Academic Nations in China and Japan

Framed by Concepts of Nature, Culture and the Universal

Margaret Sleeboom

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134376148
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Chinese History

The descriptions Chinese and Japanese people attribute to themselves and to each other differ vastly and stand in stark contrast to Western perceptions that usually identify a 'similar disposition' between the two nations. Academic Nationals in China and Japan explores human categories, how academics classify themselves and how they divide the world into groups of people.
Margaret Sleeboom carefully analyses the role the nation-state plays in Chinese and Japanese academic theory, demonstrating how nation-centric blinkers often force academics to define social, cultural and economic issues as unique to a certain regional grouping. The book shows how this in turn contributes to the consolidating of national identity while identifying the complex and unintended effects of historical processes and the role played by other local, personal and universal identities which are usually discarded.
While this book primarily reveals how academic nations are conceptualized through views of nature, culture and science, the author simultaneously identifies comparable problems concerning the relation between social science research and the development of the nation state. This book will appeal not only to Asianists but also to those with research interests in Cultural Studies and Sinology.

Part I

Framing the nation

1 Introduction

Framing the nation in China and Japan

This book, based on extensive periods of fieldwork in academic circles, inquires into the roles researchers assign to their part of the world on the platform of international relations. It explores the ways in which researchers ‘frame the nation’, which is partly a result of them being framed by the nation. By this I mean that researchers partly define their research in terms of the nation by virtue of a historical environment that defines the world in terms of nationhood, also when such a frame may not be of relevance to the research problematic at hand. The former meaning is explored in the first two parts of the book on classification methods, while the latter takes the form of case-studies in Part III.

Group classifications and distinctions

This book is about classification, more specifically, about approaching academic issues by classifying nations and world regions. Thinking about human categories involves making distinctions between them, and distributing them over various categories. Although we use human categories all the time, we are hardly aware of the large variety of categories we use and the ways in which they change and overlap. Intellectuals tend to be aware of the categories used in their own research area rather than in others. For instance, the psychologist, apart from looking at the constants and variables linked to, say personality structure, may treat culture as a relatively unproblematic constant; the cultural anthropologist, on the other hand, may well regard culture as a variable and treat biological factors as constants. Interdisciplinary research, on the other hand, may prompt us to use different categories and different classificatory methods to understand and define problems.

We make distinctions between societies and cultures and label them. For instance, we distinguish between patrilineal and matrilineal societies, ones that are wealthy and poor, developed and undeveloped, civilized and primitive and so on. Depending on the way we are used to analyse problems and what in life we find problematic, we categorize things differently, that is, we use different criteria to mark groups. These markers delineate the borders between groups in a variety of ways. Some markers are used to emphasize only the differences between two extremes (bipolar opposites). Others mark both similarities and differences between groups (patterns of contrast), or show the gradually changing shades of differences between groups (bipolar continuum). I also make a distinction between different kinds of markers: those that use culture, nature and universals to delineate the differences and similarities between national and regional groups.

The ways of marking and the kinds of markers used in academic research are usually related to the disciplinary and socio-political background of the author and the time spirit. In this book I look at the ways in which marking styles are related to the kinds of markers used for making national and regional group distinctions in a selection of case-studies from the Chinese and Japanese academic worlds. In other words, I look at how the nation is framed in two countries that may be thought to be very different. The examples from China and Japan to throw light on the similarities in which we frame groups despite the great differences we perceive.

Why do I use examples from China and Japan? Is it because I believe that the nation in these countries in some way is different from the nation elsewhere? Definitely no, although of course each nation has its own ‘unique’ history. The choice of examples from these two countries only has illustrative value in the light of my aim to understand various forms of categorizing groups. The examples have no representative value of academic research in these two countries. As shown below, one cannot only find parallels in modes of categorization between Orientalism and so-called ‘reversed Orientalism’, but also between the ways in which Chinese and Japanese scholars classify nations. The examples used, therefore, merely contribute to an understanding of taxonomies of classifications, and I am convinced that a similar study can be conducted in other parts of the world. In other words, elsewhere, too, it is possible to study the ways in which nations are classified, form the framework through which scholars understand their research problems, and the ways in which researchers themselves give meaning to the nation by the ways the ‘nation’ functions as a unit of research. In this sense, the concept of ‘framing the nation’ has a double meaning, indicating a process of interaction between a conditional framework of research and a practice in which the nation obtains its meaning.

