Synopsis
Stefan Tanaka examines how late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japanese historians created the equivalent of an "Orient" for their new nation state. He argues that the Japanese attempted to use a variety of pasts-Chinese, Indian, and proto-historic Japanese-to construct an identity that was both modern and Asian.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Stefan Tanaka is Associate Professor of History, University of California, San Diego.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History
By Stefan TanakaUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1995 Stefan TanakaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520201701
From Kangaku to Toyoshi:The Search for History
The impact of the West and the reaction against the West are common clichés in the history of Meiji Japan. Certainly, Europe and its culture played a major role in Japan's development, but too often that impact has been described as an "either-or" proposition, with those who were partial to Western ideas being extolled. Such a predisposition blurs an important problem of this period; that is, how could Japan regenerate society by adapting from the alien West while still retaining its own distinctiveness? The difficulty of this process is discussed in Peter Dale's provocative book The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. Using Toynbee's characterization of the Herodian and the zealot to describe Japan's encounter with the West, Dale states, "The Herodian discovers that his adoption of foreign material culture to defend indigenous autonomy subtly alters and subverts the very values he strives to protect. He quickly learns that the imported infrastructure has a logic all its own, and that the 'mechanically propelled Trojan horse' of alien civilisation drastically disrupts and reorganises the social fabric upon which the ideology of his traditional outlook rests."1
Clearly, this process of encounter and adaptation was not new to Japan. David Pollack describes the place in Japan of a figurative and real China from the eighth through the eighteenth centuries in terms of a dialectical relationship between China, the alien form, and Japan, the native content. He uses the analogy of"a frog [at] the bottom of its
Peter Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 47.
well, who would define its world almost exclusively in terms of its walls: the sky and world outside the well, the shape of the water in which it lived, its notions of security and danger, the proper dimensions and proportions of things, would all be most meaningfully expressed in terms of 'walls.'"2 Regardless whether one agrees that there was only one alien and one native (which I do not), this relationship can be extended to include an alien West. In Pollack's metaphor, China constitutes Japan's walls, which changed during the nineteenth century.3 The categories that were used to understand the complex events and processes of a previous age were no longer appropriate; the domestic discontinuities and the appearance of a technologically superior West could not be bounded by preexisting categories.4 In the nineteenth century, therefore, new categories had to be created that would "render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful [and] so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them."5 The bricks that were used to construct China were now seen differently; they were crooked, decaying, and even tumbling down.
This shift did not entail the simple replacement of China by the West. Using a different design but many of the same bricks, Japanese constructed a different wall, one that altered everything: the shape of the water, its security, and, in the end, Japan itself. The difference between the use of China and the use of the West was that the previous world was one in which all life was construed as being part of a fixed realm. To be sure, some intellectuals of the Tokugawa period sought to expand and even dismantle this age-old thought system, but they were very much in the minority. Even the radical Mito solution in many ways proposed a return to a purity from before the corruption of time, suggesting that the solution lay not in some new future system, but in a system that had already been tested and proven.6 The West brought
Pollack, Fracture of Meaning, 4.
For the role and "decentering" of China during the late Tokugawa period, see Harootunian, "Functions of China in Tokugawa Thought."
For a discussion of these issues, see Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); and Najita and Koschmann (eds.), Conflict in Modern Japanese History.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
Mito was a collateral domain to the ruling house uring the Tokugawa period. During the early nineteenth century a number of intellectuals proposed reforms that addressed the growing disjuncture between the fixed ideal and changing society. These proposals proved to signal the decline of the existing government, the bakufu, rather than to reform it. For further information, see J. Victor Koschmann, The Mito Ideology: Discourse, Reform, and Insurrection in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1790-1864 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
a different perspective, the probable future; knowledge was infinite, but to understand and harness it one had to understand the underlying historical laws that would indicate what was to come. The key to understanding was history.
Japan's earlier studies of the past had been used largely to affirm the status quo or to "discover" the errors of the immediate past; the notion of progress, however, transformed Japan's very history and world vision7 As a sociological study, history was no longer merely a strategy to describe what ought to have been; the focus now was what in fact is, what will be, and what ought to be. History, then, became not only the way by which Japan would know itself, but also its tool for relating, in the present and in the future, to a broad and uncertain geocultural world.
As Dale's Herodian figure suggests, it would be a mistake to assume that all Western ideas were accepted intact. Moreover, although reference was and is made to a singular West, this geocultural construction represented simply all those people, ideas, organizations, institutions, structures, and so forth that were over there in Europe; in short, they were not Japanese. The willing and even eager acceptance of selected Western things during the early Meiji period should be seen as Japan's attempt to participate with the West as an essentially equivalent—though not always equal—entity. Seemingly "Western" aspects might have been adopted, but the purpose was to effect Japan's regeneration; constitutionalism, modernity, rationality, and capitalism were merely tools for that regeneration. In this very process of adoption, the ideas accepted by Japan were altered. In the end, a new understanding of Japan, Asia, and Europe was created, one very different than that which had existed previously.
In this chapter I look at the process of change in the formulation of a history of Japan and how it led to the discovery of Japan's Asiatic past. This turn to an Asian past emerged from two problems that Japanese intellectuals encountered in their very acceptance of Western progressive historiography. First was the realization that the notion of universal progress, which implies comprehensiveness—a totality and
For a recent study on progress as a nineteenth-century Western notion, see Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
generality—is not neutral. The geographic area privileged by this totality, rather, was Europe; non-Europe was separated and distanced by the same hierarchical generality—the sequence and order—that explained the progress of the West.8
The second problem is a more fundamental contradiction within history itself. For history to be relevant, it must be usable; it must correspond to contemporary needs of society (however defined). Yet to maintain its authenticity, it must also be objective. (Lawrence Stone alludes to this issue in one of the epigraphs to Part One.) The modern historical profession is built on a scientific epistemology that pretends to be objective and universal. Yet the history that was written, especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is that of Western nation-states, international and domestic politics, and a male elite. Despite paeans to universality, these histories were about the writer's own nation. In other words, they were objective because they fit the universe of national ideals. Importantly, Japanese did not reject the progress or modernity underlying such history. Instead they created a historical narrative that was similarly universalistic, objective, and useful to Japan.9
The realm for this new past was toyo, which was at once contiguous with Western histories and antithetical to them. Geographically, toyo expanded the area of the Western universal; it added the "Far East" to the Western Orient, thereby reinforcing the Western split between the Orient and Occident. But it also reflected an awareness that such territorial categories, especially those defined by Europe, are not neutral or objective. By elevating toyo to an equivalent half of the whole, this history offered a competing totality—
a new sequence and order—to the universal of the West.
The extent to which intellectuals actually created a dialogue acceptable to both Europe and Asia is evident in toyoshi 's synthesis of the major historical methodologies prevalent during the late-Meiji period. In 1928 Sugimoto Naojiro, a recent graduate of the University of Kyoto's Department of History, described this synthesis by using the metaphor of the family: "Western historiography was the older brother to toyoshi, which was born from the womb of Chinese historiography and raised
Fabian, Time and the Other, 2-4. For other accounts on alterity, see Said, Orientalism ; Tzevetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Colophon, 1984); and Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.
Lawrence Stone, Review of The New History. and the Old, by Gertrude Himmel-farb, New York Review of Books, December 17, 1987, 59-62; also see Novick, That Noble Dream.
in the cradle of Meiji civilization." This syncretism, Sugitomo stated, was the product of corrections to the limitations and faults of Western "world" history as well as that of kangaku. 10 It was from the effort to establish equality in difference that historians consciously located the study of the history of Japan and Asia in the context of world history; here, toyoshi transcended the old and new.11
At the time of the Meiji Restoration, historical studies in Japan were quite unlike those of today. In general, history up to the Tokugawa period consisted of chronologies and compendia of leaders and events related to political power. These philological studies of the Chinese and Japanese classic texts established a moral and ethical imperative that either affirmed or condemned the contemporary world. For example, the monumental Dai nihon shi (Great History of Japan) was written to establish a historical basis for the bakufu, the government established by Tokugawa Ieyasu in the seventeenth century. In contrast, Motoori Norinaga's (1730-1801) classic study of the Kojiki (712) emphasized the inappropriateness of Chinese culture and Neo-Confucianism for Japan. Each of these works was restricted to a finite world that reached back to either ancient Japan or a forgotten China. By the nineteenth century, however, the limitations of such philological studies had become increasingly apparent; the idealized past as the model for an ethical and moral society could no longer account for domestic and international change.
The intellectual and social changes that followed the Meiji Restoration were in many ways similar to those surrounding the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in Europe, where the advent of "probable knowledge" rendered the finite world of earlier thinkers anachronistic as a new, but unknown, social order came to the fore. The changes in Japan were equally cataclysmic. Although the social order had been in decline for many decades, the Restoration signaled a new,
Sugimoto Naojiro, "Honpo ni okeru toyoshigaku no seiritsu ni tsuite," Rekishi to chiri 21 (April 1928): 439.
In his essay on toyoshi, Hatada stated that although the field was critical of the past, its major defect was its inability to synthesize the old and new into a different ideology; see "Nihon ni okeru toyoshigaku no dento," 34.
if uncertain, beginning. Those elites leading the regeneration of society found the notions of rationality and progress, rooted in science, particularly attractive. Science presented an aura of objectivity and efficiency, while the idea of progress explained how societies have (or have not) changed and held out hope that less advanced cultures could also evolve into that future, ideal society. History was necessary to explain social change (progress) in an orderly fashion according to universal standards.
