Japanese Intellectual History

In the Japanese iconography of heterogeinity, the cultural archetype of «marebito» as laid out by ethnographer Orikuchi Shinobu stands on its own. The iconography of «marebito» represents in many ways the pattern of the «rare visitor» in festival time all along Japanese folklore, and at the same time extends itself in the field of folk tales and legends. Heterogeneity springs from both the external aspect of «marebito» as well as from its origin in the «timeless land» of the «tokoyo». The problem is finally about how to represent the «invisible», how to picture the unimaginable.

a much-needed study of the history of rangaku, the study of the West by the Japanese through the medium of books in Dutch. In this book he ably and succinctly summarized Japanese scholarship which had been published on the topic up to that time. In 1986, he published a revised version of this text, Japan: The Dutch Experience, of which the book under review here is (except for the jacket and the title page) an exact reprint. When the second edition appeared, Professor Goodman was criticized for some rather obvious omissions of scholarship which had been published in the interval between 1967 and 1986, 1 a situation which now, fourteen years later, has only grown worse. But for the change in the title there would seem to be little need to review this book once more, and therefore 1 Marius B. Jansen's review of Japan: The Dutch Experience in the Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 13, 2 (1987): 466. adopting new technology from the West is, of course, the idea that, from a Japanese perspective, English is nothing more than a dialect of Dutch, and that, if one is familiar with Dutch, one just has to change around a few vowels in order to start making sense out of English. Of course, American and British scholars have always lovingly quoted Fukuzawa Yukichi, who wrote in his autobiography: "I had been striving with all my powers for many years to learn the Dutch language. And now when I had reason to believe myself one of the best in the country, I found I could not even read the signs of merchants who had come to trade with us from foreign lands." 2 But Fukuzawa also wrote that his dismay was only temporary and that he and his contemporaries found that: "After a while we came to see that English was a language not so entirely foreign to us as we had thought. Our fear in the beginning that we were to find all our labor and hope expended on Dutch to have been spent in vain, and that we were to go through the same hardship twice in our lives proved happily wrong. In truth, Dutch and English were both . . . . of the same origin. Our knowledge of Dutch could be applied directly to English; our one-time fear was a groundless illusion." 3

In 1893, the Christian journalist and political commentator Yamaji Aizan 山路愛山 wrote that through Rai San’yō’s (1780–1832) Nihon gaishi《日本外史》(An unofficial history of Japan), the Japanese became aware of the unique history and superior values of their fatherland, and that this awareness was intensified by the aesthetic beauty of San’yō’s language (he wrote in an elegant classical Chinese modelled on the Shiji 史紀 and Zuozhuan 左傳). Aizan believed that it was this national consciousness that lay behind the sonnō jōi 尊皇攘夷 nationalist movement that led to the Meiji Restoration and that laid the foundation for transforming Japan into a modern nation-state. This study centres on three questions: (1) What was the significance of such an exaltation of San’yō’s history within the historiographical and ideological debates of Yamaji’s time (the mid to late Meiji period)? (2) What was the philosophy of history that lay behind San’yō’s writings, and what were the implications of this philosophy for political action among his readers? (3) What insights do these Meiji historiographical debates and San’yō’s philosophy of history offer us into the multivalent nature of the emperor-centred ideology upon which modern Japanese national identity was built?  I employ two core hermeneutical concepts in trying to answer these questions, one the concept of Paul Ricoeur that the written text escapes the circumstances of its production and becomes open to an indefinite series of possible readers, its meaning always in suspense “in front of” the text and always open to reinscription in new contexts. The new contexts in which Nihon gaishi was reinscribed, of course, are primarily the political movements of the 1850s and 1860s, in which the emperor actually became an actor in history, and the new nationalist discourses of the Meiji period. I explore the meaning which important activists in these two periods found in San’yō’s history. The other concept I use is shutaisei 主體性 (in the sense of ‘subjective engagement’), which refers to the inner core of a committed individual’s moral decision-making, where the individual bases his actions on his own will and judgment, sometimes feeling compelled to act against the force of the establishment in the name of high moral ideals. Even the concept of the unbroken imperial line is, on one level, a conception of “absolute shutaisei” which relates directly to both the collective and the individual identity of Japanese political actors acting with a knowledge of the nation’s historical tradition. My study points out that both the post-war critique of the emperor-centered ideology and the contemporary trend of discourse deconstruction have obscured our awareness of many elements within Japan’s national ideology that have the potential of fostering, not suppressing, true shutaisei, elements which preserve some of the profound insights into human nature that emerged from over two thousand years of the Chinese and Japanese historiographical traditions. The core idea here is that the moral will of a leader or thinker with noble ideals can survive his death and be rediscovered or inherited through the study of history, to come back to life within the history that is now in the process of unfolding. That is what happened in the Meiji Restoration.

