The British Stake In Japanese Modernity

Readings in Liberal Tradition and Native Modernism

Michael Gardiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351757461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This book describes firstly a Japanese modernity which is readable not only as a modernising, but also as a Britishing, and secondly modernist attempts to overhaul this British universalism in some well-known and some less-known Japanese texts. From the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly as hastened by the spectre of China in the First Opium War, Japan's modernity was bound up with a convergence with British Newtonian cosmology, something underscored by the British presence in Meiji Japan and the British education of key Meiji state-makers. Moreover the thinking behind Britain's own unification in the long eighteenth century, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, is echoed strikingly faithfully in the 1860s-70s work of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nakamura Masanao, and other writers in the 'Japanese Enlightenment'. However, from around the end of the Meiji era, we can see a concerted and pointed response to this British universalism, its historiography, its basis in the sovereign individual subject, and its spatial mapping of the world. Elements of this response can be read in texts including Natsume S?seki's Kokoro, Watsuji Tetsur?'s F?do ( Climate and Culture ), Tanizaki Jun'ichir?'s In'ei Raisan ( In Praise of Shadows ), Kawabata Yasunari's Yukiguni ( Snow Country ), and various work of the mid-period Kyoto School. Rarely understood in terms of its British specificity, this response should have something to say to modernist studies more generally, since it aimed at a pluralism and de-universalisation that was difficult for mainstream British modernism itself. Indeed the strength of this de-universalisation may be precisely why these 'native' Japanese modernist tendencies have not much been accepted as modernism within the Anglophone academy, despite this field's apparent widening of its ground in the twenty-first century.

1     Introduction

Descriptions of the formation of Japanese modernity still typically describe a negotiation with ‘the west’. I will not be suggesting that this is wrong, but this terminology can sometimes obscure the specificity of the forces behind the negotiation, as well as later modernist responses to them. I will be arguing that much in Japanese modernity and Japanese modernism can be related more pointedly not only to influences from Britain, but also to the ideas that unified and consolidated the modern British state. I will suggest that Japanese modernity in the Meiji (1868–1912) era was in large part a negotiation with the conditions of the British raison d’état unfolding over the long eighteenth century, and globalised in the nineteenth. And correspondingly, what I am calling Japanese modernism, becoming apparent roughly from the post-Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and the post-Meiji era, can sometimes be seen as a provincialising or localising response to these conditions.

Why, although Britain is understood to have been the global superpower during the Meiji era, has there not been more specificity in relating British mythologies to the Japanese context? One reason has been a relative lack of interest in the makeup of Britain across the breadth of the American academy, where much work in Japanese Studies happens. There is unlikely to be much description of the mythologies that consolidated Britain if Britain isn’t seen as something that had to be consolidated, that is, without appreciation of the importance of some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, to British unificatio Much of the intellectual framework of modern Japan derives from nationally specific negotiations in Britain’s peripheries, but this national specificity has tended to get lost. Another way to put this might be to say that the moral forces that allowed the unifying ideas behind the modern British state to appear universal are still in operation; this universalism seems to have an anchor in nature, and leaves behind it a metonymic chain of terms which becomes hard to unthink, for which nineteenth-century Britain is really a big England. Even when Britain’s national differences are acknowledged in theory, it can be difficult to see how the aims of state cohesion resonate in the global expansion of British values, encountered at its peak of influence by a rapidly modernising Japan. So in addition to suggesting that the developmentality negotiated by late Tokugawa (–1868) and Meiji Japan is not simply Western, but also very largely British, I want to see its relation to the origin myths of the British state – from its creation at the turn of the eighteenth century, in more expanded moral form in the Scottish Enlightenment later in the century, and in the hands of the nineteenth-century traders working to ‘open’ Japan.

These stories of adjustment and de-adjustment to British globalisation will be read here across texts which are probably mostly familiar, though probably not usually thought of in modernist terms. They will consider the reception of British ideas with a sense of their Britishness specifically, and their origins in a wide-scale adjustment to British commercial empire. They will suggest that much of the intellectual foundation of Meiji Japan can be tracked to a peripheral British determination to define development, and that even into the nineteenth century, these models show national aims, fitting Scotland into British union and empire in terms of progressive historiography, space, and subjectivity – a nationalness that has almost always been overlooked, even when there is a concentration on the nationalness of Japan itself. The thinking of that most iconic theorist of Meiji modernisation, Fukuzawa Yukichi, drew heavily from eighteenth-century Scottish Political Economy or its later incarnations, and, like the Meiji Enlightenment of which he was a part, transmitted a Scoto-British concern with development from the barbarous to the civilized, the local to the global, the ‘feudal’ to the commercial. Similar can be said about Japan’s modernist de-adjustment, which oddly mirrors Scottish modernism in its rethinking of Enlightenment’s claims to the universal. Japanese modernisation, this suggests, can be read in terms of an attempt to come to terms with British universalism, and Japanese modernism can be read in terms of attempts to overcome this universalism. Indeed the Japanese early twentieth century might be seen less as a story of ‘overcoming modernity’ than one of ‘overcoming Britishness’.

