Sekaigo: Esperanto, international language, and the transnational dimension to Japan’s linguistic modernity

Abstract

In 1906, the international language Esperanto exploded onto the scene in Japan, establishing a community of speakers and practitioners that has persisted to the present day and which was long the largest non-European national Esperanto movement in the world. On the face of it this was an unprecedented and unexpected event in Japanese history. However, this article demonstrates that it was the culmination of a rich history of thinking (and implementing) ideas about Sekaigo (‘world language’) during the Meiji period. This intellectual tradition is an important and overlooked dimension of Japanese language debates – existing scholarship has focused on the creation of a standardised national language but, by writing international language back into the historiography, Japan’s ‘linguistic modernity’ is revealed as a more complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Different international languages, including Mori Arinori’s English language proposal, treaty port pidgins, and planned languages including (but not limited to) Esperanto, reveal how the need for more effective transnational communication was seen as an emergent problem fundamental to modernity and modernisation, and one potentially as amenable to rational reforms and new intellectual developments as was national language.