Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kotoku Shusui and Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement

276 Pages·2015·20.5 MB·English

by  Robert Thomas Tierney

Monster of the Twentieth Century
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Th e publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the
Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California
Press Foundation.
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Monster of the
Twentieth Century
Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan’s
First Anti-Imperialist Movement
Robert Th omas Tierney
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university
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University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2015 by Th e Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tierney, Robert Th omas, 1953– author, translator.
Monster of the twentieth century : Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan's fi rst
anti-imperialist movement / Robert Tierney.
pages cm
Includes the fi rst English translation of Kōtoku Shūsui's Imperialism by
Robert Th omas Tierney.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-28634-4 (cloth)
isbn 978-0-520-96159-3 (ebook)
1. Kōtoku, Shūsui, 1871–1911. 2. Socialists—Japan—Biography.
3. Anarchists—Japan—Biography. 4. Anti-imperialist movements—
Japan—History—20th century. I. Kōtoku, Shūsui, 1871–1911. Nijisseiki
no kaibutsu teikoku shugi. English. Translation of: II. Title.
hx413.8.k68t54 2015
325′.32092—dc23
2014047156
Manufactured in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and
sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures
Natural, a fi ber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the
minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of
Paper).
Cover image: Th e Ogre of the Orient (from an unidentifi ed series)
by T. Bianco (1904–1905). © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Kōtoku Shūsui and Anti-Imperialist Thought
In the Shadow of Revolution 15
What Is Imperialism? 36
What Causes Imperialism? 57
Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement
Th e Boxer Rebellion and the Band of Idealists 83
Heiminism and the Russo-Japanese War 96
Th e Asian Solidarity Association and the High Treason Case 115
Imperialism: Monster of the Twentieth Century
by Kōtoku Shūsui 133
Preface 135
Th ree Preliminary Observations 137
Chapter 1. Introduction 139
Chapter 2. On Patriotism 142
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vi contents
Chapter 3. On Militarism 163
Chapter 4. On Imperialism 186
Conclusion 205
Epilogue: Th e Monster of the Twenty-First Century? 209
Notes 219
Bibliography 241
Index 261
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acknowledgments
As I was researching and writing this book, I depended on the advice of many
friends and colleagues in the United States and Japan and on the fi nancial support
of numerous funding sources. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the
people and institutions that enabled me to carry this project to completion.
I stumbled upon Kōtoku’s Imperialism: Monster of the Twentieth Century by
happy accident and decided to translate it into English back in 2009. Although
Kōtoku’s book preceded the celebrated studies of Hobson and Lenin, it remains
relatively unknown in English-language scholarship. Ron Toby, my colleague at
the University of Illinois, off ered me early encouragement to study Kōtoku’s
thought and to look into the early Japanese anti-imperialist movement. I was
heartened to discover that Christine Lévy, professor at the University of Bordeaux,
had already published a French translation of Kōtoku’s Imperialism. Professor
Yoshihara Yukari of the University of Tsukuba, who hosted me in 2013, introduced
me to many excellent researchers and graduate students at Tsukuba and invited me
to present my research fi ndings twice. Yamaizumi Susumu, professor at Meiji Uni-
versity and editor of the 2004 edition of Kōtoku’s Imperialism, off ered me valuable
tips in my research and introduced me to members of the Taigyaku jiken no shin-
jitsu o akiraka ni suru kai (Committee to Reveal the Truth of the High Treason
Incident) throughout Japan. André Haag, assistant professor at the University of
New Mexico, shared with me his expertise on later anticolonial movements in
Japan. Professors Nabae Hitomi of the Kobe University of Foreign Studies, Misugi
Keiko of Kobe College, and Joel Joos of Kōchi Prefectural University invited me to
their respective institutions to lecture on Japanese anti-imperialism. Huangwen
vii
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viii acknowledgments
Lai, a graduate student in the University of Illinois, assisted me in annotating the
translation and in gathering information on the Asian Solidarity Association.
While I was in Japan, I participated in the research activities of the Early Social-
ist Research Group and availed myself of their fi ne book collection. I also traveled