幸徳秋水の思想的位置にかんして、アナーキズムに傾いた社会主義と捉える見方が一般的である(1)。そのなかで、非戦の立場から評価される一方、日本資本主義分析の不在と労働者階級の歴史的任務にたいする認識の欠陥がつねに指摘される(2)。こうした位置づけをふまえ、本稿では社会問題と帝国問題の連鎖に着目し、歴史学派が媒介した社会的なもの(the social)の受容を示したうえで、幸徳思想における帝国主義論の役割を再考する。
　しばしば指摘されるように、19世紀後半ヨーロッパの社会問題(social question)は資本主義に内在する諸矛盾と19世紀末期新旧帝国の覇権争いを背景に、帝国問題(imperial question)とセットになった課題であった(3)。20世紀の変わり目、日本の言論界では社会問題への関心が高まり、帝国主義を批判的に読み取り、平民社会主義を唱えた幸徳を含めて、改良思想や社会政策、社会革命といった「社会主義」が登場した。一般的に日本マルクス主義の前史に置かれた幸徳の論考を振り返ってみれば、広義の歴史学派に属したAlbert SchäffleとRichard T. Elyの媒介で、現代政治思想の分野でつねに「社会的なもの」と呼ばれる論理に近いことろがみられる。本稿では社会問題と帝国問題の連鎖を切り口に、幸徳の帝国主義批判と社会主義を検討する。そのなかで、社会問題は単なる現象でなく、帝国主義への傾斜と近代化の道程にたいする懐疑から生まれた帝国問題と連鎖し、彼の社会主義につながっていた問題化の過程としている。最後に、資本主義の発達段階が異なったにもかかわらず、社会問題に触発され、歴史学派の媒介で明治社会主義に持ち込まれた社会的なものの思想的意義を論じる。

The Japanese people have always greeted foreign influences with great enthusiasm. In the first centuries AD the massive introduction of Chinese civilization deeply affected all aspects of the Japanese culture. Later, cultural interactions occurred with other Asian countries. Since the 16th century western traders and missionaries brought not only technological innovations, such as firearms, but also ideological and spiritual ones such as the Christian religion.
In spite of their remarkable capacity for adaptation, the Japanese people have never compromised on the specific elements of their cultural background, such as the divinity of the Emperor, strongly connected with the Shintō religion, or such the higher value of blood ties.
After a brief note on ancient Japan, this paper deals with the Japanese warrior class. From the blood ties to the abstract concept of absolute devotion to the Lord, duty always was the keystone of the samurai thought.

This study shows how, in the 1870s and 1880s, Western philosophy came to be represented in East Asia by positivism and utilitarianism through Nishi Amane's promotion of the writings of Comte and Mill, and how Confucian concepts became the medium for the reception of this philosophy in Japan through his translations and propagation. For Nishi, the establishment of a system of precisely translated concepts using Chinese characters was paramount because it promised that the knowledge systems of the West could be incorporated into those of East Asia. Much of this legacy lives on in Nishi's neologisms, many of which came to form the basis of the Japanese (and subsequently Chinese) philosophical and logical lexicon, including the very term for "philosophy," tetsugaku/zhexue 哲學. The study also explores the changing condition of "philosophy" and "theology" as interrelated fields of learning in Holland (and Europe as a whole) when Nishi studied there in the 1850s, a condition which came to have profound influence on the transplantation of Western thought to East Asia in the latter half of the 19th century and the 20th century.

Although, nowadays, everyone knows that "Teikoku 帝国” means Empire in English, it is difficult to find this term in Chinese classics. The reason is it is one of Kindai-kangos or modern Chinese expressions which was coined by a  Dutch scholar in late 18th century Japan.
What is the intent of this paper is how Bakumatsu intellectuals recognized and received this novel term. It will show a conversion of their worldview.

今日、誰もが "帝国"とは英語でEmpireを意味していることを知っていますが、中国古典でこの語を見つけるのは難しいです。その理由は、これが18世紀後半の日本で蘭学者が生み出した近代漢語の一つだからです。
本論文の目的は、幕末の知識人がこの新奇な言葉をどのように認識し、また受け入れたかということです。このことは彼らの世界観の転回を示すことでしょう。

*Published in the 2016 special edition of Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art on ‘Political Ecology in East Asia’.
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What does it mean to discuss ‘political ecology’ in art and architecture now in the East Asian context? I investigate this through the historiography of Japan, re-examined in the light of present-day practices of art and architecture. I will consider how alternate notions of ecology, art and architecture there, became neglected 100 years ago in the shadow of the society’s hurried Western modernisation, and how their resurgence now may cast a new light on our contemporary crisis.

