Social Turbulence and Local Autonomy: Japanese Historians Interpret Chinese Social Groupings

Abstract

Introduction About a century ago, around the time of the 1911 Revolution, China entered a period of radical change in political and social thought as it confronted institutional upheaval unprecedented over the previous two thousand years. This period was effectively the era in which Japanese historiography was shedding its embryonic post–Meiji Restoration incarnation and beginning to demonstrate signs of independent development. Historical research and current affairs—as well as research on Japanese history and research on Chinese history—mutually influenced and indeed stimulated topics raised by one another.2 While this phenomenon may have emerged because Japanese historiography was at an immature stage when specialization and fragmentation had not reached high tide, as they have now, at the same time we can nonetheless see, as one often finds in newly developing academic fields, that scholarly concerns were at once naive and yet developing with considerable liveliness. In this essay I shall use the case of a Japanese historian who was affected by movements in Chinese society around the time of the 1911 Revolution as a clue to examine what impact a comparison of Japanese and Chinese society had on Japanese historiography at that time and subsequently. To be sure, inasmuch as I am not a specialist in Japanese history, I cannot evaluate whether the theses proposed by the historian at that time are valid or not. What I would like to assess here, rather, are what questions he raised and how widely these