The place where the New Village at Kijo was located is called Ishikawauchi, which is the site of a stone castle from the Sengoku period. To its rear is the green Mount Osuzu. It is a three-tiered area, called upper castle, middle castle, and lower castle by locals. The second level extends down to the Omaru River, at the mountain’s foot. The water of the Omaru wraps around three sides in the shape of a horseshoe, making it appear as a peninsula and isolating it from the outside world. When entering the village, you need to cross the river by boat. In the rainy season, the river is as wide as fifteen meters. The depth of the river during this time is unknown and travel across it is extremely inconvenient. Even in today’s satellite images, the surrounding area is still green, and human traces are rare—an area even more remote over a century ago. The Ishikawauchi Dam, built in 1938, is located upstream of Omaru, north of the New Village of Kijo. There is also a small dam in the river section where the village is located. The submerged “lower castle” stills show an outline in the dry season. There is a natural boulder in middle of the Omaru, named Rodin Rock—the symbol of New Village at that time—but it is now submerged. After New Village moved from Kijo to Moroyama in 1938, there were still two members, Sugiyama and Takahashi, who remained. Until 2018, three people still lived there.1 Now the “upper castle” features the restored house where Mushakoji lived, a relatively simple Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum. Although the New Village at Kijo is listed as a protected cultural heritage site, due to its remote location the number of visitors is less than that of New Village at Moroyama.
Zhou Zuoren was the first Chinese to visit the New Village at Kijo. He became interested in Mushakoji through reading Shirakaba and became a subscriber. He was the first to write an article about Mushakoji’s New Village Movement in China, and also established the New Village branch in Beijing in 1920. In his “Visit to Japan’s New Village,” published in the October 1919 issue of The Renaissance, he described his difficult journey from Beijing to Tanggu, Tianjin, on July 2 of that year. He traveled by steamboat to Mojiko Station, then by train to Yoshimatsu in Kagoshima, and then on to Fukushima in Miyazaki. From there, he went by coach to Takanabe, then to Takajo, where he was picked up by Mushakoji, and crossed mountain after mountain in the rain, before finally arriving at the New Village of Kijo on the evening of July 7.2 Today’s transportation may be much more convenient and faster than at that time, but because it is so far away from Tokyo (it took three days to travel from Tokyo when the New Village was founded), I backed off and gave up on my plan of visiting.
Mushakoji originally wanted to locate New Village near Tokyo, but he could not find a suitably rural setting. In order to implement Tolstoy’s pan-laborism, he had to go to the countryside. Although the road to Kijo was long, he was nevertheless very excited when he arrived:
One morning in December 1918, I walked to the river. The clear water rushed against the rocks, overflowing with foam. I stood on a rock by the bank, washed my face, gargled, and prayed to the land called the castle on the other bank … Heavens! I bowed to the heavens with my heart, and my eyes filled with tears. The clear water ran ceaselessly, taking in its partners to the sea. I salute you!3
Mushakoji Saneatsu harvesting wheat, 1919. © The Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum, Chofu.
The New Village at Kijo covered an area of 2.5 hectares.4 The population in 1918 was eighteen; twenty-nine in 1919; thirty-four in 1920; nineteen in 1921; seventeen in 1922; and eleven in 1923.5 At its first establishment, the Village required all members to participate in manual labor during an eight-hour workday. It had very loose acceptance criteria for its members. As long as they recognized the spirit of New Village, they could join regardless of origin, wealth, or status—so it quickly became a refuge for the marginalized: Koreans, leprosy patients, and other outcasts of society. In 1920, Mushakoji published an article sympathetic to the Korean independence movement in The Dong-a Ilbo, a Korean publication. He apologized for the “arrogance” of the Japanese and hoped that the Koreans would respond to the “barbaric Japanese” not with violence but with “peace, love, and justice,” just as the Nazarenes responded to the oppression of the Romans by saving the Romans. Under the influence of this article, New Village accepted two Koreans as members in 1921.6 The concept and organization of the New Village were reflected in two documents proposed in its beginning:
The Spirit of New Village
1. Our ideal is that all the world’s peoples can fulfill their destinies, and each person can also grow fully.
2. Do not harm others just so you can exist.
3. You must set your life on the right path. Do not harm others’ destinies and legitimate needs because of your own pleasures, joys, and freedom.
