Late Meiji Period Research Articles

The Circulation of Oscar Wilde’s Prose and Poems in Japan (1868–1926)

AbstractThis essay investigates the circulation of Oscar Wilde’s prose and poems in Japan from the late Meiji period to the end of Taisho period,1 examining the diverse Japanese readings and adaptations of Wilde: a dangerous socialist, a modern poet, a sentimental humanist and essayist, a decadent aesthete, and a martyr to beauty.

Opportunities and Constraints for Late Meiji Women: The Cases of Hasegawa Kitako and Hasegawa Shigure

Opportunities and Constraints for Late Meiji Women:The Cases of Hasegawa Kitako and Hasegawa Shigure Mara Patessio (bio) Scholarship on Meiji (1868-1912) women during the past twenty years has helped illuminate women's social, educational, and political participation as well as the ways in which the government tried to control them. It has also helped put a face on Meiji gendered debates, and the women's life stories that we know of point to the richness and variety of opinions and beliefs women held during those years.1 In this essay I contribute to the discourse on Meiji women by introducing Hasegawa Kitako (1872-1925) and Hasegawa Yasuko (pen-name Shigure, 1879-1941), who were active during the late Meiji period (1890-1912). (Though they had the same surname, the two women were not related. To avoid confusion, I refer to them simply as Kitako and Shigure throughout.) The contrast in their experiences and life stories draws our attention to the importance of families in shaping lives. Moreover, these lives remind us of the importance of private institutions. Anne Walthall has quite rightly pointed out the way in which, compared to the Edo period, Meiji state education narrowed the scope of what women could learn.2 However, the lives presented here show that a variety of private institutions remained important into late Meiji. Kitako was able to support herself and participate in public and educational activities through her association with Westerners and Christian institutions, [End Page 93] whereas Shigure developed her talents entirely within a Japanese context and studied only in private schools. Kitako also seems to have remained single—a privilege of her ability to support herself—whereas Shigure was married. Kitako and Shigure's lives and achievements also have some important points in common that justify their analysis here together. Both women reached financial security through their work, and in the process managed to become famous public figures in late Meiji society, but did not find that to be enough. At a time when the government and many segments of society were fully supporting the ideology of "good wives and wise mothers" (ryōsai kenbo), both were interested in discussing and changing late Meiji women's conditions, thus challenging themselves and society. In order to do so, Kitako became active in the international (Christian) women's movement and discussed Japanese women's rights abroad, while Shigure opened up a new field to women. Raised in the same geographical area of Japan and only a few years apart, Kitako and Shigure's life stories demonstrate how it was still possible to obtain different kinds of education and futures in the late Meiji, during a time when the government was intent on creating a homogeneous female subject. Hasegawa Kitako (1872-1925) Kitako is an interesting woman for various reasons. First, although we know how Western men resident in Japan encountered individual Japanese men—for example, how the Kumamoto Band helped Captain Janes proselytize—the sources available shed much less light on the relationships and the common work of Western female missionaries and Meiji women.3 Kitako's life story tells us not only about her close contact in Japan with missionaries from England (rather than from North America), but also about how such close contact became a defining experience for most of her life, and about the ways in which foreign female missionaries benefitted from Japanese women's work. Second, although most Meiji women involved in foreign missionaries' work in Japan either studied with North American missionaries or went to North America, Kitako went to England (a country in which women's education was highly debated and also supported) to continue her education. We know less about the experiences of Japanese young women studying in Europe than in North America, so her story sheds new light on this topic, and it also shows how some women could use foreign missionaries' connections to access new experiences and build a new future. Third, given that she was already a famous female educator before studying, if only briefly, at the most [End Page 94] prestigious British universities, her opinions were sought for publication in Japanese journals and newspapers that reached wide audiences...