The contemporary practitioners I discuss are the artist duo Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi (b.1989/1988) and artist-architect Sakaguchi Kyōhei (b.1978). They are all based in regional Japan. Although they have had a handful overseas presentations, perhaps given their work concerns immediate issues that are specific to the country, they have not yet been so visible in Euro-American debates. Komori + Seo have worked consistently in the city of Rikuzentakata to record, document and narrate the personal memories of locals since the community was heavily destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami of 3.11.2011. Meanwhile, Sakaguchi Kyōhei, known as an architect who does not build, has proposed alternative methods of reinstituting a society that has exhausted itself from notion of progress based on financial growth. These include his survey of what he calls ‘0 Yen House’, a housing system constructed by so-called homeless people living by the Sumida River in Tokyo; the ‘Zero Public’, an independent nation he created himself, whose headquarter ‘Zero Center’ is in Kumamoto Prefecture; and various philosophical terms he has invented to articulate the thoughts behind these practices.

Their works can certainly be considered to be what is known as ‘socially engaged practice’ – the kind of art practice that revolves around the artists’ direct engagement with society beyond the art world (Thompson 2012). In fact, given the massively increased interest to this type of art practice since the 3.11 in Japanese art scene, recent works of Euro-American critics and theorists such as Claire Bishop and Nicolas Bourriaud have been heavily referenced in the domestic debate (Hoshino 2014; Ozaki 2014). However, their work need not only be read in terms of only of currently fashionable ‘imported’ ideas from global art theory discourse. What I propose here is, rather, an analysis of these artists’ practice as a resurgence of native ideas that first had their critical relevance approximately 100 years ago during the Meiji era. These are alternate notions of ecology, art and architecture that signal a different kind of modernity and human progress to the ideologies of Western modernity imported by the government during that era.

In order to do so, I will initially discuss the historical and theoretical backdrop within which these notions were contested. Two comparable ideas of ecologies that were proposed in the Meiji period as a Japanese translation of the English term will be examined through their semantic features as kanji in terms of usage and their implied sense. This will effectively lead to a transformation of ideas of architecture and art during the period after the Russo-Japanese War of the same period. The respective practice of Komori + Seo and Sakaguchi will be discussed essentially as a resurgence of these forgotten ideas. Conclusions will be drawn as to why and how these discourses may be relevant now.
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*Please note that there is one misinformation on the paper; the naturalist Minakata Kumagusu is noted as born in Tanabe, Wakayama Prefecture but he was in fact born in Wakayama city of the same prefecture.

In the continuity of our 2018 book Rousseau au Japon the present article provides the results of a radically new approach of Nakae Chômin ideas by focusing, the translations of Chômin but also the translations made with and by his disciples, published as books and articles in the reviews (Ôbei) Seiri sôdan and Ôbei seiten shûshi. These sources have been completely forgotten. Our new approach demonstrates, beyond Rousseau, the crucial role of French republicans (Jules Barni, Etienne Vacherot, Jules Simon, Alfred Fouillée, Emile Acollas, Alfred Naquet and Charles Renouvier), who read Rousseau and introduced Kant in France in order to create a new philosophical discourse on democracy and republicanism. Another key thinker in the formation of Chômin’s philosophy is Victor Cousin, who also deeply influenced a part of the French republicans. Following Cousin, Chômin created an eclectic philosophy of liberty, by combining Rousseau, Kant, Alexander Bain’s psychology and Mencius. Chômin tried to formulate his philosophy through all texts, writings and translations. He expressed his philosophy of liberty with the Confucian notions of the Mencius. Among them, rigi can be identified as the central concept of Chômin’s philosophy, and was as the same time a notion taken from the Mencius and a word of translation for “reason” and “justice”. Previous researches already pointed out the presence of the word rigi in Chômin’s thought, but we demonstrate here that this word was not only much more used than imagined before, but was also mainly linked with Rousseau and Kant. The reason why Chômin focused on Alexander Bain’s psychology and Mencius rigi can be explained as following : in order to overcome the opposition between materialism and spiritualism, body and spirit, Chômin tried to find in the human body the roots of moral freedom. Bain and Mencius were the main tools for such goal. Such strategy was very similar to Alfred Fouillée’s philosophy. Thus, we can say that Chômin not only expressed his ideas in his own writings but also through the translation.

