Temporalities of sedition

Japan plunged into civil war in 1877.Footnote ¹ The Ottoman and Russian empires went to war against each other in 1877. These were not unrelated events.

“Only when you see an ugly hag [otafuku] do you know a beautiful woman; only when you've smelled the stench of farts do you know the fragrance of musk,” wrote one contributor in 1876 to Review Within and Abroad (Chūgai hyōron), a radical Japanese newspaper published by the Society for the Assembly of Thought (Shūshisha). “When you think about it in this way,” he continued, “the Turkish government is an ugly hag, a release of flatulence for the benefit of our government.” It was “because Turkey has an oppressive government [assei no seifu]” that people could know that Japan's was “wise” (kenmei).Footnote ²

And by “wise,” the contributor meant that the Meiji regime in 1876 was no less hideous, no less odious, than the Turkish. He meant that the Japanese people reading his newspaper should rise up to overthrow their government, just as people in Herzegovina and Serbia were doing.Footnote ³

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8 and the rebellions that led into it marked an upheaval in Japanese history. They signaled the nation's catastrophic entry onto global time. Global time, at least in Japan, contained two distinct but tensely related conceptions of temporality.Footnote ⁴ One was the notion of calendrical time, a nation moving through the day-to-day vicissitudes of an unfolding, open-ended global “narrative of meanwhile.”Footnote ⁵ An incipient Japanese national public recounted global news traveling by telegram and described itself alongside Turkey, Italy, or China as one among many nations existing simultaneously in a single moment of global history. Time, in this sense, was empirical, synchronous, undetermined, empty, and horizontal. The other dimension of global time was historical time, the idea that a nation was situated in the sweep of global history not as an empirical reality but as an intellectual construction. Time here was theoretical, nonsynchronous, determined, prefigured, and vertical. Public critics read the contemporary affairs of other people as the fulfilment of the histories of still other people. It seemed that rebellions unfolding in Herzegovina and Serbia, and an impending invasion of the Balkans by Russia, bore the determining hallmarks of democratic revolutions a century earlier in America and France.

What did that mean for Japan? To resolve the slippage between these two temporalities, to ensure that Japan's empirical progression through indeterminate global time would follow a preferred theoretical course determined by foreign histories, Japanese revolutionaries called on their brethren to take up arms. Public journalists read in news of the Ottoman Empire an example of the dangers of the deprivation of freedom and deployed that news as a thinly veiled way of pillorying their own allegedly despotic government, the third section of this article reveals, after a section on evidence. As they told of the Ottoman present, critics used French and American history to develop a theory of revolution they applied to Japanese present affairs, justifying their own prospective rebellion, the fourth section argues. But journalists understood that a national revolution on global time meant a revolution in an age of aggressive militarist imperialism. As they observed the minatory threat of European imperialism spreading across the Orient, from Turkey to China, they conveyed a sense of both greater urgency about their prospective revolution and confusion about the merits of that revolution, the fifth section explains. When the nation finally did descend into civil war, journalists desperately defended the application of their ideas of revolution to lived experience, even amid reports on horrifying carnage in the Balkans and on their own front lines, even amid consciousness of the peril of European expansionism. The destructive violence of the 1877 civil war thus exposed the intellectual travails of a nation operating with acute public knowledge of its position in both the global imperial present and global revolutionary history. It showed how Japan's public entry onto global time yielded devastating violence, how a supposedly noble revolution on global time begat a ruinous civil war.

The Society for the Assembly of Thought

The newspapers of Japan's Society for the Assembly of Thought played a central role in fomenting this violence on global time, and they revealed that entry onto global time could engender violence precisely because it happened in public.Footnote ⁶ The organization was the most significant and direct target of the Meiji government's purge of journalists under its notorious 1875 newspaper ordinances. And it published the periodicals most closely associated with the rebel factions of the 1877 civil war: its most prominent newspaper, the Review (Hyōron shinbun), along with the successor newspapers Review Within and Abroad and Civilization News (Bunmei shinshi).Footnote ⁷

According to the Account of the Southwest (Seinan ki den), a classic but pro-rebel account of the civil war, the society operated as the ideological mouthpiece and motor of the Kagoshima rebel faction.Footnote ⁸ The leader of the society, Ebihara Boku, known also as Ebihara Atsushi, was associated with Saigō Takamori, who in 1873 defected from the very Meiji government he had helped to found half a decade earlier.Footnote ⁹ Saigō and his allies, most notably Kirino Toshiaki and Shinohara Kunimoto, retreated to their home prefecture of Kagoshima, where they worked in conjunction with Ebihara in Tokyo to found the society as a discursive means of advancing their anti-government cause. In Kagoshima, they themselves founded the Private Academy, a military training ground. In opposition to ruling members of the Meiji government, the Review called for at once the promotion of civil rights (minken) in Japan and an aggressive foreign policy, earning it an enthusiastic public readership and deep suspicion from the government, which regarded it as a revolutionary cell. That it was an extremist publication is suggested by its circulation. Between July 1875 and June 1876, the Review printed a total of 172,287 copies, averaging just under two thousand copies per edition, a scale roughly comparable, according to Sawa Taiyō, to the Meiroku zasshi, the journal of the most prominent Enlightenment intellectuals. Its total circulation that year was under 5 percent that of Yomiuri, the largest paper. It was small but not negligible.Footnote ¹⁰

Links between the Society for the Assembly of Thought and the Kagoshima rebels were indeed broad and deep, according to Ogawara Masamichi, author of authoritative books on the civil war and the role of civil rights in it.Footnote ¹¹ The text often taken as the ideological manifesto of the Private Academy and the Kagoshima rebels appeared in the Review. Footnote ¹² Upholding the tenet that “each country is autonomous and independent [jishu jiritsu] and should not be the object of the coercion of another country,” the rebels laid out a trenchant critique of how Europe and America had set the principles of a world of equal nations and then refused to accept Japan in their system of international law (bankoku kōhō).Footnote ¹³ Toward a rebellion against an allegedly despotic Japanese government that could not stand up to Western imperialism, Ebihara carried out reconnaissance work in Tokyo for the Kagoshima rebels, printed valuable intelligence in the newspaper, and sometimes smuggled information to Kagoshima in the shoes of emissaries. There, the Review was avidly read by trainees at the military schools, where all sources of information except for the Review were banned in the immediate lead-up to the war. When Fukuzawa Yukichi, the most distinguished Enlightenment intellectual of the day, wrote with alarm in 1876 of Japanese journalists spurring violent rebellion, the Review stood exactly for what he denounced. Ebihara himself gave a green light to Shinohara to open hostilities in the war in 1877.Footnote ¹⁴

