TRANSNATIONAL ANARCHISM, JAPANESE REVOLUTIONARY CONNECTIONS, AND THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF EXILE

Abstract In the autumn of 1913, Japanese radical journalist Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956) fled Japan for Europe on a self-imposed exile that would last more than seven years. While there, he mingled with English social philosopher Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) and his circle of friends, and resided for several years with the family of French anarchist Paul Reclus (1858–1941), nephew and professional heir of famed nineteenth-century geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). Ishikawa’s travels contributed to the development of an intricate web of non-state, non-institutional links, fuelling an exchange of knowledge that spanned four decades. His personal trajectory highlights the significance of individual-based activism to the early twentieth-century global spread of anarchism. The experience of exile is also a valuable opportunity to explore how chance encounters, emotional ties, and subjective politics shape ideas of social change in tension with ideological consistency.

On  March , a taciturn Japanese man in his mid-thirties named Ishikawa Sanshirō(-) boarded a French ship in Yokohama. He was on the run from his country's government, travelling with false papers under the protection of the sympathetic Belgian vice-consul in the city. As a journalist and self-proclaimed socialist, Ishikawa attracted constant monitoring by the Japanese police. Censors had just forbidden the publication of his History of the Western social movement. A few years earlier, harsh repression had resulted in the execution of several close friends. Escape was the sensible solution and so he waved goodbye to the agree that organizational connections, such as those that emerged from the First International, do not fully explain the reach of the anarchist movement. They stress the role of informal links stretching across borders to explain the resilience of anarchist thought and practices, at least up to the First World War.  Specifically, a focus on individual trajectories highlights the role played by chance encounters and the contingencies of travel in shaping ideas of social change. These ideas appear sometimes in conflict with ideological consistency, such as the anarchist attachment to pacifism, and the exploration of subjectivity through Ishikawa offers a unique opportunity to trace some unexpected turns in the formation of global anarchist thought.
Second, this article revisits the development of early twentieth-century Japanese anarchism via a methodological approach that rejects a simplistic centre-periphery framework of understanding.  The emphasis here is on intellectual zones of congruence and fluidity of exchanges, thus contesting the assumption of a unidirectional transmission of ideas from West to East. Instead, anarchism is re-evaluated as a dynamic set of concepts and practices that drew from a wide range of inspirations and ambitions, both foreign and indigenous.
Anarchism in East Asia has been conventionally viewed in terms of the influence of European ideas. Historians investigated how these ideas were reconfigured in local settings, as typified by the case of modern China.  Initial studies of Japanese anarchism followed the same pattern of analysis,  with a disproportionate amount of scholarship devoted to two prominent figures, Kotoku Shusui (-) and Ōsugi Sakae (-). Kotoku's alleged involvement in the High Treason Incident, a  plot to kill the emperor, reinforced the violent image of anarchism in historiography, whereas closer attention to, for example, Ishikawa, would give a very different view.
More recent work rejects Western modernity as the sole interpretive grid while stressing both indigenous and transnational factors in the development of Japanese anarchism.  It also expands the concept of anarchism itself, which is seen as not just a form of politics, but an intellectual template that reconfigured the cultural, social, and scientific spheres of the time too. In the same vein, I show that Ishikawa's interaction with his network of friends goes further thanand even departs froma purely political view of dissent and revolution. If the critique of state power as principle of socio-political organization remains crucial, the overwhelming preoccupation is with a mode of participation in the world which eschews hierarchical relations in all the forms of lived experience.
