Part One
The Thought of an āOpen Countryā
1 The Birth of Theories of the Japanese Nation
It is difficult to determine when discussion on the origins of human beings living on the Japanese archipelago began. As long ago as the eighth century, the Hitachi-no-kuni fudoki (The Hitachi-no-kuni Domain: Records of Wind and Earth) mentioned shell mounds, and there is also the Edo Period Confucian scholar Arai Hakusekiās (1657ā1725) theory of stone tools of 1725. However, the first theory of the origin of the Japanese nation based on a modern scientific discourse must be dated from the excavation of the Åmori shell mounds by Edward S. Morse (1838ā1925) in 1877.1
Western Academicsā Theories of the Japanese Nation
During the Edo Period, Japan strictly limited all interaction with Western countries. However, after the Edo Bakufu was overthrown through the Meiji Restoration, the Meiji government introduced policies to modernise Japan and invited a large number of Western advisers and teachers to the country.
Morse had been a research assistant in biology at Harvard University in the USA, but fell out with his professor over the acceptance of evolutionary theory and resigned. He travelled to Japan to research Brachiopoda. Arriving in the port city of Yokohama in 1877, he was invited by the Japanese Ministry of Education to become a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and began his investigation of the Åmori shell mounds in that year.2 While giving lectures at the university and speeches to enlighten the Japanese about evolutionary theory, Morse unearthed a large amount of earthenware. His publication of the results of his excavations was the first academic paper to emerge from a Japanese university.
As to Morseās theory of the Japanese nation, he concluded that the ancient people of the Japanese archipelago had cannibalistic customs. This conclusion was drawn from the discovery of damaged human bones in the shell mounds. Although this was a mistake, what is of importance is that he did not believe that this ancient people were the direct ancestors of the modern Japanese nation. The ethnic group that lives in the archipelago today other than the Japanese nation is the indigenous Ainu. However, based on the fact that the Ainu did not practise cannibalism and had not developed pottery, Morse hypothesised that the people who had formed the shell mounds were the direct ancestors of neither the Ainu nor the contemporary Japanese nation, but an earlier indigenous people, the pre-Ainu. Furthermore, based on Japanese legends, he argued that the present inhabitants of the archipelago, the Japanese nation, had come from the south, and had gained their present position after conquering the earlier inhabitants.
Morse was not the first to argue that an aboriginal people had earlier inhabited the archipelago and that the āJapaneseā were conquerors who arrived later. Phillip Franz von Siebold (1796ā 1866), who came to Japan as early as 1823, had suggested in Nippon, a work that was published after he returned home to Germany, that the stone tools discovered in various parts of the archipelago had been left behind by the Ainu, an aboriginal people, and that a Tartar nation had later fought these earlier inhabitants and occupied their land.
The idea that the stone tools unearthed in various parts of Japan had been crafted by a people other than the āJapaneseā was also shared by some scholars of the Edo Period. The best known example is Arai Hakuseki, who developed the Shukushin theory. In 1725, he argued that the stone tools which had been thought to have been created by Buddhist and ShintÅist deities and goblins were in fact left behind by a nation called the Shukushin which had entered the TÅhoku and Hokuriku regions of northern Japan from the Asian continent. Another Edo Period researcher of stone tools, Kiuchi Sekitei (1724ā1808) advanced the theory that the Shukushin were the Ezo (in other words, the Ainu). Siebold was shown Kiuchiās collection of stone tools and adopted his theory.3
The Japanese legends that Morse consulted were the so-called Kiki myths, which were contained in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. These ancient Japanese myths include the story of the ādescent to earth of the descendants of the godsā (Tenson KÅrin), which described the ancestors of the Japanese Emperor descending from the Heavens (or āTakamagaharaā), the story of the āEastern Expedition of the Emperor Jinmuā, which depicted the conquest by the Emperor Jinmu ā the first (mythological) Emperor and founder of the Yamato Dynasty ā of those who had not submitted to the authority of the Imperial Household, and the story of the conquest of a people known as the Kumaso by Prince Yamato Takeru-no-Mikoto. Peoples with different customs that were not ruled by the Imperial Household were described in terms such as Emishi (a clan that lived in northeast Japan: according to one theory, now dated, the ancient term for the Ainu) and Tsuchigumo.