What, then, was Ebihara publishing in his newspaper? What were the rebels reading so avidly? And about what was Fukuzawa so concerned? Commenting in and on a world in which the means to grapple with national reality had been at once enabled and destabilized by the influx of foreign ideas and by the massification of opinion and debate, journalists wallowed in sedition as a way of coming to terms, quite literally, with their simultaneously globalizing and nationalizing present.Footnote ¹⁵

On oriental time

At first, the Ottoman Empire acted as a parable of the dangers of the deprivation of freedom. “By day, the country of Turkey moves toward further degradation, and now almost complete signs of its extermination have appeared,” Yokose Fumihiko wrote in the Review in September 1875, offering a summary translation of a news story on Turkish venality that appeared in a notable English-language newspaper in Japan. The article prognosticated the “speedy extermination” not only of Turkey but also of “Asian countries” (Ajia shokoku). It decried the “fraud and embezzlement” of Turkish officials who spent “not even a single penny … on the prosperity and wealth of the nation and the progress of the people.”Footnote ¹⁶ In typical fashion for the Review, and in an unprecedented development in the Japanese public sphere, the news article was followed with various pieces of public political commentary by critics.Footnote ¹⁷ “In such times,” commentator Hirayama Shuichi wrote, “the people of a nation must eliminate those malevolent state ministers, chase out the obsequious officials, overthrow [ippen] the evil regime, and preserve the nation.” If the people dithered, then the nation was headed for extinction. “Is this the case only with Turkey?” Hirayama wrote forebodingly.Footnote ¹⁸

It was not just Turkey. Sasaki Jun'ichirō, another commentator, cited a contribution to the Tokyo Daily (Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun) claiming that the government in Korea had adopted ordinances curtailing the expression of public opinion and debate (seigi kōron). Inveighing against the ordinances as “cruel,” he expressed “genuine shock at a Korea choosing to mimic” the practices of the “evil regime in Turkey.” He derided Korean officials as “massive jackasses” (dai bakamono).Footnote ¹⁹ It was just months after Japan had implemented its own infamous newspaper ordinances. By “Korea,” did he mean Japan?

Limiting freedom was the baleful practice of Turkey and Korea, of Orientals, but it was not as if Occidentals who mocked them should have felt free to do so. The previous month, August 1875, Yokose Fumihiko translated and published what he called an entry from the 1860 Encyclopaedia Brittanica on publication rights in Turkey. The entry explained that a French-operated newspaper had been banned in Turkey because it was connected to uprisings in the Ottoman Empire; all foreign publications were required to receive advance approval from Ottoman officials as a result. Yokose did not lament Turkish restrictions on freedom of the press and deploy them to condemn Japanese unfreedom. He used them to decry the weakness of a Japanese regime that censored its own people but failed to crack down on defamatory foreign-run English-language publications. “Places like Turkey are, in the eyes of the world, uncivilized weak countries. And yet the government of Turkey is able to preserve the sovereignty of the nation and has the power to control foreigners,” he commented.Footnote ²⁰ The Japanese government did not.

In early editions of the Review, such relatively sporadic reports on the despotism and weakness of the Ottoman Empire and impending rebellion there appeared as speculation and as a rather silly ploy to pillory the Meiji regime. Then the Balkans began to descend into all-out war, and news began to confirm an expectation of forthcoming Ottoman self-destruction, adding substance to rising revolutionary fervor in Japan itself. In June 1876, the Review “pounded its feet” with “joy” in an overblown celebration of news from “a certain Briton” in Tokyo that rebels in Herzegovina had declared independence from the Ottoman Empire and that Russia and Austria–Hungary had recognized that independence. “The suppressed spirit of freedom has erupted,” it rejoiced.Footnote ²¹

Why the enthusiasm over ethnic politics in Herzegovina? “O governments of the world, o state officials of the world (with the exception of the wise government and officials of Japan)!” the Review editors declared in light of Balkan independence movements, adding in coy parentheses, “If you oppress, then truly oppress, and if you give freedom, then truly give freedom.” Do not, it warned them, claim to give your people freedom in name and beneath that freedom deceive them, for such “hideousness will be exposed and alienate the hearts of your people” and result in “going down the road traveled by the Turkish government, which is fomenting its own overthrow and extermination.” It again parenthetically excluded “the wise government of Japan” from its warning.Footnote ²²

As if confirming the expectation that the Ottoman Empire was bound for demise and the principle proclaimed in an earlier edition that “servile governments self-destruct,” the Review reported the next month that the deposed Ottoman sultan Abdülaziz had, according to a 6 June telegram from London, committed suicide.Footnote ²³ “On hearing the report of the suicide of the deposed emperor of Turkey, our tears flow continually, and we involuntarily look up to heaven and give out a big sigh,” a critic wrote. “The Turkish monarch had long put up a tyrannical government and made his people suffer in torment. That he died an unnatural death does not call for pity,” he explained. But then he qualified that statement, as if with the Japanese monarch and his bureaucrats in mind. He separated the monarch from his monarchy, assigning responsibility to officials around Abdülaziz for deluding the sovereign. It was their, not his, corruption and despotism (sen’ō) that invited the wrath and fury of “free people” and led to rebellion in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Serbia, the next contributor continued.Footnote ²⁴

And as Turkey began to self-destruct, journalists observed signs of a broader crisis. Russia, “quietly watching, like a tiger,” for an opportunity to pounce, was planning to seize on the unrest to plunder the Balkans. The “obdurately proud countries of Europe” were seeking to exploit the situation in Turkey and “throttle” Russia. Upheaval would seize the entire area, which would collapse into a region of devastation, the Review foreboded. The impending Turkish fate “should make depraved officials of the government shudder.”Footnote ²⁵

On revolution

This talk of violent insurrection and the tottering government in Turkey would have been rather anodyne if, at the same time, the Review had not been blaming the Japanese government for precisely the same sins and speaking of the revolutionary pasts of France and America. The synchronicity of despotism across the Orient became legible in the historicity of occidental precedent. In “On the Need to Overthrow Oppressive Governments,” published in the Review in January 1876, contributors hailed the progress Japan had made away from despotism—or so it seemed that is what they said.Footnote ²⁶ Explaining that the purpose of government was to enable people to enjoy their “natural freedom” (tennen no jiyū), the writers rejoiced, “today our Japanese government has gradually lifted the oppression of the past and given the people rights to autonomy and freedom [jishu jiyū no ken] … How fortunate are the people of Japan [Nippon jinmin] in this era!” But the threat of despotism lurked. “If by any chance in the future there appears an autocrat [senseika] who wantonly exploits tyranny and injures the freedom and happiness of the people,” the writers added quickly, “then we cannot but say that for those who are human to subordinate themselves to that autocrat's commands is to violate their very duty as people.” Commentators explained that it was “to realize their natural freedom and attain supreme happiness”—that is, to fulfill the very “purpose for people existing in the world”—that in the Declaration of Independence in America it was said that the duty of people was to build free governments and overthrow regimes that obstructed their freedom. And “the manifesto of the French Revolution,” too, justified violent insurrection against the state.Footnote ²⁷

