Cultural Interaction Studies in East Asia: New Methods and Perspectives [1 ed.] 9783737011532, 9784990621346, 9783847111535

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Global East Asia

Volume 9

Edited by Chun-chieh Huang

Advisory Board: Roger Ames (Hawai‘i), Don Baker (Columbia), Carl Becker (Kyoto), Michael Friedrich (Hamburg), David Jones (Kennesaw), Bent Nielsen (Copenhagen), Jörn Rüsen (Essen), Kirill O. Thompson (Taipei), John Tucker (Carolina), Ann Waltner (Minnesota)

TAO Demin / FUJITA Takao (eds.)

Cultural Interaction Studies in East Asia New Methods and Perspectives

With 2 figures

V&R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online: https://dnb.de. This publication was published by the Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies, Kansai University, Japan in 2012 under the same title (ISBN 978-4-9906213-4-6). © 2021, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, 37073 Göttingen, Germany All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: “Port of Nagasaki,” from the collection of Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture. Reprinted with permission. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISSN 2365-7871 ISBN 978-3-7370-1153-2

Contents

TAO Demin Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

New Directions in Regional Studies NOMA Haruo The Center and Periphery in the Magnetic Field of Cultural Systems: New Perspectives on Regional Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15

HUANG Chun-Chieh Some Observations on the Study of the History of Cultural Interactions in East Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37

SHIBA Yoshinobu Japanese Studies into the History of Maritime East Asia . . . . . . . . . .

61

New Trends in Humanities Research GE Zhaoguang Trends, Positions and Methods: Seeking New Perspectives in Humanities Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

79

AZUMA Ju¯ji The Private Academies of East Asia: Research Perspectives and Overview

99

UCHIDA Keiichi The Peripheral Approach in Chinese Linguistics as an Area of Cultural Interaction Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

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Contents

Material Circulation and Cultural Transmission in East Asia NAKANISHI Susumu Embassies and Ideas as the Third Type of Cargo WANG Yong The Silk Road and Book Road in East Asia

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

MATSUURA Akira Chinese Sea Merchants and Pirates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

China’s Experience of Cultural Interaction with the West ZHOU Zhenhe Culture Surmounting Space: Sino-Western Cultural Encounters and Adaptations from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries . . . . . . . . . . 189 ZHANG Xiping Returning to a Dialog of Equals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 SHEN Guowei Modern Keywords and the Modern History of Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Transformation of Japanese Scholarship from Early Modern to Modern Times CHOI Gwan War, Memory, and Imagination: Japanese Depictions of the Imjin War . . . 227 FUJITA Takao The Establishment of the Field of “Oriental History” in Japan: Facilitating Understanding of East Asian Studies in Modern Japan . . . . . . . . . . . 241 SUZUKI Sadami A Reevaluation of the East Asian Modern System of Knowledge . . . . . . 255 YAN Shaodang A Reconsideration of Japanese China Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

The Wisdom of Selective Adaptation and Constructive Dialog TANG Yijie The Coexistence of Cultural Diversity: Sources of the Value of Harmony in Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Contents

TAO Demin Abraham Lincoln’s Reception and Destiny in East Asia

7

. . . . . . . . . . 289

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Translators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 FUJITA Takao Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Notes about this new edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319

TAO Demin

Introduction

This volume is a collection of articles by members of the Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies (ICIS) and the Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia (SCIEA). It represents a joint venture in developing a new field of cultural interaction studies. It is no exaggeration to say that when ICIS was founded in the fall of 2007, and especially when SCIEA was launched in the spring of 2009, our G-COE (Global Center of Excellence) program received considerable attention.1 Professor Yingshih Yu of Princeton University inscribed Xun Zi’s words—“The beginnings of Heaven and Earth are still present today” (天地始者, 今日是也)—to encourage us to break new ground in East Asian studies. Professor Akira Iriye of Harvard University kindly contextualized our program in terms of transnational history: it “reflects awareness of the importance of transcending a purely nation-centric approach to history, and stresses the cultural aspect of cross-border relations. Both of these fit admirably into the framework of transnational history. It is part of a global, transnational effort to chart a new course in understanding our past. The past must be shared by all people regardless of national division, but the part of the past that can be shared most meaningfully is cultural productions, their infusion, and their transmission.” It had been a practice in academic circles to use the word ko¯ryu¯ (交流, jiaoliu in Chinese, or “exchange” in English) to describe contact between different coun1 The inaugural meeting of ICIS was attended by Professors Ying-shih Yu, Zhang Kaiyuan, Huang Chin-xing, Wang Fan-sen, Cheng Pei-kai, Lee Cheuk Yin, Ge Zhaoguang, Zhang Xiping, Shibusawa Masahide, Kimura Masato, Togawa Yoshio, Kojima Tsuyoshi, Kin Bunkyo, Michael Lackner, and Federico Masini; the founding congress of SCIEA was joined by Professors Aoki Tamotsu, Akira Iriye, Hirano Ken’ichiro¯, Togawa Yoshio, Horiike Nobuo, Tsuchida Kenjiro¯, Nakami Tatsuo, Sawai Keiichi, Machi Senjuro¯, Tsujimoto Masashi, Kizu Yu¯ko, Takekoshi Takashi, Wang Min, Wang Fan-sen, Huang Chun-chieh, Huang Yi-Long, Cheng Pei-kai, Li Changsen, Yan Shaodang, Zhou Zhenhe, Ge Zhaoguang, Zhang Xiping, Zhu Yin, Jin Siyan, Ma Xiaohe, Lee Cheuk Yin, Wu Xiaoming, To Wing-kai, Lu Yan, Kim Tae Chang, Choe Yong Chul, Choi Gwan, Ha Woo Bong, Jang Woncheol, Nguyen Cao Huan, Kate Wildman Nakai, Francis Fukuyama, Martin Collcutt, Rudolf Wagner, Joachim Kurtz, and Willy Vande Walle.

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tries and regions, and scholars were accustomed to limiting their attention to bilateral relations between countries or regions. But ko¯ryu¯ implies the positive and ideal; it does not include the meaning of negative or harmful consequences from contact or relationships, and therefore, could lead to a lopsided view of history. In light of this problem, we suggested the term ko¯sho¯ (交 渉 , jiaoshe in Chinese, or “interaction” in English) to promote a neutral attitude and objectivity in research. We also emphasized the importance of exploring contact and relationships in a larger context of multilateral interactions. Fortunately, our proposal has become increasingly accepted by many scholars and has now become a consensus in the SCIEA. For example, Professor Liu Jiafeng of Huazhong Normal University wrote to me in an e-mail that “I entirely agree with the use of jiaoshe to replace jiaoliu, as the word jiaoliu is too positive and represents too much of an ideal” to describe the historical relations between Christianity and Islam in China, which was full of negotiations and conflicts.2 While we are proud that our message of bunka ko¯sho¯ gaku (文化交渉学, wenhua jiaoshe xue in Chinese, or “cultural interaction” in English) has produced increasingly positive echoes domestically and internationally, we fully recognize that there is a long way to go in developing this new academic field, especially in terms of research scope and methodology. We therefore held workshops on methodology in cultural interaction studies in fall 2010 and spring 2011 at Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou and National Taiwan University in Taipei, respectively. The present volume includes several papers from these two workshops, as well as some inspiring articles presented on other occasions. The papers reflect and exemplify new trends and mainstream research activities by leading scholars of the Institute and the Society in their efforts to establish the field, which could be characterized by such keywords as “multicultural interaction,” “cultural relativity,” “multiculturalism,” and “multiple cultural identities.”3 2 To be sure, the word ko¯sho¯ also has its problems. Over the course of its modern popular usage, it referred restrictively to such actions as political negotiations; the meaning of association and intercourse from an earlier age was almost forgotten. For this reason, some Chinese scholars thought that it is too awkward to use in discussing scholarly issues. However, it was in Japan rather than in China that scholars used the term often in their book titles and discussions concerning international contact. Through our efforts, the word ko¯sho¯ is now recovering its original meaning of association and intercourse, which could be considered a phenomenon of reverse-export and cultural interaction. 3 At the second workshop in Taipei, I presented a paper in Chinese entitled “Some Keywords in the Study of Cultural Interaction in East Asia: New Perspectives and Viewpoints of Cultural Studies in a Globalizing Era” in which I discussed the keywords of which I had become particularly aware during the course of our joint efforts since 2007. These terms include: transnational networks, approach from periphery, functional intermediary, multilateral interaction, realm of cultural life, “East Asianization,” regional history, multiple identities, cultural gene, the Book Road, the “East Asian Mediterranean,” the study of Man, and the

Introduction

11

I would like to take this opportunity to raise the issue of our attitudes toward “hybrid cultures” ( 混成文化4), a term I learned recently from a conversation with Professor Akira Iriye in Tokyo. As a matter of fact, any kind of cultural interaction inevitably generates hybridization, whether that interaction is human, a product, a practice, or an environment. If someone does not know the importance of diversity for coexistence, and has no experience working with people of different backgrounds, but only acknowledges narrowly defined “national traditions” or “pureblood cultures,” they can never take “hybrid cultures” seriously or recognize their legitimacy. Speaking from personal experience, I was born in Shanghai after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, but never had the opportunity to learn about Confucianism positively until I came to Japan for doctoral training in the late 1980s. I was fortunate to be able restore my cultural roots through attending lectures by Shimada Kenji, Kaji Nobuyuki, and Mizoguchi Yu¯zo¯ and through working with my Japanese advisors Wakita Osamu and Koyasu Nobukuni in completing my dissertation on the Kaitokudo¯, a Japanese Neo-Confucian academy in early modern Osaka. I further strengthened my faith in Confucianism through contacts with Professors Tetsuo Najita, Weiming Tu, Benjamin Schwartz, and Wm. Theodore de Bary during my postdoctoral research at Harvard and through teaching at Bridgewater State College of Massachusetts. Therefore, it is fair to say that someone may not necessarily be the inheritor of their cultural roots simply through ethnicity or nationality. In order to carry on the tradition to which they belong, they have to learn and be educated, and the provider of that education may not necessarily be in their birthplace or home country. March 2012

magnetic field of cultural systems. The paper is included in the first issue of East Asian Cultural Studies, the bulletin of the new Graduate School of East Asian Cultures at Kansai University established in April 2011. 4 Professor Aoki Tamotsu is a pioneer in using this kanji expression, which I prefer to use for “hybrid cultures.” There were similar expressions, such as 雑種文化 suggested by the late professor Kato¯ Shu¯ichi, as well as 混 血 文 化 by others. However, the former doesn’t carry a positive nuance in Chinese, and therefore may be replaced by the expression 雑交文化 as suggested by Professor Cheng Pei-kai, director of Chinese Civilisation Centre at City University of Hong Kong and the general editor of Jiuzhou Xulin 九 州 學 林 (Chinese Culture Quarterly), a renowned journal on Chinese literature, history, philosophy, archeology, and arts published in both traditional and simplified Chinese versions.

New Directions in Regional Studies

NOMA Haruo

The Center and Periphery in the Magnetic Field of Cultural Systems: New Perspectives on Regional Research

I.

Introduction

As a fellow of the Global COE Program at Kansai University (2007–2012) aimed at “Creating a New Cultural Image of East Asia via a Peripheral-Based Approach,” my main educational role is to conduct lectures in spring and autumn on Peripheral Projects 1 and 2. The courses are called “lectures,” but are actually designed to provide doctoral students with opportunities to experience fieldwork; practical training is strongly implied. In the summers of 2008 and 2009, sociology professor Kumano Takeshi, whose specialty is cultural anthropology; G-COE Assistant Professor Nishimura Masanari, whose area is Southeast Asian archeology; and I were in charge of one-week field trips to Hueˆ´ in central Vietnam. In 2010, Professor Yabuta Yutaka, whose concentration is early modern Japanese history; and G-COE Assistant Professor Aratake Kenichiro¯, whose specialty is Japanese economic history, conducted fieldwork jointly in the Amakusa area of Kumamoto Prefecture. A second year of fieldwork in Amakusa is planned for 2011. Now that the project is still in the middle stages, I believe I should use this opportunity to register my ideas on the significance of these regional studies, methods of fieldwork, and differences with previous research done on Asia. Most of the students taking the courses are specializing in the history of East Asian— including Japanese—philosophy, philology, and linguistics. I was asked to direct the courses using a philosophy that diverged from the approach I have previously taken in my specialization of geography. Although the students were all in the doctoral program, none had any real experience with fieldwork; over eighty percent were foreign students, and of those, over eighty percent were from China and Taiwan: countries in the kanji (Chinese characters) cultural sphere. In concrete terms, my courses were based on two presentations. The first was a presentation I made at a roundtable discussion at the first annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia held at Kansai University on June 27, 2009. The theme of the meeting was “New Approaches to Multicultural Inter-

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action”; the topic of my panel was “The Periphery as Fieldwork in Cultural Interaction Studies.”1 The second was a presentation made on September 27 to 28, 2010 at China’s Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, at a workshop on “Methodologies in East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies.”2 The ultimate aim of the conferences was to establish a methodology for East Asian cultural interaction studies; they were the result of a long process of trial and error.

II.

Regional Fieldwork in Japan in the Twentieth Century

A.

Outline of Asian Regional Fieldwork in Prewar Japan

Leaving any extensive discussion on fieldwork in prewar Japan to another occasion, here I would like to limit my observations to two points. Research conducted by Japanese scholars before the war extended to the northeastern area of China (Manchuria), western China, Taiwan, and Korea, and as an extension of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, to islands in the South Pacific and Indochina. Much of the fieldwork on the latter two regions was no more than crude translations of books and reports done in European countries. Such research was in sharp contrast to that based on Chinese texts, including historical research and Asian philosophies, of Han peoples in central China in the middle to lower reaches of the Yellow River. It is clear that much of the Japanese research at this time on the periphery was conducted as a suzerain power of colonies and semi-colonies using its privileged status for explorations; investigation of resources and people’s living conditions; academic research (such as research by Japan’s two colonial universities—Keijo¯ Imperial University 京 城 帝 国 大 学 in Seoul and Taihoku Imperial University 台北帝国大学 in Taiwan, as well as secondary schools of agriculture and forestry); national policy surveys by the Korean Government-General and the South Manchuria Railway Company; and practical language training at the To¯a Do¯bun Shoin 東亜同文書院 in Shanghai. On the other hand, it was impossible to conduct full-fledged fieldwork in China’s heartland on account of the Qing court, which did not facilitate field

1 The title of the presentation was: Higashi Ajia bunka ko¯sho¯gaku no fui-rudo toshite no shu¯en 東 ア ジ ア 文 化 交 渉 学 の フ ィ ー ル ド と し て の 周 縁 (“The Periphery as an East Asian Cultural Interaction Study Field”). 2 The title of the presentation was: 周縁アプローチからみた東アジア文化交渉学の視座— 方法論と実践をつな ぐ 「 場 」 の 要 諦 — Shu¯en apuro-chi kara mita Higashi Ajia bunka ko¯sho¯gaku no shiza—ho¯ho¯ron to jissen o tsunagu “ba” no yo¯tei (“Multilateral Viewpoints on Cultural Interaction Studies in East Asia from a Peripheral Approach: Importance of the Field for Integration of Methodology and Practice”).

The Center and Periphery in the Magnetic Field of Cultural Systems

17

surveys. From this context it can be said that East Asian fieldwork peripheral to Japan already existed as early as the latter part of the 19th century. For European countries, information on Qing China (1644–1911)—a country in semi-isolation from the rest of the world—was limited to a handful of open ports, such as Shanghai, Amoy, Hong Kong, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Qingdao, which served as small windows from which filtered only little glimmers of information. European powers had access to even less local information than Japan, yet conducted research to the fullest extent possible, an impressive feat considering the circumstances.3 These difficulties contributed to China’s semimysterious image.

B.

Asian Regional Fieldwork in Postwar Japan: Starting from Loss of the Field

Japan lost all of its foreign colonies with defeat in World War II in 1945. On the Korean Peninsula, the Korean War (1950–1953) resulted in the creation of North and South Korea, while the Cold War (1947–1991) was embodied in the conflict between capitalism and socialism. Koreans who had come to Japan willingly or half-forcibly before World War II returned to the North or South based on their political leanings regardless of their original birthplaces. In academia, Japanese professors at Keijo¯ and Taihoku Imperial Universities were repatriated, and the priceless materials that they had gathered from fieldwork could not be utilized for many years. What finally provided some reprieve to this situation was fieldwork done in non-East Asian regions far from Japan. Through the extensive pioneering fieldwork by the Japan Ethnology Society on rice cultivation in Southeast Asia, Japanese were able to secure a position in fieldwork for considering the origins of rice cultivation culture, migrations of minorities, and formation of nation states. I will briefly address this topic in this paper.

3 Theodore Cantor (1809–1860), Alexander, and George Bentham (1800–1884) collected and studied the plants of Hong Kong and the Zhoushan 舟山 Archipelago as far as circumstances permitted. One of the results of their efforts was Bentham’s Flora Hongkongensis (1861). (Noma, 2009). Even after the war, Segawa Masahisa 瀬川昌久 and others faced the distressing choice of studying farms in Hong Kong’s New Territories at a time when anthropological fieldwork could not be done on the Chinese mainland.

18 C.

NOMA Haruo

Theories on Laurel Forest Culture and its Broader Context

The first theory I will discuss concerning the East Asian region through true fieldwork on the periphery in postwar Japan is that of laurel forest culture. This cultural theory was advocated in 1966 by the plant breeder and explorer, Nakao Sasuke 中 尾 佐 助 (1916–1993) in the 1960s. The theory is similar in character to the agricultural culture theory developed by Ueyama Shunpei 上山春平 (1921– ), Sasaki Ko¯mei 佐々木高明 (1929– ), and Watanabe Tadao 渡部忠世 (1924– ). Underlying the theories was an orientation toward searching for Japan’s traditional cultural roots in terms of their origins and dissemination. The unique and local vegetation zone of evergreens comprised of live oak, castanopsis, Machilus thunbergii, camphor trees, camellias, and other evergreens with glossy, thick leaves received much attention. This vegetation is found in the temperate zones of Nepal, Bhutan, Assam, Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos, extending to the northern mountains of the Indonesian archipelago, the plateaus of China’s Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, the mountainous regions of Jiangnan 江南 (Wuyi 武夷, Wuling 武陵, and Nanling 南嶺 mountain ranges), the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and south-western Japan. Nakao noted the common cultural elements in technologies of soaking and removing residue from wild kudzu, bracken, red spider lily, and other wild rhizomes and cupules from live oak trees; tea cultivation and processing methods; sericulture; lacquer ware production from lacquer trees; citrus fruit and green shiso (perilla) cultivation; and brewing techniques for fermenting malt in the form of millet and rice grains, etc. Based on research of slash and burn agriculture, Sasaki designated cultivation in this region as millet and root-type cultivation of foxtail millet, finger millet, sorghum, buckwheat and other millets; dry-land rice, taro, yams, and other root vegetables. Discussions on material culture and food culture have been held by scholars in ethnology, folklore, geography, and agriculture; overlapping research with archeology has developed along the lines of Jo¯mon agriculture.4 Considerations based on time lines of earthenware forms and theories on shapes have merged with speculation on uses and ceremonies based on the artifacts. Interdisciplinary scholarship and conversations have been realized through analogies from techniques that reproduce similar items. With more in-depth research and archeological dating technologies, determination of absolute age can now be done with radiocarbon dating and tephrochronology. Long-term changes, such as climate change, can 4 The heart of Jo¯mon culture itself was not in the laurel forest zone but in the oak forest zone of central and northeastern Japan. The theory was often mentioned at the time that farming elements were extant during the Jo¯mon period, and that it was the preceding stage to the paradigm that Yayoi culture equaled laurel forest zone culture.

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now be done through microscopic and stratigraphic analysis of pollen and phytoliths. In order to demarcate laurel forest zone vegetation, national borders, regional administrations, and other artificial or political considerations naturally become moot. Also, laurel forest zones tend to cross natural boundaries such as river basins. Sasaki, Ueyama, and others have labeled such core zones the “East Asian Fertile Crescent,” but from the perspective of a Sino-centric world, such areas are the periphery. As a result, the laurel forest zone theory involves the periphery, and as it has prompted a strong urge to search for Japanese cultural roots in the south, it should be noted that the periphery and mutual relationships occurring between phenomena (structure), as well as the nature of societies have not been the focus of attention.

Figure 1: East Asian Vegetation: Oak Forest and Laurel Forest Culture Zones; Sasaki, 1993

Other theories, such as the oak forest zone culture theory (Sasaki 佐々木, 1993), and beech tree zone culture theory (Ichikawa 市川, 1984; Umehara 梅原, 1985) have been advocated as a counter to this vegetation zone. Such analogous cultural theories also trace cultural roots from the north, and are built on the comparison of cultural element compounds centering on the visible, such as material culture, and are therefore subject to similar flaws. This vegetation consists of deciduous broadleaf trees of Asian oak variety, which are distributed from the Huai He 淮河 region to the Liaodong Peninsula; the Liaodong Forest zone; and the Mongolian

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NOMA Haruo

oak forest zone comprised of mainly Mongolian oak, Tilia japonica, Betulacea, Ulmaceae, and maple that extends along the eastern line dividing Harbin and Shenyang 瀋陽. In the vegetation map (Figure 1), the former are shown as warmtemperate broadleaf forests, while the latter are warm-temperate deciduous broadleaf forests. Sasaki also considers oak forests in the broad sense from East Tartary to the lower reaches of the Amur River. It is assumed that the temperate zone hunters and gatherers (Orochs, Evenks, Evens, and other Tungusic forest dwellers) and coastal non-nomadic fishermen (Nivkh, Nanai (Hezhe 赫 哲 ), and other Koryaks live in these regions. The oak forest zone in this broad sense involves raising of pigs, wearing of leather and fur clothing, pit dwelling, poisoned arrows, saddle querns, milling of flour, and use of tree bark. Their common cultural elements include growing of turnips, W-type cultivated barley, Welsh onion, edible burdock, mustard greens, buckwheat, and northern crops such as foxtail millet and Proso millet and other grains that originated from the central Eurasian Grain Belt and were transmitted over the northern route. In this context, the central culture of the midstream region of the Yellow River is considered a more advanced level of agricultural culture, a result of the earlier initiation of agriculture in the Liaodong Peninsula (Sasaki, 1993: 57). At this juncture, the northeastern region of China, the Korean Peninsula, and East Tartary once again became the foci of fieldwork as the East Asian periphery. In terms of rice cultivation, doubts have been raised by Watanabe and others concerning the theory of the origins of rice in Assam and Yunnan. Through molecular genetics, an increasingly influential theory is that Oryza sativa Indica (Indian rice) and Oryza sativa Japonica (Japanese rice) are temperate Japanesetype rice cultivars with HWC-2 genetic compositions and were originally dispersed mainly in the middle-lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Cultivated rice in Yunnan and Assam came to be thought of as having adapted to a complex environment as a result of the interaction of a variety of ethnic cultures in those regions. Japanese rice that was disseminated as rice cultivars, once called Oryza sativa javanica, though small in number, have come to be consciously distinguished from tropical Japonica. It is now known that tropical Japonica was taken from the Philippines, Taiwan, the Ryu¯kyu¯ archipelago, and other tropical islands to southern Kyushu, from where it spread throughout Japan (Sato 佐藤, 1992). What is implied is that although the “sea route” advocated by Yanagita Kunio 柳田国男 (1875–1962) was not the main route, his theory cannot be denied. In fact, it has been underscored.

The Center and Periphery in the Magnetic Field of Cultural Systems

D.

21

Path toward a Global Theory

I would like here to mention as periphery fieldwork research in the 1990s the forum held at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies called “Establishing a Methodology for Integrated Regional Research: Exploring New Paradigms for Coexistence in a Glocalized World in the 21st Century.” This program was recognized as an important regional research center by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology for a four-year period starting in 1993. By this period it was possible to conduct fieldwork in and visit many areas of continental East Asia, including inland regions. A reason for the government’s selection of the program was that Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies has played an important role since its inception in the fields of nature and biology. The project emphasizes interdisciplinary, and a partially inter-faculty approach, which seeks to transcend early modern Western science parameters to achieve a new intellectual paradigm. Such research has mainly shifted from research on one particular Southeast Asian region to that which transcends national borders, and that could be called intuitive temporary forms of landscapes and synoptic models. Further modifications have been added through interdisciplinary discussion. (Figure 2) At the same time, socio-cultural ecosystem dynamics that include perspectives on social structures have been advocated (Tachimoto 立本, 1996); this approach has different aspects than the laurel forest culture theory, whose foci are limited to specialization in materialist culture, myths, and folkloristic rituals.

