Tag: utopianism

Kita Ikki and the Contradictions of Utopianism

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. [↩]

Imperial Internationalism in Japan: The Bahai Faith Meets the Concordia Movement

The Bahai faith originated in Iran in the mid-19th century led by its living prophet Baha’u’llah. His teachings called for the unification of the world’s religions, viewing all faiths as different manifestations of God.1 The eldest son of Baha’u’llah, Abdu’l-Baha, succeeded his father and led a campaign to spread the teachings of Bahai to the United States and Europe. Agnes Baldwin Alexander, a young American woman from Hawaii, would spread the religion in Japan in the 20th century. The faith’s humanist, internationalist doctrine fit neatly within the nation’s imperial ideology.

In London in 1912, Agnes B. Alexander wrote an account of the meeting between Abdu’l-Baha and Jinzo Naruse, President of Japan’s Women’s College. Naruse was a liberal educator who sought support for Japan’s Concordia Movement, an internationalist project intending to find “Common ground on which all nations could harmonize”.2 Abdu’l voiced his support for Naruse’s movement, positioning the Bahai cause as central to the peace and unity of the human race while stressing the need for a “Divine Power” to put these principles into practice. He signed Naruse’s autograph book with the following prayer:

“O God! The darkness of contention, strife and warfare between the religions, the nations and the people has beclouded the horizon of Reality and hidden the heaven of Truth. The world is in need of the light of Guidance. Therefore, O God, confer Thy favor, so that the Sun of Reality may illumine the East and the West” (December 30, 1912. Translated by Ahmad Sohrab)

Abdu’l’s prayer demonstrates the faith’s capacity to justify Japan’s imperial internationalism. The symbolic power of light for human purification, “The Sun of Reality”, is central to the Bahai teachings. Likewise, the Sun has great symbolic importance in the history of Japan. The Japanese imperial army’s adoption of the ‘Rising Sun Flag’ illustrates the nation’s mission to bring peace, unification, and modernity to Asia. This ideology would materialize in the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ positioning the Japan as the protector Asia, uplifting the East (through political, social, and economic reforms) to make it competitive with the West.3  Similar to the imperial ideology, the Bahai faith is a humanist religion. Abdu’l-Baha shows his humanist values by denouncing the war and hatred that stems from national and religious differences. In ‘Bahai World Faith’ he argues the spread of Bahai to all nations will birth a unified “heavenly civilization” and saw the Japanese as possessing a unique capacity to enact it – unifying the East and West.4 Abdu’l-Baha’s successor, Shongi Effendi, gifted several Bahai books to Emperor Hirohito in 1928 with a message encouraging him to use the Bahai teaching as inspiration and to “arise for its worldwide recognition and triumph”5. The utopian vision of Japan leading world peace and unity aligns with Naruse’s Concordia Movement.

Historians like Mark Lincicome are critical of 20th-century Japanese liberal internationalists (like Naruse) for the paradoxical justification of imperialism on humanist, anti-war grounds. Lincicome shows how during the Taisho Democracy Era, educators advocated for Japan’s unique capacity in promoting world peace through the cultural, political, and economic assimilation (Doka) of weaker Asian nations.6 This internationalism adapted to become hyper nationalism after the Manchurian Invasion in 1931. The Concordia Association of Manchukuo, originally established to promote left-leaning ideas of Pan-Asianist racial equality (Pan-Asianism) and self-determination would become a totalitarian puppet regime after the Japanese Kwantung Army’s occupation of Manchuria.7 Like the Taisho educators, Naruse’s Concordia movement turned away from its liberal values through political pressure and liberal internationalism’s adaptability.

Both Naruse and Abdu’l-Baha viewed Japan as a unique, divine power to bring God’s purifying light for an international utopia. Combining Japanese exceptionalism with humanist logic explains Japan’s ability to justify “world war in the name of world peace”.8 Although Naruse and Abdu’l-Baha criticized war, nationalism, and militarism, it becomes clear how a nexus of universalist, cosmopolitan, and internationalist rhetoric in the Taisho Era would easily adapt and be consumed by the Showa Era’s Imperialist ideology, justifying a campaign for a Greater East Asia.

