Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Kotoku Shusui, as Robert Tierney stresses in his work Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kotoku Shusui and Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement, was his prominent leading role in the strife against Japanese imperialism at the start of the twentieth century. Kotoku’s actions sparked widespread interest in his personality as someone who openly resisted the absolutism of the Meiji state. Kotoku represented a radical journalist and socialist whose intellectual and political efforts in the anti-imperialist movement have left him to be widely regarded as a prolific forerunner to the modern pacifist movement in Japan.
Tierney seeks to examine Kotoku’s impact on the movement by dissecting the work which his own piece is named after, Imperialism: Monster of the Twentieth Century (1901). What is most interesting about Kotoku’s work is that it preceded both Hobson’s study on Imperialism and Lenin’s 1916 work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Tierney wants to emphasise the importance of Kotoku Shusui and his 1901 publication given that these later approaches do not fit well with the case of Japan’s early imperialism (p.57). Such theories of economic causation, from Tierney’s perspective, do not seem as relevant to the Japanese case given that Japan at the time was still borrowing significant funds from England and the United States in order to finance the nation’s own industrialisation. Tierney takes a unique stance in his work, focussing more on the intellectual contribution of Kotoku to the anti-imperialist movement instead of other anarchist efforts.
Tierney dissects the preface of Kotoku’s Imperialism and locates the Japanese journalist’s definitive observation on the state of Japanese imperialism. Tierney extracts the quote, “Ever since the great victory in the Sino-Japanese War, Japanese from all walks of life burn with fever to join the race, like a horse suddenly freed from his yoke” (p.38). Critics of Kotoku’s work have noted his overbearing emphasis on ideals such as patriotism and militarism, forces that may only be described as mere symptoms of imperialism. This idea does come across somewhat when looking at the above quotation. Most Marxist historians have tended to reject Kotoku’s argument based on his explicit omission of the economic causes behind Japanese imperialism. Okochi Kazuo has pointed out on reflection that Kotoku’s failure to identify imperialism as the most recent stage of capitalism reflects merely the “limitations of the time in which he lived” (p.8).
Additionally, Tierney emphasises the role of Kotoku in the anti-imperialist movement by pulling up his work for the Heimin newspaper, and its own significance. Kotoku founded this socialist paper in 1903, and played a key role in pushing it to become one of Tokyo’s leading publications advocating the growth of socialist ideas just a year after it was founded. The Heimin newspaper certainly stood out as a representative banner for the anti-war movement in Japan in Tierney’s eyes. What is also striking about the significance of the newspaper is the ability it granted Kotoku to establish direct links with Chinese and other Asian revolutionaries that were stationed in and around Tokyo; the most notable of these being Sun Yat-Sen. If there was one idea that Heimin newspaper served to reiterate, it was that such a “bulletin board for sharing ideas” offered a clear illustration of how journalism could be utilised as a means of fostering communities of insurrection (p.109).
One of the primary case studies that Tierney uses in order to examine Kotoku’s condemnation of Japanese imperialism is the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The Boxer Rebellion was arguably the catalyst that explains Kotoku’s adoption of such an anti-imperialist stance, one that differed greatly from his earlier anti-Western nationalist perspective (p.86). This conflict represented a truly imperialist war in from Kotoku’s point of view. Japan’s attack on its semi-colonised neighbour China, a nation that was equated with lawlessness given the uprising, was seen therefore as a means of upholding civilisation through the use of a heavy contingent of troops (pp.86-7). As Tierney evaluates, Kotoku shunned this European style of procedure, one that seemed only to be motivated by military expansion and profit. Japan would go on after the rebellion to enter into an agreement with Great Britain in which both sides recognised mutual interests in China and provide for joint support in the event of Russian aggression. This western style of diplomacy that Japan had entered into only seemed to validate the militarist arguments put forward in Kotoku’s Imperialism.
The key question that Tierney summarises his work with is whether Kotoku’s Imperialism is still relevant, and if so, to what extent? The term relevant may be better replaced with applicable here, as Tierney himself even highlights earlier on in his piece that Kotoku’s own intellectual efforts in the anti-imperialist movement have tended to be replaced in terms of historical memory by later anti-imperial movements (p.12). Hence, in terms of modern applicability, we arrive at numerous instances whereby we can recognise patterns between modern politics and the views of Kotoku Shusui. Tierney’s primary example of this is President Reagan’s use of the term “evil empire” as a means of solely insulting the Soviet Union in the 1980s (p.211). American politicians and journalists nowadays no longer hesitate in defining the United States as an empire, and indeed one that extols its “benevolent hegemony” (p.212). This summary point relates to a large extent back to the definitions that their East Asian counterparts offered much in the same way as Kotoku at the start of the twentieth century.