Takeuchi Yoshimi Research Articles

Thoughts after translating Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Ro Jin 鲁迅 (Lu Xun)

ABSTRACT Despite the ups and downs in their relationship, China and Japan have been engaged in a process of cultural exchange for nearly two millennia. A recent outcome of this interaction has been the discourse surrounding the founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936), his foremost exponent in 20th century Japan, the writer and thinker Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好 (1910-1977) and the effect of their interaction ever since on intellectuals in both countries. This is an interaction which had substantial influence on the intellectual climate in post-war Japan and still plays a role in intellectual discourse in contemporary China, particularly in the debates surrounding modernity and nationalism. I have worked with Joshua Fogel in making the first translation into English of Takeuchi’s classic monograph Ro Jin (1944) into English from the Japanese. In the process, we have attained new insights into historical and contemporary intellectual developments in both countries, as well as a deepening understanding of “Takeuchi’s Lu Xun”. I have also examined two rival translations into Chinese by Li Xifeng 李心峰 (1986) and Li Dongmu 李冬木 (2005) from the angle of fidelity to the original and readability.

What exactly is Takeuchi Yoshimi's logic of Asian resistance?

AbstractLiterary Critic and Sinologist, Takeuchi Yoshimi, provides post-colonial and decolonial studies a logic of resistance that seeks to destabilize the colonialist projects of Western modernity without repeating its structural logic. In this regard, Takeuchi's logic of resistance functions as a dialectical lens into the “emancipatory traps” of Western modernity that frame the victim–victimizer paradox by turning negativity into a method of generating heuristic possibilities. But in this pursuit to look for alternative sites for mining theoretical possibilities, Takeuchi returns to the origins of Chinese modernity for imagining a proper logic of Asian resistance, that which could be deployed as a resource for negating the imperial gestures of modernist thought while affirming the positive kernel of the Enlightenment with the hope of bringing forth a global world that is continuously transformed by the cultural particulars themselves. The goal of this article is to further elucidate Takeuchi's logic of Asian resistance and to discuss how this logic can be read as having the potential to correct Nishida Kitarō's and the Kyoto School's failed attempt to overcome modernity.

Literature, Powerlessness, and Modernity: A Reading of Takeuchi Yoshimi's “What Is Modernity?”

Abstract While the Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi is frequently mentioned in discussions of “alternative modernity” on the part of Asia, people have not sufficiently addressed the asymmetrical relationship between literature and politics in Takeuchi's thinking, as his literary analysis is oftentimes associated with a Hegelian reading of subjectivity. Through a reading of Takeuchi's “What Is Modernity?,” published in 1948, this article examines Takeuchi's discourses on politics from a literary standpoint that is radically nondialectical and “powerless” with regard to “politics” as he understands it. Takeuchi's critique of modernity as well as his idea of Asian nationalism cannot do without his idiosyncratic understanding of literature, especially his reading of Lu Xun, and his insistence on the powerlessness of literary resistance. Takeuchi's literary reshuffling of the political, the article argues, opens up a horizon where the very historico-political condition of possibility of existing political institutionalizations can be put into reexamination—it helps us reconsider the concepts of relation, otherness, and equality, which are still in operation to frame our understanding of the world.

Spirit of Bandung beyond Colonial Mobility

This article argues that the spirit of Bandung’s relevance in a time of resurgent fascist mobilization is in the new logic of movement that the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia espoused. The critiques of liberal humanism and its relation to fascism by Ernst Bloch, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Aimé Césaire reveal that an underlying problem of coloniality and movement remain in current paradigm of liberalism. The article situates conceptual reworkings of colonial-fascist movement by the thinkers Takeuchi Yoshimi, Frantz Fanon, and Ch’oe In-Hun within the trajectory of the spirit of Bandung. Through this engagement, the article argues that the spirit of Bandung has called for revolutionary movement beyond the grids of colonial mobility in the transpacific.

