Tokyo Imperial University Research Articles

Annotation from the chair. Takeichi Tsugawa of Tsugaru as a community health pioneer in Japan and the ideological environment in his young days; Tokyo Imperial University Yanagishima Settlement and Minzoku-Eisei Magazine

Annotation from the chair. Takeichi Tsugawa of Tsugaru as a community health pioneer in Japan and the ideological environment in his young days; Tokyo Imperial University Yanagishima Settlement and Minzoku-Eisei Magazine

기무라 다이켄 『원시불교사상론』의 유정론(有情論)과 의지주의

Taiken Kimura (木村泰賢) was a distinguished Buddhist scholar active during Japan's Taisho period. As a monk affiliated with the Japanese Soto Zen, he completed his education in the Department of Indian Philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University. Subsequently, he pursued further studies in Europe, including stints in England and Germany. During his European sojourn, he authored On Primitive Buddhist Thought (Genshi bukkyō shisōron), which was published in Japan in 1922. Within this publication, Kimura posited that both Primitive Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism were underpinned by voluntarism. He underscored Mahayana Buddhism's continuity with Primitive Buddhism. Kimura extensively employed voluntarism to analyze the Twelvefold Dependent Origination in Primitive Buddhism. Notably, he associated the concept of “ignorance”(avijjā) within the Twelvefold Origination with “blind will”, a notion articulated by Schopenhauer.
 Central to Kimura's perspective was the belief that the essence of sentient beings lay in desire, constituting the driving force behind life's activities. He identified two desires within the Twelvefold Dependent Origination, “craving”(taṇhā) and “ignorance”(avijjā), understanding them as manifestations of will. According to his viewpoint, the life activities of sentient beings unfolded as expressions of desire or will.
 Nevertheless, Kimura contended that desire transcended its role as a mere producer of “defilements” (kilesa), extending into an absolute “actual reality”(dharmatā). He frequently associated the concept of “nibbana without residue”(anupdisesanibbana) or absolute “actual reality” with the will, sometimes identifying it as a material or metaphysical reality. His theoretical framework could be characterized as a form of Metaphysics of Will. Drawing from the apparent reality of sentient beings as driven by desires, Kimura aimed to elucidate not only the life activities of sentient beings amid suffering but also to expound upon the absolute world that transcends suffering.

The Role of Pedagogy in Secondary Teacher Training in Early Twentieth-Century Japan: Theory of Pedagogical Research in College by Kumaji Yoshida of Tokyo Imperial University

ABSTRACT The secondary teacher training curriculum at the College of Literature of Tokyo Imperial University in early twentieth-century Japan made pedagogy-related subjects compulsory. Kumaji Yoshida, the leader of the institutionalisation of pedagogy at Tokyo Imperial University at the time, considered scientific research in pedagogy essential for the training of secondary school teachers as well as for college education. Through Yoshida’s theories, this article demonstrates how Japan attempted to link secondary teacher training and pedagogy at Tokyo Imperial University during the early twentieth century.

КОЛОНИАЛЬНАЯ КОРЕЯ ГЛАЗАМИ ЯПОНСКИХ ИСТОРИКОВ: ОСНОВНЫЕ НАПРАВЛЕНИЯ ЯПОНСКОЙ ИСТОРИОГРАФИИ КОНЦА ХIХ–ХХ вв.

The author presents an overview of Japanese historiography on colonial Korea (late 19th – 20th centuries). Mainstream Japanese historiography arose out of a fusion of Western historiography introduced by Ludwig Riess and the Chinese kōshōgaku tradition. Japanese historiography on East Asia generally followed the negative portrayals of China and Korea. Tokyo Imperial University’s 1890 history of Japan, the Kokushigan, argued for a common ancestry to Koreans and Japanese. Views of Korea's historical subjugation to Japan became widely accepted in Japanese scholarship. From the beginning of the XX century Japan promoted the idea of a joint and inseparable “Manchurian-Korean history”, where Korea was subjected to heteronomy in politics and economics. After WWII, the subject of colonization has been always featured prominently in such publications, ever since the founding of the Japanese Society for the Study of Korean History in 1959. Such publications featuring colonial history as Japanese history (1962) and an eight-volume series entitled Contemporary Japan and its Colonies played a crucial role in the Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi debates on Japan’s responsibility towards Asia in the early 80-s. About this time the Japanese Society for Colonial Studies was founded.

