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Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist Time: Arishima Cooperative Farm in Hokkaido, 1922–1935*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2012

SHO KONISHI
SHO KONISHI*
Affiliation:
St. Antony's College, University of Oxford Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper offers a fresh anarchist history of modern rural experience at the heart of Japan's modernization project in Hokkaido. The rationalization of agricultural methods and the establishment of big farms in Hokkaido worked by tenant farmers served the dual purpose of both colonizing and modernizing Japan's northern frontier. Against the idea of progress imbued in that colonial project, the anarchist and celebrity writer, Arishima Takeo, liberated his tenant farmers by dissolving his tenant farm in Niseko in 1922. The farmers were made the new cooperative owners. Members of the farm, made famous during widespread tenant-farmer disputes, believed they stood at the heart of progress. ‘Sōgo fujō’ (mutual aid) was viewed as an ethic for social transformation, democracy and elimination of hierarchy that linked the farmers with the wider world. It was the farmers’ consciousness of working in a new era, better than ever before, that made them modern. Their community offers us a case study of the imagination and experience of modern temporality amongst the most unlikely subjects of the modern, ordinary agricultural laborers in rural Asia in the early twentieth century. This anarchist history challenges the conceptual framework that has categorized rural Japan as the seat of conservative politics, nativism and traditionalism, and the antithesis of modernity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , November 2013 , pp. 1845 - 1887
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Kiriyama Katsuo and Momoyo for their warm hospitality and the generous time they gave to our interviews. Thanks to the Arishima Takeo Kinen Kan for opening up their archival materials for this project. I also wish to thank the anonymous readers for Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments.

References

1 For comparative purposes, see Scott, James C. (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 193–222Google Scholar.

2 For a cultural and intellectual history of the anarchist movement in modern Japan, see my work (forthcoming), Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

3 See Kropotkin, Peter's seminal work on the role of mutual aid in evolution, (1902), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: William Heinemann)Google Scholar.

4 Anarchist notions of mutual aid should not be confused with the ideals of agrarianism, which saw the small family farm as the backbone of the nation and its agrarian traditions and ethics as the foundation for national values and unity. The two currents of thought were fundamentally different. Unlike agrarianism, anarchism did not idealize rural life as the preserve of national values, nor did it support private property as its foundation. On agrarianism, see Havens, Thomas (1974), Farm and Nation in Modern Japan: Agrarian Nationalism, 1870–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press)Google Scholar.

5 Noe, Itō (1970), Itō Noe zenshū, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin), pp. 464–474Google Scholar.

6 Kiriyama Katsuo and his wife Momoyo were two of the original members of the Arishima Cooperative Living Farm. I conducted two lengthy interviews with them at their home on the farm in Niseko Village, 19 December 2000 (Kiriyama interview I) and 7 March 2001 (Kiriyama interview II).

7 Stefan Tanaka has offered insights into the conflicts which the introduction of Western modern time gave rise to in the countryside in early Meiji. Tanaka, Stefan (2004), New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press)Google Scholar. Daikichi, Irokawa has also identified the hopes and visions for democracy amongst rural people in early Meiji, in Irokawa (1988), The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press)Google Scholar, translated and edited by Marius Jansen. However, both works leave the reader with the notion that these conflicts and democratic expectations of common people effectively ended with the institutionalization of the Japanese nation state at the end of the nineteenth century.

8 On the modern experience of time, see Koselleck, Reinhart (2004), Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press)Google Scholar.

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10 Lu, David (1997), Japan: A Documentary History (Armonk, New York and London, England: M. E. Sharpe), p. 400Google Scholar.

11 Takeo, Arishima (1979–1988), Arishima Takeo zenshū, edited by Shigeki, Senuma, vol. ix (Tokyo: Chikuma), pp. 25–26Google Scholar.

12 Scott, James C. (2009), The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press)Google ScholarPubMed.

13 The proposal that modernities may be studied according to their often competing notions of civilizational progress and corresponding lived imaginations of the future may be found in Konishi, Sho (2007), Reopening the ‘Opening of Japan’: A Russian-Japanese Revolutionary Encounter and the Vision of Anarchist Progress, American Historical Review 112 (1) February: 101–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne (2009), Reading Capital (Brooklyn, New York; London: Verso), p. 108Google Scholar.

15 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 108.

16 For a recent discussion on time and space similarly informed by Marxist thought, see, for example, Harry Harootunian (2005), Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem, boundary 2 Summer: 23–51.