4. We must try our best that humankind across the world can share in the same spirit and the same way of life as us, so that all humankind can fulfill its obligations, enjoy freedom, and have decent lives that accomplish their destinies (including individuality).
5. Whoever wants to live in this way, and believes that it is possible to live in this way, and hopes that people all over the world can live in this way—these people are members of New Village and are our brothers and sisters.
6. We do not want conflict between countries and between classes. Those who enter New Village lead decent lives, work together, and believe that the world we hope for will emerge, and we work hard for this.7
New Village Rules
1. The New Village was established in order to live in accordance with the spirit mentioned above. Where there is a proper method, it should be followed. We hope to abolish the rules in the future.
2. Those who are in agreement with the Spirit of New Village and participate are our members.
3. There are two kinds of members: first, those who practice according to the Spirit; second, those who agree with the Spirit but aren’t in a position where they practice.
4. There are limitations on the first type of member; as for the second type, anyone can join.
5. The first type of member should complete voluntary labor at will. However, an exception shall be made for those who are ill, or where there are unavoidable events, and this must be agreed to by all.
6. Member comrades shall not order each other around.
7. Property owned by members of the first category is unconditionally given to New Village. However, within the first year after joining, they can still choose what to do with their assets. Afterwards, all assets will be donated unconditionally to New Village.
8. Each member shall be responsible for their own words and deeds.
9. Any person who is not in accordance with the Spirit, or unenthusiastic, may be ordered to leave. However, the decision shall be made after discussion with all members.
10. Volunteer labor and other village matters shall be decided by all. However, within the limits of not violating the Spirit, you need not agree.
11. The second type of member shall try their best to promote the Spirit of New Village to the masses, assist the village in its work, and complete that work. Those who have the ability to pay membership dues shall donate over half-yen per month at will.8
These two documents can be said to be the crystallization of Mushakoji’s and his comrades’ thought in founding New Village, the exploration of personal and social paths through the fog of the First World War. Although he was born an aristocrat, his conscience was captured by the inequality brought about by class differences. His sympathy for the masses who “worked for bread” led him to reflect on the deformation of labor caused by the rapid capitalist development in Japan from the Meiji to the Taisho era. His criticism of belligerent Japan proved that he could not accept the killings of the World War—and he even opposed socialist revolution in Russia because of its violence. In order to reconcile social contradictions and avoid violent revolution, he walked a third road beyond capitalism and socialism. He supported collective ownership of property, but opposed class struggle; believed in freedom, but did not accept competition; he advocated for necessary labor, but paid attention to people’s leisure; he pursued anarchist egalitarianism, mutual aid, and cooperation, but abandoned any associated violence. He emphasized personal will and opposed oppression; with the ideal of humans across the world following their destinies, he resisted nationalism and ethnocentrism.
These ideals were reflected in the two-level membership system, a far-sighted design for a progressive social experiment, which not only ensured the integrity of New Village’s experimental base in the wilderness, but also gathered the strength of outside aid at the broader social level by lowering the threshold of belonging. It not only mobilized members outside the village to promote it, but also alleviated their moral anxieties for not being able to leave the “old world.” Later evidence also proved that the life-sustaining nourishment in the form of financial and other resources provided by members outside the village was crucial to New Village.
The New Village at Kijo, 1935. © The Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum, Chofu.