Although numerous historical schools emerged in Japan during this period to order the various pasts into a comprehensible whole, the two most important were enlightenment (bunmei ) history and "national" history. Both, like their European counterparts, were conservative.12
Intellectuals of the early-Meiji period eagerly adopted the "world histories" of Europe so as to develop a history in which Japan, too, could be part of the universal order. The fact that enlightenment historians, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901), Taguchi Ukichi (1855-1905), Miyake Yonekichi, and Naka, looked to the West does not mean that their ideas were liberal. In their quest to establish a new historical understanding of Japan, they sought a scientific methodology that prioritized the study of human activity as a regulated and historical object. Through their reading of the histories of Western civilization, they came to believe that universal laws existed that govern all societies, including Japan, and they attempted to place Japan into that universalistic framework.13 In this sense the West, a geographical and idealized entity that represented progress and modernity, replaced China as Japan's ideal.
Taguchi was one of the first to apply this new notion of progress, in his Nihon kaika shoshi (Brief History of Civilization in Japan). His historical conception was based on the notion that the study of human society can ultimately be reduced to a single, all-encompassing law, one
For studies of these different schools, see Numata Jiro, "Shigeno Yasutsugu and the Modern Tokyo Tradition," in Historians of China and Japan, ed. W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 264-87; Peter Duus, "Whig History, Japanese Style: The Min'yusha Historians and the Meiji Restoration," Journal of Asian Studies 33 (May 1974): 415-36; and Carol Gluck, "The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography," Journal of Asian Studies 38 (November 1978): 25-50.
Kuwabara Takeo, ed., Nihon no meicho (Tokyo: Chuko Shinsho, 1962), 12-13.
that included Japan. "The enlightenment [kaika ] of human society," he stated, "is governed by a fixed principle [ittei no ri ].... We must recognize that the path of this force [seiryoku ] is quite narrow."14 According to Taguchi, placing Japan on this path required the elision of over a millennium of Japan's past. Its deviation from this universal had begun in the sixth century, when the imperial court came under strong influence from the continent, especially T'ang China (618-907); Buddhism delimited Japanese imagination with its concept of reincarnation; and the importation of T'ang grandeur directed valuable resources toward the embellishment of the court and away from the people. Putting Japan back on a universal course thus meant the disavowal of the corrupting influences of Buddhism, Confucianism, and materialism. Although Taguchi suggested a return to ancient Japan, the point was not so much to regain a lost purity as to return to the early stages of Japan's proper course of development. Taguchi's history was devastating in its implications for a society seeking to reconstruct itself, for it required the forgetting of Japan's aristocratic, militaristic, and feudal ages—in other words, of virtually its whole recorded past.15
Perhaps more than at any other time in history, the West was, for Japanese intellectuals, the manifestation of an ideal toward which Japan had to strive if it was to be successful or even survive. Taguchi did not accept the notion that India, China, and Japan shared a common heritage, arguing instead that Western countries had understood the universal order and properly utilized that knowledge to advance to their present superior level. His criticism of Buddhism and Confucianism sharply contrasts with later historical narratives, which have extracted aspects of both systems of thought as fundamental elements of Japanese ideas. It is important to remember that Taguchi's purpose was not specifically to imitate or be like the West. He and his contemporaries did not consider the West inherently superior, only historically more advanced. He stated, "We study physics, psychology, economics, and other sciences not because the West discovered them, but because they are the universal truth."16 Fukuzawa's famous article "Datsu-A ron"
Quoted in lenaga, Nihon no kindai shigaku, 72.
There is an interesting parallel with Rammohun Roy's search to a pre-Muslim golden age to reconstruct a history of India. Like Taguchi, he eliminated most of the recorded past; his three periods were the age of god (Upanishads), 900-600 B.C., the age of darkness, 600 B.C.—A.D. 1800, and the age of future expectations.
Quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 90. Fukuzawa Yukichi similarly argued that Japan should study and follow the universal laws that he believed encompassed all societies; see, for example, An Outline of a Theory. of Civilization, trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973).
(Dissociation from Asia) indicates similar caution. While this essay was no doubt a plea for Japan to distance itself from Asia in order to gain equivalence with (or at least diminish the separation from) Europe, Fukuzawa's likening of Western civilization with the measles, a disease that relentlessly spreads to all corners of the globe, reflects his ambivalence on the value of enlightenment.17 For both Taguchi and Fukuzawa, Japan's achievement of Western knowledge would put it on a par with the West. The universal, then, was a concept that explained different levels; difference was placed solely on a temporal, not an on-tological, plane.18
The conditions in which these Meiji intellectuals lived bore several similarities with those facing European writers, including Saint-Simon (1675-1755) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the two men most instrumental in formulating positivistic sociology. Both were concerned with the perceived disintegration of society. Frank Manuel points out that "Saint-Simon by his own testimony was communicating the same urgent longing of men for a society in which they could feel themselves integral parts, an organic society, as contrasted with a state in which isolated units competed and fought with one another."19 Comte, who sought to prevent the breakdown of the idealized social fabric of postrevolutionary France, also prioritized the group: "The scientific spirit makes it impossible to view human society as being really composed of individuals. The true social unit certainly consists in the family alone."20 Science, thus, precluded the study of the individual and emphasized the social unit. The notion of the progress of civilization was tied to an ideal organic society in which the members, each different and with diverse abilities, combined into a harmonious organic whole. The key to Comte's sociology was a scientistic philosophy of history, defined by three social stages—theologism, metaphysics, and positivism—that allowed the study of human existence as a science.
Fukuzawa Yukichi, "Datsu-A ron," in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1960), 10:238-40.
For a discussion of liberal and conservative applications of progress to the non-West, see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 10-17.
Frank E. Manuel, "From Equality to Organicism," Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (January 1956): 69. See also Robert A. Nisbet, "Conservatism and Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 58 (1952): 167-75; idem, "The French Revolution and the Rise of Sociology in France," American Journal of Sociology 49 (1943): 156-64; and Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 7-9.
Quoted in Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 480.
According to Comte, the development of man can be traced through the progress of his mental faculties: from theologism—the attribution of events to supernatural forces—to positivism—the use of reason and observation to unearth truth.
The European historians who had the most direct influence on Japan followed similar lines of thought. François Guizot (1787-1874), whose History of Civilization was widely read by Japanese intellectuals, defined civilization as both the progress of society and the progress of individuals. But while both were necessary, they were not of equal importance. Guizot feared the excesses of power—both of government and of the people—and believed that society determines what is best and that change, though desirable, must be gradual: "We trust that the time now approaches when man's condition shall be progressively improved by the force of reason and truth, when the brute part of nature shall be crushed, that the godlike spirit may unfold. In the meantime let us be cautious that no vague desires, that no extravagant theories, the time for which may not yet be come, carry us beyond the bounds of prudence, or beget in us a discontent with our present state."21
Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62) also subordinated the individual to nature in his History of Civilization in England, another historical text widely read in Meiji Japan. He stated:
I hope to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous, to what has been effected by other inquirers for the different branches of natural science. In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought, have studied natural events with the views of discovering their regularity: and if human events were subjected to similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results.22
Buckle, too, affirmed progress and order, but unlike Guizot, his universal was more restrictive. "Man" was not an individual, but represented the social or collective unit whose acquisition of knowledge (progress) brought about civilization.23 Buckle's philosophy of history grounded progress in two basic natural conditions: "Climate," which controlled the accumulation and distribution of wealth, and "Aspects of Nature,"
F Guizot, The History of Civilization from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution, trans. William Hazitt, 3d U.S. ed., vol. I (New York: D. Appleton, 1874), 29, 34.
Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), 6.
For his discussion on the relation between nature and history, see ibid., 65-148.
which determined knowledge. By emphasizing the group or whole and the "natural," or scientific, conditions, he virtually eliminated the possibility for action outside of this norm, and confined the possibility of progress—that is, the attainment of knowledge—to Europe.
This notion of progress rooted in an organic society was well suited to the needs of early Meiji elites for a concept that could render order out of a seemingly chaotic situation. They saw positivistic history as the way by which the new nation-state, Japan, could become a part of "world" civilization, eradicate arbitrary (archaic) social hierarchy or relations, determine what was best for society, and establish a sense of order and sequence. History could be formulated to describe Japan's past, present, and even future in comparison with Europe. Like Neo-Confucianism at the beginning of the Tokugawa period, this new conceptual order was an optimistic one. The optimism, however, was rooted not in an elitist ideal that all men could achieve sagehood, but in an assumption of change toward an ideal order, an order that existed only in the context of an organic society. Moreover, as a forward-looking yet at the same time conservative ideology, it was effectively mobilized to counter popular movements such as the jiyu minken undo (freedom and popular rights movement).24 Acceptable change had to be gradual and could only be validated through the scientific investigation of the past; caution, prudence, and, above all, objective knowledge were essential.
The other major historical school of the time was the "national" school, or school of textual analysis (koshogaku ).25 Current scholarship has emphasized the differences between this school and that of enlightenment history, based chiefly on institutional affiliation and methodology. While I do not refute these distinctions, such an interpretation, I argue, overlooks important similarities.26 Both enlightenment and national historians believed that history should be rational and progressive; both considered society to be the primary unit of analysis; and both emphasized gradual change.
For two studies that describe this movement as a populist alternative to the system established by the ruling clique, see Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of Meiji (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Roger Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).
