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- Convenor:
-
Mick Deneckere
(Ghent University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Matthew Fraleigh
(Brandeis University)
- Stream:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Location:
- Torre A, Piso 0, Sala 04
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel aims at rekindling the study of the 19th c. intellectual movement known as the Japanese Enlightenment, by looking beyond the legacy of the Meirokusha and through an investigation of Japanese perspectives on the Western Enlightenment, and by consequence, on the Enlightenment in Japan.
Long Abstract:
To most historians of Japan, "the Japanese Enlightenment" calls to mind an intellectual movement that emerged around the time of the Meiji Restoration and that was particularly active in the 1870s, in the Westernization phase of Japan's modernization effort. As one of Japan's leading intellectuals of his time, Fukuzawa Yukichi and the intellectual society Meirokusha have come to epitomize this movement. Despite the movement's importance for Japan's modernization process, studies in non-Japanese scholarship dedicated to its proponents and their legacy remain relatively few. Next to the well-known works "The Japanese Enlightenment" (Carmen Blacker 1964) and "Meiroku zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment" (William Braisted 1976), only a handful of monographs highlight the ventures of some Meirokusha members, such as "Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought" (Thomas Havens 1970), "The Political Thought of Mori Arinori: A Study in Meiji Conservatism" (Alistair Swale 2000), or "Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi" (Albert Craig 2009).
While addressing distinct ideas by different people, however, these studies seem to have one basic assumption in common, namely that the Japanese Enlightenment was restricted to the intellectual activities of Meirokusha thinkers. This panel will revisit the Japanese Enlightenment and deconstruct the movement in two ways. The first will look at "bunmei kaika" in its historical context and explore whether the term "Enlightenment" with its strong Western connotations truly reflects the nature of the intellectual activities of the time. It will also examine what was going on in intellectual circles other than the Meirokusha, be it the literary or the Buddhist world. The second way in which the Enlightenment will be analyzed is through Japanese perspectives on the Western Enlightenment and, by consequence, on the Enlightenment in Japan. With this second line of enquiry, the panel will explore how those authors who, in traditional historiography, constitute the staples of canonical Western Enlightenment found their way into Meiji era Japan and were reconfigured into different philosophical and historical narratives. By addressing intellectual activity in Meiji Japan through these novel angles, this panel aspires to reopen the debate on what the Japanese Enlightenment was all about.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
Looking beyond the often-quoted front-line figures of the Japanese Enlightenment, this talk focuses on the legacy of Buddhist intellectuals. Based on a media-driven concept of the Enlightenment, it discusses their memorials to the government and the establishment of Buddhist societies in the 1870s.
Paper long abstract:
In his article "Enlightenment in Global History: a Historiographical Critique" (2012), Sebastian Conrad looks at the Enlightenment as a global and century-long movement. While pointing out that the Enlightenment came to be embraced by a wide variety of actors, when using the case of Japan in support of his propositions, Conrad limits himself to ideas and quotes by traditional Japanese Enlightenment thinkers, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi or statesman Tsuda Mamichi, both members of the Meirokusha. The repeated reference to the same authors and their writings in historical narratives on the Enlightenment in Japan may have engendered its image as a short-lived, limited and rather monolithic movement. This paper aims at looking beyond front-line figures such as Fukuzawa Yukichi and other often-quoted Meirokusha members, and at restoring to center-stage those that historical narratives have, whether or not inadvertently, pushed into the stage wings. Indeed, the pursuits of permanent members of the Meirokusha triggered activities in other intellectual circles, not least in the Buddhist world.
The immediate response to the publication of "Meiroku zasshi" (the journal of the Meirokusha) in the form of "Hōshi sōdan", the first dedicated Buddhist journal, which exemplifies Buddhist intellectuals' wish to engage in the intellectual debates of the time and in the education of the people, has already received some scholarly attention. Moving beyond journal publication, this paper will look at a number of memorials that Buddhist intellectuals addressed to the Meiji government in the 1870s, as well as at the establishment of Buddhist societies, both instances of what Jonathan Sheehan (2003) terms "media of the Enlightenment". In following Sheehan's proposition to put religion into dialogue with the Enlightenment, this paper seeks to reassess the intellectual movement's alleged secular character. It will look at how, for Meirokusha thinkers and for religious intellectuals alike, it was the "anxiety to reform the morale or spirit of the Japanese people [that] became the basis of the movement during the early eighteen-seventies known as keimō or Enlightenment" (Carmen Blacker 1969).
