The Limits of Westernization

American and East Asian Intellectuals Create Modernity, 1860 – 1960

Jon Davidann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351655880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The goal of this project is to locate the origins and development of modern thought in the United States and East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While a strong literature on post-war modernization exists, there is a gap in the pre-war origins and development of modern ideas. This book re-evaluates the influence of the United States on East Asia in the twentieth century and gives greater voice to East Asians in the construction of their own ideas of modernity.

1 Modernity in East Asia

Early pioneers, 1860–1920

Fukuzawa Yukichi travels to the West

Fukuzawa Yukichi, a young Japanese student still learning English, accompanied the first Japanese diplomatic mission in history to the United States in 1860 as its English interpreter. This American encounter, along with a second trip alongside a Japanese Embassy to Europe in 1863 and a third trip back to the United States in 1867, greatly influenced his thinking about Japan and its future. Although he thought the manners of westerners abominable, he admired the independence of their thought and the openness of their discourses. On his trips, he focused not on western philosophy and science, knowledge he thought he could absorb by reading a book on the subject, but on the more practical side of American and European affairs. Who paid for the expenses at a hospital? How was money deposited in a bank and loaned out? It is an early indication of how Fukuzawa treated western ideas. Fukuzawa exhibited a pragmatic curiosity about things and ideas from the West. They might work for Japan, or they might not work. They could be used or tossed away. But the primary concern for Fukuzawa was to find ways of moving beyond a political regime (the Tokugawa) he perceived as deeply flawed and failing in Japan. On his first trip to the United States in 1860, Fukuzawa had a photo taken of himself in San Francisco posing with the photographer’s daughter, Theodora Alice Shew, a young American girl. The photograph shows a spare youth dressed in a kimono with a samurai haircut, staring out at the viewer in a defensive posture, arms crossed, with a curious but unyielding visage. In a later photo, Fukuzawa, still in his traditional kimono, wears the swords of the samurai at his waist. He peers out at the camera with a robust impassive face, still stubborn but now more confident and comfortable.¹

Fukuzawa’s interest in the West came in part from his stubborn streak. His independence got him into trouble on his second voyage to the United States in 1867. During the journey, he publicly made critical comments about the Tokugawa government, accusing government officials of using their titles and access to gain important privileges and criticizing the government for its anti-foreigner policy and closed ports. After his return to Japan, the Foreign Office banished him for several weeks from its headquarters as punishment for his indiscretions. Fukuzawa became a careful and enthusiastic observer of the West. As his English language skills improved, he became the translator of all things western into the Japanese context. It is important to note, however, that Fukuzawa did not receive formal education in the West. He absorbed information on his trips and read western philosophy on his own.²

Fukuzawa studied things western carefully. But he became more than just a translator of Western ideas. Fukuzawa’s travels reverberated throughout Japan and East Asia. He wrote about them soon after he returned to Japan in Seiyo Jijo (Things Western), a simple-to-read ten-volume compilation of his observations on western life and institutions that became a bestseller. As the reader will see, however, his thought turned out to be wide-ranging. He also wrote two groundbreaking books on learning and civilization, founded a newspaper, Jiji Shimpo (Current Events), and a university, Keio-Gijuku, and even wrote a children’s book on world geography. He became the most productive and influential intellectual of the Meiji era. His books were read not only by Japanese elites but by also by villagers in organized reading groups, a remarkable testament to the breadth of his influence. Far from endorsing imitation of the West, Fukuzawa encouraged Japanese to be independent thinkers. Fukuzawa’s personality traits such as his natural curiosity, stimulated by his trips abroad, and his independence allowed him to think beyond the present to a more modern future. Combined with his writing skills and intellectual abilities, he established a way of considering modernity that shaped the thought of generations of Japanese intellectuals to come.

Fukuzawa helps us confront East Asia on its own terms, not through the prism of American perceptions that were at times wildly inaccurate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fukuzawa (1835–1901) and Chinese thinker Liang Qichao (1873–1929) constructed early versions of modern thought, helping to establish a template by which East Asians could build hybrid modernity using their traditions, including Confucianism, while borrowing selectively from the West. Their utilization of specific Confucian ideas is surprising given the reformers’ almost universal identification of Confucianism as part of the problem.