Historians of modern Japan have so far paid limited attention to Ishikawa. Although mentioned on occasion, typically he is dismissed as an irrelevant exile or for being too intellectually abstract.  Studies that note his active contribution to the history of Japanese anarchism tend to proceed from a theoretical standpoint in defining his various roles. Thus, according to this approach, he is a contributor to the ecological critique of the country's rapid industrialization.  Alternatively, he is a leading proponent of anarcho-syndicalism during the s.  His philosophical vision has also been placed within the current of 'cooperatist anarchism' that swept Japan during the first decades of the twentieth century.  While these accounts have validity, they omit Ishikawa's transnational experience and its effect on him as a mediator of people and ideas. Over the years, he developed a loose network of like-minded thinkers and activists, and the fostering of this borderless community was crucial to his anarchism. Likewise, his familiarity with French culture, history, and contemporary events adds an extra dimension to his intellectual journey. The present article investigates these neglected aspects of Ishikawa's life and thought, re-evaluating in the process the significance of individual-based activism at both the local and global levels.  N A D I N E W I L L E M S I As a libertarian offshoot of socialism,  Japanese anarchism gradually emerged as a critique of the capitalist ideology that underpinned the country's sweeping economic transformation after the Meiji Restoration of . By the s, the expression shakai mondai (social problems) had become a familiar occurrence in the press, particularly in Kokumin no Tomo (The Nation's Friend), a progressive periodical that promoted socialist ideas.  The first generation of socialisminspired intellectuals, such as pioneering labour leader Katayama Sen (-) and Unitarian preacher Abe Isō(-), drew attention to the darker side of industrialization and made frequent comparisons with England's urban poverty to support their ideas. They associated activism with notions of Christian charity. At the same time, the Meiji oligarchy became increasingly oppressive, stifling radical thought whenever possible. The enactment of the Public Order and Police Law of  directly targeted organized labour while imposing restrictions on freedom of speech, assembly, and association. The looming war with Russia during the first years of the s saw a strengthening rather than dampening of opposition to the ruling elite. In , Kotoku Shusui and Sakai Toshihiko (-) founded the Heiminsha (Society for the People), publisher of the Shukan Heimin Shinbun (People's Weekly), the country's first socialist paper, and an outspoken critic of conflict with Russia. Ishikawa joined them soon after, thereby becoming a pivotal figure in Japan's non-war movement.  Anarchist ideas spread, including rejection of the very idea of the state itself. In the People's Weekly, Ishikawa denounced the state as a 'collectivity founded on self-interest and ambition'. He claimed that only by cutting the bond between individuals and state governance would people stop identifying with its warmaking tendencies.  Over the following years, the young journalist participated in a hard-fought campaign at the side of Tanaka Shozō(-), the country's famed 'first environmentalist', championing the victims of pollution caused by overexploitation of the Ashio Copper Mine in the rural north-west of Tokyo.  The experience strengthened Ishikawa's solidarity with peasant communities,  who were acutely affected by rapid industrialization and heavy taxation. It also drew him toward a mode of political activism disengaged from institutional links.  The relationship between anarchist activism and the agrarian worldseen as the locus of practices of co-operation and a balanced human-nature interactionwould remain one of Ishikawa's life-long preoccupations.
In an ideological climate dominated by frequent theoretical disputes about the means, modes, and goals of socialism, Kotoku's public embrace of anarchism in  stoked the fires of radicalism that threatened the state-led modernization drive. He famously declared his preference for the tactics of direct action over parliamentary politics,  splitting socialist supporters into two opposing factions.  Ishikawa would soon also reject electoral suffrage as a means of effecting change, stating that he preferred the freedom of a communicator to submission to a party.  But he was more reserved in his support for direct action, claiming to be 'an educator, rather than an agitator'.  Controversy similarly flared up about the place of class struggle in socialist thought. Sakai Toshihiko, to become a founding member of the Japan Communist Party in , adhered strictly to Marx's concept of revolution. For his part, Ishikawa asserted that social change depended on the gradual awakening of the individual rather than on a mechanistic process of class struggle.  There was a certain dose of utopianism in Ishikawa's words, as he eagerly referred to universal love and brotherhood as an ultimate political goal. His anarchism, which he would increasingly promote as a holistic worldviewbased on principles of co-operation and non-hierarchy in all facets of lived experiencewas never a purely political project.