Sorting sex, controlling sex: Masui Kiyoshi's chicken research and experimental system, 1915-1950.

Masui Kiyoshi (1887-1981), a prominent Japanese geneticist, is best known for inventing the sex-sorting method of chicks and his contributions to experimental genetics in Japan. Masui drew inspiration from Goldschmidt's sex determination theory and used chickens, transplantation techniques, and his own "chick sexing" methods in his scientific work. This paper examines the intersection of genetics and industrial breeding by tracing the evolution of Masui's experimental systems. During the early 20th century, poultry farming emerged as a significant industry in Japan, resulting in the development of standardized organisms and techniques for chicken farming. Masui, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, collaborated with the Imperial Zootechnical Experimental Station to use these organisms as models for sex determination theory while exploring their further industrial possibilities. First, the paper show how Masui viewed chickens as epistemological objects and transformed his anatomical discoveries into standardized industrial practices. Next, it describes how Masui's collaboration with German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt led to new academic questions about sex determination mechanisms and how he integrated his knowledge of chicken physiology into his research on "experimental gynandromorphs" to elaborate the theories. Lastly, the paper discusses the biotechnological ideals that Masui aimed to achieve and how they were co-constructed with his mass-production method of intersex chickens from the early 1930s. The trajectory of Masui's experimental systems highlights the dynamic relationship between agroindustry and genetics in the early twentieth century and demonstrates the 'biology of history' in which the biological processes of organisms intertwine with their epistemological history.

Gender of Profession: The Nurse and The Medical Practitioner at the Tokyo Imperial University Hospital.

This article explores the shaping of gender hierarchy between the nurse and the doctor in modern Japan, through the lens of the Tokyo Imperial University Hospital. I understand gender hierarchy of these two medical professions not just in terms of ranks in hospital bureaucracies, salaries, or educational credentials, but also the ways their work was defined, their skill levels were evaluated, as well as the probability of their united actions as members of a single profession to advocate their shared interests. Tokyo Imperial University is Japan's oldest university, which is the birthplace of modern medical education. The hospital of this university was a symbolic locus for the making of gender hierarchy of the doctor and the nurse, which often transpired in other institutions and articulated in state regulations such as the Nurse Regulations prepared by Home Ministry officials in 1915. In this hospital, doctors who were male, while designing nursing education and labor practices, defined nursing primarily as women's supplementary labor for doctors. While doctors had an exclusive professional territory, such as diagnosis, surgery, and medication, what nurses' exclusive professional territory was undefined and how their skill levels could be evaluated remained unclear. In other words, probationary nurses often worked together with trained nurses, which allowed managers of the hospital to exploit their cheap labor, as well as attenuating the professional authority of the trained nurses. But, this process did not go unchallenged. Leaders of nurses at this hospital, such as Suzuki Masa and Ōzeki Chika did not think that nurses should be subordinated to the doctor. As managers of the Tokyo Imperial University Hospital hired unmarried women to have them endure intense labor with low wages, Ōzeki publicly protested a doctor at Tokyo Imperial University to improve nurses' working environment, and these two soon resigned. After the resignation, Suzuki organized a visiting nurse service company called The Charity Visiting Nurse Corps (jizen kangofukai), and dispatched a group of its member nurses to the clients. Unlike when they worked in the Tokyo Imperial University Hospital, they became an independent service provider, deciding their work schedules, and the fees for their service for themselves. Compared to their wages in the Tokyo Imperial University Hospital, the service fees were two to three times higher in this new company. As nurses came to claim a high pay, visiting nurse service companies of this kind blossomed in Tokyo and other big cities, However, they eventually failed to gain a clear legal definition of what nurses could exclusively do as professionals and how their skills were assessed, and private nurses lost their high demand during the Great Depression. By looking at this process, this article reconfirms the conventional wisdom that the gender hierarchy of doctors and nurses were not biologically given but socially constructed through the interplay of education, employment, state policies, and the market, and considers why nurses' efforts alone could not challenge the entirety of this hierarchy, without institional supports from the state.

