Toshio Yokoyama
The word ‘sustainability’ is heard more and more these days whenever global environmental issues are discussed, and consequently academic interest in stable societies that existed in human history seems to be growing. My talk tries to shed light on the experience of Japan from the late 17th century to the late 19th century. In stable societies with limited resources, regulated consumerism, and a stable population with minimal mobility, intermediaries play greater roles than they do in changing societies. Whether coexistence in a close community between diverse elements works well or not largely depends on the quality of the intermediaries. My talk will focus on the pivotal intermediary of that time, two genres of popular household encyclopedias, Setsuyoshu and Ozatsusho: The former providing instruction in ‘elegant’ forms of written communication, and the latter in ‘unoffending’ behaviour towards the numerous gods in heaven and earth. Close examination of the wear and tear in extant copies of these books reveals what the users’ common concerns were. At the same time, anecdotes of former generations’ attitudes towards those books help us to understand the enormous flexibility of interpretation that the text allowed, preventing any growth of dogmatism. The long-lasting dominance of such guides certainly contributed to the civility of the population, but on the other hand people eventually developed a sense of humour with which they could laugh at themselves for somehow behaving timidly in accordance with the instructions they offered; hence the reinforcement of an old proverb: Iwashi no atama mo shinjin kara - even a sardine’s head becomes holy…. Some European visitors’ accounts of mid-19th-century Japan say that they encountered ‘a high state of civilization’. Such remarks can be attributed partly to the visitors’ expectations, but among the Japanese, regardless of their classes, there was a strong attachment to the value of courtly behaviour towards others, including non-humans, and to the East Asian traditional idea of bunmei/ civilization with harmony between heaven, earth and human beings. It was against such a cultural background that quite a few Meiji intellectuals, including the eccentric Nakai Hiroshi, maintained a sense of detachment from high-tech Europe, considering it ‘yet to be civilized’. To review afresh the Japanese experiences of those two centuries may give us some hints for imagining a future global civilization.
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Toshio Yokoyama, B.LL. and M.LL. ( Kyoto); D.Phil. ( Oxford) Vice-President (International Relations) of Kyoto University, with a double professorship at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, and the Institute for Research in Humanities.
Born in Kyoto a few years after the end of WWII. His daily delight during childhood was fishing in the Shimogamo Canal. After Rakuhoku High School, he entered Kyoto University to study law, which did not satisfy him. In 1970, he stayed in a village in Eastern Java and became interested in things Japanese for the first time. In 1972, he joined the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, to pursue his interest in Kamo no Mabuchi, the nativist poet. Afterwards, he repeatedly visited the Asian countryside . In 1983, he received a doctorate from the University of Oxford where he had been a British Council scholar in modern history during the latter half of the 1970s. In 1993, he was Erwin von Bälz Guest Professor at Tübingen, and in 1999 Visiting Lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford. In 2001, he joined the founding of t he above-mentioned graduate school , and played a major role in opening within the school a common space named ‘Sansai Gakurin’ dedicated to the promotion of universal learning. He has been Warden of Sansai Gakurin since the summer of 2002.
He was on the Advisory Board of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in the south of Kyoto Prefecture from 2003 to 2005, and has been in the chair of the Advisory Committee of Lake Biwa Museum since 2004.
He is the author of Japan in the Victorian Mind (London: Macmillan, 1987). His other works and edited volumes include Kaibara Ekiken (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1995): an introduction to the neo-Confucian thinker of a classical civilization, Patterns of Usage of Setsuyoshu: A Graphic Analysis of Wear and Tear on the Bottom Surface of Surviving Copies (IRH Social Survey Report 38, Kyoto University, 1998), and 21 Seiki noKa-Cho-Fu-Getsu (Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 1998): a small book recording a series of dialogues with scientists and artists on the possibilities of an elegant co-existence with nature. Among his joint-works, a recent one in Japanese, English, and French is Sameshima Naonobu Zai-Ou Shokan Roku ( Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 2002), and the latest one is Written Texts - Visual Texts ( Amsterdam: Hotei, 2005). Currently, he is a co-editor of an English academic journal, SANSAI.