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Paper short abstract:

The late Meiji period saw the rise of Tōzai Bunmeiron, a comparative discourse on Eastern and Western civilization, propagating the harmony or eventual amalgamation of the two civilizations. Japan was regarded as the/a leading actor in this lofty process. After a resurge during World War One this discourse evaporated, but this paper argues that it was part and parcel of Japan’s Modern Mindset that continues up until this very day.

Paper long abstract:

The early Meiji period is often characterized by the government slogan of bunmei kaika. The bunmei in this slogan is intended as singular and universal, although everyone agreed that the content was overly West European. However, at the end of the 19th century a slightly more diverse way of thinking arose in the West. Partly riding on the wave of Orientalism and its final stage of Japonisme, new interest in ‘the East/the Orient’ accumulated, as a heterogeneous entity that was not mainly backward but rather mysterious, profound and spiritual. This new Western current was immediately introduced to Japan, and made for the first usages of Tōzai Bunmei (ron). At first the dichotomy came down to a very rough generalization of the West as materialist and individualist, and the East as spiritualist and statist/collectivist.

After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 this discourse developed exponentially. Increased self-confidence, pride, ambitions and dreams resulted into an indigenous Japan-centered elaboration of the imported discourse on Eastern and Western civilization, with a more detailed content that catered to specific Japanese problems and ambitions, and provided Japan with a related role and national mission. The two most well-known exponents of this discourse are Ōkuma Shigenobu’s Tōzai Bunmei no Chōwa (1907) and Ukita Kazutami’s Tōzai Bunmei Yūgōron (1909).

In the power vacuum in East Asia during World War One this Japanese discourse experienced its zenith, to die out immediately after the war’s end. Nevertheless, it is not hard to find statements by wartime, postwar and present-day politicians or opinion leaders that are identical to the Tōzai Bunmeiron discourse. Accordingly, this paper positions this discourse within the more long-term intellectual framework of Japan’s Modern Mindset, in which similarly a distinction is made between an Eastern and Western civilization, and Japan is put in between, looking up to the ‘best of the West’ and looking down upon ‘the Asian rest’. On the basis of its supposedly unique position as ‘the most successful disciple of the West in the East’ Japan has continually bestowed upon itself a superior particularist mission, as the only country that can function as the bridge between East and West.