“Do learned men of the public,” critics wrote to conclude, inviting the public sphere to speak openly on the need for revolution, “take us as ignorant and stupid or not?” Commentary followed. “I cannot but praise the American people for fulfilling their duty to God” by “resisting the country of their mothers and fathers” and “winning freedom,” contributor Yamawaki Gi wrote. “True freedom is the sprout of fresh blood and death, not of armchair debate [zajō giron].” Americans had won the freedom that they enjoyed, he claimed, by “taking up lances” against the British government. They showed that freedom “cannot be obtained without hundreds of lives.”Footnote ²⁸

But Yamawaki hastened to add, “I am not saying that the free government of Japan today should be overthrown. I implore: let there be no mistake.” He was just warning that “if in a few hundred years” the Japanese government did to its own people what the British government had done to the Americans, Japanese should not fear death in resisting that regime.Footnote ²⁹

In this public culture of re-creating the European and American past in the Japanese future, the Ottoman present acted as an example of oriental degradation and despotism, as a sign of the dangers that the Japanese Empire faced as an Asian nation, and as a convenient synecdoche under government monitoring of the press. The French and American pasts offered precedent and historical justification for a revolution to overthrow the Meiji regime. The Turkish present added a degree of urgency, of desperation, to a prospective revolution, making transparent the coyness of the ploy of “warning of a future” of despotism.Footnote ³⁰ The problem was now. Revolution was needed now.

“On the Need to Overthrow Oppressive Governments” appeared two months after the Review published one of the most important texts in the intellectual history of revolution in modern Japan and indeed in the development of the Japanese public sphere. It was titled simply “On Revolution” (“Kokusei tenpen ron”).Footnote ³¹ The publication drew the ire of the Meiji government, led to the imprisonment of journalists, and spelled the eventual demise of the Review.

To justify revolution, the text drew a sharp distinction between the nation, or the “organic state,” and the government that ruled over that organic state. “A nation [kuni] is originally a different entity from the government [seifu],” it explained. If monarchies fall or the government changes, “it is not as if the nation [kuni] is exterminated as a result.”Footnote ³² The text then provided a series of “articles” on revolution. The first argued that “for the freedom of the masses” (shūsho no jiyū no tame), it was necessary to carry out a revolution when “reform” alone did not suffice. And when a government “opposes demands [ju] for the freedom of the people, it is appropriate for citizens [kokumin] to use military force [heiryoku] to abolish that government.” The second clause stressed that only the nation (kuni) as a whole had the right (ken) to overthrow its government, inasmuch as execution, legislation, and even sovereignty resided in the nation (shuken wa sunawachi kuni ni zokusuru mono nari).Footnote ³³ Historians often credit the United States military with introducing the idea of true popular rule to Japan after its invasion of 1945, claiming that the Japanese public sphere failed to claim sovereignty to itself before then.Footnote ³⁴ Here the public sphere was telling itself that it, implicitly not the emperor, was sovereign. And this idea could be lawfully taught in primary schools.

“On Revolution” was not an original treatise. It was, rather, a Japanese translation of an unnamed foreign text made by Mitsukuri Rinshō, an aide (daijō) in the Ministry of Justice. The translation was printed in Accounts of the World (Bankoku sōwa) and then reprinted, in slightly abridged form, in the Review.Footnote ³⁵ The printing in Accounts was itself a re-publication—from, of all things, an appendage to a textbook for early Meiji primary schoolers titled Occidental Primer for the Encouragement of Good (Taisei kanzen kinmō zoku hen). The 1874 extended version of that textbook included this passage of “On Revolution” as well as other chapters that Mitsukuri translated from the American didactic text System of Moral Science. First published in 1853, System of Moral Science was written by the Connecticut-born theologian Laurens Perseus Hickok and used as a “manual” for thought at Union College, at which Hickok became president, and at Amherst College.Footnote ³⁶ The textbook, approved by the Meiji bureaucracy, could thus teach children that their sovereignty meant that they could overthrow the government if it denied them their rights and if they had the support of public opinion. The textbook was banned a decade later.

Mitsukuri himself was a distinguished scholar of French law and a prolific translator, the man who coined the term minken, or “civil rights,” in Japanese, a term that came to form the center of what in English is conventionally called Japan's Movement for Freedom and “Popular Rights” (jiyū minken undō). He was appointed to a committee in the early 1870s led by justice minister Etō Shinpei, and he was charged with translating texts to produce Japan's first-ever civil code. He rendered the French term droits civils as minken, leading to dissent in the committee: “What does it mean that the people [min] have authorities [ken]?”Footnote ³⁷ But with the support of Etō, who himself went on to lead a violent rebellion against the Meiji government in 1874 and was decapitated that year, the term stuck, invoked relentlessly over the next decades of Japanese history by democratic agitators, and by the Review in the mid-1870s.

The reprinting of Mitsukuri's translation of “On Revolution” ignited predictable controversy. And commentary in the Review was predictably sardonic. After raving about Mitsukuri, contributor and leading editor Seki Shingo denied and thereby ironically affirmed what seemed obvious: “By publishing this text amid the effervescence of this day, the good sir [Mitsukuri] intended not to stimulate and encourage the rebels of our present moment but to express a hope for future generations—I don't really know about this sort of thing.” Mitsuki Kiyoshige, another commentator, gushed that after reading a text on civil rights in an earlier edition of the paper, he had not thought a more magnificent piece of writing possible. And yet here was one! “If anyone in the public does not believe in civil rights theory or in the translation by Mr. Mitsukuri, then go look at the Declaration of Independence of the thirteen states of America,” he wrote.Footnote ³⁸ And Yokose Fumihiko wrote,

“My spirit of resolve is not one step behind that of Patrick Henry, the reformer of America,” the final contributor concluded. “And upon now reading this translation of Master Mitsukuri, ‘On Revolution,’ my courage for freedom grows ever stronger.” There was no way to “restrain his thought,” he wrote.Footnote ⁴⁰