17 See, for example, Yoshiaki, Nishida (2003), Dimensions of Change in Twentieth-Century Rural Japan, in Ann Waswo and Nishida Yoshiaki, Farmers and Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon), pp. 14, 18Google Scholar.

18 For a discussion of the agrarian sector's role in Japanese fascism, see Moore, Barrington Jr, (1966), The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press), pp. 254–313Google Scholar. Moore, Jr presents a view of the Japanese peasantry as a voiceless mass, a repressed source of labour for the landed upper class that is squeezed for its contributions to capital. See also Dore, Ronald and Ōuchi, Tsutomu (1971), Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism, in Morley, James, Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 181–210Google Scholar. See also Smethurst, Richard (1974), A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press)Google Scholar, and Havens, Farm and Nation.

19 Kotkin, Stephen (1997), Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, California: University of California Press)Google Scholar. A cursory comparison of the gigantomania of Magnitogorsk, a state-backed project in Stalinist times, with the relatively small scale of the Cooperative Living Farm, is suggestive of the difference in concepts of progress between the two visionary enterprises.

20 The phrase ‘fear and trembling’ is Soren Kierkegaard's. Kierkegaard, (2006), Fear and Trembling, ed. by Evans, C. Stephen and Walsh, Sylvia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)Google Scholar. My interpretation of this moment of tenant liberation owes much to his thought.

21 Arishima Takeo, private letter to Mathilda Heck, 15 January 1919. Arishima Takeo, Arishima Takeo zenshū, vol. 14, p. 746.

22 Niseko-chō shi (1982) (Niseko: Niseko chōshi Hensan Iinkai), p. 737. The event was mainly forgotten during the Cold War, when the community was labelled as ‘dangerous communists’ after its formal disintegration following the Second World War.

23 Abe Yōkichi, who was one of the farmers at the liberation, described the event as such. Abe Shinichi (1978), Arishima no sato: Arishima nōjō jidai no seikatsu (Arishima's Hometown: Life in the Times of Arishima Farm), (Hokkaido) Self publication in the archives of the Arishima Takeo Museum in Niseko, Japan (hereafter ATM). See also Shinkichi, Itō (1997), Yūtopia kikō: Arishima Takeo, Miyazawa Kenji, Mushakoji Saneatsu (Travel to Utopia: Arishima Takeo, Miyazawa Kenji, Mushakoji Saneatsu), (Tokyo: Kodansha), p. 79Google Scholar. Kiriyama Katsuo, who heard much about this particular occasion during the Cooperative Living Farm period, provided a very similar depiction (Kiriyama interview I). The image in a painting drawn at the time of liberation preserved in the ATM also delivers a sense of the strained atmosphere similar to the above description, which contrasts with the official historical record.

24 The liberation talk was first printed in Arishima's journal Izumi. Arishima Takeo (1922), Kosakunin e no kokubetsu, Izumi, no. 1 (1 October): 43.

25 Abe, Arishima no sato, p. 79.

26 Ibid., p. 77.

27 Anonymous, Tokyo Asahi Shimbun (1923), 12 July.

28 For example, Anonymous (1922), Zaisan hōki no daiippo toshite nōen sanbyakuchōhowo kaisan, Yomiuri shimbun, 12 July.

29 For example, Anonymous (1922), Arishima Takeo shi zenzai san wo hōki, Hokkai Times, 3 March.

30 Anonymous, Kosakunin e no kaihōchi ga Arishimashi no risōdōri ni chūmokusareta waga kuni saisho no kyōsanmura kojin no sanshūnen wo mukaiete, Geibi nichinichi shimbun (1926), 13 June.

31 Anonymous, ‘Kosakunin e no kaihōchi’, 13 June.

32 Anonymous (1922), Kami no tamamono, Otaru shimbun, 20 July, p. 3.

33 Takekazu, Ogura (1963), Agricultural Development in Modern Japan (Tokyo: The Japan Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Association), p. 26Google Scholar.

34 Ogura, Agricultural Development in Modern Japan, p. 134.

35 Smethurst, Richard (1986), Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Masanori, Nakamura (1979), Kindai Nihon jinushiseishi kenkyū (Tokyo)Google Scholar. See also Smethurst, Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes, footnote 66, p. 26.