Asia as Counter-method

Abstract By taking the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan as a point of departure, this paper attempts to differentiate a “bloc asia” as a virtual aggregate from an “Area Asia” as a concrete geo-historical region in order to theorize the possibility of taking Taiwan or Asia as a counter-method. The paper starts with an examination of Takeuchi Yoshimi's 1960 “Asia as Method” in light of the two possible Asias—Asia as entity and Asia as method—suggested in Koyasu Nobukuni's poststructuralist reinterpretation. It then moves on to the two possible methods as disclosed in Kuan-Hsing Chen's Asia as Method—one adopts an “Asian studies in Asia” approach with an inter-referencing system; the other foregrounds a dynamic process of turning and hybridizing that occurs between Western colonial powers and local structures—to warp up the similar differentiation of Area Asia and bloc asia, as well as that of Asia as entity and Asia as method. The second part of the paper focuses on Taiwan's recent “Pikaochiu” incident, which uncannily conflates questions of same-sex marriage rights and ancestral tablet terminology. Instead of regarding it as merely an Internet kuso, the paper takes it to demonstrate how out of the old clan patriarchy in East Asia there may emerge new “homophobic” forms that rely not on a proscription of specific sex practices but rather on defending the integrity of the family surname and patrilineage. Yet its potentiality as a rollback against a Euro-American model of marriage, kinship, and family, and simultaneously a reversal against East Asian Confucian values, makes it a bizarre yet challenging case to explicate how Asia could function as a counter-method, a virtual “not yet.”

Constitution and Literariness: Takeuchi Yoshimi's Critique of the Postwar Japanese Constitution

Years after the promulgation of the postwar Japanese constitution, the literary critic Takeuchi Yoshimi wrote an essay entitled “Our Feeling for the Constitution” (1960), in which he critically examines the emotional distance between the postwar constitution and the Japanese people. Despite or because of the fact that, as a literary critic rather than a political theorist, Takeuchi's reflections on the constitution hardly conform to any theoretical discussion of the constitution's articles, his thoughts might radically and fundamentally put into question issues that are presumed by other politico-theoretical discussions. “The new constitution,” writes Takeuchi, has no affinity with us. I feel…

“Overcoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review

Discussing the issues of “Asia,” Takeuchi Yoshimi’s discourse of “Overcoming Modernity” () has received broad attention among the international community of scholars. Commentators try to identify the ideological elements of this discourse that, as they hope, could help to solve post-modern problems. After analysing Takeuchi’s understanding of the war and its context, this paper shows that his discourse of “overcoming modernity” has an anti-historical tendency, which stems from the ideological ambiguity of his attitude towards the question of who was responsible for the war.

인국의 사상가를 통해 할 수 있는 모든 것 : 다케우치 요시미와 루쉰, 동아시아 사상사의 한 궤적

This study reorganized the relationship between Takeuchi Yoshimi and Lu Xun and throughout his lifetime, what Takeuchi Yoshimi attempted to do through Lu Xun. For this aim, this study not only looked into the translated versions of 『Lu Xun』 but also comprehensively examined the works on Lu Xun ranging from his 20s and until his death written by Takeuchi Yoshimi. The study on Lu Xun by Takeuchi Yoshimi not only accumulated the knowledge on the thinker from another country but also showed that a researcher can establish one’s own thinking based on the research. In addition, Takeuchi Yoshimi, as an expert researcher on China, understood China but also as a social critic, criticized the Japanese society through Lu Xun. Moreover, Takeuchi Yoshimi, as a translator, delivered the words and the problem consciousness of Lu Xun to the society one lives in and, as a practitioner, aimed to create ‘the square of the people’ by using Lu Xun as a mediator. Based on the relationship with Lu Xun, Takeuchi Yoshimi was able to ercely confront the issues of modernism, liberalism, and culturalism of Japan. When referring to his actions through Lu Xun, they encompass all eorts which can be done by using a thinker of a neighboring country as a mediator and this is an important historical heritage of the East Asian history of thought.

