ABSTRACT
With recent developments of the “global justice movement,” scholars became more attentive to social movements beyond national borders outside of the Western world. This chapter attempts to reinterpret the trajectory of social movements in Japan from the perspective of global justice by focusing on the thought and behavior of Kōtoku Shūsui, a representative socialist-activist in the early twentieth century. Kōtoku’s first book Imperialism: The Specter of the Twentieth Century anticipated the networking of social movements on global scale advocating the abolishment of war and the promotion of equality. What historical conditions induced him to tackle the issue of justice on the global scale? How were Eastern traditional thoughts such as Confucianism intertwined with Western contemporary thoughts such as Marxism to produce his conception of global justice? How did Japan’s ambiguous positionality between a victim and perpetrator in terms of imperialism affect his theorization on global justice? By interpreting Kōtoku’s intellectual trajectory as an effect of the epistemological compression of time-space caused by the development of communication and transportation, this chapter sheds new light on the discussions on global justice in East Asia.