The modern Buddhist studies of Zen priests at Tokyo Imperial University: considering perspectives on original Buddhism

ABSTRACT While the study of Buddhism at universities in Japan since the Meiji period (1868–1912)—transplanted as a modern institution—produced many results using a critical and rational approach to Buddhist texts, many scholars of Buddhism, who were also Buddhists, were challenged to reconcile their own belief systems with those of Japanese Buddhism, which existed outside of the texts. In this context, Taiken Kimura 木村泰賢 and Hakuju Ui 宇井伯寿, both professors at Tokyo Imperial University, attempted to bridge the gap between primitive Buddhist studies and beliefs, or between objectivity and subjectivity, using the concepts of bodhisattva way 菩薩道 and a Zen tradition beyond the written words of scripture 教外別伝 as a framework for Buddhist studies, respectively. Therefore, although their research was always in consideration of its academic significance and did not directly link their belief and scholarship, they can be placed in the history of Buddhist thought.

Izutarō Suehiro (1888–1951), Uso no kōyō / Die Nützlichkeit der Lüge (1922)1)

Abstract Izutarō Suehiro (1888–1951), Uso no kōyō The Utility of Lies (1922). This translation presents an essay by the influential professor for private law at Tokyo Imperial University, Izutarō Suehiro that gives some insight into the historical roots of modern Japanese civil law methodology as it highlights the shift in Japanese jurisprudence away from the so-called German ‘conceptual jurisprudence’. Rejecting the traditional formalistic application of rigid statutory law, which in Suehiro’s eyes forced judges regularly to resort to legal fictions and lies about the facts of a case in order to be able to deliver humane judgements, his new ‘Japan-compatible’ approach expected the judiciary to develop flexible case law, which would enable judges to achieve ‘concretely appropriate’ judgements. In this context the judiciary was no longer to assume litigants as rationally acting, self-concerned individuals in general, but to admit the possibility of irrational, altruistic etc. personalities and to adjust the application of law to these individual differences. This raises however concerns regarding the principle of equality before the law and the role of a democratically legitimated legislator.

유용한 출생: 학습원(学習院)으로 본 근대 일본 능력주의 사회와 혈연적 엘리트의 특권

In the late nineteenth century, competitive written examinations for educational credentials and professions surfaced as a critical determinant of one’s social standing in Japan. But birth was still critical in credential competition in Japanese meritocracy. This article explores how the value of aristocratic birth was rearranged in modern meritocracy through the lens of Gakushūin, a Peer’s School created by leading Japanese aristocrats (kazoku), in 1877 to recreate hereditary aristocrats as merited leaders of modern Japan.<BR> This school had the elementary, middle, and high school programs. Once a student entered the elementary school program, he could advance to the high-school program without competitive entrance examination. This article argues that the testless admission to the high-school program at Gakushūin was a significant privilege. Outside Gakushūin, students had to go through a tough competition to enter high schools, and it was not too difficult for high-school graduates to enter universities not too popular like Tokyo Imperial University in modern Japan. In other words, students of aristocratic birth at Gakushūin could gain the university degree, though it may not be from the most privileged university in Japan, without tough competition, and professional privileges the degree entailed. And brilliant students at the high-school program at Gakushūin were welcome to apply to competitive universities if they wanted. In other words, their birth, I contend, worked as an insurance limiting their downward mobility in Japanese meritocracy.

On Kiyoshi Oka’s unpublished papers in 1943

In 1943 from September to December Kiyoshi Oka wrote a series of papers numbered from VII to XI, as the research reports to Teiji Takagi (then, Professor of Tokyo Imperial University), in which he solved affirmatively the so-called Levi Problem (Hartogs' Inverse Problem termed by Oka) for unramified Riemann domains over $\C^n$. This problem which had been left open for more than thirty years then, was the last one of the Three Big Problems summarized by Behnke--Thullen 1934. The papers were hand-written in Japanese, consist of pp.~108 in total, and have not been published by themselves. The aim of the present article is to provide an English translation of the most important, last paper (Part II) with preparation (Part I). At the end of Part I we will discuss a problem which K. Oka left and is still open.

