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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2020
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.
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.
3 To situate the Ottoman Empire and Japan within a single analytical framework is to follow the pioneering work of Aydin, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Japan and Egypt see Adal, Raja, Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education (New York, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hideaki, Sugita, Nihonjin no Chūtō hakken: Gyaku enkinhō no naka no hikaku bunkashi (Tokyo, 1995)Google Scholar; Worringer, Renée, Ottomans Imagining Japan: East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Karl, Rebecca E., Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, 2002)Google Scholar.
4 The development of these conceptions of time in Japan, which he views as simultaneous and complementary, is the focus of Tanaka, Stefan, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar. Although different in approach, on global time see Ogle, Vanessa, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a metahistory see Fryxell, A. R. P., “Time and the Modern: Current Trends in the History of Modern Temporalities,” Past & Present 243/1 (2019), 286–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as the collection of essays in the volume to which it belongs.
5 This, of course, reflects the well-worn notion of the nation as a community of “homogeneous, empty time” bound by a shared, undetermined national experience of “meanwhile” that is generated by print capitalism: Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London, 2006)Google Scholar. For scathing criticism of this idea see Kelly, John D., “Time and the Global: Against the Homogeneous, Empty Communities in Contemporary Social Theory,” Development and Change 29 (1998), 839–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A classic critique is of course Chatterjee, Partha, “The Nation in Heterogeneous Time,” Futures 37/9 (2005), 925–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, , The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar. On Japan in the global intellectual history of the nation see the signal Hill, Christopher L., National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham, NC, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 A full inventory of the content of newspapers published by the Shūshisha as well as brief introductions to the newspapers appears in Hiroyuki, Shiode, “Hyōron shinbun hoka Shūshisha teiki kankōbutsu kiji sōran,” Seisaku kagaku, kokusai kankei ronshū 10 (2008), 49–101Google Scholar.
7 On the significance of the Review in Meiji history, including its connection to violence and the nation, see the pioneering Hiroshi, Mitani, “Kōron kūkan no sōhatsu: Sōsōki no Hyōron shinbun,” in Yasushi, Toriumi, Hiroshi, Mitani, Makoto, Nishikawa, and Nobuyuki, Yano, eds., Nihon rikken seiji no keisei to henshitsu (Tokyo, 2005), 58–87Google Scholar.
8 See ibid., 64, for a reproduction and analysis of this source. Mitani cites it to wonder if in fact it is too simplistic. See Taiyō, Sawa, “Shūshisha no shō kenkyū,” Tōkai daigaku seiji keizai gakubu kiyō 20 (1988), 43–66, at 51–2Google Scholar, on competing factions within the Review. Links to other rebel factions in the civil war, including those of Kumamoto and Kōchi, are bracketed here.
9 For a biography in English of Saigō that construes the civil war as a rebellion of samurai to preserve their heritage see Ravina, Mark, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori (Hoboken, 2005)Google Scholar.
10 Huffman, James L., Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan (Honolulu, 1997), Appendix 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sawa, “Shūshisha no shō kenkyū,” 56, who explains why circulation numbers are limited indicators of influence. Unlike leading newspapers, the Review was not a daily publication, which partly accounts for the gap in total circulation.
11 Masamichi, Ogawara, Seinan sensō to jiyū minken (Tokyo, 2017)Google Scholar. See also Masamichi, Ogawara, Seinan sensō: Saigō Takamori to Nihon saigo no naisen (Tokyo, 2007)Google Scholar; Hiroki, Ochiai, Seinan sensō to Saigō Takamori (Tokyo, 2013), esp. 123Google Scholar. On the violent Meiji origins of Japanese democracy see Siniawer, Eiko Maruko, Yakuza, Ruffians, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar.
12 Ogawara, Seinan sensō, 22.
13 See Mitani, “Kōron kūkan,” 76–80, for a breakdown and analysis of the original manifesto.
14 Ogawara, Seinan sensō: reconnaissance, 24; reading the Review, 53; Fukuzawa, 23; Shinohara, 42. Ochiai Hiroki, Seinan sensō to Saigō Takamori: on reconnaissance and the Turkish problem, 123. See also Sawa, “Shūshisha no shō kenkyū,” 53. For stunning discoveries on the genteel American education of a separate civil-war rebel, Machida Keijirō, see Fleming, William D., “Japanese Students Abroad and the Building of America's First Japanese Library Collection, 1869–1878,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 139/1 (2019), 115–41, esp. 123–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Although this study quibbles with his characterization of the Meiji public sphere, it is enabled by the magnificent work of Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Cambridge, 2007). Cf. also Huffman, Creating a Public, 2: “no single institution did more to create a modern citizenry than the Meiji newspaper press.”
16 Hyōron shinbun, 20 (Sept. 1875), 4. I am translating back from Japanese into English rather than simply copying the original English text.
17 On unprecedentedness see Mitani, “Kōron kūkan,” 58–9, who explains that the practice of public “criticism” or “reviewing,” indeed the word “review” (hyōron) was pioneered by Hyōron.
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.