대동아전쟁과 다케우치 요시미(竹内好)의 전쟁책임론

대동아전쟁과 다케우치 요시미(竹内好)의 전쟁책임론

Resistance to Modernity and the Logic of Self-Negation as Politics: Takeuchi Yoshimi and Wang Hui on Lu Xun

Lu Xun is perhaps the most studied figure in modern Chinese literature and there has been a great deal of debate about interpreting his work. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to the way in which readings of Lu Xun serve as a lens from which to examine political interventions in response to global transformations and more specifically to the global logic of capitalism. The path-breaking works of Takeuchi Yoshimi and Wang Hui are especially thought provoking in this respect since they each wrote about Lu Xun to intervene in the politics of their times. More specifically Takeuchi and Wang each drew on Lu Xun to develop a new vision of politics at times when narratives and processes associated with the nation-state and capitalism eclipsed critical political practice. Intellectuals in both interwar Japan and post-Mao China stressed an evolutionary vision of modernity with which they criticized their present and immediate past: imperial fascism and feudalism in Japan, and the Cultural Revolution in 1980s and 1990s China. In both the works of Takeuchi and Wang, Lu Xun evinces a resistance to evolutionary or progressive narratives of history. In this essay, I read Takeuchi and Wang's respective interpretations of Lu Xun as responding to the cultural logic of global capitalism. Takeuchi and Wang each appeal to feeling or irrationality to develop a vision of Lu Xun as resisting modernity. For Takeuchi, Lu Xun symbolized not only the Chinese revolution itself, but also a more fundamental defiance of European history and epistemology. Since this history as rationalizing modernity was expanding and encompassed the very formation of the self, Takeuchi argued that resistance implied self-realization through self-negation and that Lu Xun embodied this paradoxical practice. In the mid-1990s, when the neoliberal phase of capitalism was transforming social relations in China, Wang invoked Takeuchi's interpretation of Lu Xun and more explicitly confronted the dynamic of capitalism. In Wang's view, the nature of intellectual production in capitalist society tends to fore-close the possibility of politics. However, he claims that Lu Xun's writings and practices represent a time when Chinese intellectuals were more closely connected to social movements and thus present the possibility of radical transformation.

The “Asia as a Method” in Takeuchi Yoshimi and the Topos of Choson

The “Asia as a Method” in Takeuchi Yoshimi and the Topos of Choson

Japanization and the Chinese “Madman”: Triangulating Takeuchi Yoshimi's philosophy of translation

ABSTRACTThe special nature of Sino-Japanese translation, with a history as long as that of vernacular translations of Greek and Latin, is worth exploring because it can throw new light on Eurocentric and universalist approaches to translation theorizing. The tradition of translating between China and Japan, disrupted and then reinvigorated by the “invasion of Europe” in the nineteenth century, is the subject of ruminations by Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–77), a prominent twentieth-century Sinologist. Takeuchi triangulates the relationship between Japan, China and the West in a way that forces a deeper reconsideration of the notion of the “translational”. The West (the Other) is a means through which identity can be constructed by Japan (the Self), but given Japan's long history of being shaped by/shaping the China imaginary, China is also Japan's Other. Takeuchi's prime interest is in Japan projecting its own identity onto China (via Lu Xun). In the present article, Takeuchi's two translations of Lu Xun's “The Diary of a Madman” in 1956 and 1976 are compared with those by Inoue (1932), Oda and Tanaka (1953) and Komada (1974) to understand how Takeuchi's advocacy of a realignment with China (and Asia) constitutes an attempt to reconstrue a Japanese identity that would refute the West's monistic view of civilization.

