Journal - Reopening: The Opening of Japan (Meiji)

RDimH Presents - Academic Journal The American Historical Review Vol. 112, No. 1 (February 2007) Article: "Reopening the “Opening of Japan :A Russian-Japanese Revolutionary encounter and the Vision of Anarchist Progress by Sho Konishi" Author: Sho Konishi Synopsis: Western modernity has long provided a governing logic for our understanding of the history of modern Japan. This logic has often interlinked our use of sources of historical evidence, the method of investigation, theory, and historical narratives. "Reopening the 'Opening of Japan': A Russian-Japanese Revolutionary Encounter and the Vision of Anarchist Progress" by Sho Konishi attempts to construct an alternative logic of history writing that connects sources, method, theory, and narrative in new ways. The article traces the transnational encounter in mid-nineteenth-century Japan between the Russian revolutionary Lev Mechnikov and Japanese who participated in the "Meiji Ishin," what Mechnikov called a "complete and radical revolution." Their revolutionary encounter took place on the non-state and non-organizational level beyond the imagined divide between East and West, a spatial order that itself has been a product of the temporal order of Western modernity. From his encounters with Ishin Japan, Mechnikov constructed a novel theory of human evolutionary progress based on cooperatist principles of anarchism that would both transform modern anarchist thought and form the basis for a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life: "cooperatist anarchist modernity." Those who identified with this movement saw themselves transcending national, racial, gender, and other identities of a specific nature. By tracing intellectual developments transnationally, through cross-border networks, this article offers a fresh approach to Japanese intellectual history. In unsettling, or "reopening," the historical meaning and value of Japan's opening to the wider world, Konishi argues for the importance of viewing modern international history outside the epistemological limits of East and West, colonized and colonizer.

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