Introduction

The question addressed in the present thesis is how locals interpret foreign political theory given the physical, and if applicable, intellectual, distances. Its main concern is in how indigenous political spatialisation exerts influence on an imported theory, questioning why and how is knowledge making the world apparently as one, despite the difference. This is an inquiry into collective subjectivity and power, one that questions a seemingly self-evident assumption in studies of world politics in general and in critical geopolitics in particular: that the diffusion of geographical knowledge is accompanied by the power of its author. The author is in most cases in the modern periods considered to be from ‘the West’. The aspiration of the present study is to take an approach ‘from within’ (Jenco, 2007), examining how theories are domesticated in a particular analytical space and identifying cognitive gaps between the so-called ‘original’ space. In this sense, it is a comparative study. In doing so, it strives to offer a framework for analysing global traveling theory. It thoroughly considers what ‘context’ means for traveling theory, interested more in the often overlooked micro- alterations than in visible transformations. Where and when does interpretation take place? Who is the subject of the action? What is being explained by the theory? Why and how is it done? By addressing these questions, the following two chapters provide a theoretical mapping of how political theory travels inter-regionally.

This chapter focuses mainly on Western academic literature. Edward Said (1982, 2001), who proposes the term ‘traveling theory’, stresses on the one hand the importance of origin and accordingly discounts the plurality of contexts through which theory travels, and on the other hand rightly notes the open-endedness of the evolution. Consequently, he does not take into sufficient account the question of context. A successful account of traveling political theory has to be approached as a product of

intertwining agencies across multiple times and spaces, taking both conscious and unconscious contextualisation into consideration. In order to disentangle the complexity, contexts must be cautiously reconstructed.

Classical geopolitics is a body of political theories that has influenced on studies of international politics (Ó Tuathail, 1996b; Ashworth, 2014; Buzan and Lawson, 2015). It is assumed to enlighten people with ‘scientific’ ways of envisioning the world. Despite its usefulness in considering the meaning of geography in the question of how political theory travels in the age of accelerated globalisation since the end of the nineteenth century, studies on this topic are still limited. In 2000, David Atkinson and Klaus Dodds published an edited volume on geopolitics as a traveling theory, focusing on both diversity and the ‘faint but identifiable traditions’ of geopolitical ideas (Atkinson and Dodds, 2000: xv) Despite the disciplinary concern that critical geopolitics has ended up to limit its inquiry largely within the West (Hepple, 2001; Dodds et al., 2013: 8), scholarly research in the geographical diversity has been far from enough (cf. Slater, 1993, 1994; Wusten and Dijkink. 2002; Sharp, 2013). Concentrating on the discourses of the Great Powers and hence following the premise of geographical knowledge as power (Ó Tuathail, 1996b; Agnew, 2003; Dalby, 2010; Dodds et al. 2013; Agnew, 2013; cf. Müller, 2008, 2013; Moisio, 2015), most contributions to the field have unwittingly neglected the question of subjectification in the global migration of knowledge, and accordingly tend to place more emphasis on the common geopolitical tradition among the Great Powers than the diversities. By contrast, what this study is interested in is, when a political thought travels globally, what happens to power and subjectivity and how the political thought inflects the theory itself. It is concerned with the vital role of locality in the intellectual map of global knowledge dissemination and production. This locality will be addressed from three aspects: in terms of contexts, in terms of collective subjectivity and power structure, and in relation to globality. Judging from how the Japanese state has been largely seen as a fervent borrower of Western knowledge to become the first non- Western modern state, arguments could, in fact, potentially be made against my view, which sees Japan as a creative interpreter of Western knowledge instead. However, as I will argue later, this borrowing can be attained only when foreign knowledge is properly but implicitly or involuntarily amended by the vernacular, even though such amendment may have been indiscernible from the outside. This unseen evolution of traveling theory is the focus of this thesis.

The methodological inquiry has been relatively marginalised in Anglophone studies on geopolitics save a few notable exceptions (Bassin, 1987a, 1987b, 2004, 2007; Murphy, 1997; Atkinson and Dodds, 2000; Wusten et al., 2002; Dijkink, 1996). Therefore, I look for insights from debates emerged in the last two decades on geography of knowledge in the subfields of political and economic geography as well as international intellectual history in IR. This choice, I argue, is not a far-fetched one because critical geopolitics was originally inspired by ‘dissident’ scholars in IR (Ó Tuathail, 1996b; Buzan and Little, 2001). In addition, the forgotten legacy of classical geopolitics has been conversely revisited in the discipline of IR (Ó Tuathail, 1996b; Ashworth, 2010, 2014; Buzan and Lawson, 2015). Equally important is the fact that the two tracks—critical geopolitics and international intellectual history—share certain research interests, since they originated from the discontents with the predominantly positivist, ahistorical and Eurocentric approaches to world politics in the last century. In any case, one can say that inquiries on international intellectual history that extends beyond Europe and North America has just begun. Accordingly, in chapters 2 and 3, I will examine the debate on the importation of knowledge into Japan in the first half of the twentieth century.

This chapter proceeds in four sections. The first section identifies the questions of inter-regional migration of political theory. It suggests that the present study approaches a neglected gap between the general theory and local micro-political practices which in turn facilitate the localisation of theory. The next section elucidates on the relevance of twentieth-century Japan as a sample destination of traveling theory. It explains, in terms of power and subjectivity of traveling knowledge, modern Japan’s paradox in being the best student of Western learning. The analytical approach of this thesis is then discussed in the third part. The final section investigates existing approaches concerning the agency of the recipient, discussed in terms of local decontextualisation and recontextualisation of knowledge from two pairs of aspects: temporal and spatial, conscious and unconscious. In doing so, I highlight the importance of spatial contextualisation which takes place automatically at the early stage of the process.