Facing with the shadow of ‘Empire’ -Takeuchi Yoshimi and East-Asia-

Facing with the shadow of ‘Empire’ -Takeuchi Yoshimi and East-Asia-

The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness by Viren Murthy

Reviewed by: The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness by Viren Murthy Carine Defoort Murthy, Viren. The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness. Leiden: Brill, 2011. viii, 268 pp. $148 (cloth) Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (or Zhang Binglin 章炳麟) (1869–1936) is known as one of the important revolutionaries of early twentieth-century China. Anti-Manchu, a scholar of "national learning," and a critic of Western influence, Zhang cannot easily be categorized as either conservative, reformer, or revolutionary. Viren Murthy's study shows the intricacies and evolution of Zhang's thought, with a focus on his Buddhist inspiration, more specifically the Yogācārā (Consciousness-only) school. He starts out from Zhang's personal experience of maltreatment and torture, when he was put in jail (1903–06) after being accused of plotting against the Qing regime. Zhang spent the following years in Japan (1906–10), where he was influenced by Japanese thinkers and German idealism. Out of intellectual debates with reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Murthy unravels Zhang's own "unique philosophy of negation" (p. 5) as a criticism of Western categories and institutions, and more particularly of global capitalist modernity. On an even broader scope, Murthy's study also offers an entrance into tensions between old and new, nationalism and universalism, tradition and global modernity. The first chapter, which also functions as introduction to the intellectual scene, immediately throws the reader into a rather dense debate on modernity, capitalism, and Zhang Taiyan. Drawing on Japanese, Western, and Chinese scholarship, Murthy argues that the contrast between Zhang's anti-Manchu nationalism and his Buddhist self-negation was conditioned by global capitalist modernity. He heavily draws on the ideas of the contemporary public intellectual Wang Hui, with whom Murthy worked in Beijing, but also on other scholars such as Takeuchi Yoshimi, Chang Hao, Alex Schneider, and Georg Lukás. The second chapter analyzes shifts in Zhang's views, moving away from Kang Youwei's reformist ideal of a multiracial nation-state toward an anti-Manchu Han nationalism considered modern as well as rooted in the past. The following chapters all concern the integration of Buddhism into Zhang Taiyan's thought. Chapter 3 shows how Zhang differed from Liang Qichao in using Yogācārā Buddhism to counter capitalist modernity and entities entailed by it such as science, universal laws and ethical principles, nation-building, and imperialism. Buddhist insights combined with the Daoist idea of confusion (huo) helped to deconstruct the notion of the subject and to create a provisional subject willing to sacrifice itself in a revolutionary context. In Chapter 4, Murthy argues that Zhang negated the ideas of (Hegelian) evolution and historical progress, and that he saw the world as constituted of appearances caused by fluctuations of consciousness resulting from "karmic seeds." Convinced of the world's illusionary nature, Zhang cherished self-negation and the end of history. The fifth and last chapter shows how Zhang warned his contemporaries against the oppressive nature of such notions as "rationality," "equality," and "universal principle" as means to control man and dominate the world. Using Buddhism and inspired by Zhuangzi's idea of "equalization" (qi), Zhang rejected the homogenizing influence of global capitalism in favor of an embrace of particularities and a detachment from words. The conclusion argues that Zhang Taiyan's critical stance against the homogenizing power of capitalist modernity, its evolutionary visions, and its abstract principles is still relevant today. As Murthy notes, "Zhang's work is especially significant in Chinese intellectual history since it is one of the first attempts to overcome the alienation caused by capitalism in thought by invoking Buddhist categories" (p. 242). Murthy tries to show how Zhang's legacy has been critically adopted by his student and cultural critic Lu Xun and by Murthy's own teacher, the "new leftist" Wang Hui. Murthy's book can probably be situated in this line of intellectual heritance. Readers less acquainted with the topic will probably have a hard time following the intricacies of Murthy's arguments. Murthy's work reads as a sophisticated reflection for insiders. Carine Defoort University of Leuven Copyright © 2014 Twentieth-Century China

Takeuchi Yoshimi's 1960 ‘Asia as Method’ lecture

Takeuchi Yoshimi was a leading thinker in Postwar Japan. The originality of his work has been rediscovered in the past decade. Based on the present author's Asia as Method—toward De-Imperialization (2010) as a point of dialogue, this essay rereads Takeuchi's intuitive formulation of ‘Asia as Method’ in the 1960 and tries to pinpoint different characteristics of knowledge conditions between now and then. It discovers that the ‘Inter-Asia methodology’ imagined in Takeuchi's time is still a viable proposition to be implemented today, if we hope to break away with the dominant mode of thought that has been trapped in the colonial structure of academic institutions.

