Max Stirner’s book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (in English, The Unique and its Property, but often mistranslated as The Ego and its Own) appeared in Germany in 1844, where it caused quite a stir before the revolutionary wave of 1848 halted discussion of the incendiary work. Stirner, who died in poverty in 1856, remained obscure until around the turn of the 19th century, when a biography was published in German and a flurry of new translations of Der Enzige appeared in French, English, and, among many other languages, Japanese. Stirner’s book is, of course, the principle theoretical text in the egoist tendency within anarchism. (“Egoist anarchism” and “individualist anarchism” are often treated a synonyms, but for the sake of clarity I will avoid doing so here.) While often treated, with some justification, as a primarily North American and European phenomenon in surveys of anarchism, it was and is far from exclusively so. Japanese anarchism remains little-known in the English-speaking anti-authoritarian milieu. Japanese egoist anarchism is almost entirely unknown, and what little has appeared in English on the subject is often plagued by errors and distortions. The following series of articles deals with three Stirner-influenced Japanese anarchists: the literary Dadaist Tsuji Jun, the poet, nihilist, and terrorist Kaneko Fumiko, and the influential anarcho-syndicalist activist Osugi Sakae. I make no claim that any was an “orthodox” Stirnerian (if there can be such a thing), and all applied his ideas to their own development in extremely unique ways. These brief sketches are given as a means of showcasing the broadness and scope of international anarchist thought as well as a contribution to the ongoing revival of interest in egoist anarchism. Hopefully they will arouse interest for future research, translation, and publishing.
TSUJI JUN
As the first person to translate Stirner into Japanese, any overview of egoist anarchism in Japan should begin with Tsuj Jun. Born October 4, 1884 in Tokyo, Tsuji described his childhood as “nothing but destitution, hardship, and a series of traumatizing difficulties.” The young Tsuji sought refuge from his difficult life in literature, which was to become a lifelong passion. In 1899, he began studying English (and later, French) at a foreign language school, where he was introduced to Christianity.
Christianity played an important role in the development of socialist consciousness in Japan, as it was seen as a modern, Western ideology concerned with social reality and progress which opposed the imperial system as based on a pagan god, the emperor. The vogue for Christianity was especially prominent among Japan’s disaffected youth and declasse intellectuals. Many of the first socialists (in the broadest sense of the term) were Christians or ex-Christians. Kotoku Shusui, personally hostile to Christianity and later to become an extremely influential anarchist, complained:
“In Japan socialism is regarded merely as a special product of Christianity, or as its appendage. People even go to the extreme of believing that ‘socialist’ is synonymous with ‘Christian.’”
With this context in mind, it is less surprising that the three radicals this article examines would either flirt with or outright convert to Christianity early in their intellectual and political development. I was unable to confirm whether Tsuji ever actually became a Christian, unlike Kaneko and Osugi who both (briefly) did. Regardless, Tsuji certainly studied the Bible, the writings of prominent Christian figure Uchimura Kanzo, and the work of Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy. Tsuji’s friend and fellow anarchist Hagiwara Kyojiro included Christ as well as the Buddha, the French poet Verlaine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Stirner in a list of Tsuji’s influences in his short prose portrait of the man.
After leaving school, Tsuji began teaching English at an elementary school in 1903. His interest in socialism deepened and he became close with a circle of anarchist friends. In 1909, he took up a position at an all-girls’ high school, where in 1912 a relationship developed between Tsuji and his pupil, Ito Noe. Ito was at the time involved in a difficult arranged marriage, and the affair resulted in Tsuji’s resignation. He would remain without steady employment for the rest of his life. Shortly after Tsuji’s resignation, Ito became a contributor to the feminist magazine Seito (Bluestocking). The household made ends meet through Ito’s earnings from the journal and Tsuji’s freelance translation jobs. The same year, Tsuji read Stirner’s The Unique and its Property; his newfound unemployment afforded him many opportunities to experiment with an Epicurean, egoistic, liberated lifestyle.
