{"id":1228,"date":"2024-11-08T14:03:48","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T14:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/?p=1228"},"modified":"2024-11-29T12:49:47","modified_gmt":"2024-11-29T12:49:47","slug":"resituating-esperanto-in-east-asian-world-imaginaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/2024\/11\/resituating-esperanto-in-east-asian-world-imaginaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Resituating Esperanto in East Asian world imaginaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Esperanto, a \u2018planned\u2019, universal language created by Ludovic Zamenhof in 1887, enjoyed particular popularity in Japan and, to a lesser extent, China in the early twentieth century; Japan was home to the largest Esperanto community outside Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.1<\/a><\/sup> Developing in the paradoxical era of the early twentieth century which involved the simultaneous intensification of nationalism and the emergence of ideas of internationalism, the universalism and ahistoricity of Esperanto meant it was envisioned as a transnational medium to connect all peoples on a non-hierarchical, international basis whilst preserving national identities.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, the focus on either cosmopolitanism introduced through interaction with the West, or Pan-Asianism as the reactionary other leaves less space for the appraisal of Asian forms of cosmopolitan internationalism. Esperanto\u2019s popularity in Asia should arguably be viewed in terms of what it represented and its fusion with ideas developing out of Japan and Asia of universalism, global humanity, and world integration: for example Kang Youwei\u2019s visions of world unity from China2<\/a><\/sup> or Kotoku Shusui\u2019s anti-imperialist critique of the Russo-Japanese War as part of the Nonwar movement and his utopian imaginations of transnational sokuin dojo<\/em> (compassion or empathy).3<\/a><\/sup> Consequently, Esperanto provides a frame through which to examine Asian conceptions of \u2018worldism\u2019, which derived as much from indigenous imaginations as ideas transposed from the outside.<\/p>\n

In the \u2018worldist\u2019 imagination, whose roots are traced back to the Nonwar movement by Kanishi, utopian peace could never emerge through cooperation between nation-states. Instead, they advocated a more total vision of heimen<\/em> (\u2018the people\u2019) as a global, transnational construct that \u201ctranscended nation-state borders\u201d.4<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Esperanto must be viewed through this complexity; its popularity acted as a manifestation or exemplification of an alternative visions of world unity emerging from <\/em>Asia which embraced cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism and transcended the (Western) system of international relations. In this light, the European roots of Esperanto and its inscribed Eurocentrism are of less immediate relevance, as it is argued that it not necessarily the content<\/em> of Esperanto that mattered, but more what it symbolically represented. As Rapley rightly emphasises, Esperanto represented both a medium of global communication and, critically, an idea or ideology of world unification.5<\/a><\/sup> \u2018Worldism\u2019, of which Esperanto is imagined as a constituent part, takes the world (\u2018sohei<\/em>\u2019) and \u2018the people\u2019 (\u2018heimen<\/em>\u2019), in the abstract sense, as its fundamental basis, rather than the nation or \u2018the people\u2019 with the emphasis on \u2018the\u2019. As Chan notes, historicising Esperanto brings to light its importance in China as a propaganda medium against both Japanese imperialism and, for the Communist Party, in the civil war against the Nationalists.6<\/a><\/sup> In Japan itself, Konishi argues that it should be considered as part of anti-imperial resistance, part of projections of world order that equally contested Japanese state participation in, on the one hand, Western \u2018international relations\u2019 based on the primacy of territorial sovereignty and, on the other, anti-colonial (yet often imperialist) pan-Asian constructions of an Asian collective \u2018other\u2019.7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

This is not to deny the significance of transnational connections and networks of intellectual exchange; imaginations of internationalism and cosmopolitanism are impossible to conceive in closed spaces and are thus inherently products of transnationalism. Yet, at the same time, reframing Esperanto in this way, as an idea which fused with preexisting and emerging conceptions of world unity, an endpoint for East Asian cosmopolitan imaginaries, helps to rebalance transnational relations between East and West, and highlights that, for some, Esperanto marked a useful endpoint for their \u2018worldist\u2019 visions, rather than being the starting point for a new Asian cosmopolitanism. East Asia, especially Japan, was a receptive audience to Esperanto not just because it represented something new, but also because it could be integrated into local imaginations of \u2018worldism\u2019.<\/p>\n

  1. Ian Rapley, \u2018A Language for Asia? Transnational Encounters in the Japanese Esperanto Movement, 1906-1928\u2019, in Pedro Iacobelli, Danton Leary and Shinnosuke Takahashi (eds.), Transnational Japan as History: Empire, Migration, and Social Movements<\/em> (London, 2016), p.167. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Kang Youwei and Laurence G. Thompson, Ta T\u2019ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K\u2019ang Yu-wei<\/em> (London, 1958). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. Sho Kanishi, \u2018Translingual Word Order: Language without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan\u2019, The Journal of Asian Studies<\/em>, 72:1 (2013), p.96. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. \u00a0Ibid<\/em>., p.99 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. Rapley, \u2018A Language for Asia?\u2019, p.170. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  6. Gerald Chan, \u2018China and the Esperanto Movement\u2019, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs<\/em>, 15 (1986), p.11. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  7. Kanishi, \u2018Translingual Word Order\u2019, pp.91-114. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Esperanto, a \u2018planned\u2019, universal language created by Ludovic Zamenhof in 1887, enjoyed particular popularity in Japan and, to a lesser extent, China in the early twentieth century; Japan was home to the largest Esperanto community outside Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.1 Developing in the paradoxical era of the early twentieth century which involved the … Continue reading “Resituating Esperanto in East Asian world imaginaries”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1450,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/1450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}