Figure 2: Representative “World Units” in Eurasia; Takaya, 1996

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NOMA Haruo

The three points that serve as presuppositions of this research are as follows: 1. Southeast Asian regionality is recognized as a meaningful space with distinctive characteristics that can be relatively demarcated. 2. Aim to establish a new scholarly field. 3. Understood as a mandala comprised of politico-economics, family, religions, and other social systems; ceremonies; world views; communication; art and other symbolic systems on an ecosystem base. Takaya Yoshikazu 高谷好一 (2006) expanded the above argument further to include the entire earth, bundling together regions with different value systems, and dividing them into “world units.” Rather than draw lines along the early modern paradigm of national borders, Takaya interprets the ecosystems, cultures, and societies rooted therein as having meaning for humankind; he has frequently been criticized for his supra-historiocity. Takaya argues that it is the concept of the Chinese world being equivalent to the East Asian world that is the most clearly distinguishable of these “world units” (Takaya, 1996). He states that rule in the Chinese world was characterized by the phrase, “the more useful elements of military might on the steppes were used as their own followers; they annihilated all others.” One individual monopolized wealth and information coming through the oasis. He put docile farmers under his protection. The ideal in China was the basic formula of a strong emperor and farmers who worked hard. Takaya states that this pattern was formulated during the era of Emperor Wu of Han (156 BCE – 87 BCE).5 Takaya assumes the Chinese world to be a “central societal model” with a strong central force as a “world unit.”

III.

The New Outlook Called “Magnetic Field of Cultural Systems”

In Asia, the historical and cultural influence of China is conspicuous. Currently, China’s soft power and influence is astonishing. On the other hand, excessive absorption in China leads to disregard for multifaceted cultures, and the fear that attention will no longer be paid to systems outside the China core. As someone not specializing in research on China, I would like to propose the concept of “magnetic field of cultural systems” in order to position the East Asian world in the multi-cultural systems of Asia. 5 Takaya Yoshikazu 高谷好一, Shinsekai chitsujo o motomete 新 世 界 秩 序 を 求 め て (In Search of a New World Order), 1992, pp. 146–147.

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This term is also the title of the final bulletin that I jointly researched and edited: Comparative Research on Cultures as Systems: Cultural Encounters during the Age of Exploration between Europe and Asia (2009), published by the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies at Kansai University.6 The concept is of a locale that functions as a magnet. Opposite poles attract; same poles repel. Such magnetic poles are usually invisible, but if iron filings are put on a paper with a magnet it is possible to see patterns of magnetic field lines drawn by the filings. When several magnets are placed on the paper, a complex magnetic field is created through the varying strength and placement of the magnets. If we adhere closely to this analogy, each individual society is perceived as interfering with each other, attracting and repulsing each other in turn. In concrete terms, such interaction becomes a result of the movement of people and things. Items with common trade value include rare shellfish, gold, silver, copper, and currency. In a broad sense, even information and language can be included in this category. The global starting point for this interchange was the Age of Exploration that several European countries undertook in the 16th century to discover the “unknown world.” It is now becoming a historical truism that the reason the West and East were able smoothly to connect was that there was already extensive interaction within the Asian region. Intra-Asian interaction began occurring after the 13th century in the age of seafaring and trade. The “Asian seas” broadly included the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the two co-extant South China Sea and Southeast China Sea systems that sandwich the Indian and Asian continents. The former comprised a cultural system that could be called a large cultural sphere encompassing Europe, Central Asia, Arabian merchants, Islam, and Africa. The latter must be considered as having involved marine activity on the part of Malays as well as movements by individual countries in the East Asian periphery regardless of the strong influence of China. In the 16th century, the small kingdom of Portugal on the Iberian Peninsula conquered the port cities of Oman, Diu, Goa, Malacca, and Macao in rapid succession as beachheads to Asia. The Portuguese tried to build an invisible “marine empire.”7 At this time as well, it was only because India, Arabia, China, Malay, and other existing cultural systems had built networks through their 6 Noma Haruo 野間晴雄, ed. , Bunka shisutemu no jiba—16–20 seiki Ajia no ko¯ryu¯shi—文化 システムの磁場—16～20 世紀アジアの交流史— (The Magnetic Field of Cultural Systems: History of Intercourse in Asia during the 16th to 20th Centuries), Kansai Daigaku Shuppanbu, 2010. 7 Noma Haruo 野間晴雄, “Goa, Marakka, Makao no toposu—Ajia ni okeru Porutogaru bunka isan” ゴア， マラッカ， マカオのトポス—アジアにおけるポルトガル文化遺産— (Topoi of Goa, Malacca and Macao: Portuguese Cultural Heritages in Asia), Kansai Daigaku bungaku ronshu¯ 関 西 大 學 文 學 論 集 , Vol. 57, No. 2, 2007, pp. 125–151.

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tireless efforts that the Portuguese empire could use or borrow them to function effectively. The Portuguese, who are said to have introduced guns (arquebuses) to apan through Tanegashima 種 子 島 , manufactured modern firearms in 1525 in an armory in Goa, on the western coast of India, and proceeded to sell them to various regions in Asia. Their last stop was Japan. As symbolized by the presence of Portuguese on a ship that drifted ashore in Japan and that belonged to the head of the wako¯ ( 倭寇 Japanese pirates)—the Ming period Confucian scholar Wang Zhi 王直 (alias Wufeng 五 峰 ) —the Portuguese cleverly tried to make inroads into Japan by fully using the existing regional system. First they chose readily accessible venues based on their previous experience, and then persistently approached well-disposed individuals. Erosion of the non-European world by the great European powers subsequently reshaped the Asian world through colonization and strife. In Asia there were several cultures that were strong forces (nations) with different origins and backgrounds that had maintained an intricate balance with each other. Arabian merchants, Gujarat merchants from India, the Malwari and Chuti merchant classes, overseas Chinese, Malay, and other groups that excelled at trade moved freely within a fairly wide area in this magnetic field, forming an ever more complex magnetic field. I wish to consider the “East Asian World” as a subset of specific local areas that are characterized by the movement of people and things in its widest meaning. The East Asian World can be defined as a space wherein a definite magnetic field exerts influence.

IV.

Hypothesizing Centrality and Networks

I am assuming centrality and networks as a base framework for the above type of cultural system magnetic fields. When we consider the “East Asian World” as a new academic research field called East Asian cultural interaction studies, the concepts that we cannot avoid are centrality and centripetal force. Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of world systems entails a historical analysis of core and periphery nations. His theory has prompted rebuttals resulting in pluralistic cultural theories and cores that have in turn resulted in various revisions and counterarguments. We must be extremely circumspect, however, in adopting those revisions and refutations of Wallerstein’s theory in the field of East Asia. It cannot be denied that the “great tradition” of Confucian thought and behavioral norms and the practical philosophy of Daoism appear at the forefront in the periphery. In fact, it is ascertainment of the great tradition that is essential in the prevailing circumstances and processes—sometimes continuous and other

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times discontinuous—through distance, natural barriers, ecology, and transportation networks. In our global COE project, Vietnam, along with the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands and Taiwan, is a very important field. Social integration, sovereignty, and the existence of mature government organizations have far more complex stratified and class characteristics than the regional social structures represented by examples in the laurel forest cultural theory. Further, the culture of Chinese written characters is firmly rooted in Vietnam, and China’s political and administrative systems, Confucian ethical perspective and Daoist spirit are deeply imprinted there. The area of Vietnam that became the model for this paradigm is found in the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam, where the Kinh people live and engage in wet rice paddy land agriculture. Minority areas on the periphery, mountain regions, and hills where slash and burn agriculture and terraced fields are prevalent, are slightly different in distance and elevation, but become spaces with rigid distinctions.8 The Kinh people of the periphery, that is, the Kinh people who were based in the central region and its border area, moved south as pioneers, making central Vietnam (Annam) and southern Vietnam (Cochin China) their own territory. Many qualitative changes and transformations were added to the social system during this process. While the tribute system was maintained toward successive Chinese dynastic courts, Vietnam acted as if it were a “Little China” vis-à-vis peripheral nations. It should be noted here that a parallel phenomenon occurred in the Ryu¯kyu¯ Kingdom, which maintained ties and the cultural influence of China while peripheralizing at the core by spreading the Kitayama 北山 culture to the Amami Islands 奄美 and colonially administrating Miyako 宮古 and Yaeyama 八重山. Many islands are located in the coastal seas of East Asia. In the East China Sea, however, there is a fast ocean current called the Kuroshio Current that reaches the northernmost region of Japan on the Pacific. Seasonal winds and typhoons in that sea area greatly influence navigation and agriculture. Even if bays that have complex submerged shorelines and coasts dotted with archipelagoes were once used as places of refuge for small boats or ports in which to wait for favorable winds, they were not able to become pivotal harbor facilities in pre-modern times. The coasts demanded a fairly high level of navigation expertise. The Daoist Mazu 媽祖 faith and Tianhougong 天 后 宮 temples intended to safeguard navigators and fishermen that are found mainly in Taiwan, Fujian, and Guangdong, but also along the Southeast Asian coast to the Japanese archipelago, are 8 Noma Haruo 野間晴雄, “P. Guru- no mita Betonamu no¯son ku¯kan to kome no chikara —‘Tonkin Deruta no no¯min’ saiken—” (Rural Space in Vietnam and the Implication of Rice Culture: Pierre Gourou’s Peasants in Tonkin Revisited) P. グルーのみたベトナム農村空間 と米の力—『トンキンデルタの農民』再検— Kansai Daigaku bungaku ronshu¯ 関西大學 文學論集, Vol. 52, No. 3, 2003, pp. 145–172.

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direct evidence both of the broad network of diaspora Chinese, and peripherality.9 Isles that are part of the outlying islands, such as the Pescadores, Green Island, and Orchid Island in the seas around Taiwan, and the Batanes Islands off the Philippines, may be more on the periphery today than ever before, but in terms of the ocean network, it was those islands that were the citadel gateways through which new cultures and civilization entered and where trade was transacted. In times of war, however, these same islands immediately became the arena of pillage, confusion, and turmoil. Last year we added Amakusa 天 草 (in Kumamoto Prefecture 熊 本 県 ) as one of the periphery fieldwork areas for our global COE doctoral students. The main Amakusa Islands—Shimojima 下 島 and Ueshima 上島—are two of over 120 isles on the East China Sea side of southwest Japan. Most of the islands are comprised of low hills; there is very little level ground. On the Yatsushiro S e a 八 代海 side there are many jagged ria-like island coastlines and archipelagos. There is a series of cliffs and rugged reefs on the open ocean side of Amakusa. Very few of them functioned as land transport locales until the beginning of the 20th century. Traditional communities were divided largely into fishing villages that adhered closely to the coast and wet rice cultivation villages that formed in the valleys of the inner regions. Amakusa was highly receptive first of all to civilization, philosophies, and religions from the outside world, and in particular to those from the west (mainland China, or the East China Sea region), and was equipped with an isolation that facilitated preservation of such outside cultures. There are many historical remains of Catholic martyrs, and a syncretism of indigenous religions and Catholicism termed Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians), who concealed themselves until the beginning of the Meiji period. Amakusa was an imperial demesne of the Bakufu, and while it currently belongs to Kumamoto Prefecture, there was a great psychological and physical distance from the Higo Kumamoto 肥後熊本 han (藩 domain). We could say that even during the period of national isolation ( 鎖国 sakoku), it was quite easy for the authorities to overlook the existence of foreign religions there. The periphery in East Asia cultural interaction studies fieldwork consists not only of such powerful, influential vectors and material cultures. Thought, scholarship, and other high-level cultural roles and discussions related to the 9 Takahashi Seiichi 高 橋 誠 一 , “Nihon ni okeru Tenpi shinko¯ no tenkai to sono rekishi chirigakuteki sokumen” 日本における天妃信仰の展開とその歴史地理学的側面 (Historic Geographical Profiles in the Belief in the Voyage Goddess, Tenpi, in Japan), Higashi Ajia bunka ko¯sho¯ kenkyu¯ 東アジア文化交渉研究(East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies), Kansai Daigaku bunka ko¯sho¯gaku kyo¯iku kenkyu¯ kyoten 関 西 大学文化交渉学教育研究拠 点, Vol. 2, 2009, pp. 121–144.

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ideal relationship with the core society, are also important. It is necessary to analyze how the East Asian characteristic of emphasis on paternal societies, ancestor worship, and lineage, and of the Southeast Asian characteristic of multilineal and bilineal networks interact in the southern regions of East Asia. At the same time, discussions on hierarchy and discontinuity in the inner periphery are essential. In other words, our aim is to take the Chinese diaspora world in the periphery as one community of the “world unit”10 and elaborate on and visualize it through further dissection. Rather than aim for a universal model, we should attempt to concentrate on elaboration of regional models, and through comparison, reference, and relativizing with other regions, attain new knowledge. In the following section I will explain this concept by providing two examples.

V.

Formulation of the Substance of Peripheral Regions

A.

Hue´ˆ as the Periphery in the Nguye˜ˆ n Dynasty11: An Example of an Urban Region

The Nguye˜ˆn Dynasty (1802–1945), when the capital Hue´ˆ was in the central part of the country, was the last of the unified dynasties in Vietnam, and continued for thirteen generations of rulers. The territory of Vietnam today is assumed to have the same boundaries as in the Nguyeˆ˜n Dynasty. Aside from the period under the second emperor of the Nguyeˆ˜n Dynasty, Minh Mang (1791–1841), the central administration was weak. Being conferred with titles of nobility by Qing China (1644–1911), the Nguye˜ˆn rulers called their country Vieˆt Nam, a vulnerable ˙ country where only a consciousness of being a “Little China” was robust. In 1884, ´ with conclusion of the Treaty of Hueˆ, the central region, Annam, became a French protectorate. The royal family was able to maintain a certain level of reputation even through the time of the reign of the ninth emperor, Ðo`ˆ ng Khán (1864–1889), though Annam had become wholly a puppet state of France. The Nguye˜ˆn were extremely dillatory in promoting urban development, however. 10 Takaya Yoshikazu 高谷好一, “ Sekai tan’i” kara sekai o miru—chiiki kenkyu¯ no shiza「世界 単位」から世界 を 見 る — 地 域 研 究 の 視 座 — (Perspectives on Regional Research: Looking at the World on a Global Basis), Kyoto Daigaku Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 1996. 11 Noma Haruo 野間晴雄, “Shu¯en apuro-chi kara mita Guencho¯ Hue: toshi puran, gaiko¯, ko¯eki no rinen to jittai” 周縁アプローチからみたグエン朝フエ：都市プラン・外港・交易の 理念と実体 (Hue in the Nguyen Dynasty as Seen from a Peripheral Approach: Manifestation of Urban Planning, the Outer Port, and Concept of Trade); Presented at the 52nd symposium, Rekishi chirigakukai taikai 歴史地理学会大会(Convention of the Association of Historical Geographers in Japan), Kobe University, September 19, 2009.

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During this interval, France’s expansion of the city of Hanoi and colonization represented the peak of urban planning. The capital, Hue´ˆ, is considered a miniature of the Purple Forbidden City in Beijing. It was built at the beginning of the 19th century when cannon played a major role in war. Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s (1633–1707) fortification system was used throughout the city. Urban planning and landscapes skillfully blended foreign and indigenous elements. After Nguyeˆ˜n Hoàng (1525–1613) became ruler of the Hue´ˆ region in 1558, successive generations of Nguye˜ˆns named the area under their control !àng Trong and Nam Ho`ˆ ng, and made the Hue´ˆ vicinity the capital. Kim Long (1636–1687), Phú Xuân (1738–1775) and other capitals on the left bank of the Hương River were constructed as square imperial cities and as partial replicas. On the right bank of the river, Ngự Bình Mountain doubles as a protective screen and a vermillion phoenix, while the two sandbank islands represent the green dragon and white tiger of feng shui, which was emphasized in the location. The imperial city, however, was not situated precisely on a north-south axis, but veered in a southeastern-northwestern direction. The northern symbol of the black tortoise was lacking because the land in that direction was low wetland. The Nguyeˆ˜n Dynasty Hueˆ´ Citadel was located on an extension of this land, while the imperial city was on the wetland itself. Hue´ˆ can be divided roughly into seven districts: 1) the imperial city within the city walls; 2) the merchant district on the eastern side; 3) the residential district for the gentry and royalty; 4) the craftsman and artisan district in the southeast and northeast; 5) the temple district on the other side of the river; 6) the new district of French residents on the other side of the river; 7) and the outer port. The emperor and royal family lived in the imperial palace within the imperial city walls; the inner city where military officers resided—the inner quarters of the Purple Forbidden Palace—were constructed like trilayered nesting boxes. Junior-level soldiers, civil servants, and merchants resided in the imperial city. French soldiers were garrisoned in the city after 1884, while average citizens were also then allowed to live in the city, resulting in extensive deterioration of the class-based regional system. Of the above seven districts, the new city and temples were on the right bank of the river. The new town was distingushed by radial roads and intersections on the European urban plan, churches, colonial administration facilities, schools, and a merchant district. On the hills on the right side of the embankment were imperial temples with elements of a villa built while the emperor was alive. Since retired civil servants and military officers preferred living in the city outskirts surrounded by picturesque scenery on either bank of the river, they lived in a district with much greenery. Other districts were located in the low wetlands on the left bank of the river. The diaspora Chinese were concentrated in the district that functioned as a river port—Gia Hoˆ i, which lay adjacent to the outside of the city. Assembly halls ˙

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for Chinese from Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, and other locales were constructed in the district. Merchant networks with Hoˆ i An and Saigon were of importance, ˙ but today, with drastic changes in the political system, it is the overseas Chinese community and diaspora Chinese from the same province who maintain the community centers. The forerunner of this district was a section called Minh Hương, formed about four kilometers downstream along the left bank of the Hương River. The Chinese established Thanh Ha, which was ceded to them in 1636 by the Nguye˜ˆns of Quảng Nam, who approved of diaspora Chinese merchants conducting international trade near the capital.12 In the first half of the 19th century, however, sandbars formed in the Hương River as the result of construction of a moat around the imperial city, causing the port’s fortunes to decline. The port was subsequently moved to the nearby river port of Bao Vinh, which was adjacent to the city. This area was originally a semi-agricultural semiartisan settlement with a borrowing pit for tiles for the capital. The inhabitants withdrew into the interior, and the merchant district and river port that served as a hub for regional transport prospered through the efforts of the immigrants who settled in the district along one bank of the river. Over time, however, the diaspora Chinese moved to Gia Hoˆ i district and the area outside of Hueˆ´ in search of a more ˙ convenient locale.

B.

Northeastern China (Manchuria) as the Periphery: Example of an Agricultural Village Area

China’s ecosystem has been divided largely into north and south along the famous east-west dividers of Qingling 秦嶺 and Huai He 淮河, as is indicated by the ancient saying, “boats in the south; horses in the north 南 船 北 馬 .” Geographical space in the north consists of field agriculture, livestock, and land transport. Geographical space in the south was characterized by rice cultivation, water transport, and commerce. Chinese civilization, which originated and was developed by Han peoples in the basin in the dried lower reaches of the Yellow River, moved south along the Yangtze. The humid, subtropical environment differed from the Yellow River Basin, and enabled rice cultivation culture to 12 Noma Haruo 野間晴雄, Nishimura Masanari 西村昌也, Shinohara Hirokata 篠原啓方, Sato¯ Minoru 佐藤実, Okamoto Hiromichi 岡本弘道, Kimura Mizuka 木村自, Hino Yoshihiro 氷野善寬, Kumano Takeshi 熊野建, Nguyen Va˘n !a˘ng, and Nguyen Minh Hà, “Vetonamu no Hue kyu¯gaiko¯ shu¯raku no Tenko¯kyu¯ to Kanseiden no cho¯sa kiso ho¯koku” ヴェトナムのフエ旧外港集落の天后宮と関聖殿の調査基礎報告 (Basic Research Report on Tianhou (Mazu) and Guan Yu Temples Located at the Outer Port Settlement of Hue in Vietnam), Higashi Ajia bunka ko¯sho¯gaku kenkyu¯ 東アジア文化交渉学研究 (East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies), Vol. 2, 2009, pp. 261–288.

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mature. Even granting that the origin of rice cultivation culture was located around the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, it was here in the southern region that the encounter of the Han peoples, who have a talent for business, with rice farming, allowed the blossoming of advanced, intensive, commercial horticultural rice cultivation. Chinese civilization built immense barriers to prevent encroachment by barbarian enemies, as exemplified by the Great Wall, leading to self-restraint on the part of the Han from advance into the north. In contrast, the Manchu peoples advanced south of the Great Wall, conquering the old territory of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), moving the Eight Banners en masse to Beijing, and building a system to control China south of the Yellow River. When the Ming dynasty collapsed in 1644, successive emperors deriving from the Manchu line continued to assimilate and Sinicize their conventions as minorities in an overwhelmingly Han Chinese land. In spite of visible examples of imposition of Manchu customs, such as tonsure and prohibition of native attire, the Sinicization of the ruling class is apparent from the decline of the Manchu language, which was the lingua franca of the conquerors. On the other hand, Manchuria—now northeastern China, comprised of the three provinces of Liaoning 遼寧省, Jilin 吉林省, and Heilongjiang 黒竜江, which was formerly the home of the Manchu peoples—restricted immigration of Han peoples. After the end of the 19th century, however, political confusion and poverty caused by an increase in the population in North China increased the movement of large numbers of Han Chinese to colonize the northeast, thereby rapidly increasing the Han population. One of the largest streams of immigrants moved from the Shandong Peninsula 山東 through Balhae 渤海 to the Liaodong Peninsula 遼東. They traversed the gentle rolling hills of the peninsulas northward, reaching the flat, fertile Northeast China Plain. Another route that the immigrants took was overland through the Shanhai Pass 山海関. Both groups sought the Northeast China Plain, which was virgin land for agricultural development. This area had originally been low-population density space where Manchu and other Tungusic peoples grazed their livestock, but an influx of Han peoples increased population density. This was analogous to the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido in the Meiji period (1868–1912). All of the Manchu peoples in this region were driven out to the remote mountains to the east and west and to arid lands, in terms of both population and sphere of living space. Even though they strove to retain and develop their unique ethnic culture, including their Manchu language, they eventually began speaking Chinese among themselves, and their customs were Sinicized. As a result, the Manchu peoples ended up “lending shelter and losing their own quarters.” In terms of agricultural techniques, however, the Han peoples of North China (華北) were ill-informed concerning rice farming, and instead spread cultivation

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of various cereal grains and legumes such as corn, sorghum, millet, and soybeans. The Liaodong River travels south through Liaoning Province and pours into Balhae. The Liaodong Delta has limitations for rice cultivation as it receives 600 mm of rainfall per year, but the rain falls mainly in the summer, and the temperatures rise, making rice cultivation possible. The Manchu peoples left the area as unadulterated wetland for an extended period of time. Today, the area produces China’s highest quality rice (it is the best quality rice for making sushi in China, and is an improved Japanese variety). Each farm household manages over ten hectares of land. Han Chinese engage in large-scale wet rice agriculture using the largest agricultural machinery possible. Panjin 盤錦, Liaoning is at the heart of this rice growing area.13 Rice can grow in the summer around the middle and upper reaches of the Songhua River ( 松 花 江 ), a branch of the Heilongjiang (Amur River), located 900 kilometers to the north, which crosses the Amur at 46 degrees north latitude (nearly the same latitude as Wakkanai City 稚 内 in Hokkaido) because of a reservoir that was built there to secure runoff from flooding of the plains and ravines. It was the Koreans in China (Joseonjok) who spread rice cultivation by colonizing regions suitable for rice growing. The Joseonjok traveled through the Korean Peninsula to China and settled in the Baekdu Mountain ( 長 白 山 ) vicinity.14 With its victories in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and RussoJapanese War (1904–1905), Japan gained control of Port Arthur and Dalian on the tip of the Kwangtung Leased Territory on the Liaodong Peninsula. Urbanization and agriculture along the rail line was carried out through the semi-national development organization called the South Manchuria Railroad Company, Ltd. in the 20th century. At the same time, Russia, which sought to develop Siberia from the west, acquired East Tartary from Qing China through the Convention of Peking in 1860. In 1872, the Russians began building their long-sought after warm water 13 Through a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science 日本学術振興会科学研 究費 for Kan Higashi Shinakai, kan Nihonkai engan-iki no bunka ko¯sho¯ to rekishi seitai o meguru gakujutsu kenkyu¯ 環東シナ海・環日本海沿岸域の文化交渉と歴史生態をめぐ る学術的研究」(Scientific Research on Cultural Interaction and Historical Ecology in the East China Sea and Japan Sea Coastal Ring) I was able to observe and survey rice faming in Dalian 大連, Harbin, Panjin City 盤錦 in Dawa County 大窪県 in the Liaodong Delta 遼東デ ルタ in Liaoning Province 遼寧省, and Fangzhen County 方正県 in Heilongjiang Province 黒竜江省 (middle reaches of the Songhua River 松花江) between September 3 and September 9, 2010. I am grateful to Mr. Dong Zhenjiang 董振江 of Dalian, an MA student in East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies at Kansai University, for making arrangements for the survey. 14 According to Shirai 白井 (2009: 65), of the 4006 hectares of rice area in all of Manchuria in 1914, 2652 hectares farmed by Koreans; 1095 hectares by Chinese; and 259 hectares by Japanese. In other words, 66 percent of rice farming was done by Koreans, while only 6 percent was by Japanese.