While Tsuji began reading The Unique and its Property in 1912, his translation did not appear until three years later; instead, his first book-length translation, Lombrosio’s The Man of Genius, appeared in 1914. Tsuji, at least at this stage, seems to have worked from English copies of the works he translated (Man was first published in Italian). The first English translation of Stirner’s book, the work of Stephen T. Byington under the supervision of Benjamin Tucker, was published in 1907 as The Ego and its Own. This mistranslation has proved to be a major stumbling block for English speakers interested in Stirner; though the terms “egoist” and “egoism” appear throughout, he never actually used the word “ego” in his book. Tsuji’s Japanese title for the book translates literally as “The sole person and their possessions,” certainly a more accurate translation than Byington’s. In any case, the Japanese anarchists inspired by Stirner seem to be far less guilty than their Anglophone counterparts of confusing the conceptual ego or absolute, Fichtean I with Stirner’s nonconceptual and transitory unique. On this point, the American post-left anarchist Jason McQuinn is worth quoting at length:
“[W]ithin Stirner’s texts, it should be remembered at all times that he explicitly intends to use this noun [Einzige, in English unique] not as a typical concept (of an incomparable, particular individual, for example), but as a name which points to the actual, nonconceptual person’s life – that life as it is experienced prior to any conceptual interpretation.”
This elaboration is crucial when considering the similarities between Stirner’s thought and Taoism and Buddhism, particularly Zen, similarities noticed as early as 1906 by the French anarchist and occultist Alexandra David-Neel, who compared Stirner to the Taoist Yang-chou. Apio Ludd (better known as Wolfi Landstreicher) intriguingly mentions in the introduction of his new translation of The Unique that Hegel gave lectures on Eastern thought during Stirner’s time at university, so it’s entirely possible that he was familiar with and influenced by these philosophies. Whether there is a direct connection, there are certainly common points, as demonstrated by this passage from “Stirner’s Critics”:
“Stirner names the unique and says at the same time ‘names don’t name it.’ He utters a name when he names the unique, and adds that the unique is only a name…. What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a concept; what he means is neither a word, nor a thought, nor a concept. What he says is not the meaning, and what he means cannot be said.”
In other words, even as Stirner refuses to separate himself as unique from himself in any kind of symbolic form, he is nevertheless required to communicate via those same symbolic forms. He had to use a word, but the word he chose was merely an arrow pointing towards his target, not the target itself. Stirner’s unique is empty. It has no specific, conceptual content, but consists of the totality of my world as I experience it from moment to moment. This is related to Stirner’s creative nothing – his term for the way in which individuals are constantly consuming and recreating themselves and their worlds.
Although Tsuji’s Dadaist contemporary Takahashi Shinkichi, at first receptive to Stirner, eventually found “a great gulf of contradiction” between egoism and Buddhism, there remains a distinctively Buddhist tint to Tsuji’s thought and work. Tsuji made use of several of the Buddhist terms for nothingness, such as mu and ku. (Ku refers to emptiness, often accompanied by the phrase “all things are empty,” in the sense that they have no unchanging form or essence, or that they have no predetermined meaning and are “filled” only with the meaning that we create. Mu can be translated as nothing, non-being, or non- , and often serves as a negating prefix.) He related these to Stirner’s creative nothing and the Greek idea of panta rhei (everything flows). In the excellent chapter on Stirner in Nishitani Keiji’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, Nishitani calls the creative nothing a “flow of nihility” which “represents a fundamental unity of creative nihilism and finitude.” Tsuji considered the fact that “all things are in flux” – the transience and nihility of all things – to be what made creativity, change, and growth possible.
The various misinterpretations of Stirner’s views as having something to do with apotheosizing the ego or the absolute I exaggerate the apparent contradictions between egoism and Buddhism. As Stirner explained, “it’s not that the I is all, but the I destroys all, and only the self-dissolving I, the never-being I, the—finite I is actually I.” The life of the individual overflows the limits of the self, and through this dissolution everything that the self touches “fuzes” with the self, becoming part of the egoist’s property. “My intercourse with the world consists in this, that I enjoy it, and so consume it for my self-enjoyment. Intercourse is the enjoyment of the world, and belongs to my—self-enjoyment.” Nishitani notes that this self-enjoyment is reminiscent of the samadhi of “self-enjoyment,” an important state in Buddhist practice, while still taking care to distinguish between Buddhist and Stirnerian nothingness.
