Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations| Session 10B, Panel
Tsuda Sôkichi is one of the better known historians of 20th century Japan. Yet, he is far better known for his early oeuvre concerning the imperial mythology on the one, and Japan's national-intellectual traditions as reflected in literature on the other hand, than for his activities as a critic and essayist in the postwar era. It has been held that Tsuda's early work started out from an objectivistic and politically neutral view on history, as a result of which he has been considered a liberal and a defender of academic independence. Still, hardly any attention has been given in Western literature to the postwar career of Tsuda, as if its meaning did not go beyond what one could call a somewhat unfortunate fin-de-carriere. We wish to make clear that his postwar legacy amounts to more than that, and sheds a particular light on his other works, and the current of thought he is associated with.
In our paper we intend to focus on 1. the shift that took place in Tsuda's intellectual-historical stance before, during and after the war; 2. the way in which Tsuda has co mmented about the prewar era and his position in it; 3. the self-re-invention that has taken place in the writings which he reedited and republished after the war, ie the possibly damaging passages he omitted, the reeditions which were meant to cleanse his texts from overly enthused co mments on a) Japan's unicity in Asia and b) imperial orthodoxy in particular. We will try to show that Tsuda's recollections present an interesting case of historical interpretation, in casu the memoirs of a liberal, as well as a pig iron with which we can attempt to break into the generic term liberalism, in particular in the context of postwar representations of prewar Japan ("liberalism of memory").
Federico Marcon (Columbia University)
In mid-Tokugawa Japan two contrasting learning practices competed for the education of intellectuals or highly specialized bureaucrats and professionals like physicians, instructors, and economists: on the one hand the memorization of few canonical texts of the neo-Confucian tradition, and on the other the parallel and juxtaposed examination of a large number of ancient and contemporary texts of various scholarly traditions. The first learning technique was characteristic of the core curriculum of the Shôheikô, the governmentally sponsored school of neo-Confucian studies that emphasized the mastering of the Four Books and Five Classics through mnemonic techniques as the main criterion for evaluating intellectual achievement. The second became a distinguishing trait of the emerging social group of professional scholars and educators that earned their livings from the student fees of their private academies. In order to promote their knowledge and expertise in the markets of private education, these new intellectuals necessarily had to maintain an up-to-date acquaintance with the dominating issues of contemporary scholarly debates, which were widely circulating in a growing number of manuscripts and books.
Methodologies are never neutral to the content of intellectual speculation, and the contrast between these two different ways of learning had profound epistemological consequences. Comparing the mnemonic techniques taught in the Shôheikô with the bibliographic essays and teaching guidelines written by one of the most successful of the private educators of mid-Tokugawa Japan, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), I will argue that the two different methodologies reflected different ways of perceiving and studying the world. With the burgeoning of intellectuals formed in private academies, the interpretations of natural and social phenomena were less and less reduced to the formulaic knowledge that a mnemonic education tended to produce, but were increasingly based on observations, data collecting, and juxtaposed analysis of texts of different traditions. As a result, the function of memory in intellectual speculation changed from a passive matching of internalized formulas with phenomena (memory as mneme) into an active excavations of meaning through the pages of different texts or through the puzzles of natural phenomena (memory as anamnesis).
Jan Sykora (Charles University, Praha)
The name of Taguchi Ukichi (1855 - 1905), whose double-anniversary will fall on the year 2005, is usually associated with the introduction and the dissemination of the British liberal economic ideas during the first part of Meiji period. Without any doubts this man of wide-ranging interests played the leading role in organizing The Economic Society (Keizaigaku kyôkai), a non-governmental academic society focused on spreading and promoting the progress of political economy in both theory and practice, and in publishing the Tôkyô Economist (Tôkyô keizai zasshi), a highly appreciated journal not only reporting on current economic topics, trends and problems, but also propagating political economy as a science among people.
His contribution to the systematic study of Japan's political, religious, literary and intellectual history, however, seems to be the less-known aspect of his relatively short but fruitful "academic" life. As a chief editor of the first series of the Compilation of Japanese History (Kokushi taikei) he used the method reflecting both the native tradition of textual collation and criticism and the positivist techniques of Western historical scholarship (inspired mainly by Western thinkers such as H. T. Buckle, H. Spencer and F. P. G. Guizot) that influenced Japanese historiography after the Meiji Restoration. His unique view on the Japanese civilization, however, can be traced particularly in the outstanding book A Short History of Japanese Enlightenment (Nihon kaika shôshi) consisting of six volumes. In contrast to another great person of Japanese enlightenment, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Taguchi Ukichi did not point out the difference between Japanese and Western civilization but on the contrary stressed the fundamental similarity between these two civilizations. Enumerating many examples from the history and the present, and inspired by the Adam Smith's concept of laissez-faire he came to conclusion that learning the merits of the West is quite different from being subordinate to the Westerners and that the progress of mankind – either in Europe or in Japan – advanced along a path which leaded the social condition of various ranks towards an average. Like Sakuma Shozan who advocated the necessity of studying Western science as universal possession of mankind, Taguchi Ukichi argued that Japanese should study Western learning (not only physics and other natural science but social sciences like political economy as well) not because the West has discovered them, but because they embody the universal truth. His fundamental concept of making Tôkyô to become London of the East might inspire the proclamation of nationalism coloring Meiji enlightenment in general, but as proponent of the universal validity of the free trade principle and as "a free citizen of the economic worlds", he did not believe, however, that Japan was predetermined to be responsible for keeping peace under arms in the East.
Based on his general concept of Japanese civilization and its enlightenment, and applying the methodology of economics to the debates about the Japanese cultural self-assertion, the proposed paper will discuss particularly the problem of searching for the role of Japan in the Asian civilization context at the very beginning of 20 th century, the inquiry which still seems be the crucial problem of the modern Japanese society.