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port of Vladivostok on the southern tip of the Muravyov-Amursky Peninsula. Proceeding inland, they took possession of the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and the Kamchatka Peninsula, gained a foothold in Japan through maritime trade, and even attempted to advance into the Pacific. Through the Li-Lobanov Treaty of 1896, Russia was able to acquire rights to the China Eastern Railway from Vladivostok, and build the thoroughly Russian town of Harbin on the rail route along the banks of the Songhua River. This was the original route of the TransSiberian Railway. Japan, through the South Manchuria Railroad Company, developed and remodeled the principal section of the northeastern link of the railroad in Russia’s stead in the first half of the 20th century. In 1932 Japan maneuvered to create Manchukuo, including North China, with Qing China’s last emperor, Aisin-Gioro Puyi, as regent (and subsequent emperor). The ideology underlying this semicolonial puppet state was “ Harmony of Five Races” ( 五 族 協 和 ), the five races being the Japanese, Han Chinese, Koreans, Manchurians, and Mongols. Rice cultivation initiated by the Joseonjok, including introduction of coldresistant rice varieties from chilly northeastern Japan, was expanded by use of elaborate Japanese cultivation techniques. Japanese colonists from the prefectures of Ishikawa, Toyama, Niigata, Yamagata, Akita, Nagano, and other areas of northwest Japan who settled in Manchukuo as farmers, introduced the Japanese farming techniques. Some of these settlers could not return to Japan after the war, but remained in Manchuria and survived lives of hardship as Japanese orphans left behind in China. A new peripheral region was thus produced through cold-area rice cultivation and transplantation of large-scale crop farming by connecting northeast China and Japan across the distant Japan Sea.

VI.

Conclusion: Regional Scales and Fieldwork

The periphery, where space and time axes intersect, are a frontier for major controlling peoples, and while the quality of geopolitical evaluations change, a new and unique character is vested in the periphery region. In the East Asian world, however, the overwhelming centripetal force of the Chinese world remains unbroken. Through revolution in transportation conditions, exchanges between different political systems, and disparities in economic power, that periphery region offers unique early modern and modern modalities. From the perspective of East Asian cultural interaction studies, extraction of such regions, which incorporate these aspects and spaces, and the totality of things, economies, human interaction, qualitative changes, assimilation, synthesis, permutations, and encroachments are important fields of research.

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The reason I have given the example of a small area as a point in fieldwork of the periphery (for example, the river harbor region in the outskirts of Hueˆ´, as mentioned above) is that it serves not merely as an example, but as an archetype of functional investigative research of the overall reality. Naturally, when the regional scale includes the sandbank islands in the lower reaches of the Hương River, the magnetic field of cultural interaction that becomes visible in the relatively larger region provides different information for analytical methods. Further, contact with Europe, China, Japan, and other Southeast Asian worlds via the South China Sea is also related to the combination and incorporation of divergent regions (such as the port city of Hoˆ i An, originally the territory of the ˙ Champa aborigines). When discussing a peripheral region, it is imperative to portray an image of the periphery that appropriately considers the micro, mezzo, and macro stages. What is important to note in the “periphery project” fieldwork as an educational program for graduate students in the global COE program is establishing a system that is cognizant of this scale, methods for analyzing actual small-scale regions and detailed phenomena, as well as the process that connects them to a macro scale. If the word “Act” in the cliché, “Think globally, Act locally” is used to refer to the collection of data through fieldwork, it should be possible to reexamine the key issues for an explicit understanding of the periphery and a bottom-up approach to discover what tasks must be solved. It is hoped that with verification of deductive hypotheses a concomitant understanding will result. The trips to distant places should provide a rich and expanding horizon for East Asian cultural interaction studies.

Bibliography Ichikawa Takeo 市川健夫, ed. Nihon no bunatai bunka 日本のブナ帯文化 (Japan’s Beech Tree Zone Culture), Asakura Shoten 朝倉書店, 1984. Nakagahara Masahiro 中川原捷洋. Ine to inasaku no furusato 稲と稲作のふるさと (Native Land of Rice and Rice Cultivation), Kokon Shoin 古今書院, 1985. Nakao Sasuke 中尾佐助. Saibai shokubutsu to no¯ko¯ no kigen 栽培植物と農耕の起源 Origins of Cultivated Crops and Farming), Iwanami Shoten 岩波書店, 1966. Noma Haruo 野間晴雄. “P. Guru- no mita Betonamu no¯son ku¯kan to kome no chikara —‘Tonkin deruta no no¯min’ saiken—”「P. グルーのみたベトナム農村空間と米の 力—『トンキンデルタの農民』 再検— 」(Rural Space in Vietnam and the Implication of “Rice Culture”: Pierre Gourou’s Peasants in Tonkin Delta Revisited), Kansai Daigaku bungaku ronshu¯ 関西大學文學論集, No. 3, Vol. 52, pp. 145–172. —. “Goa, Marakka, Makao no toposu—Ajia ni okeru Porutogaru bunka isan”—ゴア，マ ラッカ，マカオのトポス—アジアにおけるポルトガル文化遺産— (Topoi of Goa, Malacca and Macao: Portuguese Cultural Heritages in Asia), Kansai Daigaku bungaku

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ronshu¯ 関西大學文學論集 (Kansai University Essays in Humanities), No. 2, Vol. 57, 2007, pp. 125–151. —. To¯yo¯ no shokubutsu o motomete — shokubutsuen, puranto hanta-, engeika no bunka ko¯sho¯gaku—東洋の植物を求めて—植物園・プラントハンター・園芸家の文化交 渉学— (In Search of Plants of the East: Cultural Interaction Studies of Plant Hunter Arboretum Horticulturalists), Higashi Ajia bunka ko¯sho¯gaku kenkyu¯ 東アジア文化交 渉学研究 (East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies Supplement No. 4), (Bunka ko¯sho¯gaku kyo¯iku kenkyu¯ kyoten, Second international symposium: Bunka ko¯sho¯gaku no kochiku I, Seigaku to¯zen to Highashi Ajia ni okeru kindai gakujutsu no keisei —文化交 渉学教育研究拠点第 2 回国際シンポジウム：文化交渉学の構築Ⅰ—西学東漸と 東アジアにおける近代学術の形成— (Eastward Advance of Western Learning and the Formation of Early Modern Scholarship in East Asia), 2009, pp. 109–135. Noma Haruo 野間晴雄, Nishimura Masanari 西村昌也, Shinohara Hirokata 篠原啓方, Sato¯ Minoru 佐藤実, Okamoto Hiromichi 岡本弘道, Kimura Mizuka 木村自, Hino Yoshihiro 氷野善寬, Kumano Takeshi 熊野建, Nguye˜ˆn Va˘n !a˘ng、and Nguye˜ˆn Minh Hà. “Vetonamu no Hue kyu¯gaiko¯ shuraku no Tenko¯gu¯ to Kanseiden no cho¯sa kiso ho¯koku” ヴェトナムのフエ旧外港集落の天后宮と関聖殿の調査基礎報告 (Basic Research Report on Tianhou (Mazu) and Guan Yu Temples Located at the Outer Port Settlement of Hue in Vietnam), Higashi Ajia bunka ko¯sho¯gaku kenkyu¯ 東アジア文化 交 渉 学 研 究 (East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies), Kansai Daigaku bunka ko¯sho¯o¯gaku kyo¯iku kenkyu¯ kyoten 関西大学文化交渉学教育研究拠点, Vol. 2, 2009, pp. 261–288. Noma Haruo. “Shu¯en apuro-chi kara mita Guencho Hue: toshi puran, gaiko¯, ko¯eki no rinen to jittai” 周縁アプローチからみたグエン朝フエ：都市プラン・外港・交易の理念 と実体 (Hue in the Nguyeˆ˜n Dynasty as Seen from a Peripheral Approach: Manifestation of Urban Planning, the Outer Port, and Concept of Trade) Presented at the 52nd symposium, Rekishi chirigakukai taikai 歴 史 地 理 学会 大 会 (Convention of the Association of Historical Geographers in Japan), Kobe University 神戸大学, September 19, 2009. Noma Haruo 野間晴雄 ed. Bunka shisutemu no jiba—16–19 seiki Ajia no ko¯ryu¯shi—文化 システムの磁場—16 ～ 20 世紀アジアの交流史— (The Magnetic Field of Cultural Systems: History of Intercourse in Asia during the 16th through 19th Centuries), Kansai Daigaku Shuppanbu 関西大学出版部, 2010. Sasaki Ko¯mei 佐々木高明. Nihon bunka no kiso¯ o saguru—narabayashi bunka to sho¯yo¯jurin bunka日本文化の基層を探る—ナラ林文化と照葉樹林文化 (Searching for the Base of Japanese Culture: Oak Forest Culture and Laurel Forest Culture), Nihon Ho¯so¯ Shuppan Kyo¯kai日本放送出版協会, 1993. Sato¯ Yo¯ichiro¯ 佐藤洋一郎. Ine no kitamichi 稲のきた道 (From Whence Grain Came), Sho¯kabo¯ 裳華房, 1992. Tachimoto Narifumi 立本成文. Chiiki kenkyu¯ no mondai to ho¯ho¯—shakai bunka seitairikigaku no kokoromi 地域研究の問題と方法—社会文化生態力学の試み (Problems and Methodology in Fieldwork: Experiments in Socio-cultural Ecology Studies), Kyoto Daigaku Gakujutsu Shuppankai 京都大学学術出版会, 1996. Takahashi Seiichi 高 橋 誠 一. “ Nihon ni okeru Tenpi shinko¯ no tenkai to sono rekishi chirigakuteki sokumen” 日本における天妃信仰の展開とその歴史地理学的側面 (Historic Geographical Profiles in the Belief in the Voyage Goddess, Tenpi, in Japan),

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Higashi Ajia bunka ko¯sho¯ kenkyu¯ 東アジア 文 化 交 渉 研 究 (East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies), Kansai Daigaku bunka ko¯sho¯gaku kyo¯iku kenkyu¯ kyoten 関西大学 文化交渉学教育研究拠点, Vol. 2. 2009, pp. 121–144. Takaya Yoshikazu 高谷好一. “Sekai tan’i” kara sekai o miru—chiiki kenkyu¯ no shiza「世 界単位」から世界を見る—地域研究の視座 (Perspectives on Regional Research: Looking at the World on a Global Basis), Kyoto Daigaku Gakujutsu Shuppankai 京都大 学学術出版会, 1996. Umehara Takeshi et.al. 梅原猛. Bunatai bunka ブナ帯文化 (Beech Tree Zone Culture), Shinsakusha 思索社, 1985.

*Originally published in Kansai Daigaku Bungaku Ronshu¯ 関西大學文學論集, No. 3, Vol. 60. Translated from the Japanese by Jenine Heaton. Translation published by permission of the author.

HUANG Chun-Chieh

Some Observations on the Study of the History of Cultural Interactions in East Asia

I.

Introduction

As historians engage in historical inquiry, a question that often occurs to them is: Should the scope and purview of historical inquiry ideally be national, regional, or global? Since the French Revolution in 1789, studies in national history have occupied the mainstream of historical practice. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the first half of the twentieth century in particular, historians tended to take the nation-state (usually their own) as the basic unit of historical inquiry. As a result, studies of national history became the leading trend in the twentieth century, and historians wrote discourses of meaningful historical inquiry based on political or cultural nationalism.1 Representative of national-historical studies in twentieth-century China is the classic work Guoshi dagang (國 史 大 綱, An outline of China’s national history; 1939), by Qian Mu (錢 穆).2 However, as Geoffrey Barraclough pointed out in 1979, since the end of World War II, ethnocentric national histories once in vogue prior to the war became distasteful, with many European intellectuals believing that ethnocentric national histories were among the intellectual origins of World War II.3 In such an 1 Chris Lorenz and Stefan Berger, supported by the European Science Foundation, led a team of scholars from 2003 through 2008 in carrying out the large-scale research project, “Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe” (http://www.uni-leipzig. de/zhsesf/). The results of this project will be presented at the roundtable “Religion, Nation, Europe, and Empire: Historians and Spatial Identities,” at the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Amsterdam in 2010. Afterward, the results will be published in a sixvolume set, as well as in ten specialized books, by Palgrave Macmillan. 2 Huang Chun-chieh, “Qian Binsi shixue zhong de ‘guoshi’ guan: Neihan, fangfa yu yiyi” (“National History” in Qian Mu’s Historical Thinking: Contents, Methods, and Meanings); Chun-chieh Huang, “Historical Thinking as a Form of New Humanism for Twentieth-Century China: Qian Mu’s View of History.” 3 Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History, p. 149. For the study of history in the twentieth century, see Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, as well as the special issue of Daedalus titled “Historians and the World of the Twentieth Century” (Spring 1971).

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intellectual atmosphere, the rationale for national history became weak and dubious. Yet in Asia, although nearly every country experienced the traumas of invasion and colonization during the past century, national history ironically remains the main approach of Asian historians.4 While some historians in postwar Japan have sought to stir up nationalistic fervor, all in all the focus of national-historical inquiry in postwar Japan has shifted from state-centered to people-centered studies.5 While studies of national history dominated historical inquiry in the twentieth century, the study of global history has started to catch the attention of historians in the twenty-first century. Recently Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang reviewed trends in historical research since 1990 and pointed out five new directions in recent historical inquiry:6 (1) culture and language were reformulated together as the “new cultural history”; (2) the women’s movement gave rise to women’s history and feminist history; (3) owing to a strong postmodern critique, historical inquiry and the social sciences became somewhat merged; (4) postmodern criticism went hand in hand with a strong postcolonial critique of national history; (5) global trends gave rise to world history, global history, and the history of globalization. Particularly noteworthy is the rapid rise of studies in global history since 1990. Reflecting on this rise of global history, Hayden White recently pointed out that in the purview of global history, the very notion of a global event has been transformed. This new notion of a global event may serve to deconstruct the abstract concepts of time, space, and causality assumed in Western historical studies.7 Adopting a cosmopolitan point of view, Frank Ankersmit harbors doubts about modernist world histories, for they not only tend to exaggerate the impact of nonhuman factors, such as plagues and famines, on the course of human history, but can also dehumanize history.8 doardo Tortarolo points out that the author who writes world history faces challenges regarding his ideology, as well as the legitimacy of his research.9 Be that as it may, as it becomes

4 For a recent review on the sorts of historical studies conducted in Asia, see Masayuki Sato, “East Asian Historiography and Historical Thought.” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, ed. 5 See To¯yama Shigeki, Sengo no rekishigaku to rekishi ishiki (Historical Studies and Historical Consciousness in Postwar Japan). 6 Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang, “The Globalization of History and Historiography: Characteristics and Challenges from the 1990s to the Present.” 7 Hayden White, “Topics for Discussion on Global History.” 8 Frank Ankersmit, “What Is Wrong with World History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View?” 9 Edoardo Tortarolo, “Universal/World History: Its Past, Present, and Future.”

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a major research trend in the near future, global history still has to confront the master narrative assumed in historical studies in the past.10 Between the national history that flourished in the twentieth century and the newly rising global history, there also exists regional history, area studies of selected regions such as East Asia, Western Europe, North America, Latin America, etc. Regional history in this sense is a new field of history that warrants serious thought and reflection. The main purposes of this paper are, first, to analyze the methodology of regional-historical studies in a given area, and the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia; second, to point out issues and problematiques in studying the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia; and finally, to suggest related new topics for research. Regional history as a field of historical inquiry can be subdivided into two principal types: one lies somewhere between national history and local history, and the other between national history and global history.11 The former type concerns the history of different regions within a country, such as the history of southern Taiwan, while the latter emphasizes the history of various transnational regions, such as histories of East Asia and Eastern Europe for instance. The regional history examined in this paper belongs to the latter type, as it concerns a transnational region.

II.

Reflections on Methodology

A.

East Asia as a Contact Zone

Before discussing methodological problems in the study of the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia, we must first look at some overall characteristics of this geographic region. Geographically, the region comprises mainland China, the Korean peninsula, Japan, Taiwan, and the Indochina peninsula, each with its own distinctive climatic conditions, temperature ranges, etc. The twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro¯ identified three regional types in the world: monsoon, desert, and grasslands. He described people who live in monsoon regions as delicate and rich in emotional life. They willingly face disgrace and humiliation to fulfill a task and have a strong sense of history.12 Perhaps Watsuji’s 10 At the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Amsterdam in 2010, Chris Lorenz, Dominic Sachsenmaier, Sven Beckert, et al., will hold a panel discussion titled “Global History: An Inter-regional Dialogue.” 11 On these two kinds of regional history, see Allan Megill, “Regional History and the Future of Historical Writing.” 12 Watsuji Tetsuro¯, Fu¯do: Ningengakuteki ko¯satsu (Local Cultures and Customs: Anthropological Observations).

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theory exhibits a dubious form of geographic determinism, yet the East Asian geographic region certainly is distinguished by its distinctive climates, environments, and cultures. East Asia is the contact zone of its constituent countries, peoples, and cultures.13 For two thousand years, under unequal relationships of domination and subjugation, all kinds of exchanges have taken place there. Prior to the twentieth century, the Chinese empire was the dominant power in East Asia. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Japanese empire rose to power, and other countries in the region were invaded by Japan and suffered the trials and tribulations of Japanese colonization. In the postwar period, under the U.S. aegis, East Asia was repositioned in the new Cold War order. The turn of the twentyfirst century witnessed the rapid rise of mainland China, which is fast pushing a realignment and rearrangement of the political and economic order of East Asia. In the East Asian contact zone, the Chinese empire was vast and populous, with a long, continuous history. It not only exerted a powerful influence on the politics, economies, and cultures of East Asian countries, including Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and neighboring countries, but also played the role of the center of this region. From the standpoint of the countries on the periphery, China was the source of common elements of East Asian culture, including Chinese characters, Confucian learning, Chinese medicine, etc. China stood before them as a gargantuan unavoidable other.14 Because China played such a crucial role in forming the distinctive character of the East Asian region, the study of the history of cultural exchanges in this region is all the more complex and challenging. In the history of East Asia, China can be described, in the terms of modern national history, as a transnational power in politics, economics, society, and culture. For this reason, in the study of cultural exchanges in East Asia, it is more accurate to speak of exchanges between the Zhejiang region and Japan or between the Shandong peninsula and Korea than to speak of Sino-Japanese or Sino-Korean exchanges.

B.

The New Purview in Regional History: The Turn from Results to Process

On the basis of the foregoing discussion, we may proceed to look into some methodological problems in the study of the history of cultural exchange in East Asia. The first note-worthy problem is the shift in focus from the study of results 13 “Contact zone” designates the social spaces where people of different cultures interact and impact each other. See Mary L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, p. 6. 14 Koyasu Nobukuni, Kanji ron: Fukahi no tasha (On Chinese Characters: The Unavoidable Other).

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to the study of the process of regional cultural exchanges. This is in effect a paradigm shift in the study of the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia. To clarify this methodological reflection, let us take a look at an influential compilation of writings by leading Japanese historians, Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi (Iwanami Series of World History; 1970), edited by Itagaki Yu¯zo¯.15 This massive work in thirty-one volumes was far-reaching and broad-spirited. In the Preface the editors first criticized the tendency of Japanese historians during the Meiji period (1868–1911) for treating the term “world history” as synonymous with “Western history.”16 The editors went on to remark that during the Sho¯wa period (1926–1989), Japanese historians, under the influence of Marxism, underwent a major change in historical consciousness and a new theoretical approach to world history was born. By then Japanese historians had begun to criticize the Western Eurocentric historical perceptions of previous generations. However, with Japan’s crushing defeat in the Pacific War, the wartime outlook that the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere was Japan’s historical destiny vanished into history. Since the end of the war, world history in Japan has developed along new directions both in research and education. The editors of Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi sought to critique and assimilate these various forms of world history. In light of the reorientation in Japanese historical consciousness, the editors attempted to compile the latest Japanese research results in world history. In the ensuing work, the editors divided world history into eight spheres, ranging from antiquity to the present: the world of the ancient Near East, the Medi15 Historians in postwar Japan have been enamored of world history. During the quarter century from the end of World War II until 1970, Japanese historians published 14 series titled World History. See Gao Mingshi, Zhanhou Riben de Zhongguo shi yanjiu (Postwar Japanese Studies on Chinese History), p. 48, n. 1. The biggest and most representative work is Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi (Iwanami World History Series), edited by Itagaki Yu¯zo¯, in 31 vols. The first printing was in 1970–1971, and the second in 1974–1975. 16 The preliminary stage of Western historical studies in Japan lasted from the early Meiji period until the beginning of the Taisho¯ period (1911–1926). At the end of the nineteenth century the History Department at Tokyo Imperial University gradually laid a foundation and attracted and cultivated eminent faculty. In 1877 the great German historian Ludwig Riess (1861–1928) went to lecture at Tokyo University and was greatly influential. Next in 1891 the Japanese historian Tsuboi Kumezo¯ (坪井九馬三, 1858–1936) returned to Tokyo University from studying in Europe to lecture on history. After 1897 Tokyo University had many specialists in European history, such as Murakawa Kengo (村川堅固, 1875–1946) and Uchida Ginzo¯ (內田 銀藏, 1872–1919). Kyoto University established its College of Liberal Arts in 1906 and its distinctive Division of Western History in 1907. On November 1, 1889, Professor Riess’ students established the Shigakkai zasshi 史學会雜誌 (History Association Journal), later rechristened Shigaku zasshi 史學雜誌 (History Journal). The direction and focus of the early issues of the journal were set by Professor Riess. In 1908 Sakaguchi Takashi (坂口昂, 1872– 1928) initiated the Historical Studies Association, and in 1916 he established the journal Shirin 史林 (History Grove) to encourage students to study Chinese and Western history in the purview of world history. See Sakai Saburo¯, Nihon Seiyo¯ shigaku hattatsushi (History of the Development of the Study of Western History in Japan).

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terranean world, the historical world of East Asia, the South Asian world, the world of Inner Asia, the world of Western Asia, the world of medieval Europe, and the modern world.17 Although this compilation claimed to cover world history, the chapters of each volume were written from the perspective of national history. For example, Volume 4, Antiquity (Formation of the East Asian World, 1), contains the following twelve chapters: 1. Formation of the Yellow River Civilization 2. Creation of the Yin and Zhou States 3. Formation of the Ancient Classics 4. Society and State during the Warring States Period 5. The Arguments of the Philosophers and Hundred Schools 6. The Establishment of Imperial Domination 7. The System of Control of the Han Empire 8. The Office of Transport and Equalization, the Bureau of Standards, and the Salt and Iron Monopolies 9. The Establishment of Confucianism 10. Wang Mang’s Rise to Political Power 11. The Later Han Empire and the Powerful Clans 12. The Han Empire and the Peripheral Peoples Each of these chapters was written in accordance with the purview of Chinese national history, so it would have been more appropriate if the original title of this volume was “Formation of the Chinese World.” This compilation suffers from at least two other major problems. First, each volume breaks down into a mosaic of chapters and lacks an overall structure. Since each of the volumes is presented in the context of national history without any context of world history, it cannot avoid what Jack H. Hexter called “the tunnel effect” in the study of history.18 For example, while the context of Chinese history is relevant and important to the theme of the first volume of Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi, the purview of world history would have provided a broader vantage point for considering and weighing the importance and meaning of events and processes taken up. Second, because of the decontextualization that occurs when world history is presented in this way, each chapter focuses more on results than on process in describing the development of cultures. For example, each chapter in the For17 Itagaki, Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi, Antiquity 1, preface, pp. 1–9. 18 See Jack H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961), p. 194f. See also David H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), pp. 142ff.