市川新松と市川鉱物研究室

Mr. Shinmatsu Ichikawa was a prominent mineralogist, although he was an ordinary citizen and not in government service. He lived from the late Meiji Period to the early Showa Period. He taught in elementary school and teacher training school despite not having a regular university education. He was self-taught in mineralogy and foreign language, and became a pioneer in the field of crystal morphology. His contributions include observations of the etched surfaces of natural minerals and of artificial etched quartz crystals and quartz spheres. He observed the etch pits, etch hillocks, growth hillocks and striations on the surfaces of several minerals found in Japan, engraved their positions, shapes and distributions on metal plates, and discussed his observations. He built the Ichikawa Mineral Laboratory in his house in 1918 to store his collection of minerals, rocks and fossils (more than 7000 specimens in all). His collection includes big quartz crystals twinned after Japan law from the Otome mine, twisted quartz from the Naegi region, amethyst crystals from Mt. Ametsuka and the Yusenji mine, natural etched minerals from various parts of Japan, and many minerals from the North America. The Laboratory is a historic cultural site in his hometown. Its preservation and enlightenment activities are cooperatively carried out by the local government and a neighborhood self-governing body.

Book Review: China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period

Book Review: China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period

China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904. By Urs Matthias Zachmann. London: Routledge, 2009. x, 238 pp. $150.00 (cloth).

China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904. By Urs Matthias Zachmann. London: Routledge, 2009. x, 238 pp. $150.00 (cloth).

Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time , and: China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895-1904 (review)

Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time , and: China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895-1904 (review)

China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904. By Urs Matthias Zachmann. pp. xi, 238. London and New York, Routledge, 2009.

China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904. By Urs Matthias Zachmann. pp. xi, 238. London and New York, Routledge, 2009.

China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904 (review)

Reviewed by: China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904 Douglas Howland (bio) China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904. By Urs Matthias Zachmann. Routledge, London, 2009. x, 238 pages. $150.00. At the risk of resembling one who shouts, "But the emperor has no clothes!" I would observe that the title of this book indicates neither its contents nor its argument. There is no discussion of a "Japanese discourse on national identity" in the book; and "national identity" appears only in the index, where it features as a holder for the set of definitions of Japan that members of the Japanese political elite offer in the course of the book's narrative: Japan as civilized, as the pioneer of progress in East Asia, as the leader of the East, and more (p. 235). Is this another case of editorial interference [End Page 439] in the determination of titles? The misleading use of "discourse" is especially unfortunate because it might well impel would-be readers to ignore the book as another of those postmodern complaints informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and their ilk. To the contrary, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period is disengaged from matters of historiography and epistemology and thus unencumbered by what unfriendly readers might dismiss as "theory." In fact, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period attempts to focus on Japanese public opinion. As author Zachmann specifies in both the "Introduction" and "Conclusion," the book concerns the Japanese public's shifting opinions about China during the decade marked by the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars: 1895–1904 (pp. 3, 153). Accordingly, the two central elements of the book's argument are this choice of decade and the representation of Japanese public opinion. Zachmann's representation of the decade in question is based on the diplomatic histories narrated by William L. Langer and Shinobu Seizaburō.1 His first chapter serves as an introductory review of the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, and his subsequent four chapters follow the "great events" of the decade: the Sino-Japanese War and the Tripartite Intervention, the Far Eastern Crisis of 1897, the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, and the Boxer Incident of 1900. This period is quite familiar to readers of Sino-Japanese interactions, having been covered over the last three decades in several monographs and conference volumes by scholars such as Joshua Fogel, Paula Harrell, Douglas Howland, Marius Jansen, Noriko Kamachi, Lu Yan, Jürgen Osterhammel, Douglas Reynolds, and many, many more Japanese, Chinese, and European writers—all of whom follow the path established by the remarkable Sanetō Keishū in the 1940s. Zachmann candidly notes that these scholars have covered most of this history already, but to the reader ignorant of Sino-Japanese interactions, this new book may serve as an introduction. Upon this familiar narrative, Zachmann constructs the second element of China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: shifting Japanese public opinion. By "public opinion," Zachmann means the attitudes, opinions, observations, and editorial comments of the Japanese political elite—men in government, political parties, and the leading newspapers. The objects of their individual attentions were, first, events in China and, second, Japanese government policy toward China. Foremost among these men are the familiar Fukuzawa Yukichi, Konoe Atsumaro, Kuga Katsunan, and Ōkuma Shigenobu; but Zachmann includes other, more interesting and less familiar figures such as Hinohara Shōzō (a bank representative in London) and Nakamura [End Page 440] Shingo (an international law student in Germany), as well as a host of anonymous commentators for the Chūō shinbun, Jiji shinpō, Kokumin shinbun, Tōkyō mainichi shinbun, and other publications that putatively represent a range of political opinions in Japan during the decade. Zachmann begins by categorizing these generators of public opinion in the early Meiji period as either "realists" committed to social-Darwinist power politics or "idealists" committed to justice and a chivalric regard for the oppressed. Fukuzawa was the most outspoken representative of the former, while intellectuals involved with the People's Rights Movement and the Yorozu ch...

