💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › dr-sho-konishi-anarchist-modernity.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:17:28. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Anarchist Modernity
Author: Dr. Sho Konishi interviewed by Matt Dagher-margosian
Date: April 19, 2020
Language: en
Topics: Japan, Russia, modernity, Leo Tolstoy
Source: Retrieved on 2020-10-05 from https://asiaarttours.com/anarchist-modernity-dr-sho-konishi-of-oxford-on-japan-russia-and-anarchism-part-1/ https://asiaarttours.com/anarchist-modernity-dr-sho-konishi-of-oxford-on-japan-russia-and-anarchism-part-2/
Notes: Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan by Sho Konishi https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674073319&content=bios

Dr. Sho Konishi interviewed by Matt Dagher-margosian

Anarchist Modernity

Part 1

1. For scholars, I’m always interested if there were formative life

experiences which led them to pursue their specific field of study. Were

there any events or figures which led you to research collaboration and

translation between Japanese and Russian Anarchists?

Your question about life experiences is an interesting one. Our memories

of life experiences often lead us unconsciously to (re)examine our world

in a particular way. We are usually unable and unwilling to recognize

this tendency, so we create narratives that allow us to live within such

invented narratives. We tell stories that conveniently makes sense

afterward, and which continue to change over time as we ourselves

change. Our autobiographical narratives would appear to be the most

accurate, but they are possibly the most inaccurate form of narrative.

We’re all very good at pretending as if we know what led to what… We’re

natural storytellers for our own psychological well-being. I guess our

death-bound subjectivity leads to such creativity. So to respond

honestly to your question, ‘I do not know’ is probably the most accurate

answer.

Having said that, I imagine that my interest in Russia and Japan may

have had something to do with my unhappiness with formal schooling in

Japan back in the 1980’s when I grew up. I have almost no memories of my

school life in Japan – it’s like a big blank in my mind, as if it had

never happened, probably because I hated it. It became stronger as

elementary school progressed. I still remember clearly when I asked in

Year 7, which is when children began studying English as a requirement,

why we were studying only one foreign language and why that had to be

English. I failed to understand why English language should have so much

power over us. The teacher answered that that’s the language required to

get into high school. I responded, ‘If I don’t go to high school, then I

don’t need to learn it?’ His response was that I was a bad influence on

my classmates. I was asked to leave the classroom and stand outside. I

got beat up by the teachers and had to stand outside the classroom, but

none of this served to help me understand – in fact just the opposite.

I began to realize that the problem was too large to solve in one

classroom. Of course I threw away my English texts at the time. My

schoolmates came to me with admiration and reverence for what I said and

did – they agreed with me — yet they themselves did and changed nothing,

fearful of saying anything and doing anything. It was as if nothing

happened. The best students academically were the wisest, as they knew

how to do well in such a system.

That was the pattern of my everyday school years. So I quit and became a

school dropout, drinking by myself in the park from the morning, while

my peers were preparing for their exams. My confrontation with modern

state education had started much earlier, almost as soon as I was asked

to go to school, but I won’t go on about that here. This sort of

experience, and countless more, probably influenced how I saw the world,

and played a part in what I wrote decades later. I was quite seriously

concerned about that country’s future.

My early interest in Esperanto language (not that I studied it then) had

something to do with this, for example, in that Esperanto is a kind of

linguistic solution to all sorts of discrimination.

My interest in Russia was formed in this same way, because Russia was

always so hidden in Japanese education. In Japan they never talked about

the Soviet Union in school back then, as if it did not exist, or as if

it were something bad and scary to talk about. If English had celebrity

status, Russian was the opposite. So I ended up doing my undergraduate

education in Russia.

Similarly, the military in Japan is always hidden from public sight and

scrutiny. ‘The military does not exist in Japan,’ they used to say. So I

became interested in military affairs precisely because of that. Of

course, the requirement to study English has a lot to do with a longer

and broader global history and, more immediately, Japan’s defeat in the

Asia-Pacific war. This intertwining of the hidden presence of the

Japanese military with the all pervasiveness of English language

probably also had something to do with my becoming a cadet at a military

university in the US, where I trained in military affairs while learning

Chinese and Russian languages— remnants of the Cold War. This university

possessed a highly rated Russian language program, including the best

summer Russian program at the time. I ended up representing the US

military school in the Russian/Soviet city of Tula, a military

industrial complex that had just opened to foreigners the year I came.

So I was ‘the first foreigner from the West’ (as Russians used to

labeled me then) to enter that city since it was closed during the

Soviet period.

Funnily enough, nearby Tula is also the Russian writer Lev Tolstoi’s

estate home. I first encountered Tolstoi, who was to become an important

part of my book, while I was living in Tula as an undergraduate. But it

was not through the front gate of the Tolstoi Museum that I encountered

him, but through a back way, when my Russian friends and I went to

‘gulyat’, walk around aimlessly to smoke and joke, to rest, or to swim

in the same pond that Tolstoi used to swim in. The water looked filthy,

smelly and green, but nevertheless… That was my first real encounter

with Tolstoi – imagining him swimming in that pond on the estate

neighboring the city that decades later would become a Soviet military

industrial complex. When we did go to the Tolstoi house and museum for

no particular reason, I did notice that his house had preserved a

surprising number of books and letters in Japanese, which made me

curious. Also, I realized then that the microbiologist Ilya Mechnikov

and other scientists befriended him, despite his embrace of a pastoral,

simple life of manual labor. I became curious about these people who

were from such different backgrounds and professions, and yet appeared

to be networked in multiple ways to one another, directly or indirectly.

So yes, my curiosity was there then. But frankly, at that time, just to

make my body move was tiring at the end of the Soviet regime. Especially

being the first foreigner ‘from the West’ as a first-year undergraduate,

without any family or friend connections, with endless shortages of

everything, my primary focus was finding food to survive however I could

— not scholarship.

Before my university studies, I had also become homeless for a good

while in a number of countries. While I slept on the street, I was still

holding on to my 9^(th)-year school completion certificate as if that

was going to help me. But quite the contrary, the certificate was of no

value at all. I didn’t realize it then. While I slept on the street, I

had many encounters with other homeless, as well as certain ‘tribes’ of

outcastes (whether ethnic, racial, immigrant, social, intellectual or

otherwise) in various countries. In the US, some of these ‘teachers’, as

I used to consider them, were often the disposable and hurting veterans

of America’s various wars. Some of them told me about America’s

de-institutionalization policy, which released patients, many of whom

were vets, from mental and other hospitals onto the streets. I am not an

Americanist or sociologist and have no idea what led to all this

homelessness among folks with war injuries in both mind and body. I have

no idea if what they told me was true either. This type of experience,

nevertheless, also helped lead to my interest in the problem of seeing

like a state, not only in Japan, but internationally, creating a global

if not transnational ‘underground’ world. On the streets of New Zealand,

I encountered people of various ethnic and national backgrounds. I was

wanted to learn more about what tied certain Maoris to the Malaysians,

and Indians to others underground, with various ethnic and religious

backgrounds, who made themselves invisible and escaped such national

labels.