This is not to suggest that British modernity was rejected – and like others I will take issue with the once-common idea that 1920s-30s Japanese writing is characterised by a struggle to escape the modern world. Rather, during this period there arises a push for a spatiotemporal plurality which answers a previous unipolarity and which is readable as modernist critique. In this sense, Japanese modernism shows some of the characteristics more familiar from modernism as the Anglosphere usually understands it – fragmentation, temporal disjunction, a new interest in antiquity, a renegotiation of historicity, and so on. Japanese modernism can even be seen as taking the promise of the disruption of Victorian narratives more seriously than was possible for its British counterpart, and as willing to slip the gravity of the British Empire’s conception of the worldly – an argument made by some Kyoto School writers towards the end of the period. Japanese modernism might be ‘more modernist’ – it might loosen the bonds between the modern and the organic, stressing modernity’s status as something manufactured or staged, and something which can be radically decentred. For reasons I will explore, these modernist impulses have too often been seen as anti-modernist, as atavistic or escapist; their serious challenges in terms of subjectivity and space have often been overlooked, even by ‘new modernist studies’ since the 2000s, a body of criticism often making ‘worlding’ promises, though in practice operating very largely within the needs of North American institutions.

To put this another way, the term modernist is understood here as deriving from a historiographical and subjective challenge, rather than following a search for recognisable modernist forms. As commentators like Susan Friedman Stanford have suggested, a serious revision would read modernist form from texts making this kind of challenge, rather than scanning texts to see if they show attributes already familiar as modernist.¹ Extensions of modernist studies in the early twenty-first century have come up with masses of interesting material, but they have also often transmitted an idea of modernism as something that extends globally from pre-existing frameworks, and have often accepted plurality in theory but in practice been beholden to institutional demands that derive, I suggest, from the very British-global origin myths the modernism is trying to overcome.² In the sense understood by Friedman, even the documentary (‘historical’) work of Mori Ōgai or the philosophical speculations of Watsuji Tetsurō are quite readable in modernist terms, and I track this challenge across the thematics of various 1910s–30s texts, including those of novelists like Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Kawabata Yasunari, and writings of the Kyoto School, a loose collection of philosophers at Kyoto Imperial University (later Kyoto University) following Nishida Kitarō from the 1910s, now often glossed as Japan’s most important twentieth-century philosophical school. These texts answer not only ‘European’ thought (an answer by now often described of the Kyoto School), but more specifically the universalist conceptions of space and subjectivity arising from figures like Newton, Locke, and Smith, touchstones for Japan’s own nineteenth-century cohesion. The vehicle that takes universalist, globalising thinking to East Asia is the broad British state, and it does so with a sense of belonging to nature and commanding a whole ‘world’. This is the movement of capitalism, certainly, but beyond this it is the worldview that gives capitalism an ethics and a naturalness, and this can be tracked in Japan’s passage to and from British liberal tradition.

This discussion then has two parts. The first points to some of the touchstones for Meiji modernity in ideas from Britain’s consolidating and expanding phases, and the second looks at how these are revisited in various modernist stories. It reframes some well-known texts, including Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro and Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni, and less familiar ones, like Mori Ōgai’s ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’ and Nishitani Keiji’s Sekaikan to kokkakan, but it is not a literary history, and confines itself rather to a few suggestions on thematic readings of discrete texts. Nor does it try to make authoritative statements about literary movements or genres, its readings ranging from short historical fictions to travelogues to round-table discussions – nor about the authors themselves, their motives, or critical consensus about their positions. It is less an address to Japanese Studies than an outsider reading that considers British thematics in single texts. And while there are many other stories to be told about the ongoing influence of other bodies of thought, foreign and domestic, including Shintō, Confucianism, and German philosophy, these stories are not the focus of this study, which aims more modestly to track the course of British origin myths in and out of Japanese modernity.

The story of the ‘in’ begins by returning to the origins of Meiji modernity to suggest an orientation of Japanese reform towards the British liberal worldview before and after kaikoku (‘national opening’). Chapter 2 opens with a speculation about a cosmological convergence provoked by Japanese neo-Confucianism’s need to come to terms with the techno-moral incursion of the global superpower, especially after the First Opium War (1839–42), and the search for a ground on which immanent status differences could be dispersed into the endless dynamic production of inequalities grounding the British form of nature. The length of this convergence before and after 1853 complicates the idea, sometimes still assumed, that Japan’s entry to modernity is best dated from the appearance of the American ‘black ships’. In particular, Japanese restorationists had to negotiate the version of Scottish Enlightenment thinking that had driven the British imperial mission through China and empowered traders to act largely as de facto policymakers. There is already a large body of research on the dominant British presence in the Japanese Treaty Ports and its legal, social, and educational power, but here I also further describe influences on the foundations of unified Japanese authority in the traders’ ‘late Enlightenment’ values. Moreover the force of the native Japanese Anglophile adjustment, largely led at first by those educated in Victorian Britain, was so great that by the end of the Meiji era some British writers would see the country as a kind of honorary member of the Anglosphere, measured by British proofs of historiographical soundness, in a sub-genre I call, after one of its models, ‘Britain of the East’. Chapter 3 then looks at the still under-reported direct intellectual influence of the Scottish Enlightenment and its nineteenth-century echoes on Japanese opinion-formers. It goes back to some of its sources, including the Chambers guide to Political Economy that would be adapted by Fukuzawa Yukichi (the supplement to Seiyō jijō/Conditions in the West, 1868), and notes Scottish Enlightenment ideas in the Meiji Enlightenment journal Meiroku Zasshi (1874–75), organ of the Meirokusha group of public intellectuals and sometime government officials, a group at times looking like a Scottish Enlightenment pressure group. A coda to this can be seen in a half-forgotten 1880 paean to the restorationist radical Yoshida Shōin by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which the Meiji Enlightenment’s cleaving to the progressive individual who climbs towards worldly civilization becomes something more ambivalent.

