two lecturers had
entirely different ideas of ethics, and the course unexpectedly became a
space where competitive ideologies were highlighted as each professor
alternately introduced his ideas. Students recalled the sense of conflict
fostered in the weekly polemic that took place between the two profes-
sors, each demonstrating a different intellectual vision of human ethics.
Mizobuchi focused on the Emperor’s Rescript on Education as a key text
for ethics, followed by “the China problem” (shina mondai) and issues of
Japan’s interstate relations. Individual ethics was here placed within the

78. Suite, “Sapporo ni sunde ni ita koro,” pt. 2, p. 13.

79. Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, pp. 71– 72.
248 The History Slide

larger framework of duty to nation and family. Meanwhile, Arishima

introduced Tolstoy and Ibsen in the class and focused on the Tolstoyan
notion of ethics as the mainstay of the class. It may not have been a
cohesive course for students, but the lectures became so popular that at-
tendance became standing room only. Although the class was held in
the largest lecture room in the college, students flowed into the hallway.
Arishima’s student Harada Mitsuo (1890–1977) recalled the intensity
with which the audience listened to the lectures.
The debate between the two professors continued outside the class-
room in their approaches to other aspects of college life. Harada, who
entered as the top pupil at the college and was an active participant in
Arishima’s discussion sessions, noted the sharp contrast in the two pro-
fessors’ attitudes to the daily military drills that students were required
to attend at the college. Whereas Mizobuchi led the military exercises
dressed in full uniform, Harada recalled that Arishima laughed when he
noticed that Harada had managed to absent himself from every drill.
Mizobuchi and Arishima’s relations became so conflictive that Arishima
was eventually led to excuse himself from the ethics course.
The students tended to remember visible moments of tension between
two currents of thought that Arishima had endeavored to highlight.
Many students observed the violent confrontation of words that occurred
in the cafeteria during a student-faculty teatime discussion between one
of the student participants in Arishima’s social studies sessions and an-
other college professor, Hashimoto Sugorō, over the nature of ethics.
Hashimoto, like Mizobuchi, had been teaching national ethics by using
the Emperor’s Rescript on Education. These moments in the life of the
college also included residents’ circulation of a newly created dormitory
journal, Sapporo Graphic, that reflected Arishima’s thoughts. Sapporo
Graphic strongly criticized Mizobuchi and the ideologies propounded by
the college’s main administration.

80. Arishima, Arishima Takeo zenshū, 11:356.

81. Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, p. 72.
82. Ibid., p. 73.
83. Ibid., pp. 71– 72.
84. Ibid., p. 70.
85. Ibid., p. 83.
 The History Slide 249

Arishima also formed a weekly study group, the Social Studies Circle,
when he arrived at the college. The circle had already begun working to
change the ideological tenor on campus outside the classroom before the
ethics class even began. The group of twenty to thirty people studied Kro-
potkin’s and other anarchist and socialist ideas. Known among students
as Mokuyōkai, the Thursday Get-Together, the group gathered every
Thursday evening at Arishima’s home outside the college (Figure 4.1).
That approximately a quarter of the student body at even this elite insti-
tution was committed enough to attend this group is suggestive of the
broader popularity with which anarchist thoughts were received in post-
war Japan. Kropotkin’s works on anarchism were the main texts of dis-
cussion, and a number of participants recalled that Kropotkin’s theory
of mutual aid was a focal point of the study circle. One student re-
called his roommate crying with emotion over the debates that ensued at
the Social Studies Circle. Suite Junnosuke, a promising young profes-
sor at the college, recalled reading enthusiastically Kropotkin’s Conquest
of Bread in Kōtoku’s “secret” translation that Arishima had illegally ob-
tained, as well as Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. The government considered
Conquest of Bread extremely dangerous. The mere possession of the book
was regarded as a serious crime. By these standards, criminals were too
numerous to count, for the book had passed through a number of hands
just in order to arrive at the Social Studies Circle. One student to whom
Kōtoku’s translation of The Conquest of Bread had been passed through
the underground networks of supporters of socialist-anarchist thought
in turn passed it to Arishima to read. Arishima also obtained another
copy of Kōtoku’s translation for the circle’s reading from a member of
the Heimin Farm, introduced in Chapter 3, who in turn had likely re-
ceived the banned book through the expansive anarchist-socialist net-
work. The illicit materials were passed around the study group.

86. Keitekiryō shi hensan iin kai, Keitekiryō shi, pp. 9–10.
87. Ibid., p. 10; Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, p. 71.
88. Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, p. 70.
89. Suite, “Sapporo ni sunde ni ita koro,” pt. 3, pp. 10–11; Kropotkin, Conquest of
Bread.
90. See Eguchi, Zoku waga bungaku hanseki, p. 63.
91. Keitekiryō shi hensan iin kai, Keitekiryō shi, p. 11.
250 The History Slide

Fig. 4.1 Social Studies Circle led by Arishima Takeo. Arishima is the tenth person standing from
the left, in a fedora hat and overcoat. Asuke Soichi, future founder of the anarchist publisher
Sōbunkaku, is the seventh standing from the left, also in a fedora. Photograph courtesy of
Hokkaido University Northern Studies Special Collection.

The main newspaper and journal of students at the college were edited
by those involved in attending Arishima’s lectures and study circles at his
home and included some of the top pupils on campus. These followers of
Arishima’s teaching largely succeeded in forming the dominant ideo-
logical universe of the student body on campus.
Appointed faculty-in-residence of the college’s single dormitory, Aris-
hima became a mentor figure for the students living there. The dormi-
tory, Keitekiryō, housed about one hundred people, almost the entire
student body, because almost all the students came to study in Sapporo
from different parts of Japan. Because the dormitory served as the center
of student life at the college, Arishima’s impact as faculty-in-residence
was tremendous. Many students recalled his presence with fondness.
One, for example, remembered that Arishima was the only faculty mem-
ber on campus to call the students “san” (Mr.) with respect, and that
 The History Slide 251

Arishima always sat and ate with the students in their cafeteria. The
atmosphere of the dormitory was generally very interactive, and resi-
dents there treated one another as an extended family. Although he
served in this position for only a short time, a history of the dormitory
published by an association of former student residents, recalls Arishima
as having made a tremendous impact on students as the dormitory’s
faculty-in-residence. Clark had originally established the dormitory as
a “self-governing and free entity” to reflect the ideals of the new college
in fostering independent thinking among his students. Arishima took
this ideal in full stride and used it as a space to nurture cooperatist anar-
chist ideas.
The reopening of the monthly Knowledge Discovery Symposium
(Kaishikisha) at Keitekiryō after many decades of nonactivity was an
exciting time for students at the college. Clark had originally formed the
symposium in the mid-1870s to enhance students’ knowledge and ability
to think critically and independently. Now held in the college’s dormi-
tory, the symposium became one of the major regular events in student
life. Students recalled the symposium as a long-overdue continuation of
Clark’s original vision. However, Arishima was in charge of the sympo-
sium’s revival, and many of the discussions naturally centered on anar-
chist religious thought and ethics. Students who recalled the symposium
years later wrote that Arishima’s discussions of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid
and of the philosophy of religion and life (or Tolstoyanism) particularly
stood out in their minds. These meetings among students provoked
large debates in the dormitory. At other times, Arishima gave open lec-
tures at the dormitory, in which he also discussed his ideas. He led an
informal discussion circle at the dorm that students recalled as mainly
talking about the “social problem” (shakai mondai) as the problem of

92. Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, p. 50.

93. Ibid., p. 62.
94. Seishun no Hokudai Keitekiryō henshū iinkai, Seishun no Hokkudai Keitekiryō,
p. 31.
95. Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, pp. 48–49.
96. Keitekiryō shi hensan iin kai, Keitekiryō shi, p. 715. See also Suite, “Sapporo ni
sunde ita koro,” pt. 3.
252 The History Slide

capitalism. In the eyes of both college and state officials, Arishima’s

presence at the dormitory was felt to have such negative results on stu-
dents that he was asked to resign from his position as faculty-in-residence
at the dorm after a year.
Colonization and modernization in the Western fashion came to be
considered nationalism, and that nationalism was largely perceived as
retrogressive. Even the charismatic figure Nitobe was reassessed at this
time. A number of students reacted coldly toward Nitobe’s speech at the
college when he came to visit his alma mater and former employer from
his new position as chair of colonization studies at Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity. Harada’s identification of Nitobe as a nationalist in his diary shows
as much what some students thought about nationalism in the period
after the Russo-Japanese War as what they thought about Nitobe. The
students’ cold reception of Nitobe, one of the college’s first graduates and
its foremost alumnus, suggests how much the campus atmosphere had
changed in the years after the Russo-Japanese War.
Although many students embraced the notions of cooperatist anar-
chism, the college continued to maintain its face to the world as the na-
tion’s leading institution of colonization and Westernization. College
president Satō Shōsuke remained a leading figure in the nation for the
modernization and colonization project of Hokkaido and beyond. Ad-
ministratively, the college continued to function as a national imperial
college and formed strategies and policies conducive to the interests of
the imperial nation-state. In 1911, the year Kōtoku was executed, Aris-
hima felt particular pressure at the college from government authorities.
He noted in his diary that he was being watched on campus as a “dan-
gerous person.” He left SAC in 1915 to pursue his writing career full-
time and to contribute to the anarchist movement without institutional
restrictions.
Nonetheless, even after Arishima’s departure, college students contin-
ued to identify with Kropotkinian theory. The history of the dormitory,
published many years after Arishima left the college, began its section

97. Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, p. 70.

98. Senuma Shigeki, “Arishima Takeo Den 5,” p. 32.
99. Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, p. 71.
100. Morton, Divided Self, p. 79.
 The History Slide 253

on student self-governance with a quote from Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid.

The college’s main student journal, Bunbukai kaihō, founded after Aris-
hima’s departure by his students involved in the Social Studies Circle,
published articles using Kropotkin’s ideas, including some articles titled
simply “Kropotkin.” An article on workers’ cooperatives quoted from
Kropotkin, setting the tone for the subsequent appearance of writings
on the topic of mutual aidism in the journal.
The activities of anarchist-leaning individuals related to the Social
Studies Circle also spread beyond the school to the city of Sapporo and
beyond. Tadokoro Tokusaburō (1893–1962), a good friend of Arishima,
had been another active participant in the Social Studies Circle and be-
came an anarchist. Tadokoro ran the used bookstore Sōkensha in Sap-
poro. Almost every night, a number of Sapporo’s young people gathered
at the bookstore to discuss anarchist and socialist ethical issues. In 1925,
Tadokoro established the group Musanjinsha (Noncapitalist), which had
the motto kyōrō, kyōzon, kyōraku (mutual working, mutual existence,
and mutual enjoyment). This anarchist group had members spread out
across Hokkaido. Sugawara Michitarō, a graduate of the university, was
arrested soon after graduation in 1922 for lecturing at a local junior high
school about Kropotkin. Sugawara had been involved in the previously
mentioned student journal Bunbukai kaihō. The students attempted to
establish a literary movement based on Arishima’s literature from 1918.
The university considered the movement subversive, and Satō Shōsuke
called the students into his office to put an end to it. Such activities re-
veal how much Arishima’s attempt to rectify history on campus found a
willing response from the student body and realized the turn to anar-
chist modernity, even on the chessboard of Western modernity at the
college.
Arishima’s student and friend Asuke Soichi (1878–1930) would be-
come a widely known figure among the networks of cooperatist anar-
chists. He had also been a participant in Arishima’s Social Studies Circle
and ran the radical bookstore Dokuritsusha in Sapporo before passing it

101. Keitekiryō shi hensan iin kai, Keitekiryō shi, p. 715.

102. Chōjin, “Rokoku ni okeru aruteru,” p. 17.
254 The History Slide

to the above-mentioned Tadokoro. A figure unknown to most histori-

ans, Asuke would tie together many cooperatist anarchist practices from
behind the scenes as a publisher of works by anarchist thinkers. As
founder of the anarchist publishing company Sōbunkaku, he helped fi-
nancially support through publication a number of cooperatist anar-
chists, such as the anarchist and future Rōno School Marxist Yamakawa
Hitoshi (1880–1958), Ōsugi, and the Russian children’s writer Vasilii
Eroshenko, discussed in Chapter 5. Arishima had helped Asuke start up
his company and chose to publish all his later works through Sōbunkaku.
In turn, Arishima used Sōbunkaku to help finance some of the causes he
was interested in.
Arishima has been generally depicted in the West as a despairing
romantic-in-crisis who achieved very little beyond his fiction writing.
In fact, his cautiousness and his desire to hide himself from police rec-
ords have also hidden him from the historical record. Arishima is thus
much less remembered for his anarchism than for his fiction. However,
what he himself called the “silent path” that he took was an active one
that radicalized the people around him.
Arishima would become widely known among Japanese cooperatist
anarchists as the quiet patron of the anarchist movement. His informal,
consistent involvement in the form of lecture tours, writings, journal
publications, and heavy financial support made him a major hub of the
movement. He gave speech tours on topics significant to the movement
and helped raise wide support for such causes as the Russia Famine Re-
lief Movement. He financially supported the anarchist travels and activi-

103. Nihon Anākizumu Undō Jinmei Jiten Henshū Iiankai, Biografia leksikono de la
Japana anarkista movado, p. 403.
104. When Eroshenko was deported from Japan for “dangerous activities,” Aris-
hima had Sōbunkaku publish his children’s stories. Before being involved in the pub-
lishing business, Asuke had started a business called Ippomaya, the scientific term for
sweet potato, because he sold sweet potatoes from a cart. This mobile business helped
him travel across the country. On Asuke, see Harada, Omoide no shichijūnen, pp. 75–
76. It was Asuke to whom Arishima wrote his suicide note in 1923. Their relationship is
another reminder of the ways in which bonding functioned in hidden ways among
participants in this network, often revealing itself fully only with death.
105. See, for example, Morton, Divided Self, p. 214, who refers to Arishima’s “spec-
tacular but doomed efforts to change the world.”
 The History Slide 255

ties of little-known figures, as well as famous figures like Ōsugi Sakae,

and many young anarchists in Tokyo stopped by Arishima’s home when
they were in need of cash. He was an important hub in anarchist net-
works from the 1910s until his suicide in 1923. Arishima’s name was so
respected that his endorsement of a particular movement or practice was
tremendously valuable for other cooperatist anarchists.
His activities are characteristic of the overall practices of participants
in cooperatist anarchist modernity during the late Meiji-Taishō period,
long characterized in Japanese historiography as the “Winter Period,” a
term used to refer to the period of strict persecution and government con-
trol over anarchist and socialist activities after the execution of Kōtoku
and fellow anarchists in the Daigyaku incident of 1911. The “Winter
Period” is not just a chronological designation or a descriptive term refer-
ring to government censorship, but has important interpretive conse-
quences. The term refers to the absence of political “events” and activities
by anarchists and socialists measured by political organization. The Win-
ter Period supposedly ended in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution and
the initiation of the Communist Party and the corresponding political
organization of Marxists in Japan. Yet Kropotkin’s posing of a possibility
for the merging of subjectivity and action within a larger independent
modernity appeared to become a matter of life and death by the early
Taishō. Behind the veil of an absence of “events” as defined by political
organization were the hidden everyday practices and subjectivities that
the term “Winter Period” fails to convey.
The use of the term is a reminder of the degree to which historiciza-
tion of the past is measured by events and activities in the formal politi-
cal arena. The cultural and social phenomena of cooperatist anarchist
modernity were not discernible as a political institution or organization
in the formal sense. Activities by participants in this discourse were un-
derstandable only as reflected in daily practices, in cultural life, in human
relations, and in writing, as an expression of knowledge and correspond-
ing modern subjectivity. Arishima’s activities may be understood in just
this manner. Because anarchists did not form political organizations,
their activities during this so-called Winter Period have therefore often
been undermined and misrepresented by historians. The founders of
SAC may have been seeing like a state in their crafting of the college as a
game board of Western modernity on which its students were expected
256 The History Slide

to play, but the players’ maneuvers and how they played the board were
quite another matter.
Historians have tended to overemphasize the Bolshevik Revolution as
a great breaking point that was responsible for the reemergence of Japanese
“leftist” activities and the corresponding ending of the Winter Period.
This interpretation overlooks the depth of the intellectual accumulation
of Japanese-Russian nonstate intellectual relations. Similarly, by measur-
ing the historical relevance of activities by the level of their formal political
organization, the historiographical categorization of the years between
the Russo-Japanese War and the Bolshevik Revolution as the Winter
Period hides the dynamic and creative cultural responses to the history
slide initiated by anarchists in this period. The following chapters intro-
duce a series of cultural and intellectual responses to the history slide that
may be summed up as an anarchist cultural revolution.

Historians have tended to write about this historical period as that of the
adoption of Western modalities of time and civilizational progress, ac-
cording to which Japan was always behind. Arishima’s case reveals that
this self-colonization was in fact very difficult to achieve. Like many
others in Japan during this period, Arishima had earlier failed to be self-
colonized or overcome by modernity. He had made a weak effort to em-
brace both the Western modern hierarchical order of civilizations and
races and universal equality and had fallen short. His attempt as a prom-
ising student of Western cosmopolitanism to graduate into Western mo-
dernity in America foundered during the war period and gave way to an
anarchist imagination of progress and civilization. Here, Western moder-
nity was countered not by a timeless Japanese cultural space, but by a
new, equally powerful urge for human progress.
Arishima’s and Tokutomi’s pilgrimages expressed their attempts to
immerse themselves, body and soul, in a new historical narrative, a tem-
poral belonging that transcended the cultural construct of East and
West, yellow and white, uncivilized and civilized, colonized and colonizer.
Their pilgrimages marked the moment immediately after the war in which
both Tolstoyan religion and the anarchist writings of Kropotkin were

106. For a conceptually suggestive work, see Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life.
 The History Slide 257

embraced as dual expressions of this shift in subjectivity to anarchist

modernity. The urgency with which their pilgrimages were made, just
months after the war ended, suggest the compulsion that many Japanese
felt to act in order to realize that progress. In action would lie the solution
to the retrogression of civilization and progress that they had witnessed
in the war. However, anarchist action was not to lie in political acts of ter-
rorism and assassination. Rather, the sphere of action would lie primarily
in the arena of culture and thought. The following chapter examines lan-
guage as the first cultural sphere in which the history slide manifested
itself. Esperanto suddenly became a widely practiced means to attain an
international society of heimin without the nation-state after the war.
 ch apter 5
Translingual World Order:
Language without Culture

When the international auxiliary language Esperanto suddenly became

all the rage in Japan the year after the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese
War (1904–5), leading newspapers took notice. In Asahi Shimbun’s widely
read annual assessment of the leading popular trends, the newspaper an-
nounced that Esperanto and naniwa bushi, a popular style of singing,
were the biggest public crazes of all in 1906. Although Esperanto had
first been introduced to Japan only that year, the public’s enthusiastic re-
sponse was immediate. The excitement over Esperanto was so intense that
no less than nine new Esperanto textbooks were published in Japan that
year. The first Esperanto-Japanese dictionary, Sekaigo (World language),
flew off bookshop shelves. Sekaigo was the best-known introduction to
Esperanto in early twentieth-century Japan. Its author was none other
than Futabatei. That same year, Ōsugi Sakae opened the first school of
Esperanto in Japan. The school not only fostered the pursuit of anar-
chism by young Chinese students in Tokyo but also marked the anarchist
beginnings of Esperanto in Japan. When the Tokyo School of Foreign
Languages serialized the study of Esperanto in its journal Gogaku that
same year, Ōsugi, a TSFL alumnus, was heavily responsible for the
publication.

1. Mukai, Anakizumu to Esuperanto, p. 18.

2. Nihon Esperanto undō gojusshūnen kinen gyōji iin kai, Nihon Esperanto undō
shiryō, pp. 11–12.
3. Ibid.
 Translingual World Order 259

If one looks back at the emergence of Esperantism more than a hun-

dred years ago, the near-perfect contrast between the popularity of Espe-
ranto on the ground and the absence of any discussion of Esperantism in
the historiography of modern Japan is striking. Th is distinctive moment
in the history of Japanese intellectual and cultural life has virtually dis-
appeared from historical narratives. Given that Esperanto was one of the
biggest fads in Japan in the years after the Russo-Japanese War, it is curious
that it was first popularized by the likes of Futabatei and Ōsugi, promi-
nent figures in the discourse of cooperatist anarchist modernity. Indeed,
Japanese anarchists were instrumental in the making and dissemination
of the language and its associated social thoughts after the war.
The following early history of the Esperanto movement offers a rare
window into popular consciousness and the imagination of world order
in a noncolonized country in modern Asia. It was an imagination that
was formed outside the colonized realm of knowledge and was neither
Eurocentric nor anti-West. From its inception in Japan, Esperantism was
a popularly embraced practice of internationalism that promoted the mul-
tiplicity of cultures in human historical development. Yet it was the
absence of culture in Esperanto that marked the beginning of this cultural-
linguistic turn in cooperatist discourse. At the turn of the last century,
when the concept of culture was often that of race, and race was integral
to the hierarchically constructed discourse of civilization, Esperanto in
Japan was seen in theory as a language without culture or civilization. It
represented the overturning of linguistic and cultural Darwinism. That
is, Esperantists sought to transcend the competitive world of survival of
the fittest supposedly verified by the findings of the biologist Charles
Darwin, in which the weaker, more primitive languages and cultures
would disappear, leaving the stronger and more advanced languages and
cultures of the civilized West to thrive.
The lack of a national culture and a racial identifier connected Espe-
ranto ideologically with the absence of the Nobel Peace Prize in the
Nonwar Movement’s discussions of peace. In this interlinked absence of
Eurocentric hierarchical notions of culture and progress, a vision of trans-
lingual world order and peace was formed. The language without cul-
ture was viewed as a tool for the practice of internationalism by all

4. Stocking, “Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race.”

260 Translingual World Order

“people” (heimin) as defined in the Nonwar Movement, irrespective of

nationality, race, ethnicity, class, financial background, education, or
social status. The sudden rise of the Japanese fascination with this artifi-
cial language devoid of history, culture, or power was an expression of a
forgotten grassroots movement of “worldism” and its vision of world order
in Japan that has escaped historians’ notice. Consistent with their post-
war understanding of the laws of the universe and of biological evolution
(see Chapter 6), cooperatist anarchists strove to embrace and promote the
multiplicity of cultures and their encounters without a hierarchical premise
of the eventual ascendance of a particular “fit” or “strong” race, language,
culture, or civilization and absent utopian finality.
Esperanto was referred to in Japan after the Russo-Japanese War as
“world language” (sekaigo). Today, Esperanto is often referred to as min-
saigo, which can be translated as “interpeople’s language” or “popular
language.” In both cases, a new term was manufactured to distinguish
Esperanto from the kokusaigo (international language) of kokusaikankei
(international relations), the sphere of diplomatic interactions between
territorially grounded sovereign states. Minsaigo pointedly refers to Espe-
ranto’s facilitation of direct, nonstate global interactions on the grassroots
level among individuals, social groups, and associations, absent notions
of civilizational, racial, national, or ethnic hierarchies rooted in the ter-
ritorial utopia of the nation-state representative of Western modernity.
The usage of minsaigo today reflects the persistence of the understanding
of populist internationalism that the language carried a century ago. It is
an ideological echo over time of the Nonwar invention of heimin in con-
tradistinction to the notion of kokumin.
The number of Esperanto speakers in Japan continued to rise in waves
over the next two decades. By 1928, Japan had the highest number of reg-
istered Esperanto speakers by far of any non-European country, including
the United States. Given that many Japanese Esperantists were never
registered as such, including some of the best-known speakers and sup-
porters of Esperantism, the breadth of the spontaneous civil movement of
Esperantism in early twentieth-century Japan is particularly remarkable.
It involved an impressive number of people and groups with a wide array

5. Forster, Esperanto Movement, p. 24.

 Translingual World Order 261

of innovative social thoughts and practices to link Japan to the wider

world on the nonstate level in the first part of the twentieth century.
The Esperanto movement was one expression of the widely shared de-
sire to rechannel the present toward a new direction and “rectify history”
discussed in Chapter 4. Certainly, an impressive list of leading intellectu-
als of the time followed popular culture to learn Esperanto. They included
Japan’s foremost ethnographer, Yanagida Kunio (1875–1962); leading cos-
mopolitanist and educator Nitobe Inazō; liberal critic and journalist
Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969); popular songwriter Kitahara Hakushū;
the celebrated children’s literature writer Miyazawa Kenji; and leading
anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, to name just a few representatives of diverse intel-
lectual and cultural fields in prewar Japan.
Despite the prestige of such figures, Esperantism offers an important
case of the reversal of the hierarchy of knowledge. Esperanto was studied
and discussed by elites and nonelites alike in noninstitutional spaces, such
as cafés, clinics, and the second floor of privately owned shops at night,
when institutions privileged by state and financial power had closed. By
looking at these hidden space-times outside the realms of state guidance,
one becomes privy to an imagination and practice of nonstate peace and
world order.
This chapter does not pretend to offer total coverage of the Japanese
Esperanto movement as a whole. The expansive proliferation of Esperanto
in later years suggests that the language came to mean diverse things to
different people. The later uses of the language clearly require mono-
graphic scholarly attention beyond what can be handled in this chapter.
Instead, the chapter examines the intellectual origins of and impetus for
Esperanto’s rise in Japan as a means to delineate what I call “worldism,”
a popularly circulated imagination of world order practiced by early
Esperanto supporters in early twentieth-century Japan that was distinct
from notions of world order and international relations centered on the
nation-state that held sway in the twentieth century. Esperanto was
viewed as a communicative transnational tool that enabled the free and
spontaneous formation of countless transnational societies and associa-
tions, and that amplified diversity and equality among local cultures and
vernacular languages. Although Esperanto has the concrete linguistic
properties of Indo-European languages, Japanese nonetheless embraced
its noncultural characterization. It was to be the linguistic glue to hold
262 Translingual World Order

disparate individuals, groups, and associations together, even as it pro-

moted the expansion of cultural encounters, mutual influence, and dif-
ferentiation among nonterritorially based cultural entities. Esperantists
understood the nonhierarchically (dis)ordered transnational circulation
of ideas and culture to be at the root of civilizational progress.
It is well known that the Russo-Japanese War helped spark the rise of
nationalist decolonizing sentiments in Asia and Africa. However, few
know that Japanese Esperantists and anarchists were among the most
enthusiastic supporters in Japan of Asian decolonization after the Russo-
Japanese War. Although they shared an emancipatory impulse, the in-
ternationalism manifest in the Esperanto movement was nonetheless
ideologically opposed to the most basic assumptions of rising decoloni-
zation movements. Decolonization movements were political movements
that sought to liberate a nation from imperialism by transferring power
to indigenous hands in order to found a sovereign nation-state modeled
after the West. The Esperanto movement’s imagination of free nonstate
associations of “people” around the world expressed an ideology of lib-
eration from the territorial utopia of Western modernity founded on the
modern (civilized) state.
This chapter examines the Esperanto movement as a nongovernmental
movement (NGM) rather than a nongovernmental organization (NGO).
As an NGM, the movement was locally based and motivated and escaped
the cultural imperialism embedded in the organizational composition of
many of the existing international NGOs of the day originating in Euro-
America. Indeed, even the most publicly visible supporters of Esperanto,
such as Futabatei, never became members of the Japan Esperanto Institute,
the national association for Esperanto in Japan affiliated with the World
Esperanto Association. Although the organizational history of these asso-
ciations offers some degree of insight into Esperanto’s history in Japan,
the meanings given to the language and its popular worldism can be

6. Duara, “Introduction.” Within the same conceptual universe, black American

leaders reacted to the war by seeking bonds with the Japa nese as “the champion of the
colored race.” Gallichio, African American Encounter with Japan and China.
7. Duara, “Introduction.”
8. See, for example, Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire.
 Translingual World Order 263

more meaningfully traced in the thought and practices of Esperantism’s

better-known representatives, who were highly reliant on both popular
support and ideologically joined networks for their activities.
By focusing on Japanese Esperantists’ reception of and interactions
with one another and with foreigners in Japan, I arrive at a method to
resurrect the moment of the rise and development of the Esperanto move-
ment in Japan. The chapter traces the ties formed through Esperanto that
joined its diverse speakers and supporters as a means to determine who
supported the worldism of Esperanto. At the same time, it discusses key
representatives of Esperantism and their practices. As a methodological
strategy, the chapter reassembles the social of a linguistic community that
formed beneath the diplomatic negotiating table in early twentieth-century
Japan. It reveals that with a new postwar spatiotemporal imagination of
cooperatist modernity, Esperanto relied on the network community for
its expansion. The community in turn expanded through Esperanto.
This chapter offers a fresh perspective on the history of Esperanto. It
departs from the existing understanding of Esperanto as a failed project
that has survived only as a “utopian curiosity” kept alive by a “handful
of intelligentsia.” It is true that in early twentieth-century Europe, leading
Esperantists largely conceived the language as part of a utopian project
based on the notion of linguistic Darwinism, the evolutionary elimina-
tion of all dialects and their replacement with the most advanced language,
Esperanto. This form of social Darwinism assumed that the most logical,
most regular, and most scientific language would eventually succeed all
other languages in a process of hierarchically ordered linguistic elimina-
tion and evolution. Political scientist James Scott points out that because
Esperantists lacked a powerful state to enforce their utopian dreams in
this intellectual universe, Esperanto “failed to replace the existing ver-
naculars or dialects of Europe.” Although Japanese Esperantism shared
some of its ideals with the original creator of Esperanto, Lazar Ludwik
Zamenhof (1859–1917), it had its own logic specific to popular Japanese
historical consciousness. Unlike the sociolinguistic Darwinist projection

9. Latour, Reassembling the Social.

10. Scott, Seeing like a State, p. 257.
11. Ibid., p. 257.
264 Translingual World Order

of the elimination of the weaker cultures by elites of the more powerful

cultures, Esperanto in Japan was a liberation of the vernacular from that
Eurocentric cultural hierarchy. The history of Japanese Esperantism is
thus also a history of the emergence of an ideological divide in the global
history of Esperantism.

Introducing the Language of the Heimin

Esperantism began as a grassroots movement in Japan. The Esperanto
boom occurred simultaneously in towns and cities across Japan in the
year after the war. Esperantists came from a variety of social backgrounds,
including ordinary farmers like Ogawa Masaji, a loyal member of the
Japan Esperanto Association from 1906 to 1919, urban laborers, mer-
chants, students, white-collar workers, medical and legal professionals,
soldiers, the self-employed, teachers, small shop owners, monks, writers,
students, and even government officials, all of whom began to study
Esperanto privately in 1906–7. In Tokyo, when a speech about Espe-
ranto was given in the language in August 1906, it attracted 300 people.
At the first Esperanto meeting in Tokyo in 1906, 130 people attended.
Such responses were impressive in the capital city, but the simultaneous
and spontaneous postwar gatherings of much smaller groups in towns
and cities around the country, like the 20 people in Kobe who became
members of the Japan Esperanto Association in 1906 and the 20 people
in the southern city of Nagoya who began studying the language that
same year, were perhaps even more striking. These original small local
gatherings would carry the Esperanto movement. From the small group
in Nagoya, for example, the number of Esperanto speakers continued to
grow in the city to many thousands. In 1927, Nagoya’s radio station
hosted the first Esperanto-language lecture series in Japan. Initially,
three thousand copies of an accompanying self-study Esperanto text-
book were printed, but the text sold out immediately and had to be re-
printed several times. In all, eleven thousand copies were sold to local

12. Suzuoki, Nagoya Esuperanto undō nenpyō, p. 2; Miyake, Tatakau Esuperantistota-

chi no kiseki, p. 18.
13. Nihon Esperanto undō gojusshūnen kinen gyōji iin kai, Nihon Esperanto undō
shiryō, pp. 11–12.
14. Suzuoki, Kobe no Esuperanto, p. 6.
 Translingual World Order 265

Nagoyans. Because printed materials were often passed hand to hand

at the time, it may be assumed that many more Nagoyans made use of the
texts that year.
Many who had participated in and supported the Nonwar Movement
embraced and promoted Esperanto. Futabatei had already played an
important role in shaping social thought on “language” and “culture.”
Esperanto fit Futabatei’s conception of language as a revolutionary force.
In his production of the first Esperanto-Japanese dictionary, Futabatei
called the language sekaigo (world language). The term that he used for
this auxiliary language denoted the unity of “people” that was beyond
the nation-state even as it incorporated and enabled the survival and
civilizational contributions of multitudes of ethnic, cultural, and other
differences. However, in introducing Esperanto, Futabatei did not imag-
ine the preservation of idealized ethnic groups in static and unchanging
states of existence. Recall from Chapter 1 that radical progress was em-
bodied in the Japanese vernacular language revolution that Futabatei
himself had fomented in the wake of the Meiji Ishin. Futabatei had ear-
lier constructed a modern Japanese language from a combination of
both Russian-language Populist literature and his studies of Edo com-
moners’ vernacular language from the late Tokugawa period. His craft-
ing of a new literary language initiated the modern vernacular language
movement in Meiji Japan. For Futabatei, the Japanese language was the
result of unstable and diverse forms of cultural production. Rather than
being ideal and static, language constantly changed, adapted, and dif-
ferentiated in its contact with cultures of diverse times and spaces. In
turn, civilizational progress was tied to a constantly changing culture.
Echoing this notion of modern language, the Esperanto movement sim-
ilarly recognized and promoted the temporary and ever-changing nature
of language and culture in the constant encounter and contact of lan-
guages and cultures in the modern era.
Translation and language creation could also serve to make people
conscious of social injustices and inequality in all regards— social, eco-
nomic, gendered, racial, ethnic, and international. If literature and this
ever-changing vernacular language were tools to shape subjectivity and

15. Ibid., p. 3; Suzuoki, Nagoya Esuperanto undō nenpyō, p. 2.

266 Translingual World Order

redirect society, Esperanto was a tool to help shape a new world order
based on the heimin as the subject and vehicle of historical progress.
Futabatei’s introduction of Esperanto may be functionally superim-
posed on his construction of the Japanese language. For Futabatei, both
modern Japanese and Esperanto were manufactured languages that me-
diated between the vernacular and the international spheres while dissi-
pating hierarchy on the social, ethnic, racial, and international levels. He
translated the first Esperanto dictionary from Russian in the very same
way in which he had created a new modern Japanese vernacular literary
language via Russian Populist translation. His dictionary was the prod-
uct of Japanese-Russian intellectual exchange from his collaboration with
the Russian Esperantist Fedor Postnikov (1872–1952) in Vladivostok in
1902. Postnikov was an active figure in the Russian Esperanto movement.
His brother Aleksandr Postnikov (1880–1925) was a leading Russian Espe-
rantist who was elected the first president of the Russian Esperanto League
in 1908 and headed the first Esperanto Congress of Russia in 1910. One
year later, Aleksandr was arrested in St. Petersburg and sentenced to eight
years’ imprisonment for espionage.
The postwar fascination with Futabatei’s introduction of Esperanto
suggests a keen consciousness of the relationship between language and
history among cooperatist anarchists. His vernacular language produc-
tion mattered greatly to cooperatist anarchists at this time because it was
language that was to serve as a vessel for the modern consciousness of
heiminism. The fact that it was Futabatei who first introduced Esperanto
to Japan via Russia thus had great meaning for many people. They viewed
Esperanto as a radical internationalist extension of Futabatei’s revolu-
tionary language production. Police records on Japanese anarchists show
that Futabatei’s craft of translation was very much on anarchists’ minds
at this time. An examination of the materials confiscated by Japanese
intelligence officers from the homes of those accused of plotting to assas-
sinate the emperor in the Daigyaku incident reveals that Futabatei’s trans-
lation practice continued to be a topic of discussion for them. Underground
letters between the accused at this time assessed the quality of Futabatei’s

16. Aleksandr Postnikov was given amnesty as a political exile and freed as a result of
the February 1917 Revolution in Russia.
 Translingual World Order 267

translations of Russian literary writers. The letters speak explicitly

about his craft of language production through his translations from
Russian.
Esperanto became a representative medium for communication in
cooperatist anarchist thoughts. In writing a dictionary of a language
without a culture associated with any particular territory, ethnic group,
or visible community, Futabatei had given expression in his language
production to a widespread sentiment about the cooperative nature of
society at large that extended beyond the confines of the Japanese nation-
state. This society was coined in the language of heimin. The “people,”
however, were neither an undifferentiated national or ethnic mass nor a
coherent and undifferentiated class of proletariat, per Marx and Engels.
They were differentiated ethnically, as well as by gender, culture, indi-
vidual talents, and other characteristics. Cultural differences were not
primordially defined; they were in a constant state of flux through con-
tact with others and adaptation. Futabatei, like many other speakers of
Esperanto, did not see civilizational progress in the gradual disappear-
ance of little nations or peoples in a social Darwinian struggle for na-
tional existence. Rather, progress lay in the transnational encounters of
world societies and the constant change in a million different ways that
ensued.
This intellectual history of Esperanto in Japan departs from the existing
understanding that Japanese imported Esperanto from the West as a means
to learn about the West. In writing his dictionary, Futabatei offered a lin-
guistic means for the transnational formation of the “people.”

The Diversification of Languages

The linguistic project of Esperanto acquired a sense of urgency in the late
Meiji period, when Japanese assumed the status of “national language”
(kokugo). Linguist of kokugo Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937) wrote in 1894
that Japanese purportedly contained a spiritual essence that was “the na-
tional blood.” Japanese as kokugo had become a key part of the core

17. Daigyaku jiken kiroku kankōkai, Daigyaku jiken kiroku, pp. 109–10.
18. See, for example, Lins, “Esperanto as Language and Idea in China and Japan,” p. 48.
19. Twine, On Language and the Modern State, p. 164.
268 Translingual World Order

curriculum in Japanese schools in the nation’s effort to instill the lin-

guistic determinant of nationhood. Japanese was also taught in Japan’s
colonies as a discipline to educate the colonial subject spiritually in the
virtues of being “Japanese” under the unifying power of the emperor.
The language was locked in national ideology as part of a familiar trinity
of one nation-state, one ethnicity, and one language.
In contrast to the preservation of linguistic purity, Esperanto as the
language of the heimin promoted the endless variety of the vernacular
languages and cultures in the world by serving as an intermediary among
multiple vernaculars. It promoted the interaction among the forever-
evolving multiple dialects and languages of the periphery, the colonized,
ethnic minorities, and the underclass groups that transcended the terri-
torial boundaries of the state.
The interest in promoting and protecting but not preserving the con-
stantly evolving living languages and cultures of ethnic minorities and
small nations became a shared value and a basis for friendship in the
relations between the leading Ainu ethnographer Bronisław Piłsudski
(1866–1918) and Futabatei and other worldists in 1906. Futabatei and
Piłsudski made no heroic effort to preserve the lost Ainu. From the na-
tivist perspective of distinct world cultures that can be preserved from the
outside world, Ainu people were rapidly disappearing. Certainly Futa-
batei supported Piłsudski’s effort to “protect” the Ainu from a violent
and hierarchically ordered, forced Japanization through capitalism.
However, neither Futabatei nor Piłsudski intended to preserve Ainu cul-
ture as a timeless and unchanging tradition. This was consistent with
Futabatei’s understanding and construct of a modern written Japanese
language by merging Russian with Japanese commoners’ vernacular lan-
guages to produce revolutionary change in Japanese society. Cooperatist
anarchists would have noted that in fact, both Ainu and Japanese have

20. Among an increasing number of studies on language, eugenics, ethnicity, and

Japa nese colonial politics in both English and Japa nese, see for example, Yasuda, “Lan-
guage and Ethnicity in Modern Japan.”
21. Futabatei was not the only Esperantist Piłsudski got to know in Japan. Ishikawa
Sanshirō and Piłsudski also became acquaintances, and in 1914, Piłsudski visited
Ishikawa in Brussels. Piłsudski, Collected Works, 1:32.
22. For evidence of this, see Piłsudski, Collected Works, 3:661; and Inoue Kōichi,
“B. Piłsudski’s Proposals of Autonomy and Education,” pp. 49– 74.
 Translingual World Order 269

always adapted and changed as a result of their mutual encounters, and

Ainu as such could never truly disappear. The nuanced difference be-
tween their wish to further civilizational progress as free human encoun-
ter, association, negotiation, and cultural change and the contrasting
ideal of preserving an unchanging native tradition is difficult for histori-
ans to detect.
Piłsudski was a Polish subject of the Russian Empire who had been
exiled to the island of Sakhalin for his involvement in an assassination
attempt on Tsar Alexander III. He was the younger brother of the Polish
revolutionary and general Józef Piłsudski. Józef would become the first
chief of state of the new Republic of Poland (1918–22) when Poland achieved
independence from the Russian Empire. Bronisław had been given pas-
sage into Japan as a result of the Russo-Japanese War. His meticulous
observations and massive collections on the cultural practices of native
people on Sakhalin and Hokkaido have made him recognized today as
one of the world’s leading ethnographers of Ainu culture and language.
Unlike the well-known Ainu ethnographer and Christian missionary
John Batchelor (1854–1944), Piłsudski spoke the Ainu language fluently.
He officially married an Ainu woman who was the daughter of an Ainu
chief. They had two children during the three years that Piłsudski lived
in the village of Ai in Sakhalin, Russia. Later, during his stay in Japan
for eight months in 1905– 6, Piłsudski sought to garner political and so-
cial support for the Ainu. His efforts made him quite popular among the
Ainu, according to one of his colleagues on Sakhalin, a fellow Polish
ethnographer. A 1906 letter written by the Ainu Sentoku Tarōji from
Sakhalin to Piłsudski similarly reveals that Sentoku considered him as
someone to whom Ainu could appeal for help as both a friend and an
intermediary with the government on their behalf. Sentoku wrote to
Piłsudski about the problems the Ainu faced in being forced to adopt a
“Japanese way of life.”
In 1907, Futabatei described Piłsudski in the widely read mass-market
magazine Taiyō as someone who

23. For rich details of Piłsudski’s stay in Japan, see Sawada, “Bronislaw Piłsudski and
Futabatei Shimei.”
24. Piłsudski, Collected Works, 3:661.
25. Ibid., 3:722–30.
270 Translingual World Order

served a bitter sentence in Siberia. Now he is already forty-some years old, and
yet he does not even own a house. He came to Tokyo to save the Ainu as his life
mission. He was greatly discontented because the world around him was so
apathetic to their condition. He thinks it is necessary by all means to protect
the Ainu as a people. And about himself? His clothing is minimal, and he is
never choosy about his food. As long as he can survive, he thinks he is fine. He
believes that as a poor race, the Ainu should be respected. If you look at it from
the outside, it looks stupid, but his almost naïve attitude inspires sympathy.

Despite the fact that Piłsudski is world renowned today for his ethno-
graphic studies on the Ainu and other ethnic groups, he admitted in
letters to his friend, the ethnographer Lev Shternberg (1861–1927), that
the scientific and theoretical findings on the so-called original language
and culture of the Ainu before contact with the Japanese were not what
most interested him. He described the “debris of phonetics” as “dead
stuff belonging only to the archives of philology scholars and academic
libraries.” Piłsudski wrote his friend that he wished instead to study
and involve himself in the “living,” contemporary economic and social
problems of the minority peoples in the borderlands between imperial
Russia and Japan. Far from seeking to preserve the timeless cultures of
the Ainu or to identify the origins of the Japanese people, as did many
Japanese ethnographers who studied the Ainu at the time, Piłsudski was
interested in bringing minorities of the area what he called the “bacteria
of civilization,” for which they “thirst.” What Piłsudski meant was that
he wished to further cultivate among the Ainu mundane technical know-
how, such as how to “grow potatoes, raise sheep, and salt fish,” which
would improve their everyday lives. He thus welcomed cultural encoun-
ter, adaptation, and adoption of new knowledge to improve people’s every-
day lives.
Nonetheless, the encouragement of technical know-how among the
Ainu did not by any means reflect a desire to either Westernize or Japanize
the Ainu in order to enlighten them and thereby eliminate their culture.
He chose ironic terms to refer to that process (“bacteria”), and his interest

26. Futabatei, “Rokoku bungaku dampen,” pp. 205– 6.

27. Piłsudski, “Dorogoi Lev Iakovlevich,” pp. 181–85.
28. Ibid., pp. 180, 185.
29. Ibid., p. 180.
 Translingual World Order 271

lay in introducing techniques of agriculture, raising livestock, and food

preservation that would not radically alter their cultural practices and life-
style. It was this shared progressive interest in a nonhierarchically ordered
but culturally and linguistically diverse “people” in transnational contact
that became a focal point for Piłsudski’s friendship with Futabatei and his
involvement with a network of other worldists in Japan.
The well-known German-American anthropologist and Columbia
University professor Franz Boas (1858–1942) similarly sought to identify
in the historical development and creative reaction of humans to the
environment the reason for the diversity of peoples in the world. Boas
corresponded with Piłsudski, along with other ethnographer friends of
his. Boas was working with the Russian ethnographers to gather mate-
rials on the Northern peoples for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition in
1897–1902. The expedition was organized to research relationships among
peoples on both sides of the Bering Strait. Like Piłsudski, the Russians
had become ethnographers after being exiled to the Russian Far East for
their revolutionary activity. Working in overlapping scholarly circles,
Boas and Piłsudski appear to have shared a common sphere of knowledge
about culture and civilizational development. Esperantists from Japan
expressed a parallel development of thought that was not influenced by
Boas but had its own origins and roots. Intellectual interests in human
diversity and creative cultural and linguistic change similar to those that
tied Piłsudski and Boas linked Piłsudski with Japanese worldists.
It is helpful here to contrast the multicultural idea of “the people” pur-
sued by Futabatei and Piłsudski with the multicultural idea of “the Japa-
nese” that arose in this period. Oguma Eiji points out, for example, that
as the Japanese territory expanded in the early twentieth century, peoples
who were not ethnically Japanese, such as Koreans and Taiwanese, had to
be incorporated into Japan as “non-Japanese Japanese.” As a result, the
definition of “Japanese” conformed to this reality of territorial expansion.
This chapter identifies, in contrast, a universalistic and fluid identification

30. Six letters between Piłsudski and Boas from the years 1907–16 are held in the Franz
Boas Papers Collection of the American Philosophical Society, Mss. B.B61, box 71.
31. Freed, Freed, and Williamson, “Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolu-
tionaries,” pp. 15–21.
32. Oguma, Genealogy of Japanese “Self-Images,” pp. xxiii–xxiv.
272 Translingual World Order

of “the people” as multiculturally composed and mutually interactive.

