| Summary: | <p>This thesis examines the development of a hitherto overlooked yet thriving current of thought and culture in modern Japan between the 1860s and the 1920s, which manifested in such diverse realms as religion, gender, race, war, agriculture, and education. An important aspect of this intellectual trend was the rejection of the male God. Instead, God was reconceptualised as multi-gender, challenging the hierarchical ideologies of gender, race, class, and disability that underpinned Western modern civilisational discourse. This project links previously unconnected people, including farmers, thinkers, and educators, for the first time as part of significant cultural-intellectual phenomena in early twentieth-century Japan.</p>
<p>A key figure of the phenomena was Arai Ōsui (1846–1922), a samurai-intellectual from Japan’s civil-war-defeated North. People of different professions and social strata flocked to study Ōsui’s anti-imperial teachings in the very apotheosis of state imperialism. Nevertheless, Ōsui has been forgotten in the historiography, predominantly narrated through the lens of the nation-state led by civil war victors and their views on civilisation and progress. Through the perspectives of Ōsui and his comrades, this thesis offers an alternative view of modern Japanese history outside of the state-centred ideological paradigm of Western modernity.</p>
<p>I argue that the cooperative work of Ōsui and his Japanese comrades, along with their Russian, American, British, and Korean allies, led to the emergence of a competing conception of universal human progress. The concept that I term ‘symbiotic modernity’ encapsulates their efforts to realise a non-hierarchical and inclusive world by replacing the inequality of Western modernity with equality, nationality with transnationality, and the state-centric with people-centric. While the dominant narrative of modern Japanese history, centred on the victorious state side, began with Japan’s Opening (Kaikoku) to the West and Western modernity, this thesis presents a different beginning and outcome of the opening, through Ōsui’s quest for symbiotic modernity.</p>
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