37 Anonymous (1923), Proletaria no funsōde Arishima shi Iwanai de koen, Hokkai Times, 18 July: 4.

38 Kiriyama interview II.

39 Anonymous (1926), Kosakunin no kaihōchi ga Arishima shi no risōdori ni, Geibi nichinichi shimbun, 13 June 13: 2.

40 Kiriyama interview I.

41 Miyayama no Omoide—Danwakai (2001) (video), 2 April. Thanks to Kiriyama Katsuo for videotaping this reunion and discussion between former members of Cooperative Living Farm organized by the Arishima Museum.

42 Arishima's miscalculation derived from the high price of rice at the time of this loan arrangement, followed by the sudden decline of the price of the rice, damaged by long-lasting adverse weather. Ryōji, Takayama (1972), Arishima Takeo kenkyū (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin), p. 327Google Scholar.

43 Takayama Ryōji, a local teacher in Niseko village who studied details of their fiscal situation, concludes that the Cooperative Living Farm was not better off financially than before liberation. Takayama, Arishima Takeo kenkyū.

44 Kiriyama interview I. According to Kiriyama, the majority of the members were in similar material conditions up to 1930 or so.

45 Kiriyama Katsuo recalled his father Tokiji saying this to his family and neighbours on numerous occasions. Kiriyama interview I.

46 It would be safe to assume that every household on the farm had someone who was capable of reading the handbook. In the 1920s, very few rural Japanese men were unable to read and write. Almost all men under the age of 40 and most under 60 had attended elementary school.

47 Kyōsan nōdan techō (Arishima Cooperative Living Farm Handbook), ATM, 8-7-90. 21. It did so by directly taking Arishima Takeo's writing from his speech in which he stated this nature.

48 ATM, 8-7-90.

49 ATM 8-7-90.

50 Ogura, Agricultural Development in Modern Japan, pp. 33–34.

51 Abe, Arishima no sato, p. 82.

52 ATM 1-6-101. Blueprint of the irrigation plan and ‘Request to Begin Construction of Irrigation’.

53 Abe, Arishima no sato, pp. 24–27.

54 ATM 1-6-101.

55 Francks, Penelope (1984), Technology and Agricultural Development in Pre-War Japan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Toshihiko, Isobe (1980), Farm Management System (Noho) and Labour Absorption in Japanese Agriculture: A Case Study of Yamagata Prefecture, in Labour Absorption in Agriculture: The East Asian Experience (Tokyo: National Institute of Agricultural Economics)Google Scholar.

56 Ogura, Agricultural Development in Modern Japan, pp. 438–440.

57 See Francks, Penelope (2003), Rice for the Masses: Food Policy and the Adoption of Imperial Self-Sufficiency in Early Twentieth-Century Japan, Japan Forum, 15 (1): 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Until the 1890s, Japanese-style rice was a luxury product for the ordinary consumer. Although white rice had secured its position as a staple food in early twentieth-century Japan, rural consumers still ate a ratio of 7 to 3 rice to barley.

58 Kiriyama interview II.

59 ATM, Permanent Exhibit.

60 Kiriyama interview II.

61 Ibid.

62 Anonymous (1926), Kosakunin e no kiahouichi ga arishima shi no risō dorini, Geibi nichinichi shimbun newspaper, 13 June.

63 Kiriyama interview I.

64 Ibid.

65 Kiriyama interview II.

66 Takayama, Arishima Takeo kenkyū, pp. 358–360.

67 Kyōsan nōdan techō, ATM 8-7-90.

68 Abe recalled that Yoshikawa maintained trust by keeping a strict accounting of the farm's financing, detailed organization of the records, and clear and easily comprehensible reporting. Itō, Yütopia kikō, pp. 124–125.

69 Kyōsan nōdan techō, ATM 8-7-90.

70 Saitō Shuji (1954–1967), Kaributo yobanashi, a handwritten, private account of the farm printed by Kaributo shogakko shakaika kenkyubu (Kaributo elementary school social studies section), ATM 4-3-3.

71 ‘Sōkai ketsugi roku’ (Record of monthly meetings), ATM, 1-6. The archive contains an impressive record of the detailed discussions of budget matters at the meetings.

72 ATM 1-6. See also Saitō Shuji, Kaributo yobanashi.

73 Kiriyama interview I.

74 The farm later built a separate meeting house, located near the Shrine at the foot of the hill just for this purpose.

75 It is very likely that the nature of the farm gave rise to many conflicts amongst its members. However, I do not have sufficient documentation to give a sense of the nature of these conflicts. Privately held letters and correspondence held by the Kiriyama family that are expected to be released to the Arishima Memorial Museum Archive in the future will likely hold some insight into conflicts on the farm.