Anthropologists in the discourse studied by Oguma sought to find in
their research on the Ainu the answer to the national problem of the ori-
gins of the “Japanese.” Piłsudski, on the other hand, as a representative
of the worldism under discussion, sought through his studies to respond
to the contemporary concerns of the Ainu to protect the right to practice
their own way of life. Moreover, Piłsudski studied the Ainu as a people
without national belonging, who straddled both Japan and Sakhalin.
Going back and forth between Ainu communities located in the border-
lands of Japan and Russia for his research, Piłsudski did not see more
than situational differences between Ainu of Japan and of Russia. This
view can be compared with other anthropologists who were concerned
with whether Ainu in Japan were capable of becoming loyal fellow coun-
trymen in order to identify the national identity of the “Japanese.” Their
work supported national policies and constructed justifications for Japa-
nese imperialist expansion. Thus, although superficial parallels may be
identified between Piłsudski and other anthropologists studying the Ainu
at the time, Piłsudski’s difference from them in the most fundamental
sense lay in his conformity to worldist principles critical of the hierarchal
order of international relations and corresponding imperialist policies.
In their continued attempt to transcend the constructed world order
of Western modern international relations, Piłsudski and Futabatei also
sought to develop Polish-Japanese cultural relations by founding the Polish-
Japan Society. The journal Sekai fujin (see Chapter 3) became the “official
organ” of the society. Their letters show that they worked to create a
Polish-language library in Japan and collaborated to translate Japanese
and Polish literature into each other’s languages. Piłsudski described
Futabatei as having developed through his translations of Polish literature
“spiritual ties between the two nations, so distant racially and geograph-
ically, but in many aspects quite similar.” Their work on Polish-Japanese
cultural relations was an expression of their shared project to maintain

33. Sawada, “Bronislaw Piłsudski and Futabatei Shimei,” p. 8.

34. Their private letters to each other are reprinted in Ciesielska, Bronisław Piłsudski
i Futabatei Shimei.
35. Piłsudski, “Shigi Hasiegawa,” pp. 8– 9.
 Translingual World Order 273

the diversity of languages among peoples and to facilitate direct relations

among them.
The Polish people’s status in this transnational equation was that of a
colonized people without state power or international standing in mod-
ern “international society.” Piłsudski recognized and noted this status,
writing in a Polish article that the “simple people” in Japan widely re-
garded Poland as a colonized people overtaken by imperialist powers.
Bronisław was intimately associated with the Polish independence move-
ment through his brother Józef. Józef had visited Japan in 1904 to garner
Japanese support for a wartime Polish revolutionary movement to topple
the Russian tsar from power. It was this anti-imperialist interest that tied
Bronisław to both the cooperatist anarchist movement in Japan and the
Russian revolutionary movement, despite the ambiguousness of Japanese
anarchist involvement in the global decolonization movement. Bronisław
also worked closely with the Russian revolutionary émigré community
in Nagasaki (see Chapter 3) that revolved around the publishing and
other political activities of Sudzilovskii-Russel.
As both a Polish-Russian revolutionary and a promoter of Ainu mi-
nority culture in postwar Japan, Bronisław was much sought after. His
personal networks in Japan in turn helped expand the networks that
had developed in the Nonwar Movement, introduced in Chapter 3. For
example, at a time when a number of students of Russian from the
Tokyo School of Foreign Languages were actively involved in the Non-
war Movement, one TSFL Russian-language graduate invited Piłsudski
to stay at his home. This can be seen as a continuation of the radical tradi-
tion of the TSFL Russian program first initiated by Mechnikov. In turn,
Piłsudski introduced TSFL graduate Futabatei to Piłsudski’s rapidly
widening network of Japanese associates, including the feminist and Free-
dom and People’s Rights activist Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927) who edited
the women’s journal Sekai fujin, and another leading socialist intellec-
tual, Kinoshita Naoe, who had been a contributor to the Nonwar Move-
ment. Piłsudski’s introduction of Futabatei to Fukuda led Futabatei to
contribute a number of his translations of Russian and Polish literary

36. Piłsudski and Bodzanta, “What Do They Say about Us in the Land of the Rising
Sun?,” pp. 15–17.
37. Sawada, “Bronislaw Piłsudski and Futabatei Shimei,” p. 8.
274 Translingual World Order

pieces to Fukuda’s journal. That it was Piłsudski, newly arrived from

Sakhalin, who introduced these Japanese figures to each other is a reflec-
tion of how radicals from Russia quickly became major hubs for coop-
eratist anarchist networks.
The site where networks formed around Piłsudski in Japan was repre-
sentative of cooperatist anarchist networks. Piłsudski lodged at the Ha-
kodateya, a bar and foreign-goods shop owned by a former samurai who
had fought in the battle of Hakodate against the new Meiji government.
The second floor of the Hakodateya became a frequent meeting place for
Piłsudski and his Japanese associates. On the first floor, the shop special-
ized in selling imported Russian goods. At night on the second floor, it
also served as a meeting place for political émigrés and former samurai
discontented with the government. In their dual function, such sites of
cooperatist anarchist activity were easily hidden from contemporaries
and from historians’ eyes. Knowledge of these sites was open only to
those belonging to the networks. Similarly, historians can learn of activi-
ties in these diverse and unassuming sites only by tracing one by one the
individual strands of the network. They must rely on the more famous
names, such as Futabatei, Ōsugi, and Piłsudski, for this narrative. Not
only did these people serve as hubs, but also their preserved biographical
materials are essential for the historian seeking to trace the much broader
sociocultural phenomena they represent.

Esperantic Worldism
It was after the war that the term sekai (world) increasingly began to be
used in such neologisms as sekai fujin (woman of the world), sekaigo (Es-
peranto), sekaijin (worldist), and sekaishugi (worldism). Because the use
of sekai in Japan has long been assumed to be a vague reference to West-
ern cosmopolitanism, the ideological current of worldism has been hid-
den from historians behind the language that was used to represent it.
It is important to see just how sekai was used and how people read it
in order to delineate the meaning of Esperanto as a world language

38. Noguchi, “Piusutski to Ginza no Hakodateya”; see also Sawada, “Bronislaw

Piłsudski and Futabatei Shimei.”
39. Sekai fujin (1907– 9); Futabatei, Sekaigo; Sekaijin (February–May 1916).
 Translingual World Order 275

(sekaigo), because sekaigo was part of this larger proliferation of the word
sekai. Out of the war emerged the foundations for a new nonstate trans-
nationalism or, more literally “worldism” (sekaishugi), as participants in
this discourse called it, based on an expanded notion that incorporated
the notion of mutual aid among the countless ethnic nationalities in the
world. The popularity of the use of the word sekai at this time reflects this
ideological current. Curiously, the foremost place to discuss various issues
of the everyday under the term sekai was a journal dedicated to women’s
issues.
The fusion of worldism and the women’s movement became apparent
in the journal Sekai fujin (Woman of the world), founded and staffed by
women and men who had participated in the Nonwar Movement. Sekai
fujin dedicated various discussions to women’s issues, which had been
highlighted by the massive destabilization and devastation of women’s
lives after the Russo-Japanese War. Nonetheless, the journal did not focus
solely on women’s issues, for one of its premises was that what was good
for world civilizational progress was also good for women, and vice versa.
The cover of its first issue in 1907 featured the faces of anarchists from
around the world. From its opening issue, the journal made it clear that
women of Japan would be linked socially and transnationally by antihier-
archical social thoughts. Its use of the word sekai, which also meant the
prosaic everyday life or “world” of women ( fujin sekai) and thus linked
everyday life with global concerns, was a referent for cooperatist principles
of anarchism. The first issue was dedicated almost entirely to Kropotkin
and linked cooperatist anarchism with sekaishugi (worldism). Japanese
anarchists founded Sekai fujin at almost exactly the same time at which
the anarchist and Nonwar participant Kaneko Kiichi and his wife Jose-
phine Conger (see Chapter 3) founded Socialist Woman in Chicago, the
first socialist journal in the United States dedicated to women’s issues.
Kaneko’s contribution to the understanding of women’s issues as a global
problem from his home in Chicago cannot be separated from his ties to
an emerging Japanese Esperantism.
The conceptual grounding of the women’s movement that arose in
Japan in this particular context was an internationalism that was outside

40. Sekai fujin 1 (January 1, 1907).

276 Translingual World Order

the fold of both Western cosmopolitanist internationalisms and pan-

Asian internationalisms. It is illuminating to contrast worldism in Japan
with women’s internationalism in the West fostered by such groups as
the International Council of Women, the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union, and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which largely
united white European and American women on racial, religious, class,
and civilizational grounds. Sekai fujin demonstrated the convergence
of anti-imperialist internationalism, opposition to liberal capitalism, and
ideas of gender and racial or ethnic democracy in what would become
the mainstream current of Japanese women’s movements.
Behind Sekai fujin lay the heavy involvement and contributions of
members of the networks that had formed in the Nonwar Movement. It
was this larger Nonwar intellectual context and intensification of net-
works that united Ishikawa Sanshirō and Fukuda Hideko, a veteran of
the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, to establish Sekai fujin.
Ishikawa and Fukuda’s transnationalism connected the Esperanto move-
ment and the women’s movement. It was no coincidence that the first
complete translation of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid into Japanese by Ishikawa
was first published in Sekai fujin. The momentous publication of Mutual
Aid in the women’s journal underscored the relationship among the
women’s movement, worldism, and anarchism. Similarly, in 1916, Ōsugi
and his partner, the anarchist Itō Noe (1895–1923), founded the journal
Sekaijin (Worldist) to replace Ōsugi and Arahata Kanson’s (1887–1981)
journal Kindai shisō (Modern thought). Here again, Sekaijin used the
term sekai to refer to modern anarchist civilization and progress. The use
of sekai in both Sekaijin and Sekai fujin was a radical departure from the
way in which the translation of sekaijin as “cosmopolitanist” in English
suggests Western liberal internationalism as a Kantian cosmopolitanism
defined by peace among a league of elite, civilized nation-states.
Esperanto had been created as a conscious attempt to generate cultural
integration via personal transnational communication and interactions
and to create a world society. Zamenhof, a native of the city of Białystok
in the former Russian Empire, had invented the planned language in the

41. Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 27, 51– 76; Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire,
pp. 148, 220.
 Translingual World Order 277

late 1870s and early 1880s in response to the religious tension and ethnic
strife he observed among Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews in his
hometown. However, the meaning and role of Esperanto in various places
and times throughout the world have differed considerably.
Japanese worldists recognized Esperanto as a very simple and strictly
rule-based language, theoretically devoid of culture. Futabatei’s intro-
duction of Esperanto in his dictionary claimed confidently that “one
could master the basic laws of the language in only half an hour, and
with a basic vocabulary of only one thousand words, that requires only a
few days of study.” This was possible because the language required only
a grammatical pursuit, not mastery of another culture. Journals in Japan
advertised it as a scientific language that functioned much like a simple
mathematical formula. With no cultural particularities, “everyone,” or
the heimin, was capable of mastering it.
At first glance, this seemed to echo the thought of Western European
Esperantists at the time. In a report presented to the International Anar-
chist Congress at Amsterdam in August 1907, Belgian anarchists Emile
Chapelier (1870–1933) and Gassy Marin (1883–1969) encouraged the adop-
tion of Esperanto as the international language of anarchists. Chapelier
and Marin claimed that Esperanto was the international language that
would enable international society to catch up with the abundant victo-
ries of science. The latest technological inventions and discoveries had
seemed to bring people closer together, but those very people found them-
selves unable to communicate the simplest ideas to the people of other
countries to whom they were suddenly exposed. Chapelier and Marin
claimed that the spread of Esperanto was a solution that would enable
the attainment of universal solidarity by permitting direct communica-
tion between people, as well as the transnational spread of information
directly from the source, rather than through the state and capitalist-run
medium of the press.
Despite apparent similarities, however, the Belgian anarchists’ views
differed significantly from those of early twentieth-century Japanese Espe-
rantists. Although Japanese Esperantists shared with other Esperantists

42. Futabatei, Sekaigo, p. 4.

43. Chapelier and Marin, Anarchists and the International Language, p. 4.
278 Translingual World Order

the belief that Esperanto was the most scientific and modern language
befitting world civilizational progress, they defined “civilization” rather
differently. Thus, from its beginnings, Esperantism in Japan departed
from leading ideological trends in the Esperanto movement in Western
Europe. Chapelier and Marin imagined world solidarity within the lim-
ited framework of a purportedly rational Western civilization. Measuring
languages according to linguistic Darwinism, they viewed Esperanto as
the most advanced language atop a hierarchical world order. In their
social Darwinist understanding of linguistic evolution, languages pro-
gressed and disappeared along this hierarchy, from the words spoken by
“primitive” island peoples to the most advanced cultural and linguistic
orders of Western Europe and finally to Esperanto, the product of scien-
tific enquiry, as the most advanced language. The Belgian Esperantists
explained this scheme by the logic of progression toward simplification
and rationality. They observed that “primitive” peoples spoke a language
that was full of intricacies and rich in roots. Chapelier and Marin ex-
plained that this was because the mind of primitive man “was only able
to grasp detail, and could neither comprehend nor express synthetic
ideas.” They believed that this richness in vocabulary of the primitive
languages enabled their speakers to express only a very small number of
ideas. The more advanced languages in Europe, on the other hand, had
fewer words and a diminished complexity that led to a vastly increased
flexibility of expression. They claimed that German, with half as many
roots and rules as “Aryan” languages, enabled the expression of twenty
times as many ideas. By accentuating these principles of simplification
and accordingly maximizing the richness of expression, Esperanto was
the most precise, the most logical, and therefore the most harmonious
language. It was on the basis of this logic of linguistic rationalization
within a Eurocentric world hierarchy of cultures that they asserted that
Esperanto was the most advanced and scientific language and the enabler
of the most advanced ideas.
Chapelier and Marin’s claims about Esperanto fitted larger trends
occurring in the global Esperanto movement at the time. After the lan-
guage’s rapid decline in Russia due to government prohibition of the

44. Ibid., p. 8.
45. Ibid., p. 9.
 Translingual World Order 279

language, the European center of the Esperanto movement moved to

France. French intellectuals headed by Louis de Beaufront (1855–1935)
rejected the value-oriented idealism of pacifism and brotherhood among
men that had originally led to the language’s rapid ascent in favor of a
focus on the scientific and practical use of Esperanto. According to Espe-
ranto historian Peter Forster, among French intellectuals interested in
Esperanto, “the Positivist faith in intellectual and social evolution remained
influential. In such a milieu the adoption of a language like Esperanto
could be seen as a contribution to social evolution and the rationaliza-
tion of society.”
The rapid development of Esperantism in Japan created an ideological
division among world Esperantists. An intellectual rift between Chinese
anarchist-Esperantists based in Paris and those based in Tokyo reveals
the ideological divide between the two sources of Esperanto discourse.
Influenced by their interactions with the Esperanto movement in France,
Chinese anarchists in Paris argued that Esperanto should effectively re-
place Chinese as the language of currency in China. Consistent with the
prevailing trend of Esperantism in the West, they believed that because
Chinese was not modern, it should be abandoned and Esperanto should
be adopted in its stead. This argument was based on the Paris anarchists’
belief in the superiority of Western language.
Chinese students in Tokyo, in contrast, believed that anarchism
should come from within Chinese culture, and they argued that Espe-
ranto would promote Chinese language and culture. Chinese anar-
chists in Tokyo had been heavily influenced by Ōsugi, with whom they
studied Esperanto and anarchism immediately after the war. The demo-
cratic and anti-imperialist promise of Esperanto in the wake of the Russo-
Japanese War had become a foundation for Japanese-Chinese nonstate
relations among burgeoning anarchists in Tokyo. Nonwar Movement
leader and leading anarchist Kōtoku expressed this from the very begin-
ning of his involvement with the Chinese students. Kōtoku began his
speech at the opening meeting of the Chinese Society for the Study of

46. Forster, Esperanto Movement, p. 78.

47. Müller and Benton, “Esperanto and Chinese Anarchists,” pp. 48–55.
48. Ibid.
280 Translingual World Order

Socialism in 1907 with the promise that the day of an international lan-
guage was near.
Chinese students in Tokyo, in collaboration with Kōtoku and Ōsugi,
founded the Chinese Society for the Study of Socialism to investigate
the future of anarchism for China. For both Japanese anarchists and the
first Chinese anarchists who were in Japan, the problem of language and
the larger issues of culture and modernity it represented were critical to
the formation of their relationship. Language as a function of modernity
was also foundational in the formation of their anarchist thought.
Further evidence of this can be found in the correspondence between
Kōtoku and Kropotkin in the years after the war. Kōtoku reported to
Kropotkin periodically on the cooperative anarchist activities among
Chinese and Japanese anarchists in Tokyo. In his written request to Kro-
potkin for permission to translate his work The Conquest of Bread after
the Russo-Japanese War, Kōtoku asked Kropotkin to allow the work to
be translated not only into Japanese but also into Chinese. In this ca-
pacity, Kōtoku stood as an intermediary in the network between the
Chinese anarchists and Kropotkin. Here lay a problem of language and
translation, for although Kōtoku’s translation of Kropotkin would be
translated almost immediately into Chinese, the work needed to go first
through Kōtoku’s Japanese translation as an intermediary. It was a lin-
guistic relationship that suggested an inequality of relations at the inter-
lingual point of translation from the very start. Kōtoku promised his
Chinese associates that this inequality would be resolved by the world
language of Esperanto. Esperanto in the context of the history slide thus
was present at Chinese and Japanese intellectuals’ adoption of anarchism
at this time. This suggests that a vision of worldism was at the heart of
the adoption of anarchism in East Asia.
Japanese Esperantists’ anti-imperialist and anticolonialist persuasions
led them to form intimate transnational ties with proponents of decolo-
nization from abroad. However, Japanese Esperantists and proponents
of decolonization often held very different visions of the future. Ulti-
mately, Japanese Esperantists’ popular internationalism diverged from

49. Scalapino and Yu, Chinese Anarchist Movement, p. 31.

50. Kōtoku to Kropotkin, April 29, 1907. GARF, P. A. Kropotkin Collection, f. 1129,
op. 2, khr. 1418, l. 6.
 Translingual World Order 281

the view of many decolonization supporters who sought to liberate their

“people” by modernizing along Western models of the nation-state, using
the language of Western liberalism or of Marxism. Decolonization move-
ments in Asia shared with the Esperantists their inspirational origins in
the crucible of the Russo-Japanese War. This war, predating World War
I by a decade, represented a racial, ethnic, and civilizational struggle for
much of the world. The excitement over the war is indicative of both the
intellectual and the emotional origins of the decolonization movement
at large on the global stage. The passionate celebration of Japan’s imperi-
alist war of expansion in the non-West suggests that decolonizers had
accepted from the start of the decolonization movement the primary
Eurocentric and binary constructs of Western modernity (white versus
yellow, civilized versus noncivilized, East versus West, modern versus
tradition, and so on) that had given such positive meaning to Japan’s mili-
tary victories in the war. Decolonizers largely thought in terms of West-
ern modernity. In this sense, then, burgeoning decolonizers, certain
African American leaders, pan-Asianists, and some Muslim leaders who
celebrated Japan’s defeat of Russia had conceptions of the world that
were similar to the conceptions of those who saw in Japan’s victory a yel-
low peril threatening Western civilization. In this intellectual context, it
is not surprising that decolonizers sought to fashion their own nation-
states and promote national cultures and languages that were modeled
on the very Western modern nation-state from which they tried to liber-
ate themselves. Nonetheless, the temporary merging of such divergent
currents as decolonization and Japanese Esperantism sheds light on the
broader emancipatory impulse that they shared.

When Baha’ i Became Esperantist

From the moment of its emergence, Esperanto spread via social networks.
Nighttime Esperanto meetings and public lectures facilitated its dissemi-
nation. The language became a focal point for nonstate associations and
organizations of all kinds throughout Japan. In turn, by the early 1910s,
the popularity of Esperanto and the effectiveness of its network enabled
the dissemination of other cultural and even religious trends. New net-
works and nongovernmental and religious associations expanded in Japan
by piggybacking on those preexisting networks of Esperantists.
282 Translingual World Order

One such case was the successful propagation of the internationalist

faith of Baha’i via Esperanto networks. When Baha’i missionary Agnes
Baldwin Alexander (1875–1971) came to Japan in 1914 to propagate the
Baha’i fath, she discovered that it could be disseminated very quickly
and successfully via established Esperanto networks. Not only did the
Baha’i faith use Esperanto as the language of religious practice in Japan,
but also it relied on Esperantists, often nonbelievers, to spread the faith.
This religious propagation by the nonfaithful reflected both the prolifera-
tion of Esperanto networks in Japan and the ideological means through
which they functioned. The religion in essence merged with Esperantism
in Japan. Not only did it share many Esperantist beliefs from the start,
but it also newly assumed many of the meanings and associations that
the linguistic movement carried. In this sense, Baha’i became a faith of
Esperantism in Japan.
Baha’is espoused a number of aims that appeared to merge with the
interests of Japanese Esperantists. They claimed to seek to create a global
society based on the principles of the elimination of all forms of preju-
dice; equality between the sexes; recognition of the essential oneness of
the world’s great religions; the elimination of extremes of poverty and
wealth; universal education; and the establishment of a world federal
system based on collective security and the oneness of humanity. The
faith’s strong associations with and translation via Esperanto in Japan
consolidated the perception that it shared Esperantism’s idea of emanci-
pation from the imperialism and capitalism promoted by the state and
its elites. Converted and nonconverted Japanese Esperantists alike as-
sisted Alexander’s missionary efforts.
The blind Russian writer and Esperantist Vasilii Eroshenko became
the first and most consistent supporter of Alexander’s missionary efforts
in Japan by introducing her to the already-extensive Esperanto network.
She had first heard of Eroshenko while she was attending an Esperanto
conference in Geneva. Alexander referred to these initial portals into the
Esperantist network in Japan as “the first fruits of my joining the Uni-
versal Esperanto Association.” On the Baha’i religious holiday Naw-

51. Alexander, History of the Baha’ i Faith in Japan.

52. Ibid., p. 13.
 Translingual World Order 283

Ruz in 1915, Alexander wrote of her surprise that, rather than the stu-
dents in her Baha’i class, it was the Japanese Esperanto community that
observed the religious holiday with her. Alexander recorded in her letter
from that day:

The first surprise I had was in the morning when an elderly professor . . . came
bringing in his own hands a beautiful potted plant. This was a great surprise for
I had only met the gentleman a few times at the Esperantist meetings. It seems
that my blind Russian friend, Mr. Eroshenko had told him of the day. In the
afternoon came others, some bringing gifts which I shall always deeply trea-
sure. It seems strange that all the remembrances I received on that day came
from Esperantists, and all the greetings were written in Esperanto. One of the
greetings came from a group of Esperantists in another province. . . . They all
wrote on a card wishing me greetings as they said they knew it was a day dear
to my heart as a Baha’i.

From that time onward, she directed her missionary efforts toward the
various nighttime Esperanto meetings in Tokyo and across Japan as the
most productive means to spread her faith. The Esperanto publications
in Japan turned out to be an enthusiastic medium in which to publish
her writings.

My blind friend comes every Wednesday night now and takes me to their
meeting, for I want to use every opportunity to spread the fragrances, and I
surely find opportunity among these dear people. They have been exceedingly
kind to me. They have invited me to their dinners, etc. and I have always gone
for the sake of the Beloved. . . . At one of these meetings I met a professor from
the west of Japan (Hiroshima) . . . and he asked me to come there and give the
Baha’i Message. . . . One of the Japanese Esperanto publications, La Orienta
Azio, is going to print something from the Baha’i teachings in each number
now.

Esperantists took the initiative to spread the faith for Alexander.

53. Ibid., pp. 14–15.

54. Ibid., p. 14.
55. Ibid., p. 15.
284 Translingual World Order

For the well-known writer Akita Ujaku, Esperanto imbued Baha’i with
the meaning of nonhierarchical worldism that English and its represen-
tation of the hierarchical civilizational order of international relations
could not offer. After reading Eroshenko’s translation of Alexander’s
English-language translation of the Baha’i scriptures into Esperanto, Akita
wrote in Esperanto to Alexander, “Yesterday was very interesting to me.
I wish to express my great pleasure to you. That night I spent in reading
your translation of the Hidden Words. They give me entirely new strength
and every word resounds more profoundly to me than when I read them
in the English translation. I feel proud to know that this translation is
finished by the patient work of our dear Eroshenko. Live Eroshenko!
Kore via, U. Akita.” For Akita, only Esperanto could serve as the vessel
to convey the meaning of brotherhood that he saw in Baha’i. As is clear
in Akita’s note, Alexander’s English translation of the Baha’i scriptures
was ineffective in converting him. The faith garnered great meaning for
Akita only when Eroshenko translated the English version into Espe-
ranto. From the founder and prophet of the Baha’i faith, Bahá’u’lláh
(1817–1892) to Alexander, Alexander to Eroshenko, and Eroshenko to the
Japanese Esperantists, the religious teaching gathered a new level of mean-
ing at each point of translation. In the end, Baha’i in Japan relied on
Esperanto as its language of translation to give it the added meaning of
worldism.

The Blind Face of Worldism

If Futabatei and Ōsugi had successfully introduced Esperanto in Japan,
the blind youth Eroshenko served as the virtuous and poetic messenger
of Esperanto and worldism from the Russian heimin. By the late 1910s,
Japanese had turned him into a massively popular celebrity. In his travels
across the country, he drew tremendous crowds, sometimes of thousands
of people, who were attracted to his lectures by the Esperantist vision
now represented by this blind young Russian. As a representative of

56. Ibid., p. 15.

57. An estimated 1,200 to 1,300 people attended a talk given by Eroshenko in April
1920. Fujii, Eroshenko no toshi monogatari, p. 13. At another speech he gave at Waseda
University, 3,000 people attended. Ibid., p. 35. When he came to speak in the city of
 Translingual World Order 285

Japanese Esperantism, Eroshenko had become one of the most widely

known foreigners living in Japan in the Taishō period (1912–26).
Foreign Ministry archives show that the state considered this blind
bard and composer of poems and children’s stories one of the most dan-
gerous foreigners in Japan at the time. Fearing subversive activity by
foreigners after the Russian Revolution, the Japanese government amassed
tremendous amounts of information about foreigners in Japan. An exami-
nation of the top-secret surveillance files on foreigners in Japan main-
tained by the Foreign Ministry reveals that the government devoted its
best intelligence sources and financial resources by far to trace Eroshenko’s
every move and meeting. Police described his relations with Esperantists
and prominent intellectuals as “disturbing to stability and order.” Ulti-
mately, Eroshenko was deported from Japan; this highly controversial
event was widely discussed in Japan’s leading newspapers. Police made a
detailed report of public opinion about Eroshenko after his deportation
in an effort to gauge public reactions and sentiments about the widely
known incident. They cautioned that behind what appeared to be the
harmless poetry reading of a blind man lay highly emotional support for
him by people across Japanese society, including women, socialists, liter-
ary writers, those involved in the arts, and the members of numerous
associations in Japan. Given Eroshenko’s widespread popular support,
his highly publicized deportation created an awkward situation for the
government.
Eroshenko did not fit the typical profile of a Bolshevik conspirator or
terrorist. The police did not find weapons, socialist propaganda, or anti-
state speeches, nor did they discover any hint of violence in Eroshenko’s
intentions or actions. He had no institutional power or even affiliation
with any party or government. He famously wore the hand-sewn cotton
shirt of the ordinary “people,” a humble Russian peasant’s cotton blouse
called the rubashka, which would quickly become a politicized fashion

Osaka in December 1919 at a small music concert given to promote Esperanto, 800
people came to listen. Hatsushiba, Nihon Esperanto Undōshi, p. 38.
58. Gaimushō gaikō shiryōkan (GGS)b.
59. GGSa, 4.2.6.21-1, no. 25-305-2, May 6, Taishō 10 (1921); 4.2.6.21-1, no. 806, June
6, Taishō 10 (1921).
60. GGSa, no. 4.2.6.21-1, no. 806, June 6, Taishō 10 (1921).
Fig. 5.1 Vasilii Eroshenko wearing a Russian peasant’s blouse in Japan, 1916. Photograph
courtesy of Nakamuraya.
 Translingual World Order 287

in Taishō Japan, undoubtedly influenced by Eroshenko’s wearing of it

(Figure 5.1). With his sightless eyes, he was dependent on those around
him for assistance in living in his new foreign country. The childlike
bard often sang Russian folk songs, recited his own poetry, and drew his
lectures from the numerous children’s stories he had written and that
were becoming well known in Japan.
When he first came to Japan in 1914 to study Japanese social practices
involving the blind, he was an unknown figure both in Japan and Russia.
Propelling him to center stage of the Japanese Esperantism movement,
Japanese selectively made Eroshenko into a celebrity who represented
the worldism they valued. That worldism was threatening to the govern-
ment because it furthered a sentiment that went against the cosmopolitan-
ism aligned with the Western modern construct of international relations
reliant on the modern nation-state or on nationalist pan-Asianisms, the
other side of the same coin.
The emotion with which the Japanese public embraced Eroshenko was
greatly aided by his blindness, combined with the fact that he was Rus-
sian. His blindness was not only a physical attribute but also a moral one,
for many understood him as being blind to racial hierarchies. The liberal
intellectual and Esperantist Hasegawa Nyozekan wrote of Eroshenko:
His sightless eyes cannot make him unhappy. The world that he saw for only a
very short time with the heart of a small child was all that he has seen with his
own eyes. Nevertheless, this made him happy. In his eyes could not develop the
distinction of skin color, the reason that man has tormented man. His eyes also
cannot see the horrible colors that divide the world map and incite war. His
eyes see the skin of man and the world map in monochrome. And he roams
across this single world. . . . Eroshenko must be happy that he is blind. Whereas
the poet who sees cannot not see the color or the form of man or object, the
blind poet cannot see anything other than the man or object itself. Whereas
the religious believer who sees cannot not see the color or the form of God, the
blind believer does not see anything but God Himself.

Because Eroshenko was unable to see skin color or other physical

attributes, the striking naturalness with which he was known to have
assimilated to life in Tokyo seemed to comment critically on racial

61. Hasegawa, “Antagparolo,” pp. 3–4.

288 Translingual World Order

boundaries that often separated Euro-Americans in Japan. He was widely

known to live in the home of Sōma Kokko (1876–1955) and Sōma Aizō
(1870–1954), who owned and ran the famous Nakamuraya sweetshop in
Tokyo. Kokko assumed a motherly relationship with Eroshenko, adopt-
ing him into the family beyond racial and national lines. This relation-
ship of virtual adoption into the private space of the home actively in-
verted the inequality between “Orientals” and “Westerners,” yellow and
white. In his involvement in activities for the blind in Japan, Eroshenko’s
blindness was his trademark. It made an imprint on popular perceptions
that he was innocent of hierarchical ideologies of race, ethnicity, and
nation.
Eroshenko’s link with Kropotkin, who encouraged him to go to Japan,
helped push Eroshenko into the midst of Japanese cooperatist anarchist
networks. When he first came to Japan, he very quickly became associ-
ated with leading figures of the Japa nese anarchist movement. Police
reports noted that Eroshenko met frequently with Ōsugi, Kamichika
Ichiko (1888–1981), and other anarchist and socialist figures. Ōsugi knew
full well the effect that Eroshenko’s linkages with Esperanto and Kro-
potkin would have on the Japa nese public, and he orga nized one of
Eroshenko’s first speaking engagements the year Eroshenko arrived in
Japan. Eroshenko’s talk, on Kropotkin’s anarchism, was in Esperanto.
In the lecture, Eroshenko described his personal meeting with Kropotkin
in the language of worldism. The talk was part of the nighttime Heimin
kōenkai (Heimin [People’s] Lecture Series) hosted by Ōsugi, and it was
dutifully attended and recorded by the Special Higher Police Force
(Tokkō). Esperantism and heiminism were here interlinked as destabi-
lizing social trends.
Eroshenko traveled throughout the country giving talks in a tour or-
ganized by Akita Ujaku and Arishima, in which he was accompanied by
Katagami Noboru (1884–1928) (about whom more will be said later in
this chapter). In this and other venues, he gave speeches side by side with
children’s literature writer Ogawa Mimei (1882–1961), Eguchi Kan (1887–
1975), Itō Noe, people’s arts theorist Katō Kazuo (1887–1951), and Akita
Ujaku, all of whom subscribed to cooperatist anarchism in different

62. Naimusho tokko keisatsu report in Fujii, Eroshenko no toshi monogatari, 4.

 Translingual World Order 289

Fig. 5.2 Nakamuraya sweetshop, 1909. Photograph courtesy of Nakamuraya.

forms. The state was aware of Eroshenko’s ties to the discourse on coop-
eratist anarchism in Japan, and police reports linked him with the ideas
of Tolstoy “from a philosophical viewpoint” and Kropotkin “based on
Kropotkin’s Darwinism.” Although leading figures in the Japanese anar-
chist movement like Arishima, discussed in earlier chapters, did not
speak Esperanto, they supported the Esperanto movement by participat-
ing in Esperanto meetings, circulating publications about and written in
Esperanto, and giving financial support.
The second floor of Nakamuraya (see Figure 5.2) became a nighttime
salon for networking and conversation among supporters of worldism.
Much like Piłsudski’s Hakodateya, Nakamuraya became a major meet-
ing place for those interested in things Russian, and the meetings there
expanded Eroshenko’s links with the cooperatist networks. Although
today, Nakamuraya is widely known across Japan as a trendy Shinjuku
district landmark for its sweets and curry, in the early twentieth century

63. GSS, “Kageki ha sonota kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken, gaikokujin no
bu: Rokoku jin” [Materials concerning the control of dangerous radicals, foreigner sec-
tion: Russians], 4.3.2.1-2-2, January 21, Taishō 9 (1920), top-secret file no. 19.
290 Translingual World Order

and into the period after the Asia-Pacific War, the shop opened its doors
at night to radicals under the pretext of a Russian literature and lan-
guage study circle on the second floor. In addition to Eroshenko, the
Sōmas also harbored the Indian anticolonialist revolutionary Rash Bi-
hari Bose (1886–1945), who eventually married the Sōmas’ daughter.
Sōma Kokkō, a Christian who attended the Nikolai Cathedral for a time
in the 1890s, was one of many lesser-known figures in the history of co-
operatist anarchism and Russian-Japanese intellectual relations. She was
a keen businesswoman well aware of the popular trends of the time who
expanded her business to further her ideological beliefs. It was on this
wave that she began holding an evening Russian literature and language
salon in her shop, which was first taught by a priest from the Nikolai
Theological Seminary.
Not the first-floor daytime activities but the second-floor nighttime
practices at the shop are of most interest. Nakamuraya was a nighttime
“campus.” Even academics like Waseda professor Katagami Noboru were
prompted to depart from the traditional university campus to attend the
Nakamuraya salon for their private education. Katagami was a professor
of English. After the completion of his daytime duties at Waseda, how-
ever, Katagami frequented the sweetshop at night, where he studied
Russian and mingled with Eroshenko and his network of associates.
Katagami would become a leading specialist in Russian literature at
Waseda after traveling to Russia in 1915–18. The future Russianist No-
bori Shōmu also attended the salon. In a reflection of the influx of the
latest trends from Russian theater in Japanese theatrical performance,
the celebrity actress Matsui Sumako (1886–1919), who became famous
for her role in a dramatic production of Tolstoy’s religious novel Resur-
rection, was yet another attendee of the Nakamuraya salon.
Worldism and Esperanto were inextricably linked with a popularly
imagined “Russia” represented by Eroshenko. Sōma’s business acumen
led her to promote the popular sentiment about Eroshenko and the cor-
responding criticism of the Japanese government after Eroshenko’s de-
portation by marketing Russian products in her shop. The products were
publicly associated with Eroshenko and seemed to lament his deporta-

64. For an example of Katagami’s writing on Russia, see Katagami, “Roshiya no

tamashii no shimpi.”
 Translingual World Order 291

tion. Sōma also made Nakamuraya’s employee uniform the Russian-

style rubashka to honor Eroshenko the year he was deported from Japan.
She further employed a Russian baker who made her shop widely known
for its line of Russian bread. Later, she added borscht (Russian beet soup)
to the shop’s menu as a featured item.
As the copious notes in the top-secret police fi les detail, Eroshenko
served as a hub to connect many Japa nese. Police fi lled his fi le with
records of the names of all the people who met with him. Police re-
ports noted that he met frequently with former Nonwar participants.
A letter intercepted by police from Eroshenko to his friends in Japan
demonstrates that the Esperanto Association in China took care of
him after his deportation. Through these networks, Eroshenko found
a post as a lecturer of Esperanto language and Russian literature at
Peking University. An important new contact that Eroshenko made
in China was the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), one of China’s founding
modernist writers and an Esperantist who had studied in Tokyo. Those
who did not commit to learning the new language committed them-
selves to supporting Eroshenko as its representative instead. For ex-
ample, Arishima offered Eroshenko financial support behind the
scenes.
Eroshenko’s popularity and, by association, that of Esperantism in
Japan arose within the larger context of Japanese nonstate intellectual
relations with Russia. Ironically, after the Russo-Japanese War, Russian-
Japanese nonstate relations continued to broaden, as police records con-
vincingly demonstrate. During the expansion of Esperantist worldism,
the Japanese government came to perceive its true enemy to be not simply
the Russian and Soviet state but nonstate participants in the transna-
tional interlocking networks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the

65. “Tenin no seifuku ni rubashika wo saiyō.”

66. GGS, “Kageki ha sonota kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken, gaikokujin
no bu: Rokoku jin,” no. 4.3.2.1-2-2, no. 1, no. 655, September 25, Taishō 10 (1921).
67. GGSa, no. 950, June 24, Taishō 10 (1921).
68. GGSa, July 8, Taishō 11 (1922).
69. GGS, “Kageki ha sonota kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken, gaikokujin
no bu: Rokoku jin,” 4.3.2.1-2-2, November 26, Taishō 6 (1917), top-secret file no. 213.
Arishima and Akita also visited government ministry officials to appeal Eroshenko’s
deportation.
292 Translingual World Order

Japanese government stepped up its surveillance of Japanese-Russian

networks, whose participants’ activities were recorded in the national
police files for “dangerous persons.” In the special subfile for “foreign
dangerous persons,” the weightiest and most detailed collection of sur-
veillance materials by far was on Russians, sealed under strictest condi-
tions as “top secret.” Russians in Japan could frequently be seen meet-
ing with Japanese on the private level.
The individuals were not followed because they were suspected of
spying for the Russian state; on the contrary, their very nonstate status
was critical. It was by virtue of being nonstate that they were drawn into
the midst of the cooperatist anarchist and socialist networks, which put
them under the highest suspicion. Curiously enough, although the sur-
veillance seemed to become particularly keen in the years after the estab-
lishment of the revolutionary Bolshevik regime, it was not so much the
Communists whom the state was interested in. The majority of the files
on Russian dangerous persons were on nonstate- and non-Bolshevik-
related activity. It appears that just to be of Russian nationality in Japan
was enough to give one a police surveillance file. Indeed, a variety of Rus-
sians with no apparent subversive activity and the Japanese with whom
they related were followed and watched. The police even followed Koni-
shi Masutarō and kept track of the Russians he met with in this period.
Although Konishi was never a self-identified anarchist, he was still a
central figure in Japanese-Russian transnational networks and someone
whom many people came to see to extend their contacts in the net-
work. Undercover police also closely followed the frequent meetings of
the Nonwar participant and founder of the wildly popular Heimin Caf-
eteria and Heimin Hospital, Katō Tokijirō, and the socialist Sakai
Toshihiko with Russian figures in this period. The details from these

70. GGS, “Kageki ha sonota kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken, gaikokujin
no bu: Rokoku jin,” 4.3.2.1-2-2.
71. GGS, “Kageki ha sonota kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken, gaikokujin
no bu: Rokoku jin,” 4.3.2.1-2-2, June 4, Taishō 11 (1922).
72. GGS, “Kageki ha sonota kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken, gaikokujin
no bu: Rokoku jin,” 4.3.2.1-2-2, no. 476, June 20, Taishō 11 (1922).
 Translingual World Order 293

files kept by the Foreign Ministry help show who was involved in trans-
national cooperatist anarchist networks and what they practiced.
If national surveillance files reveal that the Japanese government con-
sidered Russians to be the most dangerous national presence in Japan,
then, as noted earlier, the most dangerous foreigner in the country had
to be the Esperantist Eroshenko. Eroshenko’s name repeatedly appears
in surveillance files, with page after page devoted to his every move in
Japan, along with lists of the names of Japanese with whom he met and
interacted. The government was not misled in dedicating its resources
to Eroshenko, for it had caught on to a subversive and competing form
of internationalism in people’s affection for him.
When Arishima and Akita asked police why Eroshenko was to be
deported, arguing that he “is a mere poet,” the police replied, “Yes, in
fact, that is precisely what is wrong with him.” The reply caused Aris-
hima and Akita both to burst into laughter. Yet the acknowledgment of
the danger of culture for the state was an acknowledgment of the broader
power of culture in this period to express the vision of a competing
modernity.