Journalists and editors associated with the Review were arrested and imprisoned for these threats of revolution, providing more fodder for luridly entertaining revolutionary news. The Review reported on the incarceration of Seki Shingo, who was sentenced under the thirteenth clause of the 1875 newspaper ordinances, which prohibited “sedition.” According to a record of his interrogation reprinted in the Review, Seki stood his ground on trial, insisting that a spirit of “nationalism” (aikokushin) demanded, and “morality” permitted, that people overthrow a government and “establish a new government of freedom [jiyū no shinseifu]” if a regime wielded “abusive tyranny.” What he called the “Boshin Revolution” of 1868, which toppled the Tokugawa government, was one example of a tyrannical regime being overthrown by the people, he said; now it was time for another, it seemed. The judge upbraided him: “Your heart has been intoxicated by the learning of the Occident, and you've been lulled on theories of civil rights and freedom and whatnot. You've become a hateful rebel who's forgotten our Japanese national essence [waga Nippon no kokutai].” Commentary from the Review went into sneering raptures about the judge, a man “most exceptionally wise, indeed wise,” a man “so excessively wise that we benighted people just cannot understand him.” Pages and pages then followed on the subjugation of “the enslaved people” (dorei jinmin) under autocracy.Footnote ⁴¹

The 1875 newspaper ordinances under which journalists were imprisoned, part of what are known as the “dual evil laws” and regarded by the society, and even today, as a sign of the brutal authoritarianism of the Meiji government, ironically proceeded from the very notion of freedom and rights by which many condemned it. As Inada Masahiro explains, the 1875 “laws,” which were not technically laws, were revisions of 1871 state regulations that enthusiastically promoted the publication of newspapers. In 1873, furious interministerial bickering in the government led to a public political scandal, perhaps the first ever in Japanese history, in which internal government memoranda were leaked to the press. A crisis ensued, and Etō, Saigō, and Ebihara, among others, defected from the government. Amid this crisis, the state issued new directives, now prohibiting “reckless criticism” of the government in print and “the inducing of invidious forces that will agitate the hearts of the masses.”Footnote ⁴²

In January 1875, the Society for Coexistence (Kyōzon dōshū), led by the intellectual Ono Azusa, petitioned the Meiji regime for even stiffer regulations of public media, in a move that Inada claims was central to the proclamation of the Law on Libel and Slander (zanbōritsu) and the Newspaper Ordinances (shinbunshi jōrei) in June. “Honor” (meiyo), the group claimed, was what allowed people “to enjoy life and maintain their bodies.” Inflicting damage on the honor of another person “was worse than death.” It was according to this principle that “all the countries in Europe and America place value on laws regulating calumny [bari no ritsu] and put them on par with laws regulating physical conflict,” they said. Promulgating the concept of “libel” by transliterating and translating it from English, Ono and his band maintained that libel laws were necessary for the “protection of the rights of the individual” and criticized the Meiji regime for “already permitting the publication of newspapers and hoping to open up freedom of print while failing to implement laws to guard against its harms.” This petition, Inada explains, became government policy.Footnote ⁴³ And associates of the Review were thrown in jail. In all, some twenty-five of its journalists were detained.Footnote ⁴⁴

The society persisted in its ploy of global affirmation by public national denial in reporting on the detention of its journalists, even after the arrest of Seki. One commentator protested that all Mitsukuri and the editors were doing by writing on revolution was stating a general global theory, innocently articulating a “reasonable idea common in the world”: “Our Empire of Japan is one among many in the universe; it does not exist outside the universe,” he observed. “Are we not just one country in the universe? Mr. Mitsukuri's translation is certainly not irrelevant to us.”Footnote ⁴⁵

“Blue-eyed warriors” and “effete Confucians”

The Review, banned by the Meiji government, its journalists imprisoned, published its 109th and final edition in July 1876. Another newspaper simply took its place. The Society for the Assembly of Thought put out the first edition of Review Within and Abroad the following month, August 1876. As forces emerging from Turkey seemed to reverberate further across imperial boundaries, throwing national publics out of imperial and monarchical equilibrium into globally contagious revolutionary disorder prefigured by French and American theory and history, the very figment of foreign ideas of freedom and rights cascading through the world and into violent lived experience posed questions of method, questions that were at once historical and historiographical.Footnote ⁴⁶ For the journalists of the society themselves generated a conception of global intellectual history as they reviewed global news.

The notion of the “global” in the approach of global intellectual history encompasses at least three separate modes, Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori explain: first, a subjective category for the scholar; second, a scale of process, such as how ideas spread across the globe; and third, a subjective category for historical agents who themselves think about their global condition.Footnote ⁴⁷ These were categories that associates of the society themselves traversed as they wrote on global time. They sought to examine history as a necessarily global process that began in one part of the world and continued in another, and, thus engaging in the first mode, they developed a subjective worldview that was quite literally a view of the world: they tacitly theorized humanity as essentially homogeneous and explicitly theorized its temporality as incidentally heterogeneous, with the disparate pasts of some acting as the presents and futures of others in unconnected places. From this world-encompassing subjective theory of history, they descended into the second mode, asking how it was, then, that ideas such as freedom spread and became manifest in lived experience. And inasmuch as they consciously inhabited history not only as analysts but as actors, as objects of their own subjective inquiry into how to write the next pages of an indeterminate global narrative of meanwhile, they descended out of this second mode into the third with a modified question of method: not how ideas did spread but how they should spread. What if words alone did not make American ideological prefiguring fulfill itself and cascade across nations because governments, whether British or French, Turkish or Japanese, suppressed public proponents of freedom and rights and obstructed what appeared as a predestined global process? And what if, in this process, countries began invading one another, possibly to abet it, possibly to betray it? Then it was justifiable, indeed necessary, for ordinary people to take up methods, “lances,” prefigured in America and to shed blood, to kill.

The very first edition of Review Within and Abroad reported on a telegram from London dated 22 June stating that “malicious” inspections of newspapers in Turkey had resulted in a ban on three Turkish and three French newspapers. Its desperation exposed, the government faced “imminent extermination.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In case the comparison were not obvious, the newspaper drew attention to similarities between the simultaneous crises of freedom of speech in Turkey and Japan by suggesting and then vigorously denying any similarity. “Look, the difference between the purpose behind our government's ban on the publications of three companies, Hyōron [the Review], Kokai, and Sōbō, and that behind the Turkish bans on newspapers, is as clear as the difference between the heavens and the earth,” a critic wrote. But he wondered, “If someone in the public were obdurately to say that the Turkish ban and our country's ban are the same, what am I to say to him?”Footnote ⁴⁹ It was alarming, another wrote, that this notice of the Turkish ban came not even a month after the Review and two other newspapers were banned in Japan. Was it mere coincidence? “We fear that the people of the public might think it strange that these [two bans] have occurred in the same month and that the number [of newspapers banned, i.e. three] is the same,” he wrote. And he threw in the paper's typical vulgarity and crassness. By banning newspapers, Turkey was an “ugly hag,” a “fart,” “an oppressive government” that proved that the Japanese government was “wise” (kenmei).Footnote ⁵⁰

