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In Anarchist Modernity, Sho Konishi reexamines a critical period of sociopolitical and economic transformation in Japan known as the Meiji restoration (1868-1912). By tracing the development of an underground, non-state, cross-border, Japanese-Russian intellectual network, the author audaciously challenges historians’ conventional interpretations of Japan’s opening to the world (kaikoku) and the Meiji restoration (Meiji Ishin) as a manifestation of Western modernity and an inevitable product of modernization theory. Konishi suggests that this frequently overlooked aspect of transnational intellectual dynamics renders an insu cient, if not awed, protocol to make sense of Meiji Japan’s and the contemporary trajectory of intellectual con guration.

Through riveting accounts of the fateful meeting between Russian revolutionaries and the Japanese Ishin and its resulting translational practices, the emergence of Tolstoyanism as a populist’s anarchist religion, the watershed non-war movement occurring at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, the rise of Esperantism as the birth of a translingual order, and Japan’s post-war scienti c turn, the author expounds the powerful concepts of “anarchist cooperatism” and “mutual aid” to emphasize a new mode of lived modernity and knowledge that “long evaded [the] historian’s conceptual grasp (3).” Utilizing a diversity of primary sources collected from over twenty-ve archives and special collections, including “doodles and sketches in class notebooks, newspaper cartoons, photos, tattered slips of paper, rough notes scribbled on the back of name cards, postcards, diaries, records and songbooks compiled and …