After the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution in 1918, Espe-
ranto had reached even greater heights of interest among Japanese. By
1928, Japan had by far the highest number of Esperanto speakers in the
world outside Western Europe. Esperanto became not only the language
spoken at numerous clubs, associations, and organizations in Japan but
also the purpose and mode for joining its members together. It involved
a striking number of people and groups with a wide array of innovative

73. For example, government files demonstrate that Eroshenko met regularly with
figures like Ōsugi Sakae, Akita Ujaku, and Kamichika Ichiko. GGS, “Kageki ha sonota
kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken, gaikokujin no bu: Rokoku jin,” 4.3.2.1-2-2,
November 26, Taishō 6 (1917), top-secret file no. 213.
74. For example, GGS, “Kageki ha sonota kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken,
gaikokujin no bu: Rokoku jin,” 4.3.2.1-2-2, no. 655, September 25, Taishō 8 (1919).
75. Fujii, Eroshenko no toshi monogatari, p. 31.
76. Forster, Esperanto Movement, p. 24. Today, when Esperanto appears in course
listings at universities in Japan, it often becomes wildly popular among students, as in
the case of Saitama University, where over eight hundred students registered to study
the language in the first year it was offered, in 2005.
294 Translingual World Order

social thoughts and practices to link Japan to the wider world in the first
part of the twentieth century.
In an attempt to ride the growing wave of interest in Esperanto, in
1921–23 the Japan Esperanto Study Association sent students across Japan
in a campaign to promote the language. In 1923, for example, the cam-
paigners traveled to thirteen different towns to lecture about Esperanto.
Taking advantage of the outreach to remote audiences achieved by these
promotion campaigns, successful left-leaning publishers like Sōbunkaku
accompanied the campaigns to advertise their books. Reflecting the
popularity of Esperantism, influential critical journals, such as Demo-
kurashī (Democracy), Warera (We), Kaihō (Liberation), and Kaizō (Rein-
vention), used subtitles in Esperanto to claim their universality. The newly
formed Cosmo Club in Tokyo was a part of this second wave of Esperan-
tism, but many of the participants were of the first wave, such as Ishikawa,
Eroshenko, and a number of Chinese and Koreans who lectured at the
club. In 1921, the club held a lecture meeting attended by Chinese, Japa-
nese, Korean, French, and Russian participants and watched by police, in
which a declaration on Asian liberation ideology written by members of
the club was read. The Esperantist Takasugi Ichirō (1908–2008) also gave
a talk to club participants on how Japanese had perceived Korea since
1910. Many women became Esperantists in this period, including, for
example, the young Yamaguchi Koshizu (1900–1923), who became active
in Formosa (Taiwan) for the ethnic liberation of the native Taiwanese
under Japa nese colonization. Formosa Esperantists, in the heart of the
Japanese Empire, also collaborated to support the subversive Russia Fam-
ine Relief Movement organized in Japan in 1922 on the nonstate level
during the Japanese state’s military intervention in the Russian Civil
War. Police reports on anarchist figures like Ishikawa Sanshirō detailed
their participation in Esperanto meetings and reflected their fears over
the language as a medium of communication.
As the use of Esperanto further expanded in this second wave of
interest, the language was used for various causes. Nonetheless, the prin-
ciples fundamental to Esperantic worldism as it emerged in the wake of

77. Hatsushiba, Nihon Esperanto Undōshi, p. 54. On Sōbunkaku and its founder,
Asuke, see Chapter 4.
78. Miyake, Tatakau Esuperantistotachi no kiseki, pp. 26–28.
 Translingual World Order 295

the Russo-Japanese War remained implicit in the practices of those who

used Esperanto. These principles included the notion of heimin, or the
people without the nation-state, as the vehicle of modern progress; free
and voluntary associations of people across class, gendered, racial, and
national borders; and nonhierarchy of culture and language. The ways in
which the principles of Esperantism were to be achieved differed, and
Esperanto speakers came from various specializations and backgrounds,
such as the leading writers, ethnographers, songwriters, artists, religious
believers, and anarchist activists named in the introduction to this chap-
ter. Yet the principles, formed as they were in dialogue with Western
modernity in the crucible of war, remained the same. Unlike existing
interpretations of Esperanto as a gateway for learning about the West in
Japan, the language was in fact used to transcend the hierarchically con-
structed East-West divide.
Esperantism’s overturning of Western modern presumptions of lin-
guistic Darwinism was only the first of a series of cultural movements to
realign “culture” with “nature” in the early twentieth century. Literature,
music, education, and even science were all expressions of this 180-degree
overturning of the meaning of culture and democracy within the dis-
course on anarchist modernity in Japan. But Esperantism was one of the
earliest expressions of an anarchist cultural revolution that is discussed in
further detail in the Epilogue. The cultural revolution was a widespread
movement to overturn the definition of culture in Western modernity,
which had defined “culture” in opposition to “nature” along a temporal
continuum of civilizational progress. In the following chapter, I will ex-
amine a scientific turn among cooperatist anarchists that reflected their
embrace of cosmology and the natural sciences for their provision of an
onotological basis for cooperatist anarchism and its cultural revolution
in this period. At the same time at which Esperantists overturned lin-
guistic Darwinism, the scientific turn in Japan uprooted social Darwin-
ism by reconstituting Darwinian evolutionary theory and the natural
sciences from their ontological origins.
 ch apter 6
Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature:
Phagocytes, Dung Beetles, and the Cosmos

After his transnational pilgrimage to Kropotkin’s home in London, Ar-

ishima departed for Japan in 1907. On the ship home, he began to read a
work by Mechnikov. Arishima’s reading of Mechnikov’s work effectively
sealed the completion of his tracing of Kropotkin’s historicist account of
anarchist civilizational progress. Curiously, however, at this critical time
immediately after the war, Arishima turned to read not revolutionary
texts of revolt, but a text about microorganisms. Indeed, the Mechnikov
he was reading was not the Russian revolutionary who had traveled to
Japan in the 1870s (see Chapter 1). Arishima, who likely had never heard
of Lev Mechnikov, had turned instead to the writings of Lev’s younger
brother, Ilya Mechnikov, a leading microbiologist who would be awarded
the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908. Ilya was doing pio-
neering work on phagocytes and bacteria. How can one possibly grasp
the place of microorganisms in Arishima’s and others’ embrace of anar-
chism in this period? In the broader context of war and imperialist ex-
pansion, terrorism and assassination by anarchists worldwide, and gov-
ernment persecution of anarchists and socialists, why would anarchists in
Japan turn to Ilya Mechnikov’s universe of bacteria and phagocytes and,

1. It is not clear to what degree other Japa nese anarchists at the time were familiar
with the work of Lev Mechnikov. Nonetheless, it is known that both Ōsugi and
Ishikawa Sanshirō had closely read Lev’s writings that constituted the volume on Japan
in Reclus’s Nouvelle géographie universelle. Ishikawa was told about Lev while he was
staying at the home of the Reclus family in Brussels over a span of eight years.
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 297

later, spiders, dung beetles, and wasps in their search for answers to the
world problems at hand? In fact, the definitive postwar moment of the
adoption of anarchist ideas of progress in Japan simultaneously marked
what can be characterized as a scientific turn among anarchists.
Certainly Ilya Mechnikov was not the only natural scientist in whom
Japanese anarchists expressed a deep interest during this period. From
Mechnikov’s studies of microorganisms, anarchists extended their stud-
ies to the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and the detailed studies
of insects’ lives by the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, together
with the discussions of the natural and physical world by Kropotkin, a
scholar of physical geography and geology. Anarchists not only were in-
terested in these scientists but also succeeded in conveying their interest
to the much wider Japanese public through their translations of natural
science. Indeed, anarchists played a leading role in the popularization of
the natural sciences in Japan in the early twentieth century. This chap-
ter introduces the scientific turn among cooperatist anarchists in early
twentieth-century Japan by examining the popularization of these four
natural scientists, Ilya Mechnikov, Kropotkin, Darwin, and Fabre. It
reveals how ideas of historical progress came to inform Japanese inter-
pretations of and interest in the latest writings by natural scientists, and
how ideas of nature and the natural sciences were then applied to ideas
of culture in early twentieth-century Japan.
Kropotkin, Ilya Mechnikov, Darwin, and Fabre would appear to
have been odd choices for the formation of a coherent thought, for they
seem to have been at complete odds with one another in their views on
evolution. Kropotkin’s work was read as much for its insights on bio-
logical evolution as for its contribution to civilizational theory. Both
Mechnikov and Kropotkin belonged to a larger Russian school of cri-
tique of Darwin. Mechnikov began his scientific career by heavily criti-
cizing Darwin for his Malthusian view of competitive nature. Fabre in
turn disagreed with Darwin on religious grounds. Fabre concluded that
the perfection or genius of such tiny beings as insects could have been
achieved only by divine intervention. Mechnikov, meanwhile, was a firm
atheist who maintained that evolution occurs without a divine plan. The
apparent incoherency of their thought easily feeds the historiographical
tendency to view Japa nese interest in “Western thought” as similarly
contradictory and random.
298 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

Despite what would appear to be major differences among the four

natural scientists, Mechnikov, Kropotkin, Fabre, and Darwin, a close
analysis of the originality of the translation pattern of their ideas reveals
an internal logic hidden behind their presence in Japan after the Russo-
Japanese War. Cooperatist anarchists identified in their work an idea of
progress based in science that was fundamentally at odds with the idea
of Spencerian progress. With the help of natural science, anarchists re-
moved the distinction between high and low, subverted the centrality of
the state for human progress, advocated the multiplicity of ever-changing
cultures, and promoted voluntary associations for an interdependent
world.
Natural scientists whose works Japanese anarchists translated and
read at this time, whether proponents of Darwinian evolutionary theory
or critics of it, offered scientific evidence from the biological world for a
modern anarchist temporality and subjectivity. Anarchists ignored, if they
did not wipe away, the social Darwinist elements in Darwinian thought.
They promoted On the Origin of Species by incorporating both competi-
tion and cooperation in the struggle for survival that they identified
as part and parcel of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Darwin was trans-
lated and read through the lens of the other scientists and in relation to
them, and vice versa. He and the other widely read natural scientists in
early twentieth-century Japan thus may best be illuminated through the
lens of anarchist modernity and Russian-Japanese transnational intellec-
tual relations within a broader context of scientific translation by Japanese
anarchists.
The most notable case of anarchists’ popularization of scientific writ-
ings was their introduction and translation of Fabre. Fabre’s writings were
among the most popular and widely read works for children and adults
alike in Japan in the twentieth century. They continue to be widely read
by children today. Anarchist translations of Fabre’s observations of the
lowly dung beetle drew widespread attention a century ago, and Japanese
have not let go since. Even the convenience-store franchise Seven-Eleven
Japan recently marketed a series of Fabre figurines throughout Japan.
Seven-Eleven has well over 13,000 shops in Japan, with 1,800 of them in
Tokyo alone. The Fabre series included the ever-popular dung beetle,
other insects featured in Fabre’s works, and a miniature of the famous
Fabre himself.
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 299

Seven-Eleven succeeded in capitalizing on the fact that Fabre’s ac-

counts of insect lives has long been emblematic of childhood in Japan,
somewhat comparable to the reading of Mother Goose for English-speaking
children. That is, just as a critical reading of Mother Goose would tell much
about the English-speaking societies in which it was read, so an interpre-
tation of Fabre’s account of the dung beetle could tell much about the
twentieth-century Japanese who devoured it. Through Fabre, anarchists
have helped shape early childhood imagination and perceptions of the
natural world. Despite (and sometimes because of ) the government’s
initial ban on translations of Fabre’s studies of the lives of insects in
Japan, anarchist translations of Fabre’s studies of insects into Japanese in
the early 1920s came to capture the national imagination. If the social
knowledge of childhood has the power to order imaginations of the
future, then the popularity of anarchists’ representations and definition
of childhood meant that anarchists had a powerful influence on future
visions in Japan.
Japanese translators of Fabre today are aware that the Fabre craze that
has outlasted the twentieth century originated with Ōsugi Sakae’s vivid
translation of Fabre in the early 1920s. Ōsugi’s translation is still consid-
ered one of the best available today and has recently been reprinted, de-
spite the fact that numerous other competing translations of Fabre in
contemporary Japanese exist. Why did such leading anarchists as Ōsugi
and Ishikawa Sanshirō translate Fabre? What was it about Fabre’s in-
sects that so intrigued Japanese readers and threatened government offi-
cials? These questions have continued to puzzle entomologists and Fabre
specialists alike in both France and Japan, particularly because Fabre has
been so little known in France. Furthermore, how did anarchists make
Fabre such a popular and familiar part of Japanese life? Finally, what are
the implications of anarchist translations and their popularity for under-
standing modern Japanese history? This chapter examines the intellec-
tual origins of how Fabre and his dung beetle became national heroes in
Japan.
Anarchist translations of Fabre’s writings for popular consumption
among both youth and adults would help shape the natural sciences in

2. Fabre, Fāburu Konchūki.

3. Ishikawa’s translation of Fabre is in his Hi shinkaron to jinsei, pp. 65– 70.
300 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

Japanese academia. This reverse flow of knowledge, from anarchist sites

of production to the halls of elite universities and research centers, was
reproduced again and again in early twentieth-century Japan (see the
Epilogue). The widely recognized entomologist Tsuneki Katsuji (1908–
94), a professor at Fukui University, wrote in his autobiography that it
was his early reading of Ōsugi’s translation of Fabre in the 1920s that led
him to become an entomologist, “just as it did for many other scientists.” 
Kuratani Shigeru, a contemporary specialist of evolutionary morphology,
similarly recalls that his childhood readings of Fabre helped inspire his
desire to become an entomologist from a very early age. Kuratani writes
that later, as an undergraduate studying life sciences in college, “when I
chose my major, it dawned on me that the students could be grouped
into two categories: those who had read Fabre’s opus and those who had
read The Origin of Species. . . . These two works . . . represented the pillars
that defined and delimited the field.”
Kuratani’s placement of Darwin and Fabre side by side as the pillars
of the life sciences in contemporary Japan is unexpected. Fabre is largely
unknown outside Japan, even in his home country of France. Moreover,
his writings, which describe the social lives of insects, belong as much to
the genre of youth literature as to the writings and theories of the schol-
arly world. As noted earlier, the two contemporary figures were also far
from being in agreement. Although Darwin admired Fabre’s studies,
Fabre severely criticized Darwin’s evolutionary theory for failing to take
into account divine intervention in the workings of the natural world.
Ever since Darwin introduced his ideas, this encounter between religion
and science, divine creation and evolution, has been at the heart of de-
bates over Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
Fabre and Darwin belonged to opposing sides of this debate, but
Ōsugi first translated and introduced Fabre as a complementary thinker
alongside Darwin, leaving a lasting anarchist legacy on Japanese scientific
thinking. This chapter rereads what has been incommensurate in anar-
chist actors’ practices according to contemporary commonsense interpre-
tations of history and turns the common sense on its head. Reflecting on
the broader global context in which Darwinism has been placed in stark

4. Tsuneki, “Recollections of My Life (Extracts),” p. 6.

5. Kuratani, “J. Henri Fabre.”
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 301

opposition to religion, the chapter will explain how Darwin and his
evolutionary theory of the origins of life sat comfortably alongside a
proponent of creationism among the scientific texts translated, popu-
larized, and promoted by Japa nese anarchists.
The methodological strategy of this chapter is to see beyond the histo-
riographical construct of a binary relationship between Darwin and
Japan. This binary view has led historians to seek out how Darwinian
evolutionary theory influenced or was used in Japan within the larger
binary of the British or Western impact on Japan. The chapter considers
instead the translation of Darwin’s theories in light of the broader scien-
tific interest and translation practice among anarchists in which it was
situated. It reads the pattern of their translation practices in the postwar
historical context and the popular-level response of readers. It takes a
translingual approach that leads back to Japanese-Russian nonstate
intellectual relations and the vision of anarchist progress in order to under-
stand how anarchists managed the seemingly chaotic, contradictory, and
expansive landscape of modern scientific knowledge in Japan. Only
through attention to the longer history of Russian-Japanese intellectual
relations can one begin to understand the merging of four divergent natu-
ral scientists in modern Japanese intellectual life.
Social biologists in recent years have questioned humancentric assump-
tions about the unique capacity of human beings to care for, empathize
with, defend, and cooperate with others within their species. In the late
twentieth century, the arguments of the influential cell biologist Lynn
Margulis that symbiotic relationships among different organisms of spe-
cies, phyla, and kingdoms are the driving force of evolution have been
widely debated and discussed. Prompted by her findings of the symbiotic
origins of evolution and their implications for human cultural and social
practices, Margulis codeveloped with the British scientist James Lovelock
the theory of global symbiosis called “Gaia.” According to this theory,
the earth consists of a self-regulating biosphere dependent on microor-
ganisms’ and plants’ unconscious maintenance of the environment in
a homeostasis favorable for life. Margulis’s work was an expansion of
Kropotkin’s anarchist evolutionary theory represented by Mutual Aid,

6. Margulis, Symbiotic Planet.

302 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

which owed much to Lev Mechnikov’s observations of revolutionary

Japan.
When she first proposed them in the 1970s and 1980s, Margulis’s
ideas were highly controversial and widely rejected. In contrast, natural
science informed by anarchist constructs of progress was popularly em-
braced among Japanese in the early twentieth century. In fact, a fascina-
tion with scientific findings on microorganisms that decentered human
beings in the notion of evolution was central to anarchist modernity a
century earlier in Japan. Similar in style of thought, the anticapitalist
conclusions drawn by Margulis’s study of single-celled organisms re-
mind one of the manner in which Japanese anarchists’ reflections on Ilya
Mechnikov’s findings about microorganisms informed and developed
their ideas of progress. The studies of bacteria and other microorganisms
as a dynamic starting point for thinking about the nature of evolution
and progress were as compelling for cultural transformations in early
twentieth-century Japan as they are today.

Negative Discovery: Aligning Culture with the Centerless Universe

It is to this dust, to these infinitely tiny bodies that dash through space in all directions
with giddy swiftness, that clash with one another, agglomerate, disintegrate, every-
where and always, it is to them that today astronomers look for an explanation of the
origin of our solar system, the movements that animate its parts, and the harmony of
their whole. Yet another step, and soon universal gravitation itself will be but the result
of all the disordered and incoherent movements of these infinitely small bodies— of
oscillations of atoms that manifest themselves in all possible directions. Thus the cen-
ter, the origin of force, formerly transferred from the earth to the sun, now turns out to
be scattered and disseminated: it is everywhere and nowhere. With the astronomer, we
perceive that solar systems are the work of infinitely small bodies; that the power which
was supposed to govern the system is itself but the result of the collisions among those
infinitely tiny clusters of matter, that the harmony of stellar systems is harmony only
because it is an adaptation, a resultant of all these numberless movements uniting, com-
pleting, equilibrating one another.
—Kropotkin, Anarchism

The apparent sudden interest in the natural and cosmological world was
fully embedded in the broader shift in temporality to cooperatist anar-
chist progress with the Russo-Japanese War. The anarchist populariza-
tion of the natural and cosmological sciences in Japan in the early part of
the twentieth century was both a product of and an inspiration for coop-
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 303

eratist anarchists’ uprooting of cultural hierarchies. In turn, anarchist

readings of the life sciences formed a crucial point in the further devel-
opment of Japanese anarchist thought.
Leading anarchists like Kōtoku Shūsui and his young colleague
Ōsugi, among many others, enthusiastically turned to the biological and
cosmological sciences after the war. With the dissolution of the ideology
of Western modernity in the Russo-Japanese War, science became the
vessel through which the “true nature” of human behavior and society
could be discerned. It was in this postwar context that the anarchists
Kōtoku, Sakai Toshihiko, and Yamakawa Hitoshi founded the journal
Heimin kagaku (The people’s science) in 1907. The journal expressed an-
archists’ larger interests in the question of evolution for human society
and its implications for civilizational progress. Articles in the journal
included “The History of Human Development,” “The Evolution of Men
and Women,” “Ethics of the Animal World,” and “The Birth and Death
of Planet Earth.” The editors’ aim to disseminate that knowledge on the
popular level for the heimin was in line with the populist principle of
heiminism discussed in Chapter 3. Kōtoku similarly spoke on “Ethics in
the Animal World” for the Shakai shugi (Socialism) nighttime lecture
series in August 1907. If the animal world was ethical, evolutionary
theory could no longer be characterized as the departure of human civi-
lization from nature, but rather as the nurture and development of what
was already inherent in nature.
The cooperatist anarchist turn to science interacted discursively with
the Western modern construct of civilizational progress. Stripped down
to its most basic intellectual foundations, that construct may be most
simply understood as a movement away from “nature” and toward “cul-
ture.” Sigmund Freud, for example, exemplified this idea when he wrote
in a letter to Albert Einstein in the 1930s that the solution to war was the
gradual advancement of “culture” and “civilization,” which would work
to suppress natural human instincts of violence and barbarism. Accord-
ing to Freud, civilizational or cultural development was leading to the
“progressive rejection of instinctive ends and a scaling down of instinc-
tive reactions.” Freud thereby posed “nature” as the ultimate antithesis

7. Yokoyama Toshiaki, Nihon shinka shisōshi, pp. 233–34.

8. “Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, ‘Why War?’ ”
304 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

to the Western modern construct of “culture.” As its antithesis, “nature”

thereby served as an integral definer of “culture.” After the Russo-
Japanese War, cooperatist anarchists in Japan instead embraced “nature”
as the essence of “culture” and in this way radically inverted the concept
of modern civilization at its core. This was not a rejection of urban life or
of science and technology by any means, but rather a conception of cul-
ture and civilization as part and parcel of nature. Civilizational progress
was therefore inconceivable without the accordance of human cultural
life with the latest findings in the natural and cosmological sciences.
In 1912, the year after the execution of Kōtoku and other anarchists in
the Daigyaku incident, Ōsugi Sakae and Arahata Kanson founded the
influential anarchist journal Kindai shisō (Modern thought). Ōsugi
stated from the second issue that the journal had been founded in order
to integrate art with science and thereby give shape to “the modern” itself.
Coming on the heels of the Daigyaku incident, the founding of the
journal was reflective of the historical trajectory of a broad-based cul-
tural revolution that will be discussed further in the Epilogue. After a
brief interlude following the shock of the trials and executions of Kōtoku
and other comrades for their alleged attempt on the life of the emperor,
the Daigyaku incident had in fact given inspiration to the project to re-
construct culture according to cooperatist anarchist principles.
At first, waiting for the easing of government repression had seemed to
be the only option. Arishima wrote confidentially to his brother in 1911,
“There are three paths. One is to be rebellious, the second would be to be
a slave, the third path would be the one he takes for now—shut up and
wait, pretend that you are controlled.” But the unintended consequence
of the Daigyaku incident was that it radicalized many youth. A number of
people turned decisively to anarchism in response to the incident, includ-
ing such well-known literary figures as the poet Ishikawa Takuboku, the
feminist historian Takamure Itsue (1894–1964), and the champion of mi-
nority rights Sumii Sue (1902–1997). Arahata wrote in his recollections on
the founding of the journal that he and Ōsugi simply could not wait any-
more. The dominant understanding of the so-called Winter Period fol-

9. Arishima to Arishima Ikuma, August 9, 1910, in Arishima, Arishima Takeo

zenshū, 10:98.
10. Arahata, Shinkan Kanson jiden, pp. 204–5.
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 305

lowing the Daigyaku incident is of a period of persecution that led the

Japanese left wing to go underground. I suggest here that in fact, 1912 be-
came its members’ year to reinvigorate the cultural developments that had
been initiated after the war, just as the state was attempting to stifle the
movement. Crucial in the making of this new period of cooperatist anar-
chist thought and activity was the quest to align culture and society with
the most advanced knowledge of the natural and cosmological sciences.
Ōsugi’s 1912 article “Kindai Kagaku no Keikō” (The latest trends of
modern science) in Kindai shisō represented the latest thinking about the
relationship of human social life and culture to knowledge of the uni-
verse. Ōsugi wrote that social phenomena are not bound by the realm of
purely human affairs, but rather are constantly in dialogue (aikōshō suru)
with an ever-changing knowledge of the wider universe and correspond-
ing knowledge of the laws of nature. In turn, the knowledge of natural
science is in mutual negotiation with the understanding of the social.
Ōsugi’s article was in effect a call for a scientific turn in culture.
Ōsugi pointed out in the article that in the medieval age, politics and
religion corresponded with people’s belief that the earth was at the center
of the universe. People understood everything on earth to be the gift
of God, which enabled rulers to maintain power through the control of
knowledge. At a time when Christians understood themselves to be at
the center of the universe, they were governed by “ ‘theo-kings’ almighty
rights in a medieval political body and its organization of people.” Like-
wise, science was also controlled by an earth-centered view of the universe.
Ōsugi contrasted scientific knowledge of the “dark ages” with contempo-
rary scientific knowledge of the universe. He did not describe the form
of human society and culture that he imagined would best correspond
with that scientific knowledge. In the year after Kōtoku’s execution, it
was best to leave that up to the readers’ imagination.
Marc Davis, a scholar of astronomy and physics, has characterized the
main astronomical discoveries over the past four hundred years:
That Earth is not the center of the Universe.
That the Sun is not the center of the Universe.

11. Ōsugi, “Kindai kagaku no keikō,” p. 2.

12. Ibid.
306 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

Our galaxy is not the center of the Universe.

Our type of matter is not the dominant constituent of the Uni-
verse (dark matter predominates instead).
Our Universe (seen and unseen) is not the only Universe.
Historian Daniel Boorstin has aptly described humans’ increasing
knowledge of and awareness of the laws of the universe over the past
four centuries as an age of “negative discovery.” However, knowledge
in the human sciences, and to a lesser degree in the biological sciences,
has not caught up with the expansive knowledge of the universe, so a
strong conceptual divide continues today. In late Meiji and Taishō
Japan, this negative discovery provided the intellectual legitimacy and
impetus for anarchist social and cultural thought and practices. Anar-
chists turned to Darwinist laws of evolution in animal behavior and to a
renewed interest in the laws of cosmology as reliable sources of human
social knowledge gleaned from the natural and physical world and the
cosmic universe.
During the Russo-Japanese War, Nonwar participants had already
begun to conclude that human society had failed to catch up with scien-
tific findings about the universe over the past four hundred years and
with more recent findings in the natural world. Japan’s imperialist ex-
pansion and capitalist development led burgeoning cooperatist anarchists
to express awareness of the chasms among the existing knowledge of
nature, ideas of historical progress, and political, cultural, and social prac-
tices. It was on this basis that during the Russo-Japanese War, Kōtoku
urged the alignment of social and political thought with the scientific
discoveries of the universe. He called for a new direction in civilizational
progress toward unity between human society and culture and the laws
of the universe after the war. The universe Kōtoku referred to was the
centerless universe without beginning or end in which all energies interact
and evolve, verified by the latest scientific findings. After Darwin, “there
will be no more debate about the beginningless and endless composition
of nature,” Kōtoku stated in his introduction to Darwin’s theory of

13. Davis is quoted in Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose, p. 7.

14. Ibid.
15. Kōtoku, “Daawin to Marukusu.”
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 307

evolution. Kōtoku was quick to interlink cosmological knowledge and

biological discovery with the temporal and spatial order of the human
world.
How, then, could a modern subject, gifted with both a mortal body
and the self-knowledge that he or she was decaying day by day, live a
meaningful life in a centerless universe, the very knowledge of which
continued to expand with scientific discovery? In its radical decentering
of relations between individuals, nations, genders, and ethnic groups
and nature and the broader universe, cooperatist anarchism was seen as
the only social theory and coherent vision of progress that could accom-
modate the scientific negative discoveries of the past four hundred years.
Fascination with anarchism’s fusion with the scientific discoveries of the
centerless universe and microbiology inspired a new generation who had
been only in their teens or early twenties during the Nonwar Movement
to adopt anarchist notions of progress during this time.
Ōsugi illustrates this process. It was the particular “negative discov-
ery” of nature and ideas of mutual aid in evolution that gave Ōsugi the
ontological confidence to adopt anarchist thought after the war. Indeed,
Ōsugi’s biographer, Thomas Stanley, has pointed out that it was his un-
divided interest in science that led him to anarchism. Ōsugi recalled
the moment of his turn to anarchism immediately after the war: “As I
read [the biological evolutionary writings of Oka Asajirō (1868–1944)] I
felt as if I were gradually growing taller and as if the limits in all direc-
tions were steadily expanding. The universe that I had not known until
now was opening itself to my eyes with every page. . . . There is nothing
at all which is not changing.” This discovery was simultaneous with his
discoveries of Kropotkin’s modern anarchist writings. Ōsugi wrote:
Anarchists begin by explaining astronomy in the introduction. Then, they
explain the plants and animals. Finally, they discuss human society. In due
course, I tire of books. I raise my head and stare into space. The first things I
see are the sun, moon, and stars, the movement of the clouds, the leaves of the
paulownia tree, sparrows, black kites, chickens, and then, lowering my gaze,
the roof of the opposite prison building. It is exactly as if I were practicing what

16. Ibid.
17. Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, p. 33.
18. Ibid, p. 47.
308 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

I was just now reading. As scant as my knowledge of nature is, I am constantly

embarrassed. I think, “From now on I will seriously study nature.”
The more I read and think about it, nature is for some reason logical, and
logic is embodied completely in nature. Further, I must admire nature greatly,
for this logic must similarly be embodied entirely in human society which has
been developed by nature.

Japanese anarchists made a direct linkage between human society

and the universe and claimed that the interdependent relationship be-
tween humans and nature was such that it logically followed that humans
had no choice but to harmonize society with the most advanced scien-
tific knowledge of space matter and the natural world. They believed that
human subjectivity and social relations ought to reflexively mirror scien-
tific findings about the nature of the physical and natural universe around
and within human beings.
The moment of Ōsugi’s adoption of anarchism corresponded pre-
cisely with the moment of his discovery of biological evolutionary the-
ory. In this regard, Ōsugi was like others in this period who similarly
attributed their conversions to anarchism to the fundamental change in
their understanding of human relations to nature. Kōtoku, for example,
had spent much of his time in prison at the war’s end reading Kropot-
kin’s writings for the first time, in tandem with a book titled Physics of
the Universe. It was during this time that Kōtoku turned definitively to
anarchism. These were just a few of the many cooperatist anarchists who
embraced this negative discovery of cosmological knowledge from the
very moment of their adoption of formal anarchism.
Ishikawa Sanshirō problematized the definition of progress as the
conquering of nature. He saw this as the frightening product of the con-
ception of nature as the enemy of civilization and the antithesis of human
culture. Ishikawa proposed instead to embrace boundless nature, leading
to a deep connection of the limited human life to the limitless world of
nature. If there were to be any progress in his own life, Ishikawa wrote,
that progress would be to aim at that ideal of a human civilization deeply
interconnected with nature.

19. Ibid., p. 48.

20. Ishikawa, Hi shinkaron to jinsei.
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 309

In this context, anarchists brought back the writings of the so-called

forgotten Tokugawa thinker Andō Shōeki in an influential article in
Nihon heimin shimbun in Osaka. Shōeki’s argument for equality and
interdependence in human society as an expression of the natural energy
within all living beings and his cosmological view of human-nature rela-
tions helped fuel the anarchist scientific imagination at this time. In
1908, anarchists reintroduced the lost writings of this forgotten Tokugawa
thinker as a precursor to the modern anarchist movement in Japan and
in this way resurrected Shōeki as “the anarchist of 150 years ago.” Anar-
chists, too, were inventing traditions. In 1912, just before his death, Taoka
Reiun, discussed in Chapter 4, expressed his wish to read Shōeki’s writ-
ings after reading the article about Shōeki published by anarchists in
Nihon heimin shimbun. Shōeki was a little known thinker who wrote
in the 1700s from the northeastern regional town of Hachinohe. His work
was not discovered in the modern era until the school headmaster Kanō
Kōkichi (1865–1942) stumbled across original manuscripts of Shōeki’s
writings in an old bookstore in 1899. Reiun’s and other cooperatist anar-
chists’ excitement over finding Shōeki’s writings may best be understood
in the intellectual context of the post-Russo-Japanese War scientific turn.
That Shōeki is still often discussed today in Japan as an anarchist, an
ecological thinker, and an advocate of democracy echoes Japanese anar-
chists’ introduction of his writings one century earlier.
Shōeki offered an understanding of a progressive universe that, although
not scientific in method, well represented the notion of the centerless
universe in modern cooperatist anarchist thought. He wrote of incessant
movement and change fueled from within by the shared energy that is
immanent in all living beings. This never-ending energy, balanced by an
equilibrium between the living creatures of the natural world, including
between man and woman, materialized in everyday life through ordi-
nary everyday work according to the anarchists’ Shōeki. All were prod-
ucts of and possessed the energy of life, and all took part in the constant
exchange of energy for mutual well-being. His notion of the functioning
universe was absent a hierarchical dichotomy of high and low ordained

21. “Hyaku gojūnen mae no museifushugisha Andō Shōeki,” Nihon heimin shimbun,
p. 15; reprinted in Meiji shakai shugi shiryō shū, p. 255. For discussions of Shōeki in the
Western historical literature, see Norman, Andō Shōeki; and Najita, “Andō Shōeki.”
310 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

by God. Shōeki’s cosmological view of the interworking of nature and

human beings provided for equality among the heimin and for an anar-
chist form of “democracy.” For Shōeki, nature was the only reliable source
and the first principle of human knowledge. He contrasted shizenno yo
(the natural state) with that of hōno yo or hōsei (the world of law), in which
people who possess power without working control those who work and
engage with nature, the peasants.
In their efforts to express these scientific truths in cultural production
and thereby remedy the gap between socio-cultural understandings of
the world and scientific knowledge, cooperatist anarchists undertook a
series of translations of the latest theories and observations in the bio-
logical sciences and initiated a scientific turn in Japanese cultural life.
For anarchists, the evolutionary implications of the latest discoveries of
natural science were to be reflected directly in human history and prog-
ress. In turn, popular understandings of natural science had to reflect
that notion of progress.

Ilya Mechnikov and the Symbiotic Body

Darwinism in Japan has long been associated with Spencerian Darwin-
ism, or social Darwinism, which was widely used to shape and justify
official domestic and foreign policies in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Darwin was used in social Darwinism to prove “sci-
entifically” that humans belonged to a larger hierarchical order in which
all beings were to evolve to a higher stage, with a purpose of progressively
higher development. Social Darwinism and Malthusianism permeated
official domestic and foreign policies, as well as the discussions of some
leading academic intellectuals, at the end of the nineteenth century.
It would be tempting to read the many references to Darwin in Japan
in this period as expressions of Darwin’s impact on Japanese intellectual
life, but Japanese anarchists’ translations and popularization of Darwin
radically complicate this narrative. Darwin’s thought was used very dif-
ferently from the way in which it was used in Western Europe and the
United States in the early twentieth century. Anarchists reread Darwin
through the lens of Russian-Japanese anarchist writings on evolution in

22. Yasunaga, Andō Shōeki, pp. 60– 72, 85–88, 199–207.

 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 311

a manner that departed from social Darwinist ideology. Whereas Dar-

winism was widely associated in the West with the rejection of religious
belief and with social Darwinist ideas, Japanese anarchists translated
and disseminated a Darwinism that emphasized symbiosis, cooperation,
and altruism, key concepts in understanding anarchist readings of Dar-
win, as innate traits in the human and animal world. Ōsugi and other
Japanese anarchists translated and introduced Darwin’s writings as a
theory of the evolution of increasing diversity of interconnected natural
forms, the so-called tree of life. This reading of Darwin formed a scien-
tific foundation for the promotion of diversity and nonhierarchy in cul-
tures and languages, or Esperantism, discussed in Chapter 5.
The foundations of this reading of Darwin were, in the words of
Daniel Todes, “Darwin without Malthus.” Darwin realized after reading
Malthus’s work on the dangers of overpopulation that in nature, plants
and animals produce far more offspring than are capable of surviving.
Darwin adapted Malthus’s theory to the natural world, claiming that this
created the conditions for the improvement of a species, whereby only
the fittest among siblings could survive and pass on their traits to the
next generation. This continual process of competition and natural selec-
tion would work to improve the species and eventually lead to the for-
mation of a new species.
Seeking to revise this aspect of Darwin’s thought, nineteenth-century
Russian scientists like Kropotkin, his elder mentor Lev Mechnikov, and
Ilya Mechnikov participated in the development of the notion of Dar-
win without Malthus and applied it to their studies and explorations of
human society and civilization. This anti-Malthusian and non-Spencerian
understanding made Kropotkin’s work, which integrated human civili-
zational progress with the latest scientific discoveries, very popular in
Japan. This anti-Malthusian understanding of Darwin characteristic of
Ilya Mechnikov’s work also propelled Japanese anarchists to read and
disseminate his writings. The scientific turn among Japanese anarchists
was fully embedded in the longer history of Russian-Japanese transna-
tional intellectual relations.

23. Todes, “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor.”

312 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

The idea of nonhierarchy attributed to Darwinism thus was not a

simple product of Darwin’s influence on Japanese cultural and intellectual
life, but rather an expression of cooperatist anarchism’s specific reading
and application of Darwin in Japan. Japanese anarchists’ rereading of
Darwinism as a theory of evolution befitting their interest in anarchist
progress developed in dialogue with Russian natural sciences represented
by Kropotkin and Ilya Mechnikov. These two theorists adapted Darwin-
ian evolutionary theory to what Todes has identified as a specifically Rus-
sian style of thinking about evolution and biology. Translated side by
side with these Russian intermediaries and reread from an alternative lens
of modernity, Darwin came to be embraced by cooperatist anarchists in
Japan as one of their own.
Ilya Mechnikov’s work identified the symbiotic functions of the
human body from within the body itself. His scientific contributions
expand knowledge of the ways in which the body has been imagined
and constructed. Scholars have historicized the body as an object or expres-
sion of colonized, racial, and gendered hierarchies, as a tool of resistance,
and as other forms of body politics. Mechnikov, however, radicalized the
human body from within itself as a symbiotic entity composed of and
dependent on interactive microorganisms. He worked on the symbiotic
relationship of the human body with the bacteria and other microorgan-
isms that thrived within the body and promoted their hosts’ health and
well-being.
Mechnikov’s scientific life was guided by his analysis of Darwin’s
theory of evolution. His writings offered many cooperatist anarchists their
first persuasive insight into Darwin’s scientific ideas in a manner that was
opposed to the social Darwinism then prevalent in imperial ideology.
However, although Mechnikov’s scientific work was inspired by Darwin’s
ideas, he maintained his opposition to the emphasis in orthodox Darwin-
ian science on the Malthusian concept of overpopulation’s role in dictat-
ing competition within species. Mechnikov emphasized the functioning
of conflict and symbiosis between microorganisms within the individual
body in the struggle for existence. Japanese anarchists selected his work
as an interpretation and reworking of Darwinian theories of evolution.
For Japanese anarchists, the human body discovered by Mechnikov
was a body functioning in mutual interaction and interdependence with
its environment from both within and without and was a reflection of a
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 313

much larger cosmological universe. His understanding of multiple levels

of “social” relations among organisms, both within and outside the human
body led him to reflect in his writings on how adaptations in human
interactions with the microbiotic world could prolong individual lives.
He believed that furthering scientific understanding of microorganisms’
symbiotic functions and competitive relationships within the body was a
key to the prolongation of life. One study of his that has continued to be
widely known and pursued in scientific research in Japan determined
that microorganisms in the stomach work in symbiotic relationship with
their host, the human body. Mechnikov’s study found that although the
microorganisms depended on their host for survival, the human body
relied on the microorganisms, known as gut flora, to help digest food and
to fight off unhealthy organisms in the stomach. He famously proposed
that by regularly drinking fermented milk products, such as yogurt, which
had microorganisms integral to the healthy functioning of the intes-
tines, humans could help regulate good and bad bacteria within their
bodies.
Mechnikov worked with the belief that science could correct natu-
rally arising disharmonies. “Let those who will have preserved the com-
bative instinct, direct it towards a struggle, not against human beings,
but against the innumerable microbes, visible or invisible, which threaten
us on all sides and prevent us from accomplishing the normal and com-
plete cycle of our existence,” Mechnikov wrote during the violence of
World War I, which greatly agonized him. He argued in his work Na-
ture of Man that the happiness and well-being of man lay in his attain-
ment of harmony with the order of nature that lay both within his own
body and outside in his environment. He observed that man’s adapta-
tion to nature and harmony with the environment was far from complete,
a disjuncture rooted in the profound changes achieved in his evolution-
ary development. He believed that the exact sciences should serve to
remedy the organic disharmonies within humans and thereby offer solu-
tions to the problems of human happiness.

24. Elie Metchnikoff, Nature of Man, pp. 254–55.

25. Quoted in Todes, Darwin without Malthus, p. 103.
26. See, for example, Elie Metchnikoff, Nature of Man, pp. 209–15; and Elie Metch-
nikoff, “Haunting Terror of All Human Life.”
314 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

Mechnikov identified the will to life as a major source of disjuncture

in human life. Unlike other creatures he had observed, who appeared to
lose the instinct of self-preservation at the time of their natural deaths,
human beings largely held on to the will to live until the last days of their
lives, a disharmony that caused tremendous suffering and fear. His work
in microbiology offered a solution to this disjuncture. His discoveries
had revealed the positive role that the countless microorganisms he dis-
covered existing symbiotically within the human body played in human
health and longevity. Through a science premised on the acceptance
that “nature” was internal to the human being, the natural disharmonies
within human beings could be resolved.
Mechnikov’s theory followed from a lifelong interest in the question
of the nature of the struggle for existence. He found that inflamma-
tion, the swelling of an infected area with blood fluid and its white blood
cells, was a defensive reaction reflecting the struggle between the body’s
white blood cells and an invading parasite. He identified phagocytosis as
the incorporation of foreign, parasitic microbes by individual white blood
cells. The functioning of aspects of the immune system in higher organ-
isms had evolved from intracellular digestion in lower organisms, Mech-
nikov argued. It was his findings on immunity that won him the Nobel
Prize.
Mechnikov’s work took lessons for human existence from man’s evo-
lutionary origins in nature. In his work in embryology, he drew conclu-
sions about the functioning of human defense against microorganisms
from his examinations of primitive organisms. Here, Mechnikov echoed
Darwin’s view in The Descent of Man that “man with all his noble quali-
ties, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence
which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature,
with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and
constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man
still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

27. See, for example, Elie Metchnikoff, Nature of Man, pp. 238– 61.
28. Ibid., pp. 262–84.
29. Todes, Darwin without Malthus, pp. 82–103.
30. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 619.
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 315

This Darwinist reminder of man’s humble origins, of his ties to all

living things, in Mechnikov’s claims, attracted Japanese anarchists.
Mechnikov’s Nature of Man inspired Japanese anarchists by its attempt
to draw conclusions for human life from his scientific findings founded
in evolutionary thinking. Many participants in the cultural revolution
in the wake of the history slide, including the leading thinkers Arishima,
Ishikawa Sanshirō, Ōsugi, Kōtoku, and Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961), closely
followed Mechnikov’s discussions of the nature of man and his evolu-
tionary origins. Yanagi, Arishima’s younger associate in the Shirakaba
school and later the leader of the Mingei arts movement, echoed this
trend by publishing a well-known article on Ilya Mechnikov in the jour-
nal Shirakaba in 1911, “Mechnikov’s Scientific View on Human Life.”
The appearance of Ilya Mechnikov in Japanese intellectual life was part
of the development of a larger Russian-Japanese transnational intellec-
tual relationship since his brother Lev’s revolutionary encounters with
Japan in the early 1870s.
Read translingually from the perspective of cooperatist anarchist
thought, Darwin’s overall vision of the multiplicity and diversity of be-
ings that evolved naturally over time and that were each adapted to their
own niche seemed to speak directly to Japanese cooperatist anarchists.
The comprehensive view of the natural world that Darwin had drawn up
was translated by anarchists into a foundational concept for the natural
origins of their nonhierarchical vision of world order. The Darwin they
had translated was in fact against Darwinism. Darwin’s nature translated
well into their understanding of an anarchist “democracy” (demokurashī)

31. In 1906, for example, Kōtoku already relied on Mechnikov’s findings to discuss
the latest debates on vegetarianism. Kōtoku, “Saishoku no kenkyū.”
32. Decades later, Ishikawa Sanshirō reviewed the significance of Mechnikov’s sci-
entific thinking for anarchism. Ishikawa, Shinkaron kenkyū.
33. From early on in the history of Russian-Japanese transnational intellectual rela-
tions and the emergence of cooperatist anarchism since the Ishin, the dissolution of the
distinction between human and nature was a core idea. As discussed in Chapter 1, Lev
Mechnikov’s work Civilization, a product of his encounter with Ishin Japan, was a re-
flection of that notion of human civilization’s dependence on and inseparability from
nature. Indeed, Lev Mechnikov’s work captured many readers in that it redefined the
idea of civilization and progress by dissolving the essential distinction between human
culture and nature.
316 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

as the sociocultural manifestation of webs of life mutually interacting

and functioning within their own particular niche, without need for the
state (see the Epilogue). Darwin’s findings of altruistic behavior in the
animal world, largely overlooked until relatively recently by natural scien-
tists in the West, were entirely consistent with this urge to identify mutual
aid as a law of nature.
Often what cooperatist anarchists chose not to translate was as impor-
tant as what they did translate. The selectivity with which anarchists
translated and read Darwin is indicative of the limitations of his influ-
ence. Anarchists did not translate Darwin’s second work, The Descent of
Man, first published in 1871, which applied evolutionary theory to humans.
Containing Spencerian and Malthusian discussions of race and culture
with which cooperatist anarchists would have found fault, a section of
The Descent of Man conjectured that the savage or “weaker” races would
eventually die out or be absorbed because of contact with the “civilized
races” and interracial and intertribal competition. Darwin himself ad-
hered to a concept that equated race with culture, which would become
widespread at the turn of the last century. Therefore, the natural selec-
tion of species led Darwin to conclude that races, and therefore cultures,
would be naturally selected out. This would lead to the extinction of the
peoples who were more physically, culturally, and linguistically “savage.”
Darwin wrote:
Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race
with race. Various checks are always in action, as specified in a former chapter,
which serve to keep down the numbers of each savage tribe— such as periodical
famines, the wandering of the parents and the consequent deaths of infants,
prolonged suckling, the stealing of women, wars, accidents, sickness, licentious-
ness, especially infanticide, and, perhaps, lessened fertility from less nutritious
food, and many hardships. If from any cause any one of these checks is less-
ened, even in a slight degree, the tribe thus favored will tend to increase; and
when one of two adjoining tribes becomes more numerous and powerful than
the other, the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and
absorption. Even when a weaker tribe is not thus abruptly swept away, if it once
begins to decrease, it generally goes on decreasing until it is extinct. When civi-

34. For an account of this idea, see Stocking, “Turn-of-the-Century Concept of

Race.”
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 317

lized nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short. . . . The
grade of civilization seems a most important element in the success of nations
which come in competition.

It was hardly a coincidence that Japanese anarchists did not translate

The Descent of Man. Just as Darwin’s cultural lens led him to interpret the
implications of his scientific findings for human society and evolution in
a particular manner, so did Japanese anarchists come to differing conclu-
sions from Darwin’s on the implications of his work for human life. One
can understand in this way Ōsugi’s criticism of an earlier introduction of
Darwin’s ideas by the biologist Oka Asajirō for overemphasizing compe-
tition in Darwin’s thoughts. In Ōsugi’s view, Oka had echoed Huxley’s
misunderstanding of Darwin’s idea of the struggle for existence.
In this way, Japanese anarchists guilelessly paired Darwin’s On the
Origin of Species with Kropotkin’s anti-Malthusian rereading of Darwin.
For Ōsugi, the cooperatist anarchist time in Kropotkin’s writings was
inseparable both from the scientific findings on which Kropotkin’s the-
ory of mutual aid was based and from Kropotkin’s cooperatist readings
of Darwin.
The rereading of Darwin in light of his work on altruism finds an
echo in the entirely different historical context of contemporary times.
Contemporary biological scientists have sought to complicate under-
standings of Darwin’s notions of the “struggle for survival” by examin-
ing symbiotic relationships and cooperation, altruistic behavior, and even
empathy both within species and between species. Yet in early twentieth-
century Japan, the radical implications of Darwin’s ideas, of the continu-
ity in morality and behavior between humans and animals, were widely
accepted. The account of Darwin in global history thus cannot avoid the
travel of his ideas to Japan, not as a diversion, which is how one might
normally tend to describe the travel of Western ideas to Japan in this
period, but as a significant trip that has contributed to the reinterpreta-
tion and integral development of Darwin’s acceptance in the world at
large. The global trajectory of Darwin’s thought is thus greatly enriched

35. Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 238– 9, 182–83.

36. Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, p. 49.
37. See, for example, Waal, Age of Empathy; and Cronin, Ant and the Peacock.
318 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

when it is viewed through the lens of modern Japanese history and

Russian-Japanese transnational intellectual relations.
Translated in this manner in tandem with the Russian biological sci-
ences, Darwin came to inform cooperatist anarchists’ preexisting idea
of history and progress. In Japanese anarchist readings of him, Darwin
applied the functioning of evolutionary laws fairly equally to both human
beings and the natural world. He identified the device for change and
variation in species as occurring randomly rather than by divine inter-
vention or plan.
Darwin’s ideas, as well as those of Fabre and Ilya Mechnikov, were
expressed most strongly in Japan at this time in the cultural sphere, in
social thought, art, and literature, for example, rather than in the science
classes of imperial universities. This was due in part to the translation,
interpretation, and introduction of the natural sciences in Japan by self-
schooled anarchists. Their translations and writings about science were
read as a kind of literature, and some even became an integral part of
popular children’s literature. Only later did academia follow these trends
in popular culture.