28 Hyōron shinbun, 62 (Jan. 1876), 5. Cf. Lockwood, Matthew, To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe (New Haven, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Hyōron shinbun, 62 (Jan. 1876), 5.
30 On the construction of a Japanese Orient in the twentieth century by intellectuals and historians, with a focus on China, see Tanaka, Stefan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, 1993)Google Scholar.
31 Hyōron shinbun, 40 (Nov. 1875), 2–5. Kokusei tenpen ron translates literally back to “On Overthrowing a National Government,” but the original title that Mitsukuri translates into Japanese is “On Revolution.” On Russian views of revolution in Japan, esp. that of Lev Mechnikov, see Konishi, Sho, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese–Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, 2013), chap. 1Google Scholar; on the reverse see Linkhoeva, Tatiana, Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Ithaca, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Rather than revert to the original text, I have translated the text back into English from the Japanese translation. For the original text that Mitsukuri translated see Hickok, Laurens P., D.D., System of Moral Science, 3rd edn (New York, 1864), 268Google Scholar. The opening phrase in the origins reads, “The state is distinct from the government.”
33 For the original text see ibid., 269–70.
34 For instance, Berry, Mary Elizabeth, “Public Life in Authoritarian Japan,” Daedalus 127/3 (1998), 133–65Google Scholar.
35 Recent scholarship has claimed that the source text for this document remains unknown. See Ogawara, Seinan sensō to jiyū minken, 47; Mikio, Ogasawara, “Mitsukuri Rinshō no Fugaku: ‘Kokusei tenpen no ron’ o chūshin ni,” Sakuyō ongaku daigaku, tanki daigaku kenkyū kiyō 26/2 (1994), 106–99Google Scholar (page numbers appear in descending order). The claim is not quite right. In 1962, Ienaga Saburō declared that he had figured the “riddle” out and traced, with perfect accuracy, the textual genealogy laid out here. See Saburō, Ienaga, “‘Kanzen kinmō’ to ‘Kokusei tenpen no ron’,” Nihon rekishi 171 (1962), 26–7Google Scholar. On textbooks and Japan see Hansun Hsiung, “Republic of Letters, Empire of Textbooks: Globalizing Western Knowledge, 1790–1895” (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2016).
36 Bascom, John, “Lauren Perseus Hickok,” American Journal of Psychology 19/3 (1908), 359–73, at 361CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 Hansuke, Matono, Etō Nanpaku, 2 vols. (Tokyo, 1914), 2: 106–7Google Scholar; Epp, Robert, “The Challenge from Tradition: Attempts to Compile a Civil Code in Japan, 1866–78,” Monumenta Nipponica 22/1–2 (1967), 15–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 Hyōron shinbun, 40 (Nov. 1875), 5–6.
39 Hyōron shinbun, 40 (Nov. 1875), 7.
40 Hyōron shinbun, 40 (Nov. 1875), 8.
41 Hyōron shinbun, 84 (April 1876), 1–3. These texts are discussed briefly by Ogawara, Seinan sensō to jiyū minken, 46–8.
42 Inada, Jiyū minken no bunkashi, 141–4; in English see Shimizu, Yuichiro, The Origins of the Modern Japanese Bureaucracy, trans. Ghadimi, Amin (London, 2020), 87–91Google Scholar; Huffman, Creating a Public, 68–71.
43 All from Inada, Jiyū minken no bunkashi, 169–83.
44 Hiroshi, Mitani, Ishin shi saikō (Tokyo, 2018), 377Google Scholar.
45 Hyōron shinbun, 88 (April 1876), 2.
46 See Moyn, Samuel, “On the Nonglobalization of Ideas,” in Moyn, Samuel and Sartori, Andrew, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013), 187–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moyn, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” The Nation, 29 March 2007, at www.thenation.com/article/genealogy-morals.
47 Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History, 3–30, at 5. For critiques see López, Rosario, “The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual History,” History of European Ideas 42/1 (2016), 155–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and J. G. A. Pocock, “On the Unglobality of Contexts: Cambridge Methods and the History of Political Thought,” Global Intellectual History, pre-publication edition (2019).
48 Chūgai hyōron, 1 (Aug. 1876), 3–4.
49 Chūgai hyōron, 1 (Aug. 1876), 4.
50 Chūgai hyōron, 1 (Aug. 1876), 5.
51 Hyōron shinbun, 63 (Jan. 1876), 1–2.
52 Chūgai hyōron, 21 (Oct. 1876), 3, 2.
53 Chūgai hyōron, 14 (Sept. 1876), 4.
54 Chūgai hyōron, 14 (Sept. 1876), 6.
55 Chūgai hyōron, 15 (Sept. 1876), 6.
56 Chūgai hyōron, 15 (Sept. 1876), 6–7.
57 Chūgai hyōron, 20 (Sept. 1876), 6.
58 These epithets from Chūgai hyōron, 20, 5. See Mitani, “Kōron kūkan,” on polyphony.
59 Chūgai hyōron, 21 (Oct. 1876), 4.
60 Chūgai hyōron, 21 (Oct. 1876), 5.
61 Chūgai hyōron, 21 (Oct. 1876), 6.
62 Terzuolo, Eric R., “The Garibaldini in the Balkans, 1875–1876,” International History Review 4/1 (1982), 111–26, esp. 115–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Chūgai hyōron, 22 (Oct. 1876), 6–7.
