Late Meiji Period Research Articles

A Study on the Language Activities of ‘intelligent non employed’ in the Late Meiji Period : A Comparison between the 1912 Novels “Kanoyouni” and “Higansgimade”

A Study on the Language Activities of ‘intelligent non employed’ in the Late Meiji Period : A Comparison between the 1912 Novels “Kanoyouni” and “Higansgimade”

Technoscientific speculations: the anti-mimeticism of Japanese science fiction in the literary context of the late Meiji period

This article proposes that Japanese science fiction emerged as an escape from the limits of the realistic representation of the world proposed by Naturalism. It reads three science fiction short stories published in the magazines Tanken sekai (World of Exploration) and Bōken sekai (World of Adventure) between 1907 and 1910 to discuss early science fiction in which authors utilised technoscientific discourse. Engaging in a set of textual practices centred on developments of modern science and technology, these authors developed one of science fiction’s distinctive features: anti-mimeticism, a literary mode focused on the depiction of anything that cannot happen in real life. This article focuses on the modalities by which these stories—Tenkūkaikatsu Dōjin’s ‘Gessekai shinkon ryokō’ (Lunar Honeymoon), Ishii Kendō’s ‘Gessekai dokuryoku tanken’ (Self-made Exploration to the Moon), and Hakui Michihito’s ‘Yukai to benri wo kiwametaru ōgon jidai no tokai seikatsu’ (The Extremely Amusing and Comfortable Golden Age of Urban Life) 1 —employ a rationalistic view of the phenomenal realm to generate fictional worlds that relinquish the dominance of a mimetic representation of reality. An analysis of early Japanese science fiction from the late Meiji period reveals two elements that eschewed the realistic literature such as Naturalism: objective narration and an anti-mimetic base for the fictional world.

A Study on the Process of Laying Electric Tracks in the Periphery of Kyoto in the Late Meiji Period

A Study on the Process of Laying Electric Tracks in the Periphery of Kyoto in the Late Meiji Period

20세기 초반 서구 학자들의 중국회화사 정점기 규정

Most Chinese painting histories written in the West in the early 20th century define the Tang and Song dynasties, especially the Song dynasty, as the pinnacle of Chinese art. In general, the rules of canon in art history are agreed upon by the interaction between academic achievements and art mechanisms such as art museums, art markets, and art education. However, in the early 20th century, Chinese art was not sufficiently distributed or educated in Western society. Therefore, understanding how scholars’ viewpoints were formed under these conditions is an example of what the discipline of art history depends on in a specific situation.<BR> Japan was the first country to publish the history of Chinese art, including the history of Chinese painting. What is noteworthy is the fact that the viewpoint of Japanese academics has changed from Tang-Song in the late Meiji period to the Yuan zenith theory of the early Taisho period, and there was a political intention behind this background. Although Western researchers had no political intentions, they were greatly influenced by Japanese publications such as Histoire de l’art du Japon and the Japanese and English versions of Kokka . Accordingly, in the early Chinese painting history in the West, the view of the Song dynasty as the apex was dominant. And it is inferred that the reason why the Yuan zenith theory was not accepted in the West was due to Western art history which viewed the Renaissance as the apex, and the prejudice against literati painting. In other words, it can be said that the Western Chinese painting history in the early 20th century was formed by the insufficient data for knowledge accumulation, the cultural power of Japanese art history academia, and the prism of Western art history.

Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936 by Ricky W. Law

Reviewed by: Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936 by Ricky W. Law Annika A. Culver Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936. By Ricky W. Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 343. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-11084743634. In Transnational Nazism, Ricky W. Law masterfully seeks to illuminate the deeper ideological and cultural underpinnings of the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Berlin and Tokyo. In so doing, he details a largely asymmetrical relationship: the interwar-period Japanese largely esteemed Germany above Germans’ similar considerations of Japan within interactions between the two nations during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and early Nazi years (1933–1945), roughly analogous to Japan’s late Taishô (1912–1926) and early Shôwa eras (1927–1989). He highlights several [End Page 627] factors for this imbalance among Germans: few opportunities to learn Japanese in Germany, vast distance and expense to travel to Japan, and the entrenchment of popular stereotypes. Often formed in earlier decades, Germans held common tropes of Japan, which mirrored those widespread among Anglo-Saxon Westerners, such as a reputation as an exotic land of “cherry blossoms” (aptly symbolized by the geisha) while also evoking Kaiser Wilhelm’s militaristic yellow peril concept (embodied in the form of samurai and an invented tradition of the bushidô philosophy). These characterizations curiously echo historian Asada Sadao’s assessment of similar images of Japan in middle-class American imaginations, and Rediscovering America, Peter Duus and Kenji Hasegawa’s 2011 study on a century of Japanese perspectives of the United States. However, where and how did these ideas develop among two future Axis powers and allies? Utilizing national, city, corporate, and private German and Japanese archives in Berlin, Bonn, Freiburg, Leipzig, Koblenz, and Tokyo, Law consults an impressive source base of newspaper articles, pamphlets, popular films, documentaries, nonfiction, dissertations, and research studies. His text provides an exhaustive cataloging of how interwar-period Japanese and Germans viewed each other’s countries through the lens of these various media, which, he asserts, served to jockey influence over reader perceptions in their respective countries. Japanese media studies historian Peter O’Conner characterizes such media as “informal propaganda,” while international relations pundit Joseph Nye might reference them as examples of “soft power.” Law defines this phenomenon of interwar-period German and Japanese transfers of ideas about each other as “transnational Nazism” or “an ideological outlook” where adherents overlooked certain incompatible aspects (like Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism for the Japanese and Japan’s non-Aryan status for the Germans) amid “a worldview that combined emphasis on the nation and communal sharing of benefits and sacrifice” (2). The clear power differential setting Germans at the top of a Western cultural hierarchy, despite their humiliating 1919 prostration at Versailles, also accounts for an oftentimes fawning Japanese attitude toward Germany, such as gratuitous mention of Hitler and Nazi propaganda aped in German-language textbooks. Japanese stereotypes of the nation as a European center for science, politics, and the arts were overwhelmingly positive: much of Japan’s medical establishment had been based on that of Germany’s, with many scientists having studied there in the late Meiji (1868–1912) period, while imperial Japan’s political structure and legal framework benefited from a model derived from the Prussian constitution, with the National Diet earning its name from the German term. Later, when Adolf Hitler appeared to wrest Germany away from a devastating economic depression begun in the early 1920s, even before the global Great Depression, Japan’s pundits gazed in starry-eyed admiration at the charismatic leader. By contrast, German attitudes during the Weimar period reflected the multivalent perspectives of a democratic state, often regarding Japan [End Page 628] critically while still exoticizing its people and landscapes in ways that obscured the imperial nation’s high degree of urbanization and modernity. Notably, after the 1931 Manchurian Incident, when Japanese troops invaded northeast China, a clearly indifferent view toward China emerged in German newsreels, film, and other media, while portrayals sympathetic to Japan and its military adventurism abroad increasingly arose. However, despite its ground-breaking analysis of an often-overlooked aspect of international relations between the two countries during a...

The Analysis of Basic Establishment Concept, Maintenance and Operation Contents about Haneda Athletic Ground Established by Keihin Electric Railway After the Late Meiji Period

The Analysis of Basic Establishment Concept, Maintenance and Operation Contents about Haneda Athletic Ground Established by Keihin Electric Railway After the Late Meiji Period

Imagining an Islamic Japan: pan-Asianism’s encounter with Muslim mission

Under the influence of a globalized discourse about Japan’s uncertain religious future, many Muslims in the early twentieth century placed Meiji Japan in a religious imaginary, in which Japan became the arena for a competition between different religious aspirations. This religious imaginary is an example of the effect of mediated connections, in which information from Japan to Muslim majority regions and vice versa was generally transmitted through Euro-American channels. As a result, Muslims envisioned strategies to convert the Japanese to Islam, aiming to demonstrate the universal relevance of their religion. While this led to a number of missionary endeavours, which quickly ended in failure, it was in the realm of the imperial imaginary that Islam as a geopolitical tool became attractive to pan-Asianist circles in Japan. In collaboration with select Muslim partners and by giving visibility to the existence of Islam in Japan, Japanese pan-Asianists of the late Meiji period tried to inspire loyalties in Muslim regions for the benefit of Japan’s imperial goals. Although this partnership would not last long, it prepared the ground for Japan’s Islam policy in the 1930s and 1940s, which characteristically blended pan-Asianism with religion and the showcasing of Muslim life in Japan.