핫토리 우노키치[服部宇之吉]와 경성제국대학 ‘支那學講座’ 핫토리 우노키치의 인맥을 중심으로1

This study aim to reveal that Hattori Unokichi's connections, the first president of Keijo Imperial University (京城帝國大學), worked with professors of the Keijo Imperial University's &quot;Chinese philosophy and literature&quot; course, and that the process created the characteristics of Keijo Imperial University's Sinology course. To study this, shed light on the Chinese classics and modern philosophy of Hattori and the characteristics of various human networks in Japan and Joseon, and investigated how it moved Keijo Imperial University. The Sinology was born from the Chinese classics in the Japanese Empire. Chinese classics is a traditional East Asian study and show the characteristics of East Asia. Based on these studies, Hattori opened a Sinology course at Keijo Imperial University by gathering alumni and colleagues of Tokyo Imperial University and members of the Shibunkai(斯文會). The reason was to create a world-renowned Asian research institute. In conclusion, his dream did not come true. Instead, he opened an Tohobunkagakuin (東方文化學院) in Japan and worked as a chairman for 10 years and focused on giving world authority to Japan's East Asian research. Most of the professors at Keijo Imperial University also worked with Hattori Tohobunkagakuin. The reason why Hattori was able to continue his research on East Asia for a long time can be explained by his authority of knowledge. His authority of knowledge was based on the relationship between the teacher and the student, and his personality and academic achievements. The power of knowledge is solidified by academic background. Hattori's professors of “Chinese philosophy and literature” at Keijo Imperial University were formed with the support of academic background and of the “Chinese Philosophy and literature” course at Tokyo Imperial University. In addition, it cannot be overlooked that there were support and assistance from the Japanese imperial family and cooperators, and the Government-General of Joseon, and Gyeonghakwon (經學院), and their connections.

Professor Koeber Watsuji Tetsurō

In this translation, Watsuji Tetsurō provides an overview of the life and work of Raphael von Koeber who introduced and taught philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University to some of the most eminent Japanese intellectuals of that period. Watsuji focuses on the character of Koeber, rather than his intellectual achievements, as having an incomparably profound effect upon his students. In this regard, by discussing his sphere of influence, Watsuji simultaneously provides us with an insight into the shared intellectual heritage of many of Japan’s foremost philosophers, novelists, and academics, and subsequently raises awareness of the importance of Koeber himself.

Botchan

This English translation of 坊っちゃん (1906) was published in Tokyo by Ogawa Seibundo in 1918. It is a first-person narrative of a young man’s two-month tenure as assistant mathematics teacher at a provincial middle school in 1890s Japan. A native son of Tokyo, with all its traits and prejudices, he finds life in a narrow country town unappealing — with its dull and mischievous students, scheming faculty, bland diets, stifling rules, and gossipy inhabitants. Impulsive, combative, committed to strict ideals of honesty, honor, and justice, he is quickly enmeshed in the strategems of the head teacher, “Red Shirt.” His sufferings and confusion continue to mount until finally he and fellow-teacher “Porcupine” are able to deliver a “heavenly chastisement” and escape the island, back to his one emotional attachment, Kiyo, the old family retainer. Natsume Kinnosuke (1867-1916) signed his work Sōseke — “stubborn.” Like the narrator of Botchan, he was a city-born Tokyo-ite, who found himself teaching middle school in remote Matsuyama in Shikoku in 1895. He emerged to study English literature in London, become Professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and a successful novelist, beginning with the popular I Am a Cat in 1905.

I Am a Cat

This English version of 吾輩は猫である (Wagahai-wa neko de aru: I Am a Cat), Chapters I and II, written by Natsume Sōseki, pseudonym of Natsume Kinnosuke (1867–1916), and translated by Kan-ichi Ando (1878-1924), was published by Hattori Shoten, Tokyo, in 1906. It begins: "I am a cat; but as yet I have no name." Its sardonic feline narrator describes his origins, his settlement in the household of a Meiji teacher-intellectual, and the goings-on and conversations among the cats and humans about the neighborhood. Of the men he concludes: "They are miserable creatures in the eyes of a cat. Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki studied literature in England and became professor at Tokyo Imperial University. The success of his stories, beginning with "I Am a Cat," launched a successful career that produced 22 novels, including Botchan, Kokoro, and Light and Darkness.