Dung-Ball Rollers as Society

It is helpful here to relate the anarchist translations of Darwin and Kro-
potkin’s work and anarchists’ interest in Ilya Mechnikov to anarchist
translations of the work of Fabre in Japan. More than those of any other
biologist, including Darwin, anarchist translations of Fabre popularized
scientific investigations of the biological world. Fabre’s observations of
the insect world seemed to verify the cooperatist anarchist view of nature.
It was Fabre who was translated in order to demonstrate the idea that all
species have their unique role and function in nature. Cooperatist anar-
chists turned to the work of Fabre to demonstrate scientifically the rooted-
ness of interdependence and mutual aid in nature.
At the same time, the absence of the notion of evolution in Fabre’s
writings of the divine perfection of all creatures led anarchists to pair Fabre
with Darwinian theory and Mechnikov’s findings in anarchist ideas of
the natural world. Ōsugi’s successive translations of Darwin’s Origin of
Species in 1914, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in 1917, and Fabre’s study of in-
sects, Souvenirs entomologiques, in 1922 reflected his belief in cooperatist
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 319

anarchism as the closest social expression of scientific discovery as nega-

tive discovery. Ōsugi recalled that while he was in prison, he simulta-
neously sought out the Reclus volume on Japan, the writings of Darwin
and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who had co-discovered with Dar-
win natural selection in evolution, and Fabre’s tales. Lev Mechnikov
had been responsible for researching and writing the volume on Japan in
Reclus’s Nouvelle géographie universelle (see Chapter 1). Darwin, Wallace,
Lev Mechnikov’s geographic study of Japan, and Fabre’s rather eccentric
insect studies were an unlikely match. For Ōsugi, however, the juxtapo-
sition of their writings, a scientific study of “societies” of insects as the
smallest representatives of the natural world, the theory of evolution and
natural selection by Darwin and Wallace, and Lev Mechnikov’s obser-
vation of Japanese society as the closest expression of cooperatism of-
fered scientific demonstrations of anarchist progress.
Confident of the naturally endowed intellectual, social, and cultural
capacity of the heimin, anarchists assumed that the majority of people
were capable of assimilating science into their thought and practices.
The dissemination of Fabre’s writings became an ideal means to further
the integration of human life with the latest scientific findings on a
broad scale. The simple language and narrative style used by Fabre, who
attempted to make his findings accessible to youth, made his work a per-
fect means for Ōsugi to promulgate the latest scientific findings to the
heimin. With its accessible language and narrative style, Ōsugi’s transla-
tion of Fabre’s work became a massively popular and integral part of
children’s literature.
Ōsugi’s introduction and translation of Fabre made the French ento-
mologist wildly popular in Japan among children and adults alike.
Ōsugi’s translated volume of little creatures embodying the progressive
practices of everyday doing and playing a part in a much larger dynamic
environment has captured the imagination of children in Japan in a way
no other children’s literature could have. Today, Fabre continues to have
almost cult status in Japan. His name and his entomological studies are
synonymous with childhood in Japan. Summertime for children in Japan

38. Darwin, Shu no kigen; Kropotkin, Sōgo fujo ron; Fabre, Konchūki. See also
Ōsugi, Kuropotokin kenkyū.
39. Ōsugi, “Yakushano jo,” p. 8.
320 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

has long been equated with the reading of Fabre’s books and the associ-
ated play with insects modeled after Fabre’s writings. Countless natural
scientists and insect lovers, both professional and amateur, began their
career with their encounter with natural science through Ōsugi’s transla-
tions of Fabre’s entomology. Although everyone in Japan seems to know
Fabre’s entomological studies, what Japanese do not know is that the
embrace of Fabre originated in anarchist ideas of progress.
In Japanese readings of Fabre, the dung beetle, or scarab beetle, which
lives off animal excrement, takes a particular and prominent place. Fabre
studied other insects, but it has been his discussions of the dung beetle
that have made it a long-celebrated hero among Japa nese children. The
beetle is endearingly known by the catchy name funkorogashi (dung-ball
roller), a term first translated and popularized by anarchists. This little
champion has been turned into a virtual industry by way of countless
plastic insect play figures, cartoons, T-shirts, and other products. The
unlikely hero is imprinted in Japanese minds together with its unappetiz-
ing ball of excrement, which Ōsugi’s translation of Fabre has succeeded
in making inseparable from the identification of Fabre himself.
Anarchists’ success in disseminating the scientific studies of Fabre is
evidenced by the work’s immediate surge in sales upon publication. In
addition to the numerous reprints of Ōsugi’s translation of Konchūki,
two more multivolume complete translations of Fabre’s work were pub-
lished in the early 1930s, a twenty-volume edition by Iwanami Bunko and
a ten-volume edition by ARS. These marked the beginning of a number
of multivolume versions of the work published in Japan, with the latest
new edition being published in 2005. Ōsugi’s translations of Fabre also
found their way to China via his transnational links with Chinese anar-
chists and radicals. There, they were differently read and used as a
metaphorical weapon for cultural critique rather than for the sake of in-
terest in science itself.

40. Fabre, Fāburu Konchūki.

41. Peng, “Traveling Text,” p. 16.
42. For a discussion of Chinese radical readings of Fabre as a “traveling text” that
moved to the Chinese revolutionary context via Japa nese anarchist translations, see
Peng, “Traveling Text.”
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 321

State officials felt threatened by the immediate and massive popular-

ity of anarchist introductions of the biological sciences, and the govern-
ment banned Konchū shakai (Insect society) at this time. To their credit,
Japanese intelligence officers also sensed the linkage between the in-
creasingly popularized radical destabilization of the natural scientific
order and Esperantists’ world vision. The police began to refer to Espe-
rantists as followers of “Kropotkinist Darwinism” in their top-secret
(gokuhi) reports. The problem with this for them was that cooperatist
anarchist Darwinism departed entirely from the evolutionary theory of
Spencerian social Darwinism supportive of the imperial ideology of Ja-
pan. Anarchist readings of Darwin and Fabre’s nature were fundamen-
tally at odds with the state projects of modernization and the imperialist
logic they promoted.
Fabre’s work is considered a precursor to ethology, the science of ani-
mal and human behavior. He wrote about the natural intelligence and
functioning of insects from the perspective of the insects themselves and
thus earned the moniker “psychologist of the world of insects.” His stud-
ies captured the various trials and tribulations that the clever dung bee-
tles undergo, working together to make a pile of animal excrement many
times their own weight into a workable ball that they can roll into an ap-
propriate hiding place for long-term shared consumption. Without the
natural virtue of the lowly beetle, the farms that rely daily on the trans-
formation of the piles of dung from cows, pigs, sheep, and other farm ani-
mals into nutrient-filled soil for regeneration into healthy grass and crops
could not exist. The story of the dung beetle thus represents many of the
most honored ideas of cooperatist anarchism in Japan: symbiosis, knowl-
edge, and virtue arising from nature itself. The popularity in Japan of
what would appear to be the lowliest, most unnecessary and disposable
members and activities of society, the movers and shakers of animal excre-
ment in the natural world, is rooted in this history of anarchism.
Fabre’s genius lay in his telling of the details of the beetle’s life, and he
imbued his tales with examinations of insects’ astounding knowledge, or
what he called divine “intelligence.” Fabre’s tales drew a picture of what

43. See Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui, pp. 185–86.

44. GSS, “Kageki ha sonota kikenshugi sha torishimari kankei zōken, gaikokujin no
bu: Rokoku jin,” 4.3.2.1-2-2, January 21, Taishō 9 (1920), top-secret file no. 19.
322 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

he believed were God-given instincts. These instincts gave the beetle the
natural ability and know-how to transform, together with his cohorts,
mounds of excrement into a perfect sphere many times their own weight,
move the balls to a hiding place prepared in advance, cover them with
dirt and hay along the way in order to hide the smell and prevent other
predators from finding them, and thus preserve their precious balls of
dung for shared consumption within the safe confines of the beetles’
underground lair. Many Japanese did not view nature through the
Christian lens of a world ordered by a metaphysical God in the way in
which Fabre did. Nonetheless, Fabre’s tales of innate knowledge and
behavior unique to each species, embodied in such unendearing heroes as
the dung beetle, the wasp, and the spider, captured anarchists’ interest.
This in turn inspired the Japanese public’s hundred-year love affair with
Fabre.
Ōsugi’s dedication to Fabre in the last years of his life is indicative of
the significance he gave to Fabre’s science for his firm belief in anarchist
progress. His translations of Fabre quickly became a shared anarchist
project reliant on cooperatist networks. Not only what was constructed
but who was doing it is significant. Sōbunkaku, the anarchist publishing
company founded and run by Asuke Soichi and financially supported by
Arishima, published Ōsugi’s translation of the first volume of Fabre’s
Souvenirs entomologiques, popularly known in Japanese as Konchūki. By
this time, Asuke, who had been working as a traveling vendor who sold
baked sweet potatoes from his wooden cart, had become an influential
publisher on whom Ōsugi and many other anarchists relied on to publish
their writings. Although Asuke was one of the most dynamic publishers
in modern Japan, his work and activities have almost completely disap-
peared from history.
The last year of Ōsugi’s life was spent translating Fabre’s writings. In
addition to Konchūki, Ōsugi also cotranslated with the anarchist Itō
Noe Tales of Natural Science (Shizen kagaku no hanashi) and The Secrets
of Science (Kagaku no fushigi), published in 1923 through ARS Publish-
ing Company. During the several months Ōsugi was in France in 1923 to
attend the international anarchist conference in Paris, a trip financed in

45. See, for example, Fabre, Fāburu Konchūki, pp. 27– 67.
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 323

large part by Arishima Takeo, Ōsugi made plans to visit the place where
Fabre had worked. Although the trip never materialized, Ōsugi had
planned to translate the entire multivolume series of Fabre’s Souvenirs
entomologiques. When some police officers murdered Ōsugi and his part-
ner Ito in the chaos of the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, it was another
anarchist in the cooperatist anarchist network, Shiina Sonoji (1887–
1962), who took over the task of continuing the translations of Fabre.
Putting their anger into their translations of insects, anarchist transla-
tors and publishers of Fabre like Shiina and Asuke ensured that Ōsugi’s
spirit and ideas survived in the dung beetle and other insects of Fabre’s
work.
Although numerous translations have been made of Fabre’s Souvenirs
entomologiques since 1923, the particular vibrancy of the colloquial lan-
guage into which Ōsugi translated the first volume has drawn many
readers to his translation. Ōsugi’s translation of volume 1 was reprinted
numerous times in the 1920s and 1930s, and the most recent reprint was
published in 2005. His careful crafting of a powerful anarchist lan-
guage indicates that his translation of the work was more than a passing
interest for Ōsugi. Konchūki remained in the tradition of linguistic in-
vention in Esperanto and the creation of a revolutionary new Japanese
colloquial language initiated by Futabatei. In this way, Konchūki contin-
ued the anarchist tradition of encouraging learning by heimin outside the
walls of the imperial academic institutions that served the nation-state.
This understanding of Fabre and of Ōsugi’s investment in translating
his writings suggests the need for a rereading of Ōsugi himself. The an-
archist has often been understood as a radical individualist, which may
fit wider trends in the global anarchist movement, particularly that of
“egoist anarchism,” after the thought of German philosopher Max Stirn-
er. However, Fabre’s portrayal of the natural world and Ōsugi’s role in
promoting a scientific turn in tune with the latest findings of symbiosis

46. Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, pp. 148–49.

47. Fabre, Konchūki.
48. Fabre, Fāburu Konchūki.
49. Although Stanley describes Ōsugi’s emphasis on individualism and the ego, he
also notes that Ōsugi sought to distance himself from Stirner’s extreme individualism.
Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, pp. 62–63.
324 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

involving creatures from single cells to human beings do not fit the widely
disseminated understanding of Ōsugi as a proponent of radical egoism.
Ōsugi’s view of the individual ego may be more in accord with the idea
of naturally endowed, innate individual virtue than with Cartesian
notions of the individual and the Freudian ego conceived in clear dis-
tinction from the environment.
Although Darwin greatly admired Fabre’s detailed observations of
insect behavior, Fabre criticized the work of Darwin for its emphasis on
competition and survival of the fittest. It was on the basis of this criticism
that the Christian socialist and Nonwar Movement participant Kagawa
Toyohiko (1888–1960) wrote the first Japanese translation of Fabre in
1919. Kagawa sharply contrasted Darwin’s notion of competition-driven
evolution with Fabre’s belief in the divine origins of individual species.
Japanese anarchists, however, saw no contradiction between Fabre, who
attributed directly to God the design and perfection of each living thing,
and Darwin, who deduced that evolution was the result of a scientifically
explainable process of natural selection. For cooperatist anarchists, the
creator of which Fabre spoke was the same as the Gxd without being of
anarchist religion, which attributed an inherent moral force and energy
to all living things. Because this Gxd was not the grand designer of the
natural world found in Western Christianity, there remained no contra-
diction in anarchists’ adoption of both the biblically inspired scientific
findings of Fabre and writings on evolutionary origin by Darwin.
Ōsugi quickly attempted to remedy Kagawa’s identification of Darwin’s
difference from Fabre. Ōsugi, who had already published his translation
of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, criticized Kagawa for overemphasiz-
ing the element of competition in Darwin’s work and instead sought a
synthesis of the findings of the evolutionary theorist and the entomolo-
gist. Ōsugi’s translations of Fabre and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
thereby brought out and enhanced the intersection of their ideas for the
wider Japanese public.

The anarchist investment in science is revealing, particularly because

historians have tended to associate anarchism with irrationalism and
utopianism founded on revolutionary dreams, far removed from any
“reality” based on empirical facts. Arising in response to the Nonwar
Movement and the history slide, scientific findings of symbiosis and
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 325

mutual aid together with competition and struggle among and within
organisms, and of instinctive knowledge among insects and other tiny
creatures, contributed to the anarchist project to overturn hierarchy and
identify the origins and nature of progress and civilization. These find-
ings were not analogies for human society taken from the animal world,
but observations of the engine of biological and social evolution.
This chapter has also uncovered the anarchist origins of the pursuit
of natural science in Japan, from the popular-level pursuit of scientific
knowledge to the inspiration for scientific discovery among trained scien-
tists. It is in the context of the scientific turn and the intellectual envi-
ronment of anarchist modernity that one can understand, for example,
the primatologist Imanishi Kinji’s pioneering studies of the social and
cultural life of primates, or culture in nature. Imanishi was inspired by
his readings of Japanese anarchist translations of Kropotkin. The prima-
tologist jump-started a major revolution in research on culture in the
animal world that in turn helped inspire a rereading of Darwinian theory
in contemporary primatology. Imanishi’s novel findings, which have
influenced leading contemporary primatologists in the West, were an
intellectual product of a longer history of cooperatist anarchism span-
ning the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
The tremendous popularity of anarchists’ introductions and translations
of scientific writings would have implications for the direction that the
natural sciences would take in Japan.
Only by understanding the conceptual context in which Darwin was
translated and read can one understand why the translation and dissemi-
nation of Darwin was so often paired with Esperanto. Leading transla-
tors and popularizers of Darwin’s ideas, such as Kōtoku and Ōsugi, were
also proponents of Esperantism or other forms of interlingualism. The
popularization of anarchist Darwinism in Japan thus cannot be separated
from the surge in interest in Esperanto in early twentieth-century Japan.
The two phenomena were interconnected by the logic of cooperatist anar-
chism. Japanese who promoted Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, Fabre’s dung
beetle, and Ilya Mechnikov’s embryology also promulgated Esperanto
as a vision of a non- if not antihierarchical multiplicity of cultures and

50. See Imanishi, Japanese View of Nature.

51. See, for example, Waal, Ape and the Sushi Master.
326 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature

ethnicities and the preservation of the languages and cultures of native

and colonized peoples. This led to a dynamic intellectual link between
Darwinism and early twentieth-century multiculturalism in Japan.
Despite divergent views among Darwin, Fabre, Ilya Mechnikov, and
Kropotkin on the origins of species and the nature of evolution, Japa-
nese anarchists identified in the four scientists areas of intersection that
served their cooperatist anarchist thought. In the process of translating
these four figures, what were lost in translation were, conveniently, the
elements that failed to fit the logic of cooperatist anarchist modernity. In
the case of Darwin, anarchists embraced his scientific theories of an on-
tologically interconnected world that suggested to them that progress
was “beginningless and endless” and therefore centerless— a notion that
was radically different from Darwin’s own teleological view of evolution
that leads to the perfected human being as the ultimate goal of an intel-
ligent nature. Indeed, they chose not to translate elements in Darwin’s
writings that identified a Malthusian and Spencerian world of interracial
and interethnic competition and elimination of the supposedly weaker
races and nations that was to lead ultimately to that perfected human
being. At the same time, anarchists embraced Kropotkin’s emphasis on
Darwin’s findings of an instinctive altruism in the animal world as a basis
for the theory of mutual aid as a factor of evolution. In the case of Ilya
Mechnikov, anarchists turned to his anti-Malthusian findings of human
symbiotic interdependence with even the smallest microorganisms within
the gut, internal to the core of each human being. To Darwin’s compre-
hensive view of the tree of life and to Mechnikov’s investigations into
the minute workings of microorganisms within the human body, Fabre
added his tales of remarkably “intelligent” insect lives to round out a com-
plex understanding of a constantly self-perfecting, interconnected, coop-
eratively interdependent, centerless, beginningless, and endlessly changing
natural world as the ontological basis for cooperatist anarchist existence.
It is not surprising, then, that Ishikawa Sanshirō published his work
A Study of Evolutionary Theory in 1947, just two years after the end of
World War II. The work reviewed the significance of Darwin, Ilya Mech-
nikov, and Fabre for anarchism. Hoping perhaps to revive anarchist

52. Robert Richards discusses this view in his Darwin and the Emergence of Evolu-
tionary Theories of Mind and Behavior.
53. Ishikawa, Shinkaron Kenkyū.
 Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature 327

democracy and modernity founded on the same scientifically based

notions of the nature of human existence, Ishikawa reintroduced these
figures in the open-ended political climate of the period immediately
after World War II.
Anarchists sought to construct cultural practices that embodied the
cumulative negative discoveries of the past four hundred years so that
human society could finally reflect the findings of the cosmological and
natural sciences. Their “culture” began to be defined vis-à-vis “nature.”
What the shift in historical consciousness after the Russo-Japanese War
brought them was not only a fresh temporal and spatial mode of being
in the world but also a subjectivity of existing in that symbiotic space and
time. Culture itself was reframed and reformulated in all its variety of
expressions in the early twentieth century in response to the scientific
and historical turns of the period.
 Epilogue: Culture Turned Upside Down

During a period of roughly twenty-five years after the Russo-Japanese

War, cooperatist anarchists overturned the meaning of culture and the
cultured to meet the demands of anarchist progress. I call this recon-
struction of the concept of culture in anarchist discourse an anarchist
cultural revolution. It was the product of shifts from high culture to
popu lar, state to nonstate, institution to noninstitution, sociolinguistic
Darwinism to multiplicity and diversity of cultural development, and the
formal to the informal realms of everyday life as the sites, times, and
sources of cultural expression.
Cultural revolutions have been commonly associated with the violent
social and cultural upheavals in Communist China and the Soviet Union,
whether orchestrated by the state or as a response by the state to class
struggle and popular desire for social mobility. I use the term here to
refer to cooperatist anarchists’ overturning of the meanings and values
of various spheres of modern culture without violence or support from
the state in early twentieth-century Japan. Although the anarchist cul-
tural revolution overturned the assumptions of Western modernity, it
was also entirely distinct from nationalist cultural currents that accom-
panied decolonization movements around the world.
The anarchist concept of culture was still modern in the sense that
it denoted culture’s irreplaceable role in human progress. However,

1. Sheila Fitzpatrick first argued for the application of the concept of cultural revolu-
tion to Soviet history. See Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War.”
330 Epilogue

“culture” was no longer limited to a select handful of Japa nese elites

who had attained civilizational “enlightenment,” a rational, Christian,
and Westernized self. Similarly, it did not refer to the familiar hierarchy
of race as culture. After the invention of “the people” during the Russo-
Japanese War, the people themselves became the subject and object of
progress in this discourse. They thereby became the carriers of “culture”—
not as natives in possession of an authentic and timeless national culture,
but as those possessing the capacity to re-create and alter their surroundings
in a cooperative manner for the mutual improvement of their lives. The
dualism between the concepts of culture and nature that fed the idea of
progress also disappeared. “Culture” became the varied, creative expres-
sions of each individual’s virtue gifted from nature. Producers of anar-
chist forms of culture believed that civilizational progress was reliant on
these individual expressions for the symbiotic process of social improve-
ment. The anarchist concept of culture thereby inverted both the Western
modern notion of civilization and the ideological foundations of the
Japanese imperial state.
With the end of the Russo-Japanese War, culture began to be refash-
ioned to meet the demands of the slide in historical consciousness in-
troduced in Chapter 4. Beginning with the Esperanto movement for a
language without culture, a number of distinctive cultural movements
and intellectual developments followed one after another to constitute
the multifaceted conceptual turns in culture. Such varied cultural expres-
sions in early twentieth-century Japan as movements in children’s litera-
ture, agrarian culture, Esperanto and the People’s Arts movement, and
major trends in evolutionary theory, ethics, entomology, and microbiol-
ogy developed in response to the history slide. Anarchist cultural expres-
sions were in tune with the formulations of multiplicity, democracy,
mutual aid, and symbiosis in nature. Without a conductor to harmonize
them, the various cultural expressions nonetheless appeared as if they
had been orchestrated to overturn the concept of culture.
Previous chapters have shown how the production and circulation of
knowledge took place outside the classrooms of Japan’s imperial univer-
sities. Instead, the sites of knowledge production were often located in
places such as local shrines, rural homes that housed poetry-reading
groups, farms, churches, village schools, the second floor of the Naka-
muraya sweetshop in Tokyo, inn and pubs, the second floor of the Hei-
 Epilogue 331

min Hospital, Heimin Cafeteria, pharmacies, the shops and homes of

neighborhood book lenders, and dormitories within the imperial univer-
sities. People educated themselves and discussed the latest findings in
social studies and the natural sciences, as well as movements in art, the-
ater, language, and literature, in unofficial sites of knowledge dissemina-
tion and production. Their meetings occurred primarily in the evenings.
Culture was reproduced as knowledge that did not flow from the class-
rooms of state schools and imperial universities to shape the popular
Japanese mind. This reverse flow of knowledge is illustrated, for exam-
ple, in Chapter 5. Ōsugi’s introduction and translation of Fabre’s work
inspired popular interest in entomology and helped define and shape the
field of the biological sciences in twentieth-century Japan. From day to
night, from imperial university campuses to unofficial sites, the places
and times where and when the reverse flow of knowledge was developed
and disseminated were part of the cultural revolution.
In this intellectual environment, childhood became a highly con-
tested concept after the Russo-Japanese War because it was in the child
that notions of the relationship of nature to culture were manifested.
Cooperatist anarchists believed that virtue and talent arose naturally in
children as something to be nourished. They opposed the view of chil-
dren as a blank slate that had to be taught.
Participants in the Free Education Movement (Jiyū kyōiku undō) saw
childhood as a critical site of cultural progress. The movement, which
expanded through the same channels as the network community of co-
operatist anarchists, left an important mark in the history of popular
education and ideas of childhood. Katagami Noboru, the specialist in
Russian literature and Waseda University professor who attended the
evening salons at Nakamuraya, for example, became a key figure in the
promotion of this conception of education. In Japanese, the word for
“education” (kyōiku) is composed of two characters, “to teach” (kyō), and
“to nourish” (iku). State intellectuals like Inoue Tetsujirō, who taught
ethics at Tokyo Imperial University, advocated the teaching of national
morals. By implementing a nationwide educational policy to teach what
was “good” and “bad” in accordance with national ideology, people’s
everyday conduct could be governed. The Free Education Movement
reversed this understanding of education from an emphasis on kyō, to
teach an individual how to be a member of kokumin, the imperial national
332 Epilogue

subject, to an emphsis on iku, to nurture and nourish an individual’s

unique talents gifted by nature and spontaneous contributions to society
as mutual aid. By shifting the order of emphasis to iku, education could
maximize the nourishment of individuals and its progressive effects for
the larger community. From KYŌiku to kyōIKU the overturning of the
meaning was complete.
The anarchist notion of childhood similarly inspired the Children’s
Free Arts Movement (Jidō jiyūga undō). The movement shared with the
Free Education Movement a focus on iku, the nourishment of individual
Gxd-given virtue for anarchist progress. Participants believed that the
best place to look for nature as the source of virtue was in children. Chil-
dren’s art was an expression of that nature.
It was as part of the ideological universe of the cultural revolution
that Japanese writers began producing children’s literature in the 1910s.
Cooperatist anarchist children’s literature emerged just as a leading chil-
dren’s magazine, Shōnen sekai (Boys’ world), came to an end. It is illumi-
nating to compare the literature produced in the anarchist cultural revo-
lution with the literature of Shōnen sekai, especially given the magazine’s
fittingness to prevailing historical narratives of the rise of nationalism
in this period. The magazine was founded in 1895 by Iwaya Sazanami
(1870–1933), a famed author of children’s fairy tales and stories in Japan.
It served the state ideology by promoting the militarization of childhood.
The militarization of culture is a familiar theme in World War II–centered
historiography of this period, which has emphasized nationalism as the
emotional, intellectual, and political source of numerous cultural expres-
sions in early twentieth-century Japan. Not suprisingly, Shōnen sekai was
full of military tales of heroism and biographical/historical stories of fig-
ures whom its young readers were to imitate and learn from in order to
grow into able subjects of the state as adults. Its stories were intended to
help mold the nation’s youth into model national citizens. At the height of
the Sino-Japanese War, Shōnen sekai celebrated tales of war and bravery.
Iwaya’s adaptation of the folk story “Momotarō” (Peach boy) into a tale
about a child setting out to conquer an island of ogres that was criticized
and mocked by Kōtoku and other anarchists during the Russo-Japanese
War, is understood to have contributed to instilling a nationalistic and
imperializing consciousness in its young readers.
 Epilogue 333

The anarchist cultural revolution introduced a new culture of chil-

dren’s literary production. The new children’s literature movement over-
turned existing practices of writing stories for children about adults or
adultlike children that imposed adult activities like fighting wars and
conquering foreign lands on child characters. The children’s magazine
Akai tori (The red bird), founded in 1918, played a major role in upend-
ing the prevailing culture of children’s literature writing. The magazine
published children’s stories written and illustrated by famous anarchists
and socialists like Arishima, Akita, Ogawa Mimei, Takehisa Yumeji (1884–
1934), and the massively popular songwriter Kitahara Hakushū. These
figures shared a practice of writing stories and songs for adults that, in the
words of Kitahara, were written in the words of children and reflected
the minds of children. That is, by knowing the world in the way a child
knows the world, adult minds could be opened to the original, innately
possessed knowledge of virtue gifted by nature. The anarchist future was
invested in childhood, from which adults were to study and learn. Only
from this conceptual context of cultural revolution and its intellectual
meeting with the scientific turn can one understand, for example, why
Ōsugi’s translation of Fabre’s entomological studies became the most suc-
cessful work to emerge from the genre of children’s literature from this
period.
Ōsugi was just one of a number of popularly known contributors to
the children’s literature movement. Kitahara is probably the most fa-
mous children’s songwriter in Japan to date. A friend of both the poet
Ishikawa Takuboku and the previously mentioned proponent of People’s
Arts, Yamamoto Kanae, Kitahara was part of the wider network of co-
operatist anarchists. The songwriter believed that children in particular
were able to grasp the true essence of things, and he sought to draw out
humans’ innately creative potential through children’s songs. He de-
scribed the capacity to see and experience the world through a child’s
vision not only as essential to writing true children’s songs but also as the
source of creativity among adults. Ogawa Mimei, the “founder of mod-
ern children’s literature” in Japan, similarly related that his stories were
aimed at “adults with a child’s innocent mind.” Echoing this sentiment in
1921, Akita stated that although he had written his stories for children,
they were also for adults who had a childlike nature within themselves.
334 Epilogue

He would become a leading figure in the so-called proletarian arts

movement. Beginning in 1919, Akita intensively produced children’s sto-
ries, a number of which appeared in Akai tori.
Vasilii Eroshenko also began to write children’s stories in Japan in
this context, just as the popularity of children’s literature among anar-
chists came to the fore. Using predominantly children, animals, and the
blind as the heroes of his stories, he echoed this current of juvenile liter-
ary production. Eroshenko seemed to give perfect expression to the pe-
ripheral spaces of children’s and animals’ worlds that were understood to
precede the cultural distinction between East and West, subject and
object.
Eroshenko wrote his children’s stories for the first time when he was
in Japan. He thus reflected rather than influenced existing ideas that fu-
eled the cultural revolution in Japan. Echoing the larger children’s litera-
ture movement in Japan, Eroshenko’s children’s literature was written
for adults, albeit from the perspective of children and animals. Profound
in thought and sometimes very political, his stark, highly sensory and
graphic narratives, written from the subjective point of view of crows and
eagles, tigers and chicks and children, lacked romantic innocence. Rather,
they were infused with themes of death and suffering, human injustice
and freedom. His stories included stories written and published in Espe-
ranto, such as “La tago de l’ monda paciho” (The day of world peace). The
story tells of a boy weeping on a balcony as he watches his town celebrate
the “day of world peace” during a military parade. The soldiers are re-
turning home after winning the war. While the adults rejoice over their
newfound peace, the boy cries over their selling of their souls for a new
militarized world. Another story, “The Story of a Drab Leaf,” centers on
a tree with yellow leaves and the children and young adults who stroll by
it. Each person has a different story to tell. A crippled beggar girl and a
young man who forgets his entitlement to be happy are among those
who seek solace underneath the tree’s leaves. Eroshenko’s children’s stories
were widely promoted and financed by figures like Arishima and Akita
and were published by Asuke’s anarchist publishing company Sōbunkaku.
Leaving an unmistakable if rare primary source for historians, the stories

2. Eroshenko, “La tago de l’ monda paciho.”

3. Eroshenko, “Rakontoj de velkinta folio.”
 Epilogue 335

reflected the functioning of Russian-Japanese networks of cooperatist

anarchist modernity in Japan.
Eroshenko’s attempt to portray the world from the point of view of a
child would seem to be a philosophical impossibility. Nonetheless, for
many Japanese, Eroshenko himself embodied the perceptiveness and
natural virtues of childhood. The 1923 drama Chiisaki gisei (A small sac-
rifice), published in Josei (Woman), featured a blind boy who was re-
markably similar to Eroshenko as the embodiment of innocence, a vic-
tim of the “adult’s world.” Artistic and creative, the blind youth listens to
the nature that surrounds him and creates a new world in his mind. It
was no coincidence that Eroshenko was long portrayed and remembered
in Japan as a blind youth who never seemed to age. His embodiment of
the cooperatist anarchist imagination of childhood as blind to hierar-
chies of nation, class, ethnicity, and race had helped make him very pop-
ular in Japan in the first place.
Beginning with the anarchist artist Ogawa Usen’s cartoons and
paintings that celebrated the ordinary everyday as revolutionary sites of
action during the Russo-Japanese War, the People’s Arts or Folk Arts
movement developed in this period as an aesthetic expression of coop-
eratist anarchist notions. People’s Arts is commonly known today in En-
glish and Japanese as Mingei and is strongly associated with the thinker
and Shirakaba member Yanagi Sōetsu, among others. Yanagi’s concep-
tual foundation of arts and aesthetics for the Mingei movement was
fukugō no bi (multiplicity of beauty). This notion echoed the anarchist
meaning of culture that was already circulating at the time, represented
by a broader community of theorists and practitioners of People’s Arts,
such as Yamamoto Kanae. In People’s Arts, the heimin were both subject
and object of the arts movement. Art was defined as an expression of
each individual’s Gxd-given talent and virtue and thereby as “natural”
and universal. Beauty was not to be defined by authority or hierarchy. As
expressions of the everyday lives, perceptions, and needs of common
people, the possible forms of art were countless. People’s Arts valued ev-
eryone’s free aesthetic expression in the context of prosaic, mutually ben-
eficial everyday existence, as opposed to the so-called high art produced
by and for the privileged few. Art was therefore something everyone was
capable of producing and appreciating. The movement sought to dis-
cover and further develop the aestheticization of the practice of everyday
336 Epilogue

life. Progressive everyday life was thereby reconceived as aesthetic and

socially conscious expressions of each person’s divine virtue.
Although historians have conceived of Yanagi as a cultural national-
ist whose promotion of a people’s art of Japan and Korea implicated
him as a cultural supporter of Japan’s imperialist expansion, it is also
clear that in his formative earlier years, Yanagi’s thought was funda-
mentally influenced by anarchist thought. Like those of many others,
Yanagi’s thinking and practices were largely a product of his exposure
to Japanese-Russian transnational productions of knowledge. He be-
longed to the generation that had been heavily drawn to Tolstoy’s reli-
gious thought in its formative years during the Russo-Japanese War. He
responded to his readings of anarchist religion by writing his own series
of essays on religion, Religion and Its Truth. Yanagi’s embrace of the folk
arts began with his studies of Kropotkin’s anarchist writings in the years
immediately after the Russo-Japanese War, when, like many of his gen-
eration, he read Kropotkin’s works Mutual Aid, Conquest of Bread, and
The Terror in Russia.
In his younger years, Yanagi had been a member of the highly influ-
ential Shirakaba school of art and literature. He worked closely with and
greatly admired the school’s most senior member, Arishima, as an older
mentor. The Shirakaba School was understood by contemporaries to be
an integral part of the anarchist movement. Ōsugi wrote in 1912, for ex-
ample, “When we see the members of the Shirakaba, they remind us of
the young Tolstoi and Kropotkin.” Yanagi was also a contributor to the
scientific turn. He read Ilya Mechnikov’s writings on embryology, mi-
crobiology, and gerontology and published an essay on Mechnikov’s sci-
entific work and thought in 1910. Not only were his cultural productions
a reflection of a larger cultural trend, but the way in which his ideas were
disseminated and popularized also depended on Arishima’s support.
Arishima introduced him to his best friend, Asuke, who published Yanagi’s
work at his anarchist press, Sōbunkaku. Yanagi’s formulations of Mingei
were fully situated within a broader anarchist discourse of art whose
representatives included artists such as Ogawa Usen and Yamamoto
Kanae.

4. Ōsugi Sakae, “Zadan,” p. 15. Reprinted in Ōsugi, Ōsugi Sakae zenshū, 14:49–50.
 Epilogue 337

The production of culture in this period relied heavily on anarchist

notions of democracy. Despite the powerful Western origins of the term
“democracy,” a distinct notion of anarchist “democracy” (demokurashī),
based on the Nonwar invention of heimin without the state after the
Russo-Japanese War, developed in this period without reference to the
nation-state. The Japanese imagination of “the people” as the subject for
a just sociopolitical order is similar to how the invention of “the people”
was integral for American democracy as representative government.
Given existing understandings of anarchism as a movement to eliminate
the modern state and its representative system of government, the phrase
“anarchist democracy” would seem to be an oxymoron. Yet anarchist
culture came to define the practice of everyday democratic life, given
expression in such phrases as kurashi no chikara (the power of everyday
life) by the anarchist physician Katō Tokijirō, who worked with Kōtoku
to found the Heiminsha. “Democracy” for cooperatist anarchists meant
the pursuit of the progressive principle of mutual aid in everyday life. The
promise of anarchist democracy, aligned with the notion of modernity
as an ever-changing and developing human civilization, drew numerous
people to participate in the expansion of cooperatist anarchism. Their
idea of democracy became inseparable from active popular practices of
mutual aid to overcome economic hardship. Anarchist democracy be-
came the practical means to solve people’s everyday problems and con-
cretely improve their lives in an equitable and mutually beneficial man-
ner within a larger construct of civilizational progress. As vividly phrased
in the anarchist group Chokkōdan (the Group for Direct Action),
“direct action” (chokkō) became a catchphrase of the movement. The
term referred not necessarily to trade-union strikes by workers to achieve
changes in labor policy, but rather to the direct self-organization of
people to solve shared problems cooperatively through mutual aid. In
this way, cooperatist anarchism gave ideological shape to the development
of civil society.
Anarchists in Japan gave progressive meaning to the everyday coop-
erative practices of ordinary people and their corresponding antihierar-
chical relationality and subjectivity. “Cooperative living,” ranging from

5. On the British and American versions of the invention of the people, see Morgan,
Inventing the People.
338 Epilogue

the micro level of everyday life to transnational-scale interdependence

among peoples of different ethnicities, races, and cultural backgrounds,
was identified as the key to achieving democratic society on a global
scale.
Functioning within this intellectual universe, Heimin igaku (the Peo-
ple’s Society for Medical Knowledge), Heimin Cafeteria, and Heimin
Hospital were founded and supported as cooperative institutions by an-
archists after the Russo-Japanese War to directly address people’s practi-
cal needs for hospital treatment, medical knowledge, and meals. Katō’s
Heimin Cafeteria, which opened in Tokyo in 1918, for example, clearly
distinguished its philosophy from the Marxist-Leninist ideology of class
war. The cafeteria’s “regulations” stated that the cafeteria was “part of
the larger project for mutual aid.” This particular people’s cafeteria drew
on average 700 to 800 ordinary people and anarchists every day, with
13,387 people using the cafeteria just in March 1918, for example.
Anarchist discussions of the everyday in Japan had their own nature
and origins distinct from Marxist theories of the everyday circulated at
the time. In academia today, notions of the everyday, such as that of
Henri Lefebvre, continue to rely largely on Marxist theory. Historians
have traced the existing theories of the everyday to their origins in the
Russian Revolution. According to the art scholar John Roberts, one of
the earliest and most fundamental theoretical elaborations of the every-
day was Leon Trotsky’s (1879–1940) articles for the Soviet newspaper
Pravda in the early 1920s. But the notion of the everyday in Japan during
this period was inspired not by Marxism and Soviet revolutionary theo-
ries and experiences, but by domestic historical experiences and corre-
sponding anarchist ideologies that had developed in Japan in dialogue
with Russian Populists and anarchists. Whereas the Marxist everyday is
situated within a class-based teleological construct of materialist prog-
ress, Japanese anarchists embraced the accidentality of historical change
and progress and the notion of the universal heimin as participants in
anarchist progress.
The distinctions between Marxist theories and the anarchist notion
of the everyday suggest the limitations of Marxist theories of everyday

6. Narita, Katō Tokijirō, pp. 206– 7.

7. Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday, p. 20.
 Epilogue 339

life and space that are widely used today by scholars for understanding
cultural and social trends in modern history at large. Indeed, the Marx-
ist orientation of most Japanese scholars has contributed to preventing
them from seeing the cultural and intellectual life introduced in this
book. In order to make sense of the incredibly diverse practices of every-
day life in global history, it is necessary first to consider the thoughts
that have informed the practices, thoughts that more often than not ex-
tended far beyond the limited teleological projections of Marxist theory
and the intellectual assumptions of the Russian Revolution.
The anarchist theoretical leader Ishikawa Sanshirō rendered a new
term for democracy as everyday practice. He defined and retranslated
the English term “democracy” into new Japanese terms to reflect anar-
chist thought. Ishikawa redefined demokurashī by breaking it up into
multilingual components: the Greek demo, which he translated to mean
indigenous and rooted, that is, “the people” linked with the soil, and
kurashi, which means “everyday life” in Japanese. In another translation
of “democracy,” Ishikawa created a new term, domin seikatsu (the life of
people on the soil). Although domin seikatsu stirs up images of farmers
tending the soil, Ishikawa was in fact referring to the organic rootedness
of all people in their Gxd-given nature, or virtue. Ishikawa believed that
each individual had a will (ishi) or subjectivity/virtue ( jitsusei) that was
unique in each person. This will, talent, could be realized only through
hard work and repeated practice. Ishikawa called this activity of work
and practice nenriki, which is the energy or power everyone has to begin
work on and realize his or her virtue. The resulting force that is created
in realizing one’s virtue he called katsudō, or active motion in society.
“Freedom” ( jiyū) was the possibility given to each individual to discover
and realize his or her personal Gxd-given will and virtue, ishi and jitsu-
sei. This freedom was the source of human development, which he called
sensa banshu (one thousand differences, one million kinds). This realiza-
tion of the plurality of individual development, the so-called million ways
of participation in the human community, was what Ishikawa called

8. Ishikawa Sanshirō, “Domin seikatsu,” p. 310.

9. Ishikawa, Kinsei domin tetsugaku. See also Ishikawa’s articles, “Nōhon shugi to
domin shisō”; “Shakai bigaku toshite no museifushugi”; and “Dōtai shakai bigaku
toshite no museifushugi.” See also Kitazawa, Ishikawa Sanshirō no shōgai to shisō.
340 Epilogue

democracy, domin seikatsu. Social hierarchy was the obstacle to the real-
ization of this anarchist democracy.
Democracy here perfectly coincided with anarchist thought on
“nature” and cosmological order as negative discovery, on the macro
level, and the symbiotic functioning of microorganisms within the hu-
man body, on the micro level. Ishikawa saw democracy as an expression
of what he called the “new cosmology” defined by the centerless uni-
verse. He described the “unity in multiplicity” that would lead to inde-
pendence and equality in human society. For Ishikawa, the infinity that
characterized the centerless universe dictated the absence of an absolute
subject of power and the limitlessness of possibilities for human interac-
tion and cultural invention. Anarchism was an expression of infinity in
human life, in which only relativity was absolute. Using language that
was highly reminiscent both of the Tokugawa-era writings of Andō
Shōeki and of early twentieth-century cooperatist anarchists’ cosmo-
logical vision, Ishikawa linked democracy with rootedness in nature
and the cosmos:
From my very foundation, I am a child of the land, and I cannot be separated
from the land. I rotate with the land as the land rotates, and with the land cir-
cle around the sun. I too circle around the sun, with the energy of the solar
system, so I will be inseparable from its energy. Our lives emerge on the land,
we cultivate and work on the land, and we return to the land. This is democ-
racy [domin seikatsu]. . . . Rotation and revolution are nature’s poetry. Natural
rotation provides day and night. The revolution of the land provides the sea-
sons, spring, summer, fall and winter. . . . Democracy is the truth-good-
aesthetics of human life [shinzenbi].

For many anarchists, the balance between the individual and social
was to be an eternal process of negotiation between the two. The indi-
vidual constantly changes in response to society and his or her surround-
ings. In return, society and the environment are constantly reshaped
in response to individuals. In other words, neither individual nor soci-
ety need be sacrificed for the other. For Ishikawa, Ōsugi, and many

10. Ishikawa Sanshirō, “Shakai bigaku toshite no museifushugi,” p. 201; “Dōtai

shakai bigaku toshite no museifushugi,” p. 217.
11. Ishikawa Sanshirō, “Domin seikatsu”, p. 310.
 Epilogue 341

others, this constant negotiation between the two without sacrifice was
freedom.
A number of elite students and academics belatedly began to echo
this understanding of democracy from around 1920. Just as children are
often the mirrors of the larger society, so do imperial Japan’s elites often
mirror the knowledge and sentiments around them. In the infamous
1920 Morito incident (Morito Jiken), a noted professor was fired from
Tōkyō Imperial University for teaching and writing about Kropotkin’s
anarchist thought, many years after Kropotkinism had been popular-
ized in the broader history slide. The fact that cooperatist anarchist
thought had now seeped even into the halls of the imperial university
reveals how deeply it had penetrated Japanese society on multiple levels.
Here again, there was a reverse flow of knowledge that was an expression
of the cultural revolution.
Even the elite student group Shinjinkai of Tokyo Imperial University
echoed anarchist ideas on heimin and demokurashī. Shinjinkai’s journal
introduced democracy to its readers in its first several issues with articles
featuring Russian Esperantists. In the 1920s, when Japa nese spoke of
“democracy,” it was often represented by the faces of Tolstoy and Kro-
potkin. It often referred to the emancipatory principles of worldism.
Historians have long understood Shinjinkai as having originated
from Western traditions of liberalism among a select elite highly edu-
cated in Western thought. The ideas of Shinjinkai as represented in its
journal, Demokurashī, have long been understood to be a “motley assort-
ment” of various ideas imported from the West. Understanding of
Shinjinkai has advanced little over the past four decades. Closer exami-
nation, however, reveals that the journal was not a product of a select
elite and did not simply originate in the West. Articles in the first several
issues of the journal featured discussions of cooperatist anarchism and
on intellectuals who contributed to the formulation of cooperatist anar-
chism in Japan, such as Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Russian Esperantist Za-
menhof, Rousseau, and Emma Goldman. Placed on the front pages of
the journal’s initial issues on democracy, cooperatist anarchists were
representative faces of Shinjinkai in its early years. Demokurashī focused

12. See Smith’s important work, Japan’s First Student Radicals, p. 71.
13. Demokurashī, 1919; Smith, Japan’s First Student Radicals, p. 71.
342 Epilogue

on the ideas of Kropotkin. Beginning with the journal’s second issue in

April 1919, every issue of the journal had a feature article on Kropotkin.
Every issue carried an ongoing discussion of Kropotkin’s ideas of anar-
chism, transforming Darwinian progress into progress as mutual aid.
By consistently featuring Kropotkin’s ideas, Shinjinkai declared the co-
herence of its cooperatist anarchist orientation.
Beginning with the title Demokurashī, the journal changed its name
over time, finally adopting the title Narōdo (Narod in Russian; The people)
in July 1921. Shinjinkai appears to have sought to stir up the same trans-
lated emotion of indignation and anger over injustice that had first been
evoked by Japanese translators of Russian Populist literature in the 1880s,
such as Futabatei. Narōdo used the Russian word for “the people” to refer
simultaneously to the popular subject of the Russian Populist revolu-
tionary movement and to the heimin invented in the Russo-Japanese
War. With its title spelled in both Japanese and Russian characters on
the front cover of every issue, the journal did not lose the transnational
intellectual roots of the students’ thoughts and activities. Only by rely-
ing on the conceptual framework introduced in this book to understand
modern Japanese intellectual history can one make sense of the students’
conceptual consciousness. The motto underneath the journal’s head-
ing read in the language of progress, “The future is in the hands of the
people,” combining popular consciousness of agency with progression
into the future. Even in the rather exceptional issue that placed some-
one entirely outside Russian-Japanese intellectual relations, Abraham
Lincoln, on its cover, the corresponding article mentioned almost noth-
ing about Lincoln’s ideas. Instead, Lincoln was transformed into the
image of the populist idea of narod, or heimin, as expressed in the issue’s
repetition of Lincoln’s famous quote “of the people, by the people, and
for the people.” However, this time the journal used the phrase to refer
specifically to Lincoln’s elimination of slavery rather than the idea of
constitutional governance. The issue distorted the liberal democratic ide-
als that transformed Lincoln’s support for American-syle democracy into
an urgent call for action reminiscent of the Russian populist V Narod
movement, exclaiming, “To the People! [v narod!] To the Truth! To the

14. For example, “Kuropotokin,” p. 14.

15. Narōdo 1 (July 1, 1921): 1.
 Epilogue 343

People!” The students used Lincoln here to universalize their anarchist

democratic thought.
The notion of anarchist democracy was amply demonstrated by grass-
roots associations and organizations in the decades before World War II,
such as agricultural cooperative associations, laborers’ associations, book
clubs, the Esperanto movement, student unions (zengakuren), and the
Russia Famine Relief Movement, which was the first nation-scale, spon-
taneously arising civic movement to save people outside territorial bor-
ders. In 1921, in response to the famine in Russia during its revolutionary
civil war, local circles, clubs, and associations of all kinds across Japan
established the Russia Famine Relief Movement (Roshiya kiga kyūsai
undō). Cooperatist anarchist networks played a practical and pivotal role
in joining diverse groups and associations together in a nation-scale
movement without assistance from the state. Prominent participants in
the movement included many of the figures mentioned in this book,
such as Arishima, Akita, Eroshenko, and Ōsugi, as well as student groups
like Shinjinkai. This spontaneously arising civic movement drew to-
gether a myriad of small groups from a variety of specialties and occupa-
tions, including music schools, local poetry-reading groups, the miners’
union, a dental school, local women’s clubs, and agricultural institutes
across Japan, from Sapporo in the north to Kagoshima in the south.
The movement stood out in that it unified many local and private asso-
ciations in a spontaneous effort to assist people outside the nation’s bor-
ders. The widespread sentiment to save the Russian people that triggered
this nationwide self-organized activity was remarkable, particularly given
that Japan was in the midst of its military intervention against the Bol-
shevik government. The efforts to save the “Russian people [Rōnō] en-
dangered by imperialism” were in themselves a critique of the Japanese
state’s armed intervention in Russian revolutionary society.

