Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2025
On 1 March 1913, a slim, studious-looking Japanese man in his mid-thirties boarded a French ship in Yokohama. He had been unable to obtain documents allowing him to leave from the authorities. So in lieu of papers he had a note signed and stamped by Fernand Gobert, the sympathetic Belgian Vice-Consul in the city, falsely certifying that the man was travelling as his personal translator and language instructor. A Chinese revolutionary living in Tokyo had helped with the costs of the trip. A close friend had given him a watch, another his suit. The whole affair had the air of a tense and desperate gamble.
The traveller's name was Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876-1956). As a journalist and self-proclaimed socialist he invited constant monitoring by the Japanese police. He had been a vocal opponent of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Censors had just forbidden the distribution of his Seiyō shakai undōshi (History of Western social movements). After harsh repression a couple of years earlier in the context of the High Treason Incident, in which several of his close friends had been sentenced to death and executed, he was in fear for his life. Fleeing into exile was the only solution, and so he waved goodbye to the Japanese coast. After a stopover in Shanghai where he visited other Chinese revolutionaries, Ishikawa made the slow journey to France, finally arriving in Marseilles after 38 days at sea. He had little money, did not speak French or know anyone in the country, and genuinely wondered how he was going to stay alive.
Thus started a seven-and-a-half-year spell of self-imposed exile, probably making Ishikawa the only Japanese citizen with that status in Europe at the time. While overseas, he mingled with various activists of an anarchist disposition in England, Belgium and France. He met English social philosopher Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and lived mostly with the family of Paul Reclus (1858-1941), the nephew of famed French anarchist and geographer Elisee Reclus (1830-1905). He penned a diary, Hōrō hachinenki (Adrift for eight years), during those years and about three decades later produced a memoir relating to that period of his life which he called Rō (Adrift). On a few occasions, the “drifter”, as he referred to himself, came close to an early demise.
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