Debate and Dissent in Late Tokugawa and Meiji Japan

Abstract

has often been portrayed as lacking traditions of rhetoric, public speaking, and debate. Acccording to this view, as expressed by Roichi Okabe, Japan has not witnessed the development of any indigenous rhetorical theory and practice. (187). Both and communication scholars have argued that the supposed dearth of indigenous rhetoric is the result of strong cultural proscriptions, deep currents of resistance to Western logic, public discourse and the clear expression of opinion. Debate seems an especially alien activity from the essentialist view of as a harmonious and homogeneous culture. The modern appearance of speech and debate activities in is often attributed to contact with the during the Meiji era (1868-1912) and to the efforts of Yukichi Fukuzawa and other popularizers of culture. Klopf and Kawashima, among others, insist that Japan's practice of debate is on its century-old history of speech education introduced by Fukuzawa. (4). Becker also portrays debate as an alien activity introduced to during periods of political Westernization in the Meiji era and again during the American occupation after World War II. As culture-specific transplants in strange soil, Becker argues, these movements did not spread widely or extend beyond periods of intense contact with the, Limited States. (Becker, Japanese 144). Such characterizations of history and culture as arhetorical or antirhetorical are based on myths of homogeneity and harmony that conceal centuries of ideological conflict, dissent, struggle, and repression in Japan. For the ruling elite and its supporters, the notion that dissent is somehow un-Japanese has along been used to justify the suppression, even execution, of those who engage in it. (Hane, Reflections 1-28). Myths of unanimity have real consequences. For the United States government, whose sponsorship and dissemination of national character studies during and before World War II continue to inform rhetorical scholarship on Japan,(1) pan, I portrayals of homogeneity have been used to justify total war. Belief in predisposition to the irrational and illogical, and in their supposed antipathy toward reasoned deliberation, strengthened American insistence upon area bombardment and unconditional surrender. (Dower 94-117; Hikins 379-400). More generally, characterizations of culture as hostile to argument, logic, declamation, exposition, and debate have fueled judgments of cultural inferiority when viewed from within a culture that equates such activities with civilization itself.(2) But in the past decade historians such as Mikiso Hane, Tetsuo Naiita, and J. Victor Koschmann have reviced the portrait of Japan's past. What has emerged is not the relatively peaceful arhetorical society described by Becker (Reasons 90) and others, but a country whose past three hundred years have been marked by great ideological and often physical conflict, and whose disputes have often been conducted and recorded in the form of debates. In this paper I will demonstrate that: (1) had a rich and well-documented tradition of debate for centuries before its opening to the West in 1853; (2) Fukuzawa and other proponents of public political debate in the Meiji era had little meaningful exposure to theories or strategies of debate; and (3) The spread and subsequent decline of public political debate during the late Tokugawa and Meiji periods should be understood not as proof of essential cultural qualities or their absence, but as internal political developments grounded ill the turmoil of the times. Debate Traditions Notions persist that debate is somehow antithetical to culture or even that it is impossible to conduct in language. Even so respected an observer of culture as Edwin Reischuer note the absence of much genuine debate on the floor of the Diet and conclude that it is absent from culture in general. …