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I will analyse the writings of Nakae Chomin (1847-1901), known as the "Rousseau of the Orient", to reconsider the Japanese Enlightenment in the Meiji period.
Paper long abstract:
Enlightenment thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, Kato Hiroyuki, Mori Arinori and Nishi Amane, known as members of Meirokusha, played a crucial role in the modernization of Japan. While it is true that the members of the Meirokusha were main figures in the Japanese Enlightenment, it is important to note that most of them were government officials who devoted themselves to promote the policy of the Japanese government. In The Space of Representation in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2014), Matsuura Hisaki argues that the Enlightenment thinkers in the Meiji period exercised the "public" use of reason in journals like Meiroku Zasshi, while they could not overcome the limited status of "private" use of reason as government officials, to put it in Kant's words (What is Enlightenment?). From this perspective, Matsuura continues, Nakae Chomin is an exceptional thinker for he was expelled from Tokyo in 1887 by the Meiji government because of his engagement to the social movements.
Speaking of his texts, Nakae's works such as A Discourse By Three Drunkards On Government (1887; translated by Nobuko Tsukui, Boston: Weatherhill, 1992) has a totally different style from that of Meirokusha thinkers such as Fukuzawa. Nakae was not an author who analyzes political issues straightforwardly like Meirokusha thinkers, but instead employed various kinds of "parody" to criticize the Meiji government. He sometimes published essays using a false name or employing a style of play. In A Discourse By Three Drunkards On Government, Nakae implicitly satirized imperialism under the guise of three different characters. Such a style is also apparent when we read The World of New People (1888), a text which tries to overturn the hierarchy of "people" (heimin) and "new people" (shinmin), satirizing the policy of "equality of people" (shiminbyodo) by Meiji government. Through examining these texts, I shall show the rhetoric of parody by Nakae Chomin and thus highlight another aspect of the Japanese Enlightenment.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how Meiji intellectuals appropriated Enlightenment authors and reconfigured their relationship to their European philosophical tradition by means of the case study of Rousseau and Machiavelli. The paper focuses on Nakae Chōmin, Kuga Katsunan, Inoue Kowashi, and Hayashi Tadasu.
Paper long abstract:
While authors from the Enlightenment such as Rousseau, Kant and Smith played a fundamental role when they entered Japan, shortly after the Meiji Restoration, they tended to come all together, outside of their historical order. Their Japanese interpreters often ignored—by fault or by choice—the historicity of the relationships between their theories. Moreover, it is worthy of consideration that the Meiji era Japanese scholars reinterpreted or ignored the relationships the philosophes had created between their thought and the philosophical, religious and intellectual tradition which preceded them. In early Meiji era Japan, the Enlightenment had no clear roots or past. While this made of it a tool which was adaptable to the current Japanese predicament, it stripped it of its problematic but defining relationship to the past.
To illuminate the effects of this, I will explore one case study: the transformation of the relationship between Rousseau and Machiavelli in Meiji literature. Notoriously, Rousseau—in continuity with a tradition centred in Spinoza's political thought—praised Machiavelli's work, and especially his Prince, as a satire of tyranny. At the same time, Rousseau struggled to reconcile his republicanism with Machiavelli's, avoiding to openly criticise the different relationship between personal and public morals sketched in the work of the Italian thinker.
In Meiji Japan, both Rousseau and Machiavelli enjoyed a considerable fortune. They came to represent two different sides of the debate on government. Rousseau, with whom Nakae Chōmin openly identified, became an important source for Kuga Katsunan as well. Kuga, another supporter of people's rights, openly criticised Machiavelli. The latter became the epitome of the patriotic politician for his two most important interpreters: Inoue Kowashi, the man behind the Meiji constitution, and Hayashi Tadasu, the first Japanese ambassador to London and a minister in different cabinets. The aim of the paper is to analyse, in the framework of Meiji era's debate on the future of the nation, the meaning of the breaking up of the problematic relationship Rousseau-Machiavelli shaped by Roussau himself and the establishment of a new dynamic between the two authors.