64 Chugai hyōron, 27 (Oct. 1876), 1.
65 Shiode, “Hyōron shinbun,” 63; Inada, Jiyū minken no bunka shi, 213.
66 Shiode, “Hyōron shinbun,” 64.
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.
69 Bunmei shinshi, 10 (Jan. 1877), 5.
70 Shiode, “Hyōron shinbun,” 64.
71 Bunmei shinshi, 20 (Feb. 1877), 4–5.
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.
81 Bunmei shinshi, 41 (June 1877), 4, 2; Shiode, “Hyōron shinbun,” 64; cf. Botsman, Daniel V., “Freedom without Slavery? ‘Coolies,’ Prostitutes, and Outcastes in Meiji Japan's Emancipation Moment,” American Historical Review 116/5 (2011), 1323–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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83 Freedom and rights, of course, were not the only means by which people at the time interpreted the war. Some saw (and see) it as a war with no justification at all: Takaaki, Ikai, Saigō Takamori: Seinan sensō e no michi (Tokyo, 2016), 184–7Google Scholar; Takaaki, Ikai, Seinan sensō: Sensō no taigi to dōin sareru minshū (Tokyo, 2010), 197Google Scholar.
84 Hironori, Nagano, Seinan sensō minshū no ki: Taigi to hakai (Fukuoka, 2018)Google Scholar: torching, 96–9; massacre, 100–3; torture, 104; cannons, 114; children, 120–25; Yasukuni, 243–4; economy, 48–71; numbers, 258–9; cholera, 212–13. Ericson, Steven J., Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan: The Impact of the Matsukata Reform (Ithaca, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 See, for instance, Nagano, Seinan sensō minshū no ki, pp. 137–41.
86 Kiei, Ō, “Fukuchi Gen'ichirō no ‘Tōhōron’: Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun no shasetsu ni okeru Ro-To sensō,” Ajia chiiki bunka kenkyū 13 (2017), 1–24Google Scholar; Nobuo, Misawa, “Meiji-ki no Nihon shakai ni okeru Ro-To sensō no ninshiki,” Tōyō daigaku shakaigakubu kiyō 54/1 (2016), 41–55Google Scholar.
87 See Yavuz, M. Hakan and Sluglett, Peter, “Introduction: Laying the Foundations for Future Instability,” in Yavuz, M. Hakan, ed., with Sluglett, Peter, War and Diplomacy: the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 and the Treaty of Berlin (Salt Lake City, 2010) 1–13Google Scholar; and M. Hakan Yavuz, “The Transformation of ‘Empire’ through Wars and Reform,” in ibid., 17–55.
88 The reference is, of course, to the definition of the nation in Anderson, Imagined Communities.
89 Chūgai hyōron, 16 (Sept. 1876), 3–7.
90 This was apparently not an unusual idea in early Meiji Japan. See Ghadimi, Amin, “The Federalist Papers of Ueki Emori: Liberalism and Empire in the Japanese Enlightenment,” Global Intellectual History 2/2 (2017), 196–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ueki, an avowed revolutionary, had links to the Society for the Assembly of Thought. See Sawa, “Shūshisha no shō kenkyū,” 55–6.
91 Patton, Robert H., Hell before Breakfast: America's First War Correspondents (New York, 2015)Google Scholar; Barnwell, R. Grant, The Russo-Turkish War (Toledo, 1878), v–viGoogle Scholar; cf. Botsman, “Freedom without Slavery?”, on the global emancipation moment.
92 The attitudes of intellectuals and politicians were, of course, varied, complex, and contentious: Heraclides, Alexis and Dialla, Ada, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester, 2015), 147–67, esp. 155, 186–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shannon, R. T., Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876, 2nd edn (Hassocks, 1975), 218Google Scholar; Brown, Catherine, “Henry James and Ivan Turgenev: Cosmopolitanism and Croquet,” Literary Imagination 15/1 (2013), 109–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tedford, Barbara Wilkie, “The Attitudes of Henry James and Ivan Turgenev toward the Russo-Turkish War,” Henry James Review 1/3 (1980), 257–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kuzmic, Tatiana, Adulterous Nations: Family Politics and National Anxiety in the European Novel (Evanston, 2016), 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on visions from Muslim nations see Aydin, Cemil, “Imperial Paradoxes: A Caliphate for Subaltern Muslims,” ReOrient 1/2 (2016), 171–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
93 Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina: A Novel in Eight Parts, trans. Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa (New York, 2002), 7, 771Google Scholar.
94 Kuzmic, Adulterous Nations, 101–2, 104–6.
95 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 771.
96 Ibid., 779.
97 Kuzmic, Adulterous Nations, 108.
98 Richard Pevear, “Introduction,” in Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, vii–xvi, at xiii.
99 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 805, 809.
100 Ibid., 809.