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- Convenors:
-
Eiko Honda
(Aarhus University)
Ian Rapley (Cardiff University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Location:
- Lokaal 0.2
- Sessions:
- Sunday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Intellectual History and Philosophy: Individual papers
Long Abstract:
Intellectual History and Philosophy: Individual papers
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 20 August, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to analyze the process of the introduction of Western archaeological thought in Japan during the Meiji period. The main works related to this issue will be analysed from a translatological and intellectual perspective.
Paper long abstract:
Modern archaeology began in Japan with the activities of a heterogeneous group of Western professors, researchers, and diplomats in the last third of the 19th century. Among them, the American scientist Edward Sylvester Morse and the German diplomat Heinrich von Siebold played the most significant roles. Morse's name is especially remembered today for leading the first scientific excavation (Omori shell midden) in 1877 and writing the first archaeological report in Japan (English / Japanese).
In the same period, Siebold's Kōko-setsuryaku (1879) and the Japanese edition of the Encyclopaedia Chambers, which included an article devoted to archaeology, were published. These two works, together with the Omori excavation report, constitute the first Japanese-language texts that spread the existence of the discipline of archaeology as it had been defined in the West. These texts not only taught the Japanese about the existence of primitive cultures discovered in Europe but also provided new epistemological tools for understanding material remains from the past. These remains had traditionally been associated with the actions of mythical figures such as giants or meteorological phenomena, but belonged to cultures that predated the emergence of writing in Japan, i.e., prehistoric cultures.
This paper will analyze, through primary sources, the process of introduction of Western archaeological thought, represented by the Three Ages system and the idea of prehistory. It will be demonstrated how this knowledge transfer required a translational effort to express the new Western terminology and concepts. At the same time, it will be discussed how this transfer did not take place in an intellectual or ideological vacuum, but that the ideas of time brought by Westerners represented a knowledge without parallel in the antiquarian and cultural tradition of the Edo period. The understanding and acceptance of these ideas concerning the past required a profound mental readjustment, which would not be completed in a strict sense until the 20th century.
Paper short abstract:
Capt. Francis Brinkley was a respected scholar of Japan during the Meiji period, yet his name is all but absent from the history of British Japanology. By analyzing writings by his contemporaries, G. Satow and B.H. Chamberlain, this talk will explore a possible reason for his legacy’s obscurity.
Paper long abstract:
Captain Francis Brinkley arrived in Japan shortly before the Meiji Restoration, and until his death in 1912, he proved himself an invaluable ally for Japan, dedicating his life to the study and popularization of its language, history, and art, not only through his scholarship but also through his journalistic work, as well as his efforts in the field of English-language teaching. And yet, his name seems to have largely slipped through the cracks in recent accounts of (Meiji-period) English-language Japanology.
Why is it that, despite his remarkable scholarly and journalistic activity, Brinkley’s legacy as an early British Japanologist is all but forgotten nowadays, while names such as B.H. Chamberlain, E. Satow, and W.G. Aston stand at the forefront of Meiji-period Japanology? One common assumption is that his consistent pro-Japanese stance – which he exhibited throughout his journalistic career, in the editorial work for “The Japan Mail,” as well as his correspondence for the London “Times” – was a financially motivated one. However, this presentation will argue that the devaluation of his legacy within the field of English-language Japanology had more to do with an ideological shift within the field itself, mainly surrounding the issue of the Anglo-Japanese treaty revision. To this effect, I will analyze correspondence by Brinkley’s contemporaries, B.H. Chamberlain and E. Satow, as well as relevant entries from Chamberlain’s “Things Japanese.”
In doing so, I hope this presentation will provide the necessary basis for a re-evaluation of Brinkley's activity as a Japanologist but will also shed more light on how the complex changes undergone by Japan around the turn of the 20th century influenced the evolution of early English-language Japanology as a field.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interprets the spiritualized modern Zen as a form of embodied knowledge. It re-examines D. T. Suzuki’s discourse on Zen arts which was epitomized as "becoming one with the perfecting of skill" in relation to Eugen Herrigel’s embodied practice of Zen in the Art of Archery (1948).