For two studies that describe the historiography of this period, see Duus, "Whig History, Japanese Style," 415-36; and Gluck, "The People in History," 25-50.
For a description of these schools, see Ienaga, Nihon no kindai shigaku, 71-90.
Present-day historiography, in exploring the development of the national school, has emphasized continuity and change; the presence of elements of kokugaku (nativist learning), especially careful textual analysis (kosho ); and German (Rankean) historical methods. Above all, the approach was scientific, objective, and lacking an explicit theoretical framework. Peter Duus states this common view succinctly, and politely:
These academic historians were as much in revolt against the praise-and-blame approach of traditional historiography as men like Fukuzawa and Taguchi, but they fought not by seeking out general laws of civilization, but by careful verification of historical facts.... They devoted themselves to gathering facts, compiling chronologies, and subjecting classic works of historiography (such as Rai Sanyo's Nihon gaishi ) to rigorous textual criticism. They were capable, critical, and dedicated scholars, but basically uninspiring, without an axe to grind or the passion of political commitment.27
Institutional affiliation was an important characteristic of this school; as faculty of the Imperial University in Tokyo, the preeminent university in Japan, these historians worked for the state. Indeed, article one of the Imperial Ordinance outlining the organization and function of this university stated, "It shall be the purpose of the [Tokyo] Imperial University to teach the sciences and the arts and to probe their mysteries in accordance with the needs of the state."28 This connection was manifested in numerous ways. From 1887, for example, Tokyo Imperial University graduates were exempted from civil service exams. The professors of this school, particularly during the Meiji period, likewise enjoyed considerable prestige within the bureaucratic hierarchy: their salaries were in the top 8 percent of the bureaucratic pay scale, and they also carried considerable weight in the formulation of social policy.29
Duus, "Whig History, Japanese Style," 419-20; Ienaga Saburo argued, "These positivistic national historians were solely preoccupied with collecting materials and verifying historical facts; however, they overlooked the fundamental spirit of historical consciousness" (Nihon no kindai shigaku, 85). Numata, though downplaying the role of Riess and emphasizing the indigenous historical tradition, comes to essentially the same conclusion; see "Shigeno Yasutsugu and the Modem Tokyo Tradition," 264-87.
Quoted in Frank O. Miller, Minobe Tatsukichi: Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), 15.
One of the best-known examples of the connection between knowledge and national policy was that linking the Faculty of Law of Tokyo Imperial University, the constitution, and the bureaucracy; see F. Miller, Minobe Tatsukichi. For the relation between Tokyo Imperial University and the bureaucracy, see Marshall, "Professors and Politics"; idem, "Growth and Conflict," 276-94; and James R. Bartholomew, "Science, Bureaucracy, and Freedom in Meiji and Taisho Japan," in Najita and Koschmann (eds.), Conflict in Modern Japanese History, 295-341.
Nevertheless, affiliation as a major criterion for categorization accepts objectivism as an unquestioned mode of history, with methodology hiding larger ideological issues. The parallels with the American historical profession are not coincidental.30
The history department of the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo Imperial University was organized in 1887. To shape this new discipline, a young student of Leopold von Ranke, Ludwig Riess, was hired to teach "modem" history. In his teachings, Riess emphasized Ranke's methodological side, not his religious tendencies.31 Riess also fostered the collection of material, the establishment of archives, the objective evaluation of historical data, the publication of empirical articles, and professional cooperation through an academic society.32 In his fourth year in Japan, Riess celebrated these accomplishments in the inaugural issue of the journal of the newly established Historical Association (Shigakkai), in which he reflected on the state of historical studies: "Japanese scholars have already established a historical association and a monthly publication, and are working to renovate their former ways, elevate the level of historical research, and make history purely scientific. I hope that my colleagues believe in and remember the enormity of this project and impress all scholars with its importance."33
The notion of objectivity, however, obscures a critical assumption that contradicts the presentation of history as neutral: someone (or some body) must decide which past should be highlighted for the good of each social unit. Koshogaku historians were not merely applying a new methodology to the study of the past. In Riess's use of the word "renovation" (isshin ), or as Duus puts it, "revolt," an underlying ideology is implied that informs such change. A value-laden choice is necessarily entailed. Take the goal of progress, for example. Partha Chat-terjee states, "The rational knowledge of human society comes to be organized around concepts such as wealth, productive efficiency,
See Novick, That Noble Dream.
Because this biography of Shiratori was written in 1944, one wonders whether Tsuda felt restrained from describing a similar religiosity in his mentor's work; see Tsuda, "Shiratori hakushi shoden," 339.
Two major collections compiled during the Meiji period, the Dai nihon shiryo (Chronogical Source Books of Japanese History) and Dai nihon komonjo (Old Documents of Japan), emerged from the Hanawa shiryo (Chronological Source Books of Japanese History), a collection of documents on ancient Japan begun in the Tokugawa period by Hanawa Hokiichi (1746-1821). See Ienaga, Nihon no kindai shigaku, 80-82. See also Numata, "Shigeno Yasutsugu and the Modern Tokyo Tradition," 266, 283-85.
Rudohi Riisu, "Shigakkai zasshi ni tsuite iken," trans. by Ogawa Kinjiro, Shigakkai zasshi 1 (April 1890): 1.
progress, etc. all of which are defined in terms of the promotion of some social 'interests'. Yet 'interests' in society are necessarily diverse; indeed, they are stratified in terms of the relations of power."34 While the notion of objectivity gave knowledge authority as an impartial judge, knowledge and expertise endowed the new state with objectiv-istic criteria for determining what was to be and for whom.35
These suggestions of an underlying ideology raise a fascinating (and troubling) issue that confronts historians today: the relation between the goal of objectivity and authorial position. Regardless whether one looks on either of these historical schools positively or negatively, there is little doubt that both were attempting to create a new field of history based on scientific methodology. Scholars of both schools believed that their methods would elevate the history of Japan—the nation (kokumin ) here being the primary unit of investigation—to the level of Western history. Enlightenment historians emphasized the imperative of the universal law that would lead toward an understanding of Japan's progress and would eventually guarantee its equality with and independence from the West. Koshogaku historians, like scholars of the enlightenment school, did have "an axe to grind" and "political commitment," only in their case their commitment was to "renovate" the concept of history so that the Japanese nation could be understood in terms of Western history. The difference between the two groups was one of emphasis. Enlightenment historians believed that it was first necessary to identify the universal laws and place Japan into that mold. Koshogaku scholars, while also speculating on a general conception of history, prioritized the collection of materials.
By the late 1880s the young historians of both schools had confronted the problematics of objectivity and authorship, of progress and the non-West, and probably understood better than Riess what the creation of a new historical field in Japan meant. For Riess, "renovation" meant objective and scientific studies in which the Western narrative of progress was already accepted. But the Japanese, who constantly debated the nature of history, were less sanguine. The combination of progress, as a universal law, and nationhood are, after all, potentially contradictory. While the notion of progress may explain the rise of most Western nations, it also authorizes a hierarchy of cultures with Europe at the top and all others representing various imperfect stages
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 14.
For a study on the relation between authority, legitimacy, and knowledge as used by the Meiji state, see Silberman, "Bureaucratic State in Japan."
of Europe's past.36 The placement of non-Western countries in preexisting categories denies their own nationhood beyond that which is already defined. The impact is evident in Guizot's description of the Orient: "In other states, say, for example, in India and Egypt, where again only one principle of civilization prevailed, the result was different. Society here became stationary; simplicity produced monotony; the country was not destroyed; society continued to exist; but there was no progression; it remained torpid and inactive."37 In other words, the Orient has no history. While Guizot at least left some possibility for progress, Buckle's notion of progress was based strictly on "objective" geoclimatic standards—Climate and Aspects of Nature—which only Europe possessed. He concluded, "Hence it is that, looking at the history of the world as a whole, the tendency has been, in Europe, to subordinate nature to man; out of Europe, to subordinate man to nature.... The great division, therefore, between European civilization and non-European civilization is the basis of the philosophy of history."38
These Japanese historians realized that the writing of history required the alteration of both the norms and the conditions that give risc to progress. This fact is suggested in Riess's self-congratulatory inaugural-issue article, in which he also complained that, "because the books that have lasting value are those with a clear thesis and an academic theory [gakusetsu ] agreed upon by all major historians, today's abstract debates on methodology should not be handed down to future generations. Certain people say that because Japanese have an affinity for abstract discussions, we must first turn to such issues to awaken the interests of the reader and gain a following; but again, I cannot condone this."39 It is one of the ironies of history that the Japanese, who today are reputed to be weak in creativity and abstract reasoning, were once accused of being overly concerned with such abstract and theoretical ideas. Even those historians closest to the rigorous methodology preached by Riess exhibited a discomfort with the restrictions and uniformity it imposed. Their discussions, which centered on enlightenment ideology itself, indicate that the theory "agreed upon by all major historians" was in fact different from that of Reiss.
This distinction between Europe and the other existed long before the development of social science; see, for example, Said, Orientalism.
Guizot, History of Civilization, 37.
Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 152-53.
Riisu, "Shigakkai zasshi ni tsuite," 4-5; italics in the original.
The totality and generality of that universalistic law proved to be the mechanically propelled Trojan horse mentioned by Dale.
