Abstract
This article attends to a formative moment in the history of Japanese historiography around 1900, when many Japanese historians began to identify with the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke—curiously, however, without a substantial preceding engagement with his work. The article employs the concept of the “scholarly persona” to explore the views of influential Japanese historians on the significance of Leopold von Ranke as an embodiment of scholarly virtues. Contrasting Ranke's image in Japan with that prevalent among German and European practitioners, the article argues that Ranke did not function as a marker of a “Western” or “modern” way of doing history, as most previous accounts of his impact in Japan have asserted, but as a universally appropriable icon of a globalizing discipline.
Highlights
The Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) enjoys the elevated status of a founding father of the historical discipline
This article attends to a formative moment in the history of Japanese historiography around 1900, when many Japanese historians began to identify with the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke—curiously, without a substantial preceding engagement with his work
While the literature in English and German so far has upheld the claim of a substantial intellectual impact of Rankean historiography on Japanese historians, this article will show that there is very little evidence for this, but that the short outburst of interest in Ranke around 1900, which will be called a “Rankean moment” here, is instead best read as emerging from a concern with norms and virtues of scholarly practice that had little to do with Ranke per se
Summary
This article attends to a formative moment in the history of Japanese historiography around 1900, when many Japanese historians began to identify with the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke—curiously, without a substantial preceding engagement with his work. Its starting point is a curious disparity: while Euro-American surveys of Japanese history writing in the nineteenth century have made strong claims about the impact of Rankean historiography, so far no attempt has been made to corroborate a substantial intellectual link between Ranke and Japanese historians This introductory section discusses evidence that casts doubt on the presence of such a substantial link and introduces the particularities of the “Rankean moment” as an opportunity to rethink the notion of Rankean historiography through the lens of the scholarly persona. The most significant contribution on Ranke’s thought before 1945, Kyoto University historian Suzuki Shigetaka’s treatise on Ranke’s view of world history, published roughly four decades later, did not even acknowledge the discussions of the Rankean moment, even though these were centrally concerned with Ranke as a world historian.22 While both the lack of evidence for previous engagement and the nature of the Rankean moment are hard to reconcile with earlier accounts of Ranke’s impact in Japan, the notion of the scholarly persona offers a different explanation. By shifting the focus away from intellectual lineages and towards models of scholarly virtue, it allows us to conceptualize the Rankean moment as a culmination of the search for models of the good historian that had occupied Japanese scholars since the late 1870s
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