16. Demokurashī, 1, no. 6 (September 15, 1919): 1.

17. Kensetsu sha dōmei shi kankō iin kai, Waseda Daigaku Kensetsu sha dōmei no
rekishi, p. 173. For an illuminating local account of the Russia Famine Relief Movement
in Akita Prefecture, see Iwano, Akitaken rōnō undōshi, pp. 110–37.
18. Kensetsu sha dōmei shi kankō iin kai, Waseda Daigaku Kensetsu sha dōmei no
rekishi, p. 169.
344 Epilogue

As a direct response to the famine and as part of this wider move-

ment, student representatives of universities across Japan began to form
spontaneous student organizations that led to the founding of the All-
National Union of University Students (Gakusei rengōkai, later com-
monly known as Zengakuren). This unification of students to assist the
Russian narod (people) became the first National Student Union (Gaku-
sei rengōkai), which would become prominent again immediately after
the Asia-Pacific War through its organization of nationwide student
protests. The union has continued to play a highly influential role in or-
ganizing nationwide student protests up to today. The pivotal moment
and intellectual backbone for the emergence of the national student
union lay in the anarchist discourse on democracy that arose with the
cultural revolution, rather than in the post–World War II introduction
of democratic practices from the United States.
That civic movements in this period were informed by cooperatist
anarchist notions of heimin and demokurashī suggests a need to rethink
existing narratives of the rise of civil society in Japan. Organized civic
movements have been used to demonstrate the emergence of “civil soci-
ety” and “democracy” after World War II and the U.S. occupation. Yet
a significant intellectual development in “civil society” and “democracy”
resulted from the long-term accumulation from within and intellectual
relations with Russia.
The overturning of the meaning of culture extended to the sphere of
agriculture. From the first years of the Meiji period, modern agricultural
practices were promoted in the vast expanses of Hokkaido as a means to
achieve Japan’s colonization of its northern territory and, later, its impe-
rialist expansion into other territories.
At the heart of anarchist democracy and the modern progress formu-
lated by anarchists were the domestically rooted cooperatist activities
found in agrarian communities throughout Japan. Anarchists like Itō Noe

19. Shinjinkai, for example, announced its involvement in the relief movement by
orga nizing a benefit art exhibit for the famine in Narōdo 7 (January 1, 1922): 16. For a
detailed account of Waseda students’ involvement in the famine relief movement as
recalled by Waseda kensetsu sha members, refer to Kensetsu sha dōmei shi kanko iin
kai, Waseda Daigaku Kensetsu sha dōmei no rekishi, pp. 161–216.
20. See, for example, Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous.
 Epilogue 345

identified these practices, which she observed in her rural home region, as
“the reality of anarchism in Japan.” Itō saw in those everyday practices a
global significance for human progress. She concluded that anarchism had
been and continued to exist in everyday practice, and it was therefore this
“reality” that “we should consciously work on.” Arishima similarly said
in an interview that the success of any future social revolution lay in the
hands of a fully able and ready “people.” He explained that as elites, intel-
lectuals like himself had no place as leaders in this movement. Even such
luminaries of the anarchist movement as Kropotkin had no role in leading
any movement. However, the fact that they possessed elite status did not
mean they had no role in the movement at all. They could participate by
doing what they did best, such as writing. Each participated in his or her
own way, similar to the “million ways” described in Ishikawa Sanshirō’s
“democracy” that, for Itō, was literally everywhere in Japan.
Arishima Takeo’s liberation of his tenant farmers and founding of a
farm named the Cooperative Living Farm that was cooperatively owned
by the farmers on his former estate in 1921 became a model and symbol
of the progressiveness of cooperative practices among rural nonelites.
The success of the farm was widely known across Hokkaido and beyond,
drawing numerous farmers from northern Japan to apply for member-
ship. The farm’s modern, cooperatist anarchist perception of the world
and its integration into the broader agricultural community of Hokkaido
suggests that it was quite different from the nomadic, self-peripheralized
fugitive communites that fled the state and are featured in James Scott’s
anarchist history of Southeast Asia.
The existing view of this famous site of tenant-farmer liberation is
that of a “futile utopian project” that foundered with Arishima’s suicide
in 1923. A sourcebook frequently used in college courses in Japanese
history epitomized this view in 1997 by stating that Arishima’s suicide

21. Itō Noe, “Museifushugi no jijitsu.”

22. Arishima, “Ryokaikyu no kankei ni taisuru watashi no kangae”; Arishima, “Iki-
zumareru burujoa.”
23. For a history of the farm, see Sho Konishi, “Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist
Time.”
24. Scott, Art of Not Being Governed.
346 Epilogue

“effectively sealed the fate of this noble but poorly executed experiment.”
In contrast, the farm thrived in the decades after Arishima’s death. One
member said that he felt as if he had “climbed atop a mountain of jewels”
when he and his family became members of the farm. This sense of
achievement and progress came not from concrete material improve-
ment in their lives, of which there was little in the first decades of the
farm’s existence, but from the sense of mutual ownership of the farm
and cooperative living shared across it. As evidenced by the farm’s hand-
book, members interpreted their cooperative farm community as the
progressive materialization of Kropotkin and Arishima’s anarchist thought
even as their practices relied on commonsense rural traditions of mutual
aid.
Members of Arishima’s farm were far from the only ones to give mean-
ing to its activities through the language of cooperatist modernity. They
were widely celebrated by leftist intellectuals and agricultural laborers
alike. Their community thereby inspired a broader trend in which Japa-
nese agricultural cooperatives gave new meaning to old practices with
the language of an increasingly anticapitalist, cooperatist vision of prog-
ress and civilization with transnational tinges. Many of what appear
today to be fragmentary expressions from the Tokugawa past within the
framework of Japanese domestic history are traceable to a discourse on

25. Lu, Japan, p. 400.

26. Former farm member Kiriyama Katsuo recalled his father saying this to his fam-
ily and neighbors on numerous occasions. Interview with Kiriyama Katsuo and Mo-
moyo, two of the original members of the Arishima Cooperative Living Farm, at their
home on the former farm in Niseko Village, December 19, 2000.
27. Kyōsan nōdan techō (Arishima Cooperative Living Farm Handbook), Arishima
Takeo Memorial Museum, Archive Department, no. 8-7-90.
28. Tachibana Kōzaburō (1893–1974), who experienced a Tolstoyan religious conver-
sion in the early Taishō, founded his farm commune Kyōdaimura and, from there, the
farm cooperative movement Aiyōkai in 1929. The movement became the focal point of
agrarian activism in northern Ibaraki Prefecture. For Tachibana and the hundreds-
strong membership of Aiyōkai, the foreseen end of capitalism was the harbinger of a
new age of local self-government and economic self-sufficiency based on true brother-
hood, a life of living and working together. Making use of revolutionary anarchist lan-
guage, the representatives of Aiyōkai foresaw that “an international movement of farm-
ers will sweep the world clean of capitalism.” Vlastos, “Agrarianism without Tradition,”
p. 92.
 Epilogue 347

modernity when they are examined in light of transnational intellectual

history.
The All-Hokkaido Agricultural Industrial Cooperative Association
also began to speak in the language of Kropotkinist progress by the early
1920s. The association was the representative organ for agricultural in-
dustrial cooperatives in every town and village across Hokkaido. In
1926, the cooperative association published the first issue of its farming
journal Kyōei (Coprosperity), which outlined the ideals and goals of this
large organization. The journal sought to put the “world in perspective”
to promote thinking among agricultural laborers about world affairs.
One article, for example, focused on the revolutionary achievements of
Lenin, Kamil Pasha, and Gandhi. The journal’s dominant position
was to criticize capitalism and social Darwinist thought, which, the
journal said, had only prepared the way for the next stage: Kropotki-
nism, or cooperatism. Although the “great project” of the Meiji Ishin
had fulfilled the political tasks assigned it, the cultural resurrection in
modern Japan had not yet been achieved.
The declaration of the Hokkaido-wide cooperative called in essence
for a second, cultural, Ishin through the “cooperatist movement.” The
cooperative’s declaration stated: “In the social life of today’s civilization,
we are trying to conduct a life of less anxiety, more pleasure and hope, a
life of more creativity, mutual love, and mutual aid. Relying on egoism
or Darwinism will never lead to making a society of peace. It is Kropot-
kinism or Cooperatism that we believe in. To realize this ideal of both
the material and spiritual world, industrial cooperativism is nothing but
Kropotkinism.” The farmers’ use of Kropotkinist language in the dec-
laration as part of their attempt to rectify history is remarkable. Their
association gave meaning to agricultural practices with anarchist ideas of
progress even in Hokkaido, the nation’s experimental project of Western

29. In the article, whereas Lenin instigated the self-governance of the agricultural
villages through his New Economic Policy, Kamil Pasha represented the yellow people’s
challenge to the white people. Gandhi, a “shishi” (political activist or revolutionary
of the Ishin) represented the nonviolent path toward independence and freedom of
humanity. “Sangyō kumiaishugi sengen,” pt. 2, p. 3.
30. “Sangyō kumiaishugi sengen,” pt. 1, p. 10. See also ibid, pt. 2, p. 8.
348 Epilogue

modernity, most vividly symbolized by its vast glittering mechanized

farms and farming industries.
Miyazawa Kenji, a wildly popular Japanese writer today, arrived rela-
tively late on the scene in the history of the cultural revolution. His cul-
tural practices were an accumulation and manifestation of the broader
developments in anarchist culture that preceded them. Miyazawa reached
young adulthood at the height of the interest in children’s literature and
in the midst of the rise of anarchist discourse on “democracy.” It was at
this time that he traveled to Tokyo in order to write children’s literature
after his graduation from school. Returning to the remote town of Hana-
maki in the northern prefecture of Iwate, Miyazawa studied Esperanto
and taught the language to local farmers, dedicated himself to the devel-
opment of agrarian education, and attempted to integrate the latest find-
ings of biological evolution and cosmology into his literature for chil-
dren in the 1920s and early 1930s. Literary scholar Gregory Golley
examines Miyazawa’s literature as a call to “listen objectively” to the ani-
mals and nature around one as “brethren in pain,” a technique that
was situated within a broader practice of children’s literary writing in
Japan. Miyazawa also echoed the anarchist free arts movement. He be-
came an important participant in the cooperatist anarchist network and
its intellectual trajectory when he dedicated himself to promoting farm-
ers’ culture and arts. Miyazawa wrote Nōmin geijutsu gairon (Theory of
farmers’ art) and other manuscripts on farmers’ art in 1926, which he
used as texts in his experimental educational project for the farmers in
his village of Hanamaki. He called his educational project the Rasu chi-
jin kyōkai (Rasu Association for the People of the Soil). Miyazawa
conceived of farmers’ art as a creative expression and a natural extension
of the everyday life and labor of farmers. In turn, he called this art “the
grand fourth dimension of art.” That is, art was to be a “concrete mani-
festation of a cosmic spirit that interpenetrates Earth, Man, and
Individuality.” Rephrased in the tradition of the scientific turn of the

31. Miyazawa Kenji Museum permanent exhibit. On Miyazawa, see also Golley,
When Our Eyes No Longer See, chaps. 3, 4, 5.
32. Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, chap. 5.
33. Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory, pp. 36–37.
34. Fromm, Miyazawa Kenji no risō, p. iii.
 Epilogue 349

cooperatist anarchist cultural revolution, art was to manifest the unifica-

tion of human social life with the cosmological laws of the universe. It
was not a coincidence that the local farm members of the Rasu Associa-
tion studied Esperanto together with agricultural science, cosmology,
physics, biology, music, and art, elements of the cultural revolution. That
Miyazawa conducted his classes in his home village in Hanamaki re-
flected the continued absence of “periphery” and “center” in cooperatist
anarchist discourse.
In response to Arishima’s liberation of tenant farmers, Sakai Toshi-
hiko, by now a leader of the emerging Marxist movement, wrote in 1922
that Arishima’s act provided a practical and massive benefit to many rural
laborers, and, moreover, that the liberation was “not only the vanguard
of anarchism, but the solution to all social problems [shakai mondai].”
He published his article on Arishima’s farm liberation in the new journal
of Japanese Marxism, Zenei, in the first year of the journal’s publication.
The journal is remembered today for voicing the articulations of the
Japanese “Bolsheviks” in their break with anarchism. It is striking that
Sakai applauded the farm as a clear expression of cooperatist anarchist
ideas in a journal that represented the conversion of anarchists to Marxism,
at the key moment of their supposed departure from anarchism. Marx-
ists’ excitement over Arishima’s liberation as a move toward cooperatist
modernity suggests the continuing cooperatist anarchist tendencies within
Japanese Marxisms.
Indeed, the intellectual foundations of the Rōnō school of Marxism
initiated by Yamakawa Hitoshi continued anarchist cooperatism in a
new form and under the new label “Marxism.” Close examination reveals
that the Rōnō school maintained concepts of demokurashī and heimin
its “Marxist” discussions of the political subject as taishū (all people) or
everyone. The notion of taishū was expressed in Yamakawa’s language
of a “united front” of “workers, peasants, and all other laboring and
oppressed people.” As Yamakawa recalled, these early Japanese Marx-
ists interpreted puroretariya, their transliteration of “proletarian,” as

35. Sakai Toshihiko, “Arishima shi no nōen hōki”; also quoted in Arishima, Aris-
hima Takeo zenshū, 16:675– 76.
36. Yamakawa, “Musan-kaikyū undō no hoko tenkan.”
37. Yamakawa, “Seiji-teki toitsu sensen e!”
350 Epilogue

meaning heimin. From the very beginnings of Japanese Marxism, the

meaning of the proletariat as heimin, or “everyone,” thereby entirely re-
structured the Marxist temporal order, according to which revolution
was to be driven by a vanguard of the urban industrial working class.
Yamakawa, in his autobiographical account of the socialist movement
decades later, summed up his role in history not as the leader of a revolu-
tionary vanguard, but as a very ordinary path walked by a very ordinary
person (bonjin).
Similarly, the literary journal Tanemaku hito (Sower) opened its first
issue in 1921 with an article on mutual aid. The article characterized the
practice of mutual aid as naturally and universally arising, beyond and
without relying on religious teachings of morality and ethical behavior.
Ethical practice just “happens” because it is a universal characteristic of
all human beings, the article claimed. Scholars have identified Tane-
maku hito as Marxist and as having initiated the proletarian literature
movement in Japan. Yet many of the ideas expressed in the journal
were cooperatist anarchist, and behind the journal’s founding were the
financial support and guidance of anarchists Arishima and Asuke.
In 1928–1931, the period that Sheila Fitzpatrick calls “the Cultural
Revolution” in Soviet Russia, a new wave of intense Japanese-Russian
translations occurred. It was in fact the Soviet cultural revolution that
marked the beginning of an end (or rather a temporary pause) in the
Japanese anarchist cultural revolution. Although the emergence of Marx-
ism and the proletarian culture movement can largely be traced to the
original impulses of cooperatist anarchism and Russian-Japanese trans-
national intellectual history, these influential trends began to depart from
many of the premises of cooperatist anarchism. With the Soviet cultural
revolution, the political interventions of the Soviet state in Japanese so-
cialist culture and thought necessitate new methodologies to examine
these forms of cultural diplomacy and state propaganda. The history of
their activities thus lies outside the conceptual and methodological

38. Ibid.
39. Yamakawa, Yamakawa Hitoshi jiden, pp. 1–3.
40. Akabōshi, “Seizon kyōso to sōgo fujo ron.”
41. Shea, Leftwing Literature, pp. 72– 79.
42. Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War.”
 Epilogue 351

framework that I have invented for the nonstate, grassroots practices and
thoughts covered in this book. It seems that the epistemological capacity
of cooperatist anarchism that allowed so many new intellectual and cul-
tural movements to occur also invited its own end, however temporary,
as a widespread movement beginning in the 1930s. Marxism would be-
come the leading trend in Japanese academia. In an irony of historical
dialectic, perhaps, it would be Marxism’s teleological view of history
dominant in Japanese social sciences that contributed to erase the intel-
lectual history that has been explored in this book.
 Bibliography

Archives and Special Collections

Japan
Arishima Takeo Memorial Museum, Archive Department, Niseko
Gaimushō gaikō shiryōkan (Japanese Foreign Ministry Archives; GGS),
Tokyo
Hokkaido Museum of Literature, Children’s Literature Collection, Sapporo
Hokkaido University Northern Studies Special Collection, Sapporo
Kindai bungaku kan (Museum of Modern Literature), Hakodate
Kojima Kuratarō Archive, Hokkaidōritsu monjokan (the Archives of Hok-
kaido), Sapporo
Kokuritsu kō monjokan (National Archive of Japan; KKM), Kōbunroku
monbushō no bu (Public Record of the Ministry of Education), Tokyo
Kokuritsu kokkai toshokan shimbun zasshi bunko (National Diet Library,
Newspaper and Journal Collection), Tokyo
Meiji shimbun zasshi bunko, Tokyo daigaku (Meiji Newspaper and Journal
Collection, Tokyo University)
Miyazawa Kenji Museum, Hanamaki
Nakamura Mitsuo Collection and Archives, Kanagawa Prefectural Library of
Modern Literature, Yokohama
Ogawa Usen Memorial Museum, Ushiku
Rikubetsu Town Archive
Seki Kansai Museum, Rikubetsu
Setagaya Bunkagukan (Setagaya Literature Museum)
Tokutomi Roka Kōshun-en Archives, Setagaya
Tokyo Municipal Library, Archive Section
354 Bibliography

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Centennial Collection (TUFSCC)

Yamamoto Kanae Museum, Ueda

Russia
Arkhiv vostokovedov (Sankt-Peterburgskii filial Instituta vostokvedeniia
Rossiiskoi akademii nauk) (Archive of Orientalists, St. Petersburg branch
of the Institute for Asian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences), St.
Petersburg
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian
Federation; GARF), Moscow
Istoricheskaia biblioteka (Historical Library), Periodicals Collection and East
Asia Collection, Moscow
Otdel Rukopisei Gosudarstvennogo Muzeia L. N. Tolstogo (Department of
Manuscripts, State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy; ORGMT), Moscow
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive
of Literature and Art; RGALI), Moscow

United States
Chicago Field Museum, Archival Section
Franz Boas Papers Collection of the American Philosophical Society,
Philadelphia
Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford
Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace Archives, Stanford
University
U.S. Library of Congress Naimushō Censorship Collection, Asia Reading
Room, Washington, D.C.

Newspapers, Journals, and Other Serials

Bunbukai kaihō (Bunbukai journal)
Chokugen (Direct speech)
Delo: Zhurnal literaturno-politicheskii (Pursuit: Literary and political journal)
Demokurashī (Democracy)
Hokkaido shimbun (Hokkaido news)
Iaponiia i Rossiia (Japan and Russia)
Istoricheskii vestnik (Historical herald)
Kindai shisō (Modern thought)
Kokumin no tomo (Friend of the nation’s people)
Kokumin shimbun (Nation’s people newspaper)
Koyūkai zasshi (Journal of the Friendship Association)
 Bibliography 355

Kyōei: Hokkaido sangyō kumiai zasshi (Coprosperity: Hokkaido Industrial

Cooperative journal)
Mainichi shimbun (Mainichi news)
Myōjō (Morning star)
Narōdo (Narod)
Nichibei (Japan and the United States)
Nihon heimin shimbun (The people’s newspaper of Japan)
Rikugō zasshi (The cosmos journal)
Russkii vestnik (Russian herald)
Russo-Japanese War Fully Illustrated
Sekai fujin (Woman of the world)
Sekaijin (Worldist)
Shinkai (Expanse of the mind-heart)
Heimin shimbun (People’s newspaper)
Strannik (Wanderer)
Tanemaku hito (Sower)
Tetsugaku zasshi (Philosophy journal)
Uranishiki (Brocade lining)
Vestnik literatury (Literary herald)
Volia (Liberty)
Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii (Questions in philosophy and psychology)
Yomiuri shimbun (Yomiuri newspaper)

Books, Articles, and Unpublished Papers

Akabōshi. “Seizon kyōso to sōgo fujo ron” (On survival of the fittest and the
theory of mutual aid). Tanemaku hito 1, no. 1 (1921): 2–4.
Akaha Tsuneo. “Review of David Wells and Sandra Wilson, eds., The
Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904– 05.” Journal of Asian
Studies 59, no. 3 (August 2000): 761– 62.
Akamatsu Katsumaro. “The Russian Influence on the Early Japanese Social
Movement.” In The Russian Impact on Japan: Literature and Social Thought,
by Nobori Shōmu and Akamatsu Katsumaro, edited by Peter Berton, Paul
F. Langer, and George O. Totten, pp. 87–110. Los Angeles: University of
Southern California Press, 1981.
“Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, ‘Why War?’ (1932).” http://germanhistory
docs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage _id=4741. Accessed March 10, 2013.
The Album, Containing the Photographs and Pictures Regarding the Russo-
Japanese War. Tokyo: Kinkodo, 1904–5.
356 Bibliography

Alexander, Agnes Baldwin. History of the Baha’ i Faith in Japan, 1914–1938.

Osaka: Japan Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1977.
Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London, New York:
Verso, 2009.
Anderson, Benedict. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anticolonial
Imagination. New York: Verso, 2007.
Andō Kensuke. “Gakko kaikodan” (A recollection of our school years).
Koyūkai zasshi (Koyukai Alumni Association journal), December 1912,
pp. 9–11. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Centennial Collection
(TUFSCC).
Aoyama, Tomoko. “Japanese Literary Responses to the Russo-Japanese War.”
In The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904– 05, edited by David
Wells and Sandra Wilson, pp. 60–85. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Arahata Kanson. Shinkan Kanson jiden (The new edition of Kanson’s
Autobiography). Vol. 1. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1965.
Arishima Takeo. The Agony of Coming into This World. Tokyo: Hokuseido
Press, 1955.
———. Arishima Takeo zenshū (Complete works of Arishima Takeo). 16 vols.
Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1979–1988.
———. “Daiyonban jogen” (Preface to the Fourth Edition). In Ribingusuton
den (On Livingston) by Arishima Takeo and Morimoto Kōkichi, 5th ed.,
pp. 1–5. Tokyo: Keiseisha shoten, 1919.
———. “The Development of Japanese Civilization from the Mythical Age
to the Time of Decline of Shogunal Power.” M.A. thesis, Haverford
College, 1904. Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections,
Arishima Takeo Collection.
———. “Ikizumareru burujoa” (The bourgeoisie who are stuck). In Arishima
Takeo zenshū, 9:425–27. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1981.
———. Labyrinth. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1992.
———. “Rokoku kakumeito no rōjo” (An old Russian woman revolutionary).
Mainichi shimbun, April 5–10, 1905. In Arishima Takeo zenshū, 1:366.
Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1979.
———. “Ryokaikyu no kankei ni taisuru watashi no kangae” (My thoughts
on the relationship between the two classes). In Arishima Takeo zenshū,
9:416–18. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1981.
Aston, W. G. “Remarks on Commerce by Kato Sukeichi.” Phoenix 20
(February 1872): 117–19; 21 (March 1872): 135–38.
Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America.
Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.
———. The Russian Anarchists. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.
 Bibliography 357

Azadovskii, K. M., and E. M. D’iakonova. Bal’mont i Iaponiia (Balmont and

Japan). Moscow: Nauka, 1991.
Bakunin, Mikhail. Pis’ma M. A. Bakunina k A. I. Gerzenu i N. P. Ogarevu
(M. A. Bakunin’s Letters to A. I. Herzen and N. P. Ogarev). St. Petersburg:
V. Vrublevskii, 1906.
“The Barbarity of Soldiers.” Heimin shimbun 14 (February 14, 1904): 1.
Bartoshevskii, N. Iaponiia (Ocherki iz zapisok puteshestvennika vokrug sveta):
Vzgliad na politicheskuiu i sotsial’nuiu zhizn’ naroda (Japan [Sketches from
the notes of a traveler around the world]: A view of the political and social
life of a people). St. Petersburg: V. Velling, 1868.
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Utopia with No Topos.” History of the Human Sciences
16, no. 1 (February 2003): 11–25.
Becker, Hans-Joachim. Die frühe Nietzsche-Rezeption in Japan (1893–1903).
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983.
Belinskii, Vissarion. Selected Philosophical Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1948.
———. “Thoughts and Notes on Russian Literature.” In Belinsky, Cherny-
shevsky, and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism, edited and translated by Ralph
E. Matlaw, pp. 3–32. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.
Belonenko, V. S., ed. Iz istorii religioznykh, kul’turnykh i politicheskikh
vzaimootnoshenii Rossii i Iaponii v XIX–XX vekakh (From the history of the
religious, cultural, and political relations between Russia and Japan from
the nineteenth to the twentieth century). Saint Petersburg: Fond po
izuchenii u istorii Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, 1998.
Berton, Peter, Paul Langer, and Rodger Swearingen. Japanese Training and
Research in the Russian Field. Los Angeles: University of Southern Califor-
nia Press, 1956.
Billingsley, Philip. “Bakunin’s Sojourn in Japan: Nailing Down an Enigma.”
Human Sciences Review 5 (1993): 35– 65.
Bird, Isabella. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
Boorstin, Daniel J. Cleopatra’s Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. New York:
Vintage Press, 1995.
Bowen, Roger W. Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1980.
Brooks, Jeffrey. “Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era.” In
Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800–1914, edited by William
Mills Todd and Robert L. Belknap, pp. 97–150. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1978.
Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920. Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1983.
358 Bibliography

Burlaka, D. K., ed. L. N. Tolstoi: Pro et Contra; Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo L’va

Tolstogo v otsenke russkikh myslitelei i issledovatelei (L. N. Tolstoy: Pro and
contra; Lev Tolstoy’s personality and work assessed by Russian thinkers
and researchers). Saint Petersburg: Russkii Khristianskii gumanitarnyi
institut, 2000.
Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and
Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994.
Cahm, Caroline. Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–1886.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Cane, Aleta Feinsod, and Susan Alves. The Only Efficient Instrument: Ameri-
can Women Writers and the Periodical. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2005.
Caputo, John D. Against Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Carr, David. Review of Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time,
by Reinhart Koselleck. History and Th eory 26, no. 2 (May 1987):
197– 204.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Diff erence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Chapelier, Em., and Gassy Marin. Anarchists and the International Language,
Esperanto. London: Freedom Office, 1908.
Chōjin [pseud.]. “Rokoku ni okeru aruteru” (Artels of Russia). Bunbukai
kaihō 56 (March 1909): 15–21.
Ciesielska, Malgorzata, ed. Bronisław Piłsudski i Futabatei Shimei: W świetle
korespondencji Bronisława Piłudskiego do Futabatei Shimei (Bronisław
Piłsudski and Futabatei Shimei: In light of Bronisław Piłudski’s correspon-
dence with Futabatei Shimei). Steszew: IIEOS, 1994.
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Craig, Albert. Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa
Yukichi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Cronin, Helena. The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from
Darwin to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Crump, John. The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan. Beckenham, Kent:
Croom Helm, 1983.
Daigyaku jiken kiroku kankōkai (Publisher of the Daigyaku incident
records), ed. Daigyaku jiken kiroku: Shōko bussha (The record of the
 Bibliography 359

Daigyaku incident: Copies of confiscated materials). Vol. 2. Tokyo: Sekai

bunko, 1972.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 1.
London: John Murray, 1871.
———. Shu no kigen (Origin of species). Translated by Ōsugi Sakae. Tokyo:
Shinchosha, 1914; repr., 1929.
De Bary, Wm. Theodore, Carol Gluck, Arthur E. Tiedemann. Sources of
Japanese Tradition 1600–2000. Vol. 2, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Contin-
uum, 2004.
Duara, Prasenjit. “Introduction: The Decolonization of Asia and Africa in the
Twentieth Century.” In Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then,
edited by Prasenjit Duara, pp. 1–20. London: Routledge, 2004.
———. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern
China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Duus, Peter, and Irwin Scheiner. “Socialism, Liberalism and Marxism,
1901–1931.” In Modern Japanese Thought, edited by Bob Tadashi Waka-
bayashi, pp. 147–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Eguchi Kiyoshi. Zoku waga bungaku hanseiki (Volume 2 of the record of my
literary life). Tokyo: Shunyōdō, 1958.
Einstein, Albert, and Sigmund Freud. Why War? “Open Letters” between
Einstein and Freud. London: New Commonwealth, 1934.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., ed. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2002.
Emmons, Terence. Alleged Sex and Threatened Violence: Doctor Russel, Bishop
Vladimir, and the Russians in San Francisco, 1887–1892. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997.
Eroshenko, Vasilii. “Rakontoj de velkinta folio—Malgrandaj fabelaj skizoj de
Sanhaja vivo” (The story of a drab leaf—A small fairy-tale sketch of
Shanghai life). In Lumo kaj ombro, by V. Eroshenko, compiled by Mine
Yoshitaka, pp. 31–58. Osaka: Japana Esperanta Librokooperativo, 1979.
———. “La tago de l’ monda paciho” (The day of world peace). In Lumo kaj
ombro (Light and shadow), by V. Eroshenko, compiled by Mine Yoshitaka,
pp. 27–30. Osaka: Japana Esperanta Librokooperativo, 1979.
Evdokimov, V. E. “Predislovie” (Preface). In Tsivilizatsiia i velikie is-
toricheskie reki: Stat’ i (Civilization and the great historical currents:
Articles), by L. I. Mechnikov, edited by V. I. Evdokimov, pp. 5– 28.
Moscow: Progress, 1995.
360 Bibliography

“Exploitation in Corea.” Heimin shimbun 39 (August 7, 1904): 7.

Fabre, Jean-Henri. Fāburu Konchūki (Fabre’s book of insects). Translated by
Ōsugi Sakae. Tokyo: Asahi shoten, 2005.
———. Konchūki (Book of insects). Translated by Ōsugi Sakae, Shiina
Sonoji, Ōmi Komaki, Itsuo Doi, and Takeshi Washio. 10 vols. Tokyo:
Sōbunkaku, 1922–32.
Ferretti, Frederico. Il mondo senza la mappa: Élisée Reclus e i geografi anarchici
(The world without the map: Élisée Reclus and anarchist geography).
Milan: Zero in Condotta, 2007.
Fine, Robert. “Kant’s Theory of Cosmopolitanism and Hegel’s Critique.”
Philosophy and Social Criticism 29, no. 6 (2003): 609–30.
Fisher, Galen. “The Cooperative Movement in Japan.” Pacific Aff airs 11, no. 4
(December 1938): 478– 91.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Cultural Revolution as Class War.” In Cultural Revolution
in Russia, 1928–1931, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, pp. 8–40. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978.
Fleming, Marie. The Geography of Freedom: The Odyssey of Élisée Reclus.
Montreal: Cheektowaga, 1988.
Foner, Eric. “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History
Workshop Journal 17, no. 1 (1984): 57–80.
Forster, Peter G. The Esperanto Movement. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1982.
Freed, Stanley A., Ruth S. Freed, and Laila Williamson. “Capitalist Philan-
thropy and Russian Revolutionaries: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition
(1897–1902).” American Anthropologist, 90, no. 1 (March 1988): 7–24.
Fromm, Mallory. Miyazawa Kenji no risō (The ideals of Miyazawa Kenji).
Translated by Kawabata Yasuo. Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1984.
Fujii Shozo. Eroshenko no toshi monogatari: 1920-nendai Tokyo, Shanhai, Pekin
(Stories of Eroshenko’s cities: Tokyo, Shanghai, and Peking in the 1920s).
Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo. 1989.
“Fujin no unmei” (The destiny of women). Heimin shimbun 14 (February 14,
1904): 2.
Fukuzawa Yukichi. Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. Translated by Eiichi
Kiyooka. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
Futabatei Shimei. Futabatei Shimei zenshū (The complete works of Futabatei
Shimei). 9 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1964–1965.
———. Japan’s First Modern Novel: “Ukigumo” of Futabatei. Translation and
critical commentary by Marleigh Grayer Ryan. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1965.
———. “Rokoku bungaku dampen” (A short talk on Russian literature). In
Futabatei Shimei zenshū, 4:205–206. Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1985.
 Bibliography 361

———. “Rokoku bungaku no Nihon bungaku ni oyoboshitaru eikyō” (The

Influence of Russian Literature on Japanese Literature). In Futabatei Shimei
zenshū, 5:283–84. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965.
———. Sekaigo (World language). Tokyo: Saiunkaku, 1906.
———. Ukigumo (Floating cloud). Tokyo: Kinkōdō, 1887–88.
———. “Yo ga hansei no zange” (A confession of my past life). In Futabatei
Shimei zenshū, 5:267– 68. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965.
Gallicchio, Marc. The African American Encounter with Japan and China:
Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000.
Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Golley, Gregory. When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology
in Japanese Literary Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008.
Grot, Nikolai. “Nravstvennye idealy nashego vremeni” (Moral ideals of our
time). Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii (Questions in philosophy and psychol-
ogy) 1, no. 16 (1893): 129–54.
Guth, Christine M. E. Longfellow’s Tattoos. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2004.
Hall, Francis. Japan through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall,
1859–1866. Edited by F. G. Notehelfer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1992.
Haller, John S., Jr. “The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of
Racial Inferiority in the Origin of Man Controversy.” American Anthro-
pologist 72 (1970): 1319–29.
Hara Teruyuki and Togawa Tsuguo, eds. Surabu to Nihon (Slav and Japan).
Vol. 8. Tokyo: Kobundo, 1995.
Harada Mitsuo. Omoide no shichijūnen (My recollection of seventy years).
Tokyo: Seibundō-Shinkōsha, 1966.
Harootunian, Harry. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and
Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000.
———. “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem.”
boundary 2 (Summer 2005): 23–52.
Hasegawa Nyozekan. “Antagparolo” (Preface). In Stranga kato (Strange cat),
by Vasilii Eroshenko, compiled by Mine Yoshitaka, pp. 3–4. Osaka: Japana
Esperanta Librokooperativo, 1983.
Hatano Kazuhito. “Russian Literature and the Evolution of Japanese Literary
Language and Style.” In A Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural
362 Bibliography

Encounters, 1868–1926, edited by J. Thomas Rimer, pp. 49– 60. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Hatsushiba Takemi. Nihon Esperanto Undōshi: Historia de la Japana
Esperanto-Movado (History of the Japanese Esperanto movement). Tokyo:
Japana Esperanto Instituto, 1998.
Heiminsha dōnin (Associates of Heiminsha). “Sengen” (Declaration). Heimin
shimbun 1 (November 15, 1903): 1.
Herzen, Alexander. My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen.
Translated by Constance Garnett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
———. Sobranie sochinenii v treidsati tomakh (Collected works in thirty
volumes). 30 vols. Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1954– 65.
Hiratsuka Raichō. In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of
a Russian Feminist. Translated by Teruko Craig. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006.
Hoganson, Kristin. “As Badly Off as the Filipinos: U.S. Women’s Suffragists
and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Journal of
Women’s History 13, no. 2 (2001): 9–33.
Hoston, Germaine A. The State, Identity, and the National Question in China
and Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Howland, Douglas. Translating the West. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2002.
Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
“Hyaku gojūnen mae no museifushugisha Andō Shōeki” (Andō Shōeki,
anarchist of 150 years ago). Nihon heimin shimbun (People’s newspaper of
Japan) 16 (January 21, 1908): 15.
Iakovlev, N., ed. “Pis’ma pisatelei k Saltykovu: L. I. Mechnikov” (Writers’
letters to Saltykov: L. I. Mechnikov). Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Research in
literature) 13–14 (1934): 361– 62.
“Iaponskaia zhizn’: Innostranyie posetiteli v Iaponii” (Japanese life: Foreign
visitors to Japan). Volia (Liberty), no. 6 (May 7, 1906).
Ienaga Saburo. Suukinaru shisōkano shōgai (The life of an extraordinary
thinker). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1955.
Igarashi Akio. Meiji Ishin no shisō (The thought of the Meiji Ishin). Tokyo:
Seori Shobo, 1996.
Ikegami, Eiko. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of
Japanese Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Imanishi Kinji. A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things.
Translated by Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi, and
Hiroyuki Takasaki. London: Routledge Curzon, 2002.
 Bibliography 363

“The Influence of Tolstoy in Japan.” Heimin shimbun, no. 40 (August 14,

1904): 10.
Inoue Kōichi. “B. Piłsudski’s Proposals of Autonomy and Education for the
Sakhalin Ainu.” In Quest for an Entire Picture of B. Piłudski’s Far Eastern
Indigenous Studies, edited by Kōichi Inoue. Sapporo: Slavic Research
Center, Hokkaido University, 2003.
Inoue, Kyōko. Individual Dignity in Modern Japanese Thought: The Evolution
of the Concept of Jinkaku in Moral and Educational Discourse. Ann Arbor:
Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001.
Iriye, Akira. Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Iriye, Mitsuko. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Nagai Kafu, American Stories,
translated by Mitsuko Iriye, pp. vii–xxvii. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000.
Irokawa Daikichi. The Culture of the Meiji Period. Translated and edited by
Marius Jansen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Ishikawa Sanshirō. “Domin seikatsu.” In Ishikawa Sanshirō chosakushū
(Selected works by Ishikawa Sanshirō), 2:310–18. Tokyo: Seidōsha,
1978.
———. “Dōtai shakai bigaku toshite no museifushugi” (Anarchism as
aesthetic dynamic). In Ishikawa Sanshirō chosakushū, 3:207–217. Tokyo:
Seidōsha, 1978.
———. “Heiminsha jidai no shakai bungei.” In Ishikawa Sanshirō chosakushū,
6:22–32. Tokyo: Seidōsha, 1978.
———. Hi shinkaron to jinsei. Tokyo: Hakuyōsha shuppan, 1925.
———. Ishikawa Sanshirō chosakushū (Selected works by Ishikawa Sanshirō).
8 vols. Tokyo: Seidōsha, 1978.
———. Kinsei domin tetsugaku (Philosophy of democracy). In Kindai nihon
shisō taikei (Collection of modern Japanese thought), edited by Tsurumi
Shunsuke, 16:39–111. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1976.
———. “Nohon shugi to domin shisō” (Agrarianism and democratic life). In
Ishikawa Sanshirō chosakushū, 3:96–100. Tokyo: Seidōsha, 1978.
———. “Shakai bigaku toshite no museifushugi” (Anarchism as social
aesthetics). In Ishikawa Sanshirō chosakushū, 3:190–206. Tokyo: Seidōsha,
1978.
———. Shinkaron kenkyū (A study of evolutionary theory). Tokyo: Kumiai
Shoten, 1947.
Ishikawa Sanshirō and Kōtoku Shūsui, eds. Nihon shakai shugi (Japanese
socialism). Heimin shimbun, nos. 2–57 (1910).
364 Bibliography

Itō Noe. “Museifushugi no jijitsu” (The reality of anarchism). In Itō Noe

zenshū (The complete works of Itō Noe), 2:222–35. Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin,
1970.
Ivanova, G. D. Delo ob oskorblenii trona: Demokraticheskoe dvizhenie v Iaponii
deviatsotnykh godov, ego geroi i literatura (The affair of the attack on the
throne: The democratic movement in Japan in the 1900s, its heroes and
literature). Moscow: Nauka, 1972.
———. Russkie v Iaponii XIX– nachala XX v.: Neskol’ ko portretov (Russians in
Japan in the 19th–20th centuries: Several portraits). Moscow: Vostochnaia
literatura, 1993.
Iwano Kenzō. Akitaken rōnō undōshi (History of the Akita Rōnō Movement).
Akita: Akitaken Rōnō undōshi kankōkai (Akitaken Rōnō Movement
Publishers), 1954.
Jahn, Beate. “Barbarian Thoughts: Imperialism in the Philosophy of John
Stuart Mill.” Review of International Studies 31 (2005): 599– 618.
———. The Cultural Construction of International Relations. New York:
Palgrave, 2000.
———. “IR and the State of Nature: The Cultural Origins of a Ruling
Ideology.” Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 411–34.
“The Japanese Victory at Liaoyang and National Festivity at Home.” Heimin
shimbun 45 (September 18, 1904): 1.
Kaikō e no bakushin ryochū nikki (Travel diary toward the opening of trade).
Yokohama: Yokohama kyōdo kenkyūkai, 1996.
Kaneko Kiichi. “Torusutoi to Kuropotokin” (Tolstoy and Kropotkin). Heimin
shimbun 64 (January 29, 1905): 5.
Kant, Immanuel. “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” In
Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, A Critical
Guide, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt, pp. 9–23.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
———. Kant’s Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991.
———. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998.
Kartasheva, K. S. Dorogi L’va Mechnikova (The paths of Lev Mechnikov).
Moscow: Mysl’, 1981.
Katagami Noboru. “Roshiya no tamashii no shimpi” (The mysteries of the
Russian spirit). Shisō no shōri, July 1918.
Katayama Sen. The Labor Movement in Japan. http://www.globallabour.info
/en/2006/12/iv_the _socialist _movement _and.html. Accessed July 7, 2008.
 Bibliography 365

Katō Naoshi. “Tolstoi v Iaponii” (Tolstoy in Japan). In Mezhdunarodnyi

Tolstovskii al’manakh (International Tolstoy almanac), edited by
P. Sergeenko, pp. 74–76. Moscow: Izd’vo “Kniga,” 1909.
Katō Sukeichi. Kōeki kokoro e gusa (Guide to trade). N.p., 1868.
Katō Tokijirō. “Letter to Alexander Berkman.” Mother Earth 6, no. 3 (May
1911): 82.
Keitekiryō shi hensan iin kai (Keiteki Dormitory Editing Committee).
Keitekiryō shi (History of the Keiteki Dormitory). Sapporo: Hokkaido
Imperial University Keitekiryō, 1933.
Kemuyama Sentarō. Kinsei museifushugi (Introduction to anarchism). Tokyo:
Meiji Bunken, 1965.
Kennan, George. Siberia and the Exile System. 2 vols. New York: Century Co.,
1891.
Kensetsu sha dōmei shi kankō iin kai (Kensetsu sha dōmei History Publishing
Committee). Waseda Daigaku Kensetsu sha dōmei no rekishi: Taishōki no v
narōdo undō (History of the Kensetsu sha dōmei: The Taishō V Narod
Movement). Tokyo: Nihon shakai to chuō honbu kikan shikyoku (Japa-
nese Society and Central Bureau), 1979.
Kessler, K. F. “O zakone vzaimnoi pomoshchi” (On the law of mutual aid).
Trudy Sankt-Peterburgskogo Obshchestva Estestvopytatelei (Work of the St.
Petersburg Society of Naturalists) 2, no. 1 (1880): 124–34.
Ketelaar, James. Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990.
Kido Takayoshi (Koin). The Diary of Kido Takayoshi. Translated by Sidney
Devere Brown and Akiko Hirota. 3 vols. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press,
1985.
Kikuchi, Yuko. Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural National-
ism and Oriental Orientalism. New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004.
Kimura Ki. Maruzen gaishi (History of Maruzen). Tokyo: Maruzen,
1969.
Kinoshita Naoe. Kami, ningen, jiyū (God, man, freedom). Tokyo:
Chūōkōronsha, 1934.
Kitazawa Fumitake. Ishikawa Sanshirō no shōgai to shisō (The thought and life
of Ishikawa Sanshirō). 3 vols. Tokyo: Hatonomori shobō, 1974.
Koike Yoshitaka. Heiminsha nōjō no hitobito (People of Heimin Farm). Tokyo:
Tokuma shoten, 1980.
Konami Tomō. Bungō no musume: Aleksandra Torusutaia bomei no hibi
(Lev Tolstoy’s daughter: The emigration years). Tokyo: Shindokushosha,
1998.
366 Bibliography

Konishi Masutarō (Daniil). “Filosofiia Laosi” (The philosophy of Lao Tzu).

Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii year 4, vol. 3, no. 18 (May 1893): 27–45; year 5,
vol. 23, no. 3 (May 1894): 363–479.
———. “Nasha Iaponskaia missiia: Vospominaniia iapontsa ob Arkh.
Nikolae” (Our Japanese mission: Recollections of Archbishop Nikolai by
one Japanese). Strannik 3 (1912): 388– 91.
———. “Rokoku shisō kai no kinkyō” (The recent condition of Russian
national philosophical thought). Rikugō zasshi 160 (April 15, 1894):
168–73.
———. “Rokoku to Yōroppa” (Russia and Europe). Kokumin no tomo 223
(April 13, 1894).
———. “Rōshi tetsugaku ippan” (The philosophy of Lao Tzu). Shinkai 3
(November 1893): 24–28; 4 (December 1893): 7–14; 5 (January 1894): 1– 6; 6
(February 1894): 8–12; 7 (March 1894): 22–26; 8 (April 1894): 17–21; 10
(June 1894): 18–23; 12 (August 1894): 1–7; 14 (October 1894): 1–4; 15
(November 1894): 1–3.
———. “Tokugi to shite no shūkyō” (Religion as virtue). Rikugō zasshi
(May–August 1896): 185–88.
———. “Torusutoi haku no shūkyō ni tsuite” (On Tolstoy’s religion). Rikugō
zasshi 180 (December 15, 1895): 1–8.
———. “Torusutoi no sekaikan ni tsuite” (On Tolstoy’s worldview). In Kohan
ronshū (Lakeside conversations), edited by Kakigakko (Sixth Summer
School), pp. 233–46. Tokyo: Jujiya shoin, 1894.
———. Torusutoi wo kataru (My recollections of Tolstoy). Tokyo: Mo-
moyama shorin, 1936.
———. Untitled. Tetsugaku zasshi (Journal of philosophy) 9, no. 86 (April 10,
1894): 245–57.
Konishi Shirō, ed. Shiryō kindai Nihonshi shakaishugi shiryōshū: Shūkan heimin
shimbun (Collection of materials on socialism from modern Japanese
history: Weekly people’s newspaper). Vol. 10. Osaka: Sogensha, 1953.
Konishi, Sho. “Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist Time: Arishima Coopera-
tive Farm in Hokkaido, 1922–1935.” Modern Asian Studies, December 7,
2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X11000953. Accessed February 1,
2013.
———. “The People at Rest: The Anarchist Origins of Ogawa Usen’s
Nihonga.” World Art 1, no. 2 (September 2011): 235–56.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Kōtoku Shūsui. “Bundan endan” (Writing stage and speaking stage). Heimin
shimbun 50 (October 23, 1904): 5.
 Bibliography 367

———. “Daawin to Marukusu” (Darwin and Marx). Heimin shimbun 47

(October 2, 1904): 5.
———. Kōtoku Shūsui zenshū (Complete works of Kōtoku Shūsui). 12 vols.
Tokyo: Meiji bunken, 1968–1973.
———. “Nichibei kankei no shōrai” (The future of U.S.-Japan relations).
Nichibei, January 21, 1906.
———. “Nichiei dōmei to rōdōsha” (The Anglo-Japanese Alliance and
workers). In Kōtoku Shūsui zenshū, 4:368–79. Tokyo: Meiji bunken sha, 1968.
Originally published in Rōdō sekai (Worker’s world) 6, no. 1 (April 1902).
———. “Nihon no shimbun” (Japan’s newspaper). Heimin shimbun 46
(September 25, 1904): 2.
———. Nijusseiki no kaibutsu teikokushugi (Imperialism: The monster of the
twentieth century). Tokyo: Keiseisha shoten, 1901.
———. “Rekkoku funsō no shinsō” (The truth about the great power
conflict). Heimin shimbun 21 (April 3, 1904): 1.
———. “Saishoku no kenkyū” (A study of vegetarianism). Nichibei, March
15, 1906.
———. “Senji to hisenron” (On nonwar). Heimin shimbun 22 (April 10,
1904): 1.
———. Teikokushugi (Imperialism). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005.
Kowner, Rotem. “Becoming an Honorary Civilized Nation: Remaking
Japan’s Military Image during the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5.” Historian
64, no. 1 (2001): 19–39.
Koz’min, B. P. “L. I. Mechnikov–Gertsenu i Ogarevu.” In Literaturnoe
nasledstvo: Iz istorii Russkoi literatury i obshchestvennoi mysli 1860–1890 gg.
(Research in Literature: From the history of Russian literature and
social thought, 1860–1890), pp. 388– 94, vol. 87. Moscow: Nauka,
1977.
Kropotkin, Peter. Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal. San Francisco: Free
Society, 1898.
———. The Conquest of Bread. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906.
———. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930.
———. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. London: William Heinemann,
1902.
———. “Mutual Aid among Animals.” Nineteenth Century 28 (1890): 337–54,
699–719.
———. Sōgo fujo ron: Shinka no ichi yōso (Mutual aid: A factor of evolution).
Translated by Ōsugi Sakae. Tokyo: Shunyōdō, 1917; repr., 1924, 1926.
———. “Tolstoi.” Unpublished manuscript, November 12, 1910. RGALI f.
2738, op. 1, ed. khr. 19.
368 Bibliography

Kublin, Hyman. “The Japanese Socialists and the Russo-Japanese War.”

Journal of Modern History 21 (March–December 1950): 322–39.
Kujala, Antti. “Attempts at Fostering Collaboration among the Russian
Revolutionary Parties during the Russo-Japanese War.” Acta Slavica
Iaponica 9 (1991): 134–45.
Kupchinskii, F. P. Geroi tyla: Ocherki prestupnoi deiatel’nosti chinov intendants-
kago viedomstva vo vremia Russko-Iaponskoi voiny (Heroes of the home
front: Sketches of the criminal activities of officials of the Ser vice Corps
Department during the Russo-Japanese War). St. Peterburg: Molodaia
Mysl’, 1908.
Kuratani Shigeru. “J. Henri Fabre: My Souvenirs entomologiques
(2006.10.2[Mon]).” http://www.cdb.riken.go.jp/emo/clm/clm _en/0610n
.html. Accessed October 29, 2011.
“Kuropotokin” (Kropotkin). Demokurashī (Democracy) 5 (July 1, 1919): 1.
Lao Tzu. Tao te king, ili pisanie o nravstvennosti (Tao te ching, or Writings on
morality). Translated by Konishi Masutaro (Daniil) and edited by L. N.
Tolstoy. Moscow: Pechatnoe delo, 1913.
———. “Tao te King Laosi” (Tao te ching of Lao Tzu). Translated by D. P.
Konissi. Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, year 5, vol. 23, no. 3 (May 1894):
380–408.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-
Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lewis, Martin W., and Karen Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of
Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Lins, Ulrich. “Esperanto as Language and Idea in China and Japan.” Lan-
guage Problems and Language Planning 32, no. 1 (2008): 47– 60.
Lishina, A. K. and O. V. Lishin. “Lev Mechnikov—Revoliutsionnyi publitsist
i uchenyi” (Lev Mechnikov—Revolutionary publicist and scholar). In
Literaturnoe nasledstvo: Iz istorii russkoi literatury i obshchestvennoi mysli,
1860–1890 gg. (Research in literature: From the history of Russian literature
and social thought, 1860s–1890s), edited by V. G. Bazanov, D. D. Blagoi,
A. N. Dubovikov, I. S. Zel’bershtein, S. A. Makashin, K. D. Muratova,
L. I. Timofeev, N. A. Trifonov, M. B. Khrapchenko, and V. P. Shcherbina,
vol. 87, pp. 461– 96. Moscow: Nauka, 1977.
Liu, Lydia, ed. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global
Circulations Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
———. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated
Modernity— China, 1900–1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1995.
 Bibliography 369

Loftus, Ronald. “The Inversion of Progress: Taoka Reiun’s Hibunmeiron.”

Monumenta Nipponica 40, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 191–208.
Lu, David. Japan: A Documentary History. Vol. 2—The Late Tokugawa Period
to the Present. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
Maier, Charles S. “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative
Narratives for the Modern Era.” American Historical Review 105, no. 3
(June 2000): 807–831, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.3
/ah000807.html. Accessed June 29, 2009.
Maki, John. William Smith Clark, A Yankee in Hokkaido. Sapporo: Hokkaido
University Press, 1996.
Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic
Books, 1998.
Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991.
Markin, V. A. “L. N. Tolstoi i P. A. Kropotkin (L. N. Tolstoy and P. A.
Kropotkin).” In Iasnopolianskii sbornik (Iasnopoliana collection),
pp. 152– 63. Tula: Priokskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1984.
Marks, Steven G. How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-
Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2003.
Maruyama Masao. Bunmeiron no Gairyaku wo yomu (Reading Outline of a
Theory of Civilization). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996.
Maruyama Masao and Katō Shūichi. Honyakuto Nihon no kindai (Translation
and modern Japan). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998.
Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994.
Mayama Yōhachi. Aomori ken dokusho undō Meiji-Taisho shi (History of the
Aomori reading movement in the Meiji-Taishō period). Tsugaru: Aomori
Tsugaru shobo, 1981.
Mechnikov, Lev. L’Empire Japonaise (The Japanese Empire). Geneva: Imprim-
erie orientale de “l’Atsume gusa,” 1878.
———. “Era Iaponskogo prosveshcheniia” (The era of Japanese enlightenment).
In Iaponiia na perelome: Izbrannye stat’i i ocherki (Japan at the crossroads:
Selected articles and sketches), edited by A. A. Shcherbina, pp. 108–136.
Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Dal’nevostochnogo universiteta (Far Eastern
University Press), 1992. Originally published in Delo 2 (1877): 242–75.
———. “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii: Meidzi” (The era of the enlightenment
of Japan. Meiji). In Iaponiia na perelome: Izbrannye stat’ i i ocherki, edited by
A. A. Shcherbina, pp. 76–107. Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Dal’nevostochnogo
universiteta, 1992. Originally published in Delo 10 (1876): 133–70.
370 Bibliography

———. “La France sous Mac-Mahon: Résumé politique” (France under

Mac-Mahon: A political summary). Hokkaido Colonial Office and Its
Foreign Employees, Advisers, and Other Foreigners: Correspondence,
November 16, 1873. Hokkaido University Northern Studies Special
Collections.
———. “Kul’turnoe znachenie demonizma” (The cultural meaning of
demonism). Delo 1 (1879): 173–209; 2 (1879): 141– 77; 4 (1879): 255– 98.
———. “M. A. Bakunin v Italii v 1864 godu” (M. A. Bakunin in Italy in
1864). Istoricheskii vestnik (History herald), 3 (1897): 806–834.
———. “Na vsemirnom poprishche” (On a worldwide career). Delo 2 (1882).
———. “Obshchina i gosudarstvo v Shveitsarii” (Society and government in
Switzerland). Delo 6 (1881).
———. “Revolution and Evolution.” Contemporary Review 50 (September
1886): 412–37.
———. “Shkola bor’by v sotsiologii” (The conflict school in sociology). In
Tsivilizatsiia i velikiie istoricheskie reki: Stat’ i (Civilization and the great
historical rivers: Articles), by Lev Mechnikov, edited by V. I. Evdokimov,
pp. 152–231. Moscow: Progress, 1995.
———. “Tochka Povorota” (Turning point). Kolokol 1, no. 170 (September 1,
1863).
———. Tsivilizatsiia i velikiie istoricheskie reki: Stat’i (Civilization and the great
historical rivers: Articles), edited by V. I. Evdokimov. Moscow: Progress, 1995.
———. “Vospominaniia o dvukhletnei sluzhbe v Iaponii” (Recollections of
my two years’ ser vice in Japan). In Iaponiia na perelome: Izbrannye stat’ i i
ocherki (Japan at the crossroads: Selected articles and sketches), edited by
A. A. Shcherbina, pp. 23–75. Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Dal’nevostochnogo
universiteta, 1992. Originally published in Russkie vedomosti (Russian
herald), 248, 262, 274, 344, 348, 349 (1883); 38, 184, 204, 206, 242, 244, 289,
315, 335, 361 (1884).
Metchnikoff, Elie (Ilya Mechnikov). “The Haunting Terror of All Human
Life.” New York Times, February 27, 1910.
———. Nature of Man: Studies in Optimistic Philosophy. Translated by Sir
Peter Chalmers Mitchell. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905.
Metchnikoff, Olga. The Life of Elie Metchnikoff, 1845–1916. Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921.
Miller, Martin A. Kropotkin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Miyake Eiji. Tatakau Esuperantistotachi no kiseki: Puroretariia Esuperanto undō
no kenkyū (Tracing the paths of fighting Esperantists: Studies of the
proletarian Esperanto movement). Tokyo: Riberoi Sōsho, 1995.
 Bibliography 371

Miyazaki Muryū. Kishūshū (Demons’ tears). In Meiji seiji shōsetsushū (The

Meiji political novel), no. 1, pp. 67–120. Meiji bungaku zenshū, vol. 5.
Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1966. Originally published in Jiyū To (Light of
freedom), December 1884–April 1885.
Mizuno Aki. Okayama Meiji shakaishugi undō (The Okayama Meiji socialist
movement). Tokyo: Rodo kyoiku sentaa, 1977.
Morgan, Edmund. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in
England and America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
Morimoto Kokichi. “Johns Hopkins daigaku sōchō oyobi rekishi kyōju no
Nichiro Sensō dan” (Conversation on the Russo-Japanese War between the
president and a history professor of Johns Hopkins University). Taiyō, no.
10 (July 1904): 207–8.
Morris, Ivan. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan.
London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1975.
Morse, Anne Nishimura, J. Thomas Rimer, Kendall H. Brown, and Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston. Art of the Japanese Postcard: The Leonard A. Lauder
Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Aldershot: Lund Humphries,
2004.
Morson, Gary Saul. Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian
Case Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Morton, Leith. Divided Self: A Biography of Arishima Takeo. Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1988.
Mukai Takashi. Anakizumu to Esuperanto (Anarchism and Esperanto). Tokyo:
JCA Shuppan, 1980.
Müller, Gotelind, and Gregor Benton. “Esperanto and Chinese Anarchists,
1907–1920: The Translation from Diaspora to Homeland.” Language
Problems and Language Planning 30, no. 1 (2006): 45–73.
Mullins, Mark R. Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Move-
ments. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.
Nagahara Keiji. Kōkokushikan (Imperial historicity). Tokyo: Iwanami Press,
1983.
Naganawa Mitsuo. “The Japa nese Orthodox Church in the Meiji Era.” In A
Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural Encounters, 1868–1926, edited
by J. Thomas Rimer, pp. 158– 69. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1995.
Najita, Tetsuo. “Andō Shōeki—‘The Forgotten Thinker’ in Japanese History.”
In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi
and H. D. Harootunian, pp. 61–79. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2002.
372 Bibliography

———. Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
———. “Japan’s Industrial Revolution in Historical Perspective.” In Japan in
the World, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, pp. 13–30.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
———. “Past in Present: Danpenteki Gensetsu to Sengo Seishinshi” (Frag-
mented discourse and postwar intellectual history). Journal of Pacific Asia 3
(1996): 3–32.
———. “Political Economy in Thought and Practice among Commoners in
Nineteenth-Century Japan.” Japan Foundation Newsletter 16, no. 3 (1988):
12–18.
———. Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: Kaitokudo Merchant Academy of
Osaka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Nakae Chōmin. A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government. New York:
Weatherhill, 1992.
Nakai, Yoshiyuki. “Futabatei Shimei.” In Papers on Japan, 4:1– 63. Cambridge,
MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1967.
Narita Ryūichi. Katō Tokijirō. Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1983.
Nihon Anākizumu Undō Jinmei Jiten Henshū Iiankai (Editorial Committee
of the Dictionary of People in the Japan Anarchist Movement), ed.
Biografia leksikono de la Japana anarkista movado (Dictionary of people in
the Japan anarchist movement). Tokyo: Paru Shuppan, 2004.
Nihon Esperanto undō gojusshūnen kinen gyōji iin kai (Committee on the
Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Japan Esperanto Movement).
Nihon Esperanto undō shiryō: Kroniko de la Esperantista Movado en Japanujo
(Documents on the Japan Esperanto movement). Vol. 1, 1906–1926. Tokyo:
Nihon Esperanto Gakka, 1956.
“Nihon shinshibatsu no kaibo” (Anatomy of Japan’s gentlemen’s cliques).
Chokugen 2, no. 8 (March 26, 1905): 1.
Nikolai, Arch. Dnevniki Sviatogo Nikolaia Iaponskogo (The diaries of Saint
Nikolai of Japan), edited by Nakamura Yoshikazu, Nakamura Kennosuke,
Yasui Ryōhei, and Naganawa Mitsuo. Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press,
1994.
———. “Iaponiia s tochki zreniia khristianskoi missii” (Japan from the
point of view of the Christian mission). Russkii vestnik 83, no. 9 (1869):
219– 64.
———. “Seoguny i mikado: Istoricheskii ocherk po iaponskim istochnikam”
(Shoguns and the mikado: A historical outline from Japanese sources).
Russkii vestnik 84, no. 11 (1869): 207–27; no. 12 (1869): 415– 60.
 Bibliography 373

Ninkovich, Frank. Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the
Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Nitobe Inazō. The Japanese Nation: Its Land, Its People, and Its Life; With
Special Consideration to Its Relations with the United States. New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1912.
“Nitsushe shi to Torusutoi haku no tokugi shisō wo hyōsu” (A comparative
analysis of Nietzsche’s and Tolstoy’s Ideas of Virtue). Shinkai 5 (January
1894).
Nobori Shōmu and Akamatsu Katsumaro. The Russian Impact on Japan:
Literature and Social Thought. Edited by Peter Berton, Paul F. Langer, and
George O. Totten. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press,
1981.
Noguchi Koichi. “Piusutski to Ginza no Hakodateya” (Piłsudski and Ginza’s
Hakodateya). Evening edition of Hokkaido shimbun (Hokkaido news),
December 12, 1985.
Norman, E. H. Andō Shōeki and the Anatomy of Japanese Feudalism. Tokyo:
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1950.
Notehelfer, F. G. “Kōtoku Shūsui and Nationalism.” Journal of Asian Studies
31, no. 1 (November 1971): 31–39.
———. Kōtoku Shūsui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1971.
Nozoe Kenji. “Akitaken sākuru undō shi nōto” (Notes on the Akita Prefecture
Circles Movement). In Akita shakai undōshi kenkyū (Akita Socialism
Studies), no. 1. Edited by Akita shakai undōshi kenkyūkai (Study Group
on the History of the Akita Socialist Movement). Akita: Mishima shobo,
1968.
Oguma Eiji. A Genealogy of Japanese “Self-Images.” Melbourne: TransPacific
Press, 2002.
Osborne, Peter. “Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category.”
New Left Review, no. 192 (March–April 1992), http://www.newleftreview
.org/?view=1670. Accessed November 27, 2011.
“Ōshu ni okeru tokugi shisō no nidaihyōsha Furiderihi Nitsushe-shi to Reo
Tōrusutoi-haku to no iken hikaku” (A comparison of the views of Fried-
rich Nietzsche and Count Leo Tolstoy, the two representatives of ethical
thought in Europe). Shinkai 4 (December 1893).
Ōsugi Sakae. “Kindai kagaku no keikō” (The latest trends of modern science).
Kindai shisō (Modern thought) 2, no. 6 (November 1912).
———. Kuropotokin kenkyū (Reflections on Kropotkin). Tokyo: Arusu, 1920;
repr., 1923, 1948.
374 Bibliography

———. Ōsugi Sakae zenshū (Complete works of Ōsugi Sakae). 11 vols. Tokyo:
Sekai Bunko, 1963– 64.
———. “Yakushano jo” (Translator’s preface). In Faburu Konchūki, by Jean-
Henri Fabre, translated by Ōsugi Sakae, pp. 5–14. Tokyo: Asahi shoten,
2005.
———. “Zadan” (Conversation). Kindai shisō 1, no. 3 (December 1, 1912):
14–15.
Ōyama Gensui Hensan Iin, ed. Gensui Kōshaku Ōyama Iwao (Admiral
Marquis Ōyama Iwao). Tokyo: Ōyama Gensui Hensan Iin, 1935.
Parkes, Graham. “The Early Reception of Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Japan.” In
Nietzsche and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes, pp. 177– 99.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Pavlova, T. F. Fondy Russkogo zagranichnogo istoricheskogo arkhiva v Prage:
Mezharkhivnyi putevoditel’ (The collections of the Russian Historical
Archive Abroad in Prague: An interarchival guide). Moscow: ROSSPEN,
1999.
Peng Hsiao-yen. “A Traveling Text: Souvenirs entomologiques, Japanese
Anarchism, and Shanghai Neo-sensationism.” NTU Studies in Language
and Literature 17 (June 2007): 1–42.
The Picture Book of Japanese War with Russia. Tokyo, 1905.
Pierson, John D. Tokutomi Sohō, 1863–1957: A Journalist for Modern Japan.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Piłsudski, Bronisław. The Collected Works of Bronisław Piłsudski, edited by
Alfred J. Majewicz, vols. 1 and 3. Trends in Linguistics, Documentation, 15.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998, 2004.
———. “Dorogoi Lev Iakovlevich . . .”: Pis’ma L. Ia. Shternbergu, 1893–1917 gg.
(“Dear Lev Iakovlevich . . .”: Letters to L. Ia. Shternberg, 1893–1917).
Edited by V. M. Latyshev. Iuzhno-Sakhalinsk: Iuzhno-Sakhalinskii
oblastnoi kraevedcheskii muzei, 1996.
———. “Shigi Hasiegawa.” Swiat (World) 12 (1910): 8–10.
———. “What Do They Say about Us in the Land of the Rising Sun.” In
Bronisław Piłsudski and Futabatei Shimei— An Excellent Charter in the
History of Polish-Japanese Relations, edited by Alfred Majewicz and Tomasz
Wicherkiewicz, pp. 15–17. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2001.
Plekhanov, Georgii. “L. I. Mechnikov (Nekrolog)” (L. I. Mechnikov [Obitu-
ary]). In Sochineniia (Writings), Georgii Plekhanov, 7:327–29. Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925.
———. “O knige L. I. Mechnikova” (On the book by L. I. Mechnikov). In
Sochineniia, Georgii Plekhanov, 7:15–28. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatel’stvo, 1925.
 Bibliography 375

———. Selected Philosophical Works. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi

literatury, 1974.
Posse, V. Vospominaniia (Recollections). St. Petersburg: Mysl’, 1923.
Pozoiskii, S. K istorii otlucheniia L’va Tolstogo ot tserkvi (Toward a history of
Lev Tolstoy’s excommunication from the church). Moscow: Sovetskaia
Rossiia, 1979.
———. Lev Tolstoi i tserkov (Lev Tolstoy and the church). Tula: Tul’skoe
knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1963.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40.
———. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Rabinow, Paul. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Rabson, Steve. “Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One’s Life or Not—A
Question of Which War.” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese
25, no. 1 (April 1991): 45– 74.
Rachinskii, Sergei A. Introduction to “Kak ia stal khristaninom” (How
I Became a Christian), by S. Shōji. Russkii vestnik 217 (November 1891):
24– 25.
Ravina, Mark. The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori.
Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
Reclus, Élisée. Évolution et révolution (Evolution and revolution). Geneva:
Impr. Jurassienne, 1884.
———, ed. Nouvelle géographie universelle (New universal geography). Vol. 7.
Paris: Hachette et cie, 1882.
———. “Predislovie Elize Rekliu” (Preface by Élisée Reclus). In Tsivilizatsiia
i velikie istoricheskie reki: Stat’ i, by Lev Mechnikov, edited by V. I. Evdoki-
mov, pp. 219–31. Moscow: Progress, 1995.
Rekho, Kim. “Lev Tolstoi i Vostok” (Lev Tolstoy and the East). In Lev Tolstoi
i literatury Vostoka (Lev Tolstoy and the literature of the East), edited by
Kim Rekho, pp. 5–56. Moscow: IMLI RAN, Nasledie, 2000.
Richards, Robert. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind
and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Rimer, J. Thomas, ed. A Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural Encoun-
ters, 1868–1926. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Roberts, John. Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of
Cultural Theory. London: Pluto Press, 2006.
Robin, Ron. The Barbed-Wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the
United States during World War II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995.
376 Bibliography

“Rokoku dōshi no shōsoku” (News about Russian Comrades). Heimin

shimbun 31 (June 12, 1904): 3.
Roosevelt, Theodore. “Theodore Roosevelt—Nobel Lecture.” Nobelprize.org,
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1906/roosevelt
-lecture.html. Accessed January 5, 2011.
———. The Winning of the West. Vol. 3, The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany
Commonwealths, 1784–1790. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s
Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
The Russo-Japanese War. Tokyo: Kinkodo, 1904–5.
The Russo-Japanese War. Tokyo: Sonokichi Hasegawa, 1904.
Russo-Japanese War, 1904– 5: A Children’s Story. Tokyo, 1905.
The Russo-Japanese War: Fourth Army, Taken by the Photographic Dept. of the
Imperial Headquarters. Tokyo: K. Ogawa, 1904.
Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. “Introduction” and “Commentary.” In Japan’s First
Modern Novel: “Ukigumo” of Futabate Shimei, by Futabatei Shimei, with
translation and critical commentary by Marleigh Grayer Ryan, pp.
xiii–190. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Saigō Takamori. Saigō Takamori zenshū (The complete works of Saigō
Takamori). 6 vols. Tokyo: Daiwa Shobo, 1978.
Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural National-
ism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Sakai Toshihiko. “Arishima shi no nōen hōki” (Arishima’s surrender of his
estate). Zenei, August 1922.
Sakai Toshihiko and Katō Tokijirō. “Letters from Japan.” Mother Earth 6, no.
5 (July 1911): 148–50.
Sakon Takeshi. “M. A. Bakunin no nihon raikō-wo megutte: Sono shijitsu
kōshyō no kokoromi” (On M. A. Bakunin’s arrival in Japan: An attempt to
uncover the historical facts). In Roshiya to Nihon (Russia and Japan), no. 2,
edited by Nakamura Yoshikazu, pp. 49– 61. Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 1990.
Sand, Jordan. House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space,
and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004.
“Sangyō kumiaishugi sengen” (Declaration of Industrial Cooperativism). Pts.
1 and 2. Kyōei: Hokkaido Sangyō kumiai zasshi (Coprosperity: Hokkaido
Industrial Cooperative journal), 6 (June 1929): 6–10; 7 (July 1929): 2–8.
Sasaki-Uemura, Wesley. Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar
Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.
 Bibliography 377

Satow, Ernest. “Letter to F. V. Dickens.” In Readings in Tokugawa Thought,

edited by Tetsuo Najita, 3rd ed., pp. 297–299. Select Papers of the Center
for East Asian Studies, vol. 9. Chicago: Center for East Asian Studies, 1998.
Saunders, Clare. “Comparing Environmental Movement Networks in Periods of
Latency and Visibility.” Graduate Journal of Social Science 4 (2007), 109–39.
Sawada Kazuhiko. “Bronislaw Piłsudski and Futabatei Shimei.” In Bronislaw
Piłsudski and Futabatei Shimei— An Excellent Charter in the History of
Polish-Japanese Relations, edited by Alfred Majewicz and Tomasz
Wicherkiewicz, pp. 3–11. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2001.
———. Hakukei Roshiyajin to Nihon bunka (White Russians and Japanese
culture). Yokohama: Seibunsha, 2007.
Scalapino, Robert, and George Yu. The Chinese Anarchist Movement. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1961.
Scheiner, Irwin. Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970.
Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland
Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
———. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Seishun no Hokudai Keitekiryō henshū iinkai. Seishun no Hokudai Keitekiryō
(Keitekiryō: Student dormitory of Hokkaido University). Sapporo:
Keitekiryō dō sō kai, 1991.
Senuma Kayo. “Vliianie Russkoi literatury na Iaponskuiu” (Russian litera-
ture’s impact on Japanese literature). Unpublished manuscript, August 8,
1911, RGALI.
Senuma Shigeki. “Arishima Takeo Den 5: Kekkon zengo no Arishima Takeo”
(Biography of Arishima Takeo: Before and after marriage) (1). Bungaku 35,
no. 9 (1967): 32.
Shcherbina, A. A. “L. I. Mechnikov— Sovremennik i issledovatel’
burzhuaznoi revoliutsii v Iaponii” (L. I. Mechnikov— Contemporary and
researcher of the bourgeois revolution in Japan). In Iaponiia na perelome:
Izbrannye stat’ i i ocherki, by Lev Mechnikov, edited by A. A. Scherbina,
pp. 3–22. Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Dal’nevostochnogo universiteta, 1992.
Shea, George Tyson. Leftwing Literature in Japan: A Brief History of the
Proletarian Literary Movement. Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 1964.
Shilovyi, A. A. and M. G. Karnaukhovaia, eds. Deiateli revoliutsionnogo
dvizheniia v Rossii: Bio-bibliograficheskii spravochnik (Figures of the Russian
revolutionary movements: A bio-bibliographical handbook) 2, no. 2.
Moscow: Mospoligraf, 1930.
378 Bibliography

Shimamura Hōgetsu. “Hasegawa Futabatei shi toku” (Hasegawa Futabatei).

Yomiuri shimbun, May 15, 1909.
Shokhor-Trotskii, Konstantin. “Neskol’ko strok o P. A. Kropotkin” (Several
lines about P. A. Kropotkin). Vestnik literatury 4, no. 2–3 (1922): 10–11.
Smith, Henry Dewitt, II. Japan’s First Student Radicals. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1972.
Stanley, Thomas. Ōsugi Sakae, Anarchist in Taishō Japan: The Creativity of the
Ego. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Stepniak, Sergei. Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from
Life. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1883.
Stocking, George. “Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race.” Modernism/
Modernity 1, no. 1 (January 1994): 4–16.
Sugii Mutsurō. Meijiki kirisutokyō no kenkyū. Tokyo: Dohōsha, 1984.
Suite Junnosuke. “Sapporo ni sunde ni ita koro” (When I was still in Sap-
poro). Pts. 2 and 3. Genshirin 11, no. 6 (1953): 12–13; 11, no. 7 (1953): 10–11.
Suzuoki Jirō. Kobe no Esuperanto (Esperanto in Kobe). Osaka: Nippon Insatsu
Shuppan, 1990.
———. Nagoya Esuperanto undō nenpyō, 1906–1945 (Chronology of the
Esperanto movement in Nagoya, 1906–1945). Kobe: Kōyū Planning Center,
2002.
Tamura, G. S. “Vliianie na menia Tolstogo” (Tolstoy’s influence on me). In
Mezhdunarodnyi tolstovskii al’manakh (International Tolstoy almanac),
edited by P. Sergeenko, pp. 342–44. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Kniga,” 1909.
Tanaka, Stefan. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1993.
———. New Times in Modern Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006.
Taoka Reiun. Meiji hanshin den (Story of the Meiji rebellion). Tokyo: Hidaka
Yurondo, 1909.
———. Taoka Reiun zenshū (Complete works of Taoka Reiun). 7 vols. Tokyo:
Hōsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1973.
Taratuty, E. A. “Iz perepiski s S. M. Stepniakom-Kravchinskim” (From the
Correspondence with S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii). In Literaturnoe
nasledstvo: Iz istorii russkoi literatury i obshchestvennoi mysli, 1860–1890 gg.
(Research in literature: From the history of Russian literature and social
thought, 1860s–1890s), edited by V. G. Bazanov, D. D. Blagoi, A. N.
Dubovikov, I. S. Zel’bershtein, S. A. Makashin, K. D. Muratova, L. I.
Timofeev, N. A. Trifonov, M. B. Khrapchenko, and V. P. Shcherbina,
87:497–504. Moscow: Nauka, 1977.
 Bibliography 379

“Tenin no seifuku ni rubashika wo saiyō” (Applying the rubashika to the shop

workers’ uniform). Nakamuraya, http://www.nakamuraya.co.jp/100/index
.htm. Accessed October 31, 2009.
Thomas, Julia Adeney. Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese
Political Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Todes, Daniel P. “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary
Thought, 1859–1917.” Isis 78, no. 4 (December 1987): 537–51.
Tokutomi Roka. “Five Days at Yasnaya Polyana.” Translated by Laurenz
Kominz. In “Pilgrimage to Tolstoy: Tokutomi Roka’s Junrei Kikō,” by
Laurenz Kominz, Monumenta Nipponica 41, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 71–101.
———. Junrei kikō (Notes of a pilgrim). In Roka Zenshū (Complete works of
Roka), 7:357–574. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1929.
———. Roka nikki (Roka’s diary). 7 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1935.
Tokutomi Sohō. Jiyū dōtoku oyobi jukyōshugi (Free ethics and Neo-Confucianism).
Kumamoto: Published by author, 1884.
Tolstaya, Aleksandra. “Chichi Torusutoi to Tokutomi Roka kaiken no
omoide” (Recollection of the meeting of my father Tolstoy and Tokutomi
Roka). Gendai (Contemporary) 1 (1931).
———. Out of the Past. Edited by Katharine Strelsky and Catherine Wolkon-
sky. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
———. Preface to Torusutoi wo kataru (My recollections of Tolstoy), by
Konishi Masutarō, pp. 3–4. Tokyo: Momoyama shorin, 1936.
———. Tolstoy, a Life of My Father. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds
Hapgood. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953.
———. Torusutoi no omoide. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1930.
Tolstoy, Lev. Bethink Yourselves! London: Free Age Press, 1904.
———. The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated. In The Complete Works
of Count Tolstoy, edited by Leo Wiener, 14:1–451; 15:1–366. London: J. M.
Dent and Co., 1904.
———. Gde liubov’, tam i Bog (Where love is, there God is also). In Sobranie
sochinenii (Collected works), by L. N. Tolstoy, edited by N. N. Akopovaia,
N. K. Gudzii, N. N. Gusev, and M. V. Krapchenko, 10:281– 92. Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1963.
———. How I Came to Believe. London: Free Age Press, 1901.
———. Izrecheniia kitaiskogo mudretsa Lao-tsi, vybrannye L. N. Tolstym
(Aphorisms by the Chinese thinker Lao Tzu, selected by L. N. Tolstoy).
Moscow: Posrednik, 1909.
———. The Kingdom of God Is within You. New York: Cassell Publishing
Co., 1894.
380 Bibliography

———. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete collection of writings). Edited

by V. G. Chertkov. Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo
khudozhestvennoi literatury (State Publisher of Literature), 1949–54.
———. Short Exposition of the Gospel. In The Complete Works of Count
Tolstoy, edited by Leo Wiener, 15:366– 94. London: J. M. Dent and Co.,
1904.
———. Sobranie sochinenii (Collected writings). Edited by N. N. Akopovaia,
N. K. Gudzii, N. N. Gusev, and M. V. Krapchenko. 20 vols. Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961– 65.
———. “Torusutoi ō no Nichiro Sensōron” (Count Tolstoy’s view on the
Russo-Japanese War). Heimin shimbun 39 (August 7, 1904): 1– 6.
Tolstoy, S. L. Ocherki bylogo (Sketches of the past), 2nd ed. Moscow: Goslitiz-
dat, 1956.
Tribe, Keith. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Futures Past: On the Semantics of
Historical Time, by Reinhardt Koselleck, pp. vii–xx. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1979.
“Torusutoi haku no shūkyōron” (Tolstoi’s theory of religion). Shinkai 15
(November 1894).
Tsubouchi Shōyō. “Futabatei no koto” (Recollections of Futabatei Shimei). In
Kaki no heta (Persimmon’s navel), by Tsubouchi Shoyo, pp. 7– 94. Tokyo:
Chūōkōronsha, 1933.
Tsuneki Katsuji. “Recollections of My Life (Extracts).” Sphecos 28 (December
1994): 6–12.
Tunick, Mark. “Tolerant Imperialism: J. S. Mill’s Defense of British Rule in
India.” Review of Politics 68, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 586– 611.
Twine, Nanette. On Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written
Japanese. London: Routledge, 1991.
Tyrrell, Ian. Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temper-
ance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Uchida Roan. Futabatei no isshō (Futabatei’s life). Tokyo: Kinokyō, 1916.
———. Omoidasu hitobito (People I remember). Tokyo: Shunshūsha, 1925.
Ushimaru Yasuo. Nihon seikyōshi (History of Japanese orthodoxy). Tokyo:
Nihon Haristosu Seikyōkai kyōdan (Japanese Orthodox Christian Group),
1978.
Veer, Peter van der. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and
Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Veniukov, M. Puteshestvie po Priamur’ iu, Kitaiu i Iaponii (Travels across
Priamur, China, and Japan). Khabarovsk: Dal’nevostochnoe gosudarstven-
noe izdatel’stvo (State Publisher of the Far East), 1952.
 Bibliography 381

Viswanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Vlastos, Stephen. “Agrarianism without Tradition: The Radical Critique of
Prewar Japanese Modernity.” In Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of
Modern Japan, edited by Stephen Vlastos, pp. 79– 94. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998.
Waal, Frans de. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New
York: Harmony Books, 2009.
———. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist.
New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Wada Haruki. Nikorai Rasseru: Kokkyo o koeru narodoniki (Nikolai Russel: A
populist transgressing national borders). 2 vols. Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha,
1973.
Walker, Janet. “The Russian Role in the Creation of the First Japanese Novel,
Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo.” In A Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese
Cultural Encounters, 1868–1926, edited by J. Thomas Rimer, pp. 22–37.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
“War Has Broken Out at Last.” Heimin shimbun 15 (February 21, 1904): 1.
Waseda daigaku shakai kagaku kenkyūjo (Waseda University Social Science
Research Center), ed. Shakai shugi sha no shokan (Correspondence of
socialists). Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1974.
Watanabe Masaji. “Mechinikofu to Muramatsu Aizō” (Mechnikov and
Muramatsu Aizō). In Surabu to Nihon (Slav and Japan), edited by Hara
Teruyuki and Togawa Tsuguo, 8:133–56. Tokyo: Kobundo, 1995.
———. “Tokyo Gaikokugo Gakkō Roshiago ka to narodoniki seishin:
Kojima Kuratarō no kōgiroku wo motoni” (Tokyo University of Foreign
Studies Russian program and the Narodniki spirit: Based on the lecture
notes of Kojima Kuratarō). In Kojima Kuratarō wo shinonde (Commemo-
rating Kojima Kuratarō), edited by Kojima Kazuo, pp. 1–14. Sapporo:
Printed by author, 1994. Hokkaido University Northern Studies Special
Collections.
Weitz, Eric D. “From Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and
the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and
Civilizing Missions.” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December
2008): 1313–43.
Wells, David, and Sandra Wilson, eds. The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural
Perspective, 1904– 5. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
White, James D. “Despotism and Anarchy: The Sociological Thought of
L. I. Mechnikov.” Slavonic and East European Review 54, no. 3 (1976):
395–411.
382 Bibliography

Woodcock, George, and Ivan Avakumovic. The Anarchist Prince: A Biblio-

graphical Study of Peter Kropotkin. New York: T. V. Boardman, 1950.
Wright, Robert. The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychol-
ogy. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Yamada Hiromitsu. “Futabatei to Matsubara Iwagorō, Yokoyama Gennosuke”
(Futabatei and Matsubura Iwagorō, Yokoyama Gennosuke). Kokubungaku
kaishaku to kansho 28, no. 6 (May 1963): 34–42.
Yamakawa Hitoshi. “Musan-kaikyū undō no hoko tenkan” (A change of
direction of the proletarian movement). In Yamakawa Hitoshi shū (Col-
lected works of Yamakawa Hitoshi), edited by Takabatake Michitoshi, pp.
71–81. Kindai Nihon shisō taikei (Outline of modern Japanese thought),
no. 19. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1976.
———. “Seiji-teki toitsu sensen e! Musan seito godo-ron no konkyo” (To a
political united front! The basis of the argument for the merger of proletar-
ian political parties). In Yamakawa Hitoshi shū (Collected works of
Yamakawa Hitoshi), edited by Takabatake Michitoshi, pp. 183–201. Kindai
Nihon shisō taikei, no. 19. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1976.
———. Yamakawa Hitoshi jiden: Aru bonjin no kiroku sonota (Autobiography
of Yamakawa Hitoshi: A story of an ordinary individual). Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten, 1961.
Yanagi Tomiko. Torusutoi to Nihon (Tolstoy and Japan). Tokyo: Waseda
University Press, 1998.
Yasuda Toshiaki. “Language and Ethnicity in Modern Japan.” Sungkyun
Journal of East Asian Studies 4, no. 1 (2004): 25–44.
Yasui Ryōhei. “Futabatei no robun shokan” (Futabatei’s Russian correspon-
dence). Bungaku 43, no. 9 (September 1975): 1104–12.
———. “Futabatei Shimei no Roshiajin Polandojin to no kōshō” (Futabatei’s
interactions with Russians and Polish). Bungaku 34, no. 8 (August 1966):
22–30.
Yasunaga Toshinobu. Andō Shōeki: Social and Ecological Philosopher of
Eighteenth- Century Japan. New York: Weatherhill, 1992.
Yates, Charles L. Saigō Takamori: The Man behind the Myth. London: Kegan
Paul International, 1995.
Yokoyama Gennosuke. Nihon no kasō shakai (The lower strata of society).
Tokyo: Kyobunkan, 1899. Repr., Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1949.
———. “Shinjin Hasegawa Tatsunosuke” (Hasegawa Tatsunosuke, a man of
truth). In Futabei Shimei: Kaku homen yori mitaru Hasegawa Tatsunosuke
kun oyobi sono tsuikai (Futabatei Shimei: Hasegawa Tatsunosuke in the
reminiscences of contemporaries), edited by Tsubouchi Shōyo and Uchida
Roan, 1:198–222. Tokyo: Ekifu-sha, 1909.
 Bibliography 383

———. Untitled article. Kokumin shimbun, April 7, 1897.