East Asian intellectuals, Wang Yang-ming thought, and modernity

The dominance of Confucianism in East Asia marks an essential departure from American thought where no such overarching intellectual framework existed. East Asian modernists all sought to liberate their thinking from the confines of Confucianism. However, as the reader will see, this did not mean jettisoning Confucianism altogether but rather retooling it for modern purposes. Using some ideas from Confucian thought strengthened the resulting ideas because it was well-understood, it fit the particular historical context well, and it had immediate appeal.

Wang Yang-ming thought is especially crucial to understanding the renewal of Confucianism in the late nineteenth century.³ Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), a scholar-bureaucrat and general in the Ming Dynasty, believed the official state doctrine of Confucianism had devolved to meaningless externalities in his time, and he attempted to revive its ethical dimension by explicitly arguing for the unity of thought and action. As a metaphysical proposal, Wang’s thesis is problematic, suffering from the conflation of two separate but related entities: thought and action. As a solution to the problems of self-seeking and corruption, the fusion of thought and action together was a necessary corrective. Wang had suffered from his share of injustice and cruel leadership. A capricious court eunuch, Liu Jin, who disliked Wang, exiled the young scholar-bureaucrat from court. After years of hardship, Wang returned to the imperial court stronger and more convinced that China needed ethical leadership. Surrounded by treachery and weak leadership, Wang exhorted Chinese to be moral in their thought and action and to serve the higher good of the state.

An examination of Wang Yang-ming’s success in putting down two rebellions as general of China’s armies demonstrates his philosophical approach. In 1519, during an uprising of the Ning in southern China, Wang effectively quelled the revolt through direct military action—using a culverin cannon, newly imported from the West, to attack Ning forces—and timely deception in which he feinted an attack on the Ning while buying time to reinforce Nanjing and build his army. However, after he captured the leader of the rebellion, the Ning Prince Zhu Chenhao, he received a command from the emperor’s inner circle of advisors to release the prince so the Zhengde emperor could lead his own army to recapture the prince and take credit for putting down the rebellion. Wang took the ethical high ground, repeatedly refusing to do their bidding, even though his life was in danger as the emperor’s eunuchs sought retribution against him. Eventually, the emperor relented, and Wang returned to court in honor for having put down the rebellion and resisted the corruption of the court in its attempt to deceive the Chinese people. The second rebellion took place in Guangxi in 1527, at the end of Wang’s life. The Ming dynasty emperor asked him to come out of retirement to stop it, but he refused, and the emperor had to ask him again before he agreed. Another scholar-bureaucrat, Yao Mo, had attempted to quell the rebellion using great military force but had been unsuccessful, and the emperor relieved him of command. Wang first spent several weeks studying the situation to build a strong knowledge base. He then decided not to use physical force but rather establish negotiations with the main instigators, several ethnic minority groups. He soon had an agreement in hand, ending the rebellion.⁴

In both cases, the rebellions are instructive examples of Wang Yang-ming’s philosophical approach. In the first, Wang acted out of his ethical knowledge by judging the right and wrong of the situation, and he maintained his conscience (moral righteousness) and acted righteously, resisting the demands of the emperor’s advisors to engage in a public lie, even at the risk of death. In the second rebellion, Wang studied the situation to gain accurate knowledge, so his actions flowed from correct information and not mistaken assumptions or a lack of understanding. Finally, in the second rebellion he depended upon organizing loyal and courageous militias to aid in the effort to the end the revolt, and these men showed strong civic-mindedness.

Wang adeptly raised ethical and moral action to the level of state duty, making him very attractive to late nineteenth-century East Asian reformers. In a time of crisis, Wang inculcated public courage and action, and in both China and Japan political instability and the threat of western imperialism in the nineteenth century created a great need for citizens possessed of strong moral courage and willing to work for the protection of the nation against internal and external threats.

Thus, in the late nineteenth century, East Asian modernists turned to Wang for inspiration. In their search for ways to modernize East Asia and ward off western imperialism, they recognized in Wang an argument to build civic virtue: loyalty to the nation, independent thinking, and unselfish citizen activism. In a discourse that resonated especially strongly with Japanese intellectuals, Wang suggested individuals could risk the rejection of family and the loss of status for the sake of saving the nation. Wang had exerted a powerful influence on Japan in an earlier period: one of the most important schools of thought in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) became the Wang Yang-ming School or the Yōmeigaku (Ōyōmei-gaku). In the face of the western threat, Wang’s ideas became an attractive option to help reform and strengthen the nation.⁵

Western imperialists expanded their control in many parts of East Asia in the nineteenth century. They obtained spheres of influence in China and forced both China and Japan to sign unequal treaties—the provisions of which allowed western countries trade advantages and extraterritoriality status for their citizens in these countries. The western powers established treaty ports where foreign residents could live under their own guard—and British warships were located nearby in British-controlled Hong Kong.

