About

Toshiyuki Nishimura

A Question I Began Asking at Fifteen

When I was fifteen, I learned in social studies about revolutions such as England’s Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution. I began to wonder what might come next. What further changes would be needed to make freedom and equality a reality for everyone?

At the municipal library, I read Kant. I wondered how peace could become possible in a world where states fought one another. I could not find a satisfying answer in the library or through my teachers. I also found it difficult to find someone with whom I could share the question.

I have returned to these questions over several decades. My work now asks why the political community into which someone is born should be the only place where that person can belong as an equal member.

Four Books, Different Ways of Asking

The World Citizen Revolution examines the history of political membership and the possibility of changing it. The World Citizen Society considers the institutions that could support both collective self-government and individual choice of political community.

My two novels approach related questions through particular lives. The Hours She Kept follows a mother and daughter as rules of belonging change around them. The Day After the Vote follows a teacher through a school year in a town divided over voting and citizenship.

Fiction gives me room to follow relationships and consequences that a political argument cannot fully contain. The characters have concerns of their own. Readers may disagree with their decisions, and with mine. An imagined outcome cannot establish that an institution would work.

Why This Website

I want to make World Citizen Theory understandable to someone encountering it for the first time. I keep the fifteen-year-old who began asking these questions in mind: curious, without specialist knowledge, and looking for an explanation that takes the question seriously.

The declaration, introductory explanation, and concept pages offer ways into the argument. The books examine it at greater length, and the novels leave space to consider lives that cannot be reduced to an argument. My hope is that readers will find enough here to understand the proposal, question it, and form judgments of their own.