Ishikawa Sanshirō was a journalist and anarchist in the early twentieth century, active at a time of tremendous intellectual and social ferment. Geographical Imagination investigates his engagement with causes such as farmers’ autonomy, gender equality, and anti-war and anti-pollution. Through Ishikawa’s personal journey – which includes several years of European exile – the book invites us to reconsider the scope and ambitions of anarchism in Japan at the time and reassesses geographical thought as a basis for dialogue between Eastern and Western radical thinkers.

In this book launch, the author will be joined in discussion of the book’s themes by Dr Constance Bantman and Dr Ian Rapley. It will be hosted as an online webinar.

Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imagination: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan by Dr Nadine Willems is published by Leiden University Press. It is available for purchase via this link.

Date: Monday 26 October 2020

UK Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm (GMT)
Japan Time: 9:00pm-10:00pm (GMT+9)
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About the contributors

Dr Nadine Willems holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford and teaches at the University of East Anglia. She specialises in the intellectual and cultural history of modern Japan, with a focus on East-West transnational exchanges and political dissension. She has also translated proletarian poetry in Kotan Chronicles, by Sarashina Genzō (Isobar Press, 2017) and written about Japanese poets’ perception of the far north (Cambria Press, Forthcoming).

Dr Constance Bantman is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Surrey. Her research examines the transnational and cross-political connections of the French anarchist movement. She is the author of The French Anarchists in London (1880-1914) and a biography of the anarchist writer and editor Jean Grave (Palgrave, Forthcoming).

Dr Ian Rapley is lecturer in East Asian History at Cardiff University, a smallholder, and, when time permits, an amateur potter. His research focuses on the modern cultural and intellectual history of Japan. He is an ex-Daiwa Scholar (1999). Green Star Japan, his manuscript in preparation, is a study of transnational language concentrating on the history of Esperanto in Japan.