Key words : Nakae Chômin, Emmanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mencius, Liberty/Freedom

This introduction to a special issue entitled  "Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory" considers the problems in how film theory has been conceived, and the potentials and problems in examining the rich history of Japanese film theory. I call the "theory complex" a constellation of complexities in which not only foreign but also Japanese scholars ignore Japanese film theory, and in which Japanese thinkers experience a difficulty in terming their work theory.

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo estudar as dimensões estético-espirituais e religiosas presentes em dois sistemas marciais asiáticos modernos: o Taijiquan, de Sun Lutang, e o Aikido, de Morihei Ueshiba, respectivamente na China e no Japão, entre o final do século XIX e meados do século XX. Busca-se compreender como tais sistemas compatibilizaram aspectos religiosos com paradigmas modernos e instituíram formas de espiritualidade renovadas em diálogo com as transformações sociais e culturais de sua época. A metodologia da pesquisa será fundamentada, principalmente, na leitura crítica, análise e interpretação de textos de Sun Lutang e Morihei Ueshiba, além de obras correlatas, escritas por outros autores a eles relacionados, combinadas com a autoetnografia, por meio da prática efetiva, por parte do pesquisador, destes dois sistemas marciais. Assim, a perspectiva teórica do trabalho combinará procedimentos hermenêuticos próprio da História Cultural das Religiões com a abordagem filosófica da Somaestética, em perspectiva transdisciplinar.

The Japanese term tenkō is usually translated as ‘conversion’ and refers to left-wing intellectuals converting to right-wing ideologies, at times under duress. The use of the term tenkō by the literary critic, Sinologist and postwar public intellectual Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–1977) expands its scope and allows us to think transnationally about the phenomenon of political or ideological change. His work enables us to ask what the enabling conditions and nature of such conversions were, in relation not just to Japan but more globally. Takeuchi supported Japan’s involvement in the War, and his writings on tenkō during the postwar era attempted to make sense of Japan’s wartime experience from a global perspective. In Takeuchi’s writings, tenkō comes to represent the general superficiality of Japanese consciousness, which he opposes to the Chinese concept of kaishin, a Buddhist term that could similarly be translated as conversion but which also implies holding fast to oneself. In Takeuchi’s view, tenkō implies that there is no resistance or desire to be true to oneself. This chapter attempts to lay the groundwork for understanding this idea, which will involve grasping Takeuchi’s understanding of Lu Xun, resistance and modernity. At the same time, Murthy argues that, by redefining tenkō as not only a personal state of mind but also a broader mode of consciousness or subjectivity, Takeuchi points to continuities between pre- and postwar Japan thus connecting tenkō to a larger problem in capitalist modernity. More specifically, the problem of tenkō points to the loss of autonomy in the modern world, and kaishin emerges as a difficult resistance to this loss.

This article sets out to elucidate the role of Japanese Protestants in the education of Koreans during the early twentieth century. Scholarship has often assigned only marginal roles to Japanese Protestants within the history of Japanese imperialism, despite the remarkable success of western missionaries in Korea at the time. As imperial expansion progressed, Japanese Protestants intensified their efforts to take up a leading role in the education of Koreans in colonial Korea and in the metropole wishing to spearhead the assimilation of Koreans. By drawing on the colonial discourses of East Asian unity under Japanese leadership, Protestant churches strove to mediate and facilitate colonial policies in Korea. Yet there were also voices of dissent from prominent Japanese Protestants critical of the assimilation policies implemented by colonial authorities in Korea. This ambivalent stance of Protestantism towards Korea is further complicated by the fact that the Korean Young Men’s Christian Association in Tokyo served as an important venue of the Korean Independence Movement. Examining Christian magazines and journals of the time, this paper delves into the contentious debates among Japanese Protestants concerning the Korea Mission and the Japanese government’s strategy of assimilation through education.

In this chapter, my main aim is to offer some evidence for the fact that during the early Edo period, there actually existed a Shinto paradigm different from honji suijaku, while, at the same time, medieval forms of belief in the kami continued to exist. Of course, “non-honji suijaku” conceptions of the kami had been developed already in the medieval period, for instance in the form of Watarai or Yoshida Shinto. But these were secret teachings for specialists, unknown to the common people. The scatteredreligious incidents from the Edo period discussed in this essay indicate, however, that in contrast to previous times, Buddhist and non-Buddhist forms of kami worship were at this time quite commonly regarded as different forms of Shinto. This implies that Shinto as an independent religion had become a conceivable option, no matter whether people favoured it or not. As I will explain in more detail below, this perception of Shinto is intimately connected with the rise of Yoshida Shinto; but at the same time it developed in directions that were not at all intended or envisaged by the Yoshida.

