Abstract
AbstractThis article investigates anarchist theory and practice in 1920s and 1930s imperial Japan. It deliberately focuses on concepts and interventions by a rather unknown group—the Nōson Seinen Sha—to highlight a global consciousness even among those anarchists in imperial Japan who did not become famous for their cosmopolitan adventures. Their trans-imperial anarchism emerged from a modern critique of the present and engagement with cooperatist communalist ideas and experiences in Asia, Russia, and Western Europe. Anarchists theorized and implemented new forms of living that challenged the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and increasing militarism. In doing so, they simultaneously positioned themselves against established conservative and fascist agrarianism as well as Marxist dogmatism in the socialist movement. Despite their repression by the imperial state, they offered a radical, universalist, yet pragmatic way of being in autarkic farming village communes that corresponded with similar ideas and movements worldwide.
Highlights
Anarchist theory and practice have had the global aim of liberation, through overcoming capitalism and state power as well as any other form of authority, hierarchy, and
For other countries and colonies, at a time when the whole world was affected by capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism, anarchism evolved as a new and attractive political theory and practice for anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial social movements
Worldwide anarchism was grounded in anarchist networks that ‘comprised of formal and informal structures, [...] facilitated doctrinal diffusion, financial flows, transmission of information and symbolic practices, and acts of solidarity’, as Lucien van der Walt and Steven Hirsch have convincingly argued.[4]
Summary
It had a much more grassroots, democratic, and individualistic sense of the people (minshū) and of peoples’ ability to organize freely in temporary, task-oriented associations of interest groups In this regard, the group became influential for theorizing and implementing self-sustained communes as well as propagating cooperative ownership, the elimination of hierarchies, and the evolvement of democratic models.[33] In doing so, the Nōson Seinen Sha was embedded within a broader agrarianist discourse in imperial Japan; yet agrarian anarchism’s cooperatist communalist theory and practice, as the following section demonstrates, departed from other agrarianist positions and criticism by fundamentally challenging imperial Japan’s feudalist system and agricultural production
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