Ultimately, while homeless, I started speaking to God without an ‘o’ —

not ‘God’ as a historical artifice, in the narrative sense, but Gxd

without Being, without church, Bible, preacher, etc. It was just me and

Gxd, always and everywhere, in an intimate relationship. I had lost

utterance being alone there. I didn’t want to be a part of capitalist

modernity (I didn’t call it as such then, it was more like ‘the

money-centered empty culture of post-war Japan’ or some such expression

I had), but to avoid being part of it had made me homeless. There was no

one other than myself to justify my derailment. I felt then that if no

one followed me, even if they agreed with me, then at least I should act

alone. When you have no one else to talk to on the street, you naturally

develop a conversation with Gxd about right and wrong. Without that

experience, I probably couldn’t have thought about ‘anarchist religion’,

a term that I invented, then discovered in historical reality, as a term

to make sense of what was in fact there. Then I had to make sense of the

space-time that had necessitated such an idea.

So this might have been an influence on my interests. It probably led me

to be curious about the history of thought and practices that overturned

the existing culture. My skepticism about any institutionalized

knowledge that was in the interest of the state within the rigid

departmentalization of modern institutions, and the accompanying

politics of knowledge, all made me want to think outside them. Applying

that to modern Japanese history many years later has at least partly led

me to disclose anarchist modernity as a major cultural and intellectual

current in Japan. All this is in hindsight of course. Until you asked

me, I hadn’t thought about such links. But my attempt to create new

approaches to study the history of modern Japan outside the fold of

‘West’-, Soviet- or Japan-centric historicity to make sense of the

intellectual phenomena captured in my book, in hindsight had something

to do with some of these ‘life experiences’.

2. We’ll be discussing your incredible book today: Anarchist Modernity:

Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan

I notice throughout the book you highlight the impressive volume and

diversity of places where cooperatist anarchism took root in Japan

between 1860 and 1930: seminaries, hospitals, candy stores, farms,

urban/rural poetry circles, prison camps and elite universities are just

a few examples.

How were activists at that time able to transform multiple spaces (and

communities) into sites of cooperatist anarchism? And what contemporary

lessons does this offer for present-day individuals to also try and

transform seemingly fixed (in meaning or function) spaces and

communities?

Diversity and multiplicity are the very essence of anarchist thought

itself, which reflects how these ideas develop out of the practical

concerns of the everyday. That nature of multiplicity and everydayness

in turn reflects on where and how they relate and communicate. Yes,

space can be designated, fixed, and even controlled and managed by

power, but what you think and do in these spaces at an undesignated time

essentially determines the meaning of the space. Perhaps many of the

actors didn’t intend to transform these places into something that they

were not. It was in the process of putting their ideas into practice

that came to give certain meanings to certain places.

For the most part, I don’t consider these spontaneous participants

‘activists’ per se. For instance, in the ‘people’s cafeteria’ Taishu

Shokudo used by thousands of people in Tokyo at the time, customers were

reminded with signs and other means that they were participating in the

larger purpose of Sogofujo, mutual aid for global progress. Many of the

actors I talk about would not even have identified themselves as

‘cooperatist anarchists’ per se. That’s probably why they were able to

think and do what they did from outside the state-centric political

sphere that revolved around civilization discourse. ‘Resistance’ was not

a conceptual framework to fully make sense of their ideas. They had

their own thought on progress that was simultaneous, but separate if not

independent from Western civilization discourse — even as they lived

with and often in it. It was beyond the modern bifurcation of colonizer

and colonized. Theirs was a non-imperial thought that spread in a

non-imperial way. That’s another reason why they couldn’t be identified

then or now, through the investigations of neither the police at the

time, nor many able historians’ many decades afterward. They were often

just doing their everyday informal life practices that worked for them

through mutual aid, with an ‘anarchist modern’ subjectivity that

emphasized symbiosis with surrounding nature. They valued individual

freedom and difference, mutual aid in time of crisis, as well as the

beauty and virtue of conducting everyday life in everyday spaces. They

saw and understood biological nature along the same lines. These ideas

and practices circulated not only among public intellectuals, but also

among ordinary folks, who believed that mutual aid was indeed the best

function for survival even in the worst of times, times of pandemics,

natural disaster, war and otherwise. It seemed that cooperation, not

stark individualism and competition, was the most natural way of making

their lives better.

Through these spaces, knowledge circulated in a multi-directional

manner. Not from Tokyo or London to the rest, from city to countryside,

or from ‘above’ to ‘below’. It is important not to believe that the

origin of knowledge as coming from the ‘state’. In general, the state is

usually many steps behind the reality, as everyone knows from everyday

experience. So to talk about space, we have to talk about the direction

of the process of knowledge formation. For anarchist modernity

specifically, this circulation was often in reverse flow, even as it

flowed in a multi-directional manner: from the countryside to the city,

from the civil war losers of the north to the ‘winners’ of the war in

the south, from Japan or Russia in this case to the West, and so on.

Disrupting the dominant direction of the formation of knowledge can

serve to denature the hierarchical structure of knowledge.

Multi-directional and even reverse flows of knowledge have stripped the

power embedded in the circuits designed to propagate the state’s

ideology.

There was a practical necessity of using different spaces for various

learning functions. While imperial universities in Japan closely

followed state guidance, cooperatist anarchists needed unofficial

learning places. Imperial universities after all were far outnumbered by

these unofficial learning places.

Imperial universities like Tokyo Imperial University wouldn’t teach

anarchist thought. But on the formal chessboards that they created, an

anarchist form of chess with its own rules and strategies was being

played. So although spaces like state-run universities were controlled,

historians have failed to look at what students actually did in those

spaces that were designated for Western modernity. At night, in the

dormitory, completely different activities that uprooted and challenged

what was being taught during the day were taking place.

The seemingly mundane places where they developed their networks and the

off-times when they practiced cooperatist anarchism have methodological

implications. Your readers may understandably not be interested in

research methodology per se. But it may be important to know that they

acted outside our usual spheres of historical investigation, on the

second floor of sweet shops, in hospitals, in people’s cafeterias, and

in the evenings and weekends. They penetrated the interstices and passed

through borders and other man-made barriers without discrimination,

attaching themselves non-hierarchically to anyone along the way. As it

spread, it transcended the states’ territorial borders, discarding class

and occupational borders flexibly (although not so freely), and without

discriminating gender, legal or financial power. And it did so through

countless unexpected encounters and chance meetings. It acted a bit like

an epidemic in this sense. The difference is that people in Japan did

not fear or seek to avoid contraction. To encounter and absorb the ideas

of cooperatist anarchism was to free oneself, to maximize one’s unique

potential, and be given a place and opportunity to offer love and

empathy in everyday life. What they encountered in cooperatist anarchism

was often an articulation or an added value to their own existing

cooperative practices. The ideas of cooperatist anarchist justified

being active participants rather than backward, uncivilized and

unvirtuous beings waiting to be directed by those with political, legal

and financial power. In contemporary times (since that may be your

readers’ foremost interest), it’s up to the reader to take different

things from different aspects of the book to develop and apply as one

wishes, like anarchist thought itself. But it does seem that we need

such articulators occasionally who can give new meanings to people’s

everyday practices. I hope the book has made a minor contribution to

this end that will give new energy to ordinary folks and highlight their

extraordinary potential through everyday practice, or to those who feel

peripheralized in academia but who are working on incredibly innovative

work.