Arai Hakuseki had already argued that āgod is a manā and that the ādescent to earth of the descendants of the godsā therefore described a movement from a place called Takamagahara, and that the legend that two gods, Izanagi and Izanami, had given birth to the archipelago was in fact a description of the conquest of various areas of Japan by warships. Western scholars took this idea one step further, and argued that the ādescent to earth of the descendants of the godsā was a legend that depicted the migration of a conquering people to the archipelago and that the conquered Kumaso and Emishi were earlier aboriginal peoples.4
Sieboldās second son, Heinrich Phillipp von Siebold (1852ā 1908), who arrived in Japan several years before Morse, collected a large amount of pottery and numerous stone tools, and reinforced his fatherās theory. There are two types of ancient earthenware in Japan: the earlier JÅmon pottery and the Yayoi pottery (the oldest periods in Japanese prehistory are known after this pottery as the JÅmon and Yayoi eras). According to Heinrich, the JÅmon pottery had been created by the Ainu who had once lived throughout the archipelago as far south as Shikoku and KyÅ«shÅ«, but were later pushed northwards towards Hokkaido by a conquering people. Furthermore, John Milne (1850ā1913), an English Oyatoi (foreign employee) who taught geology, also advanced the idea that the Ainu were Japanās aboriginal people.
Alongside this thesis of the existence of an earlier aboriginal people and the immigration of a conquering nation to the archipelago, another thesis that was very influential among Western theories of the Japanese nation was that the contemporary Japanese nation consisted of a mix of various Asian nations.
For instance, in 1875, W. Denitz, a Professor at the Tokyo Medical School (this was merged with the Kaisei GakkÅ in 1877 to form what later became Tokyo Imperial University), argued that the Japanese nation was a mixture of two types of the Mongolian race, including the Ainu, in addition to the Malaysian race. Furthermore, in 1883, the typology of the German, Erwin von BÄlz (1849ā1913, another Professor at the Tokyo Medical School), which is still known today in Japan, was made public. According to BÄlz, leaving aside the Ainu, the āJapaneseā could be divided into two large groups, the āChÅshÅ« typeā, with long heads and thin bodies, a type which he argued was often seen in upper class Japanese, and the āSatsuma typeā, with short heads and thickset bodies, which was often seen in lower class Japanese (both ChÅshÅ« and Satsuma were feudal domains that played a dominant role in the Meiji government). The first group, BÄlz continued, was similar to Chinese and Koreans, and had arrived in south-western HonshÅ« from the Asian continent through Korea, whereas the later was similar to the Malays, and had arrived in KyÅ«shÅ« by a sea-route and had then moved northwards through the archipelago (see the map of Japan at p. vi). This āmixtureā theory became part of the theory of a conquered aboriginal nation through the idea that contemporary āJapaneseā consisted of a mixture of a ruling nation which came to the archipelago from overseas and conquered aboriginal peoples.
It seems that the āJapaneseā of this time appeared to those Westerners who advocated the mixed nation theory as a people with a vast range of personal features. Although this contradicts the notion that the āJapaneseā were frequently seen as an homogeneous group, at the time this seems not to have been an unusual impression. For instance, Around the World in Eighty Days, which Jules Verne wrote in the form of a compilation of information obtained from Western travel diaries of the time, stated that whereas all Chinese had the same āyellowā faces, the āJapaneseā had many different facial colours and features. Much later, in 1934, Bruno Taut (1880ā 1938) also wrote in his diary that the āJapaneseā had a large range of features.5
It cannot possibly be the case that Meiji Period āJapaneseā were much more diverse in their features than is the case today. One possible conjecture is that differences in individual āJapaneseā features that people are not usually conscious of today tended then to be seen by travellers who had experience, and were conscious, of multi-national regions which contained national differences. The view seen in BÄlz that classes were directly linked to national differences, while quite baffling to many Japanese today, was an idea that may well have occurred naturally to Germans of the time.
Since this work will not investigate the origins of the āJapaneseā, but rather focus on the discourse about these origins, it will not examine whether or not the Japanese nation was a conquering nation or a mixed nation. However, the theory that the āJapaneseā were a mixed nation and an immigrant/conquering nation was almost uniform in Western academic theories. In the early Meiji Period, these theories were the only ones seen as scientific views of the Japanese nation. It was not until after the second half of the 1880s that the āJapaneseā themselves began to develop theories of the Japanese nation based on Western anthropological methodology.
Japanese Anthropology and the Revolt against Western Scholars
In 1884, a number of students, including Tsuboi ShÅgorÅ (1863ā 1913), a young student of 20 who was studying biology at the Imperial University College of Science (this later became the Faculty of Science at the Tokyo Imperial University) called a meeting to research ancient Japanese history. A total of ten science students and staff members answered this call, and the research group that borrowed a classroom and opened proceedings is said to be the predecessor of Japanās Anthropological Society.