Dendrochronological Dating of Vernacular Folk Crafts in Northern Central Japan

We dated vernacular folk crafts (traditional snow shovels) made of beech wood (Fagus crenata Bl.) in north-central Japan. A raw chronology was constructed for the folk crafts, spanning the period from 1721 to 1953 (233 years). The raw chronology was crossdated using a reference chronology in central Japan. Eventually, tree-ring dates were confidently determined for 26 out of 44 samples. The final tree-ring dates of the folk crafts ranged between 1872 and 1953. We used oral folkloric records collected in a public survey for comparison and verification of our results. The time period of use of the folk crafts was supposed to range between the late Meiji Period and the beginning of the Pacific War (World War II), and the tree-ring dates were generally consistent with the date range. However, the final tree-ring dates were after the Pacific War for two youngest samples, showing better agreement with the historical change in industry of modern Japan. The tree-ring dates demonstrate the potential to describe the historical use of the artifacts more accurately than the folkloric records. In addition, the existing site chronology of Japanese beech has been better replicated using the folk craft samples. The chronology can possibly be further extended using archaeological wood from historical buildings.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF NOH THEATER REFORM IN THE LATE MEIJI PERIOD

This paper examines the debates on Noh theater reform that formed the core of Noh reform during the late Meiji period. Specifically, it considers the Noh Theater Reform Committee, in which Yamazaki Seitaro and Got Keiji participated, and analyzes the content of the committee's discussions. In particular, improving the kensho (spectator seating) became the main issue, and comparisons were always made with reformed kabuki theaters. Ultimately, the opinions of the Noh Theater Reform Committee became ideals furthering the adoption of nested seating in later Noh theaters.

明治後期～大正中期の中学校における外国人教師の役割 : 山口県における外国人教師制度を事例として( 教育における臨床の知)

明治後期～大正中期の中学校における外国人教師の役割 : 山口県における外国人教師制度を事例として( 教育における臨床の知)

明治後期の日記にみる滋賀県西部の里山ランドスケープにおける山林資源利用のパターン

This study investigated how local people in the late Meiji Period used forest resources in satoyama landscape or local village landscape in daily life. The investigation was based on two diaries, respectively written by a farmer and by local woodsmen of a rural village in the western part of Shiga Prefecture. The diaries, local records, and data such as topography and property distribution were analyzed and some of the elders in the village were interviewed in order to gain an understanding of the use of forest resources in that time. GIS-data of topography were drawn, and GIS was used to establish a forest resources pattern. According to GIS results, the farmer conducted 95 different kinds of activities related to forest resources from 1900-1912, compared to 207 activities by the woodsmen in the period of 1894-1905 and 1907-1909. Among these, some activities overlapped: 30 were common activities that provided resources for daily life and were essential in both occupations, such as the production of firewood or grass-cutting. The study revealed a wide variety of forest resources use (pine, Japanese cedar, Japanese cypress, grass, firewood) and a pattern that varied according to factors such as topography, property distribution and distance.