Speaking of a lesson, sometimes the same person played dual roles in

anarchist modernity, at different times of the day — like the Waseda

University professor in the book who went out at night to join

activities that contradicted what he was teaching at his university

during the day. This may be another implication for us today in

contemporary times, that you shouldn’t be afraid to do seemingly

self-contradictory practices in this complex world. If you try too hard

to unify everything in your life around a particular set of ideas, you

could end up being homeless like me. If you feel like you are locked in,

but you feel no other way to survive in this world, do something outside

your ‘employed’ time that can be locked in by forces that you feel are

outside your control. There are alternative times that belong to you,

when you can create and belong to another temporality, and yet act in

effective ways.

Paying attention to these odd places and times not only revealed how and

where they were acting, but it also had methodological implications. A

lesson for historians is to unlock these interlocked conceptions of

historical knowledge production that connected sources, method, theory,

and concept. This releases history from the fold of Western modernity,

as well as currently popular ‘post-humanist’ positions that ironically

often re-confirm modernity as a done deal.

Their connections also interconnected people of all walks of life. They

themselves didn’t measure people according to class, gender, race,

specialization, nationality, etc. And they easily connected in their

minds what we now distinguish as the social sciences, humanities and

natural sciences. This may be yet another lesson for contemporary

knowledge production in modern higher educational institutions that

neatly separate specializations and create their own territory and

legitimacy, deep in their own wells. In the intellectual landscape of

the anthroposcene, we should reflect and connect the social sciences and

humanities with the natural sciences.

There was nothing strange, then, about early twentieth-century

geographers drawing ideas from biology, or the White Birch School of

literary people promoting Ilya Mechnikov’s microbiology and immunity.

Ilya Mechnikov saw cells as symbiotically functioning in the inner core

of our bodies, which helped lead to the idea of symbiogenesis. Nor was

it odd that the anarchist Osugi Sakae translated the entomologist Jean

Henri Fabre’s studies of the ‘lowly’ dung beetle. Osugi’s translation

has become not only the most popular biology book of all time, together

with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but also a sort of Mother Goose

for Japanese children. Osugi created a nickname for one of Fabre’s

favorite objects of study, the dung beetle, as ‘funkorogashi’, or ‘dung

ball roller’. The dung beetle became extremely popular among Japanese

children and adults alike, and remains to be so, even today. As I

pointed out in the book, the dung beetle long outlasted the imperial

ideologies that banned it. However, in academia, no one ever talked

about this popular intellectual phenomenon, while focusing instead on

the imperial ideologies that banned it.

Other instances include the most famed primatologist of Japan, Imanishi

Kinji, who was a student of the philosopher Nishida Kitaro and what I

called ‘anarchist sciences’ in the book. Imanishi did not look at

primates as ‘nature’ separated from us, ‘civilization/culture’. Instead,

he began to seek culture in nature, how empathy worked among primates,

for instance. And the anarchist ethnographer Lev Mechnikov, who was a

mentor for the natural scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin.

Anarchists in Japan actively connected the humanities, social sciences,

biology, philosophy, entomology, literature, ecology/environmental

studies, agriculture, and Gxd/religion. The very thought that

interconnected all those people of all walks of life on the street,

interconnected the various ‘disciplines’ in which they became

interested. That’s why literary circles meeting in places like the

second floor of sweet shop studied about anarchist science and biology,

and how to practice agriculture. Esperanto meetings become circles to

study about the ecology and environment, concerns that are still very

much associated with Esperanto language today in Japan. Places like

local hospitals developed into anarchist meeting and publishing spaces.

These various conversions of space occurred very naturally and

unproblematically.

Urban spaces also turned into critical transnational spaces transcending

borders, where people and ideas of various origins met. During the great

Kanto Earthquake of 1923, key anarchist figures Osugi Sakae and his

partner Ito Noe were brutally murdered by police terrorism. However, it

was the thought and the multitudes of human beings that they left

behind, as much as what they wrote and translated, that have survived

until now.

The presence in history of such activities and the absence in our

historical knowledge (historiography) are telling. It shows the nature

of how and why history is often written and how it governs the future.

Historians often have defined ‘activists’ as those who engaged in the

state’s political language. By so doing, these political actors

determine their position by speaking the language of the civilizational

discourse of the West. According to this measure, Asian societies have

‘weak civil societies’. However, we need to look outside Western modern

vocabularies of ‘activists’ who speak the language of conventional state

politics. Such studies of the weakness of political activism in the

Nonwest inevitably revolve around state-centric and thus West-centric

political history.

I don’t have quantitative evidence for this, but the Kanto Earthquake of

1923 was probably a major impetus as well for the weakening of the

anarchist movement, because, while we are used to thinking of the ‘end’

or ‘weakening’ of anarchism by the events of the Russian Revolution and

the rise of Bolshevism and Marxism in Japan, it was the natural and

spatial destruction of Tokyo as hubs for these intricately formed

networks that really helped lead to the displacement of anarchism – at

least temporarily. The earthquake forced smaller hubs like the Shirakaba

School to move out of Tokyo, dissolving the cooperatist anarchist

networks that had formed at a time when spatial proximity was still

essential for network formation. The police murdered two key leaders of

the anarchist movement in the destructive aftermath of the earthquake,

Osugi and Ito Noe, together with their young nephew, but it was the

spatial dissolution of the earthquake itself, the disintegration of

Tokyo’s sites as hubs of cooperatist anarchist networks, that most

negatively interrupted this movement.

Many scholars search for feminism in Japanese history among figures who

were part of anarchist modernity, like the above-mentioned anarchist Ito

Noe. In their search for feminism, though, with almost no exception,

scholars focus on suffrage as the measure and keyword of feminism and

women’s history. However important this type of scholarship may have

been and continue to be, it’s worth being cautious here as well. Once we

make the Western version of suffrage-based feminism our measure and lens

for examining Japanese ‘women’s’ history, then we miss a huge number of

female historical actors who were very important, sometimes vital

actors. These women were at the forefront of some of the most

distinctive cultural and political movements in modern Japan. The

history of environmentalism in Japan, for instance, cannot be discussed

without consideration of the influential anti-pollution activism

initiated, organized and led by ordinary Japanese housewives in the

1950s. The places where these ordinary housewives studied and practiced

were their homes and backyards. Yet the fact that involvement in the

national politics of the state was never a part of the women’s interest

or ambition should not be considered a weakness. Our reliance on

suffrage and conventional political participation as a social scientific

yardstick of Western modernity has caused us to miss too many important

female actors in Japanese history in the first place. Today, I imagine

we could learn something new from the practice of these ordinary

housewives that would allow us to change our very understanding of

‘democracy’, ‘civil society’ and ‘politics’ by looking at these least

likely heroes of history.

