BAKUNIN\u27S SOJOURN IN JAPAN : NAILING DOWN AN ENIGMA (3)

Abstract

It is not generally known that the Russian anarchist Bakunin\u27s successful escape from Siberian exile in 1861 was a side-result of the opening of Japan a few years before, and this series of articles has set out to throw light on that episode. Previous instalments have looked into the events that led to Bakunin\u27s exile, sketched his route from Siberia via Yokohama and San Francisco back to London, and revealed connections between French and Japanese intellectuals that led to his ideas having an influence on events in Japan long before he became known there as an anarchist. A separate section pointed out some unlikely coincidences linking Bakunin\u27s political education to that of the Meiji Emperor. In this third instalment, I first examine the mystery surrounding Bakunin\u27s flight to Japan, and set out a tentative theory to explain his subsequent silence regarding the affair. After that I fill in some of the details concerning his two weeks in Yokohama, explore the personal contacts he is likely to have made there, and trace the connections that perhaps made his transit of the United States of America so smooth. Finally, I attempt to put the whole episode of his successful escape into the context of Pacific Studies, suggesting not only that the affair owed its successful conclusion to certain epochal realignments taking place among the four major powers in the Pacific arena, but also that it deserves to be regarded as an early indication of the role that the Pacific Ocean was to come to play almost a century later