“Wise” was the standard, seemingly agreed, sardonic epithet by which the society burlesqued the Meiji government and its officials, a euphemism so central to its public culture of sarcasm that the Review had published extensive commentary on that one word. The supposed “news” in January 1876 told of an “Occidental” (seiyōjin) who found it “greatly strange” that Japanese newspapers “granted the title ‘wise’ to the government and its officials.” Commentary dripped with bitter sardonicism. Yamawaki Gi wrote, “The two characters for ‘wise’ constitute the precious encomium that the ignorant and benighted people offer up to government officials.” And he provided an etymology of the term: suddenly the use of “wise” changed in June of the previous year, precisely when the newspaper ordinances were decreed. But why? “Wise” pointed to a nebulous, particularly Japanese form of government “between not-freedom and not-restriction” (jiyū ni arazu sokubaku ni arazaru no aida), he wrote. It denoted a “wisdom that is distinctive to Japan,” and “Occidentals should in no wise mix up the meaning of Japanese ‘wisdom’ with ‘wisdom’ as it is used throughout the world.” If it was all rather confusing, that was exactly the point. Yamawaki gestured wryly at the problem:

As the Meiji regime sought to crush the real threat of revolution spurred by the spread of foreign ideas, words ceased to denote and therefore ironically conveyed greater meaning: Japanese words, like the Japanese government itself, did not fit in a global world. They needed to be fixed.

The globe proffered circumvention of the national state in rhetoric, and it provided practical means to do the same in lived experience. Review Within and Abroad surveyed the world and saw violent revolutionary promise as governments across Asia foundered. When a village leader in northeast Japan committed ritual suicide to atone for fiscal mismanagement, his death had already been prefigured. “Why did Satō [the leader] fail to reflect upon the former Turkish monarch Abdülaziz's tyranny over his people and his suicide, and reach this point?” one critic asked in October 1876, turning to the oriental present. “Everyone knows that the British were unable to succeed in extracting taxes by military force from Americans even after years of war,” another said of the financial crisis in Iwai prefecture, turning to the occidental past.Footnote ⁵² The previous month, the paper reported on news coming in from Shanghai that the Yili region, in Xinjiang, had ceased to pay tribute to the Qing court, leading the Qing government to contemplate war against the region. Qing defeat would result, the paper predicted, in the destruction of the Qing Empire. A critic welcomed the prospect. Describing himself as one “who favors war, for there is no greater honor than to die for one's country,” and one who “took upon himself the affairs of Asia [Ajia],” he hailed the “rebellions in China as not something that will degrade Asia but something that will arouse the spirit of people in the provinces of Asia.”Footnote ⁵³ “Now is the time,” another commentator wrote, “amid the present trends of Asia, of heroic struggle.”Footnote ⁵⁴

But even as they blamed Asian governments for hastening their own bloody extermination, journalists stood in solidarity with Asians being assailed by forces from Europe. The following edition in the same month reported word from “someone” in Shanghai that Britain was planning to build a road in India to Yunnan, at the southern edge of the Qing Empire, a move that would “bring about the basis for great future calamity” in China.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was not just China. All of Asia was in danger. “Today, afar we find Turkey in the thick airs of war, and nearby we find China in the airs of death. Millions of tigers and wolves are each polishing their claws and waiting for a chance,” a reference, it seems, especially to British imperialists. The British, who had already forced opium on China, the paper noted, had but one purpose: “to steal their country and turn their people into slaves [dorei].”Footnote ⁵⁶ “It is the obdurate nature of Europeans,” another edition warned, “that if you yield them an inch, they will take a mile.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Its commentary polyphonous, muddled, Review Within and Abroad revealed a struggle to find clarity in a world where “blue-eyed warriors” and “red-haired guests who humiliate us” seemed to be both the bearers of a noble cause of freedom and rights and barefaced violators of that freedom.Footnote ⁵⁸ Did the Occident help or hinder oriental freedom? Critics seemed unsure. Journalists reported in October 1876 on a telegram from Belgrade and explained that the Russian government was constructing “obstacles in the way of peace between the Turkish court and Serbia.” A commentator approved: “Even if the Russians innately have the hearts of tigers and wolves,” their intervention on behalf of Serbia against Turkey was admirable, akin, he said, to the intervention of France on behalf of America against Britain.Footnote ⁵⁹ But seeming benevolence had ulterior motives, a different commentator warned: “Russia is not aiding Serbia to aid Serbia. It has its own conspiracy and long-term plans: to swallow Turkey, to ingest India, then to annex China, and to establish an empire across the world.” It was “not just Russia”: Britain, Germany, and Austria all sought to swallow small countries and expand their own lands.Footnote ⁶⁰

The solution to this confusing global violence was more violence. The final commentator concluded, “Without the pouring of hot blood, true civilization and enlightenment will be difficult to attain. That hot blood is spilled in the present conflict between Turkey and Serbia is a sign of true civilization and enlightenment in a later day.” “Asia,” too, would need hot blood for civilization and enlightenment: “Let it pour, let it pour.”Footnote ⁶¹

Journalists thus rallied for Serbian independence from and resistance against Turkey as a means of bringing global ideological violence to their own nation. In October 1876, Review Within and Abroad reproduced a Japanese rendering of the “general meaning” of a letter from a Serbian leader to Italy's Giuseppe Garibaldi, to whom the Balkan rebels appealed and who endorsed and supported them.Footnote ⁶² Commentary in Japan took the Serbian struggle to the American and French past and then brought it home:

The verb with which the contributor unwittingly “overthrew” (tenpuku) the table was the same with which so many called for “oppressive governments” to be “overthrown.”

Review Within and Abroad knew that its own lifespan was limited. In its penultimate edition, it reported on “rumors that soon a wise ban on newspaper publication will be issued.”Footnote ⁶⁴ And in October 1876, it was shut down. Not coincidentally, Shiode Hiroyuki stresses, that same month a string of linked rebellions broke out in Kumamoto (the Shinpūren Rebellion), Fukuoka (the Akitsuki Rebellion), Yamaguchi (the Hagi Rebellion), and Tokyo (the Shianbashi Incident). Editors of Review Within and Abroad were imprisoned, one apparently for his references to the Turkish problem.Footnote ⁶⁵

Japan's American revolution

Revolution, prefigured by the pasts of some, necessitated by the presents of others, arrived before long. The month after Review Within and Abroad was shut down, Civilization News (Bunmei shinshi), a replacement paper from the same publisher, printed its first edition. And not a half-year later, in February 1877, rebellion began to stir in Kagoshima and neighboring Kumamoto. The Meiji government declared war on Kagoshima on 19 February. Around this time, Ebihara, head of the society, was arrested for his correspondence with Kirino, leader of the Kagoshima rebels.Footnote ⁶⁶ And two months later, Russia and Turkey formally went to war. Now that hot blood was being spilled both in Turkey and in Japan, a different problem emerged: how to depict the stream of blood cascading across the Orient as a necessary means, legitimated by history, of applying noble ideas to life, and how to isolate blame for that ghastly methodology at the same time.