One of my former DPhil students, Anna Schrade, has looked into ordinary

housewives encountering mass pollution in the industrialization of

Japan, during its economic expansion in the immediate postwar. These

ordinary women initiated and conducted extraordinary scientific studies

by collaborating with scientists. They gathered evidence from and

studied their mundane everyday surroundings to demonstrate inhumane

pollution levels. They collected dust and tested the air and water

around them under the motto of sogo fujo, mutual aid, when the

government and the corporations weren’t acting. Their counter network to

state and capitalist modernity spread horizontally, transcending age,

occupational and class differences. Indeed, those differences were the

key to the success of their counter network. They also made their own

amateur documentary of the local pollution that was eventually shown

nationwide on the national broadcasting channel. Spontaneously organized

and networked on the grassroots level, these women were very much an

example of anarchist democracy in postwar Japan that made fundamental

differences in their own lives. The implications of producing a

historical account of their activities are not small. Until now, we have

looked at the global 1960s and ‘70s, by focusing on male elites

initiating an environmental movement, with an assumption that knowledge

spread from ‘above’ to ‘below’. We are finding exactly the opposite;

that we have overlooked the housewives of the ‘40s and ‘50s, women who

didn’t believe in or simply didn’t give a damn about voting. The media

and then elite male intellectuals followed these women’s initiation of

postwar environmentalism only much later. Only then did some elites

begin to join when it was already safe to do so, because it had become

acceptable to talk about these things in the 1970s. Our historical

accounts have only paid attention to these elites. At a time when the

men were employed by the polluting industries and often fully

contributing to environmental disaster, their wives were acting the

other way around in the same household, by going against the polluting

activities of their own husbands and their employers’ — without any

violence. Women throughout the world should be encouraged to act without

the state, and anarchist modernity has shown just how much one they have

made difference, and will continue to be so.

Speaking of space, when counter networks form against domination,

segregation, and power, what shape do they take? Here we can take a cue

from nature on the molecular level and from the ancient art of basket

weaving. Bamboo weaving practices are being looked at by Jo McCallum as

a contact point between humans and nature. We can view effective and

long lasting networks as kagome, a pattern used in Japanese bamboo

weaving. The method of bamboo weaving takes into account the natural

form, grain, and coloring of each individual piece in the weave, making

the baskets strong and yet pliable. Physicists have used the term kagome

as a name for a particular formation of lattice discovered as occurring

naturally on the molecular level. Kagome lattices now form the basis for

cutting-edge research in highly conductive manmade materials likely to

be useful for the quantum computers of the future. We can similarly view

the development of strong, pliable and highly conductive social networks

by using the metaphor of kagome.

Part 2

Asia Art Tours: You highlight throughout the book the incredible

diversity of collaboration between individuals, not just between

countries but also between the demographics of those countries. (rich &

poor, young & old, atheist & religious)

What was it about Russia and Japan at this time that spurred this

international, inter-demographic collaboration between so many groups?

In our recent era of global protests that remain relatively isolated,

what lessons can we take from this historic period for building

solidarity?

SHO KONISHI: That’s another unique question. For one, cooperatist

anarchist modernity was expressed and promoted in the most interesting,

intimate, and familiar terms, such as in the tales of dung beetles and

other insects translated by Japanese anarchists. It was never promoted

as some sort of –ism. In fact, there was no single shared name for it,

and it took my perspective of distance in time and space as a historian

to uncover it as a phenomenon. They also targeted the manifold,

interconnected ideas of Western modernity from all sides and folds. The

articulators, or public intellectuals, in this discourse were keenly

aware of the interconnected set of ideas that were at work for the

civilizational discourse of the West, so to counter that also took an

interconnected uprooting practice. As much as English language,

Christianity, technology, rationality, whiteness (race), territoriality,

military and masculinity were all interconnected, so was the counter

culture that uprooted them.

In the case of Japan, high literacy rates also helped, allowing this

discourse to become grounded in popular level interests and perceptions

of the world. After all, it was an informal ‘politics’ of everyday life.

So it was more about popular discourse, one that tied intellectuals to

the general populace in very real and concrete ways. Because in Japan

‘everyone’ was reading, anarchist thought easily found its way onto

Japanese popular soil not as anarchism per se, but as an ethical set of

ideas and practices and understanding of nature. We need to be careful

not to fall into the trap of seeing them through the lens of ‘latecomer��

theory, like Gerschenkron, a capitalist interpretation that is quite

trendy among elites, or as a latecomer to modernization at large, which

was also absorbed and promoted by elites in Japan with new aims and

interests in the postwar.

In Japan, mutual aid fit well with existing practices and values, given

how cooperatism has long been engrained in the everyday life of this

ocean culture where the threat of mass destruction by nature is always

imminent. This allowed them to adopt and develop the concept of mutual

aid progress more naturally. The ideas were already long embedded in

Japanese culture since Tokugawa times and were not foreign to them.

Why Russia and Japan? Many Russians and Japanese looked for a way to

combine the cultures of West and East. They engaged with the West, but

they had never been colonized. In the modern era, many people of both

places characterized themselves as situated between East and West. For

Japan, being an Asian country that had not been colonized by European

powers was unique, and appears to have been a factor leading to this

thought. They did not feel the urgency to throw off the West (or the

East); they did not have to prioritize decolonization either. Adherents

of cooperatist anarchism were looking for universality, rather than to

Japanize or Westernize or Russianize. It was a kind of social thought,

an idea of progress that sought to transcend hierarchies of all kinds:

East vs. West, national, ethnic, racial, gendered, social, religious,

etc.

The nonhierarchical premises of cooperatist anarchism promoted the

development of new ideas that interconnected all kinds of people.

Esperanto, which promotes linguistic equality, is a good example. Much

later, in the latter part of the twentieth century, Esperantists became

active in environmental movements like the post-Chernobyl antinuclear

activism that sought to both give humanitarian aid to the victims and to

promote environmental protections. In fact, environmentalism and

Esperantism have long been interconnected. The defense of language

rights, particularly among ethnic and national minorities, relates

closely to the defense of nature, human rights and equality.

Esperantists, and cooperatist anarchists at large, believed that

multiplicity, not standardization, generates a better society and

sociality.

AAT: I’d like to highlight popular writer of this period: Arishima

Takeo, you discuss him as follows: 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,

intellectuals 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.

Could you discuss how Arishima and other cooperatist anarchists from

Japan and Russia, put this into practice? Did this movement emerge

organically as a sum of its parts? How did those with elite backgrounds

like Arashima contribute without becoming leaders?

Another interesting question. Yes, right, Arishima didn’t have a vision

of being a revolutionary leader and in fact, none of the historical

actors identifiable as anarchist moderns did. That shows just how much

this phenomenon was different from say, the Russian Revolution.