By the Meiji twenties (1887-96), Japanese historians' initial enthusiasm for a philosophy of history that implicitly imposed a uniformity based in European progress had waned, and they began to turn toward a Japanese and Asian past.40 Yet as I mentioned above, these enlightenment intellectuals, although they did espouse Western ideas, could not be considered liberal. Moreover, it is misleading to cast the issues in terms of a struggle between liberalism and nationalism, for these frameworks are not antithetical.41 The issues studied by enlightenment historians, such as the extent to which Western civilization should be adopted and Japanese culture preserved, were merely parts of a much broader issue: the political, cultural, and intellectual autonomy of Japan.
The shift away from enlightenment history toward Japan's roots was due in large part both to Japan's very acceptance of enlightenment history and to the ultimate failure of that history to accommodate Japan as an equal. In their initial eagerness to find Japan's progressive path, enlightenment historians overlooked the ideological implications of the spatial and temporal categories that ensured Europe's preeminence. Territoriality, as an "attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area," by definition made for hierarchical ordering.42 Control was facilitated by a unilinear concept of time that ranked territories based on certain types of development or learning. The Orient, as a geocultural territory commonly described as backward, stagnant, or primitive, is located in a realm of perpetual inferiority to the West.43 The prescribed course consigned Japan to be a perpetually incomplete version of the West.
Ienaga, Nihon no kindai shigaku, 72, 74-80; and Pyle, New Generation.
See, for example, Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World 1-35. For a study that has characterized the change as a shift away from Western liberal thought to a more nationalistic stance, see Pyle, New Generation.
Sack, Human Territoriality 19.
See Said, Orientalism ; and Todorov, Conquest of America.
The extraction of Japan—and any non-Western society—from this temporal inferiority is not easily accomplished. While accepting the Western concept of progress, many of the same enlightenment and national historians sought to alter and expand the parameters. Both Naka and Miyake attempted to eliminate the Eurocentric bias in Buckle's History of Civilization in England (Naka was one of its translators). Naka, for example, added race and imperial succession to geography as basic factors affecting historical development;44 and Miyake turned to Japan's ancient culture in order to discover an ontological equivalence with Europe and the causes for their different levels of cultural development.
Other scholars discovered difference in the sociology of Herbert Spencer, another widely read European scholar. On the one hand, Spencer's writings promulgate a notion of progress. In his Principles of Sociology, Spencer argued that while the two types of society, militaristic and industrial, can coexist, virtually all societies evolve from the militant type to the democratic and industrial type. He stated, "Where the industrial activities and structures evolve, this branch of the regulating system, no longer as in the militant type a rigid hierarchy, little by little loses strength, while there grows up one of a different kind: sentiments and institutions both relaxing.... Military conformity co-ercively maintained gives place to a varied non-conformity maintained by willing union."45
On the other hand, Spencerian social evolution also readily explained the international behavior of the European nations—especially their imperialistic forays into Asia—and emphasized what the Japanese had known for quite some time: they must strengthen themselves to survive in the international arena. The application of Spencer's "survival of the fittest" notion to Asian affairs proved an important breakthrough by emphasizing the possibility of difference within a framework of progress. This concept provided an alternative to the fixed path already blazed by Europe, for here progress was seen to depend on successful adaptation to one's own environment. Kato Hiroyuki, for exam-
In his proposed seven-volume Shina tsushi (A General History of China, 1888-90), which was never completed, Naka divided Chinese history into three periods: ancient, pre-Ch'in; medieval, Ch'in to Sung; and feudal, Yuan to present.
Quoted in J.D.Y. Peel, ed., Herbert Spencer: On Social Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 157, 158-59. For a different interpretation, see Duus, "Whig History, Japanese Style," 421-22, who argues that these typologies are polarities separate from Spencer's evolutionary model of social change. See also Bowler, Invention of Progress, esp. 37-39.
ple, used this idea to recenter cultures in their particular surroundings. Each nation, he argued, is slightly different, with its survival relying on its ability to adjust and compete, both against nature and against other cultures. Nakae Chomin's (1847-1901) Discourse of Three Drunkards on Government, too, is eloquent testimony to the dilemma facing Japan in this period.46 Here, the Gentleman believing in universal laws advocates jumping ahead of Europe toward the democratic and peaceful ideal; the Champion, while accepting progress, stresses the "reality" of power politics and imperialism; and Professor Nankai (lit., South Seas) offers a middle road that deemphasizes concerns about Europe. This essay, in my view, indicates the rejection by all three "drunkards" of the West as the manifestation of an ideal to be strived for and, instead, a concern for progress—though keeping Western ideas and Europe in mind—within the particular context of Japan's history and capacity. The West, in other words, becomes merely another culture (though in some aspects still a superior one), a fellow competitor on this rocky path toward progress.
This realization encouraged historians to give Japan a "history" that was contiguous and equal with that of Europe, as a way to open up a dialogic relation with the West. Intercourse between Japan and Europe was to take place on an equivalent basis but, importantly, with difference fully recognized. To define Japan through a historical narrative similar to that of Europe, many Japanese, including such enlightenment historians as Naka and Miyake as well as such national historians as Kume Kunitake (1839-1931) and Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827-1910), turned to Japan's past. Other Japanese reached into the history of Asia to achieve the same purpose. For each the past provided the archives with which to affirm cultural or historical equivalence, historical change (as opposed to stagnation), and Japan's potential and capacity as a modern nation.
Toyoshi emerged in the 1890s out of this recognition that European world history was merely seiyoshi, a history of the West that
Nakae Chomin, A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government, trans. Nobuko Tsukui (New York: Weatherhill, 1984).
privileged European culture as superior to all other cultures. In the preface to a 1906 reference book by Takakuwa Komakichi on the history of Asia, Shiratori wrote:
In retrospect, during the early years of Meiji, our country earnestly irnitated Western countries and rapidly imported their culture [bunbutsu ] without sufficient time for assimilation. Even history courses directly used the textbooks written in those countries. Although such books bear the titles of world or global history [sekaishi, bankokushi ], in actuality they are no more than the record of the rise and fall of European countries. The affairs of East Asia are virtually neglected. At one time some books that were well received in our schools, such as [William] Swinton's Outlines of the World's History, asserted that non-Caucasian peoples do not have true history. Without doubt this seriously misrepresents our countrymen.47
Toyoshi, the history of the East, was established as one half of the whole, in opposition to seiyoshi, but it was much more than mere description of the events and people of Asia. As Shiratori's dissatisfaction suggests, toyoshi 's importance was also ideological: it involved the representation and understanding of Japan. It was needed to show that Japan also has a "true history."
Most accounts date the beginning of toyoshi to 1894, when Naka proposed that the middle school curriculum separate world history into Occidental and Oriental history. The Ministry of Education accepted this division two years later. Until then, foreign history had been equivalent to "world history," with Chinese history taught separately following the kangaku emphasis on language and ethical training. Naka argued that in the teaching of foreign history, the history of Asia should be presented just as that of Europe was. On one level, Naka was attempting to move the study of China away from chronologies of political figures and events to a positivistic view of history in which the same laws govern all human societies. As a counterpart to European history, thus, toyoshi served to expand the limited geographic area of the Western universal. On another level, however, Naka was seeking to establish the very boundaries of toyo, in terms of the connection between the Occident and Orient: toyo was defined as the vast region to the east of Europe; it expanded the Orient—Middle East, India, and Inner Asia—eastward to include China and Japan. It did not, however, include Southeast Asia.
Shiratori Kurakichi, "Jo" [Preface] to Toyo dairekishi, Takakuwa Komakichi (1906), in Shiratori Kurakichi zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1969-71), 10:445 (hereafter cited as SKZ ).
Naka's ideas also reflect a converging view among Japanese intellectuals that toyo could provide the beginnings for a narrative of Japanese history. The explanation for reforming the middle school curriculum included the following statement: "By investing in the history of toyo, we can pay attention to the mutual influences between our country and all oriental countries since ancient times, and furthermore probably explain the interaction between all oriental and Occidental countries."48 Japanese historians generally agreed that not only did Asia house the artifacts that would unlock Japan's history, but it also provided the beginnings of Western history. Thus, an accurate depiction of toyo would take Japan out of the shadow of the West. In his preface to Takakuwa's book, Shiratori argued that such a historical understanding of Asia was crucial to a coherent Japanese view of history. He stated, "If a school's curriculum lacks classes on oriental history [toyoshi ], the students' historical awareness, without any path to measure the interaction between Japanese and Western history, will end in incoherence and disunity."49 AS both the beginnings of an autonomous history and the medium that tied Japanese and Western histories together, toyo was the realm that would provide coherence and unity.
Although by the early 1890s toyoshi had been institutionalized as a distinct subject at the middle school level, and although consensus on the importance of a toyo to counter the Occident was rapidly emerging, there were nevertheless several competing notions of how toyo should be constituted. Just as Taguchi was able to develop a historical narrative that denied characteristics which today are considered inherently Japanese, other historians took advantage of the fact that the exact relation of Japan and Asia had not yet been canonized. Several historians, such as Miyake, turned to ancient Japanese and Chinese history for the objective data that would fit Japan into the universal laws of enlightenment; the conservative philosopher and Confucian scholar Inoue Tetsujiro sought to deny the mediating structures of Western histories, emphasizing instead the specificity of each culture; and Shiratori, a student of Naka and Riess, synthesized several perspectives to establish the intellectual structure of the field that has become known as toyoshi. 50
Quoted in Nakayama Kyushiro, Shigaku oyobi toyoshi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Kenbun-kan, 1935), 98-99; see also Miyake Yonekichi, "Bungaku hakushi Naka Michiyokun den," in Naka Michiyo isho (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Tosho, 1915), 31-33.
