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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.