Author: 白頭山

Exploring political philosophy in early 20th century Japan raises important questions for the field of intellectual history. With close links between the discourse of political philosophers and the state’s imperial projects, the question of complicity is at the centre of historicising the mechanisms of Japanese oppression. Determining the complicity of political philosophers is tied to the way we approach intellectual history and the questions we choose to ask. While it is difficult to establish a monolithic approach to tracing and determining the complicity of individuals, I believe the attempt to determine the extent of individual complicity is valuable to historical inquiry.

When determining the political leanings of intellectuals there are generally two sets of primary sources to interrogate. Often private correspondence and public discourse both shape our understanding of intellectual figures. In the case of intellectuals whose private correspondence deviates from the claims and allegiances of their public discourse, it’s important to ask whether either one is a more reliable indicator of complicity. In the case of Kitaro Nishida for example, Goto-Jones argues for the privileging of public discourse over private correspondence.¹ He argues that despite Nishida’s criticism of the political orthodoxy in his personal diary entries, the fact that his public works were essentially ideological propaganda frame him as complicit in enabling the imperial project.²

Locating Nishida within the academic environment of Kyoto University however, complicates our understanding of his individual agency. Identifying the regulations placed on Kyoto University by the Japanese state blurs distinctions between the academic and the political sphere. John Namjun Kim discusses the blurring of theorists and practitioners as central to the imperial project.³ Japan’s total-war ideology included the mobilising of all the state’s subjects including academics.⁴ Recognising universities as hotbeds of activism also challenges the notion of the academic sphere as isolated from the politics of the state.⁵ Recognising this overlap is useful to highlighting the parameters enforced around political discourse by the state.²

Exploring institutional complicity broadens the focal point of intellectual history to go beyond individual intellectuals. It allows us to trace the wider range of forces shaping a published text. For example, with Nishida’s paper Sekai Shinchitsujo No Genri, any analysis should include the actors who initially rejected the paper, the role of Tanabe Juri in reworking the text, as well as Nishida’s motivations in reworking Tanabe’s version years later.⁶

On the inverse, it is important to interrogate the role of the academic sphere when interrogating state policy. Kim differentiates between imperialism and colonialism by emphasising the ideological nature of imperialism.⁷ In doing so, he highlights the participation of scholars in imperial subjugation through thinking, writing, and teaching.⁸

Thus, I think it is important to go beyond an individual scholar or an isolated text when determining complicity. While difficult to concretely determine, the question of complicity is useful to tracing the relations, regulations, and power dynamics shaping state power.

1. Christopher Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and CoProsperity (Routledge, 2009), p. 85. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
3. John Namjun Kim, The Temporality of Empire: The Imperial Cosmopolitanism of Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime in Sven Saaler ed., Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders (Routledge, 2007),p. 152 [↩]
4. Ibid., p.153 [↩]
5. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy, p.73. [↩]
6. Ibid., p.79. [↩]
7. Kim, The Temporality of Empire [↩]
8. Ibid. p.152. [↩]

In an increasingly globalized world, transnational communication is a given. The mechanics of transnational communication however, were not as straightforward when the international community first began organising. Early efforts to enable this communication were centred around the language Esperanto – the most widespread planned or artificial language.¹ Iacobelli and Leary explore Esperanto to argue that language is central to transnational activity.²

A global outlook and a tendency towards expansion characterised early 20th c. Japan.³ This extended to the broader population beyond just people in power. The Esperanto community in Japan reflected this tendency. Rhetoric in Japan was centred around the notion of a new international order, one where Japan would the correct the material civilisation of the West with the spiritual civilisation of the East.⁴ Thus, Esperanto as a medium for construction of the international was a compelling force. Japanese notions of the international hinged on an interaction between East and West, guided by Japan at the forefront.⁵ I will be arguing that an interrogation of Esperanto reveals the challenges characterising this vision for the international.

There has been increasing academic recognition of the use of Esperanto in Asia.⁶ Decentring the study of Esperanto from Europe is useful to undermine the universal nature of terms like ‘the international’ and ‘global’. Though Esperanto was conceived as a medium for international communication, it is a language of European intellectual and cultural origin, drawing from European languages for much of its semantic and structural content.⁷

Esperanto gained a large following in Japan.⁵ The largest Esperanto speaking community outside of Europe was in Japan.⁵ Critiques of Japanese constructions of modernity like Takeuchi Yoshimi argue that with time, Japanese notions of modernization were increasingly equated with Europeanisation.⁸The frictions of Esperanto reveal the challenges of extricating modernity from European hegemony.

These challenges shaped interactions across Japanese society. The Japanese Esperanto community shifts the focus of Esperanto as an international language away from halls of power. The Esperanto speaking community transcended the world of diplomats and policy-makers. Ordinary people were also increasingly interested in engaging with the world beyond national borders – in ‘thinking and feeling beyond the nation’.⁹

Tracing the Japanese Esperanto community highlights a large network of actors engaging with the language.¹⁰ Motivations for doing so ranged from pragmatism to idealism.⁵ For some, it reflected attempts to master a European language to gain access to a wide array of disciplines. For others religious and political views (across the political spectrum), motivated a desire to engage with the international and work towards a fairer, more equal world.⁵

Iacobelli and Leary emphasise the need to recognise and acknowledge the difficulties involved in transnational communication — the frictions of language creating obstacles to expressing the higher level meanings these encounters sought to express.⁵ It raises the question of how successfully Japanese thinkers were able to synthesise East and West, to translate the Eastern spirituality they heralded into terms that could speak to the scientific frameworks of the West, and to transform Western structures of modern welfare and political control within Eastern contexts.¹¹

Was Esperanto a sufficient medium shape the international order through transnational engagement? I believe the Japanese community of Esperanto revealed attempts to construct agency within the international for actors who were previously merely subjects of the international. The difficulties of transnational communication revealed by the use of Esperanto however, reflect a failure to transcend the existing hierarchies and power structures of the Western dominated international order.