Ours is naturally becoming a more anarchist world without intellectuals

or leader figures needing to stand at the front of the movement waving

their flags. Key figures in Japan were murdered by the state or

committed suicide, but the practices and notions that they espoused have

long continued naturally up to today. The state wrongly thought that by

executing a leader like Kotoku, they would get rid of the movement. Of

course, their violent act did rob us of the fascinating books that

Kotoku would have written. It is striking that Japanese anarchists never

wrote a book of anarchism per se; they only had time to work on it. For

Kotoku and others, cooperatist anarchism was no big deal – it was so

embedded already in everyday life and the worldviews of ordinary people

that they didn’t need a violent revolution to initiate it.

Eventually, cooperatist anarchism took shape as what I have

characterized as a ‘cultural revolution’. A key development in the

cultural revolution was the redefinition of ‘nature’ as symbiotic and

centerless, as opposed to Spencerian Darwinist nature and its

hierarchical teleology. Culture was to be aligned with the centreless

universe of nature. So-called elites and intellectuals may have had a

place in this ‘revolution’, but not a place of power to order society

with their own self-protective design. They sought to help articulate

ideas or instigate action, but not lead or exercise power over others.

How did Arishima put it into practice? When Arishima was a teacher at

Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University) where

Christianity, rationality, military, science and technology, large-scale

agriculture (for colonial practice), and English language were taught,

Arishima began teaching about the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and

literature in informal settings such as in the dorm at night, and thus

turned the imperial institution into an academy of anarchist ideas.

He also funded various anarchists to link with the wider world. He

supported the anarchist Osugi Sakae’s trip abroad, for instance.

Arishima also gave many public talks in local areas that often opened up

critical discourse among locals. So he did a lot of ‘ground work’ before

the end.

As his final closing act before he committed suicide, he gifted his farm

to the tenants working on the farm that he had inherited from his

wealthy father. His liberation of his tenant farmers and gifting them

the farm was as perfectly fitting to anarchist thought and practice as

any could be. Here again, none of the members of Arishima Farm thought

of themselves as anarchist, but their self-organization and practices of

mutual aid in response to their liberation almost perfectly accorded

with cooperatist anarchism over time. This gave fresh meaning to their

everyday practice. They adopted the most advanced levels of irrigation

and rice processing technology on their farm. Their revolutionary

practices occurred not with a gunshot or murder, but within themselves

and out of dreadful fear. There was nothing heroic about it. Without the

security provided by their former landowner, they feared for their

survival in the arctic winters and severe nature of Japan’s northernmost

island of Hokkaido. The Arishima farmers’ level of material wellbeing

was about the same as the other tenant farmers of Hokkaido, with the

major difference being that they owned the land on which they farmed.

But it was their sense of themselves standing at the forefront of

progress that made them stand out from the others. Arishima understood

what the farmers’ local knowledge and habits of mutual aid could bring

to their shared ownership of the farm. He created the conditions that

allowed them to form a new symbiotic relationship with each other on the

one hand, and symbiotic with nature on the other. It’s important to

point out here that revolution was not about political change, but about

how they identified symbiotically with one another as shared owners and

laborers on the farm.

There was in fact nothing utopian about what these farmers were doing if

the term ‘utopia’ is understood as a perfected place of finality. For

them, the world is always changing and adapting, constantly forming and

reforming. We can have an urge to progress without destroying nature,

and an urge to change without bloody and violent revolutions. The

ordinary farmers of Arishima Farm made revolutionary acts in order to

survive, without destroying things or killing others. The notion of

mutual aid for survival is integral to cooperatist anarchism.

We can take the phrase ‘the dexterous hand that reaches to itch the

right spot’ in Japanese as a humorous yet reflective phrase suggestive

of the functioning of anarchism as its participants viewed it. That is,

anarchism served to encourage all individuals to freely develop and

practice their own individual talents and in this way to best serve

society. It is reflective of a particular cooperatist anarchist idea of

equality and democracy whereby every individual nurtures their own

unique talents gifted by nature and thereby flexibly and dexterously

enhances and improves society, each in their own unique way.

The farm members considered water, air, and soil to be a part of them,

and cared for the nature around them cooperatively for their shared

survival. They made use of their knowledge of their local natural

environment. Due to their respect and valuing of the forces and behavior

of nature and their dependence on natural resources, they replaced the

emperor’s masculine symbols on their farm, the same symbols that were

replicated across every town in Hokkaido, with a stone of the goddesses

of nature that humbly emerged from the soil. They embedded the worship

stone of the goddesses on the hill, above their meeting place.

Inspired by Arishima Farm, cooperatism became a Hokkaido-wide

cooperative movement without a leader. Participants used the language of

Kropotkinism taken from the Arishima farm, to globalize their local

practices. Across Hokkaido and beyond, people admired and followed what

Arishima Farm had achieved – despite the fact that the cooperative

living farm members were still living together with their chickens on

dirt floors, under snow-covered thatched roofs with no electricity.

Intellectuals like Arishima could never be farmers. Yet Arishima

triggered democratic communities by providing positive conditions for

action, and giving power to ordinary farmers to realize anarchist

modernity on the local scale.

AAT: I’d like to examine the international (often Russian and Japanese)

pairings you show collaborating throughout the book’s time period of

1860s-1930s. The first pairing would be Lev Mechnikov with Saigo

Takamori during the era of the Meiji Ishin (also known as the

Restoration). How were these men connected in their philosophies and why

did their contributions to the Meiji Ishin diverge so much from the

goals of the Japanese State?

Many competing ideas of the future in the past coexisted. The Japanese

revolutionary leader Saigo Takamori’s and the Russian anarchist/populist

revolutionary Lev Mechnikov’s ideas of the future were different from

the newly formed oligarchs’ ideas of the future that have so often been

the object of historians’ interest. The ‘Opening of Japan’ (kaikoku) has

long meant the opening to the West and its civilization discourse. That

particular interpretation has been the sole historical meaning given to

that event as the beginning of modern Japanese history, and we have

precluded all other possibilities of the future in the past.

Both Saigo and Mechnikov saw that what they were doing in Japan had

global significance. They did not see Japan as some sort of local

peripheral place, but rather that their actions in Japan had global

implications. Moreover, they believed that what had been practiced and

developed for centuries from within Japan offered a direction for the

future. In contrast, those practices and beliefs from an earlier era

were treated as backward by both Western powers and the new Japanese

state. It was in those ‘evil practices’ from an earlier era, the

Tokugawa period, that Mechnikov observed unique seeds of revolution.

These seeds of revolution did not exist in what he perceived as a

backward Europe. Mechnikov was deeply disappointed by the conservative

habits of Western Europeans and didn’t believe they would be able to

make the kind of revolutionary changes he observed in Japan, changes

that promoted mutual aid and trust beyond family and class. These values

led seamlessly to borderless concern for humanity at large. The openness

and development of a mutual aid culture demanded by the ocean culture of

Japan inspired him to develop further an anarchist theory of

civilizational development, based on his alternative understanding and

vision of the future. His theory greatly influenced such future leading

anarchists as Peter Kropotkin, for whom Mechnikov was a mentor.