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mation of the East Asian World volume discusses the completed formation of political institutions and economic measures, as in “Creation of the Yin and Zhou States” and “The System of Control of the Han Empire.” Only chapter 6, “The Establishment of Imperial Domination,” by Nishijima Sadao (西 嶋 定 生 ) touches upon the relationship between Chinese imperial rule and the formation of the wider East Asian world. The preceding discussion serves to reveal the broader significance of shifting the focus of historical studies of East Asian cultural exchanges from results to process. This transition in approach can stimulate the following three new directions in historical studies: From a structural to a developmental perspective. Studies of cultural history that focus on results are most likely to be static investigations concentrating mainly on the analysis of selected common essential features of culture. For example, Nishijima Sadao, in his General Introduction to Formation of the East Asian World, volume 4 of Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi, pointed out four main features of the history of East Asian civilization: Chinese characters, Confucianism, the system of imperial laws and decrees, and Buddhism.19 These four characteristics reflect the static, structural perspective Nishijima took in viewing the common features of East Asian history. However, by focusing on the dynamic process of East Asian history, we would see these four cultural features in the context of the development of each country—China, Japan, and Korea—and the different concrete contents associated with their contextualization and localization. From the center to the periphery. The turn from structure to process inclines the historian to turn his eye from the center to the periphery. By taking a resultoriented perspective in viewing cultural developments in East Asia, Nishijima was led to identify static features as the four main characteristics of East Asian culture. Following this thread of thought, Nishijima wrote that in the perspective of world history, the East Asian world was one of many premodern historical worlds that existed as “a self-contained, complete historical world.”20 But as recent studies reveal, from late antiquity on, every known ethnic group has engaged in cultural exchanges. From 2000 to 1000 BCE, West and East had already conducted various exchanges, an excellent example being the exchange in metallurgy by way of the Silk Road.21 Thus we can say with certainty that East Asia was not a self-contained, complete historical world.

19 Nishijima Sadao, general introduction, in Itagaki, Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi, Antiquity 4, p. 5. On Nishijima’s historical approach, see Gao Mingshi, op cit., pp. 44 and 70ff. 20 Nishijima Sadao, ibid., p. 7. 21 Victor H. Mair, Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World.

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Nishijima’s methodology was based on the supposition that in exchanges among East Asian countries, there was a sort of abstract common center with essential characteristics that were adopted by the peripheral cultures. This view of the history of cultural exchange in East Asia unconsciously implies a cultural and political monism and assumes that in the formation and development of cultures, the peripheral regions moved toward or away from the development path of the center. It also emphasizes that between the center and the peripheral, there was a sort of “principle of subordination,” but no corresponding “principle of coordination.”22 However, once we opt to view the history of East Asian culture as a process rather than as results, our focus naturally shifts from the center to the periphery.23 This enables us to see the processes of cultural exchange between countries in this region and to witness the interactions, conflicts, transformations, and syntheses between the self of one people and the selves of other peoples. Consequently, the common destiny and values of East Asian culture cease to emerge as a unique set of core authoritarian values from a discrete center over and above each country. On the contrary, the common core values of East Asian culture were formed in the process of each country’s interaction with the others. Hence, the history of cultural interaction in East Asia is best viewed as a process of formation of cultural subjectivities in each country. As Chen Huihong has recently asserted, “In the processes of interaction and communication, the interlocking of a multiplicity of diverse viewpoints is the perspective that researchers should adopt.”24 In the wake of the change of focus from results to process, and the consequent movement from the center to the periphery, we can see more clearly the plurality of East Asian cultures. Each region has common features, as Nishijima pointed out, but also unique and distinguishing features that set it apart. From texts to political environments. Once we have shifted our focus from results to process in studying the history of cultural exchange in East Asia, the object of our research also shifts from texts per se to political environments. In the following analysis, we will look at the relationship between classical interpretations and political power as a case in point.

22 The terms “principle of subordination” and “principle of coordination” come from Mou Zongsan. See his Zhongguo wenhua de shengcha, p. 68. 23 This is not to say, of course, that China at the center is not historically important. In fact, China functioned as the unavoidable other and continues to exert a major impact on other countries in East Asia. 24 Chen Huihong, “Wenhua xiangyu de fangfalun: Pingzhe Zhong-Ou wenhua jiaoliu anjiu de shiye” (Methodology of Cultural Interactions: New Perspective on Sino-European Cultural Interaction), p. 253.

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Before the twentieth century, when studying the history of East Asian countries, intellectuals tended to pore over the Confucian classics. This was because throughout East Asian history, in the imperial setting, the practice of interpreting and citing the Confucian classics was related in a complex fashion with the political power structure. I recently combed through East Asian Confucian interpretations of the Analects, Mencius, and other important classics. I found that proscribed passages in Mencius were excluded from the citations of Confucian classics in dialogues between rulers and ministers during the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and the Tang (618–907) dynasties, from questions on the civil-service examinations during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and by imperial tutors in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868). In exploring these questions, I realized that East Asian interpreters of the Confucian classics tended to combine dual identities, Confucians and government officials, into one. This further confirmed the intimate connection between their work as classical commentators and political power. In sum, the implications of this dual identity are threefold: First, to a large extent, classical interpretation and political power were inseparable. Second, there was certain competition between these two sides. Third, classical interpreters strove to keep these two sides in balance.25 If we adopt the traditional standpoint for studying the history of East Asian culture, our research themes would focus on the classics themselves and the analysis of how gifted intellectuals of each country interpreted the classics. However, if we adopt the new standpoint, aside from focusing on the classics, we would also pay attention to how the contemporary cultural environment and political situation influenced the interpreter’s approach to the classics. Furthermore, we would also keep an eye on the question of how the classics in turn might have influenced or changed the interpreter’s environment.

C.

The Relationship among Global History, Regional History, and National History

The second methodological problem involved in bringing a regional-history approach to the study of cultural exchanges in East Asia is the relationship among global history, regional history, and national history. To start with, taking a regional-history approach in studying the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia does not involve invoking an abstract conceptual framework that prevails perpetually and ubiquitously. Quite the contrary, regional history involves interlocking interactions within concrete settings of specific times and places. The 25 Chun-chieh Huang, “On the Relationship between Interpretations of the Confucian Classics and Political Power in East Asia: An Inquiry Focusing on the Analects and Mencius.”

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field of cultural exchanges in history definitely registers people’s suffering, such as the suffering undergone by Confucian intellectuals in their political environments. We can picture countries’ exchanges of envoy missions on horseback, merchants traveling across borders to exchange merchandise they possessed for that they were short of, intellectuals from different countries offering new interpretations of the classics in light of their own cultural contexts. Regional history gradually comes to live in the interactive relationships between the national histories of each East Asian country. It is certainly not an abstract sphere over and above each country’s national history. In fact, global history and regional history are two interdependent fields of research. Recently scholars have been speaking more of global history and regarding it as a sphere of research that includes the entire globe. Yet the world history that came into vogue after the Second World War is no different in conception from global history. During the postwar period, the Journal of World History was established in 1953, and the journal Human History commenced publication in 1963.26 Postwar authors of world history tended to stress that historical studies ought to focus on specific historical events in historically significant regions of the world.27 Historical personages and events of each country and region were to be assessed in the context of global history. According to this standard, regional history comprises a marginal sector of regional experience within global history. But if the unique concrete experiences of peoples in different regions are put aside, global history ends up as an empty abstract concept, devoid of content. Fully recognizing that regional history constitutes fundamental content for a meaningful global history, we can go on to say that global history is more adequately understood as transregional history.

D.

The Contextual Turn in the Study of Regional History

The third methodological issue in the study of regional history is the contextual turn. The gist of this methodological issue is that in the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia, all cultural products (including the classics and their values) were produced in specific cultural contexts.28 That is, they came from a specific time and place. Hence, in the history of cultural exchange in East Asia, the transmission of cultural products (especially classical texts) to a peripheral area had to involve a contextual turn to become congenial to the locale. 26 International Commission for a History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development. 27 See, for example, L. S. Stavrianos, The World to 1500: A Global History, pp. 4f. 28 The expression “cultural product” was coined by Roger Chartier. See his On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices.

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Yi T’oegye (李退溪, 1502–1571), the sixteenth-century Korean master of the philosophy of Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200), spent half of his lifetime editing Zhuzi shu jieyao (朱子書節要, The essentials of Zhu Xi; completed in 1556), in which he emphasized that owing to the differences in time and place between Zhu’s China and Yi’s Korea, he had no choice but to “cut out the dross” ( 損約) to make Zhu Xi’s words palatable to Korean Confucian readers.29 Although Yi’s expression “cut out the dross” originally referred to expunging passages, he was also contextualizing Zhu’s writings. The interpretations of Confucius’s Analects that appeared in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) is another case of contextualization. Contextualization in this case involved the transplantation of various classics, originally rooted deeply in the Chinese cultural context, into the Japanese cultural and intellectual context. The process inevitably led to the production of entirely new interpretations. Such transcultural adaptations worked well in at least two contexts in East Asia—the sociopolitical context (especially across the so-called Han-barbarian distinction) and the context of political theory (especially as regards the ruler-minster relationship)—and gave rise to other transcultural problems in the interpretation of the classics.30 Among the cultural products involved in the history of cultural exchange in East Asia, the Confucian classics in particular underwent contextualization at the hands of Japanese and Korean Confucian scholars and officials in those societies and their political courts, where these Confucians had various functions and played many roles. From the Song dynasty (960–1279), Chinese Confucians played a crucial role in both society and the political arena. After passing the civil-service examination, they were promoted to high officials. Upon retiring from office, they would become country gentry. During the Joseon era (1392– 1910), Korean Conf cians of various ranks could eventually rise to the Yangban ( 兩 班 ) aristocracy. The Confucians of Tokugawa Japan played the role of intellectuals in the society and were not separated from the political power structure.31 The most representative example of contextualization is the term “Zhongguo” (中國, China, literally, Middle Kingdom), which appears frequently in the early classics. In the context of Chinese culture and history, “Zhongguo” refers at once to a cultural and political identity, which, in the Chinese context, are fused into one. However, when Japanese Confucians of the Tokugawa period read the expression “Zhongguo” in the Chinese classics, they immediately sensed a gap 29 Yi Hwang, Jujaseo jeolyo seo (Preface to Selections of the Works of Zhu Xi), vol. 3, p. 259. 30 Huang Chun-chieh, Dechuan Riben Lunyu quanshi shilun (A Study of Tokugawa Confucians’ Interpretations of the Analects), p. 43. 31 See Hiroshi Watanabe, “Jusha, Literati, and Yangban: Confucianists in Japan, China, and Korea.”

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between the political identity and the cultural identity, because, so far as they ere concerned, the term “Zhongguo” denoted the homeland of their spirit and culture, even though the term originally meant another land historically and politically. They were convinced that since Japan had truly obtained the Way of Confucius, Japan was more suitably called “Zhongguo” than geographically central China. Similar examples of the contextual turn show vividly that this is a common phenomenon encountered in the study of the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia. In contemporary Taiwan as well, the expression “Zhongguo” has a dual reference to cultural China and political China.32 Contextualization is an important phenomenon in the history of cultural exchange in East Asia, and it will give rise to many research topics in the field. Once we begin to view the history of cultural exchange in East Asia in light of contextualization, we are better prepared to consider how this history illustrates what Clifford Geertz called “thick description.”33 Although historians began to pay attention to the problem of cultural history in the 1980s,34 I would still like to emphasize that cultural history as the study of cultural exchanges should not stop at examining and confirming people, places, events, and things exchanged, but should also closely examine them and seek the specific significances of the transactions. As Geertz wrote, “[Holding that] man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be that whole web, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”35 By studying webs of significance in our study of the history of cultural exchange, we can better appreciate the significances of exchanges between countries in the history of East Asia.

III.

Problematiques

Now that we are prepared to discuss regional history in connection with the problematiques in the study of the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia, I propose the two following issues for further study in this context: interactions of self and other, and interactions between cultural exchange and the power structure.

32 For a more detailed discussion, see Chung-chieh Huang, “The Idea of ‘Zhongguo’ and Its Transformation in Early Modern Japan and Contemporary Taiwan.” 33 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture, p. 5. 34 Georg G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography, p. 200. 35 Clifford Geertz, op. cit., p. 5.

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A.

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Interactions of Self and Other in the History of Cultural Exchange in East Asia

In Section II, I pointed out that the focus of the study of the history of cultural interactions in East Asia should be shifted from the results to the process of exchange activities. By adopting this shift of attention, we will be better prepared to register the complex problems involved in the interactions, synergies, and conflicts of each country’s self with others. Many academic studies on the problematique of the self and the other have been published in recent years. In 2006 Richard Sorabji, a renowned expert on ancient Greek philosophy, argued that though the self per se is difficult to investigate, everyone still exhibits a self in responding to the world. Though the conceptual meaning of “self” is indeterminate, the term “self,” we can venture to say, generally refers to a facet of our interactive activity. Hence, Sorabji advocates, the self is a sort of embodiment in a person’s manifold interactions with the world.36 In the Western tradition, the concept of self is typically associated with those of autonomy and rights. Consequently, comparative ethicists tend to emphasize that the concept of self in Confucian philosophy is incompatible with the more individualized and abstract Western notions of self. Recently, however, Kwong-loi Shun has inquired into the practical domain of the broader concept of man in Chinese and Western thought. In particular, he analyzed the Confucian concepts of mind (xin 心), will (zhi 志), and vital spirit (qi 氣), and found that the Western concepts of autonomy and rights are not necessarily incompatible with Confucian thought, just that in the Chinese concept of person, the social dimensions of the person are stressed.37 In the concrete historical experiences of cultural exchanges in East Asia, the concepts of self and other incorporate gendered, political, social, and cultural aspects, etc. As I have illustrated elsewhere,38 in the spectrum between cultural identity and political identity, one’s cultural self is more fundamental and inalienable. In the history of cultural interactions in East Asia, the perception and construction of self tends to be completed in the course of nteraction with the other. During the Eastern Jin (317–420), Guo Pu (郭 璞, 276–324) wrote in his preface to Shanhai jing (山 海 經, Classic of Mountains and Seas), “[Other] things do not regard themselves as other. They wait for me and then become my other. Hence, otherness comes from me; things are not inherently other.”39 Huang Zongxi (黃宗 36 Richard Sorabji, “The Self: Is There Such a Thing?” 37 Kwong-loi Shun, “Conception of the Person in Early Confucian Thought.” 38 Chun-chieh Huang, “Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu shi zhong ‘ziwo’ yu ‘tazhe’ de hudong: Leixing yu hanyi” (The Interaction between the “Self” and “Others” in the Sino-Japanese Context: Tensions and Implications). 39 Guo Pu, Shanhai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), p. 1a.

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羲, 1610–1695) said, “There are no so-called ten thousand things filling the midst of heaven and earth. The expression ‘ten thousand things’ was entirely given by me [humanity], just as what I call ‘father’ is just my father.”40 Both of these passages maintain that the self is constituted before the other is recognized, and that matches the experiences recorded in cultural exchanges between China and Korea during the Joseon period. The critiques of Chinese culture and thought by Korean visitors to China reflect their observations of self and other in concrete cultural exchanges between China and Korea. Such critiques also reveal that Korean visitors’ perceptions of self preceded their perceptions of Chinese others. In many situations, encounters and interactions with the other aroused important aspects of the self. Thus early in the twentieth century when Japanese Sinologists such as Naito¯ Konan ( 內 藤 湖 南, 1866–1934), Yoshikawa Ko¯jiro¯ ( 吉 川 幸 次 郎, 1904–1980), Aoki Masaru (青 木 正 兒, 1887–1964), and Uno Tetsuto ( 宇 野 哲 人, 1875–1974) toured China, they all started out with a firm Japanese sense of political and cultural self. In the setting of Chinese politics and culture, they invariably underwent a realization process, from subconscious to conscious.41 The experience of Uno Tetsuto, Tokyo University professor of Chinese philosophy, provides an excellent example. He felt deep reverence for Confucius, yet while traveling along the Great Wall at Badaling in 1906, he climbed atop the Great Wall to sing the Japanese national anthem.42 Interactions between self and other produced images of the other, especially in the self ’s representations of the other—to the extent of sketching “imaginative geographies” of the other.43 These images are particularly evident in travel journals, written accounts of East Asian travelers in neighboring countries. For example, after China ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895, several Chinese intellectuals and officials toured Taiwan and left firsthand accounts of various aspects of Taiwan, expressed from their Chinese perspective. These works include Quan Tai youji ( 全台遊記, Travelogue of All of Taiwan) by Chi Zhicheng ( 池志徵, traveled in Taiwan from 1891 to 1894), Kunying riji (鯤 瀛 日 記, Kunying Diary) by Shi Jingchen (施 景 琛, Traveled in Taiwan from March to April 1919), and the compilation Taiwan youji (台灣遊記, Taiwan Travelogue) by Zhang Zunxu (張 40 Huang Zongxi, Huang Zongxi quanji (Complete Works of Huang Zongxi), vol. 1, Mengzi shishuo (The Teachings of Mencius, sec. 7, “Wanwu jie bei zhang” (Myriad Things Are in Myself), p. 149. 41 Huang Chun-chieh, “Ershi shiji chuqi Riben hanxuejia yanzhong de wenhua Zhongguo yu xianshi Zhongguo” (Cultural China and the real China in the Eyes of Japanese Sinologists in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century). 42 Uno Tetsuto, Shina bunmei ki (An Account of Chinese Civilization). For an account of Uno Tetsuto singing Japan’s national anthem atop the Great Wall, see p. 60 of the Chinese translation. For an account of Uno Tetsuto’s travels in China, see Joshua A. Fogel, “Confucian Pilgrimage: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels in China, 1906.” 43 D. Clayton, “Critical Imperial and Colonial Geographies.”

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遵 旭, traveled in Taiwan from April 4 to 20, 1916).44 Sometimes the self ’s observations or descriptions of the other came from reports of official delegates’ interactions, such as the accounts of Tang China by Japanese envoys and the accounts of Ming China by Korean envoys. Occasionally people drifted to other countries because of sudden changes in the weather or by accident. In 1826, after a Japanese ship drifted to Shanghai, the Chinese composed poems dedicated to the Japanese refugees. Japanese also drifted to Guang-dong and wrote descriptions of Guangzhou Harbor.45 During the Qing dynasty, Cai Tinglan (蔡廷蘭), a presented scholar from Penghu, encountered a storm while riding a boat to Taiwan and drifted to Vietnam in 1835. The following year, after traveling overland back to Fujian, he compiled his observations in Hainan zazhu ( 海南雜 著, Miscellany of the Southern Seas).46 All of these historical records provide important sources concerning the self ’s representations of others.

B.

Interactions between Cultural Exchange and the Power Structure in East Asia

The second problematique in the study of the history of cultural interactions in East Asia lies in the forms of political power that came into play in cultural exchanges among East Asian countries. This issue inevitably leads us to reflect on imperial China’s role as the unavoidable other to other East Asian countries. China’s vast imperial scale started with the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) and grew ever stronger and more mature. Once the central Chinese imperial order was established, it produced a comprehensive intellectual infrastructure and system for cultural transmission. Gan Huaizhen has summed up the complex relationships among the imperial order, the Confucian state, and the Confucian school of thought, and has provided issues for further study.47 According to him, the Chinese political order unfolded as a special East Asian worldview,48 and this 44 These three books are collected in Taiwan youji 台灣遊記 (Taiwan Travelogues) (Taipei: Taibei Yinhang Jingji Yanjiu Shi, 1960). 45 See Matsuura Akira, Edo jidai To¯sen ni yoru Nit-Chu¯ bunka ko¯ryu¯ (Sino-Japanese Cultural Interaction via Chinese Ships during the Edo Period), pp. 310–344. 46 Cai Tinglan, Hainan zazhu (Miscellany of the Southern Seas). For Cai’s biography, see Lin Hao, Penghu tingzhi (Stories about Penghu), sec. 14, Yiwen b. For a recent study of Cai Tinglan, see Chen Yiyuan, Cai Tinglan ji qi “Hainan zazhu” (Cai Tinglan and His Miscellany of the Southern Seas). 47 Gan Huaizhen, Huangquan, liyi yu jingdian quanshi: Zhongguo gudai zhengzhi shi yanjiu (Imperial Power, Rituals, and Interpretations of the Classics: A study of Traditional Chinese Political History). 48 Gan Huaizhen, “Chongxin sikao Dongya wangquan yu shijieguan: Yi ‘tianxia’ yu ‘Zhongguo’ wei guanjianci” (Rethinking East Asian Imperial Power and Worldview in Terms of the Key Terms “All under Heaven” and “Central Kingdom”).

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worldview influenced the theory of royal power throughout the entire region.49 Cultural interactions in East Asia unfolded within the interlocking network of imperial power structures. Related issues to be dealt with include the following: First, after the fall of a center of political power in East Asia, the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 for instance, what changes start to appear in cultural-exchange activities? What is the impact on domestic policies, thought, and culture in other East Asian countries, such as Korea?50 Second, in the history of interactions between China and Japan, to what extent and depth are cultural exchanges influenced by the two countries’ power structures?

IV.

Possible Research Topics

On the basis of the discussion above, I suggest the following three topics for further study: the exchange of people, the exchange of goods, especially texts, and the exchange of ideas.

A.

Exchange of People: Professional Intermediate Agents and Their Observations of Others

In the history of East Asia, people of each country traveled along other countries’ roads, paying private visits back and forth. Japanese envoys to China can be traced back to the medieval period, as can Korean ministers and intellectuals dispatched to China. There were also exchanges of envoys between Japan and Korea. All of them left quantities of historical materials worth further examination. Most of the people who actually conducted the cultural exchanges in East Asia were what Yang Liansheng described as “professional intermediate agents” (媒介 人物), including merchants, entrepreneurs, purchasing agents, compradors, labor-hiring agents, marriage match-makers, gatekeepers serving as messengers, envoys, missionaries, pastors, high priests, wizards, teachers, translators, and 49 Gan Huaizhen, Tianxia guojia: Dongya wangquan lun (On East Asian Imperial Power). 50 For studies of Korean reverence for the Zhou dynasty and yearning for the Ming in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and for Korean reflections on intellectual currents in the Ming dynasty, see Sun Weiguo, Da Ming qihao yu xiao Zhonghua yishi: Chaoxian wangchao zun Zhou si Ming wenti yanjiu, 1637–1800 (Flag and Title of the Ming Dynasty and Small-China Consciousness: Research on Joseon Dynasty Respect for the Zhou Dynasty and Yearning for the Ming).

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interpreters.51 Private intermediate agents were not only prime movers in the political and economic activities of each country, but also important carriers of each country’s social and cultural values. The first manifestation of cultural exchange in East Asia was in the exchange of people. Hence, these agents are worthy objects of study for the history of cultural exchange in East Asia.

B.

Exchange of Goods, Especially Texts

The second suggested research topic is the exchange of goods in East Asia. A special feature of cultural exchange in this region was the exchange of books and texts. The export of Chinese literary texts to Japan in the ninth century has been estimated to total about 1,568 titles. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 70 to 80 percent of the books that Japan imported were written in Chinese.52 Among these books, such important classics as Confucius’s Analects and Mencius had a deep and far-reaching influence on Japanese thinkers.53 Moreover, the Japanese successfully preserved some Chinese classics, and in turn exported them back to China after these classics were lost there. From 1395 to 1443 Japan sent envoys to Korea roughly every year in search of important Buddhist classics, including Da zang jing (大 藏 經), Da banruo jing (大 般 若 經), and Fahua jing (法 華 經).54 These cases all reflect the intimate cultural relationship between China, Japan, and Korea. Accordingly, Wang Yong suggested that besides the Silk Road, East Asia had another route of cultural exchange: the Book Road.55

C.

Exchange of Ideas

The discussions above on the exchange of people and material goods, especially texts, have significant implications for the exchange of thought and ideas. This is the third recommended theme in the study of the history of cultural exchanges in East Asia. Under this theme we find numerous research problems regarding 51 Yang Liansheng, “Zhongguo wenhua de meijie renwu” (Professional Intermediate Agents of Chinese Culture); see especially p. 244. 52 Yan Shaodang, Riben cang Songren wenji shanben gouchen (Ferreting Out the Rare Song Literary collections preserved in Japan), pp. 1f. 53 See Huang Chun-chieh, Dechuan Riben Lunyu quanshi shilun, and Zhang Kunjiang, Riben Dechuan shidai guwenpai zhi wangdao zhengzhi lun: yi Yiteng Renzhai, Disheng Culai wei zhongxin (Politics of the Kingly Way of the School of Classical Learning in Tokugawa Japan: Focusing on Ito¯ Jinsai and Ogyu¯ Sorai). 54 See Kang Chuchin, “Haeje” (Introduction), in Haehaeng chongjae (Collections of Travelogues). 55 See Wang Yong, Zhong-Ri ‘shuji zhi lu’ yanjiu (The “book road” between China and Japan).