Tsuji and Ito’s first child, Tsuji Makoto, was born in 1914, around the time Tsuji’s translation of The Man of Genius became a bestseller and Ito became editor-in-chief of Seito. Tsuji assisted Ito with translation and editing, and encouraged her as she strove to become “the new woman,” a feminist ideal frequently discussed in Seito’s pages. Interestingly, Helene Bowen Raddeker argues that Ito’s feminism and autobiographical social criticism concerning love, marriage, and the family were influenced by egoism. She would have certainly been familiar with egoism, not only through her relationship with Tsuji but also the famous anarcho-syndicalist militant Osugi Sakae, who Tsuji and Ito became acquainted with around this time.
Shortly after their second son Ryuji’s birth in 1915, Tsuji began an affair with Ito’s cousin. Ito and Tsuji ended their relationship, each taking custody of one child, and Ito entered Osugi’s four-person free love experiment. Though also an egoist, Osugi always remained an activist and champion of the revolutionary cause, something which drew Ito to him, especially as Tsuji grew increasingly cynical about the prospects for revolution.
Tsuji, after a brief stint teaching English, shakuhachi flute, and violin, began wandering the country. During this period of vagabondage and increasing alcoholism, he would play the shakuhachi for extended periods of time, sleeping in various temples, shrines, and friends’ homes. Around 1921, he was introduced to what would prove to be a crucial and explosive element in his philosophical molotov cocktail: Dada.
Originating in Zurich as a reaction to the First World War, Dada was introduced to the Japanese literary world via a pair of articles that originally appeared in the newspaper Yorozu Choho. On a visit to retrieve a copy of The Unique and its Property, Tsuji’s friend Takahashi showed him the articles. In Wakatsuki Shiran’s “The Latest Art of Epicureanism,” Dada was identified with the Buddhist mu and its practitioners were described as “radical, epicurean, egoist, extreme individualists, anarchist, and realist” with art that “lacked principles.” From this description alone, it is easy to see why this new phenomenon would pique Tsuji’s interest. Tsuji and Takahashi both became deeply involved in the burgeoning literary Dadaist scene; each would later claim the title of first Japanese Dadaist. Both began writing at roughly the same time, and both were (at least initially) influenced by Stirner and Buddhism. Takahashi, as mentioned earlier, would later reject egoism in favor of a more strictly Buddhist form of Dadaism, and later still abandoned Dada in favor of Zen poetry.
Interest in the new movement quickly grew, with writers such as Yoshiyuki Eisuke, Hagiwara Kyojiro, and groups such as the Dadaist collective Mavo and the group centered around the avant-garde anarchist poetry magazine Red and Black making important contributions. Many of these artists were friends of Tsuji’s; however, unlike Tsuji and Takahashi, they were more inclined to use Dada as a vehicle to convey revolutionary anarchist ideas. For Tsuji, Dada was another means of egoistic personal liberation. “Whatever sort of -ist you call me, for whatever reason, doesn’t really matter to me… even Dadaist…. I am going to be my own variety of Dada regardless.”
In addition to his translations, essays, and poems, Tsuji was also a painter, playwright, actor, and an itinerant shakuhachi player. Dada, not tied to any particular medium, especially suited him. Like Stirner’s unique and Buddhism’s mu, he considered Dada “empty.” “Dada,” said Tsuji, “is not art, not literature, not social movement, not religion, not science… not futurism or expressionist, and at the same time Dada is all of them.” He summed up this approach in one of his poems as “Tada = Dada.” (Tada is Japanese for “everything.”) Tsuji’s felt no compulsion to become an evangelist for Dada, preferring instead only to expound on Dadaist ideas sporadically when the mood struck him. This exasperated his friend Takahashi, who declared that the “passive” Tsuji had left it up to him to spread Dada to the world.Tsuji preferred example to active propagandizing. “I only tried to describe the details of my life which might explain the process of becoming a Dadaist.” Compare this to the following passage from Stirner:
“I say: Free yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; because it is not given to everyone to break through all limits, or, more eloquently: that is not a limit for everyone which is one to the others. Consequently, don’t exhaust yourself on the limits of others; it’s enough if you tear down your own.”