76 Kiriyama interview II.

77 See Harvey, David (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Malden, Maryland USA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing), p. 265Google Scholar.

78 On modern farms, see Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 193–222.

79 Niseko-chō shi, pp. 776–777.

80 Ibid.

81 Itō writes that the monument was originally to have been erected in November 1922, three months following liberation. Itō, Yūtopia kikō, pp. 109–111.

82 The blueprint of the office is reprinted in Niseko-chō shi, pp. 741–742.

83 Kiriyama interview II.

84 For a general account of the shrines of the area surrounding Niseko, only a very small number of local study projects initiated by residents of the area as self-publications exists. See for example, Kai, Kuchian Jinja Shinza Hyakunen Kinen Jigyo Hosan (1997), Kuchian jinja shi (Kuchian: Asahi Taiyō dō)Google Scholar.

85 See for example Arishima, (1969) Kain no matsuei (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten)Google Scholar, a novel about a tenant farmer in Hokkaido written in 1917.

86 Ito Shinkichi, Yūtopia kikō, pp. 124–125. The language is still used today by former Cooperative Living Farm members to describe their pre-liberation past. Kiriyama video, Miyayama no Omoide.

87 Abe. pp. 71–72.

88 See, for example, Ito Shinkichi, Yūtopia kikō, pp. 124–125.

89 Ito Shinkichi, pp. 124–125.

90 Kiriyama video, Miyayama no Omoide.

91 Letter held in private collection of Kiriyama Tokiji, ATM (inaccessible to public use at this point due to its references to living Farm members). Author heard of letter from Kiriyama Katsuo, Kiriyama interview II.

92 Takashi, Nagatsuka, The Soil: A Portrait of Rural Life in Meiji Japan, trans. Ann Waswo (London and New York: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar, gives a realistic account of tenant-landlord relations in the early 1900s. On landlord benevolence, see for example pp. 39–40. For an anthropological discussion of gift-giving practices in the light of psychology and time, see Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 3–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Kiriyama interview I. For example, Kiriyama recalls that every year, a family receiving persimmons from relatives on Honshu counted the number of people in each household on the farm and delivered a single fruit for each person in each household. Neighbours came to expect that in the autumn, that household would bring them each a persimmon. The fruits were delivered personally, not losing thereby the cooperative meaning of the gift.

94 For one aspect of this history of the mastery over Hokkaido's nature, see Walker, Brett, The Lost Wolves of Japan (University of Washington Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

95 See the works by the local history study group of Kuchian, the neighbouring village of Niseko, Suteo, Ishida, Shizuo, Takei, and Taizō, Ono, Nono shinbutsu (Gods of the Field) (Kuchian: Kuchian Local History Study Group, 1987)Google Scholar, and hozonkai, Kuchian chō kyodōbunkazai, ed., Kuchian no jijinsan batōsan (The jijinsan and batōsan of Kuchian) (Kuchian: Kuchian chō kyodō bunkazai hozonkai)Google Scholar.

96 I found this sixth side during an inspection of the stone and Iyateru Shrine in March 2001.

97 Abe, p. 74; Kiriyama interview II.

98 Kiriyama interview II.

99 Ibid.

100 For a discussion of this code as part of Japan's ‘modern myths,’ see Gluck, Carol, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

101 Kiriyama interview I.

102 Niseko shi, p. 494.

103 Both festivals and funerals were financed by voluntary contributions of members, separate from the required payments to the Ijihi (maintenance fund).

104 Kiriyama interview II.

105 Abe, p. 75.

106 Kiriyama video, Miyayama no Omoide.

107 Ogura, p. 669.

108 Nishida Yoshiaki, Dimensions of Change in Twentieth-Century Rural Japan, pp. 14–18.

109 Sangyō kumiai sengen, part II, Kyōei: Hokkaido Sangyō kumiai zasshi, July 1929: 3.

110 Warerawa naniwo nasanto suru? (Kumiai undō no moryō), Kyōei, December 1926, front page.

111 Sangyō kumiai sengen, part I, Kyōei: Hokkaido Sangyō kumiai zasshi, June 1929: 6–10.

112 Kyōei, March 1929: 1. Later issues of the journal carry the same advertisement.