Some trust and bonding likely came out of Saigo and Mechnikov’s

understanding of mutually shared circumstances. Both had placed

themselves on the periphery of power and culture when they began their

correspondence. Saigo resigned from the government and began to practice

farming in the rural outreaches of a place called Kumamoto in the south.

He was disturbed by the poor treatment and impoverishment of the samurai

who had carried out the revolutionary changes of the Meiji Ishin

(Restoration) in the first place. Mechnikov had directly participated in

the failed European revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century, and

Saigo, who was a leading figure in the revolutionary Meiji Ishin, was

attracted to Mechnikov’s revolutionary experience and his idealism. Both

had clear revolutionary ideas that they felt had been not reaching its

potential and felt alternative, ground-up work was necessary. They saw

injustice in the government. Saigo must have seen some parallels in what

revolutionaries were trying to achieve in Europe and the Meiji Ishin

that had been ‘betrayed’ in his view. For Mechnikov, maybe Saigo looked

like the Garibaldi with whom Mechnikov had fought in Italy. Both were

ambivalent about Western modernity as it was being promoted and realized

by the government. They perceived that the Japanese state was going down

the route of the modern Western state, and they shared a conviction that

this was not the right direction for Japan or for Russia, nor for the

rest of the world.

You can imagine the consequences when Mechnikov and other Russian

Populist revolutionaries started teaching at the prestigious School of

Foreign Studies in Tokyo where the ‘father of modern Japanese language

and literature’ Futabatei Shimei was trained as a Russianist. Mechnikov

and the revolutionaries who followed him to Japan focused the Russian

language programme on studies of Russian Populist revolutionary

literature. As a result, Futabatei began translating Russian populist

literature as a defense against capitalist modernity of the West. His

writings were widely read, and circulated in particular among the

activists of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement whose actions

often echoed the Russian revolutionary movement’s.

So the global significance that Mechnikov gave to the Japanese

revolution came to be reflected in Russian translation culture in Meiji

Japan, a culture that would color the cultural and intellectual life of

modern Japan for a long time to come. What is shocking is that scholars

weren’t able to see this current over many decades of studying modern

Japanese history.

AAT: To conclude, let’s look at the relationship between the Dean of

Tokyo’s Orthodox Seminary: Konishi Masutarō and Lev (Leo) Tolstoy. On

these figures, you note: Nowhere, except Russia, have the works of

Tolstoy been published as many times as in Japan.

What did Tolstoy’s philosophy unlock for Masutarō in his own exploration

of faith? And what were the reasons that Tolstoy’s interpretations of

faith, and common people captivated Japan’s readers at this moment in

time?

(I’m particularly fascinated w. Tolstoy’s concept of God as ‘Gxd’ and

its relation to the concept of Heimin in Japan)

It’s not that the philosophy of the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy unlocked

new ideas for the Orthodox seminarian Konishi Masutaro. Rather, it was a

simultaneous and mutual articulation process and translation project.

This is clearly shown in the historical records of their interactions.

Yet no one has ever been able to pick up on this relationship that has

entirely failed to fit our Eurocentric and hierarchical understandings

of the East-West interaction.

The nature of their transnational relationship as mutual and

non-hierarchical reflected the premises of cooperatist anarchist

modernity. Both of them were interested in Tao te Ching (Lao Tzu) as an

antidote to the institution of Christianity. But it was Tolstoi who came

to learn from Konishi initially, not the other way around. Konishi was

already known as a classical Asian philosophy specialist, ironically

because he had been trained in the Russian Orthodox Christian seminary

in Japan. The Orthodox Church in Tokyo in turn had absorbed former

leaders and teachings of the Kaitokudo, the commoners’ ‘Academy of

Virtue’ in Osaka that had taken an independent position from the

official Tokugawa regime. Using classical Chinese thought as a way to

resist power, the Orthodox Church in Japan stood against Japan’s

oligarchs and Western modernity at large. This was in line with its

traditions in Russia, but its reliance and teaching of Chinese classics

were unusual and unique to the Japanese branch of the Church. Konishi

was a graduate of both the Orthodox Christian seminary and the leading

Russian Orthodox Seminary in Kiev. He in turn tried to develop with

Tolstoi an ethical thought that was ‘universal’ and without hierarchy

from the Chinese classics, Tao te Ching. The text guaranteed ontological

equality. We could look at their understanding of the divine as Gxd – or

God without Being — much in the way that the Tao te ching embodied a

divine essence or spirit, or Gxd. Japanese beginning with Konishi

translated Tolstoi’s religious writings as expressions of ‘Gxd’. One

didn’t need to be Christian to be Tolstoian in Japan, although it’s

important to point out that Tolstoi himself did believe in a God with

Being. It was Konishi’s and others’ originality of translations and the

people who took it that transformed Tolstoi’s religious thought into

anarchist religion in Japan.

Japan’s translated Tolstoi uprooted the translated concept of ‘modern

religion’ as the Christianity of the West. It was in this context that

the idea of ‘religion’ developed as an ethical code that the common

people possess. In other words, according to their religious ideas, one

didn’t need to be Christian to be civilized. The theoretical

implications for this are extremely large. This history gives us a

completely new, if not revolutionary way of thinking about the

intellectual history of modern Japan.

Why did it work so well? They did not think of themselves as anarchists.

So this was not about an ‘ism’ per se, as in a kind of dedication to a

utopian ideology. But rather it was a means of making a set of

interlocked ideas and practices visible and coherent.

Part 3

Asia Art Tours: You explicitly highlight the role of translation in

creating an environment of cooperative Anarchism between Russia and

Japan:

Rather than a form of unequal power relations, translation in this

discourse was a transnational exchange conducted on equal grounds that

implied a non-hierarchical world order beyond the epistemological limits

of East-West relations.

Could you discuss how you see translation as critical to understanding

the Cooperatist Anarchism of the period? How were works that were

forbidden or beyond criticism in one country (Tolstoy, The Tao te Ching)

exchanged between countries in a way that created radical new meanings

and solidarity between Russian and Japanese anarchists

SHO KONISHI: Translation is one of the most productive ways to

understand the intellectual history of Japan. The intellectual history

of modern Japan is actually a history of translation in one form or

another. If intellectual history is a history of translation, then all

modern intellectual histories are in a way, transnational histories.

There are a number of theories out there about translation in

intellectual history. One theory is that translation is an expression

and producer of cultural nationalism as identity and difference. This is

because translation acts to allow the reader to identify his or her

‘mother’ language from foreign language as the ‘other.’ In modern Japan,

this was predominantly occurring in translations of English, which,

according to Naoki Sakai, produced a sense of the other vs. the self,

West vs. Japan. Another theory is of translation as self-colonization,

according to which translations of English literature were an act of

self-colonization, of adaptation to and a perceived superior culture and

adoption of the Western concept of ‘self’. In contrast, the translation

practices that I talk about in my book uprooted such dichotomies. They

negated colonization practices justified by ideologies of civilizational

hierarchy. The translations of Tolstoi and Tao te Ching liberated their

readers from that hierarchy and its embedded temporality. They allowed

ordinary people to be the vehicles of social progress. These

translations were not expressions of cultural nationalism or

self-colonization, but rather a practice of liberation that embraced a

global outlook.