The problem of framing the nation

This study focuses on the bias resulting from using the nation as a framework of research to the exclusion of other units of analysis and comparison. Some conceptions of the nation are premised on the notion of cultural uniqueness, others on that of biological uniqueness. Racial discourse may elucidate the general problem of framing the nation. Racial explanations of human behaviour refer to physiological features, even though other factors may be more plausible. Racism selectively blinds the racist academic and excludes other explanations. Racial categories, then, prejudice the mind of the racist researcher. In nation-centric research based on the notion of race, race may be defined through the political borders of the nation-state or the bio-cultural notion of homeland. Thus, some Chinese equate Chineseness with the possession of certain bodily features; others equate it with the ‘Chinese family’. In a similar way, nation-centric blinkers affect academic definitions of ‘unique’ national characteristics, while common factors such as the influence of nation-state politics, the outcome of unintentional processes, and the role played by other local, personal and universal identities are discarded or expanded into essentializing and sweeping generalizations. This is what makes nation-centric approaches relatively biased in a way hard to detect. For, in some cases the bias is stronger than in others, and the bias is hidden in the research framework.

Framing the nation and Orientalist categories

This book targets those academic works that dogmatically, systematically or thoughtlessly use the nation-state as their framework of analysis. Historically, it grew from the national and regional functions specific regions had in both policy-making and academic thought, often referred to as Orientalism. This kind of regionalism and nation-centric thought is not only evident in Orientalism but also in other forms of academic thought that habitually, mechanically or strategically centre on the national and regional unit.

In his Orientalism, Said described the Orient as a product of the Occident, as an idea that corresponds to unequal military, economic and political relations between imperialists and colonialists and the dominated. The ideology that defined the Orient, Orientalism, functioned in academic life through doctrines and theses on the Orient; through styles of thought, by making an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident; and as a corporate institution, an authority involved in describing, teaching, and controlling the Orient. In this view, the authority of Orientalism made it impossible to think, write and behave without taking into account the constraints imposed by Orientalism.

Said also referred to Gramsci’s distinction between civil society and political society in explaining the pervasive influence of Orientalism. The former constitutes voluntary affiliations of indirect domination, such as schools, the family, and unions; the latter concerns direct domination by means of the army, police, and the central bureaucracy. In Western civil society ideas influence institutions and people by creating consent, and when certain cultural ideas dominate, he speaks of hegemony. Hegemony instils Orientalism with power and influence, providing Europe with a collective notion of Us and Other, corresponding to the Orientalist categories of a superior Us and a backward Other. To Europeans, the familiar European was classified as rational, virtuous, mature, and normal, while the exotic Oriental was set apart as irrational, depraved, childlike and different. In such classification schemes, temporal categories projected the Oriental into the past of modern Europe as primitive, backward, undeveloped, and uncivilized, thereby justifying Occidental paternalistic and condescending attitudes toward its Oriental object. Thus, the power to define and classify the Other as very different from Us became an indispensable tool for backing up military domination.

Said’s work poses important questions about the role of the expert in defining his object of study, the generation of knowledge and, consequently, the power of applying knowledge. But Orientalism, in the first instance, was meant to deal with the orientalization of the Middle East. A comparison of the West’s relationship with China and Japan indicates the existence of multiple forms of dominance and hegemony. China was never colonized in the sense that India was; and, Japan was never colonized (parts of it were, by the Japanese themselves) or militarily dominated by ‘the West’, apart from by the allied forces (SCAP) after the Pacific War. Neither was Japan essential to the self-definition of a historically rootless Occident. And yet, Japan has been defined in the same condescending and detemporalizing manner by experts of Japanese studies such as Chamberlain, Sansom and Reischauer (Minear 1980). Japan posed no particular religious threat, nor was it regarded as a possible source for the philological roots of European languages. Japan’s élite had built a tradition of defining itself by reference to its own historical schools of which some were oriented on China. Only later, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the West became Japan’s main reference group, with which it was soon in competition for its own hegemonic sphere. Although scholars, missionaries and travellers wrote works on Japan that fit in with the Orientalist tradition as described by Said, they were not just an extension of a relationship of domination by Europe of Japan. In fact, the reverse thesis is just as plausible. Writings on the West and the experience of Japanese travellers, bureaucrats, samurai and scholars in the West were important factors in Japan’s effort of building a strong nation-state, and subsequently, the hegemonic expansion of Japan in Asia.

