Tag: ishiwara kanji

The seminal events which China and Japan faced from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century catalysed many utopian ideas in public discourse, which imagined how their societies might be reorganised for modernity. Within these utopias, however, the interplay between indigenous and Western ideals produced systems of thoughts which have embedded contradictions between the two forces at play.

Examples of this contradictory utopianism could be seen in many utopian thinkers and activists both throughout the late 19th to early 20th century. Ishiwara Kanji, who in the immediate post WW2 era was an ardent advocate of world federation, was in the 1930s a general, instrumental in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.¹ Late Qing thinker Kang Youwei’s idea of Datong contains, within its critique of the existing world, contradictions between the substance and the origins of its thoughts. Kang, in his proposals for women and for the public raising of children, implicitly critiques the traditional notions of family and filial piety, as burdening mothers with responsibility for raising the child, and burdening children with responsibility for requiting their parent’s care.² Yet Datong finds its original utopian expression in the Confucian classic Book of Rites (Liji).³ The conflict between Kang’s critique of the traditional institution of family and filial piety, and the provenance of his utopianism is unresolved.

In the utopian ideas of Kita Ikki’s An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan, it is unsurprising to find contradictions in his conception of an East Asian utopianism. The premise of Kita’s thoughts are based on situating Japan at the forefront of an ‘Eastern Republic’ with an indigenous ideology.⁴ Thus central to Kita’s thoughts is the need for a supra-regional entity by which to challenge Western hegemony, formed on the basis of universality of his revolutionary ideology.⁵ Yet in constructing the ideology, Kita maintained particularist elements, such as the contribution of Nichiren Buddhism, to his ideology.⁶ Equally Kita argued against the import and imposition of democracy in Japan as being insensitive to its ahistoricism in a Japanese context, yet saw no contradiction in suggesting the imposition of his ideology beyond a Japanese context. Likewise, Kita’s conception of male suffrage as being part of a citizen’s duty to the nation stood in contrast to his contempt and his lack of belief in the ability of common people for transformation as historical agents.⁷ Most damning is his conception of Koreans as lacking sufficient self-awareness for self-determination, even as he expounds equality of citizens under the emperor.⁸

How could we account for this tendency towards contradiction? The desire to construct a utopian imaginary based on native, rather than Western, ideals, meant that such utopian works drew from traditions which may otherwise have been critiqued as part of its utopian narrative. For Kang, the Confucian concept of ren and the innate goodness of Man underpinned his belief in the perfectibility of humanity, which is the basis of his utopianism.⁹ For Kita, Nichiren Buddhism provided the common basis by which Japan and China, for example, can fraternalise and bind.¹⁰ That there are internal contradictions in these utopias are unlikely to themselves be indictments of those ideas, but these nonetheless represent an unresolved tension at the heart of many utopian ideological projects in East Asia.

1. Konrad Lawson, ‘Reimagining the Postwar International Order: The World Federalism of Ozaki Yukio and Kagawa Toyohiko’, in Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley (eds), The institution of international order: from the League of Nations to the United Nations (New York, 2018), pp. 185, 188. [↩]
2. K’ang Yu-wei, ‘Ta T’ung Shu’, in Laurence G. Thompson (ed.), Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei (London, 1958), pp. 38-39. [↩]
3. Ibid., pp. 27-29. [↩]
4. Brij Tankha, Kita Ikki and the making of modern Japan: a vision of empire (Kent, 2006), pp. 129-130. [↩]
5. Ibid., pp. 159-160. [↩]
6. Ibid., p. 159. [↩]
7. Kita Ikki, ‘An Outline Plan for the Reorganisation of Japan’, in William Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck, Arthur E. Tiedemann, Andrew Barshey, and William M. Bodiford (eds), Sources of Japanese Tradition: Vol. 2: 1600 to 2000 (New York, 2010), pp. 964-965. Tankha, Kita Ikki, p. 158. [↩]
8. Tankha, Kita Ikki, pp. 136-138. [↩]
9. K’ang, ‘Ta T’ung Shu’, in Thompson (ed.), Ta T’ung Shu, pp. 42-44, 46-47. [↩]
10. Kita, ‘An Outline Plan’, in De Bary et al. (eds), Sources, p. 159. [↩]