In the months leading up to the formal outbreak of the civil war, Civilization News continued to press for revolution. In the second edition of the paper, journalists reported on a telegram announcing the opening of a parliament in Turkey. They rejoiced that the “airs of enlightenment” were blowing, even through Turkey, “the foremost of oppressors.” But it was only after “righteous, brave soldiers” had risen up in violent rebellion that parliamentary government was achieved, the paper claimed.Footnote ⁶⁷ And in January 1877, just months after counter-Enlightenment nativists in Kumamoto assassinated the prefectural governor and attacked newly installed telegraph stations, Civilization News reported on vast advances there toward civil liberties and popular elections, even amid continued restiveness.Footnote ⁶⁸ When members of the new prefectural government made a tour of the northern part of the prefecture, they met with widespread petitions and violent agitation for public elections. Citing what it described as the words of “Americans”—“Give me liberty or give me death!”—commentary on the news called on civil rights proponents across the nation to “put these words into action,” not simply “to talk of civil rights and speak of freedom.” For “freedom is life, and without freedom, there is no life.”Footnote ⁶⁹

While other newspapers featured regular reports “from the battlefield,” where they had dispatched journalists, reports in Civilization News once the civil war began tended to be oblique, seemingly deliberately so: they had to twist around possible censorship.Footnote ⁷⁰ But the message they sent amid that obliqueness was calibrated to tell of a revolution foretold. In its first edition after the outbreak of the war, in February 1877, Civilization News depicted an American Revolution unfolding in Kumamoto. “Men and women” in the villages had come together and made a pledge “to regard life and death as the same” and “win true civil rights even with fresh blood.” Their utterances “may sound like mad, violent words, but when we think about them, they are indeed true and appropriate,” the paper commented. The Kumamoto rebels pledged to let “blood flow,” for “fresh blood will restore the spring colors of freedom for the entire nation.” Citing Patrick Henry, whom the paper now named, it again declared, “Give me liberty or give me death!”Footnote ⁷¹ In the previous edition of the paper, released just two days before the outbreak of war, Civilization News published “On Righteous Soldiers [Giheishi],” a battle cry. The manifesto looked abroad and compared rebels “of other lands to those of our nation,” telling of the “righteous soldiers of American independence and the French Revolution” who “recovered freedom.”Footnote ⁷²

And as the war progressed, Civilization News insisted that the revolution was succeeding. The people of Kumamoto had risen up, detained or assassinated government officials, and elected a new provisional people's assembly by popular vote.Footnote ⁷³ The paper urged residents of nearby Saga prefecture to come and partake in bloodshed and burgeoning liberties: “It is not befitting for gentlemen to watch.” It pressed them on: “Recover and spread civil rights! Civil rights are based on the divine purpose of our Emperor to preserve the happiness of the masses!” Everybody would face death, but who was to have enduring honor? Life was fleeting and guaranteed to end: fear not death, the paper urged.Footnote ⁷⁴

Turkey, meanwhile, was slipping further into its own war. Civilization News, depicting the war similarly as a struggle for freedom, turned on Turkish journalists for collaborating with the regime, as if in a broadside against Japanese journalists on the government side. “Rumors on the street” in April 1877 had it that Turkish newspapers and their “slave journalists” were receiving funds from the government “in extreme secret.” “Do those who designate themselves the ears and eyes of the world”—that is, journalists (kisha)—“not feel shame in this?” The state of speech in Turkey evoked what had once happened elsewhere. “Louis of France,” the Civilization News critic reported, “prohibited good words” and “massacred those who defamed him.” His “redress came quickly.” And so the tyrannical officials of Turkey, too, could only hold on to their dying gasps, the paper said. “Russia is increasingly preparing its armed forces, and soon it will set aright this abusive tyranny. Is this not joyful? Is this not joyful?”Footnote ⁷⁵

It seems that commentators were again unsure of how joyful Russian fulfillment of French prefiguring in Turkey was. That same month, the newspaper reported on “rumors” that the Russian government had been observing the internal disorder (nairan) in Japan and saw it as “an opportunity they could not miss to ○○ the Orient (Tōyō ○○ no ki).”Footnote ⁷⁶ Critics again bore down on Turkey, against which Russia was reportedly achieving military victories, and wondered what those victories meant for Japan. “Thousands and myriads of words” had already been spent on Turkey, one critic complained; “do I have to talk about this again now?” But he did talk about it, pointing out that it should have been clear enough to all readers that “signs of the impending extinction of Turkey are today nigh.” He explained that it was the “duty” of Russians as a “strong” nation to aid in the war against an evil tyrant. It was not long before Russia would fly its flag over Turkey, the critic wrote. “But in our country, unlike in Turkey,” the commentator said, the “wise government ministers” had “thoroughly won over the hearts of the people.” In florid language, the newspaper wrote of the lustrous victories of the government armies and the failure of the armies of the people “reported without cease.” “The newspaper journalists in Tokyo” suggested a vast difference between Turkey and Japan: there was no way that Russia, which had already encroached on Japan's northern frontier and settled Karafuto, the paper noted, could do to Japan what it did to Turkey. Were critics being sarcastic here, too? Russians were “scared of the greatness of our official army.” But the people, the commenter added ominously, could not rely only on the greatness of the state army: they had to be prepared to fight themselves. “If the Russians come at us, then how we are we going to respond to them?”Footnote ⁷⁷ The rebellion being waged in Japan, he claimed, drawing from classical Chinese war theory, was a necessary means of jolting a complacent government into “opening its eyes” and “deigning to turn them” to the Russian threat.

What were people to make of this perplexing, deteriorating national and continental scene? The Society for the Assembly of Thought depicted the simultaneity of the destabilization of the Ottoman Balkans and that of Japan's southwest as evidence of the ongoing global fulfillment of freedom and rights. But at the same time, that very fulfillment had opened up an opportunity for Russia to “○○” the entire Orient. Even while launching oblique attacks on the Japanese government rather than on Russia itself for the Russian threat, and even while upholding through Russia the principle of liberal interventionism in all but name, journalists feared Russian entry into an Asian scene already dominated by other imperialists. Freedom and rights ran up against the reality of a harsh imperialist global system in which freedom itself, and the bloodshed it engendered, appeared as the very means by which Occidentals dominated Orientals. Now that it had arrived, hot blood seemed less joyful than Americans and French had promised, but still somehow necessary in a brutal militarist world.

