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Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History

University of California Press

The impact of the West and the reaction against the West are common clichés in the history of Meiji Japan. Certainly, Europe and its culture played a major role in Japan's development, but too often that impact has been described as an "either-or" proposition, with those who were partial to Western ideas being extolled. Such a predisposition blurs an important problem of this period; that is, how could Japan regenerate society by adapting from the alien West while still retaining its own distinctiveness? The difficulty of this process is discussed in Peter Dale's provocative book The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. Using Toynbee's characterization of the Herodian and the zealot to describe Japan's encounter with the West, Dale states, "The Herodian discovers that his adoption of foreign material culture to defend indigenous autonomy subtly alters and subverts the very values he strives to protect. He quickly learns that the imported infrastructure has a logic all its own, and that the 'mechanically propelled Trojan horse' of alien civilisation drastically disrupts and reorganises the social fabric upon which the ideology of his traditional outlook rests."1

Clearly, this process of encounter and adaptation was not new to Japan. David Pollack describes the place in Japan of a figurative and real China from the eighth through the eighteenth centuries in terms of a dialectical relationship between China, the alien form, and Japan, the native content. He uses the analogy of"a frog [at] the bottom of its

Peter Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 47.

well, who would define its world almost exclusively in terms of its walls: the sky and world outside the well, the shape of the water in which it lived, its notions of security and danger, the proper dimensions and proportions of things, would all be most meaningfully expressed in terms of 'walls.'"2 Regardless whether one agrees that there was only one alien and one native (which I do not), this relationship can be extended to include an alien West. In Pollack's metaphor, China constitutes Japan's walls, which changed during the nineteenth century.3 The categories that were used to understand the complex events and processes of a previous age were no longer appropriate; the domestic discontinuities and the appearance of a technologically superior West could not be bounded by preexisting categories.4 In the nineteenth century, therefore, new categories had to be created that would "render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful [and] so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them."5 The bricks that were used to construct China were now seen differently; they were crooked, decaying, and even tumbling down.

This shift did not entail the simple replacement of China by the West. Using a different design but many of the same bricks, Japanese constructed a different wall, one that altered everything: the shape of the water, its security, and, in the end, Japan itself. The difference between the use of China and the use of the West was that the previous world was one in which all life was construed as being part of a fixed realm. To be sure, some intellectuals of the Tokugawa period sought to expand and even dismantle this age-old thought system, but they were very much in the minority. Even the radical Mito solution in many ways proposed a return to a purity from before the corruption of time, suggesting that the solution lay not in some new future system, but in a system that had already been tested and proven.6 The West brought

Pollack, Fracture of Meaning, 4.

For the role and "decentering" of China during the late Tokugawa period, see Harootunian, "Functions of China in Tokugawa Thought."

For a discussion of these issues, see Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); and Najita and Koschmann (eds.), Conflict in Modern Japanese History.

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.

Mito was a collateral domain to the ruling house uring the Tokugawa period. During the early nineteenth century a number of intellectuals proposed reforms that addressed the growing disjuncture between the fixed ideal and changing society. These proposals proved to signal the decline of the existing government, the bakufu, rather than to reform it. For further information, see J. Victor Koschmann, The Mito Ideology: Discourse, Reform, and Insurrection in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1790-1864 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

a different perspective, the probable future; knowledge was infinite, but to understand and harness it one had to understand the underlying historical laws that would indicate what was to come. The key to understanding was history.

Japan's earlier studies of the past had been used largely to affirm the status quo or to "discover" the errors of the immediate past; the notion of progress, however, transformed Japan's very history and world vision7 As a sociological study, history was no longer merely a strategy to describe what ought to have been; the focus now was what in fact is, what will be, and what ought to be. History, then, became not only the way by which Japan would know itself, but also its tool for relating, in the present and in the future, to a broad and uncertain geocultural world.

As Dale's Herodian figure suggests, it would be a mistake to assume that all Western ideas were accepted intact. Moreover, although reference was and is made to a singular West, this geocultural construction represented simply all those people, ideas, organizations, institutions, structures, and so forth that were over there in Europe; in short, they were not Japanese. The willing and even eager acceptance of selected Western things during the early Meiji period should be seen as Japan's attempt to participate with the West as an essentially equivalent—though not always equal—entity. Seemingly "Western" aspects might have been adopted, but the purpose was to effect Japan's regeneration; constitutionalism, modernity, rationality, and capitalism were merely tools for that regeneration. In this very process of adoption, the ideas accepted by Japan were altered. In the end, a new understanding of Japan, Asia, and Europe was created, one very different than that which had existed previously.

In this chapter I look at the process of change in the formulation of a history of Japan and how it led to the discovery of Japan's Asiatic past. This turn to an Asian past emerged from two problems that Japanese intellectuals encountered in their very acceptance of Western progressive historiography. First was the realization that the notion of universal progress, which implies comprehensiveness—a totality and

For a recent study on progress as a nineteenth-century Western notion, see Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

generality—is not neutral. The geographic area privileged by this totality, rather, was Europe; non-Europe was separated and distanced by the same hierarchical generality—the sequence and order—that...