The bedrock ideals of New Village can be found in its holidays. According to a letter Mushakoji wrote in the journal New Village, New Village has five rest days each month, and there are five festivals in the year—New Year’s Day (January 1), Shakyamuni’s birthday (April 8), Tolstoy’s birthday (August 28), Rodin’s birthday (November 14, also the founding day of New Village), and Jesus’s birthday (December 25, Christmas).9 Shakyamuni’s compassion for all living beings, Jesus’s salvation for all, Tolstoy’s pan-laborism, and Rodin’s belief in beauty were the ideological resources that Mushakoji had always drawn from.10 However, his admiration of Tolstoy had modulated long before he began the New Village experiment. After all, Tolstoy’s “extreme altruism,” excessive emphasis on physical labor, and excessive exclusion of mental labor seemed difficult to achieve in reality—so he introduced the “static theory of self,” from the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, in order to find the most suitable position between “self-sacrifice” and “reasonable self-interest:” “He (Maeterlinck) taught me: we should focus on our own strengths, and improve our own strengths. The concept of ‘ourselves’ is profound, and difficult to comprehend.”11
In July 1919, Zhou Zuoren visited Mushakoji, his wife Takeo Fusako, their adopted daughter Kikuko (the daughter of Kadenokoji Yasuko and her ex-husband, who later lived with Shiga Naoya and her mother), and three others who lived in the house across the river from the “lower castle.” It, and the New Village main house and workshop in the “middle castle,” were completed two months before. The main house was the dormitory for male members, including three ten-mat bedrooms, and was also the place where members gathered, with a library and canteen. The dormitories for female members were being built, so they were temporarily living on the upper level of the stables. The “upper castle” was where they worked: “It’s all dry land, for planting some beans, wheat, corn, eggplant, sweet potato and so on.”12 New Village had a mare, three goats, two pigs, two dogs, and a variety of chickens. However, the production of eggs was not enough for their own use, and they needed to purchase eggs from other local producers. The Village struggled, but failed, to be self-sufficient. For monthly living expenses, they needed at least 250 yen, and still depended on the membership dues donated by the local branches. The large expenses such as land purchases, material transportation, housing construction, agricultural tools, water conservancy, and so on depended on Mushakoji’s remuneration (he was preparing to sell his Abiko residence at that time). Zhou Zuoren, as a Chinese subscriber and advocate for the White Birch Society and Shirakaba, was treated with courtesy, but was also asked to work in the field—helping him experience the spirit of “cooperation through farming, sharing pain and joy” of the New Village. He felt “great joy and honor.”13 His article “A Visit to a New Village in Japan,” records his experiences there in great detail, depicting an image of the Japanese “utopia” as making stumbling progress for a Chinese audience who was experiencing the process of the May 4 New Culture Movement.
At the Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum in Chofu, I watched a 16 mm black and white silent film that lasted seven minutes twenty-four seconds. It was filmed in 1922 by Mushakoji’s junior classman at Peers School, Yukio Akimiti. It recorded the daily life of New Village at Kijo and the fourth anniversary celebration held on November 14. On the rapids of Omaru River, someone was ferrying in. The members on the shore stood by the rocks and waved. Some were playing in the water. Beyond the river were the farmlands owned by local people, and the ancient mountains surrounding the secret world of New Village. When the bell rang in the morning, the members filed into the canteen. After breakfast, they gathered around the canteen to see the work assignments for the day. Men ploughed, threshed, tended vegetables, built houses, loaded firewood, and read and wrote; women washed clothes in the river, and sewed inside their houses. Mushakoji weeded his vegetable patch and greeted guests at his door. The grass was verdant, and the distant mountain was silent. For rest, they could either take a walk in the woods or go boating on the river. On the anniversary, children played games and adults wore costumes and held parades. They dressed up as tribal chiefs and as Chaplin, and danced in circles …14
Although the film presented an idyllic image of rustic work and life—a free, unfettered paradise—all utopias face problems when they are practiced. New Village was no different, contending with both internal conflict and external difficulty. Kimura Syouta was one of the first people to criticize the New Village initiative. A writer and translator, he and his wife followed Mushakoji to Kijo as some of the first members of the village. New Village stipulates that all members should hand over their personal property to the collective for overall distribution, and that the collective should be responsible for any expenses for living, eating, medical treatment, and travel during ordinary times. Each person would receive a monthly allowance of one yen (half-yen for children). Takeo Fusako was responsible for the financial allocations, but her arrangements were often considered unfair—because she was perceived to give more money to those she was friendly with, or partial to. Kimura Syouta was not only dissatisfied with Takeo, but was also critical of Mushakoji. Although Mushakoji was a member of New Village, he had not put his other career aside. He often went back and forth to Tokyo, continuing to participate in the literary and artistic activities of the White Birch Society and spending less time doing labor in the village than the others; instead, he mainly sat writing at the desk. Kimura Syouta believed that, during this early period for New Village, everyone should become familiar with agricultural affairs as quickly as possible, promote production, and help achieve economic independence. For this reason, he even suggested suspending the distribution of allowances to invest as much money as possible into the construction of New Village; thus, he belonged to what became known as the “labor faction.” Mushakoji believed that his writing and activities in Tokyo could increase income from royalties in order to contribute to New Village. He insisted on the allowance system and advocated that there should be more leisure and artistic activity in the village; he belonged to the “art faction.” The two factions argued bitterly. In the end, Kimura Syouta left New Village disappointed, in May 1919. The Osaka Daily News, which had paid attention to New Village since its beginning, reported that a “terrible internal collapse” had occurred.15
In addition, even if New Village was founded in the mountains and the wilderness, it could not escape the constraints of the wider society and government rule. Local farmers regarded these idealists from the big cities as rich, and raised the price of eggs and grain accordingly. When they intended to buy more land, the village head at Ishikawauchi quoted them a price that was several times higher than the market rate.16 Plainclothes and military police also went to New Village once a month to monitor their movement and thought. In 1921, one member of New Village, Yokoi Kunisaburou, was conscripted. Subsequently, Miyazaki Prefecture built an army airport and also stationed troops near New Village. Another member of New Village, Sugiyama Masao, was conscripted as forced labor.17 For New Village, which was short of people and a stable workforce, this made matters much worse. The final relocation of New Village from Kijo was due to their inability to defy a Miyazaki reservoir plan that would use the Omaru River to generate hydroelectric power.