As men began to die in the bloodshed that the Society for the Assembly of Thought had so eagerly anticipated, Civilization News now told of wartime abominations that the Japanese and Turkish armies were both committing. “Peace talks between Turkey and Russia ended without results, and on the twenty-fourth of last month, war began,” Civilization News reported in May 1877. The reason why Russia “hated” Turkey, the news claimed, was that Turkish forces had committed atrocities against the Serbian people, entering a hospital in Serbia and massacring patients there. “By contrast, although our imperial [i.e. government] forces similarly forced their way into a hospital in Higo [i.e. Kumamoto], prefectural officials in Kumamoto applauded them.” The Turkish officials had forgotten the “principles of love for country and kindness to the people,” turned the government into an instrument for their own private interests, and were now slaughtering the Serbian people. “But our country is not like this,” the commentator insisted. “The officials are, one and all, wise.” And the “people are benighted and stupid; they should not establish popular assemblies or a national parliament, and to resist the officials is to denigrate the imperial court.” It warned the people of the southwest to “await the day of slaughter.”Footnote ⁷⁸

And as print could now tell the public at once, all together and in an instant, of the horrors of death at home and abroad, life itself, lost in the name of defending freedom and rights, appeared unbearable. Civilization News continued to report on the atrocities that the Japanese Imperial Army was inflicting on the people of the southwest: torching cities, reducing belongings to ash, and driving people to find aid from the rebel armies, whom the journalists hailed for providing relief to suffering civilians. The commentators bewailed the arson of civilian homes, akin to “setting their hair on fire.” “The people fear the Imperial Army as they fear tigers and lightning,” journalists reported.Footnote ⁷⁹ The situation was dire. “On observing recent trends and witnessing recent news,” a commentator wrote, “I cannot help but feel my tears falling.” Bemoaning the “many adversities” that had befallen “the Empire of Japan,” he wrote, “At home, how many of our comrades are falling at swords and cannon fire! How much of the bones and blood of our people vanishes with cannon smoke! And abroad, the crisis in Turkey has not failed to have an effect on us”: in both crises, “calamity will be difficult to avert,” he predicted.Footnote ⁸⁰

Civilization News was shut down anticlimactically in June 1877. Even while clinging to the conviction that “death” was a necessary method when “writing” failed to make “the people of the Orient emerge from the deep abyss of slavery and breathe in the realm of freedom,” its journalists lamented the “failure” to “bring about government reform by arms.”Footnote ⁸¹ The Society for the Assembly of Thought was dissolved.Footnote ⁸² The civil war ended in defeat for the rebel side in September.

Seeing through the nation

The pointless paroxysm of violence that elements of the public sphere goaded on in the name of freedom, rights, and popular government brought about none of those things.Footnote ⁸³ It did bring about widespread devastation and suffering. It did bring about “calamity.” Villages were torched by both sides. Civilians were massacred. Men tortured fellow men to extract wartime intelligence. Cannon fire terrified and terrorized civilians. Schools suspended operation. Children were mobilized as soldiers. Who knows how many people were raped? Well over ten thousand deaths led to the founding of Yasukuni Shrine, today notorious for honoring perpetrators of atrocity in the Second World War. The economy was reconstructed around slaughter. Civilians hauled goods, cooked rations, served in makeshift hospitals, and buried the dead. They worked almost 19 million man days for the war. Up to 120,000 people fought as soldiers. They helped spread a cholera epidemic starting in June 1877 that struck thirty-four prefectures and infected fourteen thousand people. The desperate printing of money to finance the costs of war led to spiraling inflation. When stabilizing measures were applied, the economy crashed, driving the countryside into crushing poverty and spurring a period of intense terrorism.Footnote ⁸⁴

And as the civil war produced calamity, it produced curiosity. The war was a boon to the media industry.Footnote ⁸⁵ Newspapers profited and proliferated, and they spread consciousness that Japan was not alone in grappling with imperialism, corruption, and despotism. It was not just the Review. Mainstream newspapers, the Japanese bureaucracy, and the military all took sustained interest in the Turkish wars.Footnote ⁸⁶

Hindsight reveals that Japanese pundits were not wrong to look upon Turkey with such consternation, to decry the depravity of its officials and the monstrosities they committed against their own imperial subjects, and to discern in the wars with Serbia and Russia a sign of the degradation of not just the Ottoman Empire but the entire Orient.Footnote ⁸⁷ But what they identified as the turpitude and consequent “impending self-destruction” of the Turkish regime, the voracity of the Russian invaders, and the hypocrisy of French and Americans who heralded equality and freedom and then denied them to Japanese—these were all symptoms of a broader crisis: the very inadequacy of the nation as a limited, modular form with supreme sovereignty in a world in which knowledge, illimitable, spread almost instantly with little regard to arbitrary divisions of loose communal imagination, spreading confusion at the same time.Footnote ⁸⁸ A supposedly empty, uniform model of sociopolitical organization had been filled violently with freedom and rights by Occidentals in the past, and those same Occidentals were now rampaging through the lands of the despotic, unfree Orient, building empires where nations should have been, Japanese intellectuals thought. As they thus saw the world through the nation, some indeed saw through the nation, recognizing how the globalization of knowing and the rampancy of militarist imperialism rendered a supposedly Westphalian world of equal nations illusory, untenable.

“In each country, there is a thing called government that establishes laws, decrees ordinances, and thereby punishes people for acts of evil and violence,” one contributor wrote in a letter to the editor of Review Within and Abroad in September 1876.Footnote ⁸⁹ He demanded a global government that would do the same for countries across the world. To this “single great government,” each country would “elect committee members by popular vote [minsen],” and this committee would take up the administration of the world. Its purpose would be twofold: first, to punish national governments that enacted “evil laws and wielded abusive administration on their people” and to “help the people” topple oppressive regimes and establish “good governments” instead; second, to mediate among nations, resolving conflicts and preventing “large countries” from oppressing smaller ones. For international law (bankoku kōhō) applied only to a limited number of “occidental” countries and had not become a “common law across the universe”: the “power” of Russia and the “largeness” of America endangered smaller countries like Poland and Japan.Footnote ⁹⁰

But there was no global government to thwart violence among nations and prevent abuses of power within them; there were no global structures of thought and action to contain processes of thought and action that were manifestly global. Caught in the sudden, disorienting reality of writing nationally and publicly in a world where, as in the second mode of Moyn and Sartori, violence flared and news spread on a global scale, journalists scrambled to develop a subjective system by which to understand and determine their insurmountable situation in an indeterminate, synchronous global present: they had to invent a global intellectual history in both the first and third modes at the same time, to think about themselves both as objects in a global narrative of meanwhile and as agents shifting that narrative to their benefit. How did they fit in the sweep of a history now so visibly global? As they asked, borrowing from the theories, histories, and present affairs of other lands to formulate the question, they confronted the problem that the formal universalism of the modular sovereign nation and the formal universalism of freedom and rights, which seemed to be reciprocally constitutive in theory, appeared incompatible in practice. National peoples were supposed to be endowed by their governments with freedom and rights, they thought, but nowhere was there historical evidence of a government peacefully and autonomously endowing its people with those things. And everywhere was there confusing, contradictory evidence of the uncertain motives and dubious results of countries invading others to make those principles manifest in national life.

Where did that leave them? As the Japanese public clashed with its government over freedom and rights, and as revolutionary disorder appeared to vibrate through the Orient in a single global instant, and as “red-haired” imperialists denied Asians equality and threatened Asian sovereignty, journalists took up news of the Ottoman Empire streaming in on global time, retrieved models they claimed for a shared global past, and took it upon themselves to preserve a unified, sovereign nation by calling for war and ripping it apart. It did not work. They found that no physical arms quelled the intellectual cataclysm of entering onto global time.

“The slight haze it produced in his head”

The cataclysm of global time was indeed an intellectual cataclysm beyond national control, a shared, public, worldwide experience of moving together, as a single world in a single instant, through the synchronous, day-to-day indeterminacy of a singular, unfolding global present, even while the different pasts of different places made their plural, historically determined, national presents clash. In the absence of a just, equitable international system to resolve conflict, which many in Japan seemed so earnestly to desire, there appeared few available means of reconciling these clashing histories and presents other than by letting blood flow. So demonstrated, so grievously, to so many across the world, the national rebellions of the Christian Balkans against imperial Turkey. Experiencing “hell before breakfast” vicariously again as overseas newspaper correspondents reported on the Balkans bloodbath, Americans could read books, hardly over a decade after their own civil war, extolling the efforts of Russians to “rescue” their “brothers of the Slavonic race and of the Orthodox Church” from the “infidel bondage” of Turks, who had “deviated but little from the manners and customs of their Asiatic forebears” and were “yet devout followers of Mohammed,” “notwithstanding their close proximity to, and constant intercourse with, the democratic commercial communities of modern Europe.”Footnote ⁹¹ British and Russian intellectuals had been whipped into a public frenzy over the war: Dostoevsky endorsed the defense of Christendom; Tchaikovsky composed a stentorian, rousing piece titled the “Serbo-Russian March”; Turgenev wrote a searing parody, translated by Henry James into English, of Queen Victoria reading The Times and, deranged, imagining a croquet match played with the heads of Bulgarian babies, her dress stained with their blood; Tennyson wrote a soaring panegyric on Montenegro “beating back the swarm / Of Turkish Islam” so that “red with blood the Crescent reels from fight.”Footnote ⁹²

Tolstoy, meanwhile, had public misgivings. Anna Karenina, which appeared serialized in a Russian newspaper between 1875 and 1877, self-consciously produced the strange sensation of reading in a real periodical a fictional story that featured fictional characters reading quasi-fictional newspapers that discussed real news on which real newspapers reported: Stepan Arkadyich, we read at the very beginning of the novel, “liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.” The final part of the novel, Part VIII, was dominated by the Balkans problem: “nothing else was talked or written about at that time but the Slavic question and the Serbian war,” the narrator observes.Footnote ⁹³ The editor of the Russian Herald, in which Part VIII was supposed to have appeared in May 1877, blocked its publication because it broadcast qualms about the war. Tolstoy included the chapters independently in the final version of the novel. Dostoevsky denounced his views.Footnote ⁹⁴

The problems of which Tolstoy despaired were human problems, global problems. They were problems of a war fought, in real time, not only on the front lines but also on the home front, in quotidian conversations at train stations and in everyday columns in newspapers. There was something horrifying, something unprecedentedly horrifying, about war on global time: a rebellion in a distant land could travel by telegram through the journalistic veins of the nation into the very hearts of its ordinary inhabitants, evoking not a salutary sympathy but a sanguinary urge to shed even more blood.

Tolstoy exposed a new global age of warfare: how public fascination with a foreign conflict unleashed unprecedented domestic questions of freedom of speech and the rights of individuals; how everyday people could bypass the state to see themselves in, and then take upon themselves, the lurid ideological struggles of unknown others; how the public became an arena for massifying murder as it fomented ruinous, merciless violence in the supposedly noble fight against despotism; how national boundaries, deepening geopolitically, seemed to vanish intellectually as instant communication technologies threw time and space into disarray and amplified violence with every next telegram, every new edition of the paper; how the telegram and the newspaper produced a degree of supranational global simultaneity that disrupted the viability and internal stability of nations at the exact time when nations of free peoples appeared to be the predestined way of the world.

And there was the most astonishing dimension of Japan's entry onto global time: its story appeared not only in the pages of Civilization News but also, in the exact same moment, about the exact same war, in the pages, or conspicuously purged from the pages, of the Russian Herald. Suddenly, the story of Russia and the story of Japan converged in Serbia. It was not the empirical story of military battles and political details, but the deeper, global story of nations so agitated by problems of the intellect, of the mind, that men killed their kind and thought it a good thing.

The fictional Sergei Ivanovich, bored after his book about forms of statehood in Europe and Russia falls flat, turns his attention to the Serbian rebellion against Turkey, heartened that it has ignited flames of pan-Slavism across Russia. He is concerned that “newspapers printed a great many useless and exaggerated things with one aim—to draw attention to themselves and out-shout the rest,” but he finds sympathy in the mobilization of public opinion behind “the heroism of the Serbs and Montenegrins.”Footnote ⁹⁵ At the train station in Kursk, amid chatter on the latest telegrams reporting Turkish defeats in battle, he learns that Vronsky is departing for Serbia as a volunteer in the fight against Turkey. He meets Vronsky on the platform at a stop on their voyage. Vronsky is “pacing like a caged animal”; he complains that it is “so stuffy on the train.”Footnote ⁹⁶ He remembers the mangled corpse of his erstwhile lover Anna Karenina, whom he first met at a train station and who threw herself onto train tracks just pages earlier, after her extended infidelity with him degenerated into noxious drug abuse and psychological ruination. He continues by train on to Serbia, his “last love,” his military intervention in Serbia parallel to his sexual intervention in the life of Anna.Footnote ⁹⁷

Sergei then goes to speak with Levin, his brother, the character in Tolstoy's oeuvre most similar to Tolstoy himself.Footnote ⁹⁸ Levin believes that it is immoral for “private persons,” volunteers like Vronsky, to act on their own will for war: “war is such a beastly, cruel and terrible thing that no man, to say nothing of a Christian, can personally take upon himself the responsibility for starting a war.” Sergei ripostes, exulting in how newspapers, in a “joyous” phenomenon unseen in the war with Turkey two decades earlier, have allowed the Russian people to make “full expression of public opinion” and spurred them to “sacrifice themselves for their oppressed brothers.”Footnote ⁹⁹

“‘But it's not just to sacrifice themselves, it's also to kill Turks,’ Levin said timidly.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