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exchanged texts. Moreover, since China was perceived as the unavoidable other, also worth exploring are how Chinese thought affected Japan and Korea, and how Japan and Korea maintained self identity despite this influence. The impact of Chinese thought on Japan and Korea. There always existed a huge gap between Chinese thought and local conditions of the peripheral countries of East Asia. The acceptance of Mencius in Japan is a good example. In Tokugawa Japan the political system clearly rejected Mencius’s political thought, so as soon as Mencius was imported to Japan, this work immediately drew attacks from the Sorai school (徂徠學派) and aroused debates between the Classical Meaning school (古義派 ) and the Zhu Xi school.56 These intellectual waves are worth further scrutiny. The problem of self identity in East Asian cultural exchanges. In the close cultural relations among countries in East Asia, China, the huge unavoidable other, always stirred up the problem of self-identity in the peripheral regions. A prime example in eighteenth-century Japan is the debates between To¯ Teikan (1732–1797) and the National Learning school thinker Motoori Norinaga (1730– 1801) over the provenance and nature of Japanese culture. To¯ Teikan believed that Japanese cultural elements such as the imperial system, the language, names, etc., originated in Korea, and that the clan Zhen-Han (辰韓, Jin-Han in Korean) was descended from remnants of the vanquished Qin dynasty. To¯ Teikan’s theory that Japan’s culture was largely borrowed from overseas aroused forceful criticism from Motoori Norinaga, who called To¯ Teikan a madman.57 This dispute is known as the Korea problem in the history of Japanese thought. Throughout this debate one can easily sense the projection of gargantuan China in the background. This important phenomenon in the study of cultural exchange in East Asia is worthy of further study. In the course of approximately 1,500 years of cultural exchange in East Asia, the range of possible research themes is not limited to the above-mentioned exchanges of people, material goods (especially texts), and thought and ideas. Aside from these, there were also transmissions of political systems (such as the Chinese imperial system to the peripheral countries), of religious faith (such as faith in the bodhisattva Guanyin [觀音]), etc. Any of these would make a good topic for further inquiry.

56 See Zhang Kunjiang, op. cit., chap. 5, pp. 219–286. 57 See To¯ Teikan, “Sho¯ko¯hatsu” (Spontaneous Thoughts), Motoori Norinaga, “Kenkyo¯jin” (Madman), and also Koyasu Nobukuni, Ho¯ho¯ toshite no Edo (Edo as Method), pp. 16–26.

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Conclusion

As globalization in the twenty-first century accelerates and unfolds, it is denationalizing and deregionalizing the countries of East Asia.58 Yet it is also interconnecting regions of the globe.59 These new developments have made a major impact on nation-states, an idea that prevailed in the twentieth century.60 Still, it remains the case that in economic activities in the age of globalization, each person remains first and foremost a citizen of a nation; only in a derivative sense can a person be reckoned a citizen of the global village. While recommending a regional approach in the study of the history of cultural interactions in East Asia, I still insist on national history, so that the purview of historical research is properly expanded, and so that the purview of global history will be sufficiently concrete and well-grounded in the future.61 In the second section of this paper I recommended adopting a regional approach to the study of the history of cultural interactions in East Asia. Methodologically, this implies a shift of focus from the results to the process of such cultural exchanges. This adoption of a more dynamic viewpoint in the study of cultural exchange in East Asia would push the focus of such study from the center outward to the periphery, from the original text to the environment in which the text was reinterpreted. In section three, I also recommended taking up two problematiques as starting points for research on the history of cultural exchange in East Asia. The first one was the interaction and balance of stress between self and other in the process of cultural exchange in East Asia. The second one was the relationship between the activities of cultural exchange and the power structure of each East Asian country. In section 4, I proposed that, among possible research themes to pursue in this field, it would be fruitful to focus on exchanges of people (especially professional intermediate agents), of material goods (especially texts), and of thought and ideas, among the countries of East Asia. With the rise of Asia, and East Asia in particular, in the twenty-first century, and with the globalization currently underway, the state-centered studies of East Asia in the humanities and social sciences has gradually given way to considering East Asia as a whole. For example, Tokyo University used to have a chair in Chinese philosophy, but it has been redesignated as the chair in East Asian thought and cultural studies. The Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies at 58 59 60 61

Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? Anthony Gidden, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, pp. 4f. Peter F. Drucker, “The Global Economy and the Nation State.” National history is still being discussed in recent publications. See, for example, Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, eds., Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800, and Stefan Berger, ed., Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective.

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Kansai University started publishing the Journal of East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies (東アジア文化交渉研究) in 2008. Recently, Ying-shih Yu looked back at Chinese intellectuals’ obsession with the Western analytic models of Pragmatism and Marxism during most of the twentieth century, and noted that in the past twenty years a new turn in the study of cultural history has taken place in the international historical community. He hoped that Chinese historians would truly immerse themselves in traditional Asian culture and devise new concepts and methods for tracing the Chinese historical experience with greater probity. Preferably, they would not again employ problematiques and methods from the outside, such as theories and practices adopted from the Western world. Yu asserted that a society and its people merit study not just because they are a part of the larger world but, more importantly, because they bear intrinsic value in their own right.62 Taking a regional-history approach to the study of the history of cultural interaction in East Asia represents a way of returning to and immersing ourselves in the cultural traditions of East Asia to appreciate and understand its diversity and richness.

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Chen, Yiyuan 陳益源. Cai Tinglan ji qi “Hainan zazhu” 蔡廷蘭及其《海南雜著》(Cai Tinglan and his Miscellany of the Southern Seas). Taipei: Liren, 2006. Clayton, D. “Critical Imperial and Colonial Geographies.” In Handbook of Cultural Geography, edited by Kay Anderson et al., pp. 354–368. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Drucker, Peter F. “The Global Economy and the Nation State.” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (1997): 159–171. Fischer, David H. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Fogel, Joshua A. “Confucian Pilgrimage: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels in China, 1906.” In his Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, pp. 95–117. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995. Gan Huaizhen 甘懷眞. “Chongxin sikao Dongya wangquan yu shijieguan: Yi ‘tianxia’ yu ‘Zhongguo’ wei guanjianci” 重新思考東亞王權與世界觀：以「天下」與「中國」為 關鍵詞 (Rethinking East Asian Imperial Power and Worldview in Terms of the Key Terms “All under Heaven” and “Central Kingdom”). In Dongya lishi shang de tianxia yu Zhongguo gainen 東亞歷史上的天下與中國概念 (The Ideas of “All under Heaven” and “Central Kingdom” in East Asian History), edited by Gan Huaizhen. Taipei: Guoli Taiwan Daxue Chuban Zhongxin, 2007. Gan Huaizhen 甘懷眞. Huangquan, liyi yu jingdian quanshi: Zhongguo gudai zhengzhi shi yanjiu 皇權、禮儀與經典詮釋： 中國古代政治史研究 (Imperial Power, Rituals, and Interpretations of the Classics: A study in Traditional Chinese Political History). Taipei: Guoli Taiwan Daxue Chuban Zhongxin, 2004. Gan Huaizhen 甘懷眞. Tianxia guojia: Dongya wangquan lun 天下國家：東亞王權論 (On East Asian Imperial Power). Taipei: San Min Shuju, 2008. Gao Mingshi 高明士. Zhanhou Riben de Zhongguo shi yanjiu 戰後日本的中國史研究 (Postwar Japanese Studies on Chinese History). Taipei: Mingwen Shuju, 1996. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gidden, Anthony. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1994. Guo Pu 郭璞. Shanhai jing 山海經 (Classic of Mountains and Seas). Taipei: Zhonghua, 1965. Hexter, Jack H. Reappraisals in History. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1961. Huang Chun-chieh 黃俊傑. Dechuan Riben Lunyu quanshi shilun 德川日本論語詮釋史 論 (A Study of Tokugawa Confucians’ Interpretations of the Analects). Taipei: Taiwan Daxue Chuban Zhongxin, 2006. Rev. ed., 2007. Huang Chun-chieh 黃 俊 傑. “Ershi shiji chuqi Riben hanxuejia yanzhong de wenhua Zhongguo yu xianshi Zhongguo” 二十世紀初期日本漢學家眼中的文化中國與現實 中國 (Cultural China and the Real China in the Eyes of Japanese Sinologists in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century). In his Dongya ruxueshi de xin shiye 東亞儒學史 的新視野 (New Perspectives on the History of East Asian Confucianism), pp. 265–312. Taipei: Taida Chuban Zhongxin, 2004. Huang, Chun-chieh. “Historical Thinking as a Form of New Humanism for TwentiethCentury China: Qian Mu’s View of History.” Paper presented at the international conference “New Orientations in Historiography: Regional History and Global History,” East China Normal University, Shanghai, November 3–5, 2007.

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Huang, Chun-chieh. “The Idea of ‘Zhongguo’ and Its Transformation in Early Modern Japan and Contemporary Taiwan.” Nihon kanbungaku kenkyu¯ 日本漢文學研究, no. 2 (March 2007): 398–408. Huang, Chun-chieh. “On the Relationship between Interpretations of the Confucian Classics and Political Power in East Asia: An Inquiry Focusing on the Analects and Mencius.” Medieval History Journal 11, no. 1 (June 2008): 101–121. Huang Chun-chieh 黃俊傑. “Qian Binsi shixue zhong de ‘guoshi’ guan: Neihan, fangfa yu yiyi” 錢賓四史學中的「國史」觀：內涵、方法與意義 (“National history” in Qian Mu’s Historical Thinking: Contents, Methods, and Meanings). Taiwan lishi xuebao 臺 大歷史學報, no. 26 (December 2002): 1–37. Huang Chun-chieh 黃俊傑. “Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu shi zhong ‘ziwo’ yu ‘tazhe’ de hudong: Leixing yu hanyi” 中日文化交流史中「自我」與「他者」的互動： 類型與涵 義 (The Interaction between the “Self” and “Others” in the Sino-Japanese Context: Tensions and Implications). Taiwan Dongya wenming yanjiu xuekan 臺灣東亞文明研 究學刊 4, no. 2 (December 2007): 85–105. Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲. Huang Zongxi quanji 黃宗羲全集 (Complete Works of Huang Zongxi). Hanzhou: Zhejiang Guji Chubanshe, 1985. Iggers, Georg G. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Post-modern Challenge. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Iggers, Georg G. New Directions in European Historiography. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. Iggers, Georg G., and Q. Edward Wang. “The Globalization of History and Historiography: Characteristics and Challenges from the 1990s to the Present.” Paper presented at the international conference “New Orientations in Historiography: Regional History and Global History,” East China Normal University, Shanghai, November 3–5, 2007. International Commission for a History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind. History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Itagaki Yu¯zo¯ 板 垣 雄 三, ed. Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi 岩 波 講 座 世 界 歴 史 (Iwanami World History Series). 31 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970. Kang Chuchin 姜 周 鎮. “Haeje” (Introduction). In Haehaeng chongjae 海 行 摠 載 (Collections of Overseas Missions), Vol. 1, pp. 1–28. Seoul: Minjok Munhua Chujinhoe, 1974. Koyasu Nobukuni 子安宣邦. Ho¯ho¯ toshite no Edo 方法としての江戶 (Edo as Method). Tokyo: Perikansha, 2000. Koyasu Nobukuni 子安宣邦. Kanji ron: Fukahi no tasha 漢字論：不可避の他者 (On Chinese Characters: The Unavoidable Other). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003. Lin Hao 林豪. Penghu tingzhi 澎湖廳志 (Stories about Penghu). Taipei: Taiwan Yinhang, 1963. Mair, Victor H. Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Matsuura Akira 松浦章. Edo jidai To¯sen ni yoru Nit-Chu¯ bunka ko¯ryu¯ 江戶時代唐船に よる日中文化交流 (Sino-Japanese Cultural Interaction via Chinese Ships during the Edo Period). Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 2007.

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Megill, Allan. “Regional History and the Future of Historical Writing.” Paper presented at the international conference “New Orientations in Historiography: Regional History and Global History,” East China Normal University, Shanghai, November 3–5, 2007. Motoori Norinaga 本居宣長. “Kenkyo¯jin” 鉗狂人 (Madman). In Nihon Shiso¯ To¯so¯ Shiryo¯ 日本思想鬪諍史料 (Sources of Intellectual Conflicts in Japan), edited by Washio Junkyo¯ 鷲尾順敬, vol. 4, pp. 227–312. Tokyo: Meicho Kanko¯kai, 1970. Mou Zongsan 牟宗三. Zhongguo wenhua de shengcha 中國文化的省察 (Reflections on Chinese Culture). Taipei: Lianjing Chuban Shiye Gongsi, 1983. Pratt, Mary L. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Sakai Saburo¯ 酒井三郎. Nihon Seiyo¯ shigaku hattatsushi 日本西洋史学發達史 (History of the Development of the Study of Western History in Japan). Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1969. Sato, Masayuki. “East Asian Historiography and Historical Thought.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, pp. 6776–6782. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 2002. Shun, Kwong-loi. “Conception of the Person in Early Confucian Thought.” In Confucian Ethics: A Comparative Study of Self, Autonomy, and Community, edited by Kwong-loi Shun and David B. Wong, pp. 183–199. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sorabji, Richard. “The Self: Is There Such a Thing?” In his Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death, pp. 17–31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Stavrianos, L. S. The World to 1500: A Global History. 2nd ed. Englewoon Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Sun Weiguo 孙 卫 国. Da Ming qihao yu xiao Zhonghua yishi: Chaoxian wangchao zun Zhou si Ming wenti yanjiu, 1637–1800 大明旗号与小中华意识 ：朝鲜王朝尊周思明问 題研究, 1637–1800 (Flag and Title of the Ming Dynasty and Small-China Consciousness: Research on Joseon Dynasty Respect for the Zhou Dynasty and Yearning for the Ming). Beijing: Shangwuyin Shuguan, 2007. To¯ Teikan 藤貞幹. “Sho¯ko¯hatsu” 衝口發 (Spontaneous Thoughts). In Nihon Shiso¯ To¯so¯ Shiryo¯ 日本思想鬪諍史料 (Sources of Intellectual Conflicts in Japan), edited by Washio Junkyo¯ 鷲尾順敬, vol. 4, pp. 227–312. Tokyo: Meicho Kanko¯kai, 1970. Tortarolo, Edoardo. “Universal/World History: Its Past, Present, and Future.” Paper presented at the international conference “New Orientations in Historiography: Regional History and Global History,” East China Normal University, Shanghai, November 3–5, 2007. To¯yama Shigeki 遠山茂樹. Sengo no rekishigaku to rekishi ishiki 戦後の歴史学と歴史意 識 (Historical Studies and Historical Consciousness in Postwar Japan). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1968. Uno Tetsuto 宇野哲人. Shina bunmei ki 支那文明記 (An Account of Chinese Civilization). Tokyo: Daido¯kan, 1912. Reprinted in Bakumatsu Meiji Chu¯goku kenbunroku shusei 幕 末明治中国見聞録集 成 (A Collection of China Travelogues in the Late Tokugawa and Meiji Periods), edited by Kojima Shinji 小 島 晋 治 . Tokyo: Yumani Shobo, 1997. Translated into Chinese in Zhongguo wenming ji 中国文明记. Beijing: Guangming Ribao Chubanshe, 1999.

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*Originally published in Journal for Cultural Interaction in East Asia, Vol. 1 (Kansai University: Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia, 2010).

SHIBA Yoshinobu

Japanese Studies into the History of Maritime East Asia

I.

Introduction

This paper is a brief survey of the development of Japanese research on the history of maritime East Asia over the past hundred or so years. By “history of maritime East Asia,” I refer to the overall process of the expansion of mutual contact over time among the peoples living along the seaways of Asia east of Myanmar. In this regard, what has mattered most to researchers can be reduced to two key themes: First, how to align their studies with the modern methodological apparatus of historical investigation, and second, how to locate the history of Japan or histories of Asia within the wider perspective of world evolution.

II.

Methodologies

Japanese historians began showing a “modern” interest in the maritime history of East Asia in the nineteenth century when they absorbed the Western science of historiography. With adoption of historiography, they first became aware of the large lacuna of knowledge that existed in every quarter in the traditional record keeping and writing of history within Asia.1 Inquiry into maritime history was just one major strand that filled the vacuum. In 1886, a German historian, Ludwig Riess (1861–1928), who lived in Japan from 1887–1902, was invited to teach modern methods of historiography in the Department of History (史 学 科 ) of the College of Humanities at the Imperial

1 Geoffrey Barraclough, “Main Trends of Research in the Social and Human Sciences,” Part 2, Vol. 1, Ch. III History (Paris: UNESCO, 1978), translated into Japanese by Matsumura Takeshi 松村赳, and Kinshichi Norio 金七紀男 as Rekishigaku no genzai 歴史学の現在 (Historiography Today), (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten 1985), pp. 120–133.

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University in Tokyo (帝 国 大 学 文 科 大 学 ).2 This was an attempt to break Japanese historians away from their traditional pattern of historiography in order to foster “historical science,” which was becoming a common standard of historical inquiry throughout the world. Admittedly, the traditional manner of historiography in Asia lacked scientific “objectivity” vis-à-vis the key elements of modern Western historical writing that was emerging in Europe in the nineteenth century. Chronicles and other historical records of Asia’s past were mainly written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. These writings were static in nature as they tended to dismiss major historical changes and dynamics. Such works were preoccupied with the “center,” hence irrationally neglecting “fringe elements.” Riess proposed several ideas in 1889 to effect reform: (1) establish a modern archival center (i. e., the Historiographical Institute: the University of Tokyo 史 料 編 纂 所 , founded in 1891, (hereafter called HITU) to lay a foundation for a burgeoning of “scientific history”; (2) inaugurate a modern historical society (i. e., Japan Historical Society Shigakkai 史学会), as an organization whose members share in common training in modern methods of history and whose research results are published in the society’s Journal of History (Shigaku zasshi 史 学 雑 誌 , 1889); (3) make the Department of Japanese History (国 史 学 科 ) an independent subunit of the History Department (史学科), an event that occurred in 1889, with two chairs being created in 1893. (4) In his classes and seminars, Riess encouraged students to explore areas of research that had been theretofore little studied. He suggested the auxiliary application of methods employed in disciplines related to historical science, such as geography, archeology, prehistory, anthropology, ethnology, philology, epigraphy, and linguistics, in order to deepen students’ historical thinking. (5) To look into Asia’s past from a broader and more overarching perspective, he recommended pursuing a reconstruction of “East-West contact” (東西交渉). As a salient example, he suggested examining the Dutch documents preserved in Hirado 平戸 and Nagasaki 長崎. Here I will take just a cursory look at the birth of other disciplines that are closely related to history. Needless to say, these disciplines contributed greatly to reconstructing the phases of maritime Asia in prehistoric times. Concomitant with the restructuring of historiographical arts, similar efforts were made in other disciplines, the usefulness of which was noted by Riess. The Japan Society of Anthropology (Nippon Jinrui Gakkai 日 本 人 類 学 会 ), inclusive of archaeological study at its beginning, was established in 1884, and published the 2 Kanai Madoka 金井圓, “Ludwig Riess and Historical Sources on Japan Preserved Overseas” (Ru-touihhi Ri-su to Nihon kankei kaigai shiryo¯ ルートウイッヒ・リースと日本関係海外 史料), Shigaku zasshi 史学雑誌 (Journal of History), 87:10, 1978.

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journal Reports of the Anthropological Society (Jinrui gakkai ho¯koku 人 類 学 会 報 告 ). In 1912 the journal was renamed The Anthropological Journal (Jinruigaku zasshi 人 類 学 雑 誌 ). Subsequently, the Japan Society of Archeology (日 本 考 古 学 会 ) took form in 1895, publishing the Journal of the Archeological Society ( Ko¯kogakkai zasshi 考 古 学 会 雑 誌 ), which was renamed Journal of Archeology (Ko¯kogaku zasshi 考古学雑誌) in 1896. In tandem, the Japan Society of Historical Geography (Nippon Rekishi Chiri Gakkai 日 本 歴 史 地 理 学 会 ) was inaugurated in 1899; its journal was entitled Historical Geography (Rekishi Chiri 歴史地理). In 1917, another society of historical geographers was formed in Kyoto, which published the journal, History and Geography (Rekishi to Chiri 歴史 と地理). In 1934, the Japan Society of Ethnology (Nippon Minzoku Gakkai 日 本 民 族 学 会 ) was founded; its journal was entitled Studies of Ethnology (Minzokugaku kenkyu¯ 民族学研究). Aside from historical geography, which is akin to the science of history, these disciplines differ distinctively from the arts of history in their methodological orientations. With the exception of historical archeology, social anthropology, historical ethnology, and cultural anthropology, these disciplines are concerned primarily with data on the cultural elements (natural, artificial, and social) of mankind at large rather than relying heavily on written historical documents. To maintain “objectivity” in scientific inference, they extensively collect data, such as relics, remains, and folk stories, which they classify by temporal order and spatial differences. They compare the data cross-culturally or intra-culturally in order to reveal facts about the evolution of human culture. Field surveys lie at the heart of their undertakings. In short, these disciplines share in common a multidisciplinary or supra-disciplinary orientation in their practices. Students of archeology and anthropology have contributed to establishing the chronological order of pre-historical, proto-historical, and early historical eras (or the evolutional sequence of Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic eras) of the East Asian past. They have studied the beginning of each of these eras, and the early use of earthen and metal wares. They have also studied the sequential evolution of food production (hunting, fishing, and agriculture), and related their findings to changes in climate and ecological settings, and to cross-societal transfers of technologies through distributive patterns of earthen wares, metal tools, tombs, settlements, and so on. In their search for the origins of and introduction to Japan of rice culture from abroad, they have considered the possibility of binary (northern and southern) seaborne traffic. Specialists in physical anthropology, who have examined prehistoric remains of human bones and sculls, have challenged previous elucidations of the origin of the Japanese people and culture. They have done this in collaboration with ethno-historians and specialists in comparative linguistics.

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Returning to the field of history, in the wake of the formation of the Japan Historical Society 史学会 and publication of its Journal of History 史学雑誌, 1889), Japan in the 1920s and early 1930s saw a proliferation of similar institutions that advanced the study of historical cultural contact in East Asia. The Society of Oriental Studies (To¯yo¯gaku Kyo¯kai 東 洋 学 協 会 ) was launched in 1911 along with its Oriental Academic Journal (To¯yo¯ gakuho¯ 東洋学報). Later, the society was incorporated into the To¯yo¯ Bunko, a private foundation formed in 1924 to house rare archival sources on East Asia. The Foundation includes the former Asiatic Library, which was the exhaustive collection belonging to Dr. George E. Morrison (1862–1920) of Western books on Asian studies from the fourteenth century, along with a collection from Iwasaki Hisaya 岩崎久弥 (1865–1955) of treasures of old Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and some Western books. In 1923, the Japan Academy (Nippon Gakushiin 日 本 学 士 院 ) started systematically amassing unpublished Western archival documents on Japan in the form of mimeographs. This project was conducted in collaboration with the Union Acadèmique Internationale. The mimeographed documents are preserved at HITU for public access. The Tenri Library 天理図書 館 is a private establishment built to collect sources for the study of Korean culture and other East Asian areas. In 1951, the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies at Kansai University (Kansai Daigaku To¯zai Gakujutsu Kenkyu¯sho 関西大学東西学術研究 所) was inaugurated to develop comparative studies in Eastern and Western sciences. By the end of the 1930s, there was an increase in the number of researchers working on the maritime history of East Asia. Murakami Naojiro¯ * 村上直次郎 (1868–1966; *mark indicates a direct student of Dr. Riess) took the initiative in collecting records preserved in major European archives that helped in reconstructing the histories of Japan and East Asian countries in the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries.3 He was a Japanese pioneer on research into the activities of Christian missionaries in East Asia and in trading among the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British with Japan and other Asian countries. Meanwhile, Fujita Toyohachi 藤田豊八 (1869–1929),4 *Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ 桑原隲 3 Murakami edited Library: Translation of Books on Countries Overseas (Ikoku So¯sho 異国叢書) Vols 1–13, Shunnansha 駿 南 社 , 1927–33; Continuation: Library of Translation of Books on Countries Overseas (Zoku: Ikoku So¯sho 続 異 国 叢 書 ) Vols. 1–6, Teikoku Kyo¯ikukai Shuppansha 帝 国 教 育 会 出 版 社 , Ju¯ichikumi Shuppansha 十一組出版社, and To¯yo¯do¯ 東洋堂 1936–48. He contributed to the translation of Reports of Jesuit Missionaries in Japan. He also edited the Japanese Historical Materials (Dainippon Shiryo¯ 大 日 本 史 料 ) Part XII, Vol. 12, which contains the full texts and translation of The Embassy Sent by Date Masamune to Madrid and Rome, 1909. 4 For Fujita’s works refer to Fujita, Study of East-West Contact: Volume on Research of the South Seas (To¯zai ko¯sho¯shi no kenkyu¯: Nankai hen 東西交渉史の研究：南海篇). Oka Shoin 岡書 院, 1933.

