著者

Billingsley Philip 桃山学院大学文学部

出版者

桃山学院大学総合研究所

雑誌

桃山学院大学人間科学 (ISSN:09170227)

巻号頁・発行日

no.5, pp.p35-65, 1993-09

---

It is not generally known that the Russian anarchist Bakunin's successful escape from Siberia in 1861 was a side-result of the ending of Japan's 250-year policy of seclusion. Even Bakunin's biographers have been able to find out little about the facts of his two-week stay in Hakodate and Yokohama, partly because of the lack of materials, partly because Bakunin himself seems to have been less than impressed by what he found there. The present paper, using some of the scattered Japanese-language sources presently available, seeks to throw some preliminary light on the facts of this little-known episode. After first setting out the sociopolitical background, I explain briefly the events that led Bakunin into Siberian exile and thence into his unprecedented escape across the Pacific. The third and fourth sections, using contemporary travellers' accounts (among them people who actually made acquaintance with Bakunin), sets out the conditions that must have greeted the fugitive after his arrival in Yokohama, hazards some guesses about how he must have spent his time there, and sketches his adventures en route back to England via San Francisco and New York. In conclusion, I point out that, as a man whose mission in life was the overthrow of the traditional European ruling class, Bakunin was hardly likely to have considered Japan, a place which had yet to register itself upon the Western imagination, as more than a stepping-stone on his way home. His refusal to write his memoirs of his sojourn in the country make this point abundantly clear.