Paper long abstract:
Japanese Zen has been transmitted cross-culturally, both on a textual basis and in the form of bodily practice, since the early twentieth century. Understanding modern Zen as a form of embodied knowledge and skill, this paper revisits the somatic dimension of D.T.Suzuki's discourse on Zen arts, particularly in Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture(1938).
Scholars have pointed out Suzuki’s significant role in constructing the interconnection of Zen with Japanese culture in the twentieth century. Eugen Herrigel's (1884-1955) Zen in the Art of Japanese Archery, which recounted his experience of learning Zen through the bodily practice of Japanese archery in the 1920s, was one of the most widely-known episodes influenced by Suzuki. This paper argues that Suzuki’s discourse on Zen arts sheds much light on an underrepresented trajectory whereby modern Zen was transmitted as embodied knowledge — a form of knowledge in which the body, rather than the intellect, plays a fundamental role in practically knowing what Zen is and achieving non-dual integration with the mind. In Herrigel’s case, it was primarily by recollecting the somatic engagement with the archery tools in and after the training process that he came to regard Zen as a spiritual discipline towards the state of becoming one with the tools. In response to Herrigel, Suzuki also depicted the process of grasping Zen through the practice of arts as "becoming one with the perfecting of his technical skill", and extensively expounded his "No-mind" (musshin) theory in relation to Zen arts such as swordsmanship.
However, the embodied dimension of Zen arts in Suzuki’s writings was overshadowed by his discursive strategy of spiritualizing Zen throughout the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Herrigel's experience illuminates the indispensable role the body played in reforming the modern knowledge of Zen. This paper argues that what is widely labelled as Zen spirituality is inseparable from its corporeality. The body is not merely a subordinate instrument to obtain Zen but also an intrinsic, essential dimension of modern Zen.
Paper short abstract:
This paper revisits the question of how, and why, the term shakai 社会 gained currency as a translation of "society" in the early Meiji period. It explains the political logic that informed this choice in a new way with implications for our understanding of Meiji-era conceptual change more generally.
Paper long abstract:
The difficulties experienced by early Meiji writers in finding a suitable character compound to express the meaning of the English term “society” have been repeatedly noted and analyzed by previous scholarship in both Japanese and English. This paper argues nonetheless that the reason why the term shakai 社会 was suddenly found to “work” as a “translation word” from the early 1880s onwards, has not been convincingly explained to date. Even though the character compound shakai 社会 had a prior history of usage in Classical Chinese, it was adoption of the neologism kaisha 会社 to express the sense of “corporation” beginning in the late 1860s, that prepared the ground for shakai 社会 to function as a translation for “society” - in the emerging “sociological” sense of that term - in turn.
In advancing this argument, this paper will combine a closer look at nineteenth-century uses of the word “society” in English that impacted early Meiji understandings of this term, with an analysis of early Meiji uses of the Sino-Japanese compounds shakai 社会 and kaisha 会社 that have not received sufficient attention to date. In doing so it will bring recent scholarship in both English and Japanese on the significance of the concept of “corporation” in the constitution of modern political thought - as ultimately concerned with "society" - to bear, and further argue that the logic inscribed into the term shakai 社会 is reflective of the senses expressed by the terms seishin 精神 and later shutai 主体 as Sino-Japanese character compounds as well.
Last but not least, this particular instance of the genesis of a “translation word” will be taken as a basis to question widespread assumptions about the nature and status of so-called “translation words” in modern Japanese - and “translation” in the constitution of modern “Japanese thought” - more generally, drawing also on recent trends in linguistics bridging the semantics-pragmatics divide (such as attention to primary pragmatic processes) to that purpose.