The 1911 Revolution and the Politics of Failure: Takeuchi Yoshimi and Global Capitalist Modernity

Chinese historians have considered the 1911 Revolution an incomplete bourgeois revolution, especially in comparison to the more successful 1949 Revolution. On the other hand, in their famous tract in the early 1990s, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu claimed that a rethinking of the 1911 Revolution should lead us to reject the concept of revolution altogether. In both of these formulations, as stepping stone towards socialism or demonstration that any revolution is futile, the 1911 Revolution is in some way connected to the legitimacy of capitalism. However, in post-war Japan, when Japanese intellectuals were debating the consequences of the American Occupation and Japan's role in the Second World War, the 1911 Revolution had a different significance. Post-war Japanese sinologists often turned to the 1911 Revolution as a symbol of hope, despite its failure. Takeuchi Yoshimi was the pioneer of this intellectual trend and he argued that, unlike the Meiji Ishin, which was a pale imitation of Western modernity, the 1911 Revolution represented a unique affirmation of revolutionary subjectivity, precisely because its initial attempts at modernization failed. Takeuchi and his disciples' discussions of how the 1911 Revolution produced subjectivity out of failure illustrate post-war Japanese sinologists employed the 1911 Revolution in debates about subjectivity and anti-colonialism. An analysis of their writings will open the way to thinking both the 1911 Revolution and its perception in Japan as it relates to the trajectory of capitalism and its discontents in the 20th century.

A Country of No Significance? Interpreting The Japan Times's Inattentive Approach to Chinese Affairs in 1997

This article seeks to explain why The Japan Times takes a backseat approach to events in China. Specifically, the Japanese English‐language newspaper demonstrated a lack of sensitivity when dealing with events that took place in China during 1997. The Japan Times's attitude is tantamount to actualizing a familiar identity strategy of withdrawal. For modern Japanese thinkers, such as Nishida Kitaro, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Mizoguchi Yuzo, the withdrawal is a common strategy when dealing with the issue of universality. This is a surprising observation, given these scholars' vast differences when narrating Japanese identities. Accordingly, China has defined the condition from which withdrawal seems imperative for Japan to fulfill modernity. The Japan Times's apparent inattention to China may serve as the contemporary example of “withdrawing for universality” and poses different narrators against one another to show the indecisive condition The Japan Times has created for all of them.

Displacing Japan: Takeuchi Yoshimi's Lu Xun in Light of Nishida's Philosophy, and Vice Versa

In 1944 the Japanese sinologist and cultural critic Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-77) published his seminal study, Rojin, on the life and work of the preeminent modern Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936). In this book Takeuchi paints the portrait of a pugnacious man of letters, someone engaged in constant combat, contradicting all the dominant attitudes of his era, an “iron-willed personality” with the Nietzschean traits of a “lonesome wanderer,” a man whose characteristics Takeuchi sums up throughout his book with the word resistance. Takeuchi's 150-page work—slim but pregnant with meaning and seemingly not overshadowed by wartime ideology—became the cornerstone of Takeuchi's postwar career as an author and critic who anticipated the postwar. In my view, however, the true significance of Rojin lies with the book's deep entanglement in the wartime project to overcome modernity, and, first and foremost, in the writings of Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and the Kyoto School of philosophy. By regarding Takeuchi's Lu Xun and his resistance, and Takeuchi's central notion of the contradictory self-identity of literature and politics, in light of Nishida's dialectics of individual and world, I hope to illuminate more effectively than has been done so far Takeuchi's rather dark and enigmatic book and to revalorize its significance as arguably one of the most intriguing, and certainly most idiosyncratic, wartime contributions on the topic of philosophy and the political in wartime Japan.

From the Discourse on the Slave to a New Perspective on the "East Asia" Discourse --Focuing on Lu xun and Takeuchi Yoshimi's Discourse of Slave

From the Discourse on the Slave to a New Perspective on the "East Asia" Discourse --Focuing on Lu xun and Takeuchi Yoshimi's Discourse of Slave

Overcome by Modernity? Three Works by and about Takeuchi Yoshimi

identity, the driving force of which is less ethics than epistemology, in all its derivative violence. Neither Stevens nor Goto-Jones seems to grasp this point, despite their own ethical intentions as well as the considerable value of their research. In thinking of the relation between philosophy and the po litical, one must understand that ethics, at its most fundamental level, takes place prior to the logic of identity and works to ceaselessly threaten it.