Shiratori, "Jo" to Takakuwa, Toyo dairekishi, in SKZ, 10:447.
This convergence on Asia's past was not limited to these three men. Intellectuals such as Miyake Setsurei and Okakura Tenshin attempted to establish a different universal through "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness" or art. These universals were to be neutral, or at the very least non-Western, and ones that eliminated positivistic time.
The career of Miyake Yonekichi reflects the ambivalence that enlightenment, as a historical idea, fostered when applied to Japan—or any non-Western nation.51 Miyake was born in 1860 in Wakayama and briefly attended Fukuzawa's Keio Gijuku, later Keio University. (He did not graduate, and left school for academic reasons.) There is little doubt that Miyake was influenced by enlightenment historians, such as Fukuzawa and Taguchi, for the vestiges of this background are clear in his Nihon shigaku teiyo (A General History of Japan). This survey, an ambitious work that, had it been completed, would have filled twenty-five volumes, was one of the first attempts to write a multivol-ume history of Japan according to the new historical framework. It also reveals the problems encountered in constructing a non-Western history along the lines of Western Enlightenment. Miyake complained:
Today those who carry the title of historian, being gray-haired old men, cannot face the brilliance of Western academic methods. Alone, they open the warehouse of curios and dawdle.... [Yet] those who study Western methods and understand contemporary social issues are completely ignorant of our country's history. Even the occasional person who discusses our history using Western scholarship has limited knowledge because he spends little time investigating actual historical materials.52
By 1887, the year the first and only volume was published, Miyake was well aware of the need for a new history. "Actually," he said, "this is an era when we are trying to produce a major change in the research methods of history."53 He was skeptical of Enlightenment philosophy for its Eurocentrism and critical of kangaku because it was too closely allied with China. Miyake's new historical discipline was outlined in his manuscript for the second volume of Nihon shigaku teiyo, which was probably written around 1890-91.54 In a section entitled "The True Meaning of History" (rekishi no hongi ), Miyake described history in the following way: first, "history is the academic field of knowing the vestiges of the past." It is specific to a locale, group, or nation; it entails change and includes language, customs, folk traditions, art, religion, as well as politics. The people (kokumin ) must know these pasts to under-
See Ozawa Eiichi, "Meiji keimoshugi rekishi to Miyake Yonekichi," Shicho 70 (November 1959): 1-28; and idem, Kindai nihon shigakushi no kenkyu: Meiji hen (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1968), 350-55. Also see Ienaga, Nihon no kindai shigaku, 71-73.
Ozawa, "Meiji keimoshugi rekishi," 8.
Ozawa, Kindai nihon shigakushi, 463
This unpublished manuscript was discovered in 1959. Ozawa estimated the date of completion; see "Meiji keimoshugi rekishi," 24.
stand Japan's relation to the general trends of world history. Second, "history is strongly related to literature." Early scholars used poetry (before written language) and prose (such as the Heike monogatari ) to depict their world, making these important resources. Third, "history is a scientific, academic field." History must critically examine data to create an accurate record of the past and to understand the interrelation among the various parts. In this way, history will "illuminate the progress of the nation" and "become a mirror to the future."55
There is little doubt that Miyake accepted the notion that human society can be studied scientifically and that such knowledge is crucial to Japan's progress. But he sought to use Western history to generate a scientific history of Japan; he was not interested in molding Japan to Western world histories. Thus, while he believed in progress, he did not endorse the underlying philosophy of history that privileged Europe. Specifically, he denied Buckle's geographic determinism. He wrote, "If one looks at the past through [Buckle's Climate and Aspects of Nature], when the countries of Europe, which are now called the center of civilization, were wriggling in hideouts of thieves [shurui no sokutsu ], we had already achieved a high level of civilization. The reason that we are now a bit behind in the race for enlightenment does not lie in the obstruction of nature, but in social activity."56 Here Miyake was closer to Spencer, for without rejecting progress, he argued that each culture progresses or recedes according to its own ability to adjust to its surroundings. Although nature is important, it does not determine the mental abilities of different peoples. The answers to Japan's slower development were to be found in social factors. An understanding of these factors could be reconstructed from the ancient myths and legends, but only by using critical methods.
Here is a new academic field called anthropology [jinruigaku ]; in the overall evolution [keihatsu ] of races, this field [original illegible] researches the development of order from customs and traditions to law, of weapons from wooden clubs and stones to cannons, and of society from hamlets to a nation [kokumin ]. Data include everything from all civilized people to the hordes of ignorant barbarians. A comparative study will clearly bring out the developmental order of these systems. This study, along with the study of ancient texts [kyuji ] will allow us to excavate the progress of peoples from barbarian and uncivilized to enlightened.57
Ibid., 53-55.
Ozawa, Kindai nihon shigakushi, 355.
Ozawa, "Meiji keimoshugi rekishi," 26.
Miyake's conception of a historical field that explains Japan's past was much broader than that defined by Riess. His quest to describe the totality of Japan's past is evident in his openness to evidence from such diverse fields such as archeology, art, and language. Among these, he singled out language as the particular source of intellectual development. He called the study of the past through language kyujigaku (lit., study of ancient texts), stating: "Furthermore, kyuji emerged from language. Because the development of language accompanied that of thought, at the beginning language was inadequate and incomplete. The poetic genre has long preserved the ancient tales [kyuji ]; depiction [keiyo ], simile [reikai ], and metaphor [hiyu ] were abundant. Thus, gradual progress evolved from linguistic analogies.... Language expressed thought, but at the same time, thought produced language."58 Because ancient man's understanding of his world is embedded in the ancient texts, language, not geography, was the key to understanding the development of knowledge.
The study of ancient tales served two purposes. First, language was the common denominator, the universal, that removed progress from specific geoclimatic regions. All ancient cultures, Western and Asian alike, attempted to understand their world through representation; songs, poetry, myths, folklore, and art were the media for recording and understanding the environment. In order to extract historical data from these ancient texts, Miyake argued (in a vein reminiscent of Ogyu Sorai [1666-1728], the eminent Confucian scholar) that one must immerse oneself completely in the contemporary culture and context: "I believe that the many miraculous and outrageous deeds in ancient history were not direct reports, but are folk tales in the ancient language, in other words, popular accounts in the contemporary dialect.... However, those who repeated these [tales] believed them; but because their intellect was still undeveloped and knowledge was incomplete, that which appears irrational was rational and what is now mysterious was not."59 For Miyake, kyujigaku was a nonbiased field whose practitioners could describe the development of society without using the labels of irrationality and mysteriousness so frequently attributed to non-Western cultures.
Miyake's quest for evidence also led him beyond the archipelago to the continent. In his biography of Naka he contrasted himself to his
Ibid., 44. Miyake first explored the importance of myths and legends in a series of articles that appeared in the journal Mon during 1889.
Ibid., 32-33.
colleague, who, he argued, sought simply to understand Chinese history, whereas his own interest in China and Inner Asia was to discover the roots of Japanese culture.60 Indeed, this assertion certainly has merit. In 1888 Miyake participated on a project with Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Tenshin to study, preserve, and catalog Japanese art. After investigating ancient art and sculpture principally in Nara and Wakayama, the region where he was born and raised, Miyake began a series of articles in which he used ancient art to speculate on Japan's roots and its ancient connection with the continent. For example, Miyake concluded that the lion-hunt pattern on the Banner of the Four Devaraja found at the Horyuji Temple in Nara originated in Assyria.61 By tying Nara to Assyria, Miyake was suggesting Japan's connection to an ancient Asian civilization that predated European civilization.62 Asia, Miyake implied, was not merely contiguous with both Japan and Europe, it was a part of Japan's past.
The other role of this new field is contradictory: to preserve these myths and legends in the face of the onslaught of scientific knowledge. This desire to preserve ancient stories is in fact part of the fundamental problematic of this chapter—how to write a progressive history while maintaining national distinctiveness. Although Miyake was in the end not very successful, his history does indicate a revived interest in Japanese religiosity. Miyake turned to the Kojiki, a key source of Japan's historical as well as mythological past, to contrast his history with earlier views, especially that of Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801).63 The main difference, Miyake pointed out, is that Motoori tried to revive an idealized past, whereas he, Miyake, sought to preserve these ancient texts as essential resources for the understanding of progress and Japan's identity. "In today's world predominated by empiricism, one cannot believe anything that is neither empirical nor positivistic, nor can one believe old books. We live in a skeptical world, and we are destroying our ancient customs and beliefs. Nevertheless, we are not without a religious spirit [shinko no kokoro ]; the clamor for a critique of empiricism is actually a desire for belief. Religious spirit must not be
Ozawa, Kindai nihon shigakushi, 353-55; and idem, "Meiji keimoshugi rekishi," 18-19.
Ozawa, Kindai nihon shigakushi, 456-57.
This quest for roots in ancient cultures was probably informed by histories of Western civilization. Assyria and Babylon are often included in narratives that go back to the "cradle of Western civilization." Today the same geographical area is the Middle East.
Though critical, Miyake had considerable praise for Motoori's classic study on the Kojiki.
destroyed.64 Miyake was certainly ambivalent on the value of modernity, perceiving its alienating potential. History, while necessary to understand Japan's relation with the West, was also important for understanding and preserving Japan's cultural heritage. For Miyake, the West was far from an ideal; the West was merely part of the whole, one with both positive and negative qualities.
