Historians of Japan, especially those writing in Japanese, conventionally describe incidents in the 1880s “radicalization” (gekka jiken) of the Movement for Freedom and Civil Rights (jiyū minken undō) as incidents of terrorism (tero). But is that the right term, and what do we imply by invoking that framework to discuss freedom and rights in the Meiji era? To investigate these questions, this paper examines the participation in the 1885 Osaka Incident of Arai Shōgo, a prominent civil rights activist from Tochigi prefecture.

From his origins in a well-off peasant family in southern Tochigi, Arai emerged as a leading democratic agitator in the Liberal Party (Jiyūtō); he then took the helm of the military operations of the Osaka terror cell, which unsuccessfully sought to smuggle explosives to Korea, overthrow the government there, drag Japan and China into a regional war, and thereby realize democratic ideals in East Asia.

This paper uses the case of Arai to bring the history of early 1880s Japan into global histories and theories of ideological violence, and in doing so, it seeks to achieve two aims: first, to interpret the so-called “radicalization” not as a contingent Japanese phenomenon but as a manifestation of global intellectual crises, and second, to think anew about the origins of democratic thought and imperial democracy in Japanese history.