Fukuzawa Yukichi: Western Civilization As Our Goal

2018

This dissertation was shortlisted for the ICAS Humanities Dissertation Prize, 2019 and received an "honorable distinction" for the 2019 Walter Markov Prize in global history. The dissertation argues that during the height of the New Imperialism during the latter half of the long nineteenth century, the various colonial powers around the world co-produced a “global trans-imperial culture” that was facilitated by a common knowledge infrastructure, including international congresses, trans-imperial scholarly exchange and expositions. Japan was an important member of this “colonial club” and was deeply engaged with evolving global colonial discourse and practice throughout this period. The dissertation has three interrelated aims. First, it applies new theories of inter-imperial exchange and cooperation to the Japanese Empire. Second, it works to dismantle persistent notions of Japan as a marginal latecomer to the community of imperial powers by demonstrating that Japan engaged with trans-imperially circulating discourses and practices from as early as 1868 and contributed to the development of the culture as a whole. Finally, it employs a series of case studies to illustrate how colonial knowledge was transferred across imperial boundaries: the transmission of American technologies of settler colonialism to Hokkaido in the 1870s, domestic and international debates over the “colonial” status of Taiwan around the turn of the twentieth century and the representation of Japan’s colonial territories at expositions in the 1910s. Throughout the dissertation, theories of colonial association, an anti-assimilationist approach to colonial administration that became popular in the late nineteenth century, serve as a kind of overarching case study that illuminates the consistency and “timeliness” of Japanese colonial discourse in the global trans-imperial culture. Although assimilation and association are frequently treated as unchanging traits of specific empires (with France and Japan typically identified as assimilationist and Britain and the Netherlands as associationist), this dissertation contends that shifts between assimilation and association happened concurrently in different empires around the world, providing important evidence of a common trans-imperial culture. It will demonstrate that Japanese colonial elites engaged with these ideas at the same time as their counterparts in Western empires, with Japan’s famous radical assimilation campaign coming only in the final years of its empire.

2011

The Meiji era (1868-1912) in Japanese history was characterized by the extensive adoption of Western institutions, technology, and customs. The dramatic changes that took place caused the era’s intellectuals to ponder Japan's position within the larger global context. The East-West binary was a particularly important part of the discourse as the intellectuals analyzed and criticized the current state of affairs and offered their visions of Japan’s future. This dissertation examines five Meiji intellectuals who had very different orientations and agendas: Fukuzawa Yukichi, an influential philosopher and political theorist; Shimoda Utako, a pioneer of women's education; Uchimura Kanzō, a Christian leader; Okakura Kakuzō, an art critic; and Kōtoku Shūsui, a socialist. Also considered here are related concepts such as "civilization (bunmei)," "barbarism," and "imperialism." Close examination of the five intellectuals' use of the East-West binary...

A paper presented ISA Asia-Pacific Confrence, 25-28 June 2016, City University of Hong Kong The paper proposes to apply the theory of multiple modernities to the study of national identity examining various discourses of modernity that were in circulation in the Japanese empire. As proposed by Shmuel N Eisenstadt, the theory of moderenities is an expression of attitudes to social scientific understanding of the world: conventional theories of modernity and modernisation need to be challenged for their often implicit western-centricity in that all societies in the world are expected to converge on the European model. Apart from a focused critique of the conventional theories’ western-centricity and the suggestion that the analytical focus should be place on human agency, the theory of multiple modernities is rather undefined. However with these two points, it still helps develop new research on identities, and the case of East Asia serves as an ideal context in which identity is investigated from a fresh angle. Set in this broad framework, the paper investigates discourses of modernity that were in circulation in the Japanese empire. As it is well known, intellectuals of wartime Japan were deeply engaged with the question of modernity, and the idea such as the East Asian Community and the event such as the ‘Overcoming Modernity’ symposium of 1942 were expression of their endeavour. These were, needless to say, the ruler’s hegemonic idea but there is some evidence some intellectuals in colonised Korea and Taiwan took them up as the tool of subversion of Japanese imperial rule as well as of consolidating national unity. Drawing mainly from secondary literature on colonial intellectuals in the Japanese Empire, the paper sheds light on the complex interaction among different ideas framed in the modernity discourse which reflect conscious exercise of agency.