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蔵 (1871–1931)5 and Ishida Mikinosuke 石田幹之助 (1891–1974)6 demonstrated how an integrated study of Western and Asian sources could be used to fill the large vacuum in knowledge. For example, using such a method they argued persuasively that China in the tenth through fourteenth centuries experienced an unprecedented advance in nautical technology, allowing it to take the lead in expanding influence Asian marine powers in that era. In the late 1920s and 1930s other researchers followed in the footsteps of these trailblazers by exploring several significant areas of East-West contact as well as of intra-Asian inter-course. For example, under the mentorship of both *Kuroita Katsumi 黒 板 勝 美 (1874–1946) and *Tsuji Zennosuke 辻 善 之 助 (1877–1955), Mori Katsumi 森 克 己 (1903–1981), then a staff member at HITU, conducted during the 1930s a study of the triangular relationship between Japan, Korea, and China through an exhaustive and in-depth survey of the primary sources available.7 Simultaneously, in 1928 a Chair in South Seas Studies 南 洋 学 講 座 was established in the Faculty of Letters and Politics, Taihoku (Taipei) Imperial University, 台 北 帝 国 大 学 文 政 学 部, and *Murakami was invited to head that Faculty. In collaboration with his colleagues, Iwao Seiichi 岩生成一 (1900– 1988),8 Kobata Atsushi 小葉田淳 (1905–2001),9 and Kuwata Rokuro¯ 桑田 六 郎 10 in Taipei, and Itazawa Takeo 板 澤 武 雄 (1905–2001)11 at Gakushu¯in University, Murakami took the lead in translating major Portuguese sources into Japanese, collating them with contemporary Asian sources, and using the collated sources for an integrated analysis of historical events that occurred in sixteenth to sev5 For Kuwabara’s work refer to Kuwabara, Deeds of Pu Shougeng (Hojuko¯ no jiseki 蒲寿庚の事 蹟), Iwanami Shoten 岩波書店, 1935. 6 For Ishida’s work, refer to Ishida, Chinese Source Materials Relating to the South Seas (Nankai ni kansuru Shinashiryo¯ 南海に関する支那史料), Seikatsusha 生活社, 1945. 7 For Mori’s work refer to Mori, Study of Sino-Japanese Trade during the Song (Nisso¯ bo¯eki no kenkyu¯ 日宋 貿 易 の 研 究 ), 1948, now contained in New Version of the Collected Works of Mori Katsumi (Shinpen Mori Katsumi chosakushu¯ 新編森克己著作集), Bensei Shuppan 勉 誠出版 Vol. I, 2008. 8 For Iwao’s work refer to Iwao Seiichi, Studies of Japanese Colonies in the South Seas (Nanyo¯ Nipponjinmachi no kenkyu¯ 南洋日本人町の研究), 岩波書店, 1966. 9 For Kobata’s works refer to Kobata, Study of Sino-Japanese Contact and Trade in Medieval Times (Chu¯sei Nisshi tsu¯ko¯ bo¯ekishi no kenkyu¯ 中世日支通交貿易史の研究), To¯e Shoin 刀 江書院, 1939, and Studies on the Contact and Trade between Japan and South Seas Countries in Medieval Times (Chu¯sei Nanto¯ tsu¯ko¯ bo¯ekishi no kenkyu¯ 中世南島通交貿易史の研究), Nihon Hyo¯ronsha 日本評論社, 1939. 10 For Kuwata’s works refer to Kuwata, A Study on Sri Vijaya, 台北, Nanpo¯ jinbun kenkyu¯sho 南 方人文研究所, 1945, Studies on East-West Contact in South Seas Areas, Kyu¯ko shoin 汲古書 院, 1993. 11 For Itazawa’s works refer to Itazawa, Studies on the History of Trade between Japan and the Netherlands (Nichiran bo¯ekishi 日蘭貿易史), Heibonsha 平凡社, 1949, and Study on Cultural Intercourse between the Netherlands and Japan (Nichiran bunka ko¯sho¯shi no kenkyu¯ 日 蘭 文 化 交 渉 史 の 研 究 ), Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan 吉川弘文館, 1959.

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enteenth century Asia. The results of their research, which appeared in both monograph and book form, became standard works in the field.

III.

Postwar Trends in Research

With Japan’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945, many aspects of the country’s previous works of history were criticized severely from both within and without. Ultimately, it is undeniable that prewar historical works were written in an environment of political expansionism and insular nationalistic chauvinism, irrespective of whether the authors were conscious of it or not. Postwar historical studies have been consistently self-conscious of this fact. In this section, I address a couple of trends among many: (1) The search for an integrative history of the world (world history), and (2) the need for developing interdisciplinary research.

A.

Search for an Integrative History of the World (World History)

In order to foster the concepts of collaboration and interdependence with the rest of the world among younger generations of Japanese, historical revisionism in the postwar period was initiated by reforming secondary-school curricula in the 1950s and 1960s. The past tripartite division of Japanese, Oriental, and Occidental histories 国史, 東洋史, 西洋史 was consolidated into two: Japanese history 日 本 史 and world history 世 界 史 . World history was interpreted as “general history” 普 遍 史 when it was introduced to modern Japan for the first time. The editing of textbooks for senior high school students was entrusted mainly to leading scholars at various universities (for example, Murakawa Kentaro¯ 村 川 堅 太 郎 , Hayashi Kentaro¯ 林 健 太 郎 , Egami Namio 江 上 波 夫 , and Yamamoto Tatsuro¯ 山 本 達 郎 ). Hypothetical ideas postulated by famous overseas practitioners of macro-history were consulted, ranging from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Jaspers, and Arnold Toynbee, to the French School of ‘conjuncturist’ historians. A knotty problem in writing textbooks on world history at that time was how to approach describing the overall flow of world history, both vertical and horizontal. The method generally adopted was to place the three great ancient civilizations at the top, then move to a description of separate vertical flows of Western, Indian, and East Asian civilizations before describing the interweaving within the world of modernized Western civilization and other vertical civilization flows. In the meantime, the situation in the world was changing rapidly. Dramatic changes in world affairs that took place in the 1970s and 1980s after the end of the Cold War made scholarly debate over the search for a “universal

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history” an urgent matter in Japan as well as in Europe and the United States. The focus of such discussion centered on whether an “early-modern period” could be postulated within the description of world history. The article by Joseph Fletcher of Harvard University entitled “Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500–1800,” written in the late 1970s and published posthumously in 1984, was a provocative landmark in this line of argument.12 I give here only the core of his assertions. As a practitioner of ‘integrative history’ (universal history, general history, macro-history, and the like), Fletcher started with a general consensus that from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Technological Age began to interweave itself into the historical destiny of various quarters of the globe, the world at large had been one (synchronized). He then argued that the timeframe of 1500–1800 may be identified as the “early modern period.” In reviewing the arguments of several other macro-historians, he expressed dissatisfaction with their conclusions, except for the French Annalès school. Arnold Toynbee saw history as the rise and fall of certain types of societies but perceived that there were no “horizontal continuities” fundamentally linking the world’s economies, societies, and cultures. Karl Jaspers searched for parallelisms going back to the beginning of civilization, but stopped there. William McNeill attempted to tie human history together, but his focus was on the rise, spread, and dominance of West European civilization; he neither identified nor examined “common trends” in late-medieval or early-modern world economic, social, and cultural history. Marxist historians made systematic attempts to postulate world history on the basis of shared economic, social, and cultural phenomena. Notwithstanding their tendentious desire to show that all societies have followed a unilinear pattern of development, they argued such strange concepts as “nomadic feudalism” while admitting such exceptions as an “Oriental Mode of Production.” As is evident from his review of other general historians, Fletcher’s “integrative history” denotes not simply a search for “interconnections” between societies but also for “horizontal continuity” (identifying and explaining the causal relationship of such trends). As illustrative evidence for his assertion that there was an early modern phase of world history, he points to several events, including: (a) the activity of Jesuit missionaries; (b) European maritime trade; (c) spreading advances in military technology; (d) European or New World diseases; (e) food crops from America; (f) Spanish bullion; (g) shifting patterns of trade; and (h) coffee and tea drinking. Looking into the causal relations underlying these “common trends,” he calls attention to several “parallelisms” or “synchronisms” across the world: (I) demographic expansion; (II) regional urbanization, and 12 Joseph Fletcher, “Integrative History,” Journal of Turkish Studies, Vol. 9, 1985.

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enhanced power of urban classes; (III) domination of the countryside by a new urbanized status quo that led to rural unrest; and (IV) enormous growth in urban power that led to redressing the age-old balance between steppe and sown land. He adds further that, throughout these changes, demographic growth may be a common elemental factor. Coincidentally, Kristof Glamann, a renowned Danish specialist in European trade from 1500–1750,13 gave a lecture entitled “A Study of the International Trade and Circulation of Bullion in the Early Modern Period” in Tokyo in 1978. Like Fletcher and others, he also equated the timeframe of 1500–1750 with the beginnings of “world trade” and the “world economy.” According to Glamann, the emergence of this new situation was, in the final analysis, a function of the circulation of bullion on a global scale. Differing from conventional wisdom, he concluded that the goal of European traders was not so much to export European products to Asia and to explore markets for them as it was to import and supply Asian goods to European markets. Traders definitely needed to acquire silver either from Mexico or Japan, as silver was the ultimate means of supplying capital for importing Asian goods. Due to the diversity and immaturity of mechanisms for settling prices in trade, European traders with Asia were very competitive with each other. The export or re-export of Mexican silver to Asia, for example, was of decisive importance to European traders in winning such competition. On the other hand, China in the late Ming and Qing periods had a thriving economy that definitely needed bullion from outside for its currency to make up for an endemic deficit of domestic silver production. This explains why Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch merchant marines competed with each other in participating in intra-Asian trade (especially Sino-Japanese and Sino-Philippine trade). Glamann said that this new picture of world history, for which there was a general consensus in European scholarship, was derived from the rich empirical evidence produced by Japanese and Chinese historians in their investigations of East-West contact during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This new picture of the early modern world stimulated some schools of Japanese scholars to develop fresh research approaches and postulate new interpretations of the nature of 1500–1700 Japan. For example, Hayami Akira 速 水 融 , who conducted an exhaustive survey of village-level accounts of population over the entire Edo period, inferred that the exogenous impact was far more influential than earlier assumed, and that it may be argued that Japan’s early

13 Kristof Glamann is the author of “European Trade 1500–1750,” in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed. The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. II. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Collins/Fontana, 1974.

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modern phase emerged as early as the beginning of the Edo period.14 Meanwhile, Nagazumi Yo¯ko 永積洋子, who conducted a meticulous collation of records of trade between Japan and China by way of Dutch intermediaries through combined use of Dutch and Japanese archives, provided evidence that bureaucrats as well as traders in the Edo period were fairly well-informed about events across the sea even under Japan’s enforced “seclusion policy.”15 Using the archives of the So¯ Clan 宗氏文書 of Tsushima 對馬, Tashiro Kazui 田代和生 revealed the role played by Tsushima as an intermediary in Japan’s trade with China by way of Korea.16 Fuma Susumu 夫 馬 進 advanced research on Ryu¯kyu¯an (Liuchiu’s) diplomacy with China through a regular exchange of embassies during the sixteenth century.17 Ueda Masaaki 上 田 正 昭 and other scholars discussed in detail the role of embassy exchanges between Tokugawa Japan and Yi Dynasty Korea.18 Apart from these works, researchers at the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies at Kansai University contributed greatly to the elucidation of the history ¯ ba Osamu 大 庭 脩 (1927–2002) opened of maritime East Asia in two ways. First, O new horizons in the clarification of enhanced Sino-Japanese cultural intercourse during the Edo period through meticulous examination of the cargo of Chinese vessels.19 This level of detailed research had been infeasible through simple use of Spanish and Dutch sources and thus had remained little studied. Following the 14 For Hayami’s works refer to Hayami, Population, Economy, and Society in the Early Modern No¯bi Region, Japan ( Kinsei No¯bichiho¯ no jinko¯, keizai, shakai 近世濃尾地方の人口・経 済・社会), So¯bunsha 創文社, 1992,; Hayami et al. eds, Perspective from Society in the Tokugawa Era: Growth, Structure, and Multi-State Relations (Tokugawa shakai kara no tenbo¯: hatten, ko¯zo¯, kokusai kankei 徳川社会からの展望： 発展・構造・国際関係), Do¯bunkan 同文館, 1989. 15 For Nagazumi’s works refer to Nagazumi, Quantitative Cargo Lists of Chinese Ships to Japan: Exports and Imports at Nagasaki: 1637–1833 (To¯sen yushutsunyu¯hin su¯ryo¯ ichiran 唐 船 輸 出 入 品 数 量 一 覧 ： 1637–1833), So¯bunsha 創 文 社 , 1987, and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Japan (Kinsei shoki no gaiko¯ 近世初期の外交), So¯bunsha 創文社, 1990. 16 For Tashiro’s works refer to Tashiro, Study of the History of Japanese-Korean Contact and Trade in Early Modern Japan ( Kinsei Nitcho¯ tsu¯ko¯ bo¯ekishi no kenkyu¯ 近 世 日 朝 通 交 貿 易 史 の 研 究 ), So¯bunsha 創文社, and Japanese-Korean Trade and the Tsushima Fiefdom (Nitcho¯ ko¯eki to Tsushima han 日 朝 交 易 と 対 馬 藩 ), So¯bunsha 2007. 17 For Fuma’s work refer to Fuma, ed., Revised and Enlarged Version of Notes on and Study of the “Records of the Chinese Embassy to Liuchiu” (So¯tei shi-Ryu¯kyu¯roku kaidai oyobi kenkyu¯ 増訂 使琉球録解題及び研究), Yo¯ju Shorin 榕樹書林, 1999. 18 Ueda Masaaki 上 田 正 昭 , Nakao Hiroshi 仲 尾 宏 , eds. Korean Embassies to Japan and their Temporal Background (Cho¯sen tsu¯shin-shi to sono jidai 朝鮮通信使とその時代), Akashi Shoten 明石書店, 2001. ¯ ba’s works refer to O ¯ ba, Books Brought on Chinese Ships to Japan in the Edo Period (Edo 19 For O jidai ni okeru To¯sen mochiwatarisho no kenkyu¯ 江 戸 時 代 に お け る 唐 船 持 渡 書 の 研 究 ), Kansai Daigaku To¯zai Gakujutsu Kenkyu¯sho 関西大学東西学術研究所, 1967; and Study of Reception of Chinese Culture in the Edo Period (Edo jidai ni okeru Chu¯goku bunka juyo¯ no kenkyu¯ 江戸時代における中国文化受容の研究), Do¯ho¯sha Shuppan 同朋舎出版, 1984.

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¯ ba, yet on a more exhaustive scale, Matsuura Akira 松 浦 章 same path as O garnered tremendous achievements in the explication of the structural base for navigational techniques in East Asian waters in the “early modern period” of China and Japan.20 Second, Fujiyoshi Masumi 藤 善 真 澄 of the same Institute dedicated himself to the editing and publication of the New and Comprehensive Translation with Annotations of Zhao Rukuo’s 趙 汝 适 ’s Navigations to the Countries of the South Seas 諸蕃志.21 These are but the tip of the iceberg in the numerous studies published in the 1980s through 2000s.

B.

Need for Developing Interdisciplinary Research

In the early decades of the twentieth century it was common to find more than a few archeologists, pre-historians, ethnologists, and cultural anthropologists receiving their initial training as historians. At that time, it was not difficult for historians to communicate with students of other disciplines and to collaborate with them when appropriate. With the lapse of time, however, a trend began to emerge toward compartmentalization, parochialism, and insularism. Some historians have even tried to sequester themselves within their own boundaries, while tending to turn a blind eye to other disciplines. Probably as a measure to counterbalance such a trend with an orientation toward the “general” and to promote greater scholarly communication, the Japanese government has implemented two schemes since the 1970s. First was the establishment of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka in 1974. This was to integrate the contiguous disciplines of anthropology and ethnology so as to facilitate the exploration of themes related to human living through a broadened intellectual scope. This was followed by the establishment of the National Museum of History and Folklore at Sakura 佐 倉 in Chiba 千 葉 in 1981. The museum works to tie together history, archeology, and folklore. Researchers conduct collaborative research or surveys on Japanese history and 20 For Matsuura’s works, refer to Matsuura, Studies of Overseas Trade in the Qing Period (Shindai kaigai bo¯ekishi no kenkyu¯ 清代海外貿易史の研究), Ho¯yu¯ Shoten 朋友書店, 2002; Study of Trade Conducted by Seaborne Junks Based in the Shanghai Area in the Qing Period (Shindai Shanhai sho¯senko¯ ungyo¯shi no kenkyu¯ 清代上海沙船航運業史の研究), Kansai Daigaku Shuppanbu 関西大学出版部, 2004; Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchanges via Chinese Ships in the Edo Period ( Edo jidai To¯sen ni yoru Nitchu¯bunkako¯ 江 戸 時代唐船による日中 文化交), Shibunkaku Shuppan 思文閣出版, 2007; Sino-Japanese Cultural Intercourse in East Asian Waters during the Early Modern Period (Shindai Hosen Enkai Ko¯unshi no Kenkyu¯ 清代帆船沿海航運史の研究), Shibunkaku Shuppan 思文閣出版, 2010. 21 For Fujiyoshi’s work refer to Fujiyoshi, ed., Translation with Annotations, Zhufan-zhi (Shobanshi 諸蕃志), Kansai Daigaku To¯zai Gakujutsu Kenkyu¯sho 関西大学東西学術研究所, Yakuchu¯ shiri-zu 5 訳註シリーズ 5, Kansai Daigaku Shuppanbu 関西大学出版部 1990.

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culture in both the past and present. The museum amasses relevant materials and makes the results of research open to the public through scores of themespecific exhibitions held at the museum. In addition, in 1984 the International Center for Japanese Culture 国際日本文化研究センター, a facility that integrates the study of language, history, and science related to Japanese culture, was established in Kyoto. The government’s second step was to start a program in 1979 of awarding large sums of funding for interdisciplinary studies titled “Study of Areas of Significance” 重点領域研究. This special funding is awarded annually to a few teams in fields of the humanities, who carry out projects for a period of three to six years. The themes fall into categories prescribed in the application guidelines. Each team has many members, in some cases more than a hundred. Applications are screened competitively, and the results of projects are subjected to open critique by a government-assigned committee. The following are some examples of research themes in the area of the history of maritime East Asia: (1) Cultural conflicts in Asia (1977–1979); (2) Search for integrated area studies: a search for a model of interdependence between regions and the world (1993–1996); (3) History of maritime contact within the East China Sea, centering on Fujian, China (1994– 1997); (4) Research for sources of historical information on Okinawan studies (1994–1997); (5) Transition in the Chinese world order in modern East Asia: its implications for the present day (1997); (6) Natural and cultural environments in prehistoric Japan (1997–2001); (7) Human life and culture in prehistoric Japan (1997–2001); (8) Study of the origin and formation of the Japanese people through physical analysis (1997–2001); (9) Interdisciplinary research into the origin of the Japanese people and their culture (1997–2001); (10) Origin and formation of Japanese culture through the comparative study of Japan with adjacent areas (1997–2001); (11) Composition of Japanese source materials in pre-modern Japan and the creation of electronic databases (2000–2001); (12) Study of sources concerning premodern Japan preserved in East Asian countries (2003–2007); and (13) Maritime East Asia and formation of the Japanese tradition of culture (2005– 2009).

IV.

Conclusion

Finally, I will briefly sum up the points I have presented above. (1) Under the surface of Japanese historians’ persistent engagement with the history of maritime East Asia lies a desire to fill the vast vacuum of knowledge inherent within the traditional historiography of Asia at large. (2) Riess’s suggestion to promote the study of East-West intercourse was insightful and appropriate. It taught that without a macro-historical skeleton, piecemeal research into particulars would

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end up as a mere mosaic of aggregated pieces. (3) His suggestion that called Japanese attention to the utility of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch documents in reconstructing the Asian past from the sixteenth century onward proved valid. (4) Reflection on wartime expansionism and, hence, the intellectual isolation of Japan acted as a stimulant for renewed interest in macro-history. (5) With the support of government funding for engagement in interdisciplinary research, inquiry into the maritime history of East Asia has become a popular topic of research, although some problems remain to be solved. *This paper is a revised version of the author’s presentation, “Japanese Studies of the History of Maritime East Asia,” given at the 6th Japan-Korea Academic Forum held in Seoul, Korea on September 27th–29th, 2011 (cosponsored by the Japan Academy and National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea). Published by permission of the author.

B

A

24 13 2 6 13

4 Philippines 5 Java & Outer Islands

6 Indochina

1

2

9 4

13

3

2 11

17

3 9

4

7

1 3

11

4

歴史地理 1899 ～

10

25

3

2 Liuchius or Ryu¯kyu¯ (& Taiwan) 3 Taiwan

0 Intra-East Asian contact: general 1 Intra-East Asian contact in the South seas: general

6 Hirado & Nagasaki 7 Christianity in East Asia

4 Arrival of the Dutch 5 Arrival of the British, Russians, & Americans

2 East-West contact after 16th c. 3 Arrival of the Portuguese & Spanish

0 East-West contact by seaway: general 1 East-West contact before 16th c.

Journals 史学雑誌 Topics 1889 ～

6

2

3 2

1 4

1

1

6

東洋学報 1909 ～

1

3

3

1

2

藝文 （京都） 1910 ～ 31

6

5

2 1

5

1 4

11

5

史林 （京都） 1916 ～

1

3

4

4

1

1

3

歴史と地理 （京都） 1917 ～ 35

14

2 2

4 3

3

8

1

1

5

史学 （東京） 1921

[Appendix] Preferred topics on the history of maritime East-Asia: based on the titles of articles in major journals, the 1890s–1930s

2

2

2 3

5

1

2

2

2

2

史学研究 （広島） 1929 ～

Japanese Studies into the History of Maritime East Asia

73

D

C

5 Ming expeditions to the South Seas

3 Early piracy 4 Wo piracy

1 Chinese navigation to the South Seas: Song & Yuan 2 Mongol invasion of East Asian countries

4 Korean colonies in Japan 5 Sino-Japanese-Korean contact: Sui & Tang

2 Problem of Himiko & Yamatai 3 South Korean Peninsula and Japan

11

15

13 2 10

10

5

1

4

25

14

3

10

2

3

4

1

5

3

3

東洋学報 1909 ～

3 3

2

歴史地理 1899 ～

2

9

Journals 史学雑誌 Topics 1889 ～

7 Burma, Siam, & SW China Intra-East Asian contact in northern waters: general 1 Early Sino-Japanese-KoreanManchurian contact

(Continued)

1

1

6

藝文 （京都） 1910 ～ 31 1

1 2

1

4

1

2

2

4

史林 （京都） 1916 ～ 2

1

1

3

1

2

1

1

5

歴史と地理 （京都） 1917 ～ 35 1

2

1

2

3

1

1

2

史学 （東京） 1921 2

2

1

史学研究 （広島） 1929 ～ 3

74 SHIBA Yoshinobu

Japan’s contact with Korea via Tsushima Korean embassies to Japan

3 Japanese invasion of Korea: Hideyoshi & Ieyasu Japan’s seclusion

Participation of Westerners in East Asian trade 1 International bullion flow: 15th-18th c. 2 Trade within East Asia from the 14th century

2 3

1 3

2

8

18

25 10

5

歴史地理 1899 ～

3

Journals 史学雑誌 Topics 1889 ～

1

1

3

東洋学報 1909 ～

2

7

藝文 （京都） 1910 ～ 31

2

13

史林 （京都） 1916 ～

2

2

5

4

歴史と地理 （京都） 1917 ～ 35

G Modernization of East Asia 2 3 2 2 (Source: Catalog of articles concerning Oriental history in Japan,『日本における東洋史論文目録』1964)

F

E

(Continued)

2

1

1

3

5

史学 （東京） 1921

1

1

1

4

史学研究 （広島） 1929 ～

Japanese Studies into the History of Maritime East Asia

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New Trends in Humanities Research

GE Zhaoguang

Trends, Positions and Methods: Seeking New Perspectives in Humanities Research

I.

What Does Intellectual History Tell Us?

In the last decade of the 20th century, intellectual history emerged as a popular research subject in contemporary China. But the significance of such research lies neither in the description or summary of the academic achievements of certain scholars, nor in the attempt to establish certain origins of academia. On the contrary, the main purposes are to discuss 1) how traditional scholarship has modernized under the influence of both the West and the East, 2) how Western modern research has given birth to new perspectives and methods in political, cultural, and academic contexts within China, and 3) how modern scholarship, in terms of research perspectives, materials, tools, and methods, has influenced the way we see ancient China and the way we conceive of China’s future. These three issues are of crucial importance in that they can determine whether the study of the history of learning in China can help us outline key threads of development in academic research and thus make informed predictions regarding coming trends. As many have noted, the 1920s and 1930s were important years for modern Chinese scholarship. During this period, the two most successful research institutes were the Research Institute of Tsinghua College 清华学校研究院, otherwise known as the Academy of Tsinghua University 清华国学院, which had far-reaching influence despite its short four-year existence, and the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica 中 央 研 究 院 历 史 语 言 研 究 所, founded by Fu Si-nian 傅 斯 年 and later known as the Academia Sinica when it moved to Taipei. Several things explain the exemplary nature of these two institutes. For one, they were founded at a time when Chinese scholarship was transitioning from traditionality to modernity, when a relatively peaceful social environment grounded their prosperous development, and when they both had reaped huge benefits from a wealth of scholars who were well-versed in both Eastern and Western scholarship. Apart from that, I think there are, as far as academic research is concerned, three other reasons.

