A Language for the People: Esperanto and the Defeat of ‘Worldism’ in East Asia

In the early twentieth century, the language of Esperanto found its most vibrant communities not in its European birthplace, but in East Asia. By the 1930s, China and Japan had cultivated Esperanto movements that far surpassed their Western counterparts in both ideological fervour and social reach1. Esperanto is often dismissed as a utopian failure in the face of English’s global ascendency2. However, this dismissal understates the language’s profound historical significance in specific regional contexts. In East Asia, Esperanto was not a practical failure but a potent ideological vehicle manifesting a homegrown philosophy known as ‘worldism’, which envisioned a political order transcending the nation-state system and centring on a global community of ordinary people. This movement represented a direct challenge to the ideological foundations of the Western imperial order.3

 

The appeal of Esperanto in East Asia emerged from a trenchant critique of the prevailing international system.4 As Japan and China grappled with Western imperialism and modernisation, intellectuals such as Japan’s Kōtoku Shūsui and China’s Kang Youwei articulated a powerful alternative. They argued that genuine peace was unattainable within a competitive framework of sovereign nation-states, a system they saw as inherently violent and exploitative. Instead, they envisioned a new global polity built around heimin, or common people. For these thinkers, Esperanto was not conceived as a bolstering international language for state diplomacy, but explicitly as a sōdaidō, a great way of commonality, for grassroots, transnational solidarity.5 This critical distinction framed the language not merely as a tool, but as an act of resistance. For Japanese activists, its adoption was a conscious rejection of their nation’s emulation and participation in a Western-dominated imperial system.

 

This ideological commitment manifested in concrete organisational practices that distinguished East Asian Esperanto movements from their European counterparts. Rapley documents how Japanese Esperantists deliberately targeted working-class communities, establishing study groups in factories, labour unions, and proletarian cultural associations rather than limiting themselves to middle-class intellectual circles as in the European context.6 Chinese Esperantists embedded language instruction within anarchist and socialist organising, treating fluency as both a practical skill for transnational coordination and a symbolic commitment to transcending nationalist ideology.7 This integration of linguistic practice with radical political organising demonstrates that East Asian Esperanto was not simply an educational movement but a form of politics, an attempt to create, in the present, the social relations that activists hoped would characterise a future world order.

 

The movement’s eventual decline illuminates both its achievements and limitations. As Rapley documents, the rise of militaristic nationalism in 1930s Japan systematically suppressed Esperanto organisations, viewing their transnational orientation as incompatible with wartime mobilisation8 . The historical significance extends beyond its practical failure. As Konishi argues, recovering this history challenges teleological narratives that treat the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states as an inevitable endpoint of political development.9 The Esperantists’ vision of heimin-centred global politics represented a genuinely different path, one that was historically defeated but not intellectually refuted. It reveals that the nation-state order was not an inevitable outcome but one possibility among others, consolidated through specific historical processes that included the violent suppression of alternatives.

  1. Rapley, Ian, ‘A Language for Asia? Transnational Encounters in the Japanese Esperanto Movement, 1906-28’, 2016, 167 [↩]
  2. Boli, John and Thomas, George M., Constructing World Culture: International Non-Governmental Organisations since 1875, (1999), 148 [↩]
  3. Konishi, Sho, ‘Translingual World Order: Language Without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 72: 1 (2013), 92 [↩]
  4. Ibid, 99 [↩]
  5. Ibid, 94 [↩]
  6. Rapley, 2016, 169-171 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 173-175 [↩]
  8. Ibid, 177-178 [↩]
  9. Konishi, 2013, pp. 99-100 [↩]