Beyond Utopia: New Villages and Living Politics in Modern Japan and across Frontiers

Fig 1.

The main square of the New Village, Moroyama, Japan 2016 (Photo by the author).

The main road between the towns of Hidaka and Ogawa in Japan's Saitama Prefecture winds its way through a landscape typical of the outer fringes of the Tokyo metropolis: past the family restaurants, the convenience stores and the golf driving ranges, into areas scattered with rice fields and forest. At one point along the route, an insignificant road sign points down a side turning to the 'New Village Art Gallery' (Atarashiki Mura Bijutsukan). Few passers-by seem to take this turning; but if you do, you will find yourself in another world.

The narrow lane crosses a single-track railway that runs between mossy embankments, coming out into a wide expanse of tea plantations interspersed with solar panels, which (as it turns out) are among the New Village's few concessions to the twenty-first century. Beyond lies the village square, a silent space centred on a covered well with an ancient iron motor pump. The roar of the traffic has vanished, and the quietness of the place is palpable. Most of the buildings look as though they have been untouched for several decades. The name 'New Village' (Atarashiki Mura) has its ironies. The village celebrates its centenary in 2018, and its handful of mostly elderly inhabitants are already busy preparing for the event. 'Village', too, seems a rather grandiose term for a community of a dozen people, the youngest of whom is in his forties, and most of whom are well past retirement age. But the New Village, described as 'Japan's first experiment in utopian socialism',¹ is a small living symbol of a current of thought which once flowed widely, and whose influence can still be felt today in many parts of East Asia and beyond.

Half-magical visions of a better world – a world without oppression, pain and sorrow – have a long tradition in East Asia, and are most famously expressed in the Chinese legend of the Peach Blossom Spring (Taohuayuan), recounted by fourth-century poet Tao Yuanming (365–427).² This tale of a fisherman who discovers a long-lost idyllic community hidden in the mountains of Wuling still reverberates in contemporary Chinese, Korean and Japanese everyday speech, where the expressions 'peach spring village' or 'Wuling peach spring' equate to the English term 'arcadia'. Arcadian societies, existing either in the remote past or in remote and dream-like places recur in both Confucian and Daoist classics. The Confucian notion of Datong (Great Harmony or Great Unity) evokes a world in which people care for and respect one another, and where society therefore flourishes spontaneously, with minimal control or intervention by rulers.³ In

Daoism, the vision of Taiping or 'Great Equality' expressed the longing for an ideal pattern of existence where beings lived in perfect accordance with the natural cosmos.⁴ Elements of these ideas, mingled with Shintō traditions and semi-idealized visions of the life of the Ainu (the indigenous inhabitants of northern Japan), were to find their way into the particularly intriguing utopian thought of the eighteenth-century Japanese scholar And o Shōeki (1703–62), who wrote disparagingly about Daoists, Confucians and Buddhists alike, but whose philosophy – with its emphasis on the immersion of human beings in the flows of nature – has unmistakably Daoist overtones.⁵

Despite these traditions, modern East Asian political thought is often seen as state-centred, and the power of the state over the bodies and imaginations of the region's people is frequently attributed to the historical influence of Neo-Confucian ideas.⁶ Here, though, I shall use the small history of the New Village community as a starting point for exploring some alternative non-state currents of twentieth-century East Asian politics. This alternative history destabilizes boundaries. It crosses national frontiers, complicating the distinction between the 'indigenous' and the 'foreign', the 'eastern' and the 'western', and at the same time it subverts the chronological dichotomy between 'modernizers' and 'traditionalists...