Short Abstract

This paper uncovers an anti-imperial vision of progress in modern Japan through Eto Tekirei’s concept of hyakushō (‘one hundred natures’). It reveals an inclusive vision that reimagined farmers as agents of progress, rejected nationalism, and extended solidarity to Koreans amid imperial violence.

Long Abstract

Modern historical writing has long been shaped by the ideologies of the nation-state and empire, which also structured the concepts through which modern societies understood progress, civilisation, and the human. In early twentieth-century Japan, farming occupied a particularly powerful place within this conceptual framework, positioned as both the socio-economic foundation of the Japanese nation and the timeless essence of Japanese civilisation. This paper challenges that dominant understanding by recovering the invention of a competing concept of the human and natural world, which rejected state-led capitalist agriculture and the nation-state itself. By liberating farming from nationalist ideology, it advances a more egalitarian and inclusive conception of both agriculture and ‘the people’.

The paper does so through an analysis of the ideas and practices of Eto Tekirei, a farmer, agrarian thinker, and best-selling author who challenged state-endorsed notions of progress with the hoe. Central to Tekirei’s thought was the invention of hyakushō 百性 (‘one hundred natures’), a neologism and wordplay on hyakushō 百姓 (farmers). Through hyakushō, Tekirei reimagined humanity as fundamentally diverse yet inclusive. He sought to dismantle the hierarchies and divisions that underpinned dominant ideas of social order, positioning farmers at the centre of this reconfiguration. This vision departed from official discourses that cast farmers as the source of Japaneseness, as well as from the exclusionary concept of kokumin (the nation’s people), which manifested violently in the targeting of Koreans during the massacres following the Great Kantō Earthquake. Tekirei’s hyakushō explicitly transcended such socially constructed boundaries and extended to Koreans, leading him in practice to secretly shelter Korean students from the violence at his farm.

This paper argues that, through the invention of hyakushō, farmers were reimagined as agents of progress rather than its antithesis. Conventionally associated with conservative and timeless tradition, farmers instead emerged as pioneers of a radical alternative modernity that sought to liberate everyday life from the logic of the nation-state and to ground knowledge and social improvement in symbiotic relationships with nature. By centring hyakushō as individualised yet interconnected beings, Tekirei challenged the state-endorsed meaning of farming that underpinned Japanese imperial civilisation.