4. Utopia

4. Utopia

       We cannot escape from various pains as long as we live in this world. Physical pains and mental distress are always close by. When anxiety weighs heavily on our mind or we are overwhelmed by grief, we found solace in imagining another new world without any pain. That is a fantasy of heaven. Such longing appears almost all mythologies and legends. There are a lot of idyllic imagination from ancient times that people enjoy great happiness and pleasure in unexplored island or uncharted land which is guarded from being discovered by the barrier of nature or the saving grace of god. For example, Arcadia in grease, Shangri-La in James Hilton’s novel, El Dorado, Avalon in the romance of King Arthur, Atlantis, Agartha, Zipangu in The Travels of Marco Polo, etc. Such places are called “utopia”.

              Illustration for the 1516 first edition of Utopia

　　　　“Utopia” was coined by Thomas More (1478 – 1535).  He connected grease words “ou” and “topos”. The former means “no” and the latter means “place”. However most people think utopia as a peaceful paradise, utopia originally means an inhuman regimented society in More’s book “Utopia”. He satirized the then European society in the book.

        In the West, ancient people thought that there was paradise somewhere in mountain and there was peaceful island from beyond the sea. And after the expedition by Alexander the Great, because of the influence of many strange things from the East a lot of utopian fiction travel journal was written by many European writers. The thought that there was somewhere paradise definitely different from this painful society didn’t go out unless Europeans were cornered into inland and lost the connection with the ocean by advancement of Muslims. Imagining opposite situation from now became the way of social criticism and satire, political principles, constructional plans, and literature.

      Depiction of the tale on a painting from the Long Corridor, Summer Palace, Beijing

         In the East there are a lot of story about utopia. But they are different from those of the West. The characteristics of the stories about utopia in the East are that people can go there without difficulty by an accident. One of the most famous Chinese utopian stories is The Peach Blossom Spring written by Tao Yuanming (365 – 427). The story is that a fisher went up to a river and he found the hall to a peaceful village. The inhabitants told they had escaped from war. He enjoyed staying there for few days. After he returned his village, he tried to go there again but he couldn’t. Why he couldn’t go there again is paradise is not in this world but in our recesses of the mind. Because he seek utopia outside, he got more and more lost the way.   

         Thomas More’s utopia is not fantastic society but socialist nations as the result of effort by common people. On the other hand, in The Peach Blossom Spring people gave up the realization of ideal society.

 reference: ユートピアの幻想（川端香男里）

　　　　　　　　桃源郷　中国の楽園思想（川合康三）