Pan-Farmerism in Transwar Rural Japan, 1905–1928

Historians have situated the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War within global and state-centric narratives of Japan's ascent from an agricultural and regional state into an industrialised and imperial challenger to the Western international order. However, this article argues that a historiographical shift from state to nonstate, war to transwar, and urban to rural delineates a competing intellectual current that dislodged these two wars from the history of progress. The forgotten farmer activist and thinker Horii Kintarō (or Horii Ryōho, 1887–1938) provides a lens through which to illuminate this nonstate current and to identify a strand of agrarian thought that this article terms ‘Pan-Farmerism’ – a glocal vision of rural politics grounded in everyday peasant life and humanity's connection to soil. Its non-nationalist and earthly conception of farmer democracy challenged the liberal and imperial democracy of Japan by rooting itself in self-sufficiency, grassroots cooperatives, and mutual aid, which Horii enacted in rural Akita Prefecture. Unlike other pan-isms, Pan-Farmerism as an idea transcended race, ethnicity, religious creed, and the East/West binary by envisioning a transnational solidarity grounded in farmers, rather than in state-oriented or Marxist internationalisms. A transwar nonstate approach thus unveils qualitatively new ideas obscured by extant global, international, and national history.