Yokoyama Toshiaki. Nihon shinka shisōshi: Meiji jidai no shinka shisō (History
of evolutionary theories in Japan: Evolutionary thought in the Meiji
period). Vol. 1. Tokyo: Shinsuisha, 2005.
Yutani Eiji. “Nihon no kasō shakai of Gennosuke Yokoyama.” Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Berkeley, 1985.
 Index

Abe Isoo, 156 Altruism: and Darwin, 311, 316–17,

Abe Jirō, 128 326
Adaptation, 270, 302, 313, 315; and Anarchism: defined, 9–12
language, 265, 267 Anarchy: defined, 9–10
Africa, 262 Anderson, Benedict, 14n26
African Americans, 149, 262n6, 281 Andō Shōeki, 235, 309–10, 340
Agriculture: agrarian life, 42, 43n38, Andreev, Leonid, 187
330; and Ainu, 271; and colonial- Anesaki Masaharu, 128
ism, 245–46; cooperatives/ Animals: and altruism/mutual aid,
communes, 36, 42–43, 235, 343–46; 62– 65, 73, 232, 303, 306–7, 311,
and education, 215, 245–46, 348. 316–17, 325–26; and children’s
See also Farmers; Rural life literature, 334; excrement, 320–21
Ainu, 16, 161, 217–18, 268– 73 Anthropology, 271–72
Akai Tori, 333–34 Anti-Americanism, 208. See also
Akashi Motojirō, Colonel, 198– 99 United States
Akita Prefecture, 189n70, 190, 191, Anti-imperialism, see under Colo-
193 nialism/Imperialism
Akita Ujaku, 343; and children’s Anti-Westernism, 104, 227, 259.
stories, 333–34; and Eroshenko, See also West
291n69, 293; and Esperanto, 284, Anthony, Susan B., 165
288; on Tolstoy, 184 Arahata Kanson, 276, 304
Alexander, Agnes Baldwin, 282–84 Archives, 16–20, 62, 78, 137, 203–4,
Aliases/pseudonyms, 20, 35, 82 243, 285
Alliances, political 157, 200. See also Arishima Takeo, 5, 11, 25–26, 134,
Treaties 171n43, 189n70, 209–25, 229; and
Althusser, Louis, 7 anarchist democracy, 343; and
386 Index

Arishima Takeo (continued ) Assassination, 75, 90, 257, 296; and

Asuke Soichi, 250, 253–54, 322–23, Iwakura Tomomi, 46; and Tsar
334, 336, 350; and children’s Alexander III, 269; of William
literature, 254, 288, 333–34; McKinley, 153
conversion of, 25, 134, 211, 220–21, Assimilation: “assimilating history,”
229, 237–39; Cooperative Living 213–20; and West, 99
Farm, 345–46, 349; and Daigyaku Aston, Lord William George, 56–59
incident, 255, 304–5; as elite, 214, Astronomy, 28, 305, 307
345; and Eroshenko, 254n104, Asuke Soichi, 250, 253–54, 322–23,
288–89, 291, 293, 334, 343; Laby- 334, 336, 350
rinth, 222–24; and microbiology, Atheism, 297
296, 315, 322–23; and Nitobe Inazō, Authority: of Church, 93–105, 111–39,
214, 215, 219; pilgrimage of, 209, 184, 221, 242; and individual
212, 235–37, 244, 256–57, 296; virtue, 122; of sovereign state, 151;
and Sapporo Agricultural College, of tsar, 103, 242
215, 221, 234, 244–56; suicide of,
254n104, 255, 345–46 Backwardness, 24, 32, 37, 39, 45, 66,
Aristocracy, 38, 119, 162, 201, 228; 70; and history slide, 217, 226; and
Tolstoy as, 138. See also Elites Nonwar Movement, 147, 150, 152
Art, 167– 75; cartoons/prints, 163, Bacteria, 296, 302, 312–13; “of
169–75, 185–86, 201–2, 234n54, 335; civilization,” 270
Children’s Free Arts Movement, Baha’i, 281–84
171, 332; defined, 335; farmers’ art, Bakufu, 48, 228
171, 348–49; Free Arts Movement, Bakumatsu period, 228
332, 348; and Kropotkin, 238; Bakunin, Mikhail, 1–3, 5, 29–30, 34,
People’s Arts (mingei), 27, 169, 171, 60, 85, 199
288, 315, 330, 333, 335–36; proletar- Balmont, Konstantin, 13n21
ian arts, 334; and science, 304, 318, Barbarism, 143, 151, 232–33, 303, 317;
332, 348–49; Shirakaba School, and West, 66
315, 335–36 Bartoshevskii, Nikolai, 38
Aryans, 217–18, 278. See also Race Batchelor, John, 269
Asahi shimbun, 25, 205, 258 Bauman, Zygmunt, 12, 143
Asia: and decolonization, 262, 281; Bazhenov, N. N., 108
Pan-Asianism, 13–14, 99, 228, Beaufront, Louis de, 279
276, 281, 287; Southeast, 10, 345. Beauty, 103n17, 335
See also individual countries Belgians: anarchists, 277– 78
Asia-Pacific War, 5, 73, 290, 344; and Belinsky, Vissarion, 82–83, 85
Nonwar Movement, 147–48, 161, Bible: Gospels, 102, 119, 123, 131;
167. See also World War II and Tolstoy, 119, 130–33
Ashio Copper Mines, 48, 196– 97 Biology. See Microbiology
 Index 387

Bird, Isabella, 32 56–57, 59, 74, 76, 81n141, 85–87;

Blagosvetlov, Grigorii, 39 and Japanization, 268; and
Blindness, 16, 26, 282–87, 334–35 Nietzsche, 128; “noncapitalism,”
Boas, Franz, 271 253; and Nonwar Movement, 146,
Body: body politics, 229; and race, 162, 167, 182, 186, 195– 96; and
67; and religion, 221; and science, 302, 306; and transling-
symbiosis, 27, 310–14, 326, 340; ualism, 269, 276, 277, 282
and tattoos, 50–52 Caputo, John, 120n61
Bolshevism, 255–56, 285, 292; Cartoons, 17, 163, 185–86, 201–2,
Japanese, 349. See also Revolution 234n54, 320; Ogawa Usen, 172–75,
Books. See Censorship/banned 335
publications Censorship/banned publications,
Bookstores, 130, 234, 253, 309 106, 115, 255; and biology, 28, 321;
Boorstin, Daniel, 306 of Heimin shimbun, 194, 227,
Bose, Rash Bihari, 290 238n61; and networks, 117, 233–35,
Bourgeois: “people,” 161– 62, 182; 249; and pseudonyms, 20; in
revolution, 59n79 Russia, 34, 79, 117; self-censorship,
Bowen, Roger, 51 158. See also Winter Period
Breshkovskaia, Ekaterina, 187 Center: centerless universe, 302,
Brotherhood, universal, 100n12, 306– 9, 326, 340; versus periphery,
108, 185, 236, 279, 284. See also 121, 192, 349
Fraternity Centralization, 35, 41, 47, 53
Buddhism, 103, 125m 135n101 Chaos, 47, 50, 110, 151–52, 213, 301
Bunbukai kaihō, 253 Chapelier, Emile, 277– 78
Bureaucracy, 41, 47, 75 Charter Oath, 55
Business, 31, 194– 95. See also Chekhov, Anton, 5n5
Commerce Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 34
Chertkov, Vladimir, 140, 241–43
Cafeterias: people’s, 194, 331, 338; Chicherin, Boris, 107
student, 248, 251 Childhood, 331–35; and Fabre, 27,
Camps: labor, 19; prison, 149, 198, 299–300, 319; and stereotypes,
200–203 102
Capitalism, 9, 12, 14, 346–47; and Children, 123, 163; children’s stories,
anarchist religion, 100, 128–29; 17, 26, 28, 148n10, 158, 254, 261,
“anticapitalism,” 28, 128, 302, 346; 285–88, 318, 330–34, 348; childlike
capitalist development, 9, 29, 32, nature, 287, 331, 333, 340; and
56, 59, 74, 86, 213, 245, 306; and Fabre, 298– 99, 318–20. See also
history slide, 213, 215, 229–30, 232, Folklore/fairy tales
245, 252–53; and injustice, 74, 76, Children’s Free Arts Movement,
85–87, 146; and Ishin, 29, 32, 171, 332
388 Index

Children’s Free Education Movement, Clark, William Smith, 244, 246–47,

206, 331 251
China, 5, 33n6, 59, 183, 199, 228, Class, social: and blindness, 335; as
239n61; as backward, 150, 216–18; category, 188; and clothing, 50;
“China problem,” 247; classics, class conflict, 68, 146, 157, 186,
103–12, 229; Communist, 329; and 329, 338, 350; and empathy, 76;
Eroshenko, 291; and Fabre, 320; and heimin, 120, 161– 64, 260, 267,
and imperialism, 2, 218; and 268, 295, 338; and history slide,
language/translation, 16n29, 139, 222, 229, 233; and Ishin, 35, 38, 41,
258, 279–80, 291, 294. See also Lao 47–48, 55, 65, 68, 70, 76; middle
Tzu; Tao te Ching class, 162; and Nonwar Move-
Chinese Society for the Study of ment, 146, 157, 161– 62, 186, 188,
Socialism, 279–80 260; and women, 276. See also
Chokkōdan, 194– 96, 337. See also Cliques
Direct action Cliques, 162– 63, 195, 212, 230.
Chokugen, 172, 193– 95 See also Class, social
Christianity: Hakone conference, Clothing, 50, 175, 270; rubashka
118, 121, 125; as hegemonic, 113; blouse, 285–86, 291
and hierarchy/social Darwinism, Cold War, 13
32, 105, 108, 125, 139, 216, 222, 330; Collective security, 282
and missionaries, 139, 269; and Colonialism/Imperialism: agricul-
modernization, 96– 97, 99; and tural, 245–46; anti-imperialism,
race, 216, 218, 222; as reconfig- 14n26, 164, 273, 276, 279–82; and
ured, 112, 114, 136; and relativity, the body, 312; and China, 2, 218;
108; shūkyō as, 23, 96; and as conceptual construct, 13, 99,
Westernization, 23, 96– 98, 140 140, 202, 256; cultural imperial-
Church: authority of, 93–105, 111–39, ism, 26, 262; decolonization
184, 221, 242; nonchurch/ movements, 262, 273, 276, 279–82,
antichurch, 112, 118, 132, 136, 138 329; and Esperanto, 268, 279–82;
Circles, reading/poetry, 90, 189– 94, and hisen, 147; and knowledge,
249–53, 290, 330, 343 259; Japanese, 90, 144, 154–55, 168,
Citizenship, 33, 204; and nation- 175, 180–84, 244, 272, 294, 336,
building, 115, 166, 332; and rights, 343, 344; and Lenin, 150, 152, 155,
69; U.S., 45 157; and modernization, 252, 281;
Civilization: “bacteria of,” 270; and nationalism, 181, 252; and
civilizing mission, 142n1, 143; nature, 296, 306, 321, 326; and
“noncivilization,” 227; and water, peace/democracy, 150, 152, 157–59,
68–70. See also Development; 215, 219, 276; Russian, 69, 183, 198,
Progress 223, 269, 276; and women, 164– 65,
Civil society, 28, 337, 344 276. See also Self-colonization
 Index 389

Colonization administration, 245–46 25, 134, 211, 220–21, 229, 237–39;

Colonization studies, 246, 252 and Marxism, 349; of Ōsugi
Commerce. See Trade/Commerce; Sakae, 236, 308; self-conversion,
Merchants 139, 237; of Taoka Reiun, 229
Commoners: “heimin,” 161; and Ishin, Cooperatives, 51, 53n63, 108, 195, 233,
30, 37, 48, 50–51, 53n63, 54–55, 85, 238, 338; agricultural, 36, 42–43,
102, 179, 228, 231; and language, 235, 343–46; Cooperative Living
54, 85, 268; and Nonwar move- Farm, 345–46, 349; self-
ment, 161, 175; and Tao te Ching, government, 108, 209, 238,
111, 113 251, 253, 346n27, 347n28; self-
Communes: communalism, 36, organization, 30, 232, 337, 343;
53, 209, 235; farm, 346n27; New worker, 253, 343. See also
Village, 11; Paris Commune, 35, Communes
46; Russian, 30, 36. See also Corporations, transnational, 12
Cooperatives Cosmology, 11, 166, 295, 302–10, 313,
Communism, 292; Communist 327, 348–49; “new cosmology,”
Party, 255; and culture, 329, 350. 340
See also Soviet Union Cosmopolitanism, 14, 226; and
Community, international. Arishima Takeo, 25, 212–15, 218,
See Nation-state 236–37, 245–47, 256; and Espe-
Competition: and Darwin, 30, ranto, 228, 274, 276, 287; and
62–70, 73, 179, 232, 311–12, 316–17, Futabatei Shimei, 85; and heimin,
324–26; Hobbesian, 110; and 161, 228; and Ishin, 33, 45, 85; and
international relations, 152 Lev Mechnikov, 33; and Nitobe
Confession, 123 Inazō, 150, 214–15, 246; and
Confucianism, 103n17, 164; and Nonwar Movement, 150–51, 154,
hakuai, 182; and jinkaku, 121, 161, 204; and religion, 99, 117;
166; and Konishi/Tolstoy, 109–10, and Ira Remsen, 150–51
112, 115–17, 120–21; and Kōtoku Creationism, 297, 300–301, 318, 324
Shūsui, 166, 180, 182 Creative Prints Arts Movement, 169
Conger-Kaneko, Josephine, 204n99, Cultural revolution, 28, 90, 256, 295,
275 315, 329–34, 341, 344, 348–50;
Conscience, 110, 135; “rational,” 122 defined, 329; Soviet, 350
Conscription, 159, 164 Culture: defined, 295, 327, 330;
Conservatism, 10, 15, 36, 99; and cultural diplomacy, 149, 201, 350;
religion, 240 cultural imperialism, 26, 262;
Consumers’ associations, 194 and democracy, 337, 348; heimin
Contract, social, 151, 181 culture, 228; as knowledge, 6,
Conversion, 22–25, 93–100, 116, 331; language without culture, 25,
133–40, 226; of Arishima Takeo, 259– 60, 265, 330; multiplicity of,
390 Index

Culture (continued ) Delo, 39

27, 260, 298, 325, 329–30; as nature, Democracy, 128, 148n9, 154–56, 215,
233, 327; popular, 25–28, 38, 207, 230; anarchist, 120, 161– 62,
258– 61, 281, 297–303, 310, 318–25, 294– 95, 309–10, 315, 327, 330,
329, 331, 331; production of, 10, 69, 337–45, 348–49; Demokurashi
187, 207, 265, 310, 337; and race, (journal), 342; domin seikatsu,
150, 259– 60, 316, 330; translation, 339–40; and imperialism, 152, 215,
22, 73– 77, 82, 91– 92, 98, 116 276; and Ishin, 155, 227; U.S., 160,
Czolgosz, Leon, 153 337, 342–44; and women, 276
Dependence: 315n33, 128. See also
Daigyaku Incident, 90, 196, 255, Interdependence
266, 304–5 Despotism, 79, 154; “Oriental,” 51,
Daoism, 125; the Way, 110–11, 114, 150
124. See also Tao Te Ching Determinism: geographic, 66, 69,
Darwin, Charles: Descent of Man, 216–17; and Marxism, 8
314, 315, 317; Origin of Species, Deutsch, Lev, 200
298, 300, 317, 318, 324 Development: capitalist develop-
Darwinism: and altruism, 311, 316–17, ment, 9, 29, 32, 56, 59, 74, 86, 213,
326; and Christianity, 32, 105, 245, 306; civilizational, 30, 64– 65,
108, 125, 139, 216, 222, 330; and 72–73, 210, 227, 271; cultural, 67,
competition, 30, 62–70, 73, 179, 155, 303, 329; human, 60, 64, 69,
232, 311–12, 316–17, 324–26; versus 209, 228, 303, 339; late, 210; and
Fabre, 297–300, 324; and Kropot- multiplicity, 9, 329, 339; parallel
kin, 73, 289, 297– 98, 311–12, religious development, 103, 108,
317–18, 321, 325–26, 342, 347; 271; selective, 53; and universal-
“Kropotkinist Darwinism,” 321; ism, 37. See also Backwardness;
linguistic, 25, 259, 263, 267, 278, Modernization; Progress
295, 311, 326; “without Malthus,” Dialectics, 15, 39, 47, 59, 61, 98,
311; and multiculturalism, 326; 208, 351
and Ōsugi Sakae, 300, 311, 315, Dialects, 263, 268. See also Language
317–19, 324–25 Dictionaries: and anarchism, 11, 211;
Death: and afterlife, 123, 129; and and Esperanto, 258, 265– 67, 277
children’s stories, 334; “death or Diplomacy, 2–5, 32–33, 144, 199,
solidarity,” 63; and evolutionary 206–7, 223; cultural, 149, 201, 350;
theory, 314, 316 and Esperanto, 260, 263; jargon
Decadence: of West, 127–28 of, 157
Decembrists, 79 Direct action, 195– 96; Chokkōdan,
Decolonization, 262, 273, 280–81, 194– 96, 337
329; of Japan, 214 Discovery. See Negative discovery
Deleuze, Gilles, 18 Doctrine, 111, 128–29, 139
 Index 391

Dogmatism, 111, 125, 129, 135; secular, Meiji elite, 227. See also Aristoc-
109 racy; Cliques
Dormitories, 244, 247–52, 331 Embryology, 314, 325, 336
Dōshisha Christian University, 99, 136 Emigrés: and Mikhail Bakunin, 2;
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5n5, 76, 85, 100, and Andrei Kolenko, 79, 81; and
187 Lev Mechnikov, 20, 33–37, 71, 72,
Duara, Prasenjit, 210n3 89; and Nagasaki, 199, 201, 273;
Dukhobors, 238, 242–44 networks of, 16, 89, 198nn85,86,
Dung beetle, 27–28, 296– 99, 318–25 199, 201–3, 273–74; and POWs,
Duty: and commerce, 54; and 201–3
Confucianism, 109, 121, 166; to Empathy, 180, 182–83; and Darwin,
nation and family, 121, 166, 184, 317; hakuai, 182; and literature,
248 76, 79
Emperor: and Daigyaku Incident, 90,
East-West divide, 8, 13–14, 20–21, 266, 304–5; and Ishin, 55, 78, 90;
334; and anarchist religion, 98–104, and Konishi/Tolstoy, 103, 110, 115,
108, 112, 118, 140; and history slide, 117, 120–22; and language, 268;
218, 226, 256; and Ishin, 30, 53, and Nonwar Movement, 164, 166,
70– 71, 77, 91; and Marx, 39; and 169; tennō, 103, 117, 229. See also
Nonwar Movement, 150–51, 181–83; Imperial Rescript on Education
translingualism, 281, 295, 301 Empire. See Colonialism/
Ecology, 196, 235, 309. See also Imperialism
Environmental issues Enemy: nature as, 308; Russia as, 81,
Edo period, 84, 161, 234n54, 265 183, 185, 199, 222; transnational
Education, 48, 81, 160, 161, 260; networks as, 291
agrarian, 348; and Arishma Takeo, Engels, Friedrich, 267
212–15, 244–53; and Baha’i, 282; Enlightenment, 106, 181, 245, 330
of commoners, 38, 228; as concept, Enomoto Shūson, 132
331; free education movement, Entomology, 17, 26–27, 297–300,
206, 331–32; higher education, 121, 318–24, 330–31, 333; Souvenirs
213, 215, 217; Imperial Rescript on, entomologiques, 318–23
109, 115, 121, 247–48; and POWs, Environmental issues, 196. See also
200–201, 203 Ecology
Education, Ministry of, 229, 247 Equality: and anarchist democracy,
Ego, 323–24 310; and “ heimin,” 120; and Kant,
Eguchi Kan, 288 151; meaning, 181–82, 215–17. See
Einstein, Albert, 303 also Inequality
Elites: anarchist, 61; Arishima Takeo Eroshenko, Vasilii, 5, 26, 254,
as, 214, 345; elitism, 20; and 282– 94, 343; and Arishima Takeo,
language, 25, 261, 264, 276, 282; 254n104, 288, 291, 293, 334, 343;
392 Index

Eroshenko, Vasilii (continued ) 75, 83; and mutual aid, 238;

blindness of, 16, 284–87, 334–35; Nietzsche on 127–28; and social-
and China, 291; deportation of, ism, 15, 236; and stereotypes, 102
254n104, 285, 290– 91, 293; and Evil, 79, 109; Tolstoy on, 123–24
Kropotkin, 288–89; and Ōsugi Evolution: 260, 263, 300–312, 317–19,
Sakae; 254, 284, 288, 293n73, 343; 348; dialectical nature of, 61; and
and socialism, 285, 288 Kropotkin, 61, 209, 231–32, 297,
Esperanto: and colonialism, 268, 301–2, 307, 311–12, 317–18, 324–26
279–82; and cosmopolitanism, linguistic, 278– 79; and Lev
228, 274, 276, 287; dictionaries, Mechnikov, 51, 54, 59– 63, 70,
258, 265– 67, 277; and Europe, 263, 311, 319
277– 79; as fad, 25, 258–59; and Excommunication: of Tolstoy, 22, 93,
Futabatei Shimei, 258–59, 262, 129, 130, 136–37
265–74, 277, 284, 323, 342; and Excrement, 320–22
Kōtoku Shūsui, 279–80, 288, 325; Exoticization, 50n55, 51n59, 108
as language without culture, 25,
259–60, 265, 330; minsaigo, 25, 260; Fabre, Jean Henri, 26–27, 318–26, 331,
and Nonwar Movement, 259– 60, 333; vs. Darwin, 297–300, 324;
265, 273, 275–76, 279; and Ōsugi Souvenirs Entomologiques
Sakae 258–59, 261, 274, 276, (Konchūki), 318–23
279–80, 284, 288, 293n73; as Fads/craze: Esperanto, 25, 258–59;
sekaigo 258, 260, 265, 274– 75; and Fabre, 299; Tolstoy, 130
students, 258, 279–80, 293n76, Fairy tales. See Folklore/fairy tales
294, 343 Family, 31, 122, 124, 248; and
Ethnicity: ethnic cleansing, 154; and Confucianism, 110, 120–21, 166;
heimin, 145, 167, 260, 267– 68; and dorms as, 251; and hakuai, 182;
kokumin, 167; and minorities, 268, and women, 165
270; and revolution, 66, 180n51, 198 Famine, 316; Russia Famine Relief
Ethnography, 76, 85, 261, 295; and Movement, 189n70, 254, 343–44
Lev Mechnikov, 59, 67; and Farmers, 17, 38, 163– 64, 233; Coop-
Bronislaw Pilsudski, 268–71 erative Living Farm, 345–46, 349;
Ethology, 321 domin seikatsu, 339; farmers art,
Etō Tekirei, 235 171, 348–49; reading groups,
Eugenics, 66, 216, 268n20 192– 93; Sakai Toshihiko on, 349
Eurocentrism, 25, 149, 259, 264, 278, Fashion. See Clothing
281 Fear, 150, 314
Europe: and Esperanto, 263, 277– 79; Federalism, world, 282
failed revolutions, 31–39; and Feminism, 90, 131, 204n99, 273, 304;
feminism, 165, 276; feudalism, 39; and imperialism, 165. See also
learning from 53, 57–58; literature, Gender; Women
 Index 393

Feminity, 169, 175 Nonwar Movement, 187, 192– 93,

Feudalism: European, 39; Tokugawa, 201, 205; and “social problem,” 22,
29n1, 50 85; and Tolstoy, 85, 116, 130, 205;
Figner, Vera, 76, 88 Ukigumo, 74, 82, 91– 92
Filial piety, 115, 117
First International, 185 Gandhi, Mahatma, 347
Fisherman, 169–71, 173 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 34, 40, 42n34
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 329n1, 350 Genbunitchi, 76, 84
Flag, 175, 204 Gender, 70, 76, 267, 276; and
Folk arts, 335–36 Nonwar Movement, 164– 66, 182;
Folklore/fairy tales, 78, 123, 158, and Tolstoy, 116–17. See also
187, 332 Feminism; Women
Forgiveness, 221 Genocide, 142
Forster, Peter, 279 Geography, 13–15, 39; geographic
France, 34, 35, 67– 68, 199n89; and determinism, 69, 216–17; and Lev
Esperanto, 25, 279; and Fabre, 26, Mechnikov, 33n6, 51, 59, 60n81,
299, 300; French Revolution, 9, 69, 71, 319
61, 181–82; and Kropotkin, 72n119, German (language), 80, 111–12, 127,
203n95; learning from, 53; and Lev 278
Mechnikov, 40, 46; and Ōsugi Germany, 95n3, 126–27; Germans,
Sakae, 322; Paris Commune, 35, 46 199n89, 201, 277
Fraternity (hakuai), 182, 230 Gershuni, Grigorii, 200
Freedom. See Liberty Globalization, 12
Freedom and People’s Rights God: and blindness, 287; and
Movement, 43–44, 47, 51, 74, 76, creation, 305, 309–10, 322, 324;
83, 88– 90; and the History Slide, and rationality/metaphysics, 101,
228, 230; Jiyū shimbun, 88, 161; 110, 122–23, 322; Tolstoy as, 138;
and Nonwar Movement, 156, 187, Tolstoy on, 93, 114, 122–25, 129.
190– 92, 276 See also Gxd
French (language), 41, 80, 111–12, 182 Gogol, Nikolai, 76, 84
Freud, Sigmund, 303, 324 Goldman, Emma, 195, 341
Fritz, Rose, 198n85, 231 Golley, Gregory, 348
Fukuda Hideko, 273–74, 276 Gorky, Maxim, 5n5, 187, 205
Fukuzawa Yukichi, 178– 79 Goshkevich, I. A., 1, 3
Futabatei Shimei, 5, 22, 74– 92, 116, Gray, Nicholas, 81–82
125, 130, 137, 342; and colloquial Great Britain: and international
language, 84, 89, 91, 265– 66, 268, relations, 1n1, 157, 301; and Lev
323; and Esperanto, 258–59, 262, Mechnikov, 89; and Tolstoy, 95n3
265–74, 277, 284, 323, 342; and Great Kanto Earthquake, 323
Fathers and Sons, 84, 192; and Greeks, 69, 78; demo, 399
394 Index

Grot, Nikolai, 106, 112, 126–28 Heimin shimbun: banning of, 90, 194,
Guattari, Felix, 18 238n61; as hub, 189, 197– 98, 203;
Gxd, 122–24, 240, 324, 332, 335, 339. and Nonwar Movement, 145,
See also God 156– 98 passim, 203, 206; and
Taoka Reiun, 227, 309; and
Hakodate, 1; Hakodateya, 274, 289 Tolstoy, 184, 187, 203, 237; transla-
Hakone conference, 118, 121, 125 tion of, 161; and women, 164, 175
Hakuai, 182 Heresy, 100, 116, 132, 136
Hall, Francis, 31–32 Heroes, 42n36, 75–76, 88–89; and
Harada Mitsuo, 248, 252 children’s stories, 158, 332, 334;
Harmony: and Esperanto, 278; and dung beetle as, 28, 299, 320, 322;
nature, 55, 302, 313–14; social, 146 military, 158, 177, 332; non-heroes,
Harootunian, Harry, 128 75–76
Hasegawa Nyozekan, 261, 287 Herzen, Alexander, 2n3, 34–36,
Hasegawa Tenkei, 128 79n135, 85
Hashimoto Sugorō, 248 Hiratsuka Raichō, 131
Haverford College, 213, 215, 221 Hisen: as term, 147
Hegel, G.W.F, 122, 210 Hisen undō, 130, 143, 147. See also
Heimin, 23–24; as “commoners,” 161; Nonwar Movement
and Esperanto, 24, 264– 67; and “History slide,” 212, 226, 236, 256–57,
ethnicity, 145, 167, 260, 267– 68; 280, 315, 324, 330, 341
heimin ideology, 145–46, 161, 206; Hobbes, Thomas, 110
versus kokumin, 145, 162, 167, Hokkaido: agricultural cooperatives,
177, 183, 206, 260; and Konishi 344–47; and Arishima Takeo, 215,
Masutarō, 115, 119–21, 292; and 221, 234, 244–55, 344–47; coloni-
Marxism, 167, 338, 349–50; as zation of, 245–46, 252, 344; and
narod, 34; as “people without the exile, 197; natives, 161, 269
state,” 160– 77, 206; and social Hokkaido Imperial University, 150,
class, 120, 161– 64, 260, 267, 268, 215n9. See also Sapporo Agricul-
295, 338; and Tokugawa era, 229, tural College
346; as transnational, 177–87, Homogenization, 61
226–27; as universal, 182–83, Honor, 158, 165– 66, 169
338, 350 Hospital, people’s, 194– 95, 292,
Heimin cafeteria, 194, 331, 338 331, 338
Heimin circles, 190– 91. See also Hotoku agricultural cooperative,
Circles, reading/poetry 42–43
Heimin hospital, 194– 95, 292, 331, 338 Hubs, see under Networks
Heimin kagaku, 303 Humanism, 75, 100, 214; and Kōtoku
Heiminsha, 23, 156–57, 160, 172, 182, Shūsui, 156–57, 181; and Tolstoy,
189– 98, 205, 337 127, 183, 204
 Index 395

Humility, 100n12; Lao Tzu, 109 Industrialization, 53n63, 100, 148

Humor, 45, 76 102, 172–73, 175; Inequality, 71, 87, 98, 106, 152n19,
parody, 83; satire, 84. See also 194; gender, 164; between Japan
Cartoons and West, 38, 216, 288; and
Hybridity, 8– 9; of religion, 103 language, 265, 280
Hygiene, 200 Innocence: and blindness, 287; and
children’s literature, 333–35; and
Iaponiia i Rossiia, 203 subversion, 175
Ibsen, Henrik, 237, 240n63, 248 Inoue Kyōko, 121
Idealism, 41–42, 157, 192, 279 Inoue Tetsujirō, 121, 125, 331
Ideology: Asian liberation, 294; Insects, 26, 297–300, 318–27; intel-
Bakuninist, 30; Confucian/state, ligence of, 321, 326; societies of,
115, 164, 268, 312, 321, 331, 332; 319
Esperanto, 262; heimin, 145–46, Institutions, international, 142
161, 206; Marxist/Leninist, 338; Intelligence: divine, 321; of insects,
ryōsai kembo, 165; wartime, 169, 321, 326; of slaves, 78
181, 190, 222; of Western moder- Intelligence agencies, 18, 266, 285,
nity, 10, 144–45, 212, 220, 303 321. See also Police; Surveillance
Ienaga Saburō, 227 Intelligentsia, 35, 37, 79, 263
Iida Uprising, 44 Interdependency, 101, 120, 233–34, 338;
Ignatii Kamei, 116 and nature, 298, 308–9, 312, 318, 326
Ikegami Eiko, 190 Interiority, human, 114, 124, 225, 240
Imanishi Kinji, 325 International Anarchist Congress, 277
Imitation: Japanese, 32. See also “International relations”: as concep-
Learning, Western tual construct, 12, 31, 143–54, 167,
Immune system, 314 185, 200, 206, 207; gaikoku kōsai,
Imperialism, cultural, 26, 262. See 178; and gender, 164, 166; and
also Colonialism/Imperialism interpersonal relations, 178–80; as
Imperial Rescript on Education, 109, intersubjective, 183; kokusaikankei,
115, 121, 247–48 260; redefinition of, 154– 60,
India, 67, 290 178–80; as utopian, 12, 143, 145,
Indigeneity, 98, 231, 262; and 151–53, 158, 200, 206
democracy, 339; and modernity, Irokawa Daikichi, 51, 54, 227
8– 9; and religion, 102–3, 116, Ishikawa Sanshirō: on democracy,
118n54 339–40, 345; and Esperanto,
Individuals: individualism, 100, 126, 268n21, 276, 294; and history
127, 169, 323; jinkaku, 121, 125, 139, slide, 210, 224, 230, 235; and
166; and Ōsugi Sakae, 323n49, nature, 296n1, 299, 308, 315,
324; uniqueness of, 50, 64, 164, 326–27; and Nonwar Movement,
332, 339 172, 183, 187, 194– 96
396 Index

Ishikawa Takuboku, 87–88, 220, 230, Jinkaku, 121, 125, 139, 166. See also
333; and Daigyaku incident, Virtue
304–5; and Tolstoy, 134, 184 Johns Hopkins University, 150,
Ishin: and capitalism, 29, 32, 56–57, 215, 246
59, 74, 76, 81n141, 85–87; and
commoners, 30, 37, 48, 50–51, Kaba Mountain Incident, 88
53n63, 54–55, 85, 102, 179, 228, 231; Kagawa Toyohiko, 324
and cosmopolitanism, 33, 45, 85; Kaihō, 292
East-West divide, 30, 53, 70– 71, Kaikoku (Opening), 2–3, 13, 21,
77, 91; “Ishin betrayed,” 41, 227, 30–31, 55–56, 59, 150
230; as kaikoku (Opening), 2–3, Kaitakushi, 245, 247. See also
13, 21, 30–31, 55–56, 59, 150; and Colonialism/Imperialism
mutual aid, 21, 30–31, 52– 68, 73, Kaizō, 294
85, 231–32, 347; as restoration, 29, Kamichika Ichiko, 288
229–30; as revolution from below, Kaneko Kiichi, 156, 204, 237, 275
229; and social class, 35, 38, 41, Kanno Sugako, 90
47–48, 55, 65, 68, 70, 76; and Kant, Immanuel, 113, 122, 151, 276
socialism, 146, 230; and subjec- Katagami Noboru, 288, 290, 331
tivity, 61, 75, 85, 87; and Western- Katō Kazuo, 288
ization, 41, 53 Katō Naoshi, 129–31, 220
Italy: and Lev Mechnikov, 34, 40, Katō Sukeichi, 54–58, 179
42n34 Katō Tokijirō, 194– 95, 292, 337–38
Itō Noe, 276, 288, 322, 344–45 Katsura Tarō, 177
Iwakura Mission, 41, 46, 53 Kazan’ Cathedral, 93
Iwakura Tomomi, 46, 53 Keber, Rafael von, 128
Iwanami Bunko, 320 Kemuyama Sentarō, 90n166
Iwaya Sazanami, 332 Ketelaar, James, 96
Kida Kinjirō, 171n43
Jahn, Beate, 152n19 Kido Takayoshi, 53
Japanese (language): and national Kiev Theological Seminary, 104–5, 136
ideology, 267– 68 Kindai shisō, 189, 276, 304, 305
Japanese (people): definition of: 268, Kinoshita Naoe, 86, 156, 167n39, 189,
271. See also Kokumin 196, 205, 273
Japan Esperanto Association, Kiristokyō shimbun, 118
264, 294 Kitahara Hakushū, 27, 261, 333
Japan Esperanto Institute, 262 Knowledge: reverse flow of, 27, 300,
Japanization, 268, 270 330–31, 341; self-knowledge, 106,
Japonology, 4n4, 13, 56, 60, 103 108, 307; and translation, 6, 15, 40,
Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 271 74–75, 97– 99, 233, 244, 299–301,
Jews, 199, 277 310, 322, 325, 331
 Index 397

Kō, 162, 180 Kropotkin, Peter, 5, 19–27, 31, 61,

Kōda Rohan, 129 71–73, 76, 85, 88, 89n165, 224–25,
Kojima Kuratarō, 79 229n40, 231–44; and Arishima
Kokka shakai, 163, 179, 180 Takeo, 209–11, 296, 234–40, 249,
Kokumin, 160, 180, 331; and education, 251–56, 288, 296, 336, 346; and
331–32; and gender, 166; versus Darwin, 73, 289, 297– 98, 311–12,
heimin, 145, 162, 167, 177, 183, 317–18, 321, 325–26, 342, 347;
206, 260 and Demokurashi, 341–42; and
Kokumin no tomo, 87, 117, 123, 161 Eroshenko, 288–89; and farmers,
Kokumin shimbun, 90, 160, 177 346–47; and Kōtoku Shūsui, 91,
Kolenko, Andrei, 78–79, 81 198n85, 211, 224, 230–35, 238–39,
Kolokol’, 34, 38n22 243, 249, 280, 288; Kropotkinist
Konishi Masutarō, 23, 95–139, Darwinism, 321; imprisonment,
182, 220–21, 229, 240–44, 292; 72n119, 203n95; and language,
and heimin, 115, 119–21, 292; and 275– 76, 280, 288–89, 341; and
Moscow, 105–8, 126–27; and Morito incident, 341; and Nonwar
tokugi, 115, 120, 123, 125, 129, 139; Movement, 187, 199, 203; and
and Tolstoy, 23, 95–139, 220–21, science, 26, 297– 98, 301, 302, 307,
229, 240–44 311–12, 317, 318, 321, 325–26; and
Korea, 199n89, 294; and Japanese Tolstoy, 19–20, 22, 24, 96, 113,
expansion, 157, 183, 246, 271, 336 140–41, 209–10, 237, 240–44,
Koselleck, Reinhart, 7, 210 251, 256, 336, 341; and women,
Kōtoku Shūsui, 5, 80, 90– 91, 147n8, 275–76
154– 60, 210, 220, 332; and China, Kropotkin, Peter (publications),
279–80; and “direct action,” 196; Conquest of Bread, 249, 280, 336;
and Esperanto, 279–80, 288, 325; Ethics, 241–42; Mutual Aid, 64,
execution of, 90, 196, 252, 255, 73, 209, 231–32, 238, 249, 251, 253,
304, 305; and gender, 165– 66; and 276, 301, 318, 336; The Terror in
Heiminsha, 156–57, 160, 182, 195, Russia, 336
197– 98, 337; imprisonment of, Kublin, Hyman, 24, 148
308; on “international relations,” Kuratani Shigeru, 300
154– 60; and Kropotkin, 91, Kuroiwa Ruikō, 159
198n85, 211, 224, 230–35, 238–39, Kyoto School, 128
243, 249, 280, 288; and Nonwar Kyōei, 347
Movement, 172– 73, 179–83, 186, Kyoto University, 136
194– 98, 201; and science, 26, 303,
306–8, 315, 325; and United States, Labor: division of, 232; labor camps,
157, 172, 183, 196– 97, 198n85, 211, 19; Liberation of Labor, 71, 200;
231, 238 unions, 196, 337, 343. See also
Kowner, Rotem, 149n11 Laborers
398 Index

Laborers, 119, 163, 264; agricultural, 229–30; “liberty, equality, frater-

223, 346–49; associations, 253, 343; nity,” 230; universal, 21, 57, 180,
and Futabatei Shimei, 86, 88; and 215–16
tattoos, 50–52; “War Laborers,” Lincoln, Abraham, 342–43
195 Literacy, 48, 123, 161, 192– 93; and
Land, 18, 154, 235, 340; degradation, POWs, 200, 202
196 Literature: antiliterature, 83; chil-
Language: and adaptation, 265, 267; dren’s, 17, 26, 28, 148n10, 158, 254,
colloquial/vernacular, 84, 89, 91, 261, 285–88, 318, 330–34, 348; and
261, 264–66, 268, 323; and com- empathy, 76, 79; European, 75,
plexity, 278; and Darwinism, 83; folklore/fairy tales, 78, 123, 158,
25, 259, 263, 267, 278, 295, 311, 3 187, 332; and innocence, 333–35;
26; diversification of, 267– 74; populist, 22, 34, 74– 78, 84, 88– 91,
Genbunitchi, 76, 84; of heimin, 24, 137, 192, 240, 260, 266, 342;
264– 67; and national unity, 265; proletarian, 14, 350; Russian,
as revolutionary 85, 265, 268; 74– 92, 116, 137, 187, 193, 207, 293,
scientific, 263, 277, 278; without 240n63, 290– 91, 311. See also
culture, 25, 259– 60, 265, 330; Novels
“world language,” 258, 260, 265, Liu, Lydia, 16n29, 139
274– 75, 280. See also Esperanto; London: and Kropotkin, 140, 209,
Translation 238, 243, 296; as revolutionary
Lao Tzu, 104–14, 181, 221, 242, 244; hub, 203
as anarchist, 108. See also Tao Te Lopatin, L. M., 107
Ching Lovelock, James, 301
Law, 181, 310; divine, 125; interna- Loyalty (to state), 110, 115, 117; and
tional, 56, 142, 206; natural, 65, Ainu, 272
151, 305; rule of, 30, 153, 182, 213, Lu Xun, 291
232
League of Peace, 142 Mahan, Alfred, 159
Learning (from West), 20, 31–32, Maier, Charles, 142n1
40, 42, 53, 246; and Esperanto Mainichi Shimbun, 187
267, 295. Malay-Polynesians, 67, 217
Lenin, Vladimir, 185–86, 198, 201, Malthusianism, 27, 62, 179, 242n69,
347; Leninism, 157, 338 297, 310–17, 326
Liberalism, 15, 99, 128, 208, 247, 341; Manchuria, 168, 183, 246
and decolonization, 281; and Margulis, Lynn, 301–2
imperialism, 150, 152, 155 Marin, Gassy, 277–78
Liberation of Labor, 71, 200 Marion, Jean Luc, 110, 122n64
Liberty, 60, 180–82; economic, 210; Marriage, 117
“freedom and equality,” 151, 181, Maruzen Bookstore, 130
 Index 399

Marx, Karl, 229n40; on “East,” 39; Media, 111, 207, 277; foreign, 149,
and Lev Mechnikov, 60, 62, 201. See also Heimin Shimbun;
70– 71; and “people,” 267 Sōbunkaku
Marxism, 7–8, 13–14, 70– 71, 255, Medieval era, 209, 238, 305
338–39, 349–51; and decoloniza- Meiji Ishin. See Ishin
tion, 281; and Futabatei Shimei, Mencius, 180–81
85; and heimin, 167, 338, 349–50; Merchants, 31, 33, 169; and mutual
and Nonwar Movement, 157, 167, aid, 54–55, 179. See also Trade/
186, 200; Rōno School, 254, commerce
349–50; as social science, 146–47 Mesopotamia, 67
Masculinity, 165 Messianism, 216
Materialism, 85–86, 126, 127, 222, Metaphysics, 98, 101, 107, 110, 122,
338 128, 322
Matsubara Iwagorō, 86 Microbiology, 26, 296, 307, 313–14,
Matsui Sumako, 290 330
Matsumura Kaiseki, 118 Microorganisms, 26, 296– 97, 301–2,
McKinley, William, 153 312–14, 326, 340. See also
Mechnikov, Ilya, 26–27, 33n7, 62, Phagocytes
296– 98, 302, 310–15, 318, 325–26, Middle Ages. See Medieval era
336 Militarism, 159, 167, 334; antimilita-
Mechnikov, Lev, 5, 11, 20–22, 26; and rism, 24, 143, 148, 181, 196; and
civilizational development, 63– 73; childhood, 332; and masculinity,
death of, 21, 68, 69; and evolution, 165
51, 54, 59– 63, 70, 311, 319; geogra- Military, 81, 148–49, 165– 69, 219;
phy, 33n6, 51, 59, 60n81, 69, 71, buildup, 155, 159; and cartoons,
319; and “history slide, 225, 227–28, 185; and heroes, 158, 177, 332, 334;
231–32, 243; and Ishin, 29–80, 82, and honor, 158, 165– 66, 169;
89, 91; as Japanologist, 103; and intervention, 294, 343; naval
Marx, 60, 62, 70– 71; memorial to, power, 158–59; ser vice, 159,
20, 71– 72; and natural science, 242; training, 245–46, 248
296, 302, 311, 319; and Nonwar Mill, John Stuart, 215–16
Movement, 154, 203n95; as Miller, Martin, 72
populist, 22, 29, 33–44, 70–78, Minorities, 142n1, 199, 268, 270
82n143, 89; and samurai, 5, 40–43, Minsaigo, 25, 260
49, 50n55; and Switzerland, 20, Minyūsha, 161
34, 40–47, 51, 53, 59, 71–73; and Miracles, 119, 122
Tokugawa Japan, 32, 48n54, 50, 51, Missionaries, 16, 95; Baha’i, 282–283;
54; and Tokyo School of Foreign Christian, 139, 269; Orthodox, 37,
Language, 43–44, 74–82, 98, 273 101, 102, 126n78
Mechnikov, Olga, 21, 72 Mixing, racial, 66– 67, 223–24
400 Index

Miyazaki Muryū, 88–89 Muslims, 281

Miyazaki Tamizō, 235 Mutual aid, 3, 8, 12, 330, 337–38,
Miyazawa Kenji, 27–28, 261, 348–49 350; and animals, 62– 65, 73, 232,
Mizobuchi Shunma, 247–48 303, 306– 7, 311, 316–17, 325–26;
Mobility, social, 47–48, 328 commerce as, 54–59, 179; defined,
Mobilization, war, 162 31; and democracy, 337; and
Modernism, 60, 225, 291 “direct action,” 196; and iku, 332;
Modernity: defined, 7; as ideology, and Ishin, 21, 30–31, 52– 68, 73, 85,
10, 144–45, 212, 220, 303; and 231–32, 347; and Kropotkin, 21, 31,
indigeneity, 8– 9; “modernities,” 64, 73, 85, 209, 231–32, 238, 249,
6– 9, 96; “modernity” studies, 8; 251, 253, 276, 301, 317, 318, 325–26,
as retrogression, 222; and territori- 336, 342, 346–47; rural, 346–47;
ality, 12 sōgo fujo, 85, 231; and worldism,
Modernization: and Christianity, 275
96– 97, 99; and colonialism, 252, Myōjō, 167–71
281; and cooperatism, 53; and Mysticism, 113, 123
Konishi/Tolstoy, 109, 125; versus Myth, 42n36, 122; patriotism as, 181;
“modernity,” 8; and nature, 321; resurrection as, 221
and Nonwar Movement, 146–47,
162 Nagai Kafu, 224n32
Modernization studies, 8 Nagasaki, 1n1, 199–203, 239n61, 273
Mongolians, 217 Najita, Tetsuo, 42n35, 55n71
Monotheism, 217 Nakae Chōmin, 43, 154, 243
Morito Incident, 341 Nakamuraya sweetshop, 288– 91, 331
Moscow, 93n1, 100n12; and Konishi Name-dropping, 239
Masutarō, 105–8, 126–27 Napoleonic model, 47, 53
Moscow Psychological Society, Narod, 34; V Narod movement, 37,
106–7, 126 230, 342. See also Populists
Moscow University, 101n13; and Narodnaia Volia, 200
Konishi Masutarō, 105– 6, 127 Nation-state: and “international
Multiculturalism, 9; and Darwinism, community,” 24, 56–58, 99,
326; and “the people,” 271–72 142–44, 148, 151–55, 158, 204,
Multinational corporations. See 219–20; kokka shakai, 163, 179–80;
Corporations, transnational and “society,” 74; and war, 24,
Muramatsu Aizō, 44 158. See also “International
Murder, 34n8, 75, 116; of Ōsugi Relations”
Sakae, 323 Nationalism, 13, 81, 99, 128, 140, 147,
Musanjinsha, 253 169, 180, 228, 332; cultural, 16, 98,
Mushanokōji Saneatsu, 11 177, 204; and colonization,
Music. See Songs 180–81, 252; transnational, 14
 Index 401

Nativism, 4, 99, 140, 147n8, 175, 225, Nikolai Cathedral, 115, 290
227; natives, 269, 326, 330 Nikolai Theological Seminary, 290.
Natural law, 65, 151, 305 See also Orthodox Seminary
Nature: anarchist definition of, 232; Ninkovich, Frank, 153
and colonialism, 296, 306, 321, Nitobe Inazō: and Arishima Takeo,
326; culture as, 233, 327; and 214, 215, 219; and colonization,
democracy, 340; as enemy, 308; 150, 219, 246; and Esperanto, 261;
and harmony, 55, 302, 313–14; and and jinkaku, 121, 125; reassessment
interdependency, 298, 308– 9, 312, of, 252
318, 326; and mutual aid, 63– 66, Nobel Prize: and Ilya Mechnikov, 26,
231–32, 307, 316, 318, 325–26, 330, 33n7, 62, 296, 314; and Nonwar
332; natural sciences, 3, 26–27, 63, Movement, 259; and Theodore
295–327, 331; state of nature, Roosevelt, 142–44, 152, 154
57n73, 110, 151–53, 206, 226; as Nobori Shōmu, 117, 129, 290
virtue, 231 Noncivilization (hibunmeiron), 227
Naval power, 158–59 Nongovernmental movements: versus
Nechaev Affair, 34n8 NGOs, 26, 262
Negative discovery, 302, 306–8, 327, Nonwar Movement, 23–25, 120n59,
340 142–208, 307, 324, 337; vs. Antiwar
Nenriki, 339 Movement, 147; and capitalism,
Networks, social: and censorship, 117, 146, 162, 167, 182, 186, 195– 96; and
233–35, 249; of émigrés, 16, 89, cosmopolitanism, 150–51, 154, 161,
198nn85,86, 199, 201–3, 273–74; 204; and East-West divide, 150–51,
hand-to-hand, 239; and Heimin 181–83; and Esperanto, 259– 60,
Shimbun,189, 197– 98, 203; hubs 265, 273, 275–76, 279; and
of, 17, 189, 194, 197–203, 254, 255, Futabatei Shimei, 187, 192– 93, 201,
274, 291; name-dropping, 239; as 205; and “history slide,” 211, 230,
state enemy, 291 233; and Kōtoku Shūsui, 172–73,
Newton, Isaac, 65 179–83, 186, 194– 98, 201; and
New Village, 11 Kropotkin, 187, 199, 203; and
New York, 45, 204n98; and émigré Marxism, 157, 167, 186, 200; and
networks, 297, 203 Nobel Prize, 259; and “nondoing,”
NGOs. See Nongovernmental 173; and Tolstoy, 23–24, 130, 140,
Movements 183–84, 187, 203–5
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 126–28 North (vs. South), 216–17
Nihilism, 90, 108 Nourishment (iku), 331–32
Nihon heimin shimbun, 309 Novels: dime novels, 130; Russian,
Niijima Jō, 99 22, 74, 82, 85–86. See also
Nikolai, 37, 100–104, 109, 115–16, Literature
135–36, 138 Nudity, 50, 67. See also Tattoos
402 Index

Ōba Kakō, 201 Eroshenko, 254, 284, 288, 293n73,

Obedience, 115, 185 343; and Esperanto, 258–59, 261,
Occupation, American, 28, 344 274, 276, 279–80, 284, 288,
Oceans: and culture, 64, 68– 69, 293n73; and Fabre, 299–300,
171n43 319–20, 322–24, 331, 333;
Ogawa Masaji, 264 imprisonment, 236, 319; and
Ogawa Mimei, 288, 333 individualism, 323n49, 324;
Ogawa Usen, 156, 171–77, 335, 336 murder of, 323
Oguma Eiji, 271–72 Ōtsuka Kōzan, 171n43, 193– 94
Oka Asajirō, 307, 317 Ōyama Iwao, 40–41, 46
Okinawans, 217–18 Ozaki Kōyō, 117
Ōkubo Toshimichi, 53
Oligarchy, 69; Meiji, 230 Pacifism, 146–47, 157, 168, 279
Opening (of Japan). See Kaikoku Pamphlets, 33, 54–58, 148, 189,
Organic: society, 83; disharmony, 313; 198n85, 201, 233
rootedness, 339 Pan-Asianism, 13–14, 228, 276, 281,
Orientalism, 13, 32, 37, 49, 147, 214, 287; and Tolstoyanism, 99
216, 225, 288; and despotism, 51, Parasites, 314
150; self-Orientalizing, 175 Paris Commune, 35, 46
Oriental studies, 216 Parkes, Graham, 126n79
Orthodox Church: Japanese, 100, Participation, social/political, 43,
104, 110, 114, 116, 118, 135–140, 203: 50–51, 129, 140, 168, 190, 339; in
Russian, 4n4, 22, 37, 93 100–105, international relations, 179;
117, 129, 135, 242. See also Excom- parliamentary, 156
munication; Orthodox Seminary Parties, political, 15, 28, 162, 285;
Orthodox School of Russian Communist, 255; socialist, 15,
Language, 104 186, 200
Orthodox Seminary, 23, 95, 104, Patriotism, 48, 148, 168, 175, 180–82.
114–15, 117, 127, 131, 132n94, See also Shishi
136n105, 137, 290 Peace: and imperialism, 150, 152, 155,
Orzhikh, Boris, 200 157–59, 219; liberal peace, 155;
Ōshio Heihachirō. See Ōshio meaning of, 142–44, 151–59, 169,
uprising 259; peace movements, 24, 143, 163
Ōshio uprising, 50, 54 Peasants, 32, 37–38, 88, 310, 349;
Ōsugi Sakae, 11, 26, 80, 210, 220, clothing of, 285–86, 291; as heroes,
235–36, 254–55; and Arishima 75; and literacy, 123; and Konishi/
Takeo, 255; 322–23, 336; and Tolstoy, 119, 123, 187
biological sciences: 26, 296, “People.” See Heimin; Narod
303–43 passim; and Darwinism, People’s Arts, 27, 169, 171, 288, 330,
300, 311, 315, 317–19, 324–25; and 333–36
 Index 403