This history of translation allows us to better understand how

translation can be an even more innovative practice and process than we

thought. Not only were they not translating Western terms, but their

translations uprooted the very Western terms and the meanings embedded

in them. In this way, they liberated people from the constraints of the

Western meaning of modern religion.

In order to be civilized, human beings no longer needed to be Christian

or Muslim, but just oneself, as unique individuals. In plural, they were

called ‘heimin’ (‘the common people’). This conflicted with the

standardized usage of the term for ‘the people’ as Kokumin (‘the

nation’s subjects’).

Tolstoi was the most translated writer in the entire history of

translation practice in Japan. He was translated as a religious figure,

when religion was critical to determine not only who was to carry

civilization, but what sort of idea of progress. Konishi’s introduction

and translation of Tolstoian religion changed the temporality of

modernity in Japan and people’s belonging to that temporality. It

allowed one to have a much broader sociality beyond the nation state. It

allowed and nurtured non-state level transnational links with other

Asian countries outside the relationality of colonizer and colonized,

White and Yellow, and civilized and uncivilized. The translations

allowed for new temporalities that liberated people from the constraints

and limits of Western modernity that had generated such conceptual

hierarchy of divisions for world order. An alternative world order was

simultaneously taking root that changes the way we think about the

global history today at large.

AAT: During the Russo-Japanese War, How did State institutions and media

promote its concept of Kokumin and how did this contrast and compete

with Non War and Cooperatist Anarchists who promoted the concept of the

Heimin? (I found your writing about the battle to define the meanings of

“honor” and “peace” to be fascinating) What was at stake in this battle

of meanings?

SK: In the Russo-Japanese War, war was peace in a way, a ‘peace’ that

revolved around the territorial notion of the imperial nation state, the

territorial utopia. To win war meant to gain peace and to adhere to an

idea of progress toward a perfected space governed by civilized human

beings, u-topos. The Nonwar Movement at the time was not reducible to

anti-imperialism. Their critique was not only anti-war, but against that

war and its idea of peace that the war was intended to bring.

Interiority became a site of contestation. Teddy Roosevelt promoted the

idea that anarchism was terrorism, while Nonwar adherents saw ‘terror’

as belonging to the state’s uncontrolled abuse of power. Nonwar

adherents had no intention of using violence. Meanwhile, the state used

violence as means to control and govern the state’s subjects. Kotoku

Shusui, a leading anarchist and the leading voice of the Nonwar

Movement, and 11 other alleged co-conspirators including Kotoku’s

common-law wife, were murdered by the state for conspiring to

assassinate the emperor in 1910. Osugi Sakae, translator of accounts of

the dung beetle, was also murdered, by the military police, 10 years

later.

The determination of what was natural was at stake. All other moral

vocabularies followed to that end. For cooperatist anarchists, what was

natural was symbiotic nature. Around the time of the war, people were

reading not books about war, protest or revolution, but the

above-mentioned Ilya Mechnikov’s writings on microbiology in which he

described symbiosis functioning on the micro-most level within the human

body. A battle of meanings over ‘nature’ was part of a larger battle

over the definition of what was good.

If we look at the artist Ogawa Usen’s cartoons in Nonwar publications

during the war, we find women, older men, and fishermen quietly napping,

sleeping and at rest. These were far from the action-oriented images we

might expect to find in a time of war. The images of napping during a

time of war were very powerful. In the middle of the day, when one ought

to have been most productive, an older man was depicted fishing – not

just fishing, but napping quietly and alone while he waits. The cartoon

shows him sleeping in the afternoon sun while a fish tugs at his line.

This, at the height of war, was one of numerous powerful cartoons with

hidden critical commentaries by Ogawa, published in the leading Nonwar

publication of the time, Heimin shimbun. His perspective, aligned with

the philosophy of the Tao te ching and perhaps easily lost on us today,

would have been picked up by readers at the time in Japan. Readers would

have been widely familiar with the Tao te ching, a key text at the time.

This classical Chinese philosophy usurped the concentration of power in

the hands of rulers and elites through its focus on the divine power and

majesty of the small and weak masses, in gentle and peaceful inaction or

natural action, as opposed to the force and power of rulers and elites.

It saw the divine itself as flowing within the small and weak.

Over the past two decades of our own time, we’ve been facing a similar

battle of definitions, based on which a different word order might be

imagined. Many examples come to mind. An obvious one, for instance, is

the term, ‘globalization,’ the spread and institutionalization of

capitalist modernity worldwide. The related term ‘global history’ that

reflects ‘globalization’ has the power to justify the present and

thereby close the future, rather than opening it up to alternative

possibilities. What sort of ‘global history’ would we see if we were to

take anarchist modernity seriously?

AAT:During the War, you provide insight about Japan’s POW Camps as sites

of revolutionary potential:

With some ninety thousand Russian POWs scattered in twenty- eight POW

camps across Japan, the camps served as ideal hubs… for the networked

activities of Non-war Movement activists and their Russian revolutionary

counterparts… These figures turned the camps into a kind of a liberal

arts college, or a “barbed-wire college”... 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

campuses to educate captured Russian soldiers ... Hundreds of thousands

of Russian soldiers were radicalized by their experiences in the war and

their education in the POW camps.

Could you describe how revolutionaries took advantage of these punitive

spaces and transformed them into sites of revolutionary potential? Are

there contemporary lessons which can be taken and applied to the modern

panopticon of prisons and camps that currently festers across the globe?

SK: The tens of thousands of Russian POWs in Japanese camps during the

Russo-Japanese War were already discontent. It was a matter of

redirecting that energy and critical mind toward revolutionary thought

and action. Russian Populist revolutionaries in Japan led by the

physician Nikolai Sudzilovskii-Russel published a newspaper, Iaponiia i

Rossiia (‘Japan and Russia’), which was disseminated to the POWs. Russel

was given free hand to disseminate his material. I believe the Japanese

government was well aware of the revolutionary nature of the material,

as it had been using secret agents to support and funnel money to

Russian revolutionaries in an attempt to destabilize the Russian

government. Some of the biggest names in the Russian revolutionary

movement moved through Japan in this period, and there were powerful

effects of the education and coaching of POWs in garnering the POWs’

support for the Russian revolutionary movement. Indeed, the Russian

writer Andrei Belyi depicted the return to Russia of mass waves of

revolutionary minded veterans of the Russo-Japanese War in his 1913

novel Petersburg.

Time was suspended in the camps, and there was quite a lot of time to

kill. Being in the camps gave people time to reflect. The war was

brutal, and people wondered for what they had fought. The Russian POWs

felt the contrast between the brutality of the war being fought against

Japan, and the incredible suspended period of calm in the camps, when

they were free to walk around the town, interacting freely with Japanese

people. They were treated incredibly well in Japan, and given access to

the highest standards of medical care. This was in accordance with the

Japanese government’s effort to show the high civilizational

achievement. The same motive that led Japan to win the war with Russia,

led it to treat Russian POWs extremely well.