Welfare for Elites: The Student Health Center at Tokyo Imperial University and the Paradox of Medicare in Japanese Meritocracy.

How did the Japanese establish a medical welfare system? In answering this question, historians of modern Japan have accentuated the assertive role of state bureaucrats, especially from those of the Home Ministry (naimushō). Historians of Japanese medicine also emphasized the role of the state. William Johnston, in his pioneering work on tuberculosis in Japan, explored the rise of a hygiene administration on this disease as a state enterprise. In the medical history of Japan, scholars highlighted the significance of the wartime period in the birth of this system. The emphasis on the Japanese wartime state is justified. The Japanese government managed to establish a national health insurance in 1935, while the United States government has not been able to establish a medical insurance for every citizen to this day. However, these scholars have not explored how welfare benefits were distributed to members of Japanese society. This article seeks to fill this historiographical gap by looking at the Student Health Center of Tokyo Imperial University (Tōdai), Japan's first state-established university founded in 1886. This university, I contend, was a critical locus in the birth of medical welfare in Japan. At this university were the most privileged medical facilities and practitioners who could provide medical services, as well as students without stable incomes of their own, thus in need of welfare support. The demand of staff of Tōdai's Student Association to establish a Student Health Center was accepted and realized in 1926, and Tōdai students became the beneficiaries of state-managed medical support. The Tōdai Student Health Center was different from other medicare facilities in that its role was not limited to save students from poverty. Student Health Center practitioners helped students check health for university admission, campus life, and job placement to be white-collar elites. Student Health Center practitioners evaluated students' health when they tried to enter Tōdai and get jobs and inculcated students in how to manage living as mental-worker "gentlemen," in coping with tuberculosis, venereal diseases, and neurotic breakdown. Also, they produced statistics about the health condition of Tōdai students, which immediately stimulated further investment in the facilities of Tōdai authorities for the center. Based on statistical data, Tōdai authorities developed a hygiene campaign against tuberculosis so that students could take advantage the of state-of-the-art treatments inexpensively. As such, Tōdai students became among the biggest beneficiaries of this process. In other words, the Student Health Center had a dual significance at Tōdai: a medicare institution as well as part of privileged campus culture. Tōdai was a symbolic locus that reveals the uneven diffusion of medical welfare benefits in Japanese society. Through the lens of this facility, this article seeks to explore the paradox of welfare in meritocracy that contributed to the formation of the elite class in modern Japan.

Auf dem Weg zu einem Völkerbund: Yanaihara Tadaos Kritik an der japanischen Kolonialpolitik auf Taiwan

Abstract With the abolition of martial law in 1987 and the following democratization process, Taiwan’s four mayor ethnic groups (si da zuqun) began to develop an ethnic identity as well as a collective sense of identity. These emerging identities were though not just a mere product of the post-war era, but had been constituted by the crucible of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). Many Han-Chinese in Taiwan conceived the Qing-Dynasty’s cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895 as a betrayal. As they didn’t receive equal treatment with Japanese during the ensuing fifty years of Japanese rule, many Han Taiwanese felt neither belonging to China nor to Japan. Caught in this field of tension between China and Japan, Taiwanese intellectuals started to draw attention to their “special situation” and engaged in a “national movement” (minzoku undô). In respect to the struggle for identity of these intellectuals, a discussion of Yanaihara Tadao’s work is very instructive. As professor for colonial studies at Tokyo Imperial University (1920–1937), he compiled the detailed study Taiwan under Japanese Imperialism. The critical and comprehensive approach adopted made it a fundamental source for postcolonial research on Japanese rule in Taiwan, as well as the “national movement”. Based on Yanaihara’s study on Taiwan, this article shows the impact Japanese colonial policy had on Taiwanese livelihood, thus explaining the reasons for the formation of the Taiwanese “national movement”. By comparing Yanaihara’s colonial criticism and alternative with the claims of the proponents of the “national movement”, and the affirmation of Taiwan’s current multicultural identity, this article illuminates parallels between Yanaihara and Taiwanese identity in both past and present day Taiwan.