Regardless whether one prefers to describe Miyake's history as a continuation of or reaction against the problematic presented by enlightenment history, there is little doubt that enlightenment thought led to a greater interest in Japan's and Asia's pasts. Miyake strongly believed that scientific knowledge would bring about a better understanding of the world; his identification of language as that basic characteristic that is common across humankind indicates his acceptance of progress, but a progress that would not be subsumed by the Western histories popular during the early Meiji period. Significantly, volume two of Nihon shigaku teiyo was not published, and none of the subsequent twenty-three planned volumes were even written.
Around the same time that Miyake was working on the second volume of his history, Inoue Tetsujiro, professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, gave a speech to the recently founded Historical Association on the need for more studies on Asia. This speech, "Toyoshigaku no kachi" (The Value of Oriental Studies), clearly outlined his rationale and program for a new field of oriental studies.65 Inoue in many ways represented kangaku, the school that Miyake criticized as anachronistic, and this article was an indirect rejoinder to such criticisms. But despite these differences, numerous similarities can be identified as well. For Inoue, too, the continent was the means by which Asians could inform Westerners about Japan and Asia, understand Japan, and account for differences among nations.
Inoue's conception of this new field centered on China and was directed toward a reformation of kangaku. His reason for this focus was simply that the study of toyo had greater value for Japan than other academic fields. It would lead toward a better understanding of Asia, and Japanese research on Asian history would correct European miscon-
Ozawa, "Meiji keimoshugi rekishi," 28.
Inoue Tetsujiro, "Toyoshigaku no kachi," Shigakkai zasshi 2 (November 1891): 704-17; (December 1891): 788-98; and (January 1892): 1-14.
ceptions of Japan. "I believe," he said, "that a pressing issue for Japanese is [how] to use historical research to inform those [Western] nations about Japan and clarify Japan's progress. When they understand both the historical facts and this level of progress [shinpo ], their contemptuous expressions will undoubtedly disappear. Here, the value of oriental studies to Japanese is truly enormous."66 Inoue attributed Europe's lack of understanding of Asia to the difficulty of Asian languages. He argued that just as it would be difficult for Japanese to learn hieroglyphics to study Babylonian history, the handful of Western scholars who specialized in Japan encountered the same problem. For this reason, he argued, studies by European scholars on Japan are "like that of a child"—boring and frequently containing mistakes and strange interpretations. Thus, he continued, because of the nascent stage of Oriental studies in Europe, it would be to Japan's advantage to develop this field itself and then report the findings to Europe; "The duty [gimu ] of Japanese is to see that orientals are thorough in conducting their own historical research in those areas overlooked by Western scholars, that we properly inform Westerners, and that academic society evaluate the overall benefits." In other words, through academia, the Japanese had to define the orient and then inform the West.67
Inoue believed that the roots of the problem were ignorance and misunderstanding, not epistemology or ontology. By researching and reporting a "correct" account of Japan's higher level of progress than that of other Asian countries, Japanese scholars could teach Europeans to distinguish Japanese from others. Such encounters as when Inoue was mistakenly—and, he believed, condescendingly—called a Chinese or Ceylonese while in Europe would be eliminated. This argument is similar to that of Fukuzawa in "Datsu-A ron," for both sought to show Europe that Japan was much more advanced than Asia. But while Fukuzawa described Japanese history in Western terms, Inoue sought equivalence through cultural relativism. He argued that toyo had developed differently from the Occident, which gave it a different political system, literature, religion, and culture. But despite this emphasis on the historical specificity of each culture, he believed that a Japanese description of Asia's past would show that Japanese history bore many similarities to that of Europe and that the level of sophistication in each was rather similar.68
Ibid., November 1891, 717.
.Ibid., 709-17 (quote at 716); and December 1891, 797-98.
Ibid., December 1891, 788-98.
This solution may seem simplistic, but Inoue was well aware of the epistemological dilemmas that confront those who attempt to write a progressive and scientific history. Inoue perceptively argued that science situates all things according to fixed principles, with no room for variation. Science, he argued, is ahistorical, for there is no distinction between time and place; events occur anywhere and anytime, making science synchronic. History, in contrast, always changes and never repeats itself; it is successive (sokusesushon ) and continuous (keizoku ). The philosophy of history and embedded temporal and territorial categories, he argued, are creations of particular people and events; they are not universal. Inoue's history was diachronic and culturally specific; it eliminated any implication that Japan must be like the West—or even like Asia.69
This new historical field, he contended, could be built within kangaku, which, however, would have to be considerably altered. First, he emphasized that the historian must have breadth, with knowledge of an expanded body of material. He must be able to select and utilize materials judiciously, for "among events, unrelated factors do not exist."70 Inoue's expanded archives included works on all of Asia, as well as on politics, law, religion, literature, military studies, commerce, and so forth. Second, Inoue recognized the crucial role of methodology in determining the outcome of historical research. "The value of a history is extremely different depending on methodology; the difference is like night and day [lit., heaven and earth—shojo ]."71 Inoue did not offer a specific methodology, but argued that awareness was necessary to see through different authorial positions. He believed that this recognition of subjectivity, especially as molded by national perspectives, would allow scholars to separate the means of analysis from the conclusions. Thus, despite his dim view of European research on Japan, he urged Japanese historians to read Western writings in order to gain insight into aspects that they themselves might not notice. And for an accurate reading, he insisted on the use of the original texts of European historians rather than interpretations or translations. (Westerners might have difficulty learning Japanese, but Inoue foresaw little problem in Japanese learning European languages.) Finally, he emphasized the importance of understanding historical trends and events to bring out the "hidden spirit" of history. This spirit was not a universal law, but sim-
Ibid., January 1892, 1-14.
Ibid., 1-3.
Ibid., 4.
ilar to Ranke's particularistic side where he connected this spirit to the nation: "Each nation has a particular spirit, breathed in by God, through which it is what is and which its duty is to develop in accordance with ... the ideal."72 Both Inoue and Ranke, in this regard, highlighted a religious ideal that privileged the cultural uniqueness of his own country. Inoue cited Shinto around the Meiji Restoration as an example of this "hidden spirit."73
Inoue's last two points are refractions of other attempts to construct a historical field in a non-Western society. Where Miyake used kyuji to extend the realm that could be included within a progressive history, Inoue accepted the idea of historical development, but not one of progress. His discussion of methodology recognized the Eurocentrism and restrictiveness of science, but rather than creating a new, broader objectivity, he simply claimed that his proximal perspective as a Japanese and Asian was valid as well. For Inoue history by its very nature was local, not scientific. Because history is continuous and cumulative, he wrote, "one can justifiably say that history is reason [riizon ]." Reason for Inoue could be likened to a raison d'être: "when one completely forgets one's past, awareness disappears, in other words, reasoning [risei ] disappears. One's understanding of oneself disappears."74 In the same way that an individual must know his past, "in a nation [kokumin ], history becomes the reason for the nation." From this understanding of history, he believed, the kokutai (national essence), an awareness of the nation, inevitably arises.75 Inoue brought history's national purpose—as the basis of a nation's identity—to the surface.
In his effort to define an oriental history Inoue was very perceptive of some of the contradictions in history as well as of difficulties involved in reconciling the human sciences with an autonomous Japan. But his rejection of a scientific universal in history ran counter to trends then prevalent in historical studies in Japan, and even his writings moved in the direction that he criticized. Although he saw his program as a way to revive kangaku, the methodology he emphasized virtually precluded any continuity; aside from his skepticism of the possibility of
Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 162.
For Inoue's awareness of Ranke, see "Toyoshigaku no kachi," January 1892, 4. For a discussion of Rankean historiography in Japan, see below. In support of his effort to elevate Shinto, Inoue cited the slogan sonno joi (Revere the emperor, expel the barbarian).
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 14.
a scientific explication of cultures, his outline of oriental history bore more similarity to Miyake's ideas than to the exegetical studies that predominated in kangaku. But by trying to extend kangaku, a different academic heritage, in this way, he reinforced an emerging category, toyo. Lest readers think that Inoue was anachronistic, some of his ideas—the rejection of unilinear time, the priority of cultural diversity over universalism, and the denial of a prescientific philosophy of history—were revived in the 1930s.
Even though Shiratori was relatively young at this time and his training was different from that of Miyake and Inoue, his early writings reflected similar concerns. There is no doubt that Shiratori was a positivistic historian; his highly detailed and narrowly conceived monographs certainly support this interpretation.76 As one of the first students of Riess, Shiratori, too, argued that the study of history must be scientific; an objective understanding of the past was possible only through thorough investigation of a manageable area, the gathering and analysis of all related information, and critical verification of old documents. It is generally because of this rigorous critical and textual methodology that Ranke's much repeated and often misunderstood quote, "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (as it actually was), has also been identified with Shiratori.77 Shiratori worked doggedly to build the historical study of toyo into a scientific and objective academic field, and toyoshi 's reputation even today as a methodologically oriented field that emphasizes only scientific objectivity reflects his success in this endeavor.78 This preoccupation with methodology, however, has by far overshadowed the concept of history that Shiratori also developed. For Shiratori, methodology was but the tool to understand the complexity of an event and the laws or tendencies hidden within. He was quite
Ironically, Shiratori has been described as "casual" regarding his use of sources; improper citations were apparently not uncommon in his drafts. See Yoshikawa (ed.), Toyogaku no soshishatachi, 45-46.
Krieger, Ranke, esp. 1-20. For studies that emphasize Shiratori's objectivity, see Tsuda, "Shiratori hakushi shoden," 346-47; Goi, Kindai nihon to toyoshigaku, 79-80; and Hatada, "Nihon ni okeru toyoshigaku no dento." For an account in English, see Fogel, Politics and Sinology, 119-20.
For this interpretation, see Hatada, "Nihon ni okeru toyoshigaku no dento"; and Tsuda, "Shiratori hakushi shoden," 346-47. For a summary in English, see Fogel, Politics and sinology, 119-20.
aware that a framework, a prescientific philosophy of history, establishes the criteria that determine what is accurate, objective, correct, and true.
Shiratori should perhaps be best known as a synthesizer of mid-Meiji ideas. Even though at least one biographer has discounted any connection between his early writings and his later career, that early work is highly reminiscent of Miyake and Inoue79 As early as 1890, Shiratori experimented with various ideas to center the study of history on a unilinear notion of progress. As he put it, "Everything within society is from this inevitable mechanism [progress]. The variations that exist struggle against one long continuous thread; in a similar way, when events that appear to be accidental and independent are thoroughly investigated, one will find that they belong to the underlying trend and are connected to the previous era." The role of history is to understand that mechanism: "The persons from the past who became famous and are called heroes are merely those who understood the direction of this social power and grasped the opportunity. In other words, heroes are the children and tools of society."80 This conviction that history contains the secrets to understanding human society—the collective group—was a consistent feature of all his writing. Thirty-eight years later, near the end of his career, Shiratori credited Guizot with pointing the way for the historical profession in Japan: "True history is not placing emphasis on facts; but, based on a theoretical methodology, it is possessing a thorough knowledge of cause and effect."81 For Shiratori, facts were essential to fill the gaps of a broader historical narrative. Nevertheless, the use of the metaphor of children raises the question of human agency in enlightenment history: if one must always obey the law, an inevitable mechanism, does the child (or nation) ever gains its own subjectivity?
Identifying the exact nature of this inevitable mechanism, the "authentic philosophy of history" that would combine the subjective needs of Japan with demands for universalistic and objective knowledge, proved difficult for the young Shiratori. Like Inoue and Miyake, he
Goi argues that there is little connection between Shiratori's writings and later studies; see Kindai nihon to toyoshigaku, 23. Others would probably agree with Goi, for they, too, do not consider his first two articles—"Rekishi to chishi no kankei," Shigakkai zasshi 1 (December 1889): 56-64; and "Rekishi to jinketsu," Shigakkai zasshi 2 (January 1890): 5-9—which were not included in his collected works.
Shiratori, "Rekishi to jinketsu," 8, 9.
Shiratori, "Gakushuin ni okeru shigakka no enkaku," Gakushuin honinkai zasshi 134 (October 1928), in SKZ 10:379.
found it easier to write history in negative terms; for Shiratori, scientific historical methods became the authority that would diminish the stature of kangaku. His 1890 article "Rekishi to jinketsu" (History and Heroes), for example, confronted the exegetical study of the Chinese classics directly82 He stated that the history of Asia has been that of great men and heroes—a bias, he noted parenthetically, that was not unique. But these exemplary men, he continued, were often elevated or created by later generations to authorize tradition and norms of behavior. The restraints imposed by such chronologies, he pointed out, impeded the Japanese abilities of inquiry and synthesis. This attack equated kangaku with shina, the once-great culture that, though still proud and self-centered, was now backward and decaying. Positivistic history freed the present from the confines of an ideal that was fabricated to perpetuate respect for the authority of the past; the heroes of the past, like shina, the culture Japan had so revered, had been dethroned from their unassailable position.
This use of science to reject kangaku, however, does not signify full acceptance of a Western theory of history. "Occidentals," Shiratori complained, "are apt to fall into self-indulgent arrogance and conceit. They believe that the discovery and invention of world culture [bunbutsu ] occurred among their race, and consider yellow and black people inherently inferior races with no creative abilities."83 In an abridged translation of James Bryce's "The Relations of History and Geography," Shiratori made a subtle change that eliminated its cultural specificity. In a passage where Bryce wrote that man is "largely determined and influenced by the environment of Nature," Shiratori gave mankind a far more active role. The translation reads, "Although man struggles against nature and regulates [seigyo ] nature, ... man, as one part of nature, is controlled by climate [fudo kiko ], which bounds progress and decline."84 Although one might dismiss this change as an error in translation, the difference between Bryce's statement and Shiratori's translation suggests new meanings created by the appropriation of someone else's words. The change from nature over man in Bryce to
Shiratori, "Rekishi to jinketsu," 5-9. Shiratori's ideas bear a similarity to Hegel's discussion of great men and history; see Hegel, Philosophy of History, 29-35.
Shiratori, "Shina jodaishi," in SKZ 8:545-77 (quote at 549).
Shiratori, "Rekishi to chishi no kankei," 57. The original reads, "In other words, he is in history the creature of his environment, not altogether its creature, but working out also those inner forces that he possesses as a rational and moral being; but on one side, at all events, he is largely determined and influenced by the environment of Nature" (James Bryce, "The Relations of History and Geography," Contemporary Review 49 [March 1886]: 426-27).
man over nature in Shiratori parallels Miyake's criticism of Buckle's geographic determinism. While Shiratori, like Buckle, described Climate as the "scientific" determinant for the accumulation of wealth, now man, not Nature, determines knowledge. Yet despite his attempt to give Japan the potential for historical development by giving man power over nature, Shiratori accepted most current scientific concepts: the role of climate in societal development, the priority of the group, and a belief in progress. It is not surprising, then, that he was unable to explain difference.
Shiratori directly (and unsuccessfully) confronted this failure in an unpublished article on ancient China from circa 1904. He based his argument on the data of several prominent European Orientalists, including James Legge, Pierre Laffitte, and Terrien de Lacouperie, while working within a progressive framework similar to that of Comte, with movement from fetishism, the interpretation of all objects and affairs of the external world in terms of animate life; theology, the voluntary use of abstract conceptions to distinguish objects within one's own consciousness; and positivism, the combination of phenomenal experience with spiritual experience.85 China, he argued, was still within the first stage; the utterly accurate and minute descriptions of the phenomenal world were evidence that it had reached the most advanced level of fetishism. Japan, with its polysyllabic language, had reached the metaphysical stage.
The use of the Comtean framework and the work of European Orientalists signals Shiratori's attempt to place his work within the same scholarly dialogues of these Europeans. But although he was working within the same framework, his purpose was different; by reassigning Japan to a more advanced stage of development than China, he separated the two nations and tried, unsuccessfully, to extract Japan from the limitations imposed by the categorical norms for determining progress. He could not, however, overcome the Western positivist tenet that difference—in other words, the non-West—translates to inequality, indeed, inferiority. It is significant that this article—his only work that applied Comte to Asian history—was not published, for surely he realized that by placing China (fetishism) and Japan (metaphysics) within this Comtean scheme, Asian history was still being defined in terms of Western hierarchy.
Shiratori disavowed any connection to Comtean positivism, but went on todescribe progress as a three-tiered unilinear progression; see "Shina jodaishi," in SKZ 8:558-59. For Shiratori's engagement with these Orientalists, see 545, 550-58, and 573-76.
Although each of these Japanese intellectuals received very different training—Miyake was largely self-taught, Inoue was schooled in philosophy, and Shiratori was trained in positivistic history—by the 1890s their interests converged on a single issue: alterity, which brought force-fully to Japan's attention with the Western expansion into Asia. For Japan, then, the West became another other, in addition to a China that was rapidly losing its preeminent position. Yet the question of universality forced Japan to dig deeper into Asia's past. A dialectic that separated self and other, Japan and China, or Japan and the West could not be so facilely perpetuated when Japan was in the process of modernizing.
By the 1890s, however, this inquiry was still cast in terms defined by the West. Thus Miyake, Inoue, and Shiratori each attempted to reject the part of Western thought that, he believed, forced Japan to be like the West: Miyake and Shiratori renounced geographical determinism, while Inoue disavowed mediating categories of science to describe a national past. They did not, however, resolve the issue. Miyake and Shiratori's adherence to a unilinear concept of progress precluded difference, while Inoue's rejection of science eliminated the potential for dialogue with Europe. Miyake virtually stopped writing history after 1890, and Inoue would become well known (indeed, infamous) for his work on national ethics and spirit. Shiratori would discover an escape from this predicament in Ranke's spirit.
In the five years following his appointment to Gakushuin in 1890, Shiratori did not publish, ostensibly because he was busy preparing for his courses on oriental history. His first article in five years displayed a considerable difference from earlier work. After 1895 he wrote rather detailed studies, first on the ancient culture of Korea and the Ural-Altaic peoples, later on China, and then on Japan. But while the content and scope of these articles themselves were different, the thrust remained consistent with his general historical project. History was still the means to tie Japan, Europe, and Asia together into a conceptual order that accounted for both difference and equality. After his appointment to Tokyo Imperial University in 1904, the importance of these studies to the formulation of an overall philosophy of history became more apparent.
In 1908 Shiratori began to give greater definition to toyoshi and the field of history in general. Indeed, this seems to be the decade when history as a positivistic science gained preeminence over other historical visions. In one of his few articles devoted exclusively to historical methodology, "Shihitsu no kyokuchi" (The Ideal of Historical Writing), Shiratori called his methodology kosho, textual analysis. Although today he has, understandably, been categorized within this positivistic school, his version of kosho differed considerably from the earlier historical compendia and textual studies that he condescendingly criticized as being something that anyone could do.