The execution of Kotoku and eleven other dissidents in January  in connection with the High Treason Incident left an enduring scar on socialist and anarchist circles. The opacity of the proceedings and violence of the government's reaction silenced political radicalism for about a decade, a period known as the 'winter years' of Japanese socialism.  Ishikawa was interrogated but not charged, and it fell on him to retrieve the body of his friend from prison.   Ishikawa, Chosakushu, I, p. .  In generic terms, direct action refers to 'workers' general strike'. At the time, however, very few workers were sufficiently organized to launch such a strike, and protest could easily degenerate into violent action. Also, electoral suffrage was limited to a small fraction of the male population, which gave hardly any representative power to the working class. See Assessed in terms of European socialist doctrine, the ideas of Japanese political dissenters in the first decade of the twentieth century reflected a certain degree of ideological confusion. Ishikawa readily admitted that during the period socialism, communism, and anarchism were not clearly differentiated.  What was a common thread amongst dissenters of all allegiances, though, was compassion for the powerless victims of modernization. As Ishikawa recalled in his memoirs: When I think about it now, there is no doubt that the philosophical stance of the Heiminsha coterie was very naïve, even romantic. But the fact that a high spirit of humanism  was permeating the chaos of the time is a beautiful thing I cannot forget, even now. I think that Japan's socialism, communism, anarchism and the like were rooted in sound, fertile soil then.  Ishikawa's own blend of anarchism grew from this soil. He was less of an original thinker than a connector and synthesizer of an eclectic set of ideas from East and West, all the while remaining focused on social realities that he perceived as unjust and exploitative. Over the years, he strove to offer an alternative model of socio-political organization that reworked European knowledge in light of East Asian indigenous thought and context, in particular its agrarian traditions. The concept of domin seikatsu ('life of people of the earth') that he promoted upon his return to Japan in  supported the creation of a loose and centre-less network of autonomous human communities operating through an unmediated relationship to industrial and agricultural production.  Although Proudhonian in inspiration, this model also relied on Buddhist cosmology in its conception and practices of self-introspection for its realization, and referred to Japan's history of peasant resistance to feudal authority.
The Nomin Jichikai, a nationwide network of self-governing farmers' councils that Ishikawa helped to set up during the mid-s, encouraged rural regeneration through education and self-sufficiency. Although relatively short-lived, the scheme was meant as a non-violent anarchist path to farmers' liberation and competed with many other dissenting visions at the time, from communism to pure anarchism and agrarianism. Ishikawa's trademark remains the willingness to conceive of human communities as rooted to the landhe extolled agricultural work and co-operative practices found in agrarian settingsbut without referring to the emperor-centred ideology that characterized popular I I Close association with Kotoku and other executed figures of the High Treason Incident made Ishikawa's presence in Japan increasingly precarious and motivated his departure in . He first reached Belgium and sought the company of revolutionary contacts established through common acquaintances. Calling on Paul Reclus in Brussels in the summer of , he was immediately shown by his host a photograph taken in  to commemorate the first year of the People's Weekly.  It portrayed Ishikawa together with Kotoku, Sakai, and Nishikawa Kojirō(-). The photograph had circulated overseas at the time of the High Treason Incident, suggesting that Ishikawa was already a known figure in European anarchist circles.  As he recalled, 'from that first meeting I was treated as a member of the family'.  Exile also provided Ishikawa with the long-anticipated chance to meet Edward Carpenter, the radical intellectual whose civilizational critique had struck a chord among Japanese dissidents. On the initiative of Ishikawa, both men had corresponded earlier on. Recognizing their commonality of views, Carpenter wrote in : How sweet it is to hear from you all across the world and to know that the same thoughts are moving you far away in the land of the Rising Sun, as here on the shores of the Atlantic! The same inspirations and hopes of a newer truer human society, and the same struggles and battles against the forces of Tyranny.  Friendship progressed over the years, as attested by the steady exchange of letters.  Although unsuccessfully, Carpenter tried to help Ishikawa find a job when he was in England in early , even putting an advertisement in the Manchester Guardian publicizing the skills of a 'Japanese young man, well educated' seeking 'light warehouse or office work in a shipping or other business'.  Whilst socialist thought provided a common anchor of understanding, the scope of their shared interests was wide indeed.