Ryogo Kubo in his formative years as a physicist

The Japanese theoretical physicist Ryogo Kubo made remarkable contributions to statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics, amongst which his name is most widely associated with the linear response theory. Despite his importance in the history of modern physics, however, historians have paid him little attention. Using his unpublished manuscripts in a newly organized archive, this paper examines his studies and research up to the end of World War II. Influenced by his brother Masaji Kubo, a physical chemist, and the milieu at Tokyo Imperial University, he became interested in theoretical approaches to properties of matter and worked on dipolar gases and resistance in metals. After graduation, he studied three different phenomena—relaxation, melting, and rubber elasticity—by applying the method of eigenvalue problems. He was also involved in wartime research on noctovision and worked on photoemission in semiconductors. This paper also identifies two distinct focuses in his early research that persisted in his work after the war: solid-state physics and statistical mechanics in today’s terminology. Reconstructing Kubo’s formative years is instrumental for constructing a historiography of a key aspect of modern Japanese physics, namely, how the science of matter evolved before and during the war.

Inoue Tetsujirō (井上哲次郎, 1855–1944): The Confucian Way and the Wayward Confucian

There is no arguing the impact of Inoue Tetsujirō on the development of philosophy in Japan from the Meiji Restoration through the end of the Pacific War. He was the first Japanese to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Germany and the first native-born chair of the philosophy department at Tokyo Imperial University, the training center for almost all the major Japanese philosophers who graduated before 1915. Inoue was instrumental in making German idealism the Western philosophy of choice for Japan, but he also appreciated Asian traditions as well, having no qualms about claiming there was true philosophy in India, China, and premodern Japan. He set the foundation for academic philosophy in Japan not so much through his own rather simplistic personal philosophy, but especially through his contributions to the organization of the field. This article focuses mainly on Inoue's troubled relation with Confucianism. On one hand, in seeking a premodern philosophy to serve as the bedrock for modern Japan, Inoue looked to the Edo-period (1601–1868) Confucian traditions originating in China. He divided them into Shushigaku (朱子学, the Zhu Xi school), Yōmeigaku (陽明学, the Wang Yangming school), and what he named Kogaku (古学), the school focusing on classical texts preceding neo-Confucian developments and interpretations. In many respects, like so many others of his generation, Inoue was by training and personal preference a Confucian. That is not the whole story, however. Inoue understood Confucianism's primary purpose as cultivating the social values and order that would ensure an efficient society of human flourishing, stability, and harmony. Yet, he also likely suspected that the people of the new Japan, with its modernization and plethora of Western ideas, would not unquestioningly accept the authority of the Confucian classics, nor be willing to undertake the rigors of textual study that are the hallmark of the Confucian scholar. In Edo-period Japan, that study had been the responsibility of the samurai class, but in their democratization program, the Meiji reformers had abolished the old class system. Education of the young would now shift from the Confucian academies to the new public school system. Always cooperative with the government to the point of being obsequious, Inoue took a leading role in the National Morality program and its installment in the nationwide school curriculum. That curriculum combined a Shinto-based reverence for the sacred nature of the emperor in the kokutai (国体) ideology along with practical moralistic values that could be loosely called Confucian. Yet, if schooling for most was limited to the elementary level and if there was no longer a samurai class to oversee the moral behavior of the society, who could nurture and enforce the moral order? Through a set of fortuitous events, Inoue "discovered" bushidō (武士道), the Way of the warrior. If there were no longer a samurai warrior class, perhaps all Japanese could become de facto samurai—at least in their mindset. Most may no longer have the scholarly skills and time to glean their spiritual and moral insights from Confucian texts. Yet, they could find the virtues of loyalty, sincerity, filiality, and compliance with seniority within the distinctively mindful heart and spirit of ancient Japan carried within the Japanese bloodline. What happened to the Confucianism of Inoue Tetsujirō? Some of its values were absorbed into bushidō and National Morality, but the praxis of the Confucian scholar and the ideal of the kunshi (君子) seem to have been lost, much to Japan's detriment.