HOW JAPAN FIRST BEGAN TO EXPORT MACHINE-MADE MANUFACTURES TO EAST ASIA*

Drawing on late Meiji period data, the efforts of Japan’s cotton spinning mills to overcome overseas competition and establish themselves in the Chinese, Korean and Hong Kong markets are examined. Estimating a probit model of the decision to export, it is found that despite readily available export finance and commercial networks that should have greatly lowered the costs of participating in East Asian markets, sunk entry costs still appear to have been quite large. Many otherwise capable mills apparently saw little prospect of entering tariff-less East Asian markets, notwithstanding the possibility of generous subsidies and trade association devised predatory strategies.

The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism (review)

Reviewed by: The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism Stephen Dodd (bio) The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism. By Michael K. Bourdaghs. Columbia University Press, New York, 2003. x, 273 pages. $49.50. In this book, Michael Bourdaghs sets out to demonstrate that the novels of Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943) may be read as a key to exploring contending versions of Japanese nationalism that have been played out in the literary field since the late Meiji period. The story of how Tōson came to prominence [End Page 227] first as a romantic poet with his 1897 publication of Wakanashū(A collection of seedlings) is well known. Echoing the title of his own book, Bourdaghs hints that this romantic phase is a link between shifting concepts of national identity and Tōson's own emergence as a major literary figure of modern Japan: "The speakers in the poetry of Tōson figure the subject of national imagination as a being driven ceaselessly forward, spurred by the desire for a promised moment of awakening, a springtime of rejuvenation and rebirth—a dawn that by its very nature must never arrive" (p.12). In Tōson's major work Yoake mae (Before the dawn, 1929-35), the character Hanzō (loosely based on the experiences of Tōson's own father) was equally fired by the romantic spirit of Meiji, and his pathetic demise by the novel's end represents the bitter realization that the tantalizing promise of "dawn" would remain forever unattained. However, it is the very articulation of unfulfilled desire that lends shape, and significance, to the story's telling. Likewise, Bourdaghs's book presents Tōson's writing—and perhaps Tōson himself—as a kind of open text, susceptible to a variety of readings that never fully satisfy our desire to know, yet which, taken together, offer significant and compelling insights. While such an approach may lend itself to the danger of reducing Tōson to a mere smorgasbord of multiple readings, Bourdaghs locks his own investigations within the disciplining framework of the specific historical contexts in which these readings were constructed. In the process, his insightful and informative book has deepened our understanding of a highly influential but sadly still neglected Japanese writer. The book argues that Tōson's literature reveals how most of the energies of potentially more progressive, alternative views of what it meant to be Japanese had been appropriated and tamed by the late 1930s under the rubric of a more aggressive and exclusionary nationalistic discourse that had taken center stage. However, the author is at pains to point out that Tōson himself should not be categorized as a xenophobic, ultranationalistic writer (an exponent of what he calls "bad" nationalism): indeed, it is precisely his association with liberal and antielitist, cosmopolitan views ("good" nationalism) that makes him an excellent case study for a far more subtle interplay between literary text and social context. The point is well taken, and I am reminded of Alan Tansman's meditation on possible links between Shiga Naoya's writings and the emerging "fascist aesthetic" of the 1930s. Direct correlations between Shiga's literature and politics simply do not ring true, but the question that remains is the extent to which such sensitive writers may have "aesthetically seeded an atmosphere of fascism."1 Bourdaghs, too, concentrates on Tōson's intervention in a range of nationalistic discourses at this more complex and ambiguous level. [End Page 228] Though the book deals primarily with Tōson's novels, the introduction offers a useful recapitulation of his instrumental role as a poet, in particular the way a modern national identity was bound up with the search for a new poetic form. For example, we read that, compared to poets like Masaoka Shiki who argued for a masculine, patriotic style in keeping with the spirit of Meiji, Tōson's romantic contribution to the new poetry was decidedly more ambiguous and "unmasculine." Yet his very adoption of a "feminine" role replicates an earlier, long-standing tradition of males appropriating, and thereby asserting dominance over, the female literary voice. In this way...