Fukuzawa Yukichi and modern independence

Born into a lower samurai family in Osaka in 1835, Fukuzawa was raised in a time of political disturbances. The 1830s were a time of famine and poverty throughout much of Japan, including Osaka. As a result, Osaka was a hotbed of radical thinking, and Wang Yang-ming thought became quite popular there, with several Yōmeigaku (Wang Yang-ming schools) where acolytes taught Wang Yang-ming thought. Wang’s philosophy indicated that a man should do as his conscience provided and not blindly follow his lord. Thus, it allowed for a rebellious attitude.

In 1837, after a series of crop failures during a time of famine, Oshio Chusai, among the most important of Yōmeigaku thinkers and a prominent teacher in Osaka, led a rebellion of impoverished peasants against the Tokugawa in Osaka. The revolt failed, Oshio took his own life shortly before being captured, and large parts of Osaka were burned. Fukuzawa does not mention the incident in his autobiography, but stories of this episode likely made their way into Fukuzawa’s classroom and his group of friends. While Fukuzawa never embraced radicalism, the idea that one should openly oppose injustice became part of his concept of individuals exercising independent thought and judgment.⁶

His father’s experiences in the local clan also profoundly influenced Fukuzawa. He was an accountant but dreamed of becoming a scholar; however, his lord refused to allow him to undertake intellectual studies. Nonetheless, Fukuzawa’s father imbued in his children the same dream. Fukuzawa never forgot how the Tokugawa caste system denied his father. As he later explained, “The feudal system was my father’s mortal enemy, which I am honor-bound to destroy.”⁷ His father, known as a strict Confucian, kept his morals in his work and his family life. Although his father died when Fukuzawa was an infant, Fukuzawa inherited from his father his commitment to study and improve himself. Fukuzawa took up his father’s wish, and he became an excellent student.

In Osaka, Shōzan Shiraishi, a scholar of Confucianism and Han learning, became Fukuzawa’s teacher. Shōzan opposed the Zhu Xi school of Confucianism which taught the forms of the perfect gentleman through fine poetry and literature, the same school Wang Yang-ming had accused of degrading the original thought of Confucius. Shōzan derided the uselessness of poetry writing in his classroom. Fukuzawa and his schoolmates followed suit, making fun of Chinese learning, especially Chinese medicine. He reflected on this atmosphere later in his autobiography.

Our general opinion was that we should rid our country of the influences of the Chinese altogether … they [Chinese medicine students] listen to those crazy lectures of their master, but he simply repeats the same old mouldy theories handed down for how many centuries! Poor things!⁸

Fukuzawa dismissed the delicacies of Confucian theories and instead embraced a moral heart, a stout body, and a sound mind.

After Fukuzawa became well-known, he wrote An Encouragement of Learning, a famous treatise on education published from 1872 to 1876 as sixteen different pamphlets. In it, Fukuzawa strongly criticized the old Confucian ways of learning for their impracticality. “In essence, learning does not consist in such impractical pursuits as the study of obscure Chinese Characters, reading ancient texts which are difficult to make out, or enjoying and writing poetry.” These forms of learning were “without practical value” in Fukuzawa’s words. Instead, one should learn so that one can search for “the truth of things and make them serve [one’s] present purposes.”⁹ Fukuzawa’s criticisms of traditional Chinese learning matches that of Wang Yang-ming’s rejection of Confucian orthodoxy. Even though we have no evidence Fukuzawa explicitly endorsed Wang Yang-ming Confucianism, it is quite likely he was familiar with it. Fukuzawa revealed his “present purpose” soon enough.

There were opportunities for advancement even within the framework of the Tokugawa system, and Fukuzawa showed promise and became well-educated. In 1858 Fukuzawa went to Edo (Tokyo) to work as a tutor, and a year later, as his English...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Modernity in East Asia
• 2 The development of modernity in American thought, 1890s–1910s
• 3 John Dewey’s trip to China, Hu Shih, Lu Xun, and Chinese modernity, 1919 to World War II
• 4 American and Japanese internationalism and modernity in the 1920s
• 5 Modernity in crisis, 1930s–1940s
• 6 The postwar transformation
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index