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Paper short abstract

The common translation of bunmei kaika as “civilization and enlightenment” is often questioned, always presupposing a synonymy of bunmei and “civilization” already as given. This presentation questions this equation to trace its origins (as well as early uses of kaika) in contemporary sources.

Paper long abstract

The Sino-Japanese character compound bunmei is commonly considered a “translation word” for the nineteenth-century English “civilization,” adapted from classical Chinese precedents during the transition from the Tokugawa to the Meiji period. Based on contemporary materials, this presentation demonstrates that this was not how the term bunmei was used and understood at first. Bunmei initially gained currency as a translation word for “enlightened” as in “enlightened government,” even as it was apt to convey a sense of the eighteenth-century English “civility” as well. Depending on context, it also worked as a translation word for the English “civilized” for this reason. But bunmei had never been used to explicitly render the nineteenth-century English “civilization” before 1875. For obvious reasons, the English “civilization” had been rendered as bunka if not kaika (or bunmei kaika for that matter) up to that point.

Fukuzawa Yukichi’s insistence on “civilization” (rather than “civility and enlightenment”) as the proper meaning of “Western bunmei” requires closer scrutiny than it has hitherto received. The same holds true for his derivation of the English term “civilization” from the Latin civitas as opposed to the Latin civilis/civilitas, and for the lexical background of the term kaika by which early uses of this term would still have been informed.

Fukuzawa’s linguistic moves in this case are indicative of a structural transformation in early Meiji political thought at the same time as they are emblematic for the function of so-called “translation words” in modern Japanese more generally.