Beyond Utopia: New Villages and Living Politics in Modern Japan and across Frontiers

Abstract

This article takes the story of the New Village, a Japanese intentional community founded in 1918 by novelist Mushanokōji Saneatsu, as a starting point for exploring non-state visions of politics in twentieth-century East Asia. Modern East Asian political thought is often seen as highly state-centred, but the history of the New Village (which still exists today), and of similar experiments in community living, highlights the diversity and influence of alternative political ideas in the region. Placing this history in context of recent debates about spaces of autonomy and everyday utopias, the article examines the influence of the New Village idea and its resonances with similar movements in other parts of the world. These resonances complicate the distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘foreign’ and subvert the chronological dichotomy between ‘modernizers’ and ‘traditionalists’, since the dreams of a better world explored in the article drew elements of past and future together in ways that challenged both tradition and modernity. Placing these dreams in their cross-border context, I argue that they contain ideas that are worth re-examining in the context of the contemporary crisis of democracy, not just in Asia but worldwide.