Tsuboi was the grandson of a Japanese rangakusha (scholar of Dutch studies) and the son of a doctor in the service of the ShÅgun (bakushināi). From his days as a student at preparatory school, he had published a number of handwritten circulating newspapers, including Kore demo shinbun (It May Not Look Like One, But This is a Newspaper), Tonchinkan (Irrelevancy), Negoto hanbun (Half Nonsense), and was an active and brilliant student.6 The official title of the research group was first āJinruigaku no Tomoā (Friends of Anthropology),7 but was later changed to the āJinruigaku KenkÅ«kaiā (Anthropology Research Association) and then the āTÅkyÅ Jinruigakkaiā (Tokyo Anthropological Society) in 1886. In 1931, it became the āNippon Jinruigakkaiā (Anthropological Society of Nippon).8 At first, this group was nothing more than a gathering of young students in a classroom who discussed the Ainu and earthenware. However, in 1886, an official journal, the Jinruigakkai hÅkoku (Anthropological Society Bulletin) was issued at the same time as the title of the association changed from Association to Society. The title of the journal was changed again the next year to the TÅkyÅ jinruigakkai zasshi (Tokyo Anthropological Society Magazine), and later to the Jinruigaku zasshi (Journal for the Anthropological Society of Nippon) in 1911. This publication became the central academic magazine for anthropology in Japan.
For these budding anthropologists, the origin of the Japanese nation was an area of great interest from the start. Japanese anthropologists, like Western anthropologists, would later engage in fieldwork in various areas of Asia, but Japan at this time was the focus of research by the Western Powers. Japanese anthropologists thus struggled to shoulder the burden of studying their own country, though anthropology in Japan eventually emerged from the situation where the overpowering influence was the Western mixed nation theory. Although many talented individuals, such as Torii RyÅ«zÅ (1870ā1951), a student of Tsuboiās who was to become the leading spirit behind the surveys of areas to which the Great Japanese Empire had expanded, and Koganei Yoshikiyo (1859ā1944), who was to become the father of Japanese physical anthropology, participated in the Anthropological Society, almost all adopted the mixed nation theory. There was a debate between the vast majority, including Torii and Koganei, who believed that the Ainu were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago, and Tsuboi, who claimed that the original inhabitants were an extinct race, the Koropok-guru or Korobokkuru, mentioned in legends. However, this can be seen as a rehash of the debate between the Siebolds, who claimed that the Ainu were the original inhabitants, and Morse, who claimed that it was the pre-Ainu who were the first inhabitants.
This was true of others apart from these young anthropologists. For instance, the nativist (kokugaku) scholar, Yokoyama Yoshikiyo (1826ā1879), argued that the Japanese nation was a mixture of āthe earlier native inhabitants, the race descended from the Sun Goddess [the Tenson], and later arrivals from China and Koreaā. According to Yokoyama, āthe earlier native inhabitantsā were the same race as the Ainu. Ono Azusa (1852ā1886), one of the intellectuals of the Meiji enlightenment, in his introduction of Yokoyamaās theory accepted the theory advanced by Morse, stating that āa cannibal race once inhabited Japanā.9
It was natural for there to have been an adverse reaction to this mixed nation theory. One example is Kurokawa Mayori (1829ā 1906), the author of KÅgei shiryÅ (A History of Japanese Arts and Crafts), a pathfinding work on fine arts and crafts, who wrote a number of papers on ancient Japanese peoples from about 1879 when Morseās theory began to emerge, and much earlier than scholars such as Tsuboi.
In āEmishi jinshu ronā (On the Emishi Race) published in 1892, Kurokawa argued against the theory that the Ainu were the original inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago and were the mythical Emishi.10 According to Kurokawa, the word Emishi originally came from a term that referred to all rebels who refused to obey the orders of the Imperial Family and was not a term for an alien nation. Moreover, he stated that the ā Ainu of today [in Hokkaido] are descendants of Japanese who stopped evolving because they moved to the far frontiers of the stateā. In other words, no alien peoples existed on the archipelago and, from time immemorial, the only inhabitants had been the āJapaneseā. He argued that those who claimed that the Ainu were an aboriginal people conquered by migrants led by the Imperial Family who arrived at a later stage were ārogues giving vent to delusionsā who āare in contempt of the Imperial Courtā, or in other words were themselves Emishi in revolt against the Imperial Household.
NaitÅ ChisÅ (1823ā1900), a Mito (a school influenced by nativist thought) scholar who became a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, stated in 1888 in his āKokutai hakkiā (Manifesting the National Polity) that āthere is not a single person in this land who is not descended from the godsā. He criticised the theory that the āEastern Expedition of the Emperor Jinmuā and the ādescent to earth of the descendants of the godsā merely depicted the experience of an immigrant conquering nation, as āviewing the Japanese national polity (kokutai) as equivalent to that of other violent and brutal countries.11 According ...