Mushakoji Saneatsu at the study in Kijo, 1924. © The Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum, Chofu.
In terms of his personal life, the marriage between Mushakoji and Takeo changed in 1922. Takeo fell in love with Sugiyama Masao, who was ten years younger than she. Mushakoji divorced her and married Meshigawa Yasuko, who had entered the village the year before. Later on, Takeo was regarded as an early feminist in Japan. She had been married to Mushakoji for ten years, and “didn’t understand true love until she entered the village.”18 Her extramarital affair with Sugiyama, though deeply painful to Mushakoji, also transformed his idea of womanhood. In an article from 1928, “Three Random Writings,” he wrote: “Chastity cannot be used as a yardstick to judge women … Even many shortcomings do not mean that someone is rotten.”19 Takeo and Sugiyama did not formally marry until 1932. After New Village moved to Moroyama, the two continued living at Kijo until Sugiyama died in 1983, and Takeo died in 1989. They truly lived up to the pledge that “members should live permanently at New Village.” Mushakoji, regardless of their past, agreed that Takeo could keep his family name, and voiced support for the couple’s life together. When Takeo was interviewed in her old age, she recalled that she “was deeply pained, was disillusioned, and there was a residual pride formed by my early life of abundance. Fortunately, with the warm support of Sugiyama, I was able to survive this period of mental and physical suffering.”20 The marriage of Mushakoji and Meshigawa resulted in the birth of a daughter, Shinko, and then another, Taeko, in New Village. In December 1925, because of the gap between the ideal and the reality, and in order to take care of his sick mother, Mushakoji left New Village with his wife, daughters, and Kikuko. By that time, Shiga Naoya had moved to Nara, so Mushakoji also took his mother from Tokyo to Nara, where he set up a new household and became a close neighbor of Shiga’s. Mushakoji’s departure from the village did not mean that he gave up on New Village. In his later career, he continued to contribute to it as an outside member, and worked hard to support its future development.
According to statistics from the 1973 article “The Current Situation in New Village,” if the money that Mushakoji devoted to the cause of New Village throughout his life was converted into yen of that year, it would reach a hundred million yen.21 In the early days of the establishment of New Village at Kijo, his colleagues in the White Birch Society, Shiga Naoya, Yanagi Soetsu, and Kishida Ryusei, also donated generously. Yanagi Soetsu and Nagayo Yoshiro each visited, in 1920 and 1921. In order to prepare for the construction of the White Birch Art Museum, Mushakoji successfully persuaded the Osaka industrialist Yamamoto Koyata to buy Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and brought it to Japan for exhibition in 1919. In 1920, he also asked Yamamoto to purchase a piece of land for him in Kayane, Kawaminami, near Kijo—for the second New Village.22 In the same year he also established Aranosha in Tokyo as the publishing arm of New Village. The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake greatly reduced the assistance of outside members. By 1924, however, after years of promotional material, activities, speeches, and lobbying, in addition to the headquarters at Kijo, the second New Village at Kawaminami (land only; no members ever lived there), and the publishing wing in Tokyo, New Villages could be found in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nagano, Hamamatsu, Hakodate, Aomori, Yokohama, Fukuoka, Kure, Gifu, Akita, Yamaguchi, Saiki, Otaru, Okayama, Niigata, Miyazaki, Hiroshima, Koromo, and Beijing and Dalian, in China.23 There were now twenty-three branches, and, by 1929, eight hundred outside members.24
“Saneatsu’s Ideal World: Centenary Exhibition,” Yomiuri Shimbun, Morning Edition, October 30, 2018.