Koyasu Nobukuni, professor emeritus of the University of Osaka, has for many years been considered the leading senior scholar of Japanese Confucianism in Kansai by many scholars in this field in Japan. Several of his seminal books have been translated into Chinese, and they have had a definite impact upon Confucian Studies and Japanese Studies in China. In addition to the string of influential books published by Koyasu, he also organized and edited a major journal of studies on Edo thought. After reading some of his books and finding his application of Foucault’s methodological concepts interesting, I wrote this introduction to Koyasu’s work for the sake of Euro-American Japanologists and scholars in Japanese and Sino-Japanese Studies. One of Koyasu’s best-known essays is called "Hōhō toshite no Edo" (Edo as Method). This title echoes the title of a famous essay by the Japanese scholar of Chinese literature, Takeuchi Yoshimi, an essay which had also been echoed in a book title by my own University of Tokyo doctoral supervisor, Mizoguchu Yuzo, "Hōhō toshite no Chuugoku" (China as Method). Takeuchi’s idea was to revise the methodological perspective for studying China from one rooted in the Japanese Sinological tradition to one rooted in the actual living Chinese people. Mizoguchi was advocating a similar change of perspective, but his concern was to abandon a Eurocentric world view for a “Sinocentric” one. That is, both Takeuchi and Mizoguchi proposed “reversing the direction of conceptual world-formation” by taking Asia or China as a methodological foothold outside of the West (thus moving from East to West instead of West to East). For Koyasu, whose concern was finding a new approach to the study of Edo thought, the idea was to take the Edo period (the ‘pre-modern’ in Japan’s modern self-consciousness) as a foothold outside of modernity for understanding Japan’s modernity. That is, instead of reconstructing the Edo period from the point of view of modernity, he proposes to deconstruct the modern period from the standpoint of Edo. This means giving up once and for the all the determination to find impulses toward modernity in the intellectual history of the Edo period. How can this be done? By retracing the process of the construction of the image of a particular major Edo thinker in the modern period, which is nothing other than to deconstruct the historical image of modern Japan that has been built up on the basis of “Edo.” The aim of this deconstruction is to reveal the Edo thinker we are studying as he existed within the discursive space of his own time. For Koyasu there is also another way to reread modern Japan with Edo as the methodological foothold. This is what he calls “the archaeology of modern knowledge,” which involves looking closely into the process by which various elements of Japan’s modern national identity were constructed by Edo-period thinkers such as Motoori Norinaga (who tried to reconstruct the ancient Japanese language as it existed before the overwhelming influence of Chinese).

Предисловие к книге «Власть правителей и идеологии Восточной Азии» [渡辺浩 (1997). 東アジアの王権と思想, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press).
Перевод Арсения Тарасова; выполнен с английского перевода (Watanabe, H. (1988). "About Some Japanese Historical Terms". Sino-Japanese Studies, 10(2): 32-42).

Regarding the development of anarchism in East Asia during the post-WWI period, Taiwanese anarchism has barely been explored in most narratives due to the lack of materials. Amongst which, Fan Ben-Liang, a Taiwanese anarchist who was active in the early 1920s, and his New Taiwan Anarchist Society are constantly mentioned in the context of transnational anarchist movements, while his thoughts and ideas remain understudied. From the perspective of intellectual history, this paper establishes an analytical framework consisting of the Meiji theory of imperialism, the Taisho anarchism, and the colonial anti-imperialist anarchism. By probing into works of Kōtoku Shūsui and Ōsugi Sakae, it delineates a close relation between Kōtoku’s Monster of the 20th Century: Imperialism, Ōsugi’s discourses of the ‘facts of conquest’, and Fan’s anti-colonial anarchism. Instead of focusing solely on the context of post-WWI anarchism, this paper indicates the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial characteristics prompted by the legacy of Meiji socialism in Fan’s arguments. It is through this approach that this research contributes to filling in the missing piece of the existing narratives, and readdresses the potential of East Asian anarchism studies.

It is, undoubtedly, a well-known fact that Japan was greatly influenced by China in the process of its development. Chinese thought, language, literature, and customs largely shaped Japan’s state and society at the incipient stages of its rise from pre-history and continued to bear great importance to the Japanese people later on. Keeping this in mind, one can only wonder why in the field of nationalism the profound influence of this “significant other” has not received the attention it deserves. This paper is an attempt to tackle this “academic injustice” and to investigate in what particular ways Chinese thought and culture informed early Japanese nationalism. By doing so I hope to add a few more strokes to the overall picture of nationalism in Japan and to elucidate some facts about it that have been somewhat overlooked by the academic community.