明治末における美感と「美術」の制度

In 1907 the Ministry of Education established an annual salon called Ministry of Education Art Exhibition or Bunten. The establishment heralded the final stage of modernization of art institutions by the Meiji government. Bunten gathered a tremendous number of visitors. In 1909, The Yorozu Choho, a popular newspaper of the time, ran a new correspondence column on the sense of beauty: “the moment when I felt the beauty”. Between January and June, 26 letters appeared in the column which would be divided into four categories: visual beauty, acoustic beauty, a compounded beauty of both the visual and the acoustic, and an ethical beauty. But there were no letters which directly referred to art works. In the late Meiji period, people were seriously interested in the occult and in pseudo-sciencesuch as hypnotism and clairvoyance. The Yorozu Choho serial was in the same vein: an exploration of a mental and psychological field.

Marketing the Modern: Department Stores, Consumer Culture, and the New Middle Class in Interwar Japan

From its origins in the industrial fairs and emporiums of the 1870s and 1880s, the department store, by the 1920s, had become a fixture of the modern cityscape and a key agent for the cultural production of the new middle class in Japan. Central to this role was the equation of the department store with the culture of consumption that became one of the hallmarks of the Taishō (1912–1926) and Shōwa (1926–1989) periods. In their search for a growing mass market, department stores worked to commodify and modernize the material culture of everyday life. In the process they sold a vision of the modern defined as the totality of consumer products available at their stores. The cultural authority of the department store assured the spread of this particular definition in the 1920s and 1930s, supplanting earlier ideas that embodied modernity in such things as parliamentary government, railroads, and a colonial empire. In other words, department stores shaped an idea of the modern that associated it with the daily practices of private life rather than the public institutions of the nation-state and industrial capitalism.For a discussion of this earlier concept of the modern, see Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985).

The Missionary Work of the Nichiren Sect in the Late Meiji Period

The Missionary Work of the Nichiren Sect in the Late Meiji Period

External-PIXE identification of material for popular music pipes during the late Meiji era, Japan

Two types of music pipes, Ginteki and Suifûkin, that were popular during the late Meiji period in Japan were semi-quantitatively analyzed by the external-PIXE at RIKEN. The aim of this study is to identify the material used for these pipes and to assist the description to make an instrumental catalogue. Our results show that most of the collected Ginteki, literally silver flute, is composed of two parts. One is the whistle head of Pb - Sb alloy with the Pb to Sb ratio between 5.9 and 6.4; and the other is the main body with six holes which is made of tinplate. All of the Ginteki in this study are nickel coated. The Suifûkin, on the contrary, is made of only tinplate and is not coated with nickel.

The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862-1945.

Preface Introduction: why do people travel? Why do people write about travel? Part I. Past and Present, Discovery and Rediscovery: Travel to China Through the Late Meiji Period: 1. Travel in the context of East Asia 2. First contacts: the travelers aboard the Senzaimaru and other early accounts 3. Kangaku travelers in the Meiji period: China as ailing organism Part II. Fitting China Back In: Travel to China in the Taisho and Early Showa Periods: 4. Travel writing and the changing nature of Sino-Japanese relations 5. Educators, scholars, students 6. Professional travel writers 7. Journalists and politicians 8. Businessmen and the military 9. Novelists, poets, critics, and artists 10. Wartime travel in China Conclusion: travel within the world of Chinese characters and the problem of understanding China Appendix A. A note on the terminology for travelogues Appendix B. Abbreviations used in the notes and bibliography Notes Bibliography Character list Index.

The Tectonics of Japanese Style: Architect and Carpenter in the Late Meiji Period

The Tectonics of Japanese Style: Architect and Carpenter in the Late Meiji Period