In the POWs’ psyche, their service to the state was pending. Japanese

treated the POWs generously as general civilians, and the POWs no longer

perceived themselves as soldiers serving the nation state with weapons.

In the camps, the POWs transformed their thinking, from service to the

nation state, to conceiving of themselves as people without the state,

which they shared with the Japanese Nonwar Movement.

AAT: The final pairing I’d like to highlight is Anarchist Ōsugi Sakae

and Jean-Henri Fabre the French Entomologist.

Could you discuss how Japan’s anarchists saw their own perspectives

within Fabre’s writing on the natural world? Why did this viewpoint

resonate so vividly with the wider Japanese populace (to this day).

Lastly, why did they reject the more Malthusian and Spencerian notions

of brutal competition and hierarchy expressed by Darwin.

SK: From the outset, Fabre and Osugi had different ideas about the

natural world. While Fabre saw insects as God’s creation, Osugi saw them

as cooperatively connected with the wider nature including humankind,

kind of like the idea of ‘Gaia’ as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have

called it.

Osugi’s originality in his translations made Fabre’s writings on insects

extremely popular in Japan. The way Osugi translated Fabre was vivid,

colloquial, humanizing and humorous. Many translations have appeared

since then, but I still think it’s hard to beat the first by Osugi.

His translations appeared within a broader interest among cooperatist

anarchists in the natural sciences, most specifically, a fascination

with the smallest creatures of our universe. Interestingly, while Lev

Mechnikov’s writings never became known in Japan, it was Lev’s younger

brother Ilya, a Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist, whose writings came

to be widely read among cooperatist anarchists. Ilya Mechnikov’s

writings on microbiology proved that human beings’ innermost being was

mutual aidist. He demonstrated that the nature that surrounds us and is

within us from our very cells is symbiotic. Thus, symbiotic development

was at the heart of our evolutionary origins. Many decades after

Mechnikov’s own work, the world-renowned biologist Margulis developed

her own work, inspired by the symbiotic functioning of phagocytosis by

Mechnikov and other early twentieth-century Russian and Soviet

biologists. She took important cues from these Russian biologists on the

role of symbiogenesis in evolution, biologists who likely worked in the

same circles as Ilya Mechnikov.

Why did it resonate with the wider Japanese populace? It perhaps echoed

their mode of existence and sociality, particularly at that time.

Anthropologists often make sweeping generalizations and assumptions that

divide so-called individualist societies vs. collectivist ones, as if

human subjectivities and societies can be divided into two models.

Cooperatist anarchists reflected symbiotic human subjectivity onto the

tiniest, seemingly most unimportant little creatures, like microbes and

dung beetles. They demonstrated these little creatures doing, and their

acts as being not only necessary for the health of larger society and

environment, but also illuminating for our understanding of the nature

of our own existence. Each tiny element, each little creature, was

viewed as significant for the well-being of the larger entity that we

are all a part of. It was both aesthetic and ethical. It was also

simultaneously collective and individual. To be individual, one needs to

be collective, and to be collective, one must be individualistic. So,

neither of these terms would have captured their subjectivity.

Cooperatist anarchists did not reject Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,

but they did reject The Descent of Man, by ignoring it. Darwin’s

understanding of evolution was embraced as it suited their idea that

everything is constantly evolving, and forming and reforming.

Competition as well as cooperation was essential to the survival of any

species. With each individual talent gifted by Gxd, each has different

roles to play, resulting in an intricate interconnectivity of energies.

For cooperatist anarchists, the world of insects was a missing piece in

their worldview. If colonizers at the time sought to prove the right of

their mission by measuring the bones and skulls of inferior creatures in

accordance with the Western civilizational model of the hierarchy of

species, Japanese anarchists sought to prove their worldview by removing

the hierarchy of world order. They did so by decentering the world,

talking about the dung beetle and microbes, and exploring the negative

discovery of the universe. Fabre fit their concept of the natural world

that embraced the smallest and seemingly most useless creatures like the

dung beetle, and made it the hero and subject of fascination, recounting

in smallest detail its utterly eccentric behavior. Yet this odd

eccentricism made the dung beetle the most essential creature for the

survival of human civilization. Its recycling of animal dung allowed for

the survival of the entire agricultural world that is so essential to

human survival. This is perhaps why the scarab beetle, a type of dung

beetle, was worshiped by the Egyptians. The notion accords well with the

earlier mentioned philosophy of Tao te Ching. Ever since Osugi’s

translation, the beetle has been called endearingly the ‘dung ball

roller’ by Japanese children and adults alike, and spawned a mass

culture of dung beetle paraphernalia, from t-shirts to model figures,

etc. Its mass popularity can be entirely attributed to Japanese

anarchist translations of Fabre’s scientific observations of the dung

beetle’s and other insect behaviour. Their translations have ever since

the early twentieth century been the Mother Goose of Japan, the book

that every Japanese child reads. Children’s collection and observations

of the behavior of beetles in nature have been ingrained in the play

repertoire of Japanese children and primary school education ever since.

Why did the wider Japanese populace reject Spencerian Darwinism’s

competition? They faced the brutality of capitalism, money-driven social

norms and ethics that were antithetical to more rooted anarchist notions

of symbiotic coexistence and progress driven by mutual aid. They were

attracted not to ideas of segregation or hierarchy, but rather to

anarchist celebrations of the ‘weak’ (as defined by Western modernity)

as the strong, the necessary, and the divine. This helped lead to the

widespread interest in Esperanto, again from below. Esperanto was a

language without culture that simultaneously embraced all languages and

cultures equally — at a time when culture meant race, and race meant the

hierarchy of civilization, which served as an ethical justification for

the weak to be colonized and controlled under eugenicist policies.

AAT: To conclude with the beginning, early in the book you bring up

Zygmunt Bauman’s criticism of the “Sedentary Imagination” of Western

Modernity, which you explain (through his framing) as one tied to

boundaries, borders, a sovereign with power and legal order. This is

compared throughout your book to the bottom-up and borderless utopia of

everyday practice that inspired so many Japanese and Russian Anarchists.

As Western Modernity is crumbling and Capitalism threatens to extinguish

all life on Earth do you see a chance for the politics and international

collaboration that we see in your book to resurface? If so, what

inspiration or tactics can contemporary activists find in the image of

the Heimin and Cooperatist Anarchists of your book?

SK: Yes, I do.

What inspiration? That’s not for me to say. I’m a mere student of

history. If 10 people read it, there will be more than 10 ways to

reflect the ideas found in the book. But I imagine that what you are

doing here will certainly be an inspiration that contemporary folks

would find important. And as such, let me thank you again for such an

exceptional opportunity to communicate with you in this way.

---

For Dr. Konishi’s incredible scholarship, please see his book Anarchist

Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in

Modern Japan by Harvard University Press.