The treatment of China by sinologists and China experts raises further issues against the (localized version of the) thesis of Orientalism, as Occidentals were led into adapting classifications of Us versus Them by the Chinese and vice versa. Chinese literati has provided an enormous corpus of scholarly contributions to the study of its own civilization, based on empirical, historical and philological research. Western knowledge of China was at least partially dependent on Chinese images of China, not in the least for reasons of a linguistic nature. The time and energy needed for mastering the Chinese language, especially ancient, classical and literary Chinese, left little scope for generating Orientalist definitions greatly diverging from those offered by Chinese traditional scholarship itself. Therefore, the affinity between Sinology and Chinese self-images may well explain so-called Orientalist notions of China as a static and exotic society. Moreover, the foreign scholar’s high regard for ancient Chinese tradition did not necessarily reflect a duty to rescue some portion of a lost, past classical oriental grandeur in order to facilitate amelioration in the present Orient. It may well result from an adoption of Chinese élite reverence for antiquity.¹

Although both China and Japan have been construed in the image of what was seen as a progressive development to modernity, debate always concerned the tensions between universalistic aspects of this modernity and the extent to which it represented a particular ‘Western’ mode of development. Similarly, Marxist theory posed the problem for Chinese and Japanese Marxists of turning localized historical movements into ‘inevitable’ revolutions that were to observe universal laws, that is, applicable to all societies. It is therefore incorrect to presume that Chinese and Japanese self-images were a direct result of imperialist domination. It would assume Chinese and Japanese populations to be orientalized, passive objects, utterly incapable of giving direction to history and unfit to deal with relations of power and domination. For instance, the Japanese nineteenth century policy of ‘Using the barbarian to control the barbarian’, signifying the importation of military equipment and knowledge for warding off the Western barbarians, does not testify to the predicament of a corner-driven helpless victim. Rather, it bares witness to a mutual relation, albeit a lop-sided one, of threat and resistance, and creation and destruction. Japan’s way of dealing with foreign threat had a parallel in Nara and Heian Japan, when it imported legal institutions, religious and political ideas, and science and technology from China. This time, however, the West took the place of China as perceived teacher and dangerous bully, and even before the rise of its own imperialism and military expansion, Japan developed its own intellectual tradition, reminiscent of what Said has coined Orientalism (cf. Tanaka 1993).

Framing the nation and reducing ‘Them’ and ‘the Other’

Orientalism has played a role in the rise and expansion of modern nation-states. This realization, however, should not divert our attention from the fact that many modes of ‘Orientalism’ have existed long before it was written about. Nor should we forget that Orientalism is akin to many genres of ethnocentrism, expressed in the discriminatory notions and generalizations we make about units of comparison, such as culture, society, race, region, country, and species. Thus Asian nationalism and debates on national identity can not be explained as a mere reaction to so-called Western imperialism in the form of ‘reversed Orientalism’ (Al-Faruqi 1988). For, it is not a mirror image of something else, nor is it mere reactive resistance to imperialist action or modernity, not even when it defines itself as such. Although Said’s Orientalism has provided an insight into the ways in which culture is intertwined with relations of dominance, it also tended to reduce cultural tradition to a function of an abstract notion of power, in which the historical nature of dependence is not specified sufficiently. Orientalism, in the first instance, was meant to deal with the orientalization of the Middle East. Orientalism in China and Japan, countries never colonized in the sense that was India, took on a different shape.

In this book, I intend to deal with examples of both Orientalism and ‘reversed Orientalism.’ Just as Orientalism has as its main referent ‘the Other’ (Fabian 1983), reversed Orientalism has a They in the form of a powerful bully. ‘They’ also plays an indispensable role in domestic politics as a negative example. For instance, notions of collective self-victimization and national persecution are easily spotted by their use of set performative expressions. For example, ‘They imperialists’ exploited ‘Us poor but brave victims’; and, ‘We’ cannot overcome Our national trauma’s if ‘We’ follow ‘Their’ rules and ways of thinking.

Critics of this kind of self-victimizing discourse in Japan, such as Peter Dale, Ivan Hall and Karel van Wolferen, in turn, seem to ascribe to the Japanese nation-state a strong but mysterious sense of agency. Although Peter Dale in his The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (Dale 1995) rightly criticizes theories of Japanese uniqueness (nihonjin-ron), he explains their production by referring to certain totalitarian notions peculiar to Japanese history. This history, paradoxically, can only be understood by ‘deepening our familiarity with the trajectory of German nationalism from 1808 to 1945’ (Dale 1995: 215). But, such historical reductionism cannot explain why in China (and other countries) very similar theories of uniqueness have flourished and still do. Similarly, in The Enigma of Japanese Power (1989), Karel van Wolferen characterizes the Japanese political system as lacking in principle and accountability, implying that other political systems are not. This Japanese system fosters certain forms of cultural and historical constructions, subtle forms of censorship, and indoctrinates the peop...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Nissan Institute/RoutledgeCurzon Japanese Studies Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the text
• Abbreviations
• PART I Framing the nation
• PART II Group categorization
• PART III Group-framing habits and strategies
• Appendix I: Joint research, Nichibunken (1988–96)
• Appendix II: General research meetings, Nichibunken
• Appendix III: Fields of basic research
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index