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.He attended meetings for months andremained unconvinced that even Itagaki Taisuke s Liberal Party (Jiyütö) wasmorally committed to an equal redistribution of wealth.And so, in May 1882,vowing a morality of spirit, Tarui and Akamatsu Taisuke established theOriental Society Party (Töyö Shakaitö).86 Tarui and Akamatsu gathered fol-lowers at the Kotoji Temple near Nagasaki.About one hundred people camefrom Shimabara, where the temple was located, three came from Nagasaki,and one each came from Tokyo, Osaka, Niigata, and Saga.One of the fewhistorians of modern Japan to note Tarui s party, historian E.H.Norman,described it as one of the most interesting examples of [a] left-wing deriva-tive of the liberal movement. 87 Norman pointed to the significance of choos-ing Shimabara, since one of the last great uprisings against Tokugawa dom-ination took place there in the early seventeenth century. 88 The foundersinscribed the principles of morality (dötoku) and equality (byödö) in theparty s charter and promised to strive for the greater welfare of society smasses (shakai köshü no saidai fukuri).89 Tarui s concern for other societies inthe region manifested itself in article five of the party s charter, which urgedparty members to publish Chinese-style (kanbun) versions of their publica-tions and distribute them in China and Korea.The following month, when the 94 Japan s Colonization of KoreaMeiji regime s home minister Yamada Akiyoshi learned of the group s exis-tence, he disbanded it on grounds that it disturbed the peace.Early the nextwinter, a Nagasaki court imprisoned Tarui for a month for printing copies ofthe organization s charter.Tarui s sympathetic understanding of inequality within Japan led him nat-urally to understand the inequality in the ways that Europe and the UnitedStates grabbed at Asia.That being said, Tarui never seems to have made thecritical connection between what Meiji aggrandizers ultimately wanted to doin Asia and what Americans and Europeans were also doing.Despite his lackof formal instruction in theories of social justice, Tarui encountered sufficienteconomic and political dislocation growing up in rural Nara, and later expe-riencing poverty when he moved to Tokyo in the year of the Ishin (1868), toinform his sensibilities to the extremes of wealth and power around him.Atelling example of the precarious nature of his home life can be understoodby considering the fact that, when he finally ran for parliament in 1892, he didso under the pseudonym of Morimoto Tökichi because his family was knownin his home region for its constant state of bankruptcy.Tarui even publishedthe first edition of his famous treatise which I elaborate upon shortlyunder the name Morimoto.90 Unlike thinkers such as Nakae Chömin and ÖiKentarö, who are remembered for their antigovernment positions, Tarui neverreceived an education that might have rendered the use of his terms of oppo-sition referential or summoned the authority of European knowledge.91 Nakaeand Öi, for example, used the term equality with clear quotation or invoca-tion of John Locke and John Stuart Mill.Tarui, on the other hand, used equality as if the concept in its Lockean sense had always been part of Japa-nese language and thought, a tendency that has left him subject to extremelydifferent historiographic claims.Adherents and detractors alike have labeled Tarui s thought eclectic andunsophisticated.This sentiment was best articulated by the famous socialcritic Tanaka Sögöro, who suggested that the influences on Tarui s thoughtresembled a cocktail of Confucian and Buddhist teachings and contemporaryEuropean and American thought. 92 Despite the hodgepodge nature of Tarui sideas, Tanaka placed Tarui at the center of his genealogical pantheon of think-ers who envisioned egalitarian possibilities for modern Japan
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