Carpenter's biting critique of modern (Western) civilization, especially in his Civilisation: its cause and cure of , answered the lurking unease in Japan generated by the pressures of modernization at the turn of the century. For dissenting intellectuals, his views offered an antidote to pervasive social Darwinism as a framework of understanding. Such unease grew after Japan's victory in the Sino-Japanese War of -, an event which seemed to support the official notion that Japan was rapidly moving forward on a path of linear progress. In Hibunmeiron (Theory of un-civilization), a series of essays published between  and , thinker Taoka Reiun (-), also a contributor to the People's Weekly, denounced the over-reliance of modern society on rationality and efficiency as an 'inversion of progress'. He credited his readings of Carpenter, among others, in reaching his conclusion.  Likewise, Ishikawa respected Carpenter's philosophy. He had published in  a book entitled Carpenter: poet and prophet, a copy of which he sent to his friend. He would later acknowledge that Carpenter's vision of life and the universe, completely different from that of other social thinkers, had rescued him from the profound dissatisfaction he felt due to the lack of unity in his thoughts, feelings, and daily life.  Thus, in November , Ishikawa actively sought to meet the person who had inspired his reflections on progress and civilization. He located Carpenter in London and accompanied him to Millthorpe, the cottage that the Englishman owned near Sheffield. Carpenter had acquired it in , determined to embrace a life of rural simplicity, away from the social degeneration caused by industrialization and what he perceived as the corruptions of his class. Ishikawa remained there for three days, retaining a vivid impression of his host's lifestyle and intellectual acumen.  In his autobiography, Carpenter distinctly recalls his first meeting with Ishikawa, while acknowledging his place in the larger group of activists he esteemed.  He notes his intelligence, also that Anything less dangerous-looking as a revolutionary it would be hard to imagine. Small in stature, timid in manner, and with a very gentle voice, he seemed the embodiment of quietude and sympathy. It was not difficult however in his case, as in that of many Japanese, to discern, beneath that composed exterior, a strong undercurrent of' resolution and courage.  Carpenter cultivated an extended circle of friends and acquaintances, both in his home country and abroad. As the title of Chunichi Tsuzuki's book so aptly states, he was a 'prophet of human fellowship', someone who not only believed in the value of human bonds but also in their fundamental ability to foster a fair and equal society.  The breadth of his personal contacts embodied his aspiration of creating a world of men and women linked to each other not by the rigidities of class and institutional structures, but by a spiritual sense of brotherhood.  Carpenter also expressed faith in 'the ultimate triumph of the common people',  something he conveyed in Towards democracy, one of his most influential works: If I am not level with the lowest I am nothing; and if I did not know for a certainty that the craziest sot in the village is my equal, and were not proud to have him walk with me as my friend, I would not write another wordfor in this is my strength.  These egalitarian aspirations lie at the core of anarchist philosophy. They were equally nurtured by Ishikawa and expressed in his frequent claim to be a heimin, a commoner or ordinary person, as in the title of the newspaper to which he contributed. He saw it as his mission to align himself with ordinary people.  In his view, the word also designated those with the moral fortitude to help forge a new era free of oppression and hierarchical distinctions.  The term heimin originally referred to the formal class of commoners, excluding aristocrats and former samurai families. They were designated as such in  by the Meiji regime and endowed with new privileges. After the Russo-Japanese War, radical intellectuals gave it a morally charged political meaning. The heimin, whether rural or urban, became the antithesis of the power cliques (batsu)political, financial and othersthat for them defined capitalist control and its war-mongering tendencies.  At the time, the attempt of ethnographer Yanagita Kunio (-) to define an 'abiding folk' (jomin) responded to similar preoccupations. The jomin embodied the quintessence of local, mostly rural, traditions as unaffected by the ravages of capitalism.  But whereas Yanagita sought to identify some kind of essential Japanese-ness, Ishikawa's emphasis was on the recognition of a common people regardless of differences based on nationality, class, ethnicity, and gender. And for him, the heimin was not only naturally antagonistic to capitalism, but also imbued with a spirit of revolt against any kind of oppression, a spirit he would in later years trace back to the farmers' rebellions of pre-modern Japan.  Carpenter had written to Ishikawa in  that 'the future of mankind is leading us beyond patriotism to humanity'.  Both men shared a loose anarchist philosophy which envisaged the creation of a human community superseding state relations and whose strength lay in its egalitarian creed.
Further congruence of thought can be deduced from the articulation of the universal within the individual. Carpenter advocated 'cosmic consciousness' as the key to the attainment of genuine democratic ideals.  As Kirsten Harris explains, cosmic consciousness refers to the awareness of the interconnectedness of all people and matter existing in the past, present, and future.  This awareness leads to a point where all distinctions of caste and class disappear, and equality and freedom can truly become the guiding principles of life in society. But it is only when individuals have come to the realization that they are all part of a universal self that this can happen.  Carpenter likened thus the achievement of cosmic consciousness to overcoming self-consciousness, a process that, for him, induced flashes of illumination or a kind of mystical revelation.  The kind of activism espoused by Ishikawa also saw social transformation as the result of individual awakening, which itself demanded a gradual process of self-cultivation. This leaning toward a spiritual, almost mystical, understanding of social activism is explicit in Ishikawa's first full-length essay, Kyomu no reiko( Chaotic spirituality).  The text deserves particular attention for its evocation of Buddhist practices of introspection aimed at refining and purifying the mind. Ishikawa refers to the need for self-examination, or soul-searching, in order to attain a higher truth that implicitly rejects hierarchical constraints.

T R A N S N A T I O N A L A N A R C H I S M
Similarly, the revolutionary epiphany he experienced at the village of Yanaka during the Ashio anti-pollution campaign in April  proceeded from the sense of ecstasy that filled him during meditation.  The practice was important for him personally and also attests to an intimate association between political activism and spirituality.  Both Carpenter and Ishikawa related their socio-political visions to the notion of revelatory experience. Such faith in self-introspection as a tool of social change does not square well with a conventional interpretation of revolutionary politics. Like his host, however, Ishikawa was adhering to a pervasive intellectual current of the turn of the century that valued non-rational, spiritual modes of apprehending reality. As a reaction to materialistic and utilitarian conceptions of development, this current took many expressions, of which interest in theosophy and occultism was an extreme example.  From a European point of view, it also embodied a critique of Western civilization, which encouraged some thinkers to turn to sources of Eastern tradition, particularly religious and spiritual ones.  Carpenter himself derived much insight from Eastern thought in the course of his intellectual development. He located his understanding of the 'universal self' within a long philosophical tradition, which included the Hindu sacred treatises, the Upanishads, as well as Buddhism and Taoism.  From that perspective, Ishikawa was a valuable interlocutor to Carpenter, who had a genuine interest in Eastern spirituality and on the occasion of their meeting keenly discussed Zen practices and Shintoism with him.  As a participant in the spiritual trends of the times, Ishikawa found common ground with the Englishman. Mutual intellectual affinities thus validated his anarchism. By the s, the two men had reached similar conclusions on the possibility of a higher egalitarian order and that its realization was 'a thing of the heart, rather than a political creed'.  The chance encounter through Carpenter with social reformers Henry Salt (-), founder of the Humanitarian League, and his wife Kate (-), added to Ishikawa's reflection on the association between Eastern religious traditions and anarchism. He had read one of Salt's pamphlets on 'Humanitarianism' back in Japan already, a fact that Salt acknowledged with some curiosity.  A close friend of Carpenter, with whom he shared the inclination for the simple life, Henry Salt remains one of the forgotten visionaries of his era. He was a noted scholar of Henry Thoreau (-) and an enthusiast for ethical socialism. Today, he is mainly remembered for his ardent vegetarianism and denunciation of animal cruelty, but that obscures the wider reach of his views. Similarly, Carpenter's brave and far-sighted defence of homosexuality tends to overshadow his other contributions.  Salt believed in the universal kinship of all creatures and readily contrasted Christian condescension towards animals with Buddhism's emphasis on the sacredness of all life.  He rejected the conventional divide between animals and mankind, arguing that one 'must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood'.  In the belief that man is part of nature, not its master, he denounced despoliation of the natural environment at a time when ecological consciousness was not as prominent as today.
