Chapter 3 - Breaking Boundaries

Summary

In some respects, nationalism constitutes a failure of the imagination. Attachment to borders and rules of sovereignty ignore the potential of true cosmopolitanism and transnational connections. Even though the concept of “citizen of the world” has often been overused, it remains relevant for the understanding of the origins and aspirations of anarchism in the modern period. When in March 1913 Ishikawa boarded a French ship in Yokohama, his close association with Kōtoku and other executed figures of the High Treason Incident having made his presence in Japan increasingly precarious, he not only escaped from a dangerous situation. He also actualised a mode of participation in the world whose political efficacy and value lay precisely in the existence of a borderless community of like-minded thinkers and activists scattered across several continents.

As Germany was about to invade Belgium, it would not take long for Ishikawa to fall into another perilous set of circumstances. Chance and determination tossed him between France, Belgium, England and Morocco, during which time his survival mostly depended on the goodwill of anarchists and anarchist sympathisers. He exchanged views, forged bonds and deepened his political engagement. At first glance, little of this seems of lasting consequence beyond the trajectory it imposed on his own life. Indeed, his foreign journey seems of little weight in the context of the dramatic geopolitical turbulence of the period. A closer look suggests, however, that Ishikawa, whose socialism by then had morphed into a consciously expressed anarchism, had become a crucial link in a complex web of intellectual connections that played a significant role at the local and global levels. These connections fuelled an anarchist discourse of dissent that the contemporary geopolitical chaos helped to reshape.

Tracing Ishikawa's travels in the 1910s thus reveals the threads of connectivity which allowed this discourse to circulate and become relevant in terms of the study of global intellectual history. The present chapter focuses on these crucial years of Ishikawa's self-imposed exile in Europe, between 1913 and 1920, and their legacy.