Shiratori used the metaphor of a carpenter building a house to describe the ideal historian.86 He likened kosho to a scaffolding—the means for acquiring the necessary materials, which in the case of history had two dimensions. First, just as a wide variety of materials is necessary to build a house, a vast array of events, peoples, ideas, and so forth exists in the past, which must be sought out from a wide range of fields, including those not normally considered part of the historian's realm. Shiratori's writings on mythology, ethnology, and comparative linguistics among Koreans, Hsiung-nu, Manchus, and Mongols during this period reflect his belief that "nonhistorical" fields, such as the human sciences, philosophy, natural sciences, geography, and astronomy, facilitate construction of a historical understanding. In other words, the whole culture of a nation is crucial for an accurate history. Second, material must be carefully evaluated for accuracy. The historian must eliminate errors and falsifications from frequently embellished historical records and must also immerse himself in the period to understand those facts in their own context. This part of Shiratori's methodology, which he called the scientific half—the technique—has overshadowed his overall vision, as was similarly the case with Ranke. But just as the scaffolding facilitates the placement of materials and is then removed, he considered such detailed studies as preparatory to understanding the whole: "Textual analysis [kosho ] does not appear in history, it is merely the preparation and preliminary inquiry."87
The other half of history is the artistic side; Shiratori criticized those who wrote dry factual narratives (a comment that is common in the historical profession today as well): "The only point is that there are no mistakes.... Facts [jijitsu ] are indeed accurate, but they are not at all interesting to read. It has reached the point that only the specialist
Shiratori, "Shihitsu no kyokuchi," Bunsho sekai 3 (January 1908): 64-69.
Ibid., 66.
has the perseverance to read [history]."88 He asserted that like the poet who has the "power of synthesis and imagination," the historian must be able to synthesize masses of data. Those who concentrate on minutiae too often are unable to discern the general trends and the spirit of the age. These trends and spirit form the structure—the reason for history—that will allow the facts to remain without the methodological scaffold.
The model for Shiratori's ideal historian was Ranke, not so much the positivist Ranke, but a historian whose dominant historical trends offered a framework for synthesizing objective inquiry.89 For example, in one of his first meetings as a young student with his mentor, Hashimoto Masukichi approached Shiratori for detailed information on ancient China. Shiratori's advice, he recalled, was that he read Ranke's History of the Popes. 90 Shiratori's regard for Ranke as a well-rounded historian perhaps comes through better in this lavish praise: "His prose is outstanding, concise, and elegant, and at the same time he satisfies both the intellect [risei ] and emotions with his sophisticated ideas and revealing descriptions of the spiritual world."91 Shiratori saw in Ranke the ability not only to uncover facts, but also to use those facts to write an elegant history (a goal that one can easily argue Shiratori himself did not achieve) that synthesized a considerable range of evidence and uncovered general trends (taisei ).
The religiosity alluded to above provided an avenue for Shiratori to resolve the dilemma that plagued him during his early career. He uncovered the possibility of writing such spirit into history in Ranke's emphasis on "dominant tendencies," a suitably vague concept that facilitated a union of the universal—that which all societies have—and the particular—the description of that idea through a society:
Each age is immediate to God, and its value depends not on what comes out of it but in its own existence, in its very self. Therewith the consideration of history, and especially of individual life in history, gets its entirely distinctive charm, since by it every epoch must be viewed as something valuable in itself and as entirely worthy of consideration. The historian has thus to direct his main attention in the first instance to how men have thought and lived in a certain period, and then he will find that apart from the certain unchangeable and eternal main ideas—for example the moral—every epoch has its particular ten-
Ibid., 65.
For a reappraisal of Ranke, see Krieger, Ranke.
Enoki, Toyo Bunko no rokujunen, 272.
Shiratori, "Shihitsu no kyokuchi," 68.
dency and its own ideal.... All generations of mankind appear equally justified before God, and so too must the historian regard the matter.92
The History of the Popes was the first work in which Ranke employed the theme of Christianity, not only as the universal spirit essential for bringing out the particular, but also as a history in its own right, one that embodied the ideal he was seeking.93 Thus, because the appearance of the universal spirit is specific to time and place, individuals (and particularly the nation) developed differently, often to correct the past: the reformation of Catholic corruption was "one of the most characteristic and successful tendencies of the human spirit, ... opening it to the freedom of a new and different progress."94 This new freedom and progress were specific to Protestants, especially Germans. The main theme in the History of the Popes was the distinction between increasing political considerations among the Catholics and the priority of religious conviction among the Protestants. In other words, the dominant tendency, Protestant progressivism, combined the priority of spirit over the secular world with Germany's rise.
This theme was used by Shiratori as well, who saw in this religious spirit the unifying theme for the Japanese nation-state, one that opened Japan to "the freedom of a new and different progress." In contrast to an earlier article, "Shina jodaishi," where he posited the spiritual world as part of the final stage of development, he now called religiosity Japan's basis for progress. Since this spirit was prior to and much more vague (that is, closer to the origin of man) than the universal of positivism, Shiratori could point out that the cultures of Japan, Asia, and Europe were essentially equivalent: they all possessed spirit. But because that tendency developed differently according to specific geographic conditions, it also allowed for different essences and origins. Hence, although Shiratori's history was informed largely by Western historiography, through adaptation it was altered into a theory with a similar structure but quite different context, and one with far-reaching implications. The Japanese political system, he argued, was a religious goverument (shukyoteki seiji ) called matsurigoto, meaning that all the affairs of the nation are determined by the gods.95
Quoted in Krieger, Ranke, 229.
Ibid., 151-52.
Ibid., 138, 154.
See, for example, Shiratori, "Nihon ni okeru jukyo no junnosei," in SKZ 10:236. The character sei can be read matsurigoto. The political implications of this interpretation will be discussed in Chapter 4.
Hayden White's comments on Ranke's unifying concept are especially relevant:
The "idea of the nation" was for Ranke not only a datum but also a value; ... Ranke revealed as much when he characterized the "idea of the nation" as eternal, changeless, a thought of God. He admitted that peoples may come and go, churches may form and disappear, and states may arise and perish; and that it is the historian's task to chronicle their passage or, in later times, to reconstruct them in their individuality and uniqueness. But to grasp their essence, to perceive their individuality and uniqueness, is to seize the "idea" which informed them, which gave them their being as specific historical existents, and to find the unitary principle which made them a something rather than an anything. And this is possible only because the "idea" of a nation is timeless and eternal.96
Shiratori, too, was seeking that unifying principle, the essence of culture through which he might unearth Japan's "individuality and uniqueness" and give it "being as specific historical existents." But he differed from Ranke in that the contestation for difference in Ranke's formula occurred within a common understanding of Europe, and problems raised by the distancing of non-Europe from Europe were not an issue.97 Unlike Ranke, Shiratori had not only to account for the difference of the nation, but also to place East and West on a level of equivalence. His "idea of the nation," therefore, was not a "thought" of God, but a historical concept, rooted deep in the protohistoric age. By basing Japan's "idea of the nation" on a historical idea—a manifestation of the concept of heaven or, in other words, the imperial institution—Shiratori found a way to identify the uniqueness of Japan and thus give it an identity. But despite being historical, as the manifestation of a universal spirit, the imperial institution was also removed from history and became timeless. It was a common denominator of all human societies and could be studied scientifically to understand how cultures develop. While Ranke's "idea of the nation" functioned to discourage the social scientific search for universal laws, Shiratori's use of Ranke's "idea" co-opted such laws. Science was necessary to uncover, objectively, that progressive "idea." As White points out, the search for a universal questions the idea of nation as an absolute value and reveals the "purely historical nature of national characteristics."98 But while for
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 172.
See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 1-35.
White, Metahistory, 174; italics in the original.
Ranke this revelation might have been undesirable, in that it would have called into question the objectivity of his studies, for Shiratori it was necessary to explain Japan's difference. The particularistic potential for such a theory is clear. One merely has to drop the assumption that this universalistic spirit, though manifested differently, is rooted in all cultures; it then becomes possible to affirm Japan's unique heritage, even while retaining the belief in modernity and science.
The elevation of spirit to a timeless norm allowed Shiratori to solve many of the issues that had confronted Meiji intellectuals. He was able to shed the odious parts of both kangaku and enlightenment history and instead create a history that was similar to that of the West, specifically, Germany. Much as the West had used the Western Orient and the "world of Islam" in its self-construction, Shiratori used religiosity to construct a new historical narrative useful to Japan.99 This idea was no more arbitrary than Comte's positivism or Ranke's spirit, and served a similar role: it organized the concepts of change, progress, and the social unit. Progress was no longer tied to a unilinear scheme of development, but to something timeless, the idea of the nation. Moreover, historical study, as the mediation between the study of man and of science, remained scientific and objective. To mix two metaphors used earlier, having laid the foundation, the Japanese Were now able to begin construction on their own Trojan horse. It was now necessary to gather the proper materials, the historical facts that would support the "idea."
For an excellent paper that examines the importance of Islam to the distinction between East and West, see Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Occasional Paper Series, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University (Washington, D.C., 1987). Asad states, "It is too often forgotten that 'the world of Islam' is a concept for organizing historical narratives, not the name for a self-contained collective agent" (11).
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