Salt's emphasis on 'universal brotherhood' and the Humanitarian League illustrates the special moral vocabulary favoured by the intellectual community to which he belonged. It attributed a strong significance to feelings of empathy intrinsic to the human condition and applied regardless of any distinctions of status or ethnicity.  Ishikawa shared this sense of empathy, as shown by his attachment to the term heimin, which had permeated his activism until then. After his return to Japan, he stressed a similar conception of ninjō(human feelings), a distinctly human moral consciousness that initiates and sustains changes in society: 'with all these multifarious phenomena of the cosmos as external force, ninjo, the internal factor that affects human society is essentially constant from ancient times to the present day and from West to East'.  Ishikawa's interest extended to the connections he saw between the principles of Salt's Humanitarian League and those promoted by the adepts of New Buddhist thought in Japan. In a letter to an old friend Takashima Beihō(-), a prominent supporter of progressive Buddhism and founder of the Heigo Press, he reported on an invitation to the Salt's cottage and enquired about the periodical on animal protection, The Humanitarian, which Henry Salt had offered to send to Takashima in Japan.  Takashima was himself a fervent advocate of animal protection, together with other moral precepts such as the abolition of prostitution, temperance, and gender equality. He campaigned as a core member of the New Buddhist Society.  As such, Takashima was one of the many individuals involved in the rehabilitation of Buddhist religion during the Meiji era, following its eclipse by Shinto at the time of the Meiji Restoration of .  This took different forms, including the rise of scholarly Buddhism in universities and the emergence of various reform movements, such as the one spearheaded by the New Buddhist Society. Reform movements had an ambivalent relationship to Christianity. The latter's expansion in modernizing Japan represented a challenge, but there was an accompanying realization that it should also serve as a model, particularly concerning methods of dissemination and campaigns to encourage moral behaviour.  The New Buddhist Society kept a close interest in Unitarian practices, hence, for example, its own advocacy of temperance. In the background, a universalist perspective that aspired to the construction of a 'world religion' was never far from the minds of Meiji spiritual thinkers.  Ishikawa and Takashima's correspondence touched upon the benefits of meditation, literary criticism, and the travails of life as an exile.  Ishikawa was also keen that his friend read The Humanitarian.  His letters were published in Shin Bukkyo, the journal issued by the New Buddhist Society, an important outlet for his reflections on civilization and exile and for many years a forum of exchange between Christians and progressive Buddhists.   Ishikawa, Chosakushu, VII, pp. -.  Established in  as the Buddhist Puritan Society, which changed its name to the New Buddhist Society in . See Hoshino Seiji, 'Rational religion and the Shin Bukkyō(New Buddhism) in late Meiji Japan', in Yoshinaga Shin'ichi, ed., Kindai nihon ni okeru chishikijin shukyōundōno gensetsu kukan: 'Shin Bukkyo' no shisoshi, bunkashiteki kenkyū(Discursive space of intellectual religious movements in modern Japan: a study of the 'Shin Bukkyo' journal from the viewpoint of the history of culture and thought) (-), at www.maizuru-ct.ac.jp/human/yosinaga/shin-bukkyo_report.pdf.
 See James Ketelaar, Of heretics and martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and its persecution (Princeton, NJ, ).  Notto Thelle, Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: from conflict to dialogue, - Scholarship has shown that the ambitions of the New Buddhist movement went beyond the repositioning of Japanese Buddhism in the face of the Meiji administration's repressive policies. Indeed, it addressed not only purely religious concerns, but also the aspects of mysticism and self-cultivation that preoccupied many thinkers of the time and that they related to projects of socio-political reform.  Ishikawa's bonds with the movement reflected this trend. That he saw correspondences between Henry Salt's Humanitarian League and Takashima Beiho's New Buddhism highlights his role as a connector of ideas and people. The commonality was not just animal cruelty, but extended to a common moral vocabulary. I V Ishikawa's direct experience of the First World War while staying in Brussels with Paul Reclus was another pivotal experience of his exile years. From the first day of the invasion of neutral Belgium by German forces on  August  until his flight to France six months later, he was sucked into the brutality of the global conflict. The first words of his 'Diary of a siege' conveyed his outrage at 'citizens who have suddenly become vicious wild animals preying on their own kind, hating and cursing and trapping each other'.  The text went on to stress that The so-called civilized humanity of the present times, which has organized the murderous, thieving, plundering outfit known as the state, is really as cursed as a poisonous insect of the natural world…If I am fortunate enough to survive, then the history of this siege will generate reflections for the rest of my life. that 'the Japanese military, who take the German army as a model, are more sensible than them'.  His critique reflected a typical anti-imperialist anarchist stance, as well as disgust with ethnic discrimination. As he stated, 'ultimately, this war is a fight (for expansion) amongst the capitalist great powers, and their spirit of insulting the black and yellow peoples has rubbed off amongst themselves'.  At a time when the outbreak of the war was famously hailed in Japan a 'divine aid' for the development of the country,  Ishikawa offered a contrasting view. He lamented his government's designs on the German colonial possessions of Jiaozhou Bay on the Shandong Peninsula in China, suggesting that Japan was behaving like a thief taking advantage of a fire and risking a disastrous entanglement in the worldwide conflict.  In October , he cautioned that this small act of vanity seemed like a step toward a future war with the US because it would fuel anxiety amongst Europeans and Americans with regard to access to Chinese territory.  Ishikawa was well aware that Belgium, as a small country with an unfortunate geographical location, was a nation-state artificially constructed for the sake of the big powers' strategic concerns, and, as Larry Zuckerman notes, treated as 'a rag doll for neighbours to squabble over'.  Ishikawa observed that, in that sense, Belgium shared much with Korea, annexed by Japan a few years earlier. For him, annexation threatened Belgium too if France and England failed to defeat Germany.