People’s cafeteria, 194, 331, 338 Port Arthur, 169

People’s hospital, 194– 95, 292, 331, 338 Portsmouth Peace Treaty, 143, 154,
People’s Will, 200 177, 207, 223
Periphery, 121, 192, 218, 268, 349; Postivism, 279
self-peripheralization, 11, 345 Postmodernism, 9, 110
Perovskaya, Sofia, 76, 88, 187 Postnikov, Aleksandr and Fedor, 266
Perry, Commodore Matthew, 66, 218 Poverty, 282; poor people, 75, 86,
Persecution: in Japan, 255, 296, 185, 195
304–5; in Russia, 76, 79, 242; Prejudice, 39
Peter the Great, 33n6, 78 Primatology, 325
Phagocytes, 26, 62, 296, 314 Primitivism, 32, 39, 50, 68, 151, 175;
Philippines, 165, 183 and anarchy, 9; and language,
Philosophy: people’s, 115, 121–22, 126 259, 278; and organisms, 314
Pilgrimages, 16; and Arishima Takeo, Primordialism, 30, 65– 66, 267
209, 212, 235–37, 244, 256–57, 296; Prints, 169, 171– 72, 175. See also
and Tokutomi Roka, 133–34, 209, Cartoons
256–57 Prisoners: escapees, 2, 16, 33, 200;
Pilsudski, Bronislaw, 200–201, former, 44, 78– 79, 200; POWs,
268– 74, 289 149, 197–203
Pilsudski, Jozef, 199–200, 269, 273 Progress: alternative conceptions of,
Plekhanov, Georgii, 70– 71, 200 8– 9, 30–31, 143, 160, 181, 183, 231,
Poetry, 79, 83, 87; circles, 90, 189– 93, 233, 312; as conquering nature,
330, 343; and Eroshenko, 285–86; 308; and iku, 332; as linear, 146,
and Nonwar Movement, 167– 69, 151, 233. See also Development;
171, 193– 94, 204; revolution as, Retrogression
340 Proletariat, 60, 162, 186, 267; as
Poland, 34, 233n28, 272– 73; indepen- heimin, 349–50; proletarian arts,
dence, 199, 269, 273; workers, 223 334; proletarian literature, 14, 350
Police: and “dangerous persons,” 292; Propaganda, 88, 285, 350; and POWs,
secret police, 19, 20, 34, 35, 46, 285, 200–202; and terrorism, 61;
291– 92, 321; Third Section, 46, 79 wartime, 207
Populism, 1, 36–39, 303, 338; and Lev Property, private, 56, 151, 206;
Mechnikov, 22, 29, 33–44, 70–78, expropriation of, 61
82n143, 89; 200–203, 273; populist Prostitutes, 75, 86
internationalism, 260; Populist Protests, 17, 23, 54, 207; student,
literature, 22, 34, 74– 78, 84, 344
88– 91, 137, 192, 240, 260, 266, 342; Pseudonyms. See Aliases
and Sudzilovskii-Russel, 200–201; Publishers, 89, 95n3, 322–23;
and Tao te Ching, 108; V Narod Sōbunkaku, 250, 254, 294, 322,
movement, 37, 230, 342 334, 336
404 Index

Pubs/bars, 86, 330 Reclus, Eliseé, 51–52, 59– 61, 70,

Pushkin, Alexander, 100n12 71– 72; Nouvelle geographie
universelle, 51–52, 59– 60, 296n1
Questions in Philosophy and Psychol- Reform, social, 38–39, 47–48, 78;
ogy, 106, 109, 112, 127 Taika Reforms, 228
Rekho, Kim, 95
Rabinow, Paul, 67– 68 Relativity, 108, 340
Race: African Americans, 149, 262n6, Religion: “anarchist,” 22–23, 96, 114,
281; Arishima Takeo on, 216–24; 128, 139–40, 220–21, 226, 231, 324,
Aryans, 217–18, 278; Asian 336; Baha’i, 281–84; and cosmo-
self-image, 149; as binary con- politanism, 99, 117; creationism,
struct, 214, 256, 281, 288; and 297, 300–301, 318, 324; dualism,
body, 312; and Christianity, 216, 78; as hybrid, 103; and indigeneity,
218, 222; and culture, 150, 259– 60, 102–3; “modern,” 23, 96– 97, 105,
316, 330; and Esperanto, 259– 60; 116, 120, 129, 138, 220; and parallel
eugenics, 66, 216, 268n20; racial development, 103, 108, 271; and
determinism, 71; racial mixing, rationality, 99, 101, 110, 112, 122,
66– 67, 223–24; racial theories, 124, 129, 330; and subjectivity,
216–18; racial tolerance, 150; and 97– 98, 105, 128, 140; and Western-
United States, 149–50, 154, 165, ization, 23, 96– 98, 140. See also
223–24, 262n6, 276, 281, 288, God; Gxd
342–43; “yellow” race, 67, Remsen, Ira, 150–51
149–50, 155, 222–24, 347n28 Reparations, war, 199
Rank, social (kaku), 121, 139, 166 Restoration: Meiji as, 229–30
Rationality, 32, 61; and Esperanto, Resurrection, 123, 133, 221; Resurrec-
278–79; irrationality, 75, 324; tion (novel), 130, 132, 205, 290
and religion, 99, 101, 110, 112, 122, Retrogression: and nationalism, 252;
124, 129, 330; and West, 126, 128, and war, 23, 144, 210, 222
147n8, 229, 232, 278, 330. See also Revolution: and ethnicity, 66, 180n51,
Reason 198; failed, 31–39; French Revolu-
Reactionism, 9, 48, 98 tion, 9, 61, 181–82; in language,
Reading circles. See Circles, reading/ 85, 268; poetry as, 34; and power
poetry of language, 265, 268; Russian
Realism: and arts, 75, 84, 172; and Revolution, 13, 19, 83, 113, 132, 187,
international relations, 12, 207; 197– 99, 235, 255–56, 285, 291– 93,
and Nonwar Movement, 146, 338–39
157 Rhizomes, 18, 195
Realpolitik, 207 Rights, 69, 76, 124, 181–82, 185, 204;
Reason, 53, 112–13, 122–24, 135, 181, heimin’s, 230; legal, 151; minority,
210. See also Rationality 304; popular, 54; property, 56. See
 Index 405

also Freedom and People’s Rights Saigō Takamori, 5, 40–46

Movement Sakai Toshihiko: on farmers, 349;
Rikugō zasshi, 117 and Nonwar Movement, 156, 194,
Rimer, J. Thomas, 4n4, 144n5 196, 292; and science, 303
Riots: Ashio Copper Mine, 196– 97; Sakhalin: and Ainu, 269, 272, 274;
Hibiya, 177 and Russian exiles, 199, 201
Ritual, 237. See also Pilgrimage Salons: Hakodateya, 274, 289;
Rivers: and civilization, 68–70 Nakamuraya, 288– 91, 330, 331.
Roberts, John, 338 See also Circles, reading/poetry
Robin, Ron, 201 Samurai, 274; and Lev Mechnikov, 5,
Rome: ancient, 69; and Church, 101 40–43, 49, 50n55. See also Shishi
Roosevelt, Theodore, 142–43, 152–54, Sanitation, 201. See also Camps
208 Sapporo Agricultural College, 215,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 108, 241, 341 221, 234, 244–55; Bunbukai kaihō,
Rubashka, 285–86, 291. See also 253; Sapporo Graphic, 248; Social
Clothing Studies Circle, 249–50, 253. See
Rural life, 35, 48, 162, 196, 203; also Hokkaido Imperial University
artistic depictions of, 173, 175; and Sasamori Shūji, 192– 93
poetry, 90, 171n43, 190– 91, Satire, 84. See also Humor
193– 94, 330 Satō Shōsuke, 150, 252–53
Russia: communes, 30, 36; as counter Satow, Ernest, 32
to West, 205; as enemy, 81, 183, Satsuma, 41–43, 162; rebellion, 43
185, 199, 222; and Esperanto, Savages, 51n59, 154, 218, 316
266; famine in, 189n70, 254, 316, Schools, 268, 330, 331; Orthodox, 104;
343–44; literature, 22, 74– 92, 116, SAC as flagship, 245; and Tolstoy,
137, 187, 193, 207, 293, 240n63, 135. See also Education
290– 91, 311; persecution in 76, Scott, James, 10, 263, 345
79, 242; Revolution, 13, 19, 83, 113, Secrecy: and anarchists, 5, 34, 249;
132, 187, 197– 99, 235, 255–56, 285, and police, 19, 20, 34, 35, 46, 285,
291– 93, 338–39; Russian empire, 291– 92, 321
69, 183, 198, 223, 269, 276; tsar, 35, Secularism, 97, 106, 109, 124
78, 79, 102, 200–201, 242, 269, Segmentation, 110
273; as “Western,” 91. See also Seikyō Shimpō, 118
Emigrés; Orthodox Church; Sekai: as term, 228, 274– 76. See also
Soviet Union Worldism
Russian Esperanto League, 266 Sekai Fujin, 164, 272– 76
Russian Orthodox Church. See Sekaigo, 260, 265, 274–75; dictionary,
Orthodox Church, Russian 258, 265. See also Esperanto
Ryan, Marleigh Grayer, 91 Sekaijin, 274, 276
Ryōsai kembo, 165 Selection, natural, 66, 316, 319, 324
406 Index

Self, 99; divided, 97, 212; modern, Shōkei, 103n17

85; and shūkyō, 129; Westernized, Shōnen sekai, 332
330 Shternberg, Lev, 270
Self-colonization, 15–16, 98, 139, 183, Shūkyō: and Tolstoy, 95, 115–16, 119,
214, 256 125, 128–30, 138–39; as Western
Self-conversion, 139, 237 Christianity, 23, 96
Self-determination, 142n1 Siberia, 82n143, 83, 199–200, 239n61,
Self-government, 108, 251, 253, 270; and Bakunin, 1–2, 199
346n27, 347n28; in Middle Ages, Simplicity: and art, 175; and lan-
209, 238 guage, 113, 123, 277– 78, 319; and
Self-knowledge, 106, 108, 307 lifestyle, 42, 108; and people, 175,
Self-organization, 30, 232, 337, 343 273; and revolution, 36
Self-preservation, 64, 314 Sin, 123
Self-transformation, 96, 238 Sino-Japanese War, 332
Selfishness, 64 Slavery, 132, 304, 316; Greek, 78;
Sentoku Tarōji, 269 U.S., 342
Senuma, Ivan (Senuma Kakusaburō), Sociability, 59, 63, 66, 71, 73, 232
129, 131–32, 135n101, 136–37 “Social” (shakai), 74; “social prob-
Senuma Kayō, 137 lems” (shakai mondai), 74, 81, 194,
Separatism, 11–12 251, 349
Serfs, 38, 75, 83 Social Democrat, 71
Sergeenko, P. A. 137 Socialism, 36, 229n40, 255, 292, 296,
Shakai. See Social 333, 350; Chinese, 279–80; and
Shakai shugi, 205, 303 Eroshenko, 285, 288; and Futa-
Shi, 180. See also Individual batei Shimei, 85–86, 88, 192;
Shiina Sonoji, 323 Heimin Shimbun as, 90, 189,
Shimamura Hōgetsu, 87 194; and Ishin, 146, 230; and
Shimazaki Tōson, 87 Nonwar Movement, 146–47,
Shimoda, Treaty of, 1n1 186, 189, 192–201, 233; and POWs,
Shinjinkai, 341–44 197, 200; and students, 249, 253;
Shinkai, 114, 117, 127 Western, 15, 146–47, 186, 211,
Shintoism, 103 236; and women, 206, 273, 275
Shiraishi Rinosuke, 132, 184 Socialist Revolutionary Party,
Shirakaba School, 315, 335–36 200
Shiratori Kurakichi, 216 Socialist Woman, 205n99, 275
Shiroyanagi Shūko, 194 Social sciences, 22, 87, 351; and
Shishi, 40–42, 48, 347n28. See also Arishima Takeo, 213, 216, 218
Samurai Social Studies Circle, 249–50, 253
Shklovsky, Viktor, 83 Society: defined, 163. See also Kokka
Shogunate, 48, 215 shakai; Sociability
 Index 407

Soldiers, 163, 164, 184–85, 195, 197, Stirner, Max, 323

264; and Eroshenko, 334; POWs, Strikes, 196, 337. See also Unions,
197, 200–203; and Tolstoy, 184 labor
Solidarity, 61, 63, 185–86; and Students: and cafeterias, 248, 251; and
Esperanto, 277– 78 dormitories, 244, 247–52, 331; and
Solov’ev, Vladimir, 70, 100, 107, 126 Esperanto, 258, 279–80, 293n76,
Sōma Kokko and Aizō, 288, 290– 91 294, 343; and networks, 51, 234,
Songs, 11, 79n133, 158, 218, 258, 287; 249, 343; and protests, 344; and
Kitahara Hakushū, 27, 261, 333 socialism, 249, 253; student
South (vs. North), 216–17 unions, 343–44. See also Sapporo
Souvenirs Entomologiques (Konchūki), Agricultural College; Shinjinkai
318–23 Study circles. See Circles, reading/
Sovereignty, 12, 142–43, 151–53, 181, poetry
206, 213, 215, 260, 262; popular, Subjectivity, 30, 334, 337, 339; and
160 anarchist religion, 97– 98, 105, 128,
Soviet Union, 19, 201, 291, 338; 140; and history slide, 213, 214,
cultural revolution, 329, 350; 226, 229, 233, 238, 241, 244, 255,
scholars, 13; writers, 175. See also 257; intersubjectivity, 183; and
Russia Ishin, 61, 75, 85, 87; jitsusei, 339;
Sovremennik, 34 and language, 265; and nature,
Spafarii, Nikolai, 33n6 298, 308, 327
Spain, 34 Subversiveness, 46, 79, 175, 253, 258,
Spatiality, 13–14, 20, 74, 140; and 292– 94; culture of, 84; govern-
“history slide,” 213, 217, 219, 225, ment sponsorship of, 199, 200;
226, 229, 233; and nature, 307, 327; and Tolstoy, 129
and Nonwar Movement, 143, 145, Sudzilovskii-Russel, Nikolai,
151–52, 183, 191 200–203, 273
Spencer, Herbert, 298, 310–11, 316, Sugawara Michitarō, 253
321, 326 Sumii Sue, 304
St. Petersburg, 42n34, 93, 100n12, Superstition, 122, 135
266; Delo, 39; and Futabatei Surveillance, 79, 285, 292– 93
Shimei, 205; and urban poor, 86 Survival, 27, 62–63, 68–69, 232, 259,
Stanley, Thomas, 236, 307, 323n49 298, 313, 317, 324; and language, 265
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 165 Sweetshop: Nakamuraya, 288– 91,
State-building, 32, 110, 165 330, 331
Statelessness, 11, 222 Switzerland: and Arishima Takeo,
Stepniak-Kravchinskii, Sergei, 44, 238; and communalism, 209; and
76, 82n143, 88– 90, 187; Under- Lev Mechnikov, 20, 34, 40–47, 51,
ground Russia, 88–89 53, 59, 71–73; as revolutionary hub,
Stereotypes, 102 203
408 Index

Symbiosis, 9, 27, 301, 310–14, 317, heimin culture, 229, 346; and
321–27, 330, 340 language, 85, 265; and Lev Mech-
nikov, 32, 48n54, 50, 51, 54; and
Tachibana Kōzaburō, 346n27 networks, 190
Tadokoro Tokusaburō, 253–54 Tokugi: and Konishi, 115, 120, 123, 125,
Taiwanese, 246, 271, 294 129, 139; and Kropotkin, 240
Taiyō, 150, 269 Tokutomi Roka, 5, 87–90, 189n70, 235;
Takamure Itsue, 304 and Tolstoy, 133–34, 209, 256–57
Takasugi Ichirō, 294 Tokutomi Sohō, 133, 160– 61, 177, 182
Takayama Chōgyū, 128 Tokyo Imperial University, 121, 229,
Takehisa Yumeji, 333 246, 252, 331; Shinjinkai, 341–44
Tanaka, Stefan, 6n6, 216 Tokyo School of Foreign Languages,
Tanaka Shōzō, 196, 235 43–44, 74–82, 90, 98, 116, 154,
Taoka Reiun, 227–31, 309 206, 273; and Esperanto, 258
Tao Te Ching, 105–15, 120, 123–24, Tolstaya, Aleksandra, 113, 134, 138
136, 229, 241–42. See also Lao Tzu Tolstoy, Lev: as aristrocracy, 138; and
Tattoos, 50–52 Confucianism, 109–10, 112, 115–17,
Tayama Katai, 87 120–21; death of, 20, 241n65,
Tchaikovsky, Nikolai, 82n143, 201, 243n75; on evil, 123–24; excom-
203 munication of, 22, 93, 129, 130,
Temporality, 3, 6– 9, 13–14, 20, 74; 136–37; and Futabatei Shimei, 85,
and anarchist religion, 96n4, 140; 116, 130, 205; and gender, 116–17;
and “history slide,” 213–25, 229, on God, 93, 114, 122–25, 129, 240;
231, 263; and nature, 295, 298, 302, and Heimin Shimbun, 184, 187,
307, 327; and Nonwar Movement, 203, 237; home of, 11, 119, 133–34,
208, 210 137, 138, 209, 243; and humanism,
Territoriality: and definition of 127, 183, 204; and Konishi
“Japanese,” 271; and modernity, Masutarō, 23, 95–139, 220–21,
12; nonterritoriality, 183, 191, 200, 229, 240–44; and Kropotkin,
206, 262; and peace, 157–58 19–20, 22, 24, 96, 113, 140–41,
Terrorism, 9, 61, 285, 296 209–10, 237, 240–44, 251, 256, 336,
Textbooks, 136, 159; Esperanto, 238 341; and Lao Tzu/Tao Te Ching,
Theater, 11, 206, 290 104–15, 120, 123–24, 136, 181, 221,
Theology: anarchist, 97, 105, 110–11, 229, 241–42, 244; and Nonwar
115, 120n61, 121–22; Orthodox, Movement, 23–24, 130, 140,
104–5, 114, 136n105, 140 183–84, 187, 203–5; and pilgrim-
Tochigi Prefecture, 196 ages, 133–34, 209, 256–57; as
Todes, Daniel, 62, 311–14 prophet/religious figure, 93, 118,
Tokugawa period, 5, 55n71; and Andō 133, 137, 138; and shūkyō, 95, 115–16,
Shōeki, 235, 309–10, 340; and 119, 125, 128–30, 138–39
 Index 409

Tolstoy, Lev (publications): Bethink Tribalism, 67, 316. See also

Yourselves! 184; The Death of Ivan Primitivism
Ilyich, 118; How I Came to Believe, Trotsky, Leon, 338
241; Kreutzer Sonata, 116, 118, 119; Trubetskoi, Sergei and Evgenii, 107
My Confession, 119, 131; Religion Tsar, 35, 79, 102, 200, 242, 273;
and Morality, 118; Resurrection, 130, Alexander III, 269; Nicholas II,
132, 205, 290; Short Exposition of 201; Peter the Great, 33n6, 78
the Gospel, 131; War and Peace, 95n3; Tsubouchi Shōyō, 84
Where There is Love, There is God, Tsuneki Katsuji, 300
118, 123; Two Old Men, 118; What Turgenev, Ivan, 5n5, 87, 187, 205, 237,
I Believe, 131; What is My Religion, 240; Fathers and Sons, 36n15, 76,
131; What Men Live By, 131. 84
Tolstoy, Sergei, 242n69
Tolstoyanism, 17, 22–23, 95– 97, 99, Uchida Roan, 82, 129–30, 205
134, 251 Uchimura Kanzō, 115, 118
Tolstoy-Kropotkinism, 24 Ueda Kazutoshi, 267
Trade/commerce, 69, 206, 233; as Underground, 5, 20, 31, 34, 249,
mutual aid, 54–59, 179; trade 266, 305; Underground Russia,
agreements, 2, 48 88–89
Traditionalism, 146–47 Unions: labor, 196, 337, 343; student,
Translation: and colloquial language, 343–44
84, 89, 91, 265–66, 323; and culture, United States: anti-Americanism,
22, 73– 92, 98, 116; defined, 98– 99; 208; and Darwin, 310; and
as dialectical, 15, 98; and Espe- democracy, 160, 337, 342–44; and
ranto, 260, 265– 67, 276, 280, 282, Esperanto, 260; and feminism,
284, 323, 325; as exchange, 15, 165, 204n99, 275–76; and imperial-
97– 99, 117, 266; and heimin, 120, ism, 165, 183, 245; and Ishin, 1, 5,
161; and knowledge, 6, 15, 40, 47–48, 50n55, 51n59, 228; and
74–75, 97– 99, 233, 244, 299–301, Kōtoku Shūsui, 157, 172, 183,
310, 322, 325, 331; and language 196– 97, 198n85, 211, 231, 238; and
production, 84–85, 98, 178, 265– 67; Nitobe Inazō, 219; and race,
and substitution, 116; “translating 149–50, 154, 165, 223–24, 262n6,
the West,” 15, 22, 75, 77, 97–98, 182 276, 281, 288, 342–43; Theodore
Translingualism, 16n21; 258– 95; and Roosevelt, 142–43, 152–54, 208;
Darwin, 301, 315 and Russo-Japanese War, 149–50;
Transnationalism, 156, 206, 276. See and transnational networks, 197,
also Networks 204, 220–21, 223, 238; U.S.
Transportation routes, 1–2, 34 Occupation, 28, 344; William
Treaties, 1n1, 142, 153; and disorder, Clark Smith, 244, 246–47, 251.
157; Portsmouth, 143–44, 177, 223 See also Arishima Takeo
410 Index

Unity, national, 118, 148, 210n3, 306; Virtue: civic, 166; divine, 109–10,
and language, 265; “unity in 120, 128, 139, 336; jinkaku, 121, 125,
multiplicity,” 340 139, 166; toku, 23, 139
Universal Esperanto Association, Vladivostok, 1–2, 266
282–83 V Narod movement, 37, 230, 342
Universe: as centerless, 302–10, 340, Volia, 200–203
349 Volkhovskii, Felix, 82n143
Uprisings, 34, 46, 88; Iida uprising,
44; Ōshio uprising, 50, 54 Walker, Janet, 74
Uranishiki, 103n17, 118 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 319
Urban life, 11, 30, 304; associations, War: and honor, 158, 165– 66, 169;
51, 194– 95; culture, 228; intellectu- ideology of, 169, 181, 190, 222;
als, 190; language, 85; poverty, justification for, 157– 60; and
75, 86, 195; workers, 163, 189, 264, nation-state, 24, 158; propaganda,
350 207; reparations, 199; as retrogres-
Utilitarianism, 109 sion, 23, 144, 210, 222, 252, 257;
Utopianisn: and anarchism, 12, 324; righteousness of, 154, 181; violence
and Arishima Takeo, 216, 345; and of, 184, 185, 313. See also specific
culture, 260; and Esperanto, 263; wars; Militarism
and “international relations,” 12, Warera, 294
142–43, 145, 151–53, 158, 168, 188, Warriors, 33n6, 41–42
200, 206; and Nonwar Move- Watanabe Masaji, 77
ment, 157; and revolution, 9; Water, 68–70, 171n43; holy water, 133
and spatiality, 143, 145, 151, 188, Watsuji Tetsujirō, 128
225 West: anti-Westernism, 104, 227, 259;
as barbaric, 66; decadence of,
Veer, Peter van der, 97 127–28; and ideology of moder-
Veniukov, Mikhail, 38 nity, 10, 144–45, 212, 220, 303;
Vernacular, 84, 89, 91, 261, 264– 66, “influence studies,” 13; Japan
268 inequality with, 38, 216, 288;
Vietnam, 69; war, 147 learning from, 20, 31–32, 40, 42,
Vincent, John, 150 53, 246; and rationality, 126, 128,
Violence: and anarchism, 61, 329; and 147n8, 229, 232, 278, 330; socialism
Darwinism, 232; and friendship in, 15, 146–47, 186, 211, 236;
treaties, 157; and human instinct, “translating the West,” 15, 22, 75,
303; and international relations, 77, 97– 98, 182. See also East-West
152; and Nonwar Movement, 147; divide; Westernization
of ocean, 64; and state of nature, Westernization, 270, 330; and
151; Tolstoy on, 124, 242n69; of Christianity, 23, 97; and globaliza-
war, 184, 185, 313 tion, 12; and Ishin, 41, 53; and
 Index 411

“people,” 161n33, 162; and religion, World War II, 19, 28, 201, 326–27,
23, 96– 98, 140; and Russo- 332, 343–44. See also Asia-Pacific
Japanese war, 146; and Sapporo War
Agricultural College, 252
Winter Period, 255–56, 304 Yamaguchi Koshizu, 294
Witchcraft, 122 Yamakawa Hitoshi, 134, 254, 303,
Women: and Esperanto, 276, 294; 349–50
family, 165; Heimin Shimbun, 164, Yamamoto Kanae, 27, 175, 333, 335,
175; and imperialism, 164– 65, 336; Fisherman, 169–71
276; and Kropotkin, 275–76; and Yanagi Sōetsu, 315, 335–36
marriage, 117; ryōsai kembo, 165; Yanagida Kunio, 261
Sekai Fujin, 164, 272– 76; and “Yellow peril,” 149–50, 155, 222–24,
socialism, 206, 273, 275; worldism 347n28
vs. internationalism, 275–76. Yokohama, 1n1, 47, 190
See also Feminism; Gender Yokoyama Gennosuke, 22, 85–88
World Esperanto Association, 262 Yosano Akiko, 167– 69, 171, 193
Worldism, 26, 228, 260– 63, 268, Yoshida Shōin, 83
271– 94 passim, 341; sekaishugi,
228, 274–75 Zamenhof, Lazar Ludwik, 263, 276
World War I, 142n1, 281, 293, 313 Zasulich, Vera, 71, 76, 187
 Harvard East Asian Monographs
(*out-of-print)

*. Liang Fang-chung, The Single-Whip Method of Taxation in China

*. Harold C. Hinton, The Grain Tribute System of China, –
. Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Kaiping Mines, –
*. Chao Kuo-chün, Agrarian Policies of Mainland China: A Documentary Study,
–
*. Edgar Snow, Random Notes on Red China, –
*. Edwin George Beal, Jr., The Origin of Likin, –
. Chao Kuo-chün, Economic Planning and Organization in Mainland China: A
Documentary Study, –
*. John K. Fairbank, Ching Documents: An Introductory Syllabus
*. Helen Yin and Yi-chang Yin, Economic Statistics of Mainland China, –
. Wolfgang Franke, The Reform and Abolition of the Traditional Chinese Examination
System
. Albert Feuerwerker and S. Cheng, Chinese Communist Studies of Modern Chinese
History
. C. John Stanley, Late Ching Finance: Hu Kuang-yung as an Innovator
. S. M. Meng, The Tsungli Yamen: Its Organization and Functions
*. Ssu-yü Teng, Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion
. Chun-Jo Liu, Controversies in Modern Chinese Intellectual History: An Analytic
Bibliography of Periodical Articles, Mainly of the May Fourth and Post-May Fourth Era
*. Edward J. M. Rhoads, The Chinese Red Army, –: An Annotated
Bibliography
*. Andrew J. Nathan, A History of the China International Famine Relief Commission
*. Frank H. H. King (ed.) and Prescott Clarke, A Research Guide to China- Coast
Newspapers, –
*. Ellis Joffe, Party and Army: Professionalism and Political Control in the Chinese Officer
Corps, –
*. Toshio G. Tsukahira, Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan: The Sankin Kōtai System
*. Kwang-Ching Liu, ed., American Missionaries in China: Papers from Harvard Seminars
*. George Moseley, A Sino-Soviet Cultural Frontier: The Ili Kazakh Autonomous Chou
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Carl F. Nathan, Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, –

*. Adrian Arthur Bennett, John Fryer: The Introduction of Western Science and
Technology into Nineteenth- Century China
*. Donald J. Friedman, The Road from Isolation: The Campaign of the American
Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, –
*. Edward LeFevour, Western Enterprise in Late Ching China: A Selective Survey of
Jardine, Matheson and Company’s Operations, –
. Charles Neuhauser, Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People’s
Solidarity Organization, –
*. Kungtu C. Sun, assisted by Ralph W. Huenemann, The Economic Development
of Manchuria in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
*. Shahid Javed Burki, A Study of Chinese Communes, 
. John Carter Vincent, The Extraterritorial System in China: Final Phase
. Madeleine Chi, China Diplomacy, –
*. Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half
Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, –
*. James Pusey, Wu Han: Attacking the Present Through the Past
*. Ying-wan Cheng, Postal Communication in China and Its Modernization, –
. Tuvia Blumenthal, Saving in Postwar Japan
. Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis
. Stephen C. Lockwood, Augustine Heard and Company, –
. Robert R. Campbell, James Duncan Campbell: A Memoir by His Son
. Jerome Alan Cohen, ed., The Dynamics of China’s Foreign Relations
. V. V. Vishnyakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, –,
trans. Steven L. Levine
. Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan During the Closing Years of the Tokugawa
Regime
. Ezra Vogel, Margie Sargent, Vivienne B. Shue, Thomas Jay Mathews, and
Deborah S. Davis, The Cultural Revolution in the Provinces
. Sidney A. Forsythe, An American Missionary Community in China, –
*. Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement.: A
Symposium
*. Ching Young Choe, The Rule of the Taewfngun, –: Restoration in Yi Korea
. W. P. J. Hall, A Bibliographical Guide to Japanese Research on the Chinese Economy,
–
. Jack J. Gerson, Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British Relations, –
. Paul Richard Bohr, Famine and the Missionary: Timothy Richard as Relief
Administrator and Advocate of National Reform
. Endymion Wilkinson, The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide
. Britten Dean, China and Great Britain: The Diplomacy of Commercial Relations,
–
. Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, –
. Yeh-chien Wang, An Estimate of the Land-Tax Collection in China,  and 
. Richard M. Pfeffer, Understanding Business Contracts in China, –
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

*. Han-sheng Chuan and Richard Kraus, Mid- Ching Rice Markets and Trade: An
Essay in Price History
. Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution
. Liang-lin Hsiao, China’s Foreign Trade Statistics, –
*. Lee-hsia Hsu Ting, Government Control of the Press in Modern China, –
*. Edward W. Wagner, The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea
*. Joungwon A. Kim, Divided Korea: The Politics of Development, –
. Noriko Kamachi, John K. Fairbank, and Chūzō Ichiko, Japanese Studies of Modern
China Since : A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research
on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Supplementary Volume for –
. Donald A. Gibbs and Yun-chen Li, A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of
Modern Chinese Literature, –
. Robert H. Silin, Leadership and Values: The Organization of Large- Scale
Taiwanese Enterprises
. David Pong, A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives Deposited at
the Public Record Office of London
*. Fred W. Drake, China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-yü and His Geography of 
*. William A. Brown and Urgrunge Onon, translators and annotators, History of
the Mongolian People’s Republic
. Edward L. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals
*. Ralph C. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero
*. William J. Tyler, tr., The Psychological World of Natsume Sōseki, by Doi Takeo
. Eric Widmer, The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking During the Eighteenth
Century
*. Charlton M. Lewis, Prologue to the Chinese Revolution: The Transformation of
Ideas and Institutions in Hunan Province, –
. Preston Torbert, The Ching Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its
Organization and Principal Functions, –
. Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker, eds., Reform in Nineteenth-Century China
. Jon Sigurdson, Rural Industrialism in China
. Kang Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China
. Valentin Rabe, The Home Base of American China Missions, –
*. Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and Profit: Sino- Siamese Trade, –
. Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao, The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty
. Meishi Tsai, Contemporary Chinese Novels and Short Stories, –: An
Annotated Bibliography
*. Wellington K. K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins and Modern Enterprise in Late
Ching China
. Endymion Wilkinson, Landlord and Labor in Late Imperial China: Case Studies
from Shandong by Jing Su and Luo Lun
*. Barry Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and
Political Power in the Early Republic
*. George A. Hayden, Crime and Punishment in Medieval Chinese Drama: Three
Judge Pao Plays
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

*. Sang-Chul Suh, Growth and Structural Changes in the Korean Economy, –
. J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience,
–
. Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in
Medieval Japan
. Kwang Suk Kim and Michael Roemer, Growth and Structural Transformation
. Anne O. Krueger, The Developmental Role of the Foreign Sector and Aid
*. Edwin S. Mills and Byung-Nak Song, Urbanization and Urban Problems
. Sung Hwan Ban, Pal Yong Moon, and Dwight H. Perkins, Rural Development
*. Noel F. McGinn, Donald R. Snodgrass, Yung Bong Kim, Shin-Bok Kim, and
Quee-Young Kim, Education and Development in Korea
*. Leroy P. Jones and II SaKong, Government, Business, and Entrepreneurship in
Economic Development: The Korean Case
. Edward S. Mason, Dwight H. Perkins, Kwang Suk Kim, David C. Cole, Mahn
Je Kim et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea
. Robert Repetto, Tai Hwan Kwon, Son-Ung Kim, Dae Young Kim, John E.
Sloboda, and Peter J. Donaldson, Economic Development, Population Policy, and
Demographic Transition in the Republic of Korea
. Parks M. Coble, Jr., The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government,
–
. Noriko Kamachi, Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model
. Richard Wich, Sino- Soviet Crisis Politics: A Study of Political Change and
Communication
. Lillian M. Li, China’s Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World,
–
. R. David Arkush, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China
*. Kenneth Alan Grossberg, Japan’s Renaissance: The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu
. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin
. Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Chen Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi
. Thomas A. Stanley, Ōsugi Sakae, Anarchist in Taishō Japan: The Creativity of the Ego
. Jonathan K. Ocko, Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China: Ting Jih-ch’ang in
Restoration Kiangsu, –
. James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, –
. Neil L. Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Transition from Bakumatsu to
Meiji in the Kawasaki Region
. David C. Cole and Yung Chul Park, Financial Development in Korea, –
. Roy Bahl, Chuk Kyo Kim, and Chong Kee Park, Public Finances During the
Korean Modernization Process
. William D. Wray, Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K, –: Business Strategy in the
Japanese Shipping Industry
. Ralph William Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of
Railroads in China, –
*. Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects
of Change in Late Imperial China
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yüan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World
. Luke S. K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas
of 
*. John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to
K’ang-hsi, –
. Joshua A. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (–)
*. Jeffrey C. Kinkley, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, –
. C. Andrew Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu
. Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry,
–
*. Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the “Ta Hsueh”: Neo- Confucian Reflection on the
Confucian Canon
. Christine Guth Kanda, Shinzō: Hachiman Imagery and Its Development
*. Robert Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court
. Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectual and Folk Literature,
–
*. Michael A. Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile Industry: Technology and
Management at Nissan and Toyota
. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and
the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times
. Steven D. Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin
. Katherine F. Bruner, John K. Fairbank, and Richard T. Smith, Entering China’s
Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, –
. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern
Japan: The “New Theses” of 
. Atsuko Hirai, Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai Eijirō
(–)
. Ellen Widmer, The Margins of Utopia: “Shui-hu hou-chuan” and the Literature of
Ming Loyalism
. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late
Chien-lung Era
. Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, –
. Susan Chan Egan, A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung
(–)
. James T. C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the
Early Twelfth Century
*. Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in
Late Ching China
. Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of
Tokugawa Rule
*. Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, –
*. Jon L. Saari, Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis,
–
. Susan Downing Videen, Tales of Heichū
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Heinz Morioka and Miyoko Sasaki, Rakugo: The Popular Narrative Art of Japan
. Joshua A. Fogel, Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit
. Alexander Barton Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study
of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
*. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan
. William D. Wray, ed., Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan’s Prewar
Experience
*. T’ung-tsu Ch’ü, Local Government in China Under the Ching
. Marie Anchordoguy, Computers, Inc.: Japan’s Challenge to IBM
. Barbara Molony, Technology and Investment: The Prewar Japanese Chemical Industry
. Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi
. Laura E. Hein, Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in
Postwar Japan
. Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China,
–
. Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic
. Merle Goldman and Paul A. Cohen, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on
Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin L Schwartz
. James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War
. Gail Lee Bernstein, Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, –
*. Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule,
–
. Mark Mason, American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese
Capital Controls, –
. Richard J. Smith, John K. Fairbank, and Katherine F. Bruner, Robert Hart and
China’s Early Modernization: His Journals, –
. George J. Tanabe, Jr., Myōe the Dreamkeeper: Fantasy and Knowledge in
Kamakura Buddhism
. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s Military,
–
. Yu-ming Shaw, An American Missionary in China: John Leighton Stuart and
Chinese-American Relations
. James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea
*. Douglas Reynolds, China, –: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan
. Roger R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform,
–
. William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: History of Tuberculosis in Japan
. Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early
Modern Japan
. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as Literary
Genre and Socio- Cultural Phenomenon
. James C. Baxter, The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture
. Thomas R. H. Havens, Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the
Seibu- Saison Enterprises in Twentieth- Century Japan
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Anthony Hood Chambers, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction
. Steven J. Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan
. Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution
. Denise Potrzeba Lett, In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New”
Urban Middle Class
. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in
Twelfth- Century Japan
. Charles Shirō Inouye, The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi
Kyōka (–), Japanese Novelist and Playwright
. Aviad E. Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland
. Deborah J. Milly, Poverty, Equality, and Growth: The Politics of Economic Need
in Postwar Japan
. See Heng Teow, Japan’s Cultural Policy Toward China, –: A Comparative
Perspective
. Michael A. Fuller, An Introduction to Literary Chinese
. Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War,
–
. John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono
Katue (–)
. Edward Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gōnō
. Atsuko Sakaki, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern
Japanese Fiction
. Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda
Cement Factory
. JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, Culture and the State in Late
Chosfn Korea
. John W. Chaffee, Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China
. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea
. Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo
Society
. Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, –
. Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology,
Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories
. Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval
Japan
. Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity
*. James Z. Lee, The Political Economy of a Frontier: Southwest China, –
. Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization
. Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama,
–
. William C. Kirby, Man-houng Lin, James Chin Shih, and David A. Pietz, eds.,
State and Economy in Republican China: A Handbook for Scholars
. Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in
Postwar Japan
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South
Fukien Pattern, –
. Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, –
. Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered
Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction
. Curtis J. Milhaupt, J. Mark Ramseyer, and Michael K. Young, eds. and comps.,
Japanese Law in Context: Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics
. Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations,
–
. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, Culture and Power in the
Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, – 
. Terry Kawashima, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in
Heian and Kamakura Japan
. Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China
. Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin, eds., Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.-China
Diplomacy, –
. Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The – Chinese Anti-American Boycott
. David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography
. Christine Yano, Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song
. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldřich Král, with Graham Sanders, eds.,
The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project
. Robert N. Huey, The Making of ‘Shinkokinshū’
. Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, –: Resilience and Renewal
. Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democracy in China
. Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy,
–
. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China
. Aviad E. Raz, Emotions at Work: Normative Control, Organizations, and Culture
in Japan and America
. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the  Reform Period:
Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China
. Kevin O’Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo
. Ezra F. Vogel, ed., The Golden Age of the U.S.- China-Japan Triangle, –
. Thomas A. Wilson, ed., On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the
Formation of the Cult of Confucius
. Donald S. Sutton, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion
in Twentieth- Century Taiwan
. Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansionism
in Asia, –
. Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in
the Seventeenth Century
. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition
in Chinese History
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Rania Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative
. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space,
and Bourgeois Culture, –
. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation
. Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in
Tang-Song Poetry
. Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in
Shanghai’s News Media, –
. Joyce A. Madancy, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium
Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, s to s
. John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commen-
taries on the Analects
. Elisabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional
Enterprises in Modern China
. Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and
Pictures, –
. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China
. Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art
. Elizabeth Remick, Building Local States: China During the Republican and
Post-Mao Eras
. Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
. D. Max Moerman, Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious
Landscape of Premodern Japan
. Antonia Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, –
. Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan,
–
. Gail Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Public Spheres,
Private Lives in Modern Japan, –: Essays in Honor of Albert Craig
. Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture
. Stephen Dodd, Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern
Japanese Literature
. David Anthony Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the
Chinese Interior, –
. Hosea Hirata, Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern Japanese
Literature
. Kyung Moon Hwang, Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea
. Brian R. Dott, Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China
. Mark McNally, Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese
Nativism
. Yongping Wu, A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival, Bureau-
cratic Politics, and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, –
. Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the
National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in
Late Imperial China
. David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, eds., Dynastic Crisis and Cultural
Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond
. Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, eds., Trauma and Transcendence in
Early Qing Literature
. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History
. Hiroshi Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic
Production in Contemporary Japan
. Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography
. William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross, and Gong Li, eds., Normalization of
U.S.- China Relations: An International History
. Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano Chōei, Takahashi Keisaku,
and Western Medicine in Nineteenth- Century Japan
. Jonathan W. Best, A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together
with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi
. Liang Pan, The United Nations in Japan’s Foreign and Security Policymaking,
–: National Security, Party Politics, and International Status
. Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late
Imperial Beijing
. Zwia Lipkin, “Useless to the State”: “Social Problems” and Social Engineering in
Nationalist Nanjing, –
. William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in
the s
. Stephen Owen, The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry
. Martin J. Powers, Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China
. Anna M. Shields, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice
of the Huajian ji 㢅䭧䲚 (Collection from Among the Flowers)
. Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (– )
. Sara L. Friedman, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in
Southeastern China
. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, Emperor Huizong and Late
Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics
. Sophie Volpp, Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth- Century China
. Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-
Century China
. Steven B. Miles, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-
Century Guangzhou
. Lin Man-houng, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, –
. Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern
Song Dynasty China
. Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung
China, –
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Helen Dunstan, State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in
s China
. Sabina Knight, The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction
. Timothy J. Van Compernolle, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in
the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō
. Paul Rouzer, A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese
. Jonathan Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the
Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth- Century Japan
. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, –
. Adam L. Kern, Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the
Kibyōshi of Edo Japan
. Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and
Republican Periods
. Eugene Y. Park, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late
Chosfn Korea, –
. Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-
Christianity, and the Danka System
. Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making
in Modern China
. Vincent Goossaert, Th e Taoists of Peking, – : A Social History of
Urban Clerics
. Peter Nickerson, Taoism, Bureaucracy, and Popular Religion in Early Medieval China
. Charo B. D’Etcheverry, Love After The Tale of Genji: Rewriting the World of the
Shining Prince
. Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring & the Construction
of Qing Rule, –
. Carol Richmond Tsang, War and Faith: Ikkō Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan
. Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil
Service Examinations in Imperial China (–)
. Eve Zimmerman, Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of
Outcaste Fiction
. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in
Southeastern China, –
. Richard J. Smethurst, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi
Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes
. John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou,
–
. Tomoko Shiroyama, China During the Great Depression: Market, State, and the
World Economy, –
. Kirk W. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosfn
Korea, –
. Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in
Japanese Literary Modernism
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Barbara Ambros, Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The Ōyama Cult and Regional Religion
in Early Modern Japan
. Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan
and the United States
. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of
World War II
. Linda Isako Angst, In a Dark Time: Memory, Community, and Gendered
Nationalism in Postwar Okinawa
. David M. Robinson, ed., Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court
(–)
. Calvin Chen, Some Assembly Required: Work, Community, and Politics in China’s
Rural Enterprises
. Sem Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism During the
Koryf Dynasty (–)
. Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in
Late Imperial Chinese Literature
. Chang Woei Ong, Men of Letters Within the Passes: Guanzhong Literati in
Chinese History, –
. Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical
Reception (–)
. Peter K. Bol, Neo- Confucianism in History
. Carlos Rojas, The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity
. Kelly H. Chong, Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the
Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea
. Rachel DiNitto, Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in
Prewar Japan
. Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in
Late Imperial China
. Jay Dautcher, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur
Community in Xinjiang China
. Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner
Alchemy in Republican Shanghai
. Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Commu-
nity of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, –
. David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in
North China
. James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred
Peak (Nanyue फ᎑) in Medieval China
. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan
. James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan
. Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of
Abe Kōbō
. Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-

Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan
. Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity
. Lucien Bianco, Wretched Rebels: Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese
Revolution
. Cathryn H. Clayton, Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness
. Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial
and Modern China
. Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, –
. Robert Ashmore, The Transport of Reading: Text and Understanding in the World
of Tao Qian (– )
. Mark A. Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early
Twentieth Century Japan
. Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter,
Engagement, and Imagined Return
. H. Mack Horton, Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yōshū Account of a Japanese
Mission to Silla in –
. Dennis J. Frost, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in
Modern Japan
. Marnie S. Anderson, A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan
. Peter Mauch, Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburō and the Japanese-American
War
. Ethan Isaac Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early
Medieval Japan
. David B. Lurie, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing
. Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Picturing Heaven in Early China
. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, –
. Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the
Japanese Postal System, –
. Michael Schiltz, The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the
Building of the Yen Bloc, –
. Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon, eds., Toward a
History Beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations
. Sonia Ryang, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
. Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China
. Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture
. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism,
–
. Satoru Saito, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, –
. Jung-Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzō and a New
Liberal Order in East Asia, –
. Atsuko Hirai, Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan,
–
 Harvard East Asian Monographs

. Darryl E. Flaherty, Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal
Profession in Nineteenth- Century Japan
. Jeffrey Paul Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in
Prewar and Wartime Japan
. Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Kwanho Shin, From Miracle to
Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy
. Michel Mohr, Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for
Universality
. J. Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern
Japanese Fiction
. Suzanne G. O’Brien, Customizing Daily Life: Representing and Reforming
Customs in Nineteenth- Century Japan
. Chong-Bum An and Barry Bosworth, Income Inequality in Korea: An Analysis of
Trends, Causes, and Answers
. Jamie L. Newhard, Knowing the Amorous Man: A History of Scholarship on Tales
of Ise
. Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual
Relations in Modern Japan
. Christopher P. Hanscom, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of
Representation in Colonial Korea
. Michael Wert, Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in
Modern Japan
. Garret P.S. Olberding, ed., Facing the Monarch: Modes of Advice in the Early
Chinese Court
. Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in
Chinese Literature Across the  Divide
. David Spafford, A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan
. Jongryn Mo and Barry Weingast, Korean Political and Economic Development:
Crisis, Security, and Economic Rebalancing
. Melek Ortabasi, The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in
the Work of Yanagita Kunio
. Hiraku Shimoda, Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan
. Trent Maxey, The ‘Greatest Problem’: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan