Konishi 2007 - Opening of Japan

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

Vision of Anarchist Progress
SHO KONISHI
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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. Com-
paring the Ishin to revolutionary movements in Europe, Mechnikov called it “a com-
plete 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
My thanks to the anonymous readers of the AHR , who provided invaluable comments on this article.
Special thanks go to Tetsuo Najita, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and James Ketelaar, who served as my mentors
at the University of Chicago Department of History, where I wrote the essay. Archival research was made
possible by the generous support of the Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Fellowship in 2001.
1 In this article, only when referring to how nineteenth-century Russians described the events sur-
rounding the overthrow of the Tokugawa feudal regime do I use the term “revolution.” Elsewhere I use
the Japanese term “Ishin.” On the problem of rendering Meiji Ishin as “Restoration” in translation, see,
for example, Tetsuo Najita, “Japan’s Industrial Revolution in Historical Perspective,” in Masao Miyoshi
and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Japan in the World (Durham, N.C., 1993), 19–23.
2 Lev Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii: Meidzi,” in A. A. Shcherbina, ed., Iaponiia na
perelome: Izbrannye stat’i i ocherki (Vladivostok, 1992), 76. All translations are mine unless otherwise
noted.
3 I use a new term, “cooperatist,” instead of “cooperativist,” to emphasize an ethic and subjectivity
101
102 Sho Konishi
borders opened to negotiation with the West and to the concomitant narratives of
civilizational progress, they opened as well to alternative visions of progress. Mech-
nikov 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 peo-
ple 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, trans-
forming 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 during the Ishin. Cooperative practices enabled the people to
have economic and social stability in their lives at a time when they were experiencing
tremendous political instability, a lack of organizational guidance from above, and
sudden dislocation to urban areas. Mechnikov noted the commoners’ consciousness
of and pride in their contribution to the larger society, with recognition in turn of
others’ contributing role. Japanese called this organizing ethic for the conduct of
everyday life “mutual aid.” He observed that the principle of mutual assistance had
the capacity to extend beyond the confines of the immediate family, the neighbor-
hood, and even the nation, and was marked by an intense effort to learn from and
interact with the outside world, which he saw happening on many levels of society.
Mechnikov viewed this ethic as essential for the advancement of humanity. The de-
veloping vision of progress and civilization inspired by the encounter between the
Japanese ideas of ishin and Russian populist notions of revoliutsiia (revolution)
would later constitute one of the most important intellectual bases for Kropotkinism,
a leading current of modern anarchism.
Not only is Mechnikov’s encounter revealing with respect to the open and un-
settled nature of the early meanings given to the “beginnings” of modern Japan, but
the alternative meanings given to those beginnings were salient for further action.
Japanese intellectuals would turn the vision of cooperatist progress into one of the
most important conceptual foundations for modern cultural life in Japan. For ex-
ample, it heavily influenced the women’s movement, the non-war movement, and the
spheres of education, religion, language, literature, art, and even primatology. Trans-
forming the idea of time itself, participants imagined and put into practice “coop-
of cooperation not limited to the enterprise of the cooperative, a society of persons for the distribution
of goods.
4 While Mechnikov had conspired with Bakunin in revolutionary activities in the 1860s, he ac-
knowledged that their relationship was fairly negative. Hoover Institution of War and Peace Archives,
Stanford, California, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Box 183, #34, Letter from L. Mechnikov to Vasilii
Danilovich, January 29, 1884.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2007

Reopening the “Opening of Japan” 103
eratist anarchist modernity,” a temporal belonging that transcended ethnic, racial,

gendered, national, and other means of modern belonging.5
Our understanding of Japanese anarchism as a product of Western intellectual
traditions has helped to prevent us from seeing cooperatist anarchism as a form of
modernity in Japan. We have long defined anarchy, the absence of state governance
and legal order, as characterizing the most primitive stage of human progress and

civilization. By extension, the history of nineteenth-century anarchism has often con-
ceived anarchism as an intellectual and cultural legacy of the social fury of the French
Revolution, and thereby associated it with terrorism and the formless dreams of
utopianism. Similarly, Japanese historiography has viewed anarchism in Japan as a
reactionary impulse against the Western civilizational order, expressing an emo-
tional preoccupation with “traditional” and “conservative” moral and spiritual val-
ues threatened by the West.6 Common to both of these characterizations is the no-
tion that anarchism, whether by its ideals or in practice, was opposed to modernity.
The idea of Western modernity provided the starting point from which we have
arrived at much of our scholarship on modern Japan. While existing explorations of
an “alternative Japanese modernity” have attempted to examine how Japanese re-
configured and retranslated Western modernity into “indigenous” or “Japanese”
national forms as historical difference, the modernity of the “West” nonetheless
remained for historians the source that defined the terms of modernity in Japan.7
Studies of the diverse trajectories of alternative forms of modernity in the non-West
have tended to speak of “hybridity” between two ultimately foreign elements, an
oil-and-water mixture between the traditional and the new. The “multiple moder-
nities” in the non-West have qualified as such through the indigenous development
or reconfiguration of major modern elements already defined by the West and its
historical experience, such as the public sphere, capitalism, and democratic political
institutions.8 While our emphasis on these historical trajectories will undoubtedly
continue to advance our historical understanding, at the same time it has caused us
to overlook the creative transnational production of a cooperatist anarchist vision
of human progress and civilization outside the epistemological limits of “East” and
“West.”
Proceeding from a similar logic, we have long studied the modern relationship
between Russia and Japan from the perspective of state-to-state relations, beginning
with the Russian expedition to Japan in 1853 led by Admiral Evfimii Putiatin. The
story of the expedition’s contribution to the “Opening” of Japan, followed by the
5 For a theoretical discussion on the reimagination of time and the possibility for alternative iden-
tities, see Lawrence Grossberg, “History, Imagination and the Politics of Belonging: Between the Death
and the Fear of History,” in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, eds., Without
Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London, 2000), 148–164.
6 See F. G. Notehelfer’s important contribution to our earlier knowledge of Japanese anarchism,
Ko៮ toku Shu៮ sui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical (Cambridge, 1971). Other, more recent works that have
similarly described anarchism in Japan include Germaine Hoston, The State, Identity, and the National
Question in China and Japan (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 137–148; and Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped
the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, N.J., 2003).
7 See, for example, Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese
Political Ideology (Berkeley, Calif., 2002).

8 For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, N.J.,
2002).

104 Sho Konishi
Russo-Japanese War (1904 –1905), which demonstrated Japan’s rising power and
permitted its entry into the Western international community of nation-states, is a
familiar one. With the narrative of Western modernity repeated as essentially the
sole historical meaning and value embedded in the history of Russo-Japanese re-
lations, our accounts of that relationship have often been written from within the
cultural fold of Western modernity. Ironically enough, the more we have expanded

the ways to look at their interactions, the more we have solidified Western modernity
as the master narrative for international history involving modern Japan. While mak-
ing an enormous contribution to the volume of our historical knowledge, this has led
us all the more to overlook the phenomenon under examination. Even studies in the
fields of literature, theater, and art, which have added significantly to our knowledge
of Russo-Japanese relations from a non-state perspective, have been construed
largely within the conceptual framework of Russia’s impact on Japan within a larger
West-East binary and its unidirectional flow of culture.9
The purpose here is not to provide a single overarching characterization of the
rich and variegated history of Russian-Japanese relations.10 Rather, examining the
interlocking transnational networks of intellectuals that formed on the non-state
level, beyond the cultural construct of the encounter between West and non-West,
enables us to take a new approach to the “Opening” of Japan. As alien as the Rus-
sian-Japanese revolutionary encounter was to the mid-nineteenth-century culture of
international relations of Western nation-states,11 it provides us with an alternative
lens through which to read kaikoku as a moment of rupture, thereby giving it new
historical meaning and value.
From the standpoint of Western modernity, Europeans and Americans in Japan
during the Ishin believed that modern Japan owed its birth to the civilizing presence
of the Western nation-states. Merchant Francis Hall observed the events largely
through the lens of his business interests in Japan and the Western diplomatic ac-
tivities that supported them. When he described the progress that foreigners were
bringing to Japan as an eventual “good,” he meant the extent of capitalist devel-
opment as the measure of that progress. From another perspective, Isabella Bird was
one of the very few Westerners to travel widely through Japan in the early years of
Meiji. She described in minute detail the technologies of everyday life during her trip
to Japan in 1878, revealing the “hopeless darkness” of the Oriental peasant’s prim-
itive lifestyle. Her descriptions referred to a hierarchy of peoples based on their level
9 Since the discussion of the “Western impact” of Russian literature on Japan and the resulting
emergence of modern Japanese language and literature in Marleigh Grayer Ryan’s 1965 work on Rus-
sianist Futabatei Shimei, our studies of the topic have not departed much from the conceptual framework
of Russia’s impact on the East. Ryan, Japan’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei (New
York, 1965); Nobori Sho៮ mu and Akamatsu Katsumaro, The Russian Impact on Japan: Literature and
Social Thought, ed. and trans. Peter Berton, Paul F. Langer, and George O. Totten (Los Angeles, 1981);
Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World; and Thomas Rimer, ed., A Hidden Fire: Russian and
Japanese Cultural Encounters, 1868–1926 (Stanford, Calif., 1995), a collection of essays by twenty schol-
ars from Russia, Japan, and the U.S.
10 Recent Russian language studies have successfully unearthed new archival findings in relation to
Russian-Japanese cultural relations. Much work by Russian scholars in this field has reflected a renewed
interest in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church via its activities in Japan and East Asia. See, for
example, the informative reports in V. S. Belonenko, ed., Iz istorii religioznykh, kul’turnykh i politicheskikh
vzaimootnoshenii Rossii i Iaponii v XIX–XX vekakh (St. Petersburg, 1998).
11 On this culture of international relations, see Beate Jahn, The Cultural Construction of Interna-
tional Relations (New York, 2000).

of development in science, technology, and Christianity. From a diplomatic per-

spective, measuring modern progress by a nation’s capacity for empire-building in
the international arena, British Embassy secretary Ernest Satow assessed during the
Ishin that Japan would never “get beyond a third or fourth rate position.” Satow saw
the general populace as a major reason for Japan’s inability to improve its inter-
national ranking, because they “seemed to be too much mere imitators, and wanting

in bottom.”12 The idea that an interest in taking from the outside world was a sign
of backwardness contrasted starkly with assessments by Russian observers. Hall,
Bird, and Satow provide us with examples of how Europeans and Americans—male
and female, private and public—shared a vision of Western civilization and progress
that included elements of state- and empire-building, rationality via science and tech-
nology, capitalism, and Christianity.
In contrast, Mechnikov attached tremendous meaning to the intellectual achieve-
ments of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). He saw progressive aspects of the Ishin
as the product of social and cultural developments that were already apparent in
Tokugawa Japan. As someone who had been directly involved in revolutionary move-
ments across Europe, Mechnikov was uniquely positioned to compare the Ishin at
the moment of its occurrence with radical movements in the West. His fascination
with the “Revolution in Asia” led him to examine it meticulously and to cultivate
an extensive network of personal relationships with Ishin participants and intellec-
tual figures in Japan. He further stood out in terms of his preparedness in the Jap-
anese language.13 Having attained fluency in Japanese before he went to Japan,
Mechnikov studied historical texts, literature, popular pamphlets, and scholarly
works unmediated by translation to deepen his knowledge. Furthermore, distancing
himself from the diplomatic and merchant communities of the treaty ports, he based
his observations of Ishin Japan on his experiences as a private visitor essentially
without citizenship, at a time when Westerners who came to Japan were under strict
diplomatic protection and patronage.
Mechnikov’s Ishin was both rooted ideologically in Russian radical thought and
influenced by the perspectives of those in Japan who had lived through it. Thus, as
much as Western interpretations of the Ishin were specific to the historical time and
space from which they emerged, Mechnikov’s accounts warrant historicization.
MECHNIKOV HAD BEEN INSTRUMENTAL in forming the larger discursive space of pop-
ulism, a radical Russian political doctrine of the 1860s to 1880s. With the heightened
state of political repressions in Russia at the time, Russian political dissidents re-
12 Francis Hall, Japan through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, 1859–1866, ed. F. G.
Notehelfer (Princeton, N.J., 1992), 414 – 415; Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (Boston, 1984);
Ernest Satow, “Letter to F. V. Dickens,” in Tetsuo Najita, ed., Readings in Tokugawa Thought, 3rd ed.
(Chicago, 1998), 297–299.
13 Fully intending to travel to Japan in order to observe the “revolution” as it unfolded, Mechnikov
went to the Sorbonne in 1872 to attend the only Japanese program in Europe. Mechnikov, “Vospomi-
naniia o dvukhletnei sluzhbe v Iaponii,” in Shcherbina, Iaponiia na perelome, 25. Dissatisfied with the
poor quality and slow pace of education at the Sorbonne, however, he left for Switzerland to seek out
O៮ yama Iwao, a military leader of the Ishin, for one-on-one study. O ៮ yama was on assignment there to
study military affairs and French. Yet he selected the Russian revolutionary to be his teacher. The two
became so close that they decided to room together.

106 Sho Konishi
siding in Europe provided a mouthpiece for the populist cause. Mechnikov played
a leading role in this small but active community of émigrés. He served as the tactical
organizer of the group’s dissident activities and as an articulator of its ideas through
his many writings.14 His actions also extended far beyond the immediate Russian
community; in the 1860s and early 1870s, he participated in or assisted revolutionary
movements and uprisings in Poland, Spain, France, and Italy. In Italy he even fought

and was wounded as a lieutenant in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s military campaign for Ital-
ian unification.15
Impressed with the young radical’s insights, the widely read émigré social critic
Alexander Herzen frequently had Mechnikov contribute to his journal Kolokol’,
which was banned in Russia. Mechnikov oversaw the opening of the journal’s branch
in Switzerland. Instrumental in maintaining the émigrés’ direct underground ties to
intellectual life in Russia, he created and ran an illegal publications transport route
from Europe into Russia, which provided Russian readers with works from the ém-
igré community.16 Mechnikov’s steps were recorded in detail and stored in a thick
file kept by the tsar’s secret police. He used a number of irreverent pseudonyms to
further attenuate his relationship to the state, hoping “to remind the Russian gov-
ernment as little as possible of my existence.”17
The larger community of Russian intellectuals that Mechnikov belonged to ques-
tioned the narrative of civilizational progress in the West. Widely sharing the per-
ception of a hierarchically bound Europe, Russian intellectuals increasingly believed
that the revolutionary movement in the West was incapable of creating an equitable
and free society. If some had anticipated the possibility for a new social order with
the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, the violent suppression of the
Communards solidified the belief that much of Europe was immature and ill-pre-
pared for a successful revolution aimed at achieving social equality and justice.
Herzen’s influential writings had earlier provided a devastating analysis of the
virtual impossibility of a revolution in much of Western Europe, where a hierarchical
order and a massive centralized government structure to rule over it were fully in
place, instituted over centuries of development. The problem with Europe lay not
in the institutional creation of freedoms, which the Russian intelligentsia generally
considered to be successful, but in the ingrained customs of daily interaction, which
were difficult to alter. Mechnikov’s own account of his disenchantment with the rev-
olutionary movement in France echoed the older Herzen’s recollections of his ex-
periences with the revolutions in Europe decades earlier. Mechnikov described the
suppression of the Paris Commune by a public made up of a privileged class seeking
14 The Russian secret police considered Mechnikov’s writings to be as dangerous as Nikolai Cherny-
shevskii’s “What Is to Be Done?,” the so-called bible of the Russian narodniki. Police reports stated
that “What Is to Be Done?” and Mechnikov’s autobiographical story “Bold Stride,” which were pub-
lished in the same issue of the journal Sovremennik, caused the landmark publication to be shut down.
15 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii, Moscow (hereafter GARF), f. 6753, op. 1, d. 383,
l. 34; Mechnikov, “Bakunin v Italii,” Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 3 (1897): 824; “Iz perepiski deiatelei
osvoboditel’nogo dvizheniia: Materialy iz arkhiva L. I. Mechnikov,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo: Iz istorii
russkoi literatury i obshchestvennoi mysli 1860–1890 gg. (Moscow, 1977), 463; A. K. Lishina, “Russkii
garibal’dits,” in S. D. Skazkin, ed., Rossiia i Italiia (Moscow, 1968).
16 Mikhail Bakunin, Pis’ma M. A. Bakunina k A. I. Gertsenu i N. P. Ogarevu (St. Petersburg, 1906),
258.
17 GARF, f. 5770, op. 1, ed. khr. 156. Among the pseudonyms he often used were Leon Brandi and
Emil’ Denegri.

to maintain power and the uneducated, tradition-bound rural masses.18 Coming from
two generations of Russian intelligentsia, the literary and theoretically oriented “fa-
thers” and the action-oriented “sons,” Herzen’s and Mechnikov’s ideas represented
a broad swath of Russian revolutionary experience in Europe.19 “The European rev-
olution was a failure” had become a cliché with Russian intellectuals by the early
1870s.

For many, the source of a new revolutionary way of life lay within Russia. Fol-
lowing a suggestion by Herzen in 1855, the agrarian lifestyle associated with the
Russian agricultural commune came to provide a core principle for future devel-
opment and revolution. The Russian state, in their view, was a foreign import that
had been introduced by force, with no roots in native tradition. The path to revo-
lution in Russia could thus be greatly simplified.20 While the Russian commune
served as an example of alternative development for the populist movement, it would
be in Ishin Japan, with its radical openness to technological change and new ideas
from abroad, that Mechnikov would identify a universal possibility for cooperatist
anarchist human progress that transcended the provincialist claims of Slavophils.
Following his stay in Japan, he would acknowledge the severe limitations of the
Russian commune as a model for socialist everyday life.21
For Mechnikov in the early 1870s, the revolution in Japan provided both a real
and a metaphoric alternative to the conservativeness of “old Europe.” He responded
to the ongoing developments in Japan with sudden determination:
The horizon, which had hung heavy and foul over Europe, shone in the Far East with an
unexpectedly bright light. We had been accustomed to thinking of [Japan] as an eternal bul-
wark of immobility, inertia, and stagnation . . . Japan suddenly stirred, awakened, and with
unexpected life came to meet “white civilization,” despite the unwise actions of Europe.22
Mechnikov’s resolve to go to Japan thus was not an attempt to go “to the people,”
in the sense of traveling to enlighten the backward masses and stir their revolutionary
instincts. Rather, he was interested in studying the dynamics of a progressive rev-
olution that had been accomplished in the East.
Other Russians who visited Japan during the Ishin similarly described it as a
modern revolution unprecedented in Asia. Generally sharing a moral apprehension
about the conduct of foreigners in Japan, Russians saw the Western presence as
having disturbed as much as fueled the progress that ensued. They described West-
ern Europeans in Japan, from sailors to diplomats, as having a misguided under-
18 Hokkaido University Northern Studies Special Collections, Hokkaido Colonial Office and Its
Foreign Employees, Advisers, and Other Foreigners: Correspondence, Lev Mechnikov report, “La
France Sous Mac-Mahon: Résumé politique,” November 16, 1873.
19 My use of “fathers” and “sons” comes from Ivan Turgenev’s popular novel on the social problem
in Russia, Fathers and Sons (1862), which depicts two generations of Russian intellectuals. Mechnikov
and Herzen mutually respected one another. Herzen said that Mechnikov was “the only one capable
of thinking and writing.” Mechnikov, in turn, often said of Herzen that “no man had left a deeper
impression on his life.” A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1954 –1965), 28: 10; and Olga
Mechnikov, The Life of Elie Mechnikov, 1845–1916 (Boston, 1921), 47.
20 Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, 24: 184; 6: 7. Mechnikov had similarly sought an embryo of future
socialist development in the commune in the 1860s.

21 By 1881, Mechnikov would criticize the idealization of contemporary Russia as some kind of
“good kingdom of limitless communalism.” Mechnikov, “Obshchina i gosudarstvo v Shveitsarii,” Delo

6 (1881): 227.
22 Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 23.

108 Sho Konishi
standing of civilization and progress and failing to incorporate social justice and
brotherly love in their idea of universal development.23 Even the leading Russian
Orthodox missionary in Japan, Nikolai, who theoretically stood on the opposite po-
litical shore from Mechnikov, held remarkably similar views. Based on his excep-
tional knowledge of the Japanese language and history and his experiences in Japan
during the Ishin, Nikolai viewed the “revolution” as the definitive beginning of a new

era of progress predicated on religious faith in which the West had played only a
peripheral role. For Nikolai, the Ishin was not just the violent overturning of an old
sociopolitical order, but the natural product of a developed commoners’ society. He
wrote that the “democratic” order of Japanese life not only had developed over
centuries on home soil, but was more advanced than that of the most powerful West-
ern nations. Like Mechnikov, he described the Japanese to Russian readers as among
the most educated and cultured people in the world, with a highly developed popular
culture rooted in centuries-old traditions of peasant education.24
Grigorii Blagosvetlov, editor of the populist journal Delo in St. Petersburg, be-
lieved that Mechnikov could provide an account of Ishin Japan that would prove
stimulating to the publication’s broad readership. In a letter to Mechnikov, he wrote:
Leaving behind old Europe with her routines and prejudices, you are setting out for a country
that is beginning a new period of life. In Japan, everything is being re-created anew. Her
awakening is a great and particularly interesting one for Europe to observe . . . Most im-
portant for Delo would be to give a good general view of the deep-seated reforms that Japan
has achieved in recent times. If subjected to a general analysis and well explained, they would
be edifying for us.25
In keeping with the meaning of the Japanese term ishin as a vision of constructing
everything anew, Blagosvetlov contrasted revolutionary Japan with old Europe.
Meanwhile, Euro-American concepts of progress relegated the geographical space
of the East, which often included Russia, to the temporal position of backwardness.
Karl Marx, for example, objectified the “East” as eternally stagnant. He wrote in
Capital that a true picture of ancient or feudal economies in Western Europe could
be deduced from a close study of the “primitive forms” found in contemporary Rus-
sia and Japan.26
By redirecting the capacity for progress away from the West, Russian intellectuals
in the 1870s began to redraw the map of development and hierarchical order. With
Japan seen as a locus of tremendous progress, the divide that marked the geography
of difference between a stagnant East and an advanced modern West appeared to
dissolve.
23 See N. Bartoshevskii, Iaponiia (Ocherki iz zapisok puteshestvennika vokrug sveta): Vzgliad na poli-
ticheskuiu i sotsial’nuiu zhizn’ naroda (St. Petersburg, 1868), and M. Veniukov, Puteshestvie po Priamur’iu,
Kitaiu i Iaponii (Khabarovsk, 1970), 271–280.
24 Iermonakh Nikolai, “Iaponiia s tochki zreniia khristianskoi missii,” Russkii viestnik 83, no. 9
(1869): 221–222.
25 GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 43.
26 Karl Marx, Selected Writings (Indianapolis, 1994), 237–239, and Marx, Kapital (St. Petersburg,
1872), 616.

MECHNIKOV’S ESTABLISHMENT OF RELATIONSHIPS with likeminded Japanese would lead

to a meeting of ishin and revoliutsiia in Japan. A physical meeting took place between
the Russian revolutionary and Japanese radicals. Simultaneously, a dialectical re-
lationship emerged, a meeting between the meanings of Ishin and revolution. A new
understanding of the Ishin as an expression of cooperative civilization would develop
out of these revolutionary networks.

In the years before his departure for Japan, Mechnikov had formed close ties with
a number of former shishi, revolutionary samurai of the Ishin who had been sent to
Europe to learn about the outside world. His self-identification as a wounded veteran
of Garibaldi’s war in Italy, graphically illustrated by his pronounced limp and wooden
heel, led his Japanese acquaintances to identify him as an internationalist and a
populist revolutionary.27 Mechnikov’s relationships with the shishi were established
on an interpersonal and unofficial basis. He recalled, “I conducted all my agreements
with Japanese in Europe exclusively in verbal fashion, outside of any official setting,
and without any witnesses.”28 He was secretly given a private invitation to go to Japan
to spend time with Saigo៮ Takamori, a famous shishi who had become a charismatic
leader in the new Meiji government. Mechnikov was assigned to work personally
under Saigo៮ , who would serve as his sole supervisor and patron. As part of the in-
vitation, which was facilitated through Saigo៮ ’s own family network, Saigo៮ Takamori’s
younger brother, Saigo៮ Tsugumichi, invited Mechnikov to live with him in his Tokyo
home during the latter’s stay in Japan.29
At the time that he extended the invitation to Mechnikov, Saigo៮ Takamori had
been protesting the Meiji leadership’s undignified bureaucratic assaults on the sam-
urai as excessively harsh, particularly their policies toward the already poor country
samurai. Saigo៮ claimed that by attacking the warrior class that had fueled the spirit
of the revolution and by implementing overly ambitious Westernization projects
through greater centralization of the state bureaucracy, the Meiji leaders had be-
trayed the idealist motives at the root of the Ishin. In an attempt to revive a sense
of spiritual dignity and idealism among Japan’s future leaders, Saigo៮ created a spe-
cial school in Tokyo, the Shugijuku, to simultaneously develop warrior ethics and
teach foreign knowledge. He used the annual stipend he was awarded for his lead-
ership in the Ishin to found the school. The Shugijuku in this sense, then, was a
linkage point between the national future and those who had died in the revolu-
tionary past. Saigo៮ declared in its charter that there could be no more appropriate
way to use his stipend than to support a school to honor the memory of the dead,
and to help the living prepare to follow their noble example.30 As an accomplished
revolutionary, Mechnikov was invited to serve as director of the Shugijuku as part
of Saigo៮ ’s project to revitalize the spirit of the Ishin.
Mechnikov, in turn, described Saigo៮ as a populist revolutionary leader who was
one of the common people. He recalled that Saigo៮ had given up his immense power
to voice his opposition to the policies of the Meiji government in order to adopt a
27 Kido Takayoshi, Kido Takayoshi nikki, vol. 2: 1871–1874 (Tokyo, 1983), 337.
29 Ibid., 44 – 45.
30 Ibid., 28. Saigo៮ Takamori, Saigo៮ Takamori zenshu៮ , 6 vols. (Tokyo, 1976–1980), 3: 333.

110 Sho Konishi
simple agrarian lifestyle.31 Saigo៮ ’s turn to an agricultural way of life as an expression

of his beliefs seemed to fit with Mechnikov’s own expectations of revolutionary lead-
ership rooted in democratic and populist ideals. In fact, Saigo៮ resigned from the
Meiji government just before Mechnikov arrived in Japan, and the Shugijuku was
closed. Saigo៮ would be propelled to the head of the infamous Satsuma Rebellion,
in which he led forty thousand troops to overthrow the Meiji government soon after

Mechnikov’s arrival.
Instead, Mechnikov would fulfill his assignment to inspire revolutionary idealism
among his students as an instructor of Russian at the Tokyo School of Foreign Lan-
guages (TSFL), a major center for Russian language training.32 As the primary in-
structor for upper-level courses, he established a program that taught history from
below and the Russian literary traditions of polemicism, satire, and critical realism,
a curriculum that would be maintained for years thereafter by fellow Russian rev-
olutionaries who came to teach at the school.33 After Mechnikov’s arrival, the pro-
gram became an autonomous space within the university that some students iden-
tified with as an expression of revolutionary idealism. Many students came to view
this space as separate from the state and its nation-building projects.
While an instructor at TSFL, Mechnikov developed extensive relationships with
people whom he described as “the most important leaders of the Japanese pro-
gressive movement.”34 They were leaders of the Freedom and People’s Rights Move-
ment for social equality and popular political participation, which was gaining mo-
mentum throughout Japan. Within a few years of Mechnikov’s departure from
Japan, activists in the movement would organize almost two hundred political so-
cieties across the country. One of the most prominent of those with whom Mechnikov
established a relationship was the theoretical leader of the movement, Nakae
Cho៮ min, then president of TSFL.
In their private interactions with Mechnikov, the activists provided him with a
unique source of knowledge about their movement. As he himself would acknowl-
edge, much of his understanding of Ishin Japan depended on both his direct ob-
servations and his private relationships with a wide range of Japanese friends and
acquaintances from all walks of life. His interpretation of the Ishin thus would come
as much from his acquaintances as from his own expectations and personal expe-
riences. Mechnikov described the extraordinary care his Japanese friends took to
guide him in developing his knowledge of Ishin Japan: “I affectionately guarded [my
acquaintances] every day and exploited them unscrupulously for the profit of my
studies.”35 His interaction with Japanese from a nonhierarchical perspective shaped
31 Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 44 – 45. The scholarship on Saigo ៮ has neglected this aspect of his
thoughts and activities between 1873 and 1877. Scholars have treated Saigo៮ during this period as either
preparing for civil war or retiring completely. Charles L. Yates suggests that his interest in adopting an
agrarian lifestyle at this time appears to have been quite serious. Yates, Saigo៮ Takamori: The Man behind
the Myth (London, 1995).
32 Peter Berton, Paul Langer, and Rodger Swearingen, Japanese Training and Research in the Russian
Field (Los Angeles, 1956), 16.

33 Thanks to the staff at the Municipal Archive of Hokkaido for helping me to photograph Kojima
Kurataro’s class notes of Mechnikov’s lectures held in the Kojima Kurataro Collection.
34 Mechnikov letter to Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin, in Saltykov-Shchedrin, Literaturnoe
nasledstvo, 102 vols. (Moscow, 1931–2000), 13–14: 361–362.

35 Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 32–34, and Lev Mechnikov, L’Empire Japonaise: Pays-Peuple-His-
toire (Geneva, 1878), iv.

his knowledge of the event as a revolution from within, and informed him of the
corresponding expectations among many in Japan, rooted in revolutionary ideals, for
equality and cooperation on the individual, societal, and international levels. In this
way, Mechnikov’s original idea of revoliutsiia, rooted in the claims of Russian pop-
ulism, fused with the actualities of the Ishin itself and was further shaped by the
understanding of ishin among those who had led or experienced it.

In turn, the TSFL Russian program would impart knowledge about the Russian
revolutionary movement to the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. After
Mechnikov assumed the directorship of the program, a series of former populist
prisoners and political exiles from Russia took teaching positions there.36 Sixty-five
books on Russian populism were published in Japan in 1881–1883 alone, and news-
papers were filled with reports about the revolutionary activities in Russia.37 Among
the bestselling books in Japan during this period was an account of the Russian
revolutionary movement written by Mechnikov’s close friend Sergei Stepniak that
had been translated for those involved with the movement in Japan. A student of
Mechnikov’s, Muramatsu Aizo៮ , would lead one of the most infamous incidents of
the movement, the Iida Uprising.38 Participants linked their own movement to res-
urrect the perceived unfulfilled promises for equality in the Ishin with the revolu-
tionary movement in Russia.
Saigo៮ ’s concern with restoring the spirit of the Ishin had, by virtue of his inviting
a Russian revolutionary to Japan, given the movement a new global meaning for
human progress and civilization. In both the physical interactions between Russian
and Japanese radicals and the resulting coalescing of meanings, ishin met revoliutsiia.
This was a novel meeting that arose in the particular historical juncture of the Meiji
Ishin and the Russian revolutionary movement in the wider world context. It
emerged beyond the imagined divide between a backward and traditional Orient and
a progressive and civilized West.
MECHNIKOV’S FIRST DAYS IN JAPAN were an unsettling encounter with total instability.
He heard reports everywhere about an outbreak of uprisings in the south. A number
of Ishin leaders with whom he had associated in Switzerland were involved. His
patron, Saigo៮ , had resigned from his post and left Tokyo.39 “My situation was made
all the more desperate by my complete lack of knowledge, my inability to orient
myself,” Mechnikov wrote of the chaos he found in Japan.40 What he knew about
36 Watanabe Masaji, a professor of Russian at Tokyo University of Foreign Languages (formerly
TSFL), documents the “populist spirit” that continued at the school after Mechnikov in “Mechinikofu
to Muramatsu Aizo៮ ,” in Hara Teruyuki and Togawa Tsuguo, eds., Surabu to nihon (Tokyo, 1995), 133–
156. Andrei Kolenko, for example, who taught at TSFL for more than six years, had been imprisoned
and exiled for his political activities. In his recitation class, students were asked to memorize and recite
poems subversive of the existing sociopolitical establishment, often reflecting radical populist thought
or recalling the life of the political exile. Other political émigrés who taught in TSFL’s Russian program
were S. Iu. Gotskii-Danilovich, Nikolai Gray, and Aleksandr Stepanovich Bogomolov. Kokuritsu kobun-
roku monbusho no bu, March 3, Meiji 9 (1876), 2A-25-1768; December 11, Meiji 9 (1876).
37 Asukai Masamichi, “Roshia dai ichiji kakumei to Ko ៮ toku Shu៮ sui,” Shiso៮ 520 (October 1967): 1328.
38 Watanabe, “Mechinikofu to Muramatsu Aizo ៮ .”
39 Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 42– 47.
40 Ibid., 45.

112 Sho Konishi
FIGURE 1: Lev Mechnikov in samurai dress. Photograph courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Fed-
eration. An examination of Mechnikov’s encounter with Ishin Japan suggests that he identified with Ishin
samurai not as relics of Oriental difference, but as cohorts for revolutionary change.

the Ishin and Japanese history from reading European books and journals was not
enough to prepare him for what he witnessed and experienced in Japan. Mechnikov
would be led to describe the Ishin as a conflict-ridden and multilayered experience,
full of contradictions and competing claims about its meaning for Japan’s future. Out
of these observations would come his particular fascination with what he saw as the
social foundation for a revolution from within, the nature of which seemed to be the

opposite of the path of centralization and bureaucratization taken by Japanese po-
litical leaders.41
Mechnikov viewed Japan’s revolution as offering the West a model for radical
social reform. He observed the institutional and social elimination of hierarchical
class structures and the creation of vast arenas of social mobility for the common
people. He further noted that access to new knowledge had opened up on a vast
scale.42 After traveling across Japan, staying at rural homes and visiting plebeian
quarters of the cities, as well as factories and the Ashio copper mine, he wrote, “It
is impossible not to be surprised at her unusual transformation. This is a complete
and radical revolution, the kind we know only from history . . . Not a single branch
of social and political life has remained untouched in this revolution.”43
Mechnikov’s discussions of the historical developments within Japan that had led
up to the Ishin were remarkably detailed. He noted that commentators had overly
exaggerated the influence of American and European interference in Japanese af-
fairs. He also refuted the testimonies of other foreign witnesses who explained the
Ishin as simply a reactionary uprising against trade agreements with foreigners.
Mechnikov believed that the Ishin had arisen out of cumulative domestic dissatis-
faction and strife and was only exacerbated by the foreign presence.44 It was a con-
scious response from a broad-based constituency to the need for progressive, liberal
reforms, which they believed would be instituted with the overthrow of the Tokugawa
government. The so-called patriots, or shishi, who emerged from the educated class
had defined their goal as overthrowing the shogunate and the entire political order
that came with it. Mechnikov told his readers that the shishi came from a variety of
economic backgrounds, and could be identified mainly by their literacy and edu-
cation. He pointed out that they had a shared social consciousness, and were willing
to give up their status for the betterment of society as a whole.45 The leaders of the
revolution were committed to “change and replace not only the political structures,
but also the very social essence of Japanese life.”46 The Ishin was thus not just about
41 For example, Mechnikov observed those Japanese elites “strolling down Parisian boulevards,” and
their leaders, “erecting progress and centralization according to the Napoleonic model,” as “having
hardly any understanding of the details and particularities of Japanese life.” Ibid., 31–32.
42 See, for example, ibid., 67–68; Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 76–77; Mechnikov,
“Era iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,” in Shcherbina, Iaponiia na perelome, 122–123.

43 Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 76.
44 Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 46– 47; Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 88.
45 In Élisée Reclus, ed., Nouvelle geographie universelle, 19 vols. (Paris, 1876–1894), 7: 847; Mech-
nikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 92–93. Japanese historians have since found that a considerable
number of revolutionaries in the Ishin came from wealthy upper-class farm families. See, for example,
Haga Noboru, Bakumatsu kokugaku no kenkyu៮ (Tokyo, 1978). On the development of Tokugawa-era
literary networks that would serve to unite radicals and revolutionaries across status lines, see Eiko
Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (New York,
2005).
46 Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 80.

114 Sho Konishi
a single leader seizing power, or a coup by self-serving elites, as most Westerners

believed; it was a social and political revolution with all the attendant demands and
expectations.
At the same time, the revolution necessitated successful social evolution. Japan’s
arrival on the stage of world civilization was not an arbitrary act or a historical ac-
cident, but “an unavoidable result of Japanese life itself.”47 Throughout his various
៮ shio

writings about the Ishin, for example, Mechnikov repeatedly drew upon O
Heihachiro’s 1837 “democratic” uprising, as he called it, as a symbolic action that
disclosed the accumulation of intellectual developments over the course of the To-
kugawa period.48 It was the result not of a collision between a primitive, isolated
society and an advanced civilization, he said, but of historical developments within
Japan that had been under way for centuries.
Mechnikov discovered that even amid tremendous political and social chaos, the
common people were able to go about their daily lives without direction from above.
He noted that physical laborers in Japan had a remarkably developed consciousness
of social participation, equal to that in other sectors of society. One of his strongest
impressions was of the proud and confident boatmen who had greeted his ship when
it first arrived. They were “brilliantly tattooed and stately figures, whose naked bod-
ies were covered with bright white, blue, and red images of female faces, dragons,
flowers, fossilized in fantastic arabesques.”49 Body tattoos or irezumi had become
popular in the seventeenth century among laborers. Usually telling a story through
their multicolored designs, they were a response to Tokugawa laws that dictated
clothing styles on the basis of class. Laborers who wanted to express uniqueness often
shed their government-sanctioned commoners’ garb and instead wore nothing at
all—except for the tattoos that covered their bodies.50 Mechnikov found in the tat-
toos an expression of wit, aesthetic taste, and social pride. He conveyed to his readers
that these people were not the legendary repressed and cowering dark masses of
Oriental despotism, but vocal commoners, enthusiastic individuals with pride in their
labor for society. Mechnikov seemed to have stumbled upon the bright masses of
revolution.51
For Mechnikov, the Ishin was the revolution of the century. That social revolution
was the result of cumulative social and intellectual evolution was further evidenced
by the voluntary cooperative associations that he encountered across Japan. He
found urban groups of volunteers who worked from their home regions as part of
an active network involved with mutual aid. In this voluntary support system, Mech-
47 Mechnikov, “Era iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,” 116–117, 134.
48 Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 86; Mechnikov, “Era iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,”
117.
Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 37.
49
Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 55–56. Meanwhile, American and British travelers to
50
Japan largely saw the tattoos as an exotic, savage custom reminiscent of an uncivilized, if idealized,
Nature. Christine M. E. Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (Seattle, Wash.,
2004), 142–158.
51 This view of a developed social and political consciousness among commoners during this period
is echoed in more recent studies of commoners’ participation in the Freedom and People’s Rights Move-
ment. Irokawa Daikichi and Roger Bowen attribute a widespread political consciousness and desire for
social and political equality to substantial popular organization and participation in the movement.
Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J., 1984); Roger Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy
in Meiji Japan (Berkeley, Calif., 1980).

FIGURE 2: Tattooed laborer. Illustration for the entry on Japan in Reclus, ed., Nouvelle geographie universelle,
7: 769, which relied heavily on Mechnikov’s contribution.
nikov saw the rootedness of cooperative practice in everyday existence. He observed

that when the new Meiji government failed to provide institutional support for the
demographic shift to urban centers, the economy depended on these informal local
networks to help those in need. Students attending schools far from home benefited
from voluntary cooperative associations back in their hometowns, which pooled vil-

116 Sho Konishi
lagers’ money to help pay for their studies. The expressions of mutual aid that Mech-
nikov saw as integral to the revolutionary emergence of modern Japan were rooted
in Tokugawa intellectual traditions.52
Mutual aid as a progressive tendency in Ishin Japan was indicated by people’s
tremendous will to learn and to actively acquire new knowledge and techniques from
others. The act of learning was thus not an expression of inferiority in relation to

the object of study, but an indication of progressiveness of thought. Mechnikov de-
scribed the active, bold, selective acquisition of European methods and ideas as
evincing a cooperative ethic that, through a willingness to learn from the outside
world and to establish mutually beneficial relations with others, was instrumental for
civilizational progress. He emphasized that acquiring knowledge was a conscious act
that the learner selectively manipulated as a tool for national well-being, rather than
an inevitable divine flow of reason from civilized to uncivilized, West to East.53 In-
stead of serving as a model for Westernization, Ishin Japan’s rapid modernization
offered an example of selective development in which scientific, technical, and in-
tellectual advancements were rooted in cooperative values.54
A number of Mechnikov’s observations echoed interpretations of the Ishin then
circulating among Japanese from commoners to intellectuals. Historian Irokawa
Daikichi claims that millions of commoners believed that the Ishin was a revolution
from within that would negate all divisions, achieve equality for all classes, and create
a new world order that would include equality among nations.55 Moreover, the idea
of long-term evolution appears to have been circulating widely even among Japanese
commoners at the time that Mechnikov was in Japan. Ishin-era commoners studied
the history of political protests in Tokugawa Japan, focusing on the same O ៮ shio
uprising that Mechnikov cited in his writings. Like Mechnikov, they used such in-
cidents to question the assumption that the concept of popular rights was a recent
import from the West.56
Furthermore, Japanese commoners themselves used the language of mutual aid
to give moral meaning to the Ishin. A widely circulated pamphlet on international
commerce published in 1868 by the Osaka merchant Kato៮ Sukeichi gave moral mean-
ing to the practices of merchants, formerly the lowest class in the Tokugawa social
order, by encouraging international trade as an expression of mutual aid. The
pamphlet used a commonsense ethical vocabulary shared by many in Japan at the
52 Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 67–68. For suggestive essays on cooperatives within the Japanese
context, see Tetsuo Najita, “Political Economy in Thought and Practice among Commoners in Nine-
teenth Century Japan,” The Japan Foundation Newsletter 16, no. 3 (1988):12–18; and Najita, “Past in
Present: Danpenteki Gensetsu to Sengo Seishinshi,” The Journal of Pacific Asia 3 (1996): 3–32.
53 See, for example, Mechnikov, “Era iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,” 108; Mechnikov, “Era pro-
sveshcheniia Iaponiia,” 102–103.

54 Mechnikov’s observations reflected widespread practices of cooperatist self-organization among
commoners. Cooperatives expanded in a variety of forms following industrialization in Japan. Every

Japanese town and village had some type of cooperative association. In 1923, for example, 14,000 co-
operatives existed in Japan, with almost 3 million members nationwide. In 1935 in Hokkaido, 40.7 per-
cent of all households were members of a cooperative, while in the Far Eastern Mountain region, 83.2
percent of all households were in cooperatives. Recognizing the role of cooperatives in the economy,
the Japanese government actively supported them. Galen M. Fisher, “The Cooperative Movement in
Japan,” Pacific Affairs 11, no. 4 (December 1938): 478, 483– 484.
55 Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, 60.
56 Ibid., 48.

time to explain the moral value of international commerce.57 For Kato៮ , trade was
a reciprocal provision (oginau) of goods that expressed mutual aid (ai tasukeau) as
the truth or essential principle of human action (hito tarino do៮ ri ).58 To trade surplus
goods was to provide “strangers with what they have a need for, and thus to fulfill
the duty of benevolence,” Kato៮ wrote.59 Other countries were described as partners
in mutual assistance through economic exchange. In this way, Kato៮ ’s original text

conveyed neither a sense of the foreignness of international trade nor the superiority
of the West. The references in the treatise to language from an 1868 Ishin document
called the Charter Oath reflected one interpretation of the Ishin as an ongoing rev-
olutionary experience imbued with moral promise for the new sociopolitical order.60
Kato៮ thereby framed mutual aid as a means to fulfill the Ishin’s promise of social
equity.
A comparison of two translations from this Ishin-period text, one into Russian
by Mechnikov and the other into English by the prominent British Japanologist Lord
William George Aston, shows how they clarified the competing directions of progress
that Japan’s opening implied and thereby gave added meaning to the text. Mech-
nikov emphasized mutual aid throughout his translation as a basis for Japan’s post-
revolutionary development independent of the Western model of capitalism. Aston,
on the other hand, interpreted the text as Kato៮ ’s assertion that Japan had embarked
on a path to join the community of civilized capitalist nation-states as an expression
of a universal law of progress. Both Aston and Mechnikov appear to have consci-
entiously attempted to produce translations that were as true to the original as pos-
sible. Yet through only slight variations in their choice of words, they produced very
different texts on the historical meaning of kaikoku.
Meaningful contrasts can be found throughout their translations, as can a sense
of the different futures that the two men projected. For example, Aston translated
one particular passage as follows:
Our Mikado has become convinced of the necessity of upholding the policy of commercial
relations, and has caused our friendly intercourse and trade with foreign countries to be
established on a liberal scale. This is the only course by which we can take our place in the
community of nations, and remain true to natural principles of truth and justice.61
According to this version, “natural principles of truth and justice” can be

achieved only by joining the community of nation-states, and by participating in
capitalist interactions with the West. Free trade was to be conducted within the
57 Kato៮ Sukeichi, Ko៮ eki kokoro e gusa (n.p., 1868). Although Kato៮ ’s pamphlet circulated widely at
the time of its publication, surprisingly little is known about Kato៮ himself. A local Yokohama history
study group uncovered some details about his earlier life, Kaiko៮ eno bakushin ryochu៮ nikki (Yokohama,
1996), but further study on him is overdue.
58 Kato៮ , Ko៮ eki kokoro e gusa, 4.
59 Ibid., 5–6.
60 The Charter Oath, a document issued to the public in the name of the emperor in 1868, promised
a series of revolutionary changes. The Oath would become a touchstone for much of the political con-
tention in Japan in following decades. By borrowing language from it, Kato៮ gave his discussion the weight
of revolutionary meaning associated with the Ishin document. His text emphasized that Japan’s opening
should be in harmony with the just laws of nature, language reminiscent of the Charter Oath. Inter-
national trade was thus to be practiced in a consciously moral manner as an expression of mutual aid,
in accordance with the perceived promises of the Ishin. Aston and Mechnikov’s translations can be seen
as competing interpretations of the term “laws of nature” in revolutionary Japan.
61 W. G. Aston, “Remarks on Commerce by Kato ៮ Sukeichi,” The Phoenix 20 (February 1872): 118.

118 Sho Konishi
limited community of civilized nation-states and “on a liberal scale.” This referred
to the Western model of the liberal state as the protector of the liberal values of
freedom of the individual and the rights of private property. For Aston, who would
serve in British consular offices in Japan for twenty-three years and who would be-
come the first British consul general in Korea, the liberal state of the West repre-
sented the basic unit for peace and order in the international arena. In its main-

tenance of free trade through support of international law and preservation of
private property, the Western political model was the embodiment of “natural” (and
therefore universal, or “true”) principles of liberty and “justice.”62
Mechnikov translated the same passage thus:
Our Mikado has become convinced of the necessity to maintain friendly relations with them;
only in this way can we take our proper place in the ranks of other nations, without backing
down from the principle of mutual aid and equity.63
This version posed the alternative phrase “mutual aid and equity” as the principles
of truth and justice that needed to be defended, despite Japan’s participation in the
Western community of nation-states. This implied that the international community
of Western nation-states and the political and economic code of behavior on which
that community depended were neither natural nor just. In the process of clarifying
for his Russian readers Kato៮ ’s departure from Western understandings of interna-
tional trade and relations, Mechnikov had given Kato៮ ’s text added polemical mean-
ing.
In Aston’s version, moreover, free trade by virtue of its existence naturally leads
to the mutual benefit and prosperity of everyone involved.64 In Mechnikov’s version,
trade is beneficial for the parties involved only “if it is done according to the demands
of fairness and mutual aid.”65 Mutual aid was something to be consciously achieved
and practiced, not simply a natural outcome of capitalism.
Aston’s translation conveyed the inevitability of Japan’s opening up to capitalism
and the modernity of the West. For the most part, his language reflects the inter-
pretation of kaikoku and Ishin that we still use today. Mechnikov removed the in-
evitability of merging with the West’s modernity, and put the focus and meaning of
future development in another arena altogether.
Out of the above dialectical interaction of knowledge with experience, expec-
tation, and transnational contact, Mechnikov came to see the Ishin as a revolutionary
fulfillment and model for his developing vision of human progress.66 The Ishin
62 On the invention of the “state of nature” and its influence on the practice and idea of the in-
ternational in the West, see Jahn, The Cultural Construction of International Relations.
63 Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 99; my emphasis.
64 Aston translated, “At present, there is every reason to believe that any petition asking permission
to form companies after the European model, will, if presented to the proper authorities, be favorably
received as a proposal eminently conducive to the prosperity of the people of Japan. There is nothing
to prevent such associations from being durably established.” Aston, “Remarks,” 119.
65 Mechnikov translated it as follows: “Now, if someone requests from the government permission
to establish trade associations based on the European model, the government not only will not refuse,
but will be very pleased. Because the time has come when Japan must have its own system of durable
associations, founded on the principles of mutual aid and equity. Only in this way can our commercial
development expand.” Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 99–100; my emphasis.
66 Russian scholars on Mechnikov have asserted, in contrast, that Mechnikov viewed the Ishin as
an unfinished bourgeois revolution. See, for example, K. S. Kartasheva, Dorogi L’va Mechnikova (Mos-

emerged for him as an idea and relative accomplishment of a nonhierarchical, co-

operative society, and by virtue of its location in Asia, opened up the possibility for
its realization on a global scale. For Mechnikov, the notion of revolution was now
inseparable from social evolution.

MECHNIKOV RETURNED TO SWITZERLAND in 1876 with an intellectual key that would
open the door to a new era, a beginning for a new human history. He conveyed the
progressiveness of the revolution in Japan in books and several series of articles for
influential journals in Russia and Europe during the 1870s and 1880s. With the pub-
lication of his historical and ethnographical studies, L’Empire Japonais, and his con-
tribution to the chapters on Japan and China in Nouvelle geographie universelle, an
authoritative encyclopedia on world geography compiled by the anarchist theorist
Élisée Reclus, he became recognized as one of the top Japanologists in Europe.67
Simultaneously, Mechnikov would provide an intellectual foundation for the de-
velopment of one of the principal currents of modern anarchist thought. In the late
1870s and 1880s, leading anarchists spoke of evolution in Social Darwinist terms.
Reclus defined evolution for those in the West as the rising consciousness among
the masses of the need for solidarity to overthrow the ruling classes in a violent
struggle.68 Viewing Western Europe as at the highest level of social evolution, Reclus
defined progress for the rest of the world as its inevitable Europeanization and ho-
mogenization.69 At the time, anarchism was synonymous with violence and terrorism,
used by elites in an attempt to stir the masses to revolt. Peter Kropotkin and Reclus
supported terrorist acts of “propaganda by the deed” and popular expropriation of
property by force.
Mechnikov then shifted the focus of anarchism to a distinct vision of universal
human evolutionary development. His contributions to anarchist theory, which have
been entirely forgotten in the history of the movement, were inseparable from his
interpretations of the Ishin.70 While revolution was for Mechnikov a real stepping-
stone toward anarchism, he envisioned a future cooperatist anarchist civilization that
would be hard-won and dependent on a highly developed culture at all levels of
society. That civilization would be achieved through the widespread development of
a cooperatist consciousness and corresponding social practices. After his encounter
with Ishin Japan, Mechnikov saw mutual aid as a natural law for civilizational
progress toward “anarchy.”
cow, 1981), 23; and A. A. Shcherbina, “L. I. Mechnikov—Sovremennik i issledovatel’ burzhuaznoi revo-
liutsii v Iaponii,” in Shcherbina, Iaponiia na perelome, 3–22.
67 Documentation of Mechnikov’s achievements in Japanology can be found in his personal archive
in GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, dd. 36 and 38. See also Reclus, Nouvelle geographie universelle, vol. 7, and Reclus,
“Predislovie Elize Rekliu,” in Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia i velikie istoricheskie reki: Stat’i, ed. V. I. Evdoki-
mov (Moscow, 1995), 219.
68 Mechnikov, “Revolution and Evolution,” The Contemporary Review, September 1886, 412– 437;
Reclus, Evolution et Révolution (Geneva, 1880, 1884; Paris, 1891).

69 Marie Fleming, The Geography of Freedom: The Odyssey of Élisée Reclus (Montreal, 1988), 180–
183.
70 Even works on Russian anarchism do not mention Mechnikov’s name. See, for example, Martin
A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago, 1976); Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism,
1872–1886 (Cambridge, 1989); Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (New York, 1978).

120 Sho Konishi
In 1789, French revolutionaries had envisioned that an enlightened government

would fashion a new nation on the basis of grand abstract ideals. According to this
idea, the rational being had the right to rule the less rational. Meanwhile, “philos-
opher kings” had no place in Mechnikov’s understanding of Ishin as the new vision
of the future world. Mechnikov believed that the “old order” lay in unexpected
places, in oneself and in one’s everyday interactions with others.71 The accomplish-

ments of a successful revolution ultimately depended on the mundane, on people’s
struggle for existence rather than self-sacrifice for abstract moral or political causes.
Instead of the grand illusions of utopia, Mechnikov looked to achievements in
everyday life. Change came about when people responded to necessity in ways that
fostered a cooperative ethic. Human agency arising out of the basic human needs
of daily life was for Mechnikov the source of progress for civilization.
Viewing Social Darwinism as merely the straitjacketing of Darwin’s discoveries
into a Malthusian framework of competition for limited resources, Mechnikov crit-
icized Marx and other contemporaries for echoing Malthus’s ideas in their views of
society.72 On this point, Mechnikov was part of a wider sphere of Russian intellectual
efforts, particularly in the scientific world, to discredit the Darwinist metaphor of
competitive survival of the fittest as the engine of natural evolution. This anti-Dar-
winian understanding was so common among Russian intellectuals that Daniel P.
Todes termed it a “national style” of reaction to Darwin.73 Russian biologists—
prominent among whom was Lev Mechnikov’s younger brother Ilya, who would go
on to win the Nobel Prize for his phagocytic theory of inflammation—sought a law
of evolutionary development in the animal and plant world that was fueled not by
competition and struggle, but by cooperation. At the time of Lev’s scholarship on
Japan, this effort was still limited to the fields of natural science. Lev integrated the
basic ideas of cooperation in evolutionary development among animals into his stud-
ies of culture, society, and civilizational development.74 It took his encounter with
the progressive revolutionary society of Ishin Japan for him to fashion an idea from
the Russian natural sciences into an anarchist law of human civilizational develop-
ment.
Mechnikov concluded that the cooperative aspect of human nature is stimulated
by the natural environment. The more difficult and dangerous that environment, the
greater the obstacles to survival, the more developed is human consciousness of the
need for social cooperation in order to overcome those obstacles. Survival of the
fittest, then, is accomplished not through individual or collective competition, but
in social cooperation to surmount the obstacles placed before us.75 Mechnikov wrote:
Nature gives its inhabitants a choice: death or solidarity. There are no other paths for hu-
manity. If humanity does not want to die, then people must unavoidably resort to solidarity
71 This understanding can be found, for example, in Mechnikov’s unpublished report to his sponsors
in Japan, “La France Sous Mac-Mahon.”

72 Mechnikov, “Revolution and Evolution,” 430.
73 Daniel P. Todes, “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought,
1859–1917,” Isis 78, no. 4 (December 1987): 538.

74 Mechnikov, “Revolution and Evolution”; Mechnikov, “Shkola bor’by v sotsiologii,” in Mechnikov,
Tsivilizatsiia, 186–192; Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, 238–253. Mechnikov refers to ichthyologist K. F.

Kessler’s landmark talk on the “law of mutual aid” in nature, published as “O zakone vziamnoi po-
moshchi,” Trudy Sankt-Peterburgskogo Obshchestva Estestvoipytatelei 2, no. 1 (1880): 124 –127.
75 Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, 273–282.

and mutual, collective work . . . This is the culmination of the great law of progress and the
law of the successful development of human civilization.76
In this way of thinking, human civilization was not attained by eliminating the weak
to enrich the strong. Mechnikov redefined culture as human achievements gained
through mutual aid.
Mechnikov had observed in Japan that a collaborative response to the challenges

of nature provided a major impetus for cultural and social creativity. As he described
it, the mountain ranges divided the island nation into so many different communities
that there was wide linguistic variety across the different regions, to the point that
the language spoken in one area could not be understood elsewhere. Those divisions
of the island had also forced its inhabitants to develop a political order that for
millennia had consisted largely of small, autonomous federations. In addition, the
ruthlessness and violence of the ocean had compelled the people to develop a highly
cooperative and therefore highly developed culture.77
Mutual aid as a factor of modern civilizational development was dependent on
one’s capacity to express multiple talents and thereby to play multiple roles in society.
There were an infinite number of co-actors, and thus there were infinite possibilities
for mutual gain. As a society advanced over time, the spheres in which mutual aid
could be practiced became ever broader. Individual uniqueness was maintained in
the very act of cooperation, as cooperation itself required the incorporation of var-
ious capabilities and thoughts to be successful. In Mechnikov’s thinking, an indi-
vidual is capable of cooperation only by maintaining her or his own unique talents.78
This view of human existence became the basis for his thoughts on freedom and
social equality. Freedom was achieved not by separating oneself from others, but
rather by doing for others. The individual merged with others in the act of doing,
but without the loss of individual uniqueness.
What was society for Mechnikov? He severely criticized what he termed the
“Struggle School” of sociology. Adherents of this view categorized societies as stable
entities defined by ethnicity, race, or class, ordered along a hierarchy of civilizational
development. In describing a never-ending competition for existence, they implied
the eventual disappearance of the weaker social elements. For Mechnikov, human
society and culture were continuously evolving expressions of the laws of nature.79
He divided the world into three spheres of activity—inorganic, biological, and so-
ciological—each with its own set of natural laws. The inorganic sphere consisted of
physical and chemical processes that could be explained by Isaac Newton’s law of
gravity. The biological sphere was defined by expressions of the desires for food and
sex, and incorporated the world of plant and animal individualities, which competed
and changed in accordance with Charles Darwin’s law of the struggle for existence.
Mechnikov further proposed a new, third sphere of development, which he termed
sociological. It incorporated the world of associations and networks, the world of
interests beyond the boundaries of individual biological existence. He defined this
76 Ibid., 443.
77 Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 29–31, 39.
78 Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, 85–99.
79 Mechnikov, “Shkola bor’by v sotsiologii.”

122 Sho Konishi
space as the sphere of cooperation, which included both human and nonhuman in-
teractions.80
According to Mechnikov, one sphere followed another in order of increasing
complexity and variety of processes and forms.81 In turn, he defined society as con-
sisting of complex and expanding varieties of cooperative associations and networks.
Society, therefore, did not exist as a stable, concrete entity or entities primordially

defined, but rather was constantly being formed and re-formed in a progression of
social life. This cooperative sphere contained expanding possibilities for associating
with and doing for others.
Finding the roots and possibilities of a progressive culture of mutual aid in Japan
had enabled Mechnikov to develop a global application for cooperatist civilizational
development. This essentially de-centered the world away from the West, and gave
centeredness to what had always been the referent of backwardness. The “West,”
then, suddenly became backward with respect to the demands of progress and civ-
ilization. Westerners arrived in Japan ill-prepared to meet the Meiji Ishin on co-
operative terms. Commodore Matthew Perry’s initiation of peaceful relations
through the persuasion of force was a barbaric introduction of Western “civiliza-
tion,” Mechnikov wrote.82
By reconstituting time, Mechnikov had reconceptualized the world order. How-
ever, while the West had lost its inherent superiority, a new problem emerged. Mech-
nikov had created another hierarchy by using Ishin Japan as a model of revolutionary
achievement. If time created a hierarchy based on its measurement of progress, na-
ture might be able to level out that hierarchy by creating difference, that is, different
paths to the attainment of cooperatist civilization colored but not determined by
human interactions with various environments.83 In nature lay the source of humans’
freedom to determine a society’s own path to cooperatist development beyond pri-
mordial identifications of ethnicity and race. Nature provided Mechnikov with the
possibility for a heterodoxy of developmental forms.
A dominant conception of nature and history in the West during the last decades
of the nineteenth century had come to embody a hierarchical order that Mechnikov
sought to overturn. He severely criticized racially ordered versions of Social Dar-
winism, which took an extreme form among eugenicists, who proposed that a new,
just social order could be built through the natural selection of a special race of
people.84 Mechnikov went beyond the assumptions of nineteenth-century anthro-
pologists who treated the different human races as different species, either in ac-
tuality or in essence.85 For him, ethnic or racial amalgamation in a society was a
progressive quality, which had characterized and contributed to the great civiliza-
tions of the past: “Generally speaking, the great historical civilizations were the re-
80Ibid., 164 –165.
81Ibid.
82 Mechnikov, L’Empire Japonaise, ii; Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 67–68; Mechnikov, “Era pro-
sveshcheniia Iaponii,” 76–77, Mechnikov, “Era iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,” 122–123.

83 Mechnikov differentiates his work from geographical determinism in Tsivilizatsiia, 262, 323.
84 Ibid., 290–310.
85 According to John S. Haller, Jr., Charles Darwin explained the phenomenon of races as “various
human types that ‘remained distinct for a long period.’ In such cases, the varieties might just as well be
called species.” Haller, “The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Racial Inferiority in the
Origin of Man Controversy,” American Anthropologist 72 (1970): 1319–1329.

sult of cooperative work by the most complex blend of different ethnological ele-
ments, a blend in which it was impossible to even roughly determine and sort out
the participation of ‘whites,’ ‘yellows,’ and ‘blacks.’ ”86 In his use of externally visible
traits to identify various peoples, Mechnikov applied nineteenth-century scientific
approaches to the study of racial origins. Yet his conclusion that racial and ethnic
mixing was natural and linked with cultural development departed from those tra-

ditions. Combining his observations of body structure, facial features, and skin color
with his hypotheses about the origins of Japanese cultural practices, Mechnikov iden-
tified people in Japan as being of diverse interethnic origins. For example, he noted
that the widespread predilection for public nudity in Japan was absent elsewhere in
East Asia: “In connection with several other indicators, this naturally led me to think
that the ancestors of this teeming crowd before me must have come not from the
Asian continent, but from the tropical islands, populated to this day with diverse and
little-studied interethnic Malay-Polynesian tribes.”87 He was further struck by the
diverse features and variety of skin tones that he saw.88 He concluded, “The Japanese
type represents much greater variation and fluctuation than the population type of
any European country, and this alone is sufficient to suggest that today’s Japanese
nation originated from multiple tribal elements.”89
Mechnikov also emphasized the influence of people’s surroundings on their be-
havior, which was in keeping with European trends in social science at the time.
However, his approach and conclusions differed from what Paul Rabinow has de-
scribed as the shared interest of “regulating the normal” among social scientists in
late-nineteenth-century France. According to Rabinow, French sociologists’ exam-
inations of people’s surroundings were a response to the need to provide a powerful
social glue for class antagonisms. The sociologists were ultimately seeking external
factors controllable by the state that could regulate the collective behavior of society,
whether of the French working class or its colonial peoples.90 Meanwhile, Mechnikov
emphasized human agency, people’s creative ability to overcome adverse surround-
ings. Rather than striving to create an environment in which human behavior could
be directly controlled, he endeavored to reveal how human beings use their wits and
strengths within a powerful natural environment to create positive conditions for the
collective good.91
He came to see the cultures of port cities and islands, where the powerful forces
of the ocean and the wrath of its storms made existence precarious, as likely sites
for advanced cooperative social development. This idea could be affirmed by study-
ing areas that were considered primitive or undeveloped. Between his departure
from Japan in 1876 and his death a decade later, Mechnikov traveled to island na-
tions and ports across the Pacific, including San Francisco, Hawaii, Thailand, In-
donesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Singapore, to further explore this idea.92
In his final, culminating work, Civilization and the Great Historical Rivers, Mech-
86 Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, 300.

87 Mechnikov, “Vospominaniia,” 54; Mechnikov, “Era prosveshcheniia Iaponii,” 103.
89 Ibid., 57.
90 Paul Rabinow, The French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago, 1989).
91 See, for example, Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, 262.
92 GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, d. 38; GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, d. 67, ll. 1–2.

124 Sho Konishi
nikov ordered space and time to reveal the general progression of human beings from
coerced cooperation among early civilizations, toward increasing levels of voluntary
mutual aid in the form of free associations. He observed that the achievement of
freedom had been integrally associated with human societies’ relationship with water
as the source both of life and of hardship and the struggle for survival. Only through
cooperation, not competition, were humans capable of surviving and controlling wa-

ter and thereby producing increasingly complex and advanced societies. While peo-
ples such as the Cossacks were undoubtedly free, Mechnikov wrote, they were lack-
ing in mutual cooperation, and thereby represented a primitive form of human
civilization.93 From the river civilizations to the civilizations on the seas, and finally
ending with oceanic civilizations, where people’s everyday lives revolved around the
most dangerous and inhumane bodies of water, humans developed more advanced,
cooperative societies. In this picture, while technology itself was not a measure of
human progress, it was a frequent companion to progress when used collaboratively
for survival.
Mechnikov’s new construct of civilizational progress incorporated existing ideals
predicated on a hierarchy of social competition and capitalism as only one stage in
the advancement of the world toward increasingly complex cooperative human re-
lations. He divided world history into three major periods, each characterized by a
corresponding sociopolitical type. The River Period, when the Euphrates and Tigris,
Indus and Ganges, Yellow River and Yangtze became the cradle of civilization, was
characterized by unprecedented despotism. The Sea Period began with the moment
of the appearance of cross-sea trade and the cultural interactions of the Greeks and
Romans. Oligarchy became the fundamental form of government among these so-
cieties. The most recent, modern period, the Ocean Period, began with the decla-
ration of human rights. Mechnikov divided the Ocean Period into two stages: the
Atlantic Era, which spanned the opening of America to the beginning of gold fever
in Alaska and Russia’s colonization of its eastern region; and the Global Epoch,
which was to be the period of greatest human cooperation and anarchy, given im-
petus by interactions across the Pacific toward the end of the nineteenth century and
the rise in internationalisms among people on the non-state level.94 Before his death
in 1888, Mechnikov had planned to write two more volumes of Civilization, as an
expansive exploration of the role of free associations in the formation of transoceanic
international society as the most advanced known stage of human development.95
Mechnikov took pains to overcome cultural, racial, and geographical determin-
ism by showing that the character and social composition of a civilization depended
to a considerable extent on how its people adjusted to their surroundings through
cultural production and social organization. In writing a nature-centered history that
focused on the influence of bodies of water on human societies, he broke through
the hierarchical divide between East and West, and made possible the development
of advanced free and cooperative associations in the West as well.96 The result of
this intellectual practice was that the West was no longer inherently behind Japan.
93Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, 259–262.
94Ibid., 258–259, 263–270, 325– 443.
95 Reclus, “Predislovie,” 221, and Mechnikov, Tsivilizatsiia, 446.
96 Mechnikov directly critiques the East-West paradigm of civilizational development in Tsivili-
zatsiia, 276–277.

This was a modernity that constructed a heterodoxy of developments and styles

aimed at the global attainment of cooperatism. In his theory of social evolution’s
identification of mutual aid as a principle of progress for human civilization, Mech-
nikov delegitimized the naturalization of competition and aggression that had un-
dergirded hierarchically arranged categories of race, class, gender, and nation under
Social Darwinism.

ALTHOUGH PROHIBITED IN RUSSIA, Mechnikov’s Civilization was widely read in Rus-
sian intellectual circles and beyond. Thinkers as classically far apart in their beliefs
as the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev, the “father of Russian Marxism” Georgii Ple-
khanov, and the anarchist Reclus strongly recommended it to the public. In fact, the
appearance of Civilization marked the moment when Russian radical thought shifted
from the populist belief in a divergent Russian path to the single path of world
development envisioned by Russian Marxists. Although Mechnikov had clearly op-
posed Marx, Plekhanov was intrigued by Mechnikov’s idea of universal development
beyond the East-West divide and used it to defend his crucial monist view of history
for the applicability of Marxism in Russia. Plekhanov wrote that Civilization an-
swered some of the most fundamental intellectual problems of the day.97 For him,
the work resolved the question of apparent inequality in world progress through a
scientific study of the effects of nature on social relations. In key essays defending
Marxism, he expressed his excitement about Mechnikov’s work, writing, “we urgently
advise our readers to acquaint themselves with it, or better yet, to study it.”98 It is
not surprising, then, that one of the only two works reviewed in the opening issue
of Plekhanov’s journal of Russian Marxism, Social Democrat, was Civilization.99
When Mechnikov died, Plekhanov wrote his obituary.100
Reclus, who committed himself to completing the unfinished Civilization after
Mechnikov’s death, wrote that the book “opened a new era in the history of science”
by “founding a truly scientific morality.”101 Kropotkin, who was becoming the leading
anarchist theorist, closely echoed Mechnikov’s ideas in his own work.102 He inte-
grated Mechnikov’s construct of cooperatist civilizational development as a basis for
97 James White, “Despotism and Anarchy: The Sociological Thought of L. I. Mechnikov,” Slavonic
and East European Studies 54, no. 3 (1976): 395– 411; Georgii Plekhanov, “O knige L. I. Mechnikova,”
in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, 24 vols. (Moscow, 1922–1928), 7: 15–28.
98 Plekhanov, “O knige L. I. Mechnikova,” 28. For Plekhanov’s references to Civilization in his
defense of Marxism, see also Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1974 –1981), 1:
415, 475, 610, 699; 2: 147, 651.
99 Plekhanov, “O knige L. I. Mechnikova.”
100 Asserting that Mechnikov was the best symbol of a generation, Plekhanov wrote in his obituary,
“Mechnikov was one of the most amazing and kindest representatives of that generation of the ’60s, to
whom our social life, our science, and our literature owe so much.” Plekhanov, “L. I. Mechnikov,” in
Sochineniia, 7: 327. Plekhanov was not the only one who thought of Mechnikov as the symbol of a
generation. Plekhanov and the other leaders of the Russian Marxist group called Liberation of Labor
contributed money to erect a memorial to Mechnikov in Switzerland. About 120 people, Russian émigrés
across Europe, made contributions toward its purchase. They also participated in the design of the
memorial, which was open to public vote among contributors. GARF, 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 86.
101 Reclus, “Predislovie,” 221.
102 Mechnikov worked with Reclus in organizing financial and political support for Kropotkin while
the latter was imprisoned in France, and he became a close friend of the Kropotkin family. Professionally,
the two corresponded about their mutual work in the anarchist movement. Hoover Institution of War,

126 Sho Konishi
his anarchist theories of ethical human progress. With dedication and respect, Kro-
potkin also worked to complete Civilization after Mechnikov died, at the very mo-
ment when he began to “move beyond criticism of the present order to a more de-
tailed consideration of the future society.”103 Kropotkin even worked on a biography
of Mechnikov, whom he called “the purest, most beautiful expression” of the Russian
populist movement, a sentiment that was shared by many in the Russian émigré

community.104 According to letters to Kropotkin from Mechnikov’s wife, Ol’ga, the
biography was going to devote considerable space to Mechnikov’s experiences in and
scholarship on Japan.105 It was not a coincidence that Kropotkin simultaneously
dedicated himself to writing his famous anarchist study Mutual Aid, which was pub-
lished in various forms beginning in 1890.106 In it Kropotkin essentially echoed
Mechnikov in identifying mutual aid as the engine of human progress and civiliza-
tion. Like Mechnikov, he characterized the Darwinian “struggle for existence”
among human beings as dependent on mutual assistance, not competition, for suc-
cess. Further, he viewed sociability as a basic human instinct. These key elements
of a scientifically based ethical anarchism that incorporated a vision of civilizational
development would give so-called Kropotkinism in Japan a wide appeal.
Cooperatist anarchism would cut across the grain of Japanese society in the first
quarter of the twentieth century, making it a virtual phenomenon in intellectual life.
Even celebrity writer Arishima Takeo expressed this broader public sentiment in
1905 by calling for a “cleansing and rectification of history” through cooperatist
anarchism.107 A graduate of elite American universities, Arishima had been a dis-
ciple of Nitobe Inazo before his conversion to cooperatist anarchism. Nitobe has long
been considered the foremost Japanese representative of “internationalism” and
Western cosmopolitanism. That Nitobe served both as the leading professor of col-
onization theory at Tokyo Imperial University and as under secretary general of the
League of Nations reflects well this notion of peace and world order.
Converting to a new world order and redefined internationalism, Arishima’s co-
operatist anarchist turn appeared complete when his historicity was expressed in his
diary: “I hope that America will wake from the slumber of ancient tradition and
further the progress of universal brotherhood. The state must go.”108 Here, the pro-
Revolution and Peace Archives, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Box 183, #34, ll. 6–9; GARF, f. 1129, op.
3, ed. khr. 285, ll. 1–2; GARF, f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 1747, ll. 1–15.
103 Miller, Kropotkin, 192.
104 GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 9, l. 18.
105 GARF, f. 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 9.
106 When Mechnikov died, Kropotkin asked Mechnikov’s family to keep him in mind if they wanted
someone to sort through the deceased’s papers and complete his unfinished writings, the most important
of which was Civilization. Kropotkin was at the time part of the central committee overseeing the erection
of Mechnikov’s memorial. Although Kropotkin’s biography of Mechnikov was apparently never pub-
lished, he worked seriously on it for quite some time. Mechnikov’s wife, Olga, even moved from her home
in Switzerland to live at the Kropotkins’ home just to help him write it. GARF, f. 1129, op. 3, ed. khr.
285, 286; GARF, 6753, op. 1, ed. khr. 9. It was also during this time that Kropotkin was working on the
earliest drafts of Mutual Aid. The earliest appearance of a part of the work was an 1890 article entitled
“Mutual Aid among Animals,” Nineteenth Century 28 (1890): 337–354, 699–719. However, the fully
developed work on civilizational progress that we now know as Mutual Aid did not appear until 1902.
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London, 1902).
107 Arishima Takeo, “Rokoku kakumeito ៮ no ro៮ jo,” Mainichi shimbun, April 5–10, 1905.
108 Arishima Takeo, Arishima Takeo zenshu ៮ , 16 vols. (Tokyo, 1979–1988), 9: 5.

