Reopening the “Opening of Japan”: A Russian-Japanese Revolutionary Encounter and the Vision of Anarchist Progress

要旨

In the spring of 1874, the Russian populist and international revolutionary leader Lev Mechnikov (1838–1888) sailed to Japan in order to observe and participate in the Meiji Ishin, commonly known in English as the “Meiji Restoration.”1 Japan was still in the throes of disorder and conflict as he disembarked in Yokohama. Comparing the Ishin to revolutionary movements in Europe, Mechnikov called it “a complete and radical revolution, the kind we know only from history.”2 Seeking to right a common misunderstanding among many in the West about the causes of the Ishin, he described it as being of native origin. He argued that the Ishin was not simply a political reaction to external pressure on Japan to adopt Western civilization and become involved in capitalist development. Rather, it was a complex revolution from within, based on centuries of social, cultural, and intellectual developments, that had merely been given further impetus by disturbances from abroad. Mechnikov would eventually accord the Ishin global significance for human progress in a different direction altogether from Western modernity. Historians have rarely questioned one aspect of the birth of modern Japan: the “Opening of the Nation” to the West, or kaikoku, and the resulting initiation of civilization and progress. As a result, the meaning of kaikoku has been closed, and alternative narratives of modern Japanese history have essentially been precluded from the historiography on Japan. By exploring Mechnikov's private encounter with Ishin Japan on the non-state level beyond the imagined East-West divide, it may be possible to reopen the meaning of kaikoku and introduce the larger associated vision of cooperatist anarchist civilization and progress.3 At the very moment that Japan's borders opened to negotiation with the West and to the concomitant narratives of civilizational progress, they opened as well to alternative visions of progress. Mechnikov would give Japan's modern revolution world-historical meaning as a major catalyst for the advancement of humanity based on the principles of cooperatist anarchy. The resulting idea of progress would emphasize cooperation between people over Social Darwinist competition, and spontaneous free associations of peoples over the rule of law and state governance, as fundamental for the advancement of human life. It would be based on the premise that individual and group differences on multiple levels constituted an essential basis for a cooperative human society, making possible a modern subjectivity that simultaneously incorporated both the individual and the collective. Mechnikov's encounter with Ishin Japan led him to refashion anarchism, transforming it from a Bakuninist ideology of primordial and violent destruction of the existing social and political structures into an evolutionary construct for developing a civilization on the basis of mutual aid.4 Mechnikov identified a dynamic model of civilizational progress in Japan that transcended the provincially bounded idea of the Russian commune. He was struck by the cooperative self-organization he observed among commoners the the people to have and social in a they political a of from and to Mechnikov the of and in to the larger society, with in of Japanese called for the of He observed that the of mutual had the to beyond the of the the and the and was by an to from and with the he on many levels of Mechnikov as essential for the advancement of The developing vision of progress and civilization by the encounter between the Japanese of and Russian populist of would one of the intellectual for a of modern only Mechnikov's encounter with to the and of the given to the of modern the alternative given to for further Japanese would the vision of cooperatist progress into one of the for modern in Japan. it the the and the of and the idea of imagined and into anarchist a that transcended and of modern of Japanese as a of Western intellectual has to from cooperatist as a of in

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