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On Global Time in Revolutionary Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2020
Abstract
This article reveals how Japanese anti-regime rebels in the mid-1870s deployed news of the Ottoman Empire and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 in a burgeoning national public sphere to justify and encourage violent revolution against the Meiji government. It focuses especially on commentary in Hyōron shinbun and its successor publications Chūgai hyōron and Bunmei shinshi, short-lived radical newspapers linked to what became the Kagoshima and Kumamoto rebel factions in the Japanese civil war of 1877. Anti-government agitators drew from French and American theory and history and constructed Turkey as a hidebound violator of freedom and civil rights, casting the Turkish case as a parable for what would befall the Meiji government, supposedly a similar wielder of despotism. They inveighed at the same time against European powers for seizing on “Asian” weakness to expand their empires in Asia. Newspapers thus produced a sense of global simultaneity, intimating to readers that they lived in the same empirical moment as people across the world, but as they constructed this empirical simultaneity, they produced also a sense of theoretical nonsynchronicity, in which the histories of some nations acted as the futures of others. Violent revolution, the journalists suggested, provided the best means of reconciling these dual temporalities of global time.
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References
1 Suggesting that the war of 1877 should indeed be understood as a civil war is a tacit aim of this article, which abides by David Armitage's proposed taxonomy of “revolution” as a particular kind of civil war with global currency for both analysts and actors. See Armitage, David, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New Haven, 2017), esp. 158Google Scholar. See also David Priestland, “Civil Wars and Revolutions,” Global Intellectual History, first view edition (2019).
2 Chūgai hyōron, 1 (Aug. 1876), 5.
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16 Hyōron shinbun, 20 (Sept. 1875), 4. I am translating back from Japanese into English rather than simply copying the original English text.
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18 Hyōron shinbun, 20 (Sept. 1875), 6. Hirayama Shuichi was a student of Nagaoka Hisashige, a leading editor of the Review who led the botched 1876 Shianbashi Incident. Like many others at the Review, Hirayama might have been a police spy. See Rikio, Takeuchi, “Kawasaki Shōnosuke kō,” Dōshisha jibō 136 (2013), 56–67, esp. 64–5Google Scholar. On spies see also the fascinating case of Tanaka Naoya: Ogawara, Seinan sensō, 241–3; Ogawara, Seinan sensō to jiyū minken, 113–29; Sawa, “Shūshisha no shō kenkyū,” 53–5.
19 Hyōron shinbun, 20 (Sept. 1875), 7.
20 Hyōron shinbun, 17 (Aug. 1875), 7.
21 Hyōron shinbun, 99 (June 1876), 5.
22 Hyōron shinbun, 99 (June 1876), 5–6.
23 On self-destruction, “Hikutsu seifu wa jimetsu subeki no setsu,” Hyōron shinbun, 96 (June 1876), 1–4.
24 Hyōron shinbun, 105 (June 1876), 1–2.
25 Hyōron shinbun, 105 (June 1876), 2.
26 Hyōron shinbun, 62 (Jan. 1876). This text is mentioned often in writings on the radicalism of Hyōron. It is discussed briefly, for instance, by Ogawara, Seinan sensō, 22–3; Ogawara, Seinan sensō to jiyū minken, 47.
27 Hyōron shinbun, 62 (Jan. 1876), 1–3.
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41 Hyōron shinbun, 84 (April 1876), 1–3. These texts are discussed briefly by Ogawara, Seinan sensō to jiyū minken, 46–8.
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49 Chūgai hyōron, 1 (Aug. 1876), 4.
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51 Hyōron shinbun, 63 (Jan. 1876), 1–2.
52 Chūgai hyōron, 21 (Oct. 1876), 3, 2.
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54 Chūgai hyōron, 14 (Sept. 1876), 6.
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58 These epithets from Chūgai hyōron, 20, 5. See Mitani, “Kōron kūkan,” on polyphony.
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60 Chūgai hyōron, 21 (Oct. 1876), 5.
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67 Bunmei shinshi, 2 (Nov. 1876), 7.
68 Bunmei shinshi, 10 (Jan. 1877), 4. The famed Miyazaki brothers of Kumamoto, Hachirō and Tōten, are closely linked to this story, but they are beyond the scope of this essay. For the authoritative work on them see Kimio, Uemura, Miyazaki kyōdai den, 5 vols. (Fukuoka, 1984)Google Scholar.
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72 Bunmei shinshi, 19 (Feb. 1877), 1–3. Shiode, “Hyōron shinbun,” 64, highlights this article.
73 Bunmei shinshi, 24 (March 1877), 1.
74 Bunmei shinshi, 23 (March 1877), 2.
75 Bunmei shinshi, 27 (April 1877), 6–7.
76 Bunmei shinshi, 30 (April 1877), 1. The circles appear in the original text.
77 Bunmei shinshi, 30 (April 1877), 2–4.
78 Bunmei shinshi, 31 (May 1877), 1–3.
79 Bunmei shinshi, 38 (May 1877), 1–2.
80 Bunmei shinshi, 36 (May 1877), 4–5.
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88 The reference is, of course, to the definition of the nation in Anderson, Imagined Communities.
89 Chūgai hyōron, 16 (Sept. 1876), 3–7.
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99 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 805, 809.
100 Ibid., 809.