Late Breaking - Individual Paper
7. Multiple Ontologies: Religiosities, Philosophies, Languages and Society
Tokutomi Kenjirō, one of the foremost fiction writers of late Meiji Japan and an iconoclastic Christian, emerged from a bout of deep personal depression to visit Palestine for the second time in 1919, in the wake of the First World War. He declared that the era of “the cross,” the era of suffering and of (in his view) Christian preoccupation with that theme, was over; that a new era in human history had begun; and, confusingly, that he was the return of the Biblical Adam, here now to proclaim that the sun of Japan had risen to illuminate the whole world. In Jerusalem, he wrote letters to world leaders calling for the unification of the world, and in Haifa, he visited Abbas Effendi, head of the nascent Bahá’í Faith, among other activities.
Tokutomi’s visit to Palestine in 1919, and the broader global tour of which it was a part, demand that we contemplate a central question that hung over his experience: what does it mean to suffer in a global world? This paper considers episodes in Tokutomi’s 1919 visit and turns to the deep origins of his suffering in the US Civil War, explaining how a distinctly modern form of personal suffering was carried by Leroy Lansing Janes from the US to Kumamoto, Japan, and then by Tokutomi from Kumamoto to Palestine. The paper argues that Tokutomi’s suffering was an outcome of the global condition itself—a point that came into sharp relief during his Wilsonian-moment visit to Palestine.
Amin Ghadimi
Osaka University, Japan