Japan's Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm
January 2021
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Edited book
Provincialising the State: Symbiotic Nature and Survival Politics in Post-World War Zero Japan
March 2017
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Chapter
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New Worlds from Below
The science of symbiosis and linguistic democracy in early twentieth-century Japan
January 2015
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Journal article
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Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems
Focusing on the early twentieth-century Japanese Esperantist and popular celebrity writer Miyazawa Kenji as an embodiment of a larger intellectual phenomenon of early twentieth century Japan, the essay delineates the scientific world view behind the Esperanto movement and corresponding internal logic that developed in the language movement@s foundational years. It argues that Esperantism in Japan in its early years was not an isolated linguistic movement among a small number of leftist intellectuals, but part of a much larger intellectual,cultural, and social movement that reflected the particular scientific worldview of what I call 'anarchist science'. This worldview defied the conceptual bifurcations of 'modern vs. tradition' and 'nature vs. culture' in modern history. A history of its vision offers a fresh perspective on modern history, future visions of the past, and the historical meanings of Esperantism.
Childhood, Linguistic democracy, Esperanto, Miyazawa Kenji, Natural science, Anarchism, Symbiosis
The Emergence of an International Humanitarian Organization in Japan: The Tokugawa Origins of the Japanese Red Cross
October 2014
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Journal article
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American Historical Review
Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan
September 2013
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Book
Mid-nineteenth century Russian radicals who witnessed the Meiji Restoration saw it as the most sweeping revolution in recent history and the impetus for future global progress. Acting outside imperial encounters, they initiated underground transnational networks with Japan. Prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, from Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy to Saigo Takamori and Tokutomi Roka, pursued these unofficial relationships through correspondence, travel, and networking, despite diplomatic and military conflicts between their respective nations.
Tracing these non-state networks, Anarchist Modernity uncovers a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life between 1860 and 1930 that might be described as “cooperatist anarchist modernity”—a commitment to realizing a modern society through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of state governance. These efforts later crystallized into such movements as the Nonwar Movement, Esperantism, and the popularization of the natural sciences.
Translingual World Order: Language Without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan
February 2013
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Journal article
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Journal of Asian Studies
This essay examines how Japanese Esperantism developed after the Russo-Japanese War in a manner that departed from the global Esperanto movement. Esperantists viewed Esperanto as a language that amplified the diversity of and symbolized equality between cultures. Esperanto was studied and discussed by elites and nonelites alike in noninstitutional spaces such as in rural homes and coffee shops, often 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, we become privy to an imagination and practice of peace and world order that operated outside the institutions of the nation-state. The history of this movement offers us a rare window into a popular concept of world order in Asia.
Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist Time: Arishima Cooperative Farm in Hokkaido, 1922-1935
November 2012
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Journal article
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Modern Asian Studies
This paper offers a fresh anarchist history of modern rural experience at the heart of Japan's modernization project in Hokkaido. The rationalization of agricultural methods and the establishment of big farms in Hokkaido worked by tenant farmers served the dual purpose of both colonizing and modernizing Japan's northern frontier. Against the idea of progress imbued in that colonial project, the anarchist and celebrity writer, Arishima Takeo, liberated his tenant farmers by dissolving his tenant farm in Niseko in 1922. The farmers were made the new cooperative owners. Members of the farm, made famous during widespread tenant-farmer disputes, believed they stood at the heart of progress. ‘Sōgo fujō’ (mutual aid) was viewed as an ethic for social transformation, democracy and elimination of hierarchy that linked the farmers with the wider world. It was the farmers’ consciousness of working in a new era, better than ever before, that made them modern. Their community offers us a case study of the imagination and experience of modern temporality amongst the most unlikely subjects of the modern, ordinary agricultural laborers in rural Asia in the early twentieth century. This anarchist history challenges the conceptual framework that has categorized rural Japan as the seat of conservative politics, nativism and traditionalism, and the antithesis of modernity.
The People at Rest: the Anarchist Origins of Ogawa Usen's ‘Nihonga’
September 2011
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Journal article
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World Art
This essay revises our understanding of Ogawa Usen, a prolific artist known for his contributions to the genre of Nihonga, ‘Japanese-style painting,’ in early twentieth century Japan. Nihonga was founded to appreciate and preserve ‘Japanese arts.’ Leading representatives of Nihonga aestheticized ‘Japan’ in nostalgic representations of the nation. By considering Usen's art from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) when Usen's work first gained popularity, the essay argues that Usen intended his work to express anarchist ideas of progress antithetical to the nostalgic sense of yearning for a vanishing national culture. According to some of the most recognized anarchist figures from the movement, human progress would be guided by anarchist principles that valued the everyday doing of common people, each with his or her own creative energy and talent to contribute to society. Usen first gained public attention as a cartoon illustrator for the Nonwar Movement against the state. Although museums and art historians have overlooked Usen's cartoons, his cartoons are a clear expression of the ideas behind his body of work, and among the earliest examples of his distinctive style. They reveal that the artist cannot be understood within the bifurcated framework of West vs. East, modern vs. tradition, global time vs. nationalized space. With Usen, the arts began to be understood as everyday practices of everyone, rather than ‘high culture.’ This new genre of anarchist art of, for, and by everyone began to include other art movements, including Mingei, Children's Free Arts, and Farmer's Arts. This introduction of Usen to Western historiography thus calls for a new lens to interpret some of the most innovative artistic currents in modern Japanese cultural history.
The Absence of Portsmouth in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Imagination of Peace
October 2008
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Chapter
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The Treaty of Portsmouth and Its Legacies
The latest, probing look at the 1905 Portsmouth Peace Treaty, the last peace agreement between Japan and Russia. The latest, probing look at the 1905 Portsmouth Peace Treaty, the last peace agreement between Japan and Russia
On the centennial of the peace treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, Dartmouth College hosted a conference to examine the background and making of that treaty and its long-term implications for international relations. Over forty North American, Japanese, and Russian scholars and practitioners participated in the forum. The Treaty of Portsmouth and Its Legacies presents eight outstanding conference papers, revised for publication, and two additional papers solicited to round out the scholarship. Together these papers illuminate diplomacy before and after the war, the peace process, the political and cultural legacies of Portsmouth, and the treaty’s significance for Asia-Pacific relations today.
History
Translation and Conversion Beyond Western Modernity: Tolstoian Religion in Meiji Japan
May 2007
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Chapter
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Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity
This volume fundamentally improves our understanding of processes like the secularization of society, and the growth of mass ideological movements, by looking upon these transformations to modernity as a species of conversion akin to religious conversion. The geographical areas covered by the contributors—the Ottoman domain, India, China, and Japan—provide striking examples of the dynamic force of conversion as a reaction to the tremendous pressures exerted by colonialism and imperialism and by the types of transformations constitutive of modernity.
Reopening the "Opening of Japan": A Russian-Japanese Revolutionary Encounter and the Vision of Anarchist Progress