Though he often self-deprecatingly characterized himself as lazy, Tsuji was actually extremely active in the radical artistic circles he frequented, even when faced with increasing repression and censorship. Theatre performances and other Dada events were often canceled by authorities, who also confiscated materials, and the extreme degree of overlap in the anarchist movement of the time between radical art and politics meant that many of his personal friends and acquaintances were subject to arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and even death. In 1923, the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake struck. The Ryounkaku, Japan’s first Western-style skyscraper which had become an important symbol of modernity, was destroyed. The destruction of Japan’s center of modernity was a shock on par with that of WW1, the catalyst for European Dada. Tsuji, whose own home was reduced to “a monster right out of Cubism,” later commemorated the tower’s collapse and its aftermath in his Death of an Epicurean:
“The tower in Asakusa was burnt in columns of fire and from their ashes came the young ‘Varieté d’ Epicure.’ Saddled with the grief of the notion that ‘All things are in flux,’ children who have used rouge and powder are playing tambourines and castanets. Just chant the incantation ‘Panta rhei’ and bless the lips and thighs of the young men.”
The Japanese government began a major crackdown on all radical activity, fearing that revolutionaries would take advantage of the chaos that followed the quake. Many anarchists and other radicals were imprisoned or outright murdered, including Osugi Sakae and Ito Noe. Osugi and Ito, along with Osugi’s six-year-old nephew, were arrested, beaten to death, and had their bodies thrown down a well, sparking outrage and a series of revenge attempts by anarchists. Roughly a year after what became known as the Amakasu Incident and the ever-increasing repression that followed it, Tsuji left the country, spending a year in France as a literary correspondent. When he returned to Japan, he resumed his vagabond wandering, partially as a means of avoiding surveillance and censorship. In his essay “Vagabond Romance” he complained about the increasingly oppressive social climate, lamenting the lack of freedom of expression. He denounced nationalism and expressed a wish to submit to no authority other than himself, thinking only “the fine thoughts of an insect.” Tsuji remained productive; he continued to publish radical writing and kept a large circle of friends and lovers.
In 1932, Tsuji Jun apparently suffered a mental breakdown. Climbing to the second floor of a house during a party, he shouted “I am the tengu!” (a half-man, half-bird demon or goblin in Japanese folklore) and jumped to the ground, flapping his arms and running around a table before jumping on top and calling “Kyaa! Kyaa!” He was hospitalized and diagnosed with “temporary psychosis” resulting from his chronic alcoholism. The press was as scandalized by the so-called Tengu Incident as it had been with Tsuji’s writing, hard drinking, and personal life, running articles with such titles as “Tsuji Jun Becomes a Tengu.” Tsuji would struggle with mental health issues for the remainder of his life, eventually giving up writing and becoming more and more absorbed in Buddhism. He once again took up his habit of vagabond wandering, this time dressed in the traditional outfit of a Zen Buddhist monk, going in and out of mental institutions and often running afoul of the law. He supported himself by busking, royalties from his old works, and contributions from friends and a sort of Tsuji Jun Fan Club. He died of starvation while staying in a friend’s apartment in 1944.
Tsuji was a prolific writer and the subject of a large amount of Japanese literature, but almost nothing either by or about him is currently available in English. A few of Tsuji’s poems have been translated by Ryan Choi and are easily available online at the Brooklyn Rail. Erana Jae Taylor’s Tsuji Jun: Japanese Dadaist, Anarchist, Philosopher, Monk, itself the only book-length treatment of Tsuji available in English, includes excerpts from his writing, including one full-length poem. As the publication of Taylor’s book and the ongoing revival of interest in egoist anarchism seem to have aroused a good deal of interest in Tsuji, I hope that in the near future more of his writing will be published in English.
Nothing Sacred! 