Arai Shōgo and His Global Civil War, circa 1885

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the historical relationship between terrorism and global thought through the case of Arai Shōgo, a commoner from Tochigi, Japan. Arai was chief of operations in the 1885 Osaka Incident, a failed plot among Japanese democratic radicals to travel to Korea, detonate explosives, topple the Korean government, incite war with China, resist European imperialism, and invigorate the democratic movement back in Japan. By examining Arai’s intellectual life as well as his geopolitical and local context, the article suggests that the rise of public political terrorism in East Asia not only signaled but also resulted from the crisis of intellectual globalization in the 1880s, in which terrorism marked the historical origins of the phenomenon of global civil war.