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First, the two institutes were always at the cutting edge of international academic research, not only in terms of their research foci, but also of the tools and methods they used. This is what Chen Yinke 陈 寅 恪 calls yu-liu 预流 (meaning, roughly, “trends”), which suggests that scholars should keep up with the changes in foci, materials, and international academic research methods of their time.1 However, merely abiding by yu-liu is not enough. Chinese studies carried out by native scholars should not be simply equated with “Sinology” conducted by overseas scholars. Rather, we Chinese scholars should formulate our own questions, take our own positions, and establish our own methods. In a time— the late Qing Dynasty and early years of the Republic of China—when a mania for “following the West” swept across the country and when the Western system of disciplines and Western concepts concerning academic research fully intruded into Chinese academia, the two above-mentioned institutes managed to hold their ground and firmly base their research on the central concept of “China.” They did not peddle Western knowledge, but rather attempted to reinterpret China’s present and past. They even argued that the right to interpret Chinese history must rest with Chinese scholars. Fu Si-nian, in his forceful article, “ The Purport and Delight of Working at the Institute of History and Philology”史语所 工作旨趣, drew the enthusiastic conclusion that “we should conduct Oriental studies in a scientific manner and establish orthodoxy in China.”2 Such a claim, tinted with the color of nationalism though it may be, did help promote independence of academic research in modern China and pave the way for the success of the two research institutes in question. In addition to the two aforementioned points, i. e. keeping up with international trends and becoming conscious of our own positions, another factor contributed to the significant status of the two institutes in Chinese academic research: the “opportunities of the native land” at that time. By “opportunities of the native land,” I mean the continuous emergence of new research materials in China. For example, the so-called four great discoveries—the oracle bone inscriptions from the Yin Dynasty, the manuscripts excavated in the Dunhuang Grottoes, the letters of the Han Dynasty found in the Juyan 居延 area of Inner Mongolia, and the credential files originally kept in the Forbidden City in the Qing Dynasty—were all made in that period, and they laid a firm foundation for new a understanding of China’s history. These discoveries not only led to a 1 Chen Yinke in his Preface to Chen Yuan’s The Record of the Remains of Dunhuang Treasures 陈垣 ( 敦煌 劫 余 录 ) 序 says: “New materials and methods in research spring up with the coming of each new period; and what we call ‘trends’ indicate the application of the new materials in dealing with new problems.” Collected Writings in Jin-Ming House: Second Issue 金 明 馆 丛 稿 二 编 , SDX Joint Publishing Company 三联书店, 2002, pp. 266. 2 Fu Si-nian, “The Purport and Delight of Working at the Institute of History and Philology,” Collected Papers of the Institute of History and Philology (Book I) 1928, Section 1.

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change in the quantity of historical materials, but also in the nature of historical interpretation. With the newly discovered materials, the Academy of Tsinghua University and the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica opened up new avenues in research. With the help of Yin-Shang tortoise shells and animal bones, Dunhuang manuscripts and Han letters, and Qing credential files, the institutes conducted research on the ancient, middle, and modern ages of Chinese history. In terms of research materials and tools, the two institutes laid special emphasis on archaeological evidence, comparative study of different languages, and the application of “peripheral” materials; in terms of research perspectives, they directed their attention to ethnic and minority histories; and in terms of research methods, they valued those used by sociologists and took pains to integrate linguistic studies into historical studies. Raising the banner of “science” and “Western learning” while at the same time adhering to the very notion that “Orthodox Oriental studies is always in China,” the two institutes, with their new ideas and methods, immediately stood at the international forefront and became the center of attention in academic circles both at home and abroad. In the past few years, I have spent much time reviewing the history of learning in modern China, and have been deeply impressed by the international influence that Chinese humanities research exerted at that time. As for humanities research in present-day China, how should it confront “international research trends,” and where does its way out lie?

II.

International Perspectives: From “Studies in China’s Neighboring Countries” to “Viewing China within the Frame of Neighboring Countries”

Here I would like to divide Chinese history into three phases for the purposes of analyzing changes in Chinese people’s self-concepts. The first phase can be called “the age of egocentric imagination.” Because transportation difficulties limited contact with the world outside, the powerful traditions taking shape in the Han Dynasty, and the minor influence of foreign civilizations—in a word, due to the lack of the presence of the Other—China seemed to live in a mirrorless era. Hence the formation of the “China-is-theworld” concept (implying contempt and haughtiness towards neighboring countries) and the egocentric “tribute system” ( 进 贡 制, a situation that remained unchanged until the Song Dynasty). Though the Chinese people, in the passage of time, had already extended their geographical knowledge beyond the limited area of China, they still tended to cherish the aforementioned egocentric

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notions and fancied themselves the sole inhabitants of the very center of the world. However, with the gradual arrival of foreigners in the late Ming Dynasty and more significantly, the foreign military invasions of the late Qing Dynasty, the Chinese people, in their self-assessment, began to realize the powerful existence of the Other (i. e. the West) and assumed an all-around West-oriented posture. From then on, China entered the second phase, “the period with only one mirror for self-recognition;” a time, as Joseph R. Levenson puts it, when the nation underwent tremendous change from the idea of “China-is-the-world” to that of “the-world-consists-of-numerous-countries.”3 It is with this mirror in the form of the “Other” that China began to see itself in a new light. But then again, such a new understanding was based solely on the unvaried mirror image of the West. There’s the rub: Is it a faithful mirror or a distorting one? Or is it the only mirror available for our self-recognition? Or, can it really help us fully understand ourselves? Or, do we need other mirrors apart from the West? Unfortunately, in the past one hundred years, we rarely took conscious effort to clearly differentiate ourselves from our neighbors, such as Japan, Korea, India, and Mongolia, the countries that can also be considered to be part of the “Other.” We are apt to place these neighboring countries on the “periphery” of our own culture, and are not accustomed to taking them into consideration. But does this help lead to self-assessment? I have always felt that by comparing and contrasting China with the West, we can only gain a rough understanding of our own characteristics. It is the understanding of the minute differences between us and the neighbors who share our traditions that can give us a genuine knowledge of “Chinese” culture. In the process of globalization in which the tendency towards unanimity takes hold, we might have a chance to enter the third phase, “an age with many mirrors for self-recognition.” What we have to do is shoot China with cameras from various angles and form a 3-D motion picture of it. To view China within the frame of neighboring countries can help us establish new notions of not only ourselves but also others. In other words, it might help us understand China in a new light, historically, culturally, and politically. As to how this new research perspective relates to the history of thought, I am afraid that I will have to defer discussing the subject in detail for space reasons. But I would like to briefly discuss its significance to the history of learning from the standpoint of humanities research.

3 Joseph R. Levenson, in his book Confucian China and its Modern Fate (Chapter 7, Part 1), points out that “Much of Chinese intellectual history is a transition from the idea of ‘China-isthe-world’ to that of ‘China-is-a-nation.’” See the Chinese version of the book (translated by Zheng Dahua 郑大华, et. al.), China Social Sciences Publishing House, 2000, p. 87.

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Intellectual history in China seems to suggest that the first wave of modernization and globalization in Chinese academia dated back to the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) when scholars initiated the study of the geography of northwestern China, the history of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) and the Mongolian minority that ruled it. Prompted by the inherent demands of textual research (the widening of the research focus) and the change in domestic and international situations since the Jiaqing 嘉庆 (1796–1820) and Daoguang 道光 (1820–1850) periods in the late Qing Dynasty, Chinese scholars, starting from Qian Daxin 钱 大 昕 (1728–1804), began to realize the transcendent importance of conducting research beyond the traditional conceptual space of the Han people. The change was important, first because the scholars reached beyond the field of the Han language, the Han people, and the documents and materials that concern Sinologists only, and second because they shifted the research focus beyond the sphere of the Confucian classics that textual critics were most familiar with, and third because they freed themselves from the confines of the history of politics. With a broadened point of view,4 Chinese scholars in the late Qing Dynasty began to delve into the textual study of the three great Turkish steles (the Stele of Tonyukuk, the Stele of Ki-tegin, and the Stele of Bilgekhagan),5 the translation and interpretation of the documents of the Yuan Dynasty and the Mongolian, minority, and other projects of international importance, such as the study on the Three Foreign Religions 三夷教, which were introduced by Persian clergymen and thrived in the Tang Dynasty: Zoroastrianism 琐 罗 亚 斯 德 教,

4 For example, Chen Yuan’s 陈 垣 On Christianity in China’s Yuan Dynasty 元 也 里 可 温 教 考 is greatly influenced by the research trends at that time, as is made manifest in his problemconsciousness, his choice of research topics, and his textual analysis of documents. He has made a great contribution to the study of literature in the Han language, with the help of Hong Jun’s 洪 钧 Additional Information about the Translated Materials on Yuan History 元史译文 补考 and multi-linguistic studies (e. g. the Arabic, Greek, and Mongolian languages) by many Japanese scholars. See Studies on Imported Christianity in China’s Yuan Dynasty, in Chen Yuan’s Study on Buddhism in Guizhou and Yunnan Provinces of the Ming Dynasty: Eight Books on the History of Foreign Religions 明季滇黔佛教考：外宗教史论著八种, (Hebei Education Publishing House 河北教育出版社, 2000), pp. 4–7. 5 The three great Turkish steles, i. e. the Stele of Tonyukuk, the Stele of Ki-tegin, and the Stele of Bilgekhagan, are said to have been discovered by a Finnish man, A.Geikel in 1890. It is also said that the credit of the discovery should be given to the Russian scholar N.Yadrintsev (1842–1894) rather than to Geikel. But one thing is indisputable: it was Vilhelm Thomsen (1842–1927), professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Copenhagen who, according to Geikel’s report, first deciphered the inscriptions on the three steles in 1892 and published his research findings in his book Deciphered Orkhon Inscriptions. Chinese scholar Shen Zengzhi 沈 曾 植, though unacquainted with the Turkish language, enriched the understanding of the steles with the help of Western explanations and his own knowledge of Tang-Dynasty literature.

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Manichaeism 摩 尼 教 and Nestorian Christianity 景 教.6 Even now, Japanese scholars versed in studies of Manchu 满 族, Hui 回 族, Mongolian and Tibetan minorities, have to read works by Chinese scholars such as Zhang Mu张穆 (1808– 1849), He Qiutao何秋涛 (1824–1862), and Li Wentian李文田 (1834–1895) as guides to their research.7 Even arrogant Russian scholars could not help but bow their heads before Shen Zengzhi 沈曾植 (1850–1922), the Chinese scholar who did much textual work on Turkish steles: “Since the translated version appeared, many foreign scholars have cited Shen’s work in their own writings, and no wonder Shen was employed by the Tribunal for the Management of Affairs of All Nations 总理各国事务衙门 in the Qing Administration.”8 During this transformation period, the research perspectives, languages, documents, and materials that scholars used all underwent dramatic changes, accelerating the emergence of new research areas. With the whole country being thrown into the process of globalization, politically, economically and culturally, Chinese academia continued to embrace changes into the late Qing Dynasty and the early days of the Republic of China. As mentioned in the introduction, the 1920s saw the rise of a group of superb Chinese scholars who were endowed with both openness and alertness of mind. And it was the so-called Four Great Discoveries in this period that ushered in the second wave of modernization and globalization in Chinese academia.9 During the second wave, documents and materials about the minority people in northeastern China stimulated the integration of linguistic studies and history 6 In China, studies of the Persian-originated religion Zoroastrianism were first mentioned by the Qing poet and scholar, Wen Tingshi 文 廷 式 (1856–1904) in his essay collection Scattered Words of Chun Changzi 纯 常 子 枝 语 ; he probably had seen books on Zoroastrianism written by foreign scholars. The earliest research on Manichaeism in China could be seen in Jiang Fu’s 蒋斧 A Brief Study on the Spread of Manichaeism in China 摩尼教流行中国考略; see “ Prospects of Manichaeism Studies in China” 摩尼教研究之展望 by Lin Wushu 林悟殊, in New History Studies 新史学, Vol. 7, Issue 1, Taipei, 1996. 7 For example, Naka Michiyo (1851–1908), the first Japanese scholar who ever studied the history of the Yuan Dynasty, obtained books such as the following from Chinese scholars: A Revised History of the Expedition of Genghis Khan 皇元圣武亲征记校正 and Explanatory and Additional Notes to the Inside History of the Yuan Dynasty by Li Wentian 元朝秘史李注补 from Chen Yi, a senior Qing official who, at the command of the Governor-general of the Province of Hu-Guang 湖广总督, Zhang Zhidong 张之洞 (1837–1909), went to Japan to investigate the education system there. 8 Wang Sui-Chang 王蘧常, The Chronicle of Shen Meisou’s Life 沈寐叟年谱, Taipei: Commercial Press, 1977. Other works by Shen include Notes of the Unknown History of the Yuan Dynasty (Vol. 15) 元 秘 史 笺 注 a n d Notes of the Origins of Mongolia 蒙古源流笺注, Vol. 8. 9 By that time, Chen Yinke had already sensed that this second wave must have something to do with the studies on the history and geography of northwestern China in the Qing Dynasty. He put forward his predictions in his Preface to Zhu Yan-feng’s ( 朱延丰) A Complete Study of the Turk Minority 突厥通考(1942), Collected Writings in the Hall of Cold Willows 寒柳堂集, (SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2001,) p. 163.

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studies. Chen Yinke, for example, used the languages of Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Han in proofreading the Dunhuang manuscripts. Besides, the materials newly found at Dunhuang encouraged the skeptical and analytical study of the documents that were passed down through generations. Hu Shi 胡 适, for instance, conducted textual research of Zen Buddhist literature. In addition, the documents found at Dunhuang, a politically, religiously, and culturally peripheral area so to speak, aroused scholastic interest in Sino-foreign communication in transportation and culture. Last but not least, the discovery of varied nonofficial and non-Confucian literature stimulated interest in the economic history of certain places (such as the changing economic situation of the viharas at Dunhuang), the history of different religions (such as Buddhism, which thrived along with the Three Foreign Religions during the Tang Dynasty), and regional histories (such as the history of the Guiyi 归义 regime at Dunhuang from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 AD) to the Sui Dynasty (589–617), that of the Tupo 吐蕃 regime in Tibet from the seventh to the ninth centuries, and that of the Western Regions 西域, the geological vastness west of the Jade Gate Pass 玉 门 关 ). Hence the rethinking of those so-called “ popular” research subjects and those “marginalized” topics. What is the third wave then? If I may venture an opinion, the idea of “viewing China within the frame of neighboring countries” can induce certain changes in the history of learning in China. To start with, I have noticed that the changes that occurred in the first two waves were all directed towards northwestern China, a space overlapping part of the ancient Silk Road. But little attention has been paid to our eastern surroundings, such as Korea, Burma, Japan, and the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands, where, in actual fact, we could find abundant documents and materials concerned with China. Prof. Wu Han 吴 晗, for example, has compiled over ten volumes of precious historical materials about China from Chronicles of the Li Dynasty of Korea 李 朝 实 录 .10 Among the materials preserved in our neighboring countries, those alone that are written in the Han language would greatly astonish us. Following the saying that says the outsider is much more clear-headed, it is hoped that such materials can help us “go beyond the sphere of China, examine our country from outside,” and gain a genuine understanding of Chinese characteristics. In addition, as we are very much accustomed to comparing the East with the West, almost all of our discussions of Chinese culture rest upon the notion of the West, the nebulous Other. However, beneath the seemingly clear descriptions of the cultural differences between the West and the East, there are considerable 10 Historical Materials on China from the Records of the Li Dynasty in Korea 朝鲜李朝实录中的 中国史料, edited by Wu Han 吴晗, (China Book Company, 1962).

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ambiguities. Going deeper, we feel somewhat puzzled: what do we really mean by the West? And what about the concept of the East? On the other hand, if we take our neighboring countries (which, of course, share more cultural similarities with us) as the Other and compare ourselves with them, we will likely find more significant cultural differences (subtle as they may be). For example, under the same banner of the Zhu Xi School, there were sharp differences among the high officials and nobles in Korea who adhered firmly to Zhu’s teachings, the Confucian scholars in Japan who had not gone through anything like the Imperial Civil Service Examination 科举制度, and the Chinese scholars who were influenced by both the textual research in their own country and foreign civilizations from outside. Such differences clearly demonstrate that, just as what we call the West is not a monolithic conceptual entity, neither are the notions of the East and Asia. Finally, as Fu Si-nian points out in his article, “The Purport and Delight of Working at the Institute of History and Philology,” the increase in available historical materials and the improvement in research tools are in fact signs of progress in academic research. As early as 1928, Fu recognized the importance of minority studies. He said that Chinese academia “did not seem willing to spend much time on the historical issues concerning the minority peoples,” and were falling behind Orientalists overseas in the study of Sino-foreign relations and the histories of minority and frontier regions. For example, with respect to minority issues, such as those dealing with Turks, Mongolians, Sienpi, Uyghurs, Khitans, Jurchens, Manchus, and the Huns, Chinese scholars did not pay as much attention to them as did their European counterparts. Because of this, Fu thought it an urgent need to introduce new research tools and materials, and to combine historical studies with linguistic studies. Later, in 1938, Hu Shi 1891–1962), on behalf of China, attended the World History Conference for the first time, and submitted an English thesis entitled “Recently Discovered Material for Chinese History.” In the thesis, Hu points out some new materials concerning Chinese history, including the well-known Yin-Shang oracle bone inscriptions, Dunhuang manuscripts, Han letters, Qing credential official files, the banned books that contained abundant historical anecdotes, and the less known “literature stored in Japan and Korea.”11 But the pity is that even though seventy years have passed, the documents and materials kept in Korea, let alone those in Japan, have not been satisfactorily sorted out or studied. Certainly, I am far from capable of predicting the general trend in the history of learning. But I am sure that if 11 “Letter from Hu Shi to Fu Si-nian” 胡适致傅斯年, September 2nd, 1938), Letters between Hu Shi and Fu Si-nian in the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica 史语所藏胡适 与傅斯年来往函札, compiled by Wang Fan-sen 王汎森, see in Mainland China Magazine 大 陆杂志 (September, 1996), Vol. 93, Issue 3, p. 11.

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attention is paid to our “neighborhood,” the languages used by our neighbors and the historical materials kept by them will possibly stimulate the emergence of new research fields and tools. To quote a cliché of economics, they might be the “new growth points” in academic research.12

III.

The Position of China in Comparison with Overseas Sinology

The idea of studying China’s neighboring countries is undoubtedly neither the invention nor the exclusive right of Chinese academia. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some European and Japanese scholars had already started conducting modern research into China’s surrounding countries. They employed methods used in the study of linguistics, archeology, history, and ancient documents, and produced brilliant results. France, for instance, produced several notable figures in this field, including E. Chavannes (1865–1918), P. Pelliot (1878–1945), G. Ferrand (1864–1935), and H. Maspero (1883–1945). These scholars, though generally referred to as “Sinologists” for their research focus, often expanded their view to the countries surrounding China. Under European influence, Japanese scholars from the Meiji era—a transformation period as it were in Japanese academia—became more and more interested in Chinese minorities and China’s surrounding countries. Starting with Naka Michiyo (1851–1908), who applied his intellect to the study of Mongolian, and Korean history, a considerable number of Japanese Sinologists in the Meiji, Taisho¯ and Sho¯wa periods chose to study China’s neighboring countries. The most distinguished among them include Shiratori Kurakichi (1865–1942), Fujita Toyohachi (1869–1928), Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ (1871–1931), Ikenaka Hiroshi (1878–1953), Haneda To¯ru (1882–1955), and Wada Kiyoshi (1890–1963), all of whom were exceptionally successful in conducting historical and geographical studies of such regions as Mongolia, Korea, Annam, Tibet, and northwestern China.13 They had an advantage over their Chinese counterparts thanks to their better knowledge of Western research methods, and they had an advantage over 12 I think changes in this research field may occur in the following aspects: (1) re-emphasizing the value of linguistics and (2) non-Han religions, (3) the need to consult documents and research work in the West, (4) redefining “China” and “foreign countries,” (5) rethinking the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in terms of culture and academic research. 13 For example, Miyazaki Ichisada, in his book A Complete History of China’s Surrounding Regions (1943), discusses the Indian Peninsula, Korea, Turkistan (including the ancient Western Region and today’s Xinjiang Province), Mongolia, and Tibet. Obviously, there is, in terms of the foci and purposes of research, a sharp difference between his research style and that of Chinese scholars, not to mention his definition of “China.” See Complete Works of Miyazaki Ichisada (Book 19), (Iwanami Shoten Publishing Ltd. 1992), pp. 149–162.

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their Western rivals thanks to their better understanding of Oriental documents. In sum, they thought that Japan should be the leader in Oriental studies. Haneda To¯ru, a Japanese Sinologist, summarized Japan’s academic achievements of that time as follows: (1) study of newly found ancient documents and materials in Oriental studies, e. g. the Stele of Ki-tegin; (2) discoveries of ancient languages, e . g . Tocharian 吐火罗文, and the languages of the Uyghur and the Western Xia Regimes 西 夏 ; (3) research of ethnic groups in northwestern China; (4) discovery of the documents of non-Han religions, e.g the classics of Manichaeism; the influence of (6) Sogdian and (7) Uyghur cultures on Oriental countries. Obviously, such new changes in academic research went far beyond the study of history, culture, languages, and ancient documents in the traditionally defined space of “China.”14 About this, Chinese scholars, though grudgingly, could do nothing but admit that “if the Chinese could be said to rival foreign scholars in the studies of canonical history, they could by no means match foreigners in research of such regions as northwestern China and the South China Sea, or in the study of the history of archeology or fine arts.”15 This trend in academic research, which swept both the East and the West, seemed to be just an international fad at first glance. However, deep beneath the surface of the trend, we can find its special historical and political background. Take Japan, the country that has the closest kinship with us, as an example. From the viewpoint of academic research, the trend was inspired by the powerful forces of globalization and modernization in academia. But in terms of intellectual history, certain intentions on the part of Japan lurk behind seemingly pure academic matters. More specifically, the modernist trend in Japanese academia led to inevitable changes and crises in their traditional Chinese studies: long-standing research perspectives changed, well-established conceptions of China were subverted, and new research patterns formed. As mentioned earlier, since the Meiji era, Japan, which shares a very close kinship with China and whose scholars are certainly more skillful than their European counterparts in interpreting Chinese issues, launched an effort to develop research materials, tools, and methods after the research styles of the West. It picked up the questions, topics, and areas that catered to Western tastes, assumed a “neutral” (so-called and flaunted by the West) ground, and changed the traditional “Chinese studies” into what is known

14 Haneda To¯ru, Recent Development of Oriental Studies (1957) and Collected Theses of Dr. Haneda To¯ru (1975), Dohosha Publishing House. 15 He Changqun 贺昌群, “ Chinese Studies in Japanese Academia” 日本学术界之 “支那学” 研 究 in Collected Writings of He Chang-qun 贺昌群文集, Vol. 1, (Commercial Press 商务印刷 馆), 2006.

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as “Oriental studies”16 by extending the traditional research field from Han China to its neighboring countries. On the one hand, Japanese scholars took conscious steps to create an “Oriental space” in their research, as opposed to “Occidental space” (culturally, historically, and ethnically); on the other, they tried to separate Japan from “the Orient” so that their own country would be faced with two reference objects as the Other. That is why Naka Michiyo proposed that apart from “national history,” there should be “Occidental history” and “Oriental history,” hinting at the very fact that Japanese scholars “ended the time when their sole emphasis was put on China to the exclusion of other Oriental ethnic groups and countries”17 and greatly widened their research focus. In the Meiji and Taisho¯ periods, the topic selection of various Japanese journals, such as Oriental Studies, and the academic training of many Japanese scholars were both directed towards the issues concerning Manchuria, Uyghur lands, Mongolia, and Tibet, as a response to the trend of modernization and globalization. However, as has been previously suggested, the deep political motives behind the transformation of Japanese scholarship should not be ignored. The burgeoning nationalism in Japan from the time of the Meiji period surfaced as “Asianism,” implying Japan’s contemptuous view of China, once its most powerful Asian rival. Some of the most influential ideas (in the same vein with the new conceptions of “nation state” popular in Europe at that time) were: There was no such thing as a “Greater China;” so-called “China” was merely an empire consisting of many dynasties; “real” China was actually a Han-dominated space occupying the areas south of the Great Wall and east of Xinjiang (which literally means “New Territory”) and Tibet; ethnic groups outside Han China were in fact different cultural, political, and ethnic entities. In the name of national interest and security, the growing ideology of “nationalist expansionism” from the Meiji 16 Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ in his article, “The Mission of Scholars of Chinese Studies” cites some Western Sinologists as models of academic research, such as the American scholar William Woodhill Rockhill (1854–1914), who studied the religion, culture, and geography of Tibet and Mongolia, as well as documents about transportation in the South China Sea such as Stories of Foreign Countries 诸 蕃 志 by Zhao Ru-shi 赵汝适 and Brief Introduction to Island Countries 岛夷志略 by Wang Da-yuan 汪大渊, three British scholars, R. Phillips (who studied the history of Chinese Taiwan under Dutch control and the traffic between China and the countries of the East China Sea), Alexander Wylie (1815–1857), who was well versed in Sanskrit, Manchu, and ancient Mongolian, and James Legge (1815–1897), who studied and translated the Chinese classics, the Russian scholar Emil Bretschneider (1833–1901), who specialized in the Yuan Dynasty. Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ admits in his book that “This greatest defect of Chinese studies in our country [Japan] is that we have not yet made full use of the scientific methods used in the West, and that it is quite possible that we have even not been aware of their existence.” He points out that “Those scientific methods are useful not only in studying West-born subjects, but also in Chinese studies.” See Complete Works of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ (Vol. 1), (Iwanami Shoten Publishing Ltd 1968), pp. 591–594. 17 Egami Namio, Contemporary History of Oriental Studies, p. 3.

