The Information Wars of the 'Heimin' Peddlers : Japanese-Language Media Struggles in the Era of Revolution

The Russo-Japanese War, fought over control of Korea and Manchuria, erupted in February 1904 and concluded in September 1905 with the Treaty of Portsmouth, which declared Japanese victory. This laid the groundwork for the Japanese invasion of Korea and Manchuria. As Sakai Toshihiko recalls, it was right around the Russo-Japanese War that “the Japanese socialist movement took its first great leap.” It hardly bears repeating that the driving force behind this leap was the positioning of socialists as “anti-war.” However, this cannot be fully understood by looking merely at the level of socialist movements, for it was also intertwined with the reorganization of the Japanese-language media landscape. Competitions for sales unfolded in the Japanese-language media market where the dynamics of capital were already taking precedence. Media outlets fought to obtain information with greater speed than their competitors, and, with mass printing systems at their disposal, aimed for larger readerships. It was at this time, in publications like the weekly Heimin Shinbun (Commoner’s News), which took it upon itself to spread the anti-war “gospel,” and its successor, the weekly magazine Chokugen (Straight Talk), which reported on the Russian Revolution, that “a new form of socialist evangelism” emerged as a means for transmitting information, a form that could even be called bizarre when the media conditions of the time are taken into account: the “peddlers of socialist gospel.” Pivoting on the issue of the body as a form of mobile media, this paper considers the formation of “Russia” as a signifier in Japanese-language media of this period, together with the question of who constituted the heimin (commoner) as both transmitter and receiver of information as imagined by Heiminsha (the publisher of Heimin Shinbun). Moreover, by drawing attention to the fact that it was “the people” [minshū] of “Japan” who excluded anti-war discourse on the Russo-Japanese War from media spaces, I interrogate the dynamics of discrimination inherent in the concept of “proletariat = heimin” constructed in the translations of Sakai Toshihiko, Kōtoku Shunsui, and others.