Zhou Zuoren, “Visit to Japan’s New Village,” in Art and Life (October Literature and Art Press, 2011).
Mushakoji Saneatsu, The Land (Aranosha, 1921). This is a documentary work where Mushakoji records the search for and purchase of land in Kijo. Aranosha is a New Village publishing division established in 1920 in former Kitatoshima district in Tokyo prefecture.
The Complete Works of Mushakoji Saneatsu, vol. 4 (Shogakukan, 1988). Quoted in Liu Lishan, Japanese Writers of the White Birch Society and Chinese Writers (Liaoning University Press, 1995), 202. According to Japanese measurement, one cho is ten tan, one tan is ten se, one se is thirty tsubo, one tsubo is two jo, one jo is five go, one go is ten shaku, and one shaku is about 0.0331 square meters. Two cho, five tan, and three se total is 25,122.9 square meters, which translates into 2.51229 hectares.
Complete Works of Mushakoji Saneatsu, vol. 4. Quoted in Liu, Japanese Writers of the White Birch Society, 202.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Beyond Utopia: New Villages and Living Politics in Modern Japan and across Frontiers,” History Workshop Journal, no. 85 (2018).
“The Spirit of the New Village” has remained unchanged since it was written. I reference Sun Baigang’s translation here; see Sun Baigang, The New Village (Guanghua Book Company, 1933), 137–38.
This is the 1920 revision of the “New Village Rules.” See Sun, New Village, 139–40. The membership fee mentioned in Article 11 was in Japanese yen at that time.
See correspondence of December 7, 1918, by Mushakoji Saneatsu, New Village 2, no. 1 (January 1919). Translated by Zhou Zuoren and included in his article “Japan’s New Village,” published in New Youth 6, no. 3 (April 1919). See Zhou, Art and Life, 233. However, the birth dates of Tolstoy and Rodin are incorrect; according to Wikipedia, Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, and Rodin on November 12, 1840.
He wrote Biography of Jesus (New Village Publishing, 1920), Biography of Buddha (Kodansha, 1934), and Biography of Tolstoy (Saikensha, 1959).
Mushakoji Saneatsu, “For Oneself and Others,” Shirakaba, no. 2 (1912). Cited in Liu, Japanese Writers of the White Birch Society, 134.
Zhou Zuoren, “A Visit to a New Village in Japan,” in Art and Life.
Zhou, “A Visit to a New Village in Japan.”
Yukio Akimiti, New Village at Hyuga, 16 mm film, original copy, Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum in Chofu, data number: V-5031. This film has been digitized and is available on the official website →, but for copyright reasons can only be accessed at the museum.
See Liu, Japanese Writers of the White Birch Society, 210.
See Zhou, Art and Life, 251.
See Liu, Japanese Writers of the White Birch Society, 207.
“Mushakoji Fusako,” in Rediscovering Home: 101 People in Myazaki, ed. Miyazaki Prefecture (Nichi Nichi Shimbun, 1999) →.
Published in the November 1928 issue of The Great Harmony. Translation in Liu, Japanese Writers of the White Birch Society, 236.
“Mushakoji Fusako.”
Watanabe Kanji, “The Present State of New Village,” in Liu, Japanese Writers of the White Birch Society, 212.
Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum, 100 Years of New Village: 1918–2018 (Mushakoji Saneatsu Memorial Museum, 2018), 18.
“The Location of New Village and its Branches,” in Sun, New Village.
Complete Works of Mushakoji Saneatsu, vol. 4. Quoted in Liu, Japanese Writers of the White Birch Society, 214.
Excepted from Ou Ning, The Agritopianists: Thinking and Practice in Rural Japan, trans. Weng Haiying and Matt Turner (Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, 2025).