Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shū sui and Japan's First AntiImperialist Movement by Robert Thomas Tierney (review)

Japanese socialists and anarchists made important contributions to late Meiji politics and thought and, as Umemori Naoyuki has recently argued, were the "first self-conscious explorers" of the capitalist social formation in Japan, not solely as an economic system, but as a form of social domination that permeated a variety of intellectual and cultural domains, including language, literature, subjectivity, and sexuality.¹ Despite their wide-ranging contributions, however, the English-language scholarship on early socialists and anarchists in Japan has been disparate and often focused on a few sensational events or characters. Kōtoku Shū sui (1871–1911) takes a prominent place in this literature, both for his leadership in the early socialist movement and his arrest and execution in the notorious Great Treason Incident (Taigyaku Jiken) of 1910–11. Earlier scholarship on Kōtoku, such as F. G. Notehelfer's 1971 Kōtoku Shū sui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical, reduced the nuances of Kōtoku's politics to an attempt to translate premodern Confucian ethics into a modern political idiom, rendering Kōtoku and Japanese anarchism more generally as cultural anachronisms inadequate to political modernity.² More recent scholarship has restored Japanese anarchists to their modern, global moment. For example, Sho Konishi has explored how the intellectual dialogue between Russian anarchists and Japanese thinkers produced a unique "temporality and corresponding order of knowledge and practice" across a variety of cultural fields that comprised an alternative modernity, what Konishi deems "cooperatist anarchist modernity."³ Although Konishi's book challenges the earlier modernization paradigm that informed Notehelfer's study, Konishi's intellectual history approach risks sacrificing anarchism's explicitly revolutionary politics to its cultural and intellectual permutations. This is where Robert Tierney's excellent new study and translation, Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan's First Anti-Imperialist Movement, makes an important intervention by foregrounding Kōtoku's theory of imperialism and illuminating the political legacies of early Japanese socialism in a global context.

Tierney's Monster of the Twentieth Century is neither a history of Japanese anarchism nor a political biography of Kōtoku. Rather, it consists of an extended analysis and complete translation of Kōtoku's seminal 1901 text Teikokushugi: nijūseiki no kaibutsu (Imperialism: monster of the twentieth century). Kōtoku's work is often read as a proto-anarchist treatise and thus as a moralistic precursor to later, more "scientific," Marxian critiques of imperialism. However, Kōtoku did not come to anarchism until later (around 1905–6) and, as Tierney's study demonstrates, his anarchism developed from his analysis of imperialism. Tierney thus reverses the conventional association of imperialism and anarchism in Kōtoku's thought—wherein it was assumed the latter informed his critique of the former—and utilizes Teikokushugi to explore the larger debates about nationalism, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism taking place in socialist circles at the time. By doing so, Tierney returns Kōtoku and his interlocutors to a larger global moment in which activists and intellectuals throughout the world debated the essence of imperialism and its relation to state power and capitalism.

The first half of Monster consists of Tierney's extended analysis of Kōtoku's thought and political activities. In the introduction Tierney outlines the stakes of his analysis, positing that while it is necessary to acknowledge "Kōtoku's importance as an early Japanese socialist and anarchist," it is equally if not more important to recognize his role as a "leader of the anti-imperialist movement" and, by extension, the place of anti-imperialist movements in late-Meiji Japanese history (p. 3). In this way, Tierney connects Kōtoku to a wider, global moment of anti-imperialist activism and shows how international events and movements influenced Kōtoku's understanding of Japanese society and his increasing political...