Sōseki: Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist by John Nathan

Reviewed by: Sōseki: Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist by John Nathan J. Keith Vincent Sōseki: Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist. By John Nathan. Columbia University Press, 2018. 344 pages. Hardcover, $35.00/£27.00. On 29 November 1911, Natsume Sōseki's (1867–1916) fifteen-month-old daughter, Hinako, experienced a seizure while a maid was feeding her dinner. According to his wife, Kyōko, at the time Sōseki was in another room talking to an editor from the newspaper Asahi shinbun and initially ignored cries for help from his three older children. Hinako was prone to seizures, and he assumed that she would recover. But this time, the usual treatment of splashing water in her face did not work, and she died. In Sōseki: Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist, John Nathan tells the story of this tragedy by drawing on Soseki's diary, Kyōko's memoir, and Soseki's recasting of the event as fiction in the novel he was serializing at the time. The chapter is Nathan's most moving, and it exemplifies his biographical method. He has sifted through the mountains of information we have on Sōseki, chosen the most significant events, and brought them to life by a few powerful details. One example from this chapter: after describing the cremation of Hinako's body, Nathan informs us that the fee was normally ten yen "but because Hinako was a child, it was reduced to six" (p. 207). By selecting only those biographical facts that provide meaningful emotional insight into Sōseki's life and works, Nathan keeps his main text to within three hundred pages while still covering the main events of the novelist's life and his relationships with his wife and children; his close friend, the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki; and the group of admiring male disciples on whom he showered affection and mentorship. Interwoven throughout are elegant capsule readings of ten of his major novels, several of his shorter works of fiction, his massive Bungakuron (Theory of Literature), his memoir Omoidasu koto nado (Recollecting and Other Matters), and his work as a haiku poet. On the whole, the picture Nathan paints of Sōseki is a dark one: a writer preoccupied above all else with the tragic realization that "communication between two people, not to mention love, is impossible" (p. 237). Nathan sketches the events that [End Page 281] shaped this worldview, beginning with the deep wounds that Sōseki suffered as a child from his parents, who put him up for adoption twice before he was four years old. Then came a series of losses: two older brothers died of tuberculosis in 1887, when Sōseki was twenty-one, and Shiki would die of the same disease in 1902. Two years spent in London from 1900 to 1902, while productive intellectually, were miserable on a personal level, and Sōseki began to suffer from paranoid delusions, a sickness that would follow him home to Tokyo in 1903. Sōseki began to emerge from this difficult period with the serialization of his first novel, Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), in January 1905. The short stories Rondon-tō (The Tower of London) and Kairo kō (A Dirge) came in the same year, and by December, Nathan writes, his "creative energy geysered" (p. 90). Even as he continued with I Am a Cat in 1906, Sōseki brought out novel after novel at an extraordinary pace, finishing Botchan in eleven days in March and dashing off Kusamakura (which Nathan translates as Grass for a Pillow) in a single week in August. The same year, he also published the short novels Nihyaku tōka (The 210th Day) and Shumi no iden (The Heredity of Taste), all while teaching full time as a professor of British literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Writing in the preface to Bungakuron (1907) in what Nathan calls a "quirky manner that was one of his standard modes," Sōseki declared himself grateful for his "nervous condition and insanity" because they had enabled him to produce so much (p. 115). On the basis of his record, he secured a contract with the Asahi...

From the ashes of the Great Kantō Earthquake: the Tokyo imperial university settlement

:In 1884, an Anglican clergyman and staff and students from Oxford University set up a ‘settlement house’ in the East End of London. Conceiving poverty in moral and aspirational terms, their goal was to live with the poor to raise their cultural standards, and thus pull them out of the cycle of destitution. The idea soon spread to the United States. That the Settlement movement would travel across the Atlantic is no surprise: there was rich exchange between the UK and US in the late nineteenth century, and the values underpinning the movement were shared. But what is perhaps less expected is that the Settlement movement also travelled to Japan where it was put into practice by a range of governmental and non-government actors including students at Tokyo Imperial University in the wake of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. The movement then flourished for almost a decade, before coming to an end in 1938. How was it adapted to the Japanese context? What were its goals, methods, successes and failures? And what can this example tell us about the global circulation of ideas regarding social responsibility, the state and welfare in the inter-war period?