With Arishima Takeo’s dissolution of the tenant farm in Niseko (1922), the consequent emergence of a cooperatist farm saw an experimental phase of anarchist living in Hokkaido. Sho Konishi understands that cooperatist activity and the alternative modes of living on the farm as a rejective response to Western notions of progress and modernity.[1] The land which the farmers inhabited was to uniquely serve as fecund ground for many different and coexistent values. The cooperatist ideology encouraged political participation of all farm members, was loose in its outline of viable economic schemes and, chiefly, espoused egalitarian ideals. Popular understandings of anarchism catalogue the ideology as traditionalist, irrational and disordered.[2] However, when we look at the development and embodiment of cooperatist farms, we see that this particular brand of anarchism was a largely equalised ground on which the inhabitants enacted the process of political, governmental and social trial and error. With that expression of trial and error in mind, a conclusive ‘right answer’ was not sought out so much as the process was to be calibrated.
The “Hokkaido cooperative” resisted subscription to Western ideas of modernity which the wider Japanese state adopted.[1] On the smaller and larger scale, the anarchists sought to enshrine “sōgo fujo” (mutual aid) as a central tenet to an ideal lifestyle. Both interpersonal relations and the organisation of labour were to be characterised as interdependent and harmonious, rather than Darwinist, competitive and tension inducing.[2]However, to the end of that cooperation, conflict was not eschewed. Indeed, discursive conflict was encouraged where it could service democratic decision making and secure future relations. With the “elimination of hierarchy”, society’s reorganisation along horizontal lines naturally saw a greater range of opinions and perspectives on the affairs of the farm as well as its relation to other political actors.[3] The “day-long discussions” which required the result of “every members’ approval” before ratifying decisions demonstrates that the cooperatist farm did not stubbornly and naively aim to develop a utopian and fully agreeable society. Instead, cooperativism decided its idea of a progressive society included compromise, and was even necessary for, consensus. In this way, we can see that the cooperative farm, a society in which many values were cultivated, was without a strict hierarchical order but not disordered.
Economically, while the Hokkaido anarchists sought to distance themselves from the liberal capitalist system projected by the West, the farmers located themselves as “part of and a response to the modern condition”.[4]Therefore, at the time they were disowning personal property, communalising resources and pooling their labour efforts, they were not violently and universally overthrowing the “existing system”.[5] Furthermore, cooperatist modernity was not only subsistent, but, in entrepreneurial and profit seeking spirit, it also allowed for the marketing its agricultural produce.[6] In 1926 when rice prices in Japan fell, there was a sober reality that their trajectory was affected by the international and so the farmers experimented with dairy farming after learning from Utsunomiya farm.[7] This small case illustrates the way in which the anarchists located themselves not as an isolated society far removed from the wider globe, but rather a community, working with the help of others, which could carve out its own path to a modernity they defined on their own terms. Their embracement of agricultural technology was also a nod to the constant trial and error they practiced in developing an ideal, but not insular, society.[8]
Ultimately, the cooperatist farm did not abide by a strict ideological doctrine which prevented it from participating in a particular system or espousing certain ideals. Instead, with its basic aim to operate as an egalitarian society in which interdependent individuals lifted each other up, the definition of modernity was constantly updated in line with the processes which most well lent to that foundation. Understanding the cooperatist farm in this way is important to reconceptualising as forward thinking not only in terms of its ideals, but also as a process which continually revise itself.
[1] Konishi,Sho“OrdinaryFarmersLivingAnarchistTime:ArishimaCooperativeFarminHokkaido.”Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 6 (November 2013), p.1847
[2] Ibid, p.1846
[3] Ibid, p.1845
[4] Ibid, p.1848
[5] Ibid, p.1852
[6] Ibid, p.1863
[7] Ibid, p.1864
[8] Ibid, p.1860