2019

The present paper discusses the so-called “Russian factor” in the political development of Japan over a period from the late 19th century till the present day. The rise and fall of Japan as a “great power” in the 20th century is tightly linked with its relations with Russia (the Russian Empire and the USSR), which became a specific factor of the Japanese imperial project. Russia served as a challenge to Japan that triggered its social mobilization and militarization in 1895-1905. The victorious Russo-Japanese War made Japan a “great power” with colonies on the continent. However, it also predetermined the political rise of its military circles, which ultimately worked as a time bomb breaking the foundation of the newborn empire. Cooperation with Russia after 1906 was the most effective instrument for Japan’s further expansion on the continent, while the intervention into Siberia after 1917 came as the first alarm signaling the limits of that expansion. The paper also examines the ha...

It is necessary to go back to the Japanese history of the 19th and 20th centuries to better understand the rise of Japanese militarism in the first half of the 20th century. In the middle of the 19th century, Japan was frozen since the 17th century in a state whose political structures were blocked in what was called the Sakoku: the monarch was an emperor of divine right, but the main part of the executive power rested in the hands of the military government or Bakufu, with the Shogun at its head. The Tokugawa Shogunate is the result of the process of unification of Japan during the great feudal and clan fratricidal clashes of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, a period of civil wars called Sengoru Jidai. This Shogunate was maintained thanks to its capacity to ensure civil peace in the Japanese archipelago. Having neutralized and domesticated the warrior class of Samurai and the great feudal class called Daimyos, the Shoguns installed in their capital of Edo, the future Tokyo, were to preside over a certain evolution with a cultural and commercial development that prefigured a certain modernity, while preserving themselves from foreign influences such as those of the Western powers, English and French, which assailed China and India in the 18th and 19th centuries. This policy of firm international isolation is called Sakoku. The Sakoku resulted in a geopolitical weakening and a certain technical delay on the Westerners who intervened several times during the 19th century to force Japan out of its isolation: American whalers and then Russian military expeditions to Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, not to mention British naval pressure, succeeded one another to intimidate the Tokugawa Shoguns. The intrusion of the American fleet in the mid-19th century to force the Shoguns' Japan to open up to international trade led to Japan's modernization during the Meiji era. Japan's ability to modernize all sectors of its society and culture allowed it to catch up with Western technological models in less than fifteen years. The industrialization that went hand in hand forced Japan to seek international agreements but also developed its appetite for territorial expansion to find the raw materials that Japan was cruelly lacking. This is the irony of history: Japan became the first non-Western industrial nation at the same time that it became the first non-Western colonial nation. It is as if Japanese mimicry of the West is pushing it to adopt the imperialism of contemporary Western nations. The first Japanese annexations were made at the expense of the Chinese and Russian empires, which were its immediate neighbors, in the Northeast for Manchuria, rich in coal, and in the Southeast for Korea, rich in iron and rice. The Russo-Japanese war is exemplary in that it was the first time that a European nation, Russia, was defeated by a non-European nation, Japan. Moreover, this war prefigured the wars of the XXth century by the importance of modern technologies in communications, with the use by the Japanese of the wireless and the telephone, but also by the modernity of the Japanese warships, which thanks to the French engineer Emile Bertin, outclassed the Russian ships. The ingredients of Japanese militarism were already there and had already proven their efficiency and speed. Until 1919, Japan was able to avoid the pitfalls of a confrontation with the British, the French and the Americans, on whose side it participated in the First World War. Like others, notably the Italians, the Japanese felt that they had been wronged at the end of this war and of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, in terms of territorial gains and the conquest of resources in raw materials and outlets for their industries. The seeds of the next world conflict were already there.

Journal of Japanese Studies, 2008

Analele Universităţii de Vest din Timişoara, 2023

The study of modern Japan, in all its aspects, is in constant evolution. From the "re-discovery" of Japan by the United States and the Western European powers during the time known as the Bakumatsu period in the middle of the 19th century to the present day, the field of Japanese studies amassed over 150 years of research on the language, culture, history, and society of the archipelago. A body of scholarship far from limited to what we now define as "modern Japan" has come to be embraced and enriched not only by scholars from the "West", but also by Japanese researchers, alongside others from all over the world. Certainly, defining "Japan" and "modern" poses challenges. For this special issue I opted for a wide view of the "Japan" concept as we came to define it in postwar scholarship: the geopolitical space of the country named Japan today in its borders as set after its defeat in World War II (including some, but not all of the territories and colonies occupied by the Empire of Japan after 1868, the point in time that we identify as its launching into modernity), and populated by ethnic Japanese together with Ainu populations, as well as with Korean, Chinese, and other non-Japanese ethnic groups. "Modern" and "modernity" in turn have also be generously defined here as the period started in the Bakumatsu period (1853-1867, the end of the