Paper short abstract:

The in-depth study on legal "reforms" led by Eto Shinpei, first Minister of Justice of Meiji, offers a sound example of reflections on bridging divides. If the political decision to implement the reforms marks a new era, the ideas behind them often belong to a former frame of thoughts and practices.

Paper long abstract:

It seems in recent years that a growing number of scholars have raised awareness of the analysis of transition period between late Edo and early Meiji. A number of domains have proved to be inappropriate to merely consider in terms of premodern/modern dichotomy. Yet, deconstructing periodization is not an easy task for all those who have been trained in a conventional division of specializations, simply because of a lack of knowledge and methodology for studying another period.

The significance of the judiciary and political reforms, carried out by Eto Shinpei, first Minister of Justice of Meiji, must be investigated and understood in this cross-period context, by analyzing carefully Eto's ideas and intentions behind the measures he took as well as the proposals he submitted. His understanding cannot be dissociated, not only from the intellectual framework such as traditional Confucian learning and Edayoshi Shinyo's Kokugaku School, but also from the legal practices and local customs hitherto largely accepted by the people.

Moreover, as Eto was keen to introduce French Napoleonic codes to Japan, it is equally important to clarify how Eto had conceived this foreign legal system and to seek what justice he had endeavoured to pursue. We know that Eto was enthusiastic about French codes and we need to know, apart from the question of treaty revision, how and why Eto had become eager to lay an emphasis on the judiciary in general. In addition, we must ask to what extent he had shared and represented legal and political thoughts of the time.

In order to provide some answers to the questions, it is necessary to adopt cross-methodological approach allowing us to situate the issue in a broad, yet appropriate, viewpoint of circulation of knowledge. If an in-depth analysis requires traditional method of history of political and legal thoughts, it is crucial to understand the reflections and practices of Eto Shinpei in the context of circulation of knowledge, closely connected to the conception of global history. This paper is a part of my book project on Eto Shinpei, currently in preparation.

Paper short abstract:

My paper tries to provide a comparative and interdisciplinary approach for interpreting the Japanese process of forming modern collective (national) identity based on premodern cultural concepts of identity, comparing this pattern with global (Asian, Western and Central European) development issues.

Paper long abstract:

Several scholarly works on Japan explain the specific phenomena of the 19th century Japanese modernization in terms of Japanese tradition and culture. The process of Meiji modernisation followed the European developmental pattern, but the basement (Japanese cultural traditions) on which it was built had been made in the Edo period. Kokugaku of the Edo period can be seen as a key factor of defining cultural identity in the 18th and early 19th century based on Japanese cultural heritage. Kokugaku focused on Japanese classics, on exploring, studying and reviving (or even inventing) ancient Japanese language, literature, myths, history and also political ideology.

Meiji scholars used kokugaku conceptions of Japan to construct a modern nationalism that was not simply derived from Western models and was not purely instrumental, but made good use of early modern and culturalist conceptions of community, that the kokugaku scholars sought to research, analyse and promulgate among the broader population.

The role of pre-modern cultural identity in forming modern Japanese (national) identity - following mainly Miroslav Hroch's comparative and interdisciplinary theory of national development - can be examined compared to the "national awakening" movements of the peoples of East Central Europe. In the shadow of a cultural and/or political "monolith" (China for Japan and Germany for Central Europe), before modernity, ethnic groups or communities started to evolve their own identities with cultural movements focusing on their own language and culture, which played crucial roles in their modernisation, too.

This Meiji-period Japanese pattern of economic, political, and cultural modernity was the result of a distinct cultural program closely related to some of the basic features of the Japanese historical experience, which - similarly to various Eastern European and Asian societies - developed as a continual response to the threatening military, economic, and technological superiority of the West, with its cultural and ideological program. With "reconstructing tradition", Japan could accomplish modernization while seemingly preserving its traditions, thus could solve the dilemma of almost every non-Western country: changing its cultural horizon without losing its identity.

Paper short abstract:

1868 looms large both in Japanese history and in the history of Japanese cinema. It is the supposedly firm dividing line between period dramas and present-day dramas. However, in this paper, I will analyze a few key films which challenge this boundary, with important implications for us today.

Paper long abstract:

Among scholars of Japanese history, one of the most widely accepted temporal boundaries is 1868, the supposed dividing line separating pre- or early modern Japan from the Meiji-era project of modernization. From the 1910s and especially after 1923, once Japan's film industry began the large-scale production of films which attempted to represent the country's past, that date of 1868 was used as an ostensibly firm boundary between 'present-day dramas' (gendaigeki) and 'period dramas' (jidaigeki). Standard film histories typically claim, with some justification, that any film purporting to show Japan's premodern or early modern history, by definition, was a period drama, subject to the institutional strictures of that genre, and similarly, films whose focus was on the contemporary world were made in a manner different from those period dramas: the two genres had, it is often said, entirely separate production facilities, crews, and cast members, with little to no mixing between the two. They were even separated geographically, with films about contemporary times being made in Tokyo while films about the past were made in Kyoto. Given these conditions, it certainly seems as though both moviemakers and, presumably, moviegoers in twentieth-century Japan accepted 1868 as a stark boundary between the premodern and the modern, thereby implicitly accepting the Hegelian logic of linear progress through time.

In this paper, I will illustrate the many ways this neat typology of films obscures other views of history, and introduce a few key films which took a more skeptical view of 1868 as a 'divide' and instead straddled both sides of this boundary. In particular, wartime film producers, under increasing pressure to abandon 'frivolous' or nostalgic celebrations of the Edo period and focus on the modern world, were forced to break all the rules the industry had established, mixing casts, crews and storylines from both genres to create what I call 'trans-Restoration' films. The existence and popularity of such films suggests viewers at the time had a more nuanced understanding of historical progress than is commonly assumed—and if they were willing to question 1868 as a firm boundary, perhaps we in 2016 should also.