After this consideration of some of the British touchstones for Meiji modernity, Part 2 moves on to suggest modernist thematics in late Meiji and post-Meiji texts’ bracketing some of the stuff of British universalism. Chapter 4 describes a reframing of what the later Scottish Enlightenment called ‘conjectural’ history, after the historiographical breakwater of the suicide of the military hero Nogi Maresuke – a reassessment that suggests not only the end of Meiji as an era, but also the end of eras understood in terms of universal or staged history, and that is readable in Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro (1914) and Mori Ōgai’s later ‘historical fiction’ (‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, 1912/1913).³ Chapter 5 relatedly suggests a ‘shadowy’ renegotiation of Newtonian space as a ground of universal subjectivity, in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In’ei raisan (In Prase of Shadows) (1933) and Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni (Snow Country) (1935–37), and, in another sense, in Watsuji Tetsurō’s Fūdo (Climate and Culture) (1935). Finally the last chapter asks about the troubled term tradition, usually assumed to be implying a desire for continuity, but readable rather as a desire for discrete pasts, and part of a wider attempt to unsettle the British monopoly on the world-historical. In these terms, Nishitani Keiji’s Sekaikan to kokkakan (World-View and State-View) (1941) and the first symposium of the Kyoto Chūō Kōron series (1941) are placed against the ‘organicist’ curation of modernism by F.R. Leavis and early university English, and against a reincarnation of this organicism in the wartime work of George Orwell. This chapter suggests finally that although this challenge to the world-historical was largely written off after a British wartime renewal of the organicist defence, it attains a new significance with the sense of a further neoliberal defence stretching thin in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 5.

2 For example, in the kind of first paragraph often seen in this form of critical writing, in ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123(3), May 2008, 737–48, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz describe the new modernist studies, which is supposed to be more worldly, as invented with the creation of a new US-based organisation, backed up by US journals and prizes, and anchored to North American universities.

3 Throughout this study, family names are used, contra a fairly common practice of using given or pen names, especially for well-known figures (so in this case, Natsume rather than Sōseki). When full names are cited, family names are given first, except when a writer uses a non-Japanese name order; and names follow the conventions given in publications, for example having no macrons where the author has published under a name with no macrons – so, for example, Ken Ito not Itō Ken. The names of authors who publish in both English and Japanese also follow the published forms – so Yuichi Kato not Katō Yūichi.

Part 1

Britishing as Modernisation

2 Liberal Convergences

A Speculation on Cosmological Convergence

In 1824 Aizawa Yasushi, a scholar from the Mito School and a contributor to the epochal Mito Dai Nihon shi/Great History of Japan, met around a dozen crew from whaling ships swept ashore on the island of Takarajima in the far southwest of Japan, in today’s Kagoshima prefecture. Amidst communicative difficulties, a Captain Gibson wrote down a short introduction of himself and his ship, including country of origin and other cultural fragments.¹ Aizawa’s short account An’i mondō (1824) contains notes on writing scripts used insofar as he understands them, on customs, communications, and international relations, information centred on Anglia or, more familiarly, Igirisu, Britain.² The next year Aizawa expanded his impressions of the foreign ships in Shinron/New Theses, describing the need to adapt to the British techno-moral threat. He was concerned by British colonisation in Africa and India (justifiably), and by the possibility of Anglo-Russian cooperation to dominate Japan (less so).³ Britain, he perceives here, expects ‘to annex all the nations in the world’, equates force and trade, and combines military or ideological means pragmatically as needs arise.⁴ Shinron would undergo many transformations and become a touchstone for late Tokugawa reformers, and its chain of influence, especially after the First Opium War, would animate the rebels who pressed for the alliance of han (domains) against a failing bakufu (shogunal government), which is to say Japanese national unification pointing towards the 1868 Restoration. Here I suggest that the Meiji Restoration correspondingly has more in common with Britain’s own founding Restoration of 1688 (the ‘Glorious Revolution’) than is usually stated: firstly, immanent forces become the anchors of a dynamic world (Newtonian motion), the dynamism behind the cosmology of the new Brit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Britishing as Modernisation
• Part 2 Modernism as Reaction
• Index