Bushidō as a Hybrid: Hybridity and Transculturation in the Bushido Discourse

This paper examines the discourse on bushido in the late Meiji period. My aim is to shed light on bushido’s hybridity by using the concept of transculturation. Transculturation conceptualizes encounters between different cultures as a process of mutual construction. The bushido theorists that are discussed in this paper are in some sense transculturators, struggling between Japan and the West, the particular and the universal, and tradition and modernity. One of the common theoretical strategies for solving this problem attempted to valorize bushido and was mostly dependent on establishing equivalence with similar traditions in Western culture, such as chivalry or gentlemanship. Nitobe’s famous book on bushido went beyond this type of strategy. He not only accounted for things in Japanese cultural tradition by using Western logic, but also reinterpreted Western concepts in light of Japanese cultural traditions. This makes Nitobe a more perfect example of a transculturator than others. The ultra-nationalist discourse on bushido by Inoue Tetsujiro shows another curious aspect of bushido’s hybridity. Bushido became at once purified and hybridized through the distinction he made between superficial formality and the essential spirit. Thus, the discursive strategies of bushido theorists are closely related to bushido’s hybridity.

English Oratory in late Meiji Period Japan : Debating at Hitotsubashi

English Oratory in late Meiji Period Japan : Debating at Hitotsubashi

‘Organizing’ Meiji Women: the role of the Japanese chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for individual activists, 1900–1905

ABSTRACTStudies of the activities of the Japanese chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU, also known as Reform Society, est. 1886) in the late Meiji period (1868–1912) have primarily focused on its reformist agenda associated with the ongoing imperial nation-state building such as abolition of licensed prostitution, promotion of monogamy, and women’s education. With its strong connections to Japanese elites, Western missionaries, and female sympathizers, however, the WCTU in the early twentieth century provided its ambitious members with useful opportunities to learn necessary skills and broaden their networks. By scrutinizing three individual members with different interests as case studies, including charity for victims of industrial pollution, publication of a household magazine, and anti-war socialism, this paper demonstrates the malleability of the WCTU that extended beyond its renowned agenda and various ways in which individual members benefited from the organization.

On foreign orders for warships constructed by the Kawasaki Dockyard during Late Meiji period

On foreign orders for warships constructed by the Kawasaki Dockyard during Late Meiji period

明治後期の「世界史」について

明治後期の「世界史」について

〈田舎教師〉の欲望をさえぎる ――明治四〇年代、教育界のなかの文学――

〈田舎教師〉の欲望をさえぎる ――明治四〇年代、教育界のなかの文学――

Emily Anderson.Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God.

Emily Anderson’s new book examines the profound transformation undergone by members of the Japanese Congregational Church (Kumiai kyōkai) as they adapted their theology and ideology to the new realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book joins a large body of scholarship, both on the intersection of empire and religion, and on the trials faced by Japanese Christians during the Meiji reign (1868–1912). Much of that previous work focused on the clash of worlds: either the moment of mission encounter or the conflict between mission Christianity and existing religious and political interests. In contrast, Anderson presents the Japanese Christians not as converts but as missionaries in their own right. The moment of encounter was internal to the Christians themselves, as they came to embrace ideas of social reform, modernization, and national destiny alongside those of religious conviction. The content chapters follow a fairly well-established chronological arc, proceeding from the reformation of domestic social institutions in the mid-nineteenth century, through Japan’s reimagining of its relationship to both Asia and the West, and finally through the stages of continental expansion and experimentation that culminated in the 1932 formation of the Japanese client state in Manchuria. The first two content chapters examine how Christians faced the question of political loyalty during the late Meiji period. The first of these tests was the crisis created by the promulgation of the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), a ritualized document that blurred boundaries between the political and religious, and prompted Christians such as Kashiwagi Gien to refute old criticisms of Japanese Christians as a domestic fifth column. When such concerns resurfaced during the war against Christian (albeit Orthodox) Russia (1904–1905), prominent voices such as Pastor Ebina Danjō responded by dispelling any hint of divided loyalties: the war represented Japan’s sacred duty to bring civilization to the benighted East, and the duty of Christians was to their nation. Three subsequent chapters look to a different sort of expansion: the sacred mission to bring Christ to the Japanese diaspora in California and Korea, to use Christianity first to civilize and absorb the residents of Korea, and later to neutralize the Korean resistance to Japanese rule that had coalesced in Korea’s 1919 independence movement. The book’s final two chapters echo the question of how Christianity informed and inflected the choices of the 1920s and 1930s, examining two separate movements: one for Tolstoyan agrarianism, and another to create Christian settler villages in Manchuria—two reactions to the reality of military adventurism that, while opposed, nevertheless shared a conviction that Christianity would play a crucial role in shaping Japan’s larger destiny.

Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan

The late Meiji period (1868–1912) witnessed the birth of various forms of “progressive” and “radical” Buddhism both within and beyond traditional Japanese Buddhist institutions. This paper examines several historical precedents for “Buddhist revolution” in East Asian—and particularly Japanese—peasant rebellions of the early modern period. I argue that these rebellions, or at least the received narratives of such, provided significant “root paradigms” for the thought and practice of early Buddhist socialists and radical Buddhists of early twentieth century Japan. Even if these narratives ended in “failure”—as, indeed, they often did—they can be understood as examples of what James White calls “expressionistic action,” in which figures act out of interests or on the basis of principle without concern for “success.” Although White argues that: “Such expressionistic action was not a significant component of popular contention in Tokugawa Japan”—that does not mean that the received tales were not interpreted in such a fashion by later Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa-era sympathizers.

Management of and Experiments in a Colonial Industry: Japanese Government-run Fishermen Migration Project in Taiwan during the Late Meiji Period

Between Meiji 41 and Meiji 44 (1908–1911), the Japanese colonial government implemented a fishermen migration project in five prefectures and six ports in Taiwan. This was set up earlier than the Japanese migration project for farmers. The latter was not formally kicked off until Meiji 43 (1910). Comparing these two Japanese government-run migration projects also shows the following differences: First, the fishermen migration project started at the time when detailed surveys and assessments of Japanese colonial migration to Taiwan had not yet been completed. Second, the later farmer migration project, unlike the fishermen migration project, was under the leadership of the Taiwan Sōtokufu (Office of the Governor-General, Taiwan). The fishermen migration project was basically an agenda set up by local prefectures. Third, it aimed at improving Taiwan’s coastal fisheries through recruiting Japanese fishermen to migrate to Taiwan. The idea was that these Japanese fishermen would be exemplary fishermen who would generate incentives for Taiwanese to compete with them. Therefore, in contrast to agrarian migrants, fishermen migration was more of an economic colonial project than a political one. Given that the fishermen migration project in Taiwan was initiated by inexperienced local prefectures while the Taiwan Sōtokufu played only a passive role, its limited achievements are not a surprise. The only successful case was in Donggang (東港), where the geographical location and personal cooperation among local and Japanese fishermen helped it become an ideal place for Japanese fishermen migrants. The migration project failed in all the other five ports. In this paper, I will analyze how the fishermen migration project operated. I will show the different governmental strategies implemented between local prefectures and the colonial government at the time when the implementation of fishing reforms was still in the trial-and-error stage of colonial experiments. At the same time, I will argue that the project failed because of the existence of unfavorable structural factors that worked against the development of the migrant industry. The Taiwan Sōtokufu might have been aware of these unfavorable factors in Taiwan, which did not support the promotion of fishermen migration policies focused on coastal fisheries in Taiwan. Out of concern for colonial rationality, the colonial government had to call off the project. Nonetheless, the Taiwan Sōtokufu then expanded spending on fisheries and related industries, and became active in promoting the fishing industry. The industry thus developed during the Japanese colonial era. (This article is in English.)

The Changes in Ship Transportation Along the Yodo River from the Mid - to Late Meiji Period : A Study Using the Historical GIS Method

The Changes in Ship Transportation Along the Yodo River from the Mid - to Late Meiji Period : A Study Using the Historical GIS Method

Corporate expansion in local regions and municipal tax problems during the middle to late Meiji period

Corporate expansion in local regions and municipal tax problems during the middle to late Meiji period

A Study on Literature-Related Subjects at the Tokyo Academy of Music During the Late Meiji Period :

A Study on Literature-Related Subjects at the Tokyo Academy of Music During the Late Meiji Period :

Women getting a ‘university’ education in Meiji Japan: discourses, realities, and individual lives

During the late Meiji period (1890–1912), private and governmental educational institutions were set up to raise ryōsai kenbo (good wives and wise mothers) who could help in the formation and development of a strong Japan. However, that was only part of the story. During the same years there were also educators and female students asking for more educational opportunities, even at the university level, and it was especially in those years that the first institutions of female higher education were founded.