Ishikawa undoubtedly discussed concerns about the annexation of Belgium with his host Paul Reclus, who remained in the country even after the lifting of his exile order by France in . Two years into the war, the two men signed the Manifeste des seize (Manifesto of the sixteen), together with several other prominent figures of the European anarchist movement. The Manifesto, dated  February , reflected a difference of opinion that dated back to . It declared support for allied efforts to defeat Germany, signalling a break from the non-interventionist stance of a majority of anarchists at the time.  Published first in the French syndicalist daily La Bataille in March , then in La Libre Fédération of Lausanne a month later, the Manifesto was drawn up by Peter Kropotkin (-) with the help of French activist Jean Grave (-).  It owed its name to the (assumed) number of its  Ibid., II  N A D I N E W I L L E M S signatories, which included another revolutionary exile, Georgian Prince Varlaam Cherkesov (-), Dutch syndicalist Christiaan Cornelissen (-), and French anarchists Charles Malato (-) and Marc Pierrot (-).  In the following months,  more signatories, including activists from England, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and Switzerland, added their support.  The text, unashamedly pro-Entente, sanctioned a split within the European anarchist movement, precipitating its demise according to some, and prefiguring the contradictions that would undermine socialist parties, notably after the October revolution of .  The signatories attributed to Germany not only blame for the conflict, but also accused it of having long planned its attacks on Belgium, France, and Russia. They warned of peace talks that at the time would overwhelmingly favour the aggressor, exempting it from reparations and rubber-stamping the annexation of territories. The German government had deceived its workers, they claimed. Moreover, the working class had been poorly represented at the conference of Zimmerwald, thereby depriving it from any real meaning.  The signatories insisted there was no reason to believe in German peaceful intentions; the aggressor's objective was the annexation of Belgium and the territories of northern France. Therefore, 'We anarchists, anti-militarists, enemies of war and passionate supporters of peace and the brotherhood of peoples, have taken sides with resistance and did not consider separating our plight from that of the rest of the population.'  The Manifesto, however, immediately attracted the condemnation of the London International Anarchist Group. In an April letter to the journal Freedom, Italian exile Errico Malatesta (-) criticized the paradoxical idea of supporting collaboration with the government and capitalists of some countries in order to defeat the government and capitalists of others.  The London Group's stance relied on the conventional anarchist understanding that war was inevitable under a capitalist system, and that revolutionary insurrection was the only solution.
 In reality, the signatories numbered fifteen, a place-name having been mistaken for a surname.
 Ishikawa, Chosakushu, III, p. .  Confino, 'Anarchisme et internationalisme', p. . On socialists' abandonment of the principles of non-resistance at the eve of the First World War, see Marc Mulholland, '"Marxists of strict observance"? The Second International, national defence and the question of war', Historical Journal,  (), pp. -; on anarchism during the war, see especially Matthew Adams and Ruth Kinna, eds., Anarchism, -: internationalism, anti-militarism and war (Manchester, ).  Conference held in September  amongst delegates of anti-militarist socialist parties from several countries with the aim of co-ordinating international socialist opinion and action with respect to the war.
