Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines the interaction between the Korean reform movement and proponents of the Japanese Enlightenment movement such as Fukuzawa Yukichi . It aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of Japanese liberal's relationship with Asia during the 1880s and 1890s.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation examines the interaction of members of the Korean reform movement and the proponents of the Japanese Enlightenment such as Fukuzawa Yukichi during the 1880s and 1890s and its impact on its relationship with Asia. Based on an analysis of contemporary Japanese journals including Jiji Shinpō, Shichi ichi zappō, and others, I argue that Japan, particularly Tōkyō, was a hub for the exchange of modern knowledge and ideas about "civilization and enlightenment," and offered alternative pathways for these exchanges. The encounter, which occurred within the context of a worldwide Enlightenment movement, therefore, bore high significance for both countries. Korean reformers, seeking answers to new challenges in a rapidly changing and globally interconnected world, initially looked to Japan as a role model for successful modernization in Asia. The exchange of students and ideas between Japan and Korea had crucial repercussions on Korea's internal development, with former exchange students assuming influential roles in a failed coup d'état and the implementation of reforms upon their return to Korea. The Japanese capital served as an initial starting point for further encounters and opportunities for Korean reformers, including early encounters with Japanese and Western Protestants and Chinese diplomats, which in some cases, created the opportunity for further study abroad in the United States.

While the relationship between Japan and Korea during the Meiji period was characterized by increasingly asymmetrical power dynamics, the interactions between Japanese and Korean reformers at the same time helped to shape Japanese discourse on the "Korean question," which was a recurring issue in Japan's foreign policy discourse following the Meiji Renovation. While the general perception of Korea among the Japanese public became increasingly negative, exploring the interactions on the individual level with Koreans and Japanese provides a more nuanced understanding. In the early 1880s and again in the mid-1890s, Korean students were seen as potential agents of reform in Korea and a means of decoupling the country from Chinese influence to the benefit of Japan by enlightenment activists and liberals like Fukuzawa despite arguing in favor of "leaving Asia".

Paper short abstract:

In 1883, Sakasaki Shiran wrote the first novel about Sakamoto Ryōma, investing this obscure bakumatsu reformer with the ideals of the early Meiji liberal movement. We will shed light on Sakasaki’s own career (his story), and on how his works (his stories) have influenced imageries of Meiji history.

Paper long abstract:

Marius Jansen’s “Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration” (1961) remains one of the most famous works on the life and accomplishments of Sakamoto Ryōma, by far the most iconic among the “men of purpose” of the bakumatsu period. Within Japan, Ryōma’s predominance in the imagery surrounding bakumatsu events can to a considerable extent be attributed to Shiba Ryōtarō’s successful serialized novel “Ryōma ga yuku,” written around the same time as Jansen’s work (1962-66). Generally, however, very little attention is given (Jansen fails to mention him completely) to the role played by Sakasaki Shiran (born Sakan, 1853-1913), whose own serialized novel of 1883 not only saved Ryōma from virtual oblivion, even in his native Kochi, but also made Ryōma available for future generations to adopt him and project their ideals on his persona. I will take a closer look at Sakasaki Shiran’s own life and thought, which was very much defined by his engagement as a journalist and activist in the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights. His vicissitudinous career is characterized by a search for effective tools to propagate this thought, vying to introduce democratic reform and reach wide audiences. After a short career in the judiciary, he became a journalist, speech writer and satirical poet, ended up in prison, and then moved on to make fame as a translator of Victor Hugo and a writer of historical fiction (popularizing amongst others the story of the Tosa Loyalist Party). During the last years of his life, as his fiction made it into the common consciousness of late Meiji and early Taisho, he was invited into the Ishin shiryō hensankai, precursor of the present Shiryō hensanjo at Tokyo University. Shedding light on Sakasaki Shiran, we will get a better understanding of how the “birth” of Ryōma intertwines with Sakasaki’s own story (how, for instance, he invests Ryōma with his own jiyū minken ideals), and we can elucidate from a historical perspective some of the mechanisms operating under the surface of the ever popular bakumatsu ishin imagery.

Paper short abstract:

Examining the relationality between Yi Kwang-su, ‘the father of modern Korean literature’ and Japanese author Kunikida Doppo, this paper illuminates the complex transnational flow of knowledge at work at the very birth of modern Korean literature that goes beyond the dichotomy of East and West.

Paper long abstract:

Modernity in East Asia has largely been understood as the result of ‘translating the West’, a unidirectional flow of knowledge from West to non-West that eventually resulted in self-colonisation and/or reactionary cultural nationalism. In this knowledge transfer regime, Japan, the first East Asian country to modernise, played a role of the window into Western modernity for neighbouring countries.

Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950?), ‘the father of modern Korean literature’, was one of the first Korean students to study in Japan. He has been seen as a typical ‘self-colonised’ intellectual, for whom the West served as the ultimate source of authority. He also endeavoured to establish a national literature of Korea following a new Western conception which would reflect the greatness of nationhood. Indeed, his Mujeong (Heartless, 1917), widely recognized as the first modern Korean literature, has been known for its paean for civilizational progress and nationalism.

However, how do we square this understanding of Yi as a product of the Western impact (by way of Japan) with the fact that he was part of the Japanese-Russian transnational intellectual relations that promoted anarchist and revolutionary thought antithetical to the Western civilizational model of progress (‘civilization and enlightenment’)? Situating Yi in this massive intellectual phenomenon of what Sho Konishi and Olga Solovieva have recently called ‘Japan’s Russia’ helps to overturn the existing understanding of him, and, in turn, the figure of Yi enables us to see a triangulation of this circulation of knowledge between Japan and Russia. This paper pays particular attention to his relationality with Japanese author Kunikida Doppo which will cast a very different light on the first modern Korean novel Mujeong. Ultimately, it illuminates the complex and multi-directional nature of transnational flow of knowledge at work at the very birth of modern Korean literature that goes beyond the dichotomy of East and West altogether.