gressive America that he had originally set out to study in order to link Japan to the
wider world via Western cosmopolitanism was sharply flipped upside down. The
reconfiguration of time had transformed the spatial world around Arishima, in the
process altering his subjective belonging to that world. Arishima never opposed “the
West” or “America” per se, but rather the modernity in which he believed that many
Americans located themselves. In fact, probably no school of thought came closer

to providing an intellectual basis for a peaceful relationship with America than did
cooperatist anarchism. In response to the Russo-Japanese War, Arishima and many
others helped to form the non-war movement, in reference to which historian Hyman
Kublin suggested that Japanese and Russians during this period provide us with one
of the most successful and unique cases of antimilitarism in a time of war in modern
history.109
Through an expansion of his ties with Japanese radicals, Mechnikov’s construct
of cooperatist progress and civilization was reconfigured in Japan as a way to link
participants to the wider world through the vision of cooperatist anarchism. Ko៮ toku
Shu៮ sui, a leading figure in the non-war movement and a disciple of Freedom and
People’s Rights leader Nakae Cho៮ min, initiated a personal correspondence with
Kropotkin following the war. Ko៮ toku introduced a number of Kropotkin’s works into
Japan, translating them himself. He became one of the country’s most prominent
anarchist thinkers. While there were echoes of Mechnikov and Cho៮ min’s ties in the
bond that developed between Kropotkin and Ko៮ toku, none of them knew about their
mutual transnational connections. Together they formed a crucial link in an expand-
ing interlocking network, an epistemic organ of cooperatist anarchism and its tem-
poral belonging that transcended racial and national boundaries.
Ko៮ toku found that the network community provided the best means to distribute
his writings and translations of Kropotkin’s works even before they had been made
officially available to the public. While both men’s works were banned for the most
part, people were still able to widely access them. In fact, the network of cooperatist
anarchists across Japan functioned so well that when Ko៮ toku translated a work by
Kropotkin, his tactic for getting it out to as many people as possible was first to sell
the thousands of copies that he had printed out via personal networks, and then to
sell it through bookstores after it had already circulated nationwide. As Ko៮ toku ex-
pressed in his private correspondence to Kropotkin in 1908, “The police, of course,
will try to seize all copies. But too late!”110 Numerous intellectuals, even in remote
Hokkaido, were able to obtain Ko៮ toku’s translations.111 In this way, prohibited
knowledge traveled both within and across national boundaries, concretizing net-
works in the process.112 With the ideas of cooperatist anarchism circulating through
a variety of movements and interest groups, no institution existed to coordinate the
members of this larger community. Informal interlocking networks were able to or-
109 Hyman Kublin, “The Japanese Socialists and the Russo-Japanese War,” The Journal of Modern
History 21 (March–December 1950): 322–323.

110 GARF, Kropotkin P. A. Collection, f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 1418, ll. 18–19. Letter from Ko៮ toku,
December 26, 1908.
111 GARF, Kropotkin P. A. Collection, f. 1129, op. 2, ed. khr. 1418, l. 9. Letter from Ko ៮ toku to
Kropotkin, May 14, 1907.
112 The context is unique in this discourse, but the way in which they circulated knowledge via net-
works is not. Book lending practices during the Edo period, for example, circulated a tremendous
amount of information quickly.

128 Sho Konishi
ganize participants’ activities without the need for institutions, reflecting the very
nature of cooperatist anarchist thought.
The epistemological capacity of cooperatist anarchism provided the intellectual
foundation for a variety of distinctive cultural and social movements in Japan during
the first decades of the twentieth century, and came to define a form of “democracy
[demokurashi]” by 1920. Students at Tokyo Imperial University founded Shinjinkai,

the New Man Society, in 1918 in the pursuit of “democracy.” Its famous journal,
Demokurashi, led off its first several issues with articles featuring discussions of co-
operatist anarchism. In its first year, almost every issue featured Kropotkin’s thought.
The aim of the organization was expressed as “jinmin no naka e,” which was a trans-
lation of the Russian populist slogan “v narod,” or “to the people.”113 Demokurashi
changed its name over time, finally settling on Naroodo [Narod, “The People,” in
Russian], using the Russian word that referred to the popular subject of the populist
movement. With the title appearing in both Japanese and Russian on the cover of
the journal, it did not lose the transnational intellectual roots of their activities.
Cooperatist anarchist progress and civilization and its anti-hierarchical world or-
der offered alternative realities that united movements and interest groups beyond
national, racial, gender, or other hierarchical categories. Cultural movements and
societies inspired by cooperatist anarchism included the people’s arts movement, the
Anti-Discrimination Society, the children’s education and literature movement, the
proletarian literature movement, the Esperanto movement, the National Student
Union, and the women’s movement.114
It was the idea of anarchist democracy that fueled the first international relief
effort in Japan to be spontaneously organized from below. In response to the famine
that struck Russia in the early 1920s during its revolutionary civil war, local clubs and
associations, including Shinjinkai, established the Russia Famine Assistance Move-
ment. This national-scale civic endeavor drew together a myriad of small groups from
a variety of specialties and occupations across Japan, including music schools, the
miners’ union, dental schools, local women’s clubs, and agricultural institutes.115 The
movement stood out for its ability to unify so many local associations in a mutual
effort to assist people outside Japan, representing a modern selfhood that tran-
scended national borders. In the name of saving the “Russian people endangered
by imperialism,” the movement was organized during Japan’s military intervention
in the civil war, and reflected a public effort to put the competing internationalism
of cooperatism into practice. The unwritten history of this humanitarian relief move-
ment as an expression of anarchist demokurashi could revise our understanding of
spontaneous civic organization and democracy building in Japan as a postwar, post-
Occupation phenomenon.116 Such internationalist expressions of the temporal be-
113 George O. Totten, “Akamatsu Katsumaro: Political Activist and Ideologue,” in Nobori and Aka-
matsu, The Russian Impact on Japan, 79.

114 The Japanese Esperanto movement for international language equity, led by anarchists, had the
largest number of non-European Esperanto participants in the world, including the United States. Treat-
ing language not only as a transnational communication tool, but also as having potential control over
one’s interiority, anarchist intellectuals learned and taught the “neutral” language of Esperanto.
115 Kensetsu sha domei shi kanko iin kai, Waseda Daigaku Kensetsu sha domei no rekishi: Taisho ៮ ki
no v naro៮ d undo៮ (Tokyo, 1979), 173.
116 For a history of civic organization in postwar Japan, see Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the
Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu, 2001).

longing of cooperatist anarchism reveal a fresh concept of participation in a world

order distinct from pan-Asianism and Western cosmopolitanism.
A powerful current of the feminist movement in early-twentieth-century Japan
also gave expression to anarchist demokurashi, often symbolized by Kropotkin’s Mu-
tual Aid. Leading figures in the women’s movement, including the self-proclaimed
anarchists Ito៮ Noe and Takamure Itsue, and female laborers reflected a modern

vision of cooperatist human progress and civilization and its corresponding subjec-
tivity in their thoughts. Many of these feminists continued to be closely involved in
the wider network of cooperatist anarchists until World War II. For example, Taka-
mure, known as the pioneer of women’s history in Japan, saw in cooperatist anar-
chism the answer to the problem of Western modernity’s hierarchy of gender and
capitalist human relations, on the one hand, and the official national ideology that
created hierarchically gendered constructs of the family as subjects under the em-
peror-patriarch, on the other.
The domestically rooted cooperatist activities that prospered in Japan were “the
reality of anarchism in Japan” for anarchists such as Ito៮ Noe, who found in those
everyday practices a global significance for modernity. Much as Mechnikov himself
had witnessed decades earlier, she wrote that anarchism had existed and continued
to exist in everyday practice. Therefore, it was this “reality” that “we should con-
sciously work on.”117 Like many of those who took part in cooperatist anarchism, Ito៮
placed primary value on the everyday practices of cooperatism and its corresponding
anti-hierarchical relationality and subjectivity.
Cooperatist anarchists also contributed to the emergence of a Japanese brand of
Marxism. An irony of historical dialectic, perhaps, it was the Marxist teleological
view of history dominant in Japanese social sciences that would help to erase this
very intellectual history under exploration.
THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN Mechnikov and Japanese who experienced the Ishin, and
the corresponding conceptual encounter between ishin and revoliutsiia, led to the
emergence of a new global meaning for the Ishin. Ishin Japan came to represent an
impulse toward the global realization of human progress based on the anarchist
principles of mutual aid. It was this alternative meaning given to the Ishin in the
wider world that would later materialize in modern Japan as the cultural and social
phenomenon of cooperatist anarchist modernity. This transnational encounter and
the resulting vision of civilizational progress reopen the meaning of the “Opening”
of Japan that has been used to represent the beginning of Japan’s embarkation on
the path toward Western modernity, whether in self-colonized, reconfigured, or hy-
bridized forms.
Western modernity has long provided the internal logic for the writing of history
on modern Japan. This logic has often interlinked our use of archives or sources of
historical evidence, the method of investigation, theory, and historical narratives of
modern Japan. To understand the emergence of this phenomenon, it was necessary
to construct an alternative logic of history that linked together archives, method,
117 Ito៮ Noe, Ito៮ Noe zenshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo, 1970), 464 – 474.

130 Sho Konishi
concept, and theory, such as the tracing of non-state, non-organizational-level tran-

snational relations and their resulting social thought, by means of Russian archival
holdings on discredited revolutionaries and their broader network of acquaintances.
Such interstices of transnational activity provided a space in which a new time was
imagined. At this intersection, networks were formed and ideas were exchanged and
transformed outside the encounter between East and West, and beyond the bifur-

cated imaginaries of internationalism as Western cosmopolitanism and encountering
nationalism, and of power and resistance/accommodation. In reopening the opening
of Japan in this way, and in identifying the beginnings of a temporal belonging dis-
tinct from the imagined time-space of Western modernity, we can attempt to open
up new dimensions for modern history writing.
Sho Konishi is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Ur-

bana-Champaign, where he teaches the cultural, intellectual, and international
history of Japan and non-Western perspectives on international history.

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Reopening the “Opening of Japan”:

A Russian-Japanese Revolutionary Encounter and the

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eratist anarchist modernity,” a temporal belonging that transcended ethnic, racial,

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Political Ideology (Berkeley, Calif., 2002).

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tional Relations (New York, 2000).

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of development in science, technology, and Christianity. From a diplomatic per-

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socialist development in the commune in the 1860s.

“good kingdom of limitless communalism.” Mechnikov, “Obshchina i gosudarstvo v Shveitsarii,” Delo

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MECHNIKOV’S ESTABLISHMENT OF RELATIONSHIPS with likeminded Japanese would lead

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simple agrarian lifestyle.31 Saigo៮ ’s turn to an agricultural way of life as an expression

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Field (Los Angeles, 1956), 16.

nasledstvo, 102 vols. (Moscow, 1931–2000), 13–14: 361–362.

toire (Geneva, 1878), iv.

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36 Watanabe Masaji, a professor of Russian at Tokyo University of Foreign Languages (formerly

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“Era iaponskogo prosveshcheniia,” in Shcherbina, Iaponiia na perelome, 122–123.

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a single leader seizing power, or a coup by self-serving elites, as most Westerners

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nikov saw the rootedness of cooperative practice in everyday existence. He observed

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sveshcheniia Iaponiia,” 102–103.

commoners. Cooperatives expanded in a variety of forms following industrialization in Japan. Every

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According to this version, “natural principles of truth and justice” can be

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emerged for him as an idea and relative accomplishment of a nonhierarchical, co-

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Reclus, Evolution et Révolution (Geneva, 1880, 1884; Paris, 1891).

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