Paper short abstract:

Esperanto arrived in Japan and China in the first decade of the 20th century and followed very different pathways. This paper assesses the contacts made between Chinese and Japanese who heralded its arrival and the groups they represented politically in their home countries.

Paper long abstract:

Esperanto reached Chinese and Japanese communities at home and abroad in the earliest years of the twentieth century. While it reached a wide political panoply of groups in Japan, it was almost entirely adopted by Chinese leftists. Many Chinese had studied in Japan were nurtured there by Japanese leftists (anarchists and socialists) who taught them the rudiments of Esperanto—for example, Liu Shipei and Ōsugi Sakae in Tokyo. While few Chinese at that time learned the language beyond those elementary forms, Sino-Japanese collaboration continued on this front, and several Japanese anarchists would later travel to China and re-establish links with Chinese of a similar political proclivity—for example, Ōsugi again and Liu Sifu in Guangzhou. This paper will examine those Sino-Japanese linkages and their legacies in the first three decades of the twentieth century.