to Kōchi Prefecture, birthplace of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement, and
to Shingū in Wakayama Prefecture, the home of six defendants in the High Trea-
son case. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to the following indi-
viduals for assisting me during these travels: Dr. Matsuoka Kiichi, director of the
Kōchi Liberty and People’s Rights Museum; Dr. Takahashi Tadashi, director of the
Kōchi Prefecture Literary Museum; Ms. Murase Saho, reporter with the Kōchi
Newspaper; Mr. Tsujimoto Yūichi, director of the Satō Haruo Memorial Museum;
and Mr. Kitazawa Tamotsu, chairman of the Association to Honor Kōtoku Shūsui
in Shimanto City.
I was able to complete my translation of Kōtoku’s Imperialism thanks to a gen-
erous travel grant from the NEAC Japan Studies Program in 2010. Th e following
year, the Research Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
awarded me seed money to research the early Japanese anti-imperialist move-
ment. A faculty research grant from the Japan Foundation in 2013 enabled me to
complete a draft of this book.
I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Reed Malcolm, senior editor at the
University of California Press, for his early support and for shepherding my manu-
script through the review process, as well as to Stacy Eisenstark, Kate Hoff man,
and others at the press who helped me to turn the manuscript into a book. Th e two
readers for the press off ered invaluable feedback, which spurred me on to make
necessary revisions. I am also grateful to Christopher Pitts for his meticulous cop-
yediting and to Suzy Cincone for her careful proofreading and indexing.
I would like to express my appreciation to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for
granting me permission to use the cover image of the book, T. Bianco’s Th e Ogre of
the Orient (1904–5), and providing a digital fi le of the artwork. Waseda University
Library gave me a digital photo of the title page of the third edition of Kōtoku
Shūsui’s Imperialism: Monster of the Twentieth Century. Th e Shimanto City Public
Library graciously off ered me digital fi les of the inaugural issue of the Heimin
Newspaper and a 1909 photo of Kōtoku Shūsui. Th e Okino Iwasaburō Archive at
the Meiji Gakuin University Library provided me with the digital photo of An
Jung-geun and authorized its use in this book. And last but not least, I would like
to thank members of my family and my partner, Matsushita Hiromi.
An earlier and shorter version of chapters 3 and 5 appeared under the title
“Kōtoku Shūsui: From the Critique of Patriotism to Heiminism” in Shoki Shakai-
shugi Kenkyū (Studies in Early Japanese Socialism), no. 25 (2014): 18–40.
Following East Asian practice, Japanese surnames precede given names. Unless
otherwise indicated, all translations from the Japanese are the work of the author.
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Introduction
Anti-Imperialism in Japan:
From Th eory to Social Movement
O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle
. . . O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our
shells; help us to cover their smiling fi elds with the pale forms of their patriot
dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their
wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a
hurricane of fi re; help us to wring the hearts of their unoff ending widows
with unavailing grief.
—mark twain, “the war prayer”
Monster of the Twentieth Century is an analysis of Japan’s fi rst anti-imperialist move-
ment and centers on Kōtoku Shūsui, its intellectual leader and the author of Imperial-
ism (1901).1 Kōtoku’s book was among the fi rst general studies of imperialism to be
published anywhere in the world, preceding J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study by
one year. Unlike Hobson’s study and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Imperialism: Th e Highest
Stage of Capitalism (1916), Kōtoku treats imperialism primarily as a pathology of the
nation-state, a “plague” caused by patriotism and exacerbated by militarism. He also
off ers the contemporary reader a fresh view of imperialism from the perspective of
an observer situated in a peripheral nation then emerging from semicolonial depend-
ency to imperialist world power. Imperialism is virtually unknown in the English-
speaking world because, until recently, Japan has occupied a marginal and barely
visible place in general histories of empire. As a non-Western empire, Japan was
“unmarked as a colonizer in Euro-American eyes,” although East Asians have long
perceived it as a major imperialist power.2 Accordingly, it is not surprising to learn
that a Chinese translation of Imperialism came out in 1902, a year aft er its publication
in Japanese, and that a partial translation into Korean appeared in 1906. Recently, the
book has been translated into French.3 In the third part of this book, I have made
available to the English reader an annotated translation of Kōtoku’s work.
1
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