in  'I am glad that my work is of significance (for those by) whom our ideals and ideas are so sincerely interpreted.'  Within this anarchist community, the dangers of state control and encroachment represented a constant preoccupation. In a long letter to his Japanese friend, Paul Reclus deplored the fact that 'individual property and the supreme role of the state remain untouched dogma for the majority of men'.  Occasionally, he reaffirmed the strength of the links within the community, assuring Ishikawa that 'the Paris friends are well'.  In his last note in , three years before his death, Paul would restate the commonality of their aspirations: 'I have been moved by your nice postcard, which tells me that you are well and that we have similar sentiments on many issues', but his final words also imply that the tide was running against their shared anarchist struggle against militarism: 'I hope that your book will be successful, though [I fear that] now warlike literature has a greater chance than philosophy.'  Indeed, he lived just long enough to see his predictions validated by the upheaval of a new world war.

V I
The devastation brought by the Pacific War within and outside Japan's borders confirmed Ishikawa's and his friends' darkest forebodings. His government's geo-political scheming during the First World War had evolved into a reckless and bellicose imperialism. Meanwhile, Soviet communism had betrayed the hopes of proletarian emancipation and given birth to an authoritarian behemoth. As a form of silent resistance to what he perceived as ideological folly, Ishikawa retreated into self-sufficient living during the war years. It was mostly symbolic, but resistance of any sort was unusual amongst pre-war Japanese intellectuals, many of whom had flipped over to nationalism. After the war, Ishikawa resumed activism in the Japanese anarchist movement and continued to promote a model of socio-political organization inspired by ethics of co-operation and independence from state control.
In retrospect, his exile years may seem like a haphazard sequence of events, marked by the contingencies of travel, spontaneously created friendships, and intellectual fellowships, constraints imposed by the First World War, impromptu political activism, and encounters with Western thought. Despite, or because of, its apparent lack of structure, Ishikawa's transnational experience offers a rich source of reflection to historians interested in the early twentieth-century global  Ishill to Ishikawa,  Jan. , Honjo, HCL, Ishikawa papers, FC, N. .  Paul Reclus to Ishikawa, date unknown, Honjo, HCL, Ishikawa papers, FC, N. . Only the second half of the letter has been preserved. As it refers to the recent Conference of Locarno, it was probably written in .
 Paul Reclus to Ishikawa,  Jan. , Honjo, HCL, Ishikawa papers, FC, N. .  Paul Reclus to Ishikawa,  Feb. , Honjo, HCL, Ishikawa papers, FC, N. .  N A D I N E W I L L E M S exchange of knowledge. More specifically, it suggests taking into account two methodological correctives. The first one relates to assumptions about the directionality of knowledge transfer between East and West. By its nature, anarchism eschews state and, often, other institutional affiliations. Ishikawa's 'wandering' years in Europe highlight the existence of transnational connections that operate under the radar of official forums of intellectual exchange, making the task of tracing them particularly difficult for historians. Freed from organizational rigidities, these connections subvert the conventional understanding that ideas are unilaterally transmitted from a more advanced and 'enlightened' space to a less progressive onein this case, from Europe to East Asia. As Ishikawa's meeting with Edward Carpenter shows, this understanding is reductive. A complex intermingling of Western and Eastern concepts supplied the background to their mutual belief in non-hierarchical relations and, especially, the link between the political and spiritual spheres. The existence of a commonality of ideas, a 'shared imagination', between Eastern and Western thinkers thus constitutes a valid methodological assumption. Indeed, the very concepts of 'East' and 'West' may be more of a hindrance than a help to historians.
Second, Ishikawa's encounters and travels highlight the importance of subjectivity in moulding transnational experiences. Too often historians of ideas, including anarchism, are concerned with the development of concepts, and see historical actors as the carriers of abstract ideas rather than individuals with complex motivations. For example, Ishikawa's signing of the Manifesto of the sixteen in  shows how chance and emotional bonds influenced anarchist politics as much as pre-existing ideological convictions. Emotional affinities, randomness, and contingency are rarely given much weight in intellectual history, but they are important factors in the story of the Japanese anarchist and, equally, his interlocutors on the global stage.
Ishikawa's four-decade transnational dialogue shaped his intellectual trajectory. But by conceiving this trajectory as part of a common imaginative project shared with European thinkers, who, like him, were liable to the contingencies of human encounters, we can offer a different understanding of global intellectual history.