Opening. Sho Konishi (University of Oxford). The History of Not: Symbiotic Modern in Japan after World War Zero

Historians of Japan have often given only one meaning to the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5): Japan’s entry into the community of civilized Western nation states.  In sharp contrast to such understanding, however, a completely different, competing perspective was emerging at the time, outside imperial institutions.  We can detect this intellectual phenomenon by shifting our focus from the state to nonstate, international to transnational, official to unofficial, and from political-diplomatic life to cultural and intellectual lives on the street.  Without a leader or a conductor, participants synchronously orchestrated their practices to produce a far-reaching non-imperial culture that they relied on to redirect the course of history.   

I will disclose this phenomenon by tracing the ways in which early twentieth-century Japanese historical actors applied the negative prefixes ‘non-‘ and ‘not’ to reorder their perceived world. Symbiotic modernity resulted from their non-imperial and anti-imperial sciences and humanities.  Their cultural and intellectual pursuit of ‘not’ transcended a hierarchical order of imperial science. Imperial science included eugenics and race science, and corresponded with bifurcations of the world into Culture and Nature, West and East, colonizer and colonized, male and female. Outside this science, cultural figures of ‘not’ de-racialised and de-genderised human subjectivities.

They discovered and developed statins, Yakult fermented yogurt drink, and ‘Bulgarian’ Yogurt, all household words.  Today, their translations of Fabre’s entomological studies of  the dung beetle and other insects, have become the ‘Mother Goose’ of Japan. It seems that the dung beetle of symbiotic modernity has far outlasted the imperial ideologies that banned it. Yet our historiography, whose foundations were largely formulated by the same imperial knowledge of the early twentieth century, has conveniently forgotten this important and massively influential cultural moment.     
 

Bio

Sho Konishi is a cultural and intellectual historian specializing in the transnational formations of knowledge. He is the Director of Oxford University’s Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies. He is the author and an editor of books: Anarchist Modernity, Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan, Black Transnationalism and Japan, and Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigms, which won an ICAS Book Prize.

He is currently finishing three more monographs this year: Probiosis: Concealed Cultural Revolution and the Making of Symbiotic Modern, The Play of Virtue: Non-state Transnational Intellectual History of Civil War ‘Losers and Criminals’ of Japan, and Nature’s Logic at War: The Birth of Oceanic Humanitarianism in Japan, and editing three books that are forthcoming: Ordinary Women: Liberating Democracy, Feminism and Environmentalism, Reassembling Manchukuo from Below: Invisible Minorities and Forgotten Future Imaginations, as well as Transnational and Translocal Tohoku: Outside the Fold of Western Modern Time and Space.

Outside Oxford, he has also served as an External Faculty Member for the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago until 2024, and is currently an Invited Professor on Indigeneity and Diversity at Hokkaido University, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Anarchist Studies Series at University of Manchester Press and the Esperantic Studies Foundation. He also served as an advisor for the Venice Biennale of Architecture Philippine Pavilion, Structures of Mutual Aid, which was awarded a Special Mention for National Participation at the Venice Biennale for Architecture and was featured in the Biennale Closing Ceremony.

Funded by:

• Eurasia Foundation (from Asia)

In partnership with:

• Vicerectorat d’Internacionalització i Multilingüisme de la Universitat de València
• Departament de Teoria dels Llenguatges i Ciències de la Comunicació
• Institut Universitari de la Creativitat i Innovacions Educatives (IUCIE)
• Unitat d’Investigació Japón -Universitat de València (UIJ-UV)