1. A Language for Asia? Transnational Encounters in the Japanese Esperanto Movement, 1906-28, in Pedro Iacobelli and Danton Leary (ed.), Transnational Japan as History: Empire, Migration,
   and Social Movements (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 167-185, pp. 167-168. [↩]
2. Ibid., p.167. [↩]
3. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, 2004 [↩]
4. Ibid., p.104. [↩]
5. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
6. Iacobelli and Leary, A Language for Asia?, p.168. [↩]
7. Ibid., p.167. [↩]
8. Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity?: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York, 2005), p. 47. [↩]
9. Ibid., p.168. [↩]
10. Ibid. p.169. [↩]
11. Prasenjit, Sovereignty and Authenticity, p.104, 114. [↩]

Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping was the driving ideology of the Taiping Rebellion. The rebellion has been central to historical study for its scale, brutality, and the mass socio-political upheaval it triggered.¹ The ideological vision at its core has been interrogated by historians to determine the nature of intellectual engagement between East and West and map the nature of influence and exchange.² Understanding Hong’s articulation of the Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping as a teleological narrative of Chinese history is useful to highlighting both the Christian and the Confucian elements of his vision as well as their interaction. The teleological nature of Hong’s narrative was central to establishing a claim to authority – allowing him to draw cultural authority from classical elements of Chinese culture and moral authority from a Christian ethic.

Hong’s articulation of China’s past and future was dependent on Christian narrative elements.³ This narrative temporality was framed within a Christian framework through ideas of salvation and notions of the demonic. He characterised China’s ancient past as Christian in nature – offset by the invasion of demonic forces.² These demonic forces were associated with a range of influences like the Qing dynasty and Buddhism.⁴ In response, he presented his Heavenly Kingdom as the means to salvation, the means to set China back onto the course of Christianity.⁵

Central to his engagement with China’s ancient past was the figure of Shangdi.⁶ Arguing that the worship of Shangdi was a universal phenomenon in ancient China, he constructed a monolithic depiction of religion and worship.² Hong’s invocation of Shangdi came from an attempt to construct dialogue with Chinese antiquity. Hong’s first exposure to Christianity was through Liang’s Good Words.⁷ Pairing the figure of Shangdi with an interpretation of the Christian nature of China’s past was not Hong’s own invention, but one borrowed from Liang.⁸ However, Hong’s writing drew this connection into a temporal narrative of sin and salvation. Hong’s understanding of Christianity was thus inherently shaped by the cultural contexts embedded in Liang’s interpretations.

The Christian narrative he created was further shaped by cultural context through his medium of articulation. Despite his denouncement of Chinese classical texts, Hong’s narratives drew from this tradition. For example, the three character classic was central to the Taiping instruction of children.⁶ Hong’s narrative was also constructed within the Chinese language, thus inheriting Chinese cultural contexts. Hong was constructing a novel claim to divine authority. This was a linguistic project and his dependency on terms like tai-ping and tian-zi constructed spiritual and political authority through Confucian ideas embedded in the Chinese language.⁹ He constructed his authority through notions of familial ties identifying himself as the second son of the Heavenly Father, and as Christ’s younger brother.² His expressions of Christian obligation were thus tied to the Confucian notion of five relationships.¹⁰ He articulated obligation to the Heavenly Father through a language of familial ties and filial loyalty.¹¹ Thus, to convert his Christian visions into transmissible pieces of divine revelation, he was dependent on Chinese narrative forms. So despite Hong’s association with one and rejection of the other, his construction of authority through narrative was thus dependent on both Christian and Confucian elements.

The temporal nature of Hong’s discourse was more than just a narrative device borrowed from the Bible. It was a link between the Christian ethic and cultural authority. This link was central to allow Hong to present not only a vision for religious upheaval but a civilisational ideal that spanned reform across the social and the political realms as well. By historicising the Heavenly Kingdom, he constructed his vision as shaped and driven by the motions of history transcending the earthly not only in the religious sense but in the temporal sense – articulating a mission that was endowed with purpose that transcended the present – a mission that was in service of the past as well as the future.

1. Richard Lufrano, The Heavenly Kingdom of the Taipings (New York, 2001), p. 246. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
3. Carl S. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology: The Localization of Christianity in China, 1843–64 (New York, 2016), p. 50. [↩]
4. Ibid., p.55. [↩]
5. Ibid., p.64. [↩]
6. Ibid., p.50. [↩] [↩]
7. Ibid., p.65. [↩]
8. Ibid., p.52. [↩]
9. Ibid., p.49. [↩]
10. Ibid., p.109. [↩]
11. Ibid., p.125. [↩]