  1. Abdu’l-Baha, ‘Baha’i World Faith’ (1975), pp.254-257 [↩]
  2. Agnes B. Alexander “Abdu’l Baha meets President Naruse of Japan Women’s College.” Bahai Reference Library (1912) p. 113. [↩]
  3. Lawson, Konrad. ‘Reimagining the Postwar International Order: The World Federalism of Ozaki Yukio and Kagawa Toyohiko’ (2014):9 [↩]
  4.   Abdu’l-Baha, ‘Baha’i World Faith'(1975), pp.254-257 [↩]
  5. Barbara M. Sims, ‘Traces That Remain’ Bahai Publishing Trust of Japan (1989): 81 [↩]
  6. Mark Lincicome, “Imperial Subjects As Global Citizens: Nationalism, Internationalism and Education in Japan.” Lexington Books (2009) p. 40 [↩]
  7. Young L., “When Fascism met empire in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.” Journal of Global History 12, no.2 (2017) pp. 282-283 [↩]
  8. Mark Lincicome, “Imperial Subjects As Global Citizens: Nationalism, Internationalism and Education in Japan.” Lexington Books (2009):104 [↩]

Paradise on earth: Uchiyama Gudō’s imaginations of a (Buddhist) anarcho-communist utopia

The utopian vision of Uchiyama Gudō (1874-1911), a Zen Buddhist priest who was executed for his purported role in the plot to assassinate the Japanese Emperor Meiji in 1910, offers a unique example of the fusion of Buddhist and socialist ideas in early twentieth-century East Asia. Throughout his writings, Gudō repeatedly imagines a vision of tengoku, explicitly evoking the Christian idea of “soteriological and eschatological” paradise rather than the Buddhist jōdo (Pure Land) or gokuraku (land of bliss).1 Although connections between Christianity and the development of socialist revolutionary thought in Meiji Japan by Rambelli help to contextualise the contemporary meanings and connotations of tengoku, it is arguably most significant in the negative sense; that is, the imagination of an earthly, anarcho-communist utopian ‘paradise’ over a Buddhist heavenly bliss.

Gudō’s (Buddhist) anarcho-communism formed part of a broader wave of emerging Radical Buddhism in late Meiji Japan. He was not alone in his focus on earthly paradise; contemporary anarchists like Tanaka Jiroku were similarly advocating ideas of genseshugi (‘this-world-ism’).2 In China, both Taixu (1890-1947) and Lin Qiwu (1903-1934)  developed similar imaginations of a “pure land in this world” where anarchist utopia and Marxism respectively were “one and the same” as the Buddhist Pure Land.3 Yet, not only do Gudō’s ideas predate many of these other anarchists, his utopian imagination also differs in a critical way in its absence of Buddhist spiritualism. Avoiding references to the pure land, Gudō situates his paradise purely in the earthly realm; in a way, he subverts Radical Buddhism, which views socialism and anarchism as paths to an explicitly Buddhist ‘pure land’, and instead proposes an anarcho-communist revolution in which consciousness and freedom is achieved through Buddhism (as Buddhism and socialism are two sides of the same coin) yet paradise itself is defined by its material, social and political conditions rather than ‘heavenly bliss’. For example, during his interrogation for his alleged role in the High Treason Incident of 1910, Gudo describes his intellectual conversion to anarcho-communism as a result of reading about the communal lives of the Buddhist sangha in Chinese monasteries4. However, this is framed from a specifically worldly perspective; it was the communal and egalitarian aspects of the sangha that appealed to Gudō, as opposed to their spirituality and religious practice. Thus, Gudō removes the distinction between Buddhism and anarcho-communism; he is not striving for a spiritual awakening to nirvana or pure land, but for a (Marxian) social revolution through labour unions to achieve “the ideal land of anarchist communism, where all are free and live a comfortable life”.5

As Rambelli emphasises, Gudō was seeking to transform the (earthly) world as a Buddhist anarcho-communist, rather than “striving for a socialist form of Buddhism”6. Paradise would be distinctively and exclusively anarcho-communist. Whilst inherently informed by the semantic, epistemological, and ontological frameworks of Gudo’s Buddhism, paradise on earth in its realised form seems more rooted in classical Marxism. Paradise would thus begin when the capitalist bourgeoisie “reject[s] the old crime of living out of his capital” and “realize[s] that all human beings must secure their clothing and food through their own labor”.7

Consequently, Gudō’s vision for paradise was both inseparable from his conception of Buddhism and yet fundamentally material. This fusion of Buddhism and socialism was the path necessary to achieve individual and collective consciousness to eliminate oppression and achieve freedom. Attaining social consciousness and establishing paradise would be achieved through Buddhism not because he imagined a future land of heavenly bliss, but instead because the worldly anarcho-communist ‘paradise’ envisaged by Gudō would be the true realisation of Buddhism on earth.

  1. Fabio Rambelli, Zen Anarchism: The Egalitarian Dharam of Uchiyama Gudō (Berkeley, 2013), p.31. [↩]
  2. Lajos Brons, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism (Santa Barbara, 2023), p.76. [↩]
  3. Brons, A Buddha Land in This World, pp.92-95. [↩]
  4. Rambelli, Zen Anarchism, p.20. [↩]
  5. Uchiyama Gudō, Museifu Kyosan kakumei, quoted in and translated by Rambelli, Zen Anarchism, p.50. [↩]
  6. Rambelli, Zen Anarchism, p.30. [↩]
  7. Uchiyama Gudō, Heibon no jikaku, quoted in and translated by Rambelli, Zen Anarchism, p.63. [↩]