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period onward resulted in Japan’s ever keener interest in the territories comprising China and the surrounding countries. And it was such a political background that underlay Japan’s disinclination to view the various dynasties in China as the reigns that had power over minority groups, and also its uncommon interest in China’s minority-inhabited areas, such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Manchuria, and its neighboring countries, such as Mongolia and Korea. This nationalist political tendency stirred up the interest of Japanese academia, and the ideas about China in academic circles became popular in society at large.18 These ideas were held until as late as World War II and long remained a hot topic among Japanese historians. Here we see the entanglement of two issues: the trends of globalization and modernization in academia, and the position of the nation in the history of learning. Will we encounter the same problem when it comes to the idea of “viewing China within the frame of neighboring countries”? To push the discussion further, what we are talking about here has something to do with a fundamental question: What is the significance of traditional humanities research? In addition to entertaining us with knowledge and sharpening our intelligence, I think part of its significance lies in its effort to shape our conception of the nation (referring to the cultural notion of “country” rather than “government” in the political sense). In this process, traditions serve to provide collective memories, build up consensus, and establish a sense of belonging. If we consider Japan’s tendency in the Meiji period to place China on equal footing with other Oriental nations as a politically-conscious action against China (though this is concordant with the modern notion of the equality among nations), then how shall we cultivate problem-consciousness and establish independent research positions in our effort to “view China within the frame of neighboring countries”? Let us now recall something from the past. From its very early stages, modern humanities research in China was closely connected with nationalism on the one hand and cosmopolitanism on the other. For example, if we say Liang Qichao’s 梁 18 For example, when the first Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894, the General Staff Office of the Japanese army published Geography of Manchuria, followed by other scholarly publications such as Investigating into the Name of Manchuria (1903), Manchuria: Now and Then (1904). In 1908, Shiratori Kurakichi proposed to the then director of railway construction in Manchuria that a department be established to study this region. And later many famous Japanese scholars participated in this project; Naito¯ Konan (1866–1934), a scholar of the Kyoto School, also showed a keen interest in the history and culture of Manchuria. Again, with Japan’s invasion and occupation of Korea, academic publications on Korea mushroomed, such as A History of Korea (1892) and A Contemporary History of Korea (1901) by Hayashi Taisuke (1854–1922). See Wada Sei’s “The Achievements of the Studies on the Histories of Manchuria and Mongolia in Japan,” in Oriental Studies, Shufu-to-Seikatsusha (Tokyo) 1942, pp. 241–268.

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启超 (1873–1929) epoch-making article “New History Studies” 新史学 marks the commencement of scientific history studies in modern China, the patriotism he talks about in the beginning of the article is what is considered national identity and the nation’s stand in humanities research. After the September 18th Incident in 1931, when Japan started to take full control of the three provinces in northeastern China, Fu Si-nian, a historian well known for his up-to-date notion of “History studies rely on historical materials, ” wrote a book entitled A Brief History of Northeastern China 东 北 史 纲 . Though very much concerned about the research on China’s frontier regions, Fu refutes the idea proposed by Japanese scholars (such as Shiratori Kurakichi) that “Manchuria and Mongolia are not part of China.” He insists on using the name of “Northeastern China” instead of “Manchuria,” for the latter is the very coinage of “the wishful thinking of the Western powers that coveted Chinese territory, which is totally groundless, be it economically, politically, geographically or ethnically.”19 Though dealing with the same matter, Chinese and Japanese scholars are often poles apart in terms of the positions they adopt and the research perspectives and strategies they use. In view of this, we insist on “the critical study of Chinese issues,” for we are often unaware of the fact that though foreign scholars also do research on the history and culture of China and China’s neighboring countries, their work should not be taken as genuine “Chinese studies.” The study on the history of thought and learning carried out by foreign scholars is actually something more “foreign” than “Chinese,” and their work must be examined within the political, social, and historical contexts of foreign countries. When we advocate the idea of “viewing China within the frame of neighboring countries,” we do not mean to pick up the research topics on Manchu, Mongolia, Qurighar, and Tibet once studied by European and Japanese scholars. Their historical and cultural research on areas such as Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Burma, and the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands can be classified into “regional studies,” which lifts us above the politically defined space of “nation state” and helps us understand historical and cultural exchanges among different regions. But the foundation of such research by Chinese scholars should always be Chinese history. And such study based on the notion of “nation state” is not without its significance today, when China, as a cultural entity formed in contemporary times and as a political state established in the modern period, cannot free itself from cultural and political influences. Traditional humanities research is not a science totally transcending national boundaries, and the modern transformation of scholarship always goes hand-in-hand with the redefinition of the nation state. Humanities research tries to establish consensus, form ideas, and create images 19 See A Brief History of Northeastern China, Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica 1932, p. 3.

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rather than destroy them. This is especially true when it comes to the study of the traditions of certain nations and cultures. And those consensuses, ideas, and images are just what we refer to as “common beliefs,” or “bases of national identity.” Ding Wenjiang 丁 文 江 in his published article, “The Mission of Academia Sinica” 中央研究院的使命, claims “that the greatest difficulty of uniting China is that we lack common beliefs, beliefs that are built upon our selfrecognition.” Ding says that “history and archeology are used to study the past of our country while anthropological linguistics and other social sciences are for studying our present state,” and that “with a better understanding of both the past and the present we can truly know ourselves.” Ding concludes the article by saying that “scientific study of our history can help create the basis of new common beliefs.”20 And what we refer to as “the past of our country,” “the present state of our country,” and “our common beliefs” usually cannot be appreciated by others. To sum up, though dealing with seemingly identical issues, Chinese scholars and foreign scholars differ a good deal. We might as well say that while foreign scholars widen their focus to “China’s neighborhoods,” the research of us Chinese scholars always centers on the very concept of “China.” It might have been trendy a hundred years ago for scholars in Europe, America, and Japan to show concern about South Asia, East Asia, West Asia, and Middle Asia, and it seems fashionable now to research different regions, irrespective of national boundaries. But theory is neither like wine, which tastes better as it ages, nor like clothes, which look worse as they age. At a time when the notion of “China in history” still has significance in terms of culture and tradition, it is meaningful for us to obtain an idea of China, both historically and culturally, by creating a new reference system in which the surrounding countries and frontier regions (such as Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Afghanistan, Mongolia, and Tibet) are taken as the Other. In this way, we cannot only get a fair understanding of China, both as a changing entity in the historical context and a political entity in the present situation, but also establish our common beliefs through the study of history and culture. In other words, to form a historical and cultural picture of a changing China through comparison with neighboring countries is in itself an attempt at an enlightened understanding of “contemporary China.” As I have already pointed out, now is the time that calls for the coming of a multitude of mirrors. These mirrors are formed by the kaleidoscopic opinions that surrounding countries and regions hold about China, this powerful “Other,” in the passage of time. While “the West” is so different from China that it is at best a blurry bronze mirror, showing only the contours of Chinese culture and missing many subtleties, the neighboring countries, which have close contact with China,

20 See Oriental Magazine 东方杂志, Vol. 32, Issue 2, January 16th, 1935.

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may on the contrary help us understand our country more accurately with insightful nuances.

IV.

Breaking Self-Confinement: Cross-study Analyses of Different Cultures

Placing the research focus on China by studying “genuine” Chinese history and culture does not suggest self-confinement. For Chinese scholars, the top priority certainly should be given to the task of “viewing China within the frame of neighboring countries,” but it is also important to study the interactive workings of different cultures. By studying specific communication of different cultures in fields like religion, literature, art, and language, we may pinpoint how the cultural chain, one lock after another, links together China with its neighboring countries and regions. In 1940, Prof. Miyazaki Ichisada (1901–1995) of Kyoto Imperial University put forward a hypothesis in his article, “The Renaissance in the East and the Renaissance in the West” that the popular images of the Virgin Mary in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe might in some way be influenced by the depictions of Guanyin (Kannon) 观音 in the East, such as their almond-shaped faces, and the clasping of their hands together. And later, some people even pointed out that it was because of resemblances between the two religious figures that the statuette of Guanyin (especially the statuette of a boy paying homage to him/her) produced in the city of Quanzhou 泉州 in China for a time replaced those of the Virgin Mary and were worshiped by Catholics in Nagasaki when they went underground after persecution.21 Again, in 1943, Mr. Fang Hao 方 豪 (1894–1955) wrote an article discussing how the anti-Catholic practice of compelling people to tread on the Madonna and Child statuette in order to test whether they were Catholics was introduced from Japan to China, how it was adopted by the Chinese government for the same purpose,22 and how it left its mark on the Qing Dynasty starting from the reign period of Emperor Yong Zheng 雍正 (1722–1735). In these two examples, we may find many interesting cultural clues. Now let me cite another example, which is about the history of art and religion, to show how contemporary China is linked with its neighboring countries in 21 Miyazaki Ichisada, “The Renaissance in the East and the Renaissance in the West,” in The Complete Works of Miyasaki Ichisada 宮崎市定全集 (Iwanami Shoten Publishing Ltd. 1992), Vol. 19, pp. 33–36. 22 Fang Hao, Japanese Influence on Repressive Acts towards Catholics in the Qing Dynasty 清代 禁抑天教所受日本之影响, first published in 1943, and later appearing in Collected Writings of Fang Hao 方豪全集, (Beiping Shang-zhi Translation House 北平上智编译馆, 1948), pp. 47–66.

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belief and thought and how the great cultural chain, visible in some parts and invisible in others, has come into being. For example, the Belgian scholar, Nicolas Standaert, has discovered that Zhu Zaiyu 朱载堉, the ninth-generation grandson of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, in his The Complete Book of Music 乐 律 全 书 , makes a creative interpretation and adaptation of the Chinese national memorial performance in the Ming Dynasty, especially in terms of a dance in memory of Confucius performed at Confucian temples. Though the modified music and dance was not adopted officially in actual ceremonies, it somehow managed to spread to Europe. Another example, the French Jesuit missionary, Joseph Marie Amiot (1718–1793), included several pictures illustrating the changes Zhu made to the original memorial dance in his book Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, etc. des Chinois (Paris: Nyon, 1780).23 (How Europe was influenced by this orderly and grand Chinese national dance and what Confucian ideas were embodied in the dance, are issues that remain to be discussed.) Things come in pairs. Li Zhizao 李 之藻 (1565–1630), a famous scholar and Catholic convert, also made some modifications to the national memorial music and dance for Confucius and wrote a book about it: Notes on Ritual Music Performance in Schools 泮宮礼乐疏. More interestingly, in 1672, Zhu Shunshui 朱舜水, a committed Confucian scholar exiled to Japan after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, designed dances in memory of Confucius for Tokugawa Mitsukuni 徳川光圀 (1628–1700), a prominent daimyo in the Mito domain. These dances were based on the records in Li Zhizao’s book and were the earliest versions of the memorial dances later performed at Confucian temples in Japan. From these examples, we may get an idea of the echo-like phenomenon in cross-cultural communication. For a long time, different disciplines in humanities research seemed to wall against one another in their own self-confined space. Besides, national boundaries in academic research to some extent also limit our perspectives. However, communications between China and its neighbors were never uncommon in history, even in the period of the severe official ban on maritime activities. History witnesses how literature, religion, and art cross national borders without showing passports or visas, and create a kaleidoscopic picture. But when the river of culture overflows the embankment and runs to different places, now rapid and now slow, now upward and now downward, now emptying into a big lake and now narrowing into a small torrent, we should remember that the seeds of art and religion, or thought and learning may grow into plants that are quite different from those in the original places, all depending on the actual climate. Take the Cheng-Zhu School of Neo-Confucianism 程朱理学 for example. When its 23 Nicolas Standaert, “Ritual Dances and Their Visual Representations in the Ming and the Qing,” in The East Asian Library Journal (Princeton Univ.) XII, 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 68–181.

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teachings became rigid doctrines and hypocritical pretense under the shelter of the Imperial Civil Service Examination system and when they were challenged by textual researchers in the Qing Dynasty, the school was still gingerly guarded by the literati of the Li Dynasty in Korea. Why was this so? A simple reason: at that time the system in Korea favored the ruling class, which prescribed that only those from noble families could register for the Imperial Civil Service Examination. Therefore, a somewhat static privileged class was maintained, and they proudly defended their cultural beliefs and experiences, of which Neo-Confucianism was regarded as orthodox. Whereas in the Tokugawa period in Japan, as has been pointed out by the Japanese scholar, Watanabe Hiroshi, Neo-Confucianism had no ground to take pride in itself as an absolute and universal truth, for there was no such thing as the Imperial Civil Service Examination there, on which the literati had to depend for a living. Since the common people in Japan were not much bounded by the traditions of moral and ethical regulations, even though Neo-Confucianism, due to the efforts of some Japanese Confucian scholars like Fujiwara Seika (1561–1619) and Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), was an accepted belief in Japan’s high society, it had no power to penetrate into the life of the common people.24 And here we see how the Cheng-Zhu School met with different fates in different cultural situations. Thus, I am very much inclined to agree with Quentin Skinner’s opinion that what needs discussing is not the ideas floating in the air, but those in context, and that because of all the differences in actual situations, e. g. differences in customs, values and social structures, imported literature, religion, art, and academic research are bound to take on a different look.

V.

Prospects for Humanities Research—New Materials, Methods and Models

Almost all the valuable studies in humanities research stem from the discovery of new materials. And these materials are nothing less than the foundation of an edifice. If no solid foundation were laid, it would be like building on a foundation in sand. In view of this, I think humanities researchers in China should put a great deal of effort into the construction of a huge database. Scholars should try to collect and preserve as many new documents and materials as possible, which indeed is the prerequisite for catching up with the international trend. Besides, the collecting work cannot be confined within the realm of traditional classics, which means that folk materials, visual and video materials (apart from written 24 Watanabe Hiroshi, “Changing Neo-Confucianism in the Early Tokugawa Period in Japan,” Chinese version, History Studies and Criticism 史学研究. Vol. 5, Taipei, 1983, p. 205.

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ones), and materials from overseas (apart from those found in China) should also be included. And this is a must if we want to “expand the horizon of humanities research.” Finally, the database should have characteristics of our own, for so numerous are the available research materials in the world that no research center can be all-embracing in the field. Equipped with new materials and new methods, we then will be able to raise many new questions that we never thought of in the past. And these questions, whether verifiable or not, will certainly bring forth changes to the established models in academic research. For example, the method of twofold evidence, i. e. the cross-study of materials excavated from underground and documents passed through generations, takes shape with the discovery of the oracle bone inscriptions and with the textual and interpretative work of such scholars as Wang Guowei’s 王 国 维 “A Study of the Oracle Inscriptions of the Yin Dynasty: Genealogy of the Imperial Family” 殷 卜 辞 中 所 见 先 公 先 王 考. The uncovering of Zen Buddhist manuscripts at Dunhuang and related studies such as Hu Shi’s thesis, “The Story of the Master Bonze Shen Hui of Heze” 荷泽大师神会传, cast doubt on Buddhist literature and cast light on the phenomenon that Buddhist disciples fabricated genealogies of abbots in order to claim kinship with those in power. In a word, changes in academic research occur naturally when new materials usher in new methods and new models. Now let me once again review the history of learning in China. When in 1902 Liang Qichao wrote two non-traditional theses, i. e. “New History Studies” and “On the Great Forthcoming Changes in Chinese Academic Research” 论中国学 术思潮变迁之大势, which served as a new model in history research, he might have been inspired by modern history studies.25 When in 1919, Hu Shi finished the first half of his Historical Outline of Chinese Philosophy 中国哲学史大 纲 , a piece of ground-breaking work in philosophy studies in China, he mainly followed Western research models in the field.26 Liang and Hu attained epochmaking success partly because they were fortunate enough to live in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, a great transitional period when tra25 Liang Qichao, “New History Studies” and “On the Great Forthcoming Changes in Chinese Academic Research, ” in Complete Works of Liang Qichao 梁启超全集, Vol. 3, Peking Publishing House ( 北京出版社 , 1999), pp. 736–753; 561–615. 26 Yu Ying-Shi (余英时), in his “The Establishment of and Changes in the History of Academic Thought” ( 学 术 思 想 史 的 创 建 及 流 变 ), points out that Hu’s book “ surpasses those written by individual textual analysis schools in the Qing Dynasty for Hu’s comprehensive and systematic study of economics and history as well as his creative use of Western research methods in the study of the history of philosophy.” Yu especially brings to attention the last section of the book in which “Hu applies empirical methods to the critical assessment of the ideas of ancient scholars.” So Hu may be regarded as a paradigm who successfully applied Western research methods to study Chinese issues. See The Past and the Present (Vol. 3), Taipei 1999, pp. 68–69.

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ditional humanities research in China took a big swerve in the face of new research concepts and methods, and partly because they were wise enough to grasp the opportunity when there was an urgent need for China to establish its own research methods and cultural interpretations and to build national confidence. So in this manner, we may as well say that the research work of these two scholars was in fact part of the great project of reconstructing a new nation state.27 As for us, present-day scholars, will time and fortune again favor us? Though I dare not make a definite prediction, I have a feeling that auspicious changes in academic research are on their way, for Chinese humanities research today abounds in new materials, questions (perhaps even more than what we had in the last century), ideas, and methods. Now almost seventy years have passed. When the Academy of Tsinghua University resigned to pages of the chronicle, and the legendary Four Great Advisors in the academy also became unreachable Titans of the distant past, and when the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica moved to Taipei, and the number of scholars in Chinese traditional humanities research dwindles from day to day, can academia in mainland China make some break-throughs in its humanities studies? Can it, confronted with ever-complicated domestic and international situations, become a research base that features innovative studies of Chinese history and culture and co-sets the trends for the world’s academic research? *Originally published in the Fudan Journal (Social Sciences edition), Number 2 (2007), pp. 13–34. Translated from the Chinese by Zeng Min-hao. Translation published by permission of the author.

27 That is why Liang Qichao repeatedly emphasized that academic thoughts, particularly those in the field of history, are related to the cultivation of nationalistic spirit, and that they encourage patriotic feelings, create national identity, and enhance the management of the whole nation. See “New History Studies” and “On the Great Forthcoming Changes in Chinese Academic Research,” in Complete Works of Liang Qichao, pp. 736, 561.

AZUMA Ju¯ji

The Private Academies of East Asia: Research Perspectives and Overview

I.

Introduction

Recently, research taking on the broader regional perspective of East Asia has become more prevalent. Regardless of where one anchors one’s perspective, China, Korea, and Japan formed definite relationships and a loose state-level network, and these connections led to points of cultural contact. Recent research recognizes these connections. Even Edo Japan, though it closed off the country to outside contact, had contacts with the other countries of East Asia through Nagasaki and Tsushima, the Ryukyu Archipelago, the Choso˘n goodwill missions to Japan, and occasional shipwrecks, and the culture of other regions was imported through these routes. Indeed, without considering the perspective of East Asia, it might be said that one cannot determine the place of the traditional cultures of China, Korea, Vietnam, and the Ryukyu Archipelago, not to mention Japan. In April 2005, the Center for the Study of Asian Cultures was established as an Academic Frontier Promotion Center under the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Following this, in September 2007, the Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies was established as a Global Center of Excellence. These institutes promote the idea that a regional perspective is needed in the study of East Asia. The present study takes this perspective as its starting point. Take, for example, one element of the traditional culture of this region: Chinese characters. In the past, Chinese characters and classical Chinese in which Chinese characters were used served as the lingua franca of this region. Chinese characters clearly brought a cultural cohesion to the region that we call the Chinese Character Cultural Region. Recently, Koyasu Nobukuni, in his work Kanjiron: Fukahi no tasha (Chinese Characters: The Unavoidable Other), asserted that Chinese characters are the “unavoidable other” in the Japanese language. But in the sense that Chinese characters and Chinese loan words form an indispensable part of the Japanese language, Chinese loan words have been naturalized and are not a foreign “other”.

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The same is true of Korean and Vietnamese. At present, Hangul is used in North and South Korea for writing Korean, and the National Language Script (a variant of the Roman alphabet) is used in Vietnam for writing Vietnamese. In these countries Chinese characters have almost entirely disappeared from daily life. Yet in fact, Chinese loan words comprise about 70 percent of the vocabulary of modern Korean and also about 70 percent of the vocabulary of modern Vietnamese. Without this imported vocabulary, Korean and Vietnamese would clearly cease to be adequate for life. Something similar can be said with regard to Confucianism. Confucianism arose in ancient China and was later widely transmitted to the countries of East Asia, where it contributed to the formation of traditional culture. In the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) there is the story that during the reign of Emperor ¯ jin (early fifth century), Wang In (Wani) of Paekche brought the Analects and O the Thousand Character Classic to Japan. Whether or not this story is true, it shows that Confucianism was transmitted early on to the Korean Peninsula and Japan for the cultivation of the intellectual class. What I wish to call attention to is the fact that the Confucian tradition not only did not die out, but was actually strengthened, especially in the early modern period. The Neo-Confucian doctrines of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) exerted a tremendous influence in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. If we consider just Japan, there is probably no historian who discusses the culture of the Edo period without mention of Confucianism. Well, then, what about private academies, the topic of this paper? Private academies also helped shape the traditional culture of East Asia. Private academies ( 書 院 ) are places of learning in the private sector. These schools are also called private schools ( 私 塾 ) in Japan. At a glance, these terms convey a different impression, but they both designate private-sector establishments for learning and education. It is interesting that these private academies and schools became widely established throughout East Asia by the early modern period. Here I use the term “early modern” to designate that period before the modern period when the social system achieved a stability that endured for an extended period of time. For China, this would be the period from the Song dynasty (tenth century); for Korea, the late Yi dynasty (after the seventeenth century); for Vietnam, from the Le dynasty (fifteenth century); and for Japan, the Edo period (after the seventeenth century). One can surmise that private academies and schools had a profound connection with the development of traditional education in East Asia. Previously, this fact was not adequately appreciated. Noting this circumstance, the Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies had its Northern East Asia Research Team pursue private academies as a common research topic. Here I would like to express my own understanding of the prospects for research on private academies and of the relationship of private academies to the

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formation of East Asian traditional education. I cannot, of course, discuss such matters in detail as they pertain to such a wide region as East Asia, and rather than raise a few examples for consideration, I would like to discuss freely what I see as common themes and footholds for future research.

II.

Why Study Private Academies?

The wide establishment of private academies throughout East Asia in the early modern period is directly related to issues concerning education and culture. This is because the thought and learning that spread in a society through education make up the culture of the region. Today we often say things like “That’s just like a Russian” or “an Italian,” etc., but we should keep in mind that national intellectual traditions, morals, and customs are formed through education. R. P. Dore, in the Preface to the Japanese edition of his Education in Tokugawa Japan (Edo jidai no kyo¯iku), has written as follows: In the final chapter of this work I have already discussed how the legacy of the merits and demerits of Tokugawa education affected Meiji Japan. In light of the emergence of modern Japan, two aspects, I think, bear emphasizing: the importance of the concept of education in traditional society and the importance of how education is socially realized. A different concept of education can be found entrenched in traditional society prior to the takeoff of economic development, the bureaucratization of society in general, and the great pressure that these developments bring to bear on education, making it into an institution for conferring status and achieving social mobility. Under the traditional concept of education, education seeks to create individuals that delight in the learning itself and that derive satisfaction in applying the knowledge learned to one’s work. Where this notion of education is widespread, that nation is happy indeed. This is what I wish to emphasize.1

Dore wrote this passage when he was investigating Tanzania in Africa. Compared to the impoverished circumstances of developing countries, Japan during the Edo period had a well-established system and concept of education that supported people as they pursued their stable livelihoods. In this sense, Japan was indeed a happy nation. As pointed out, the legacy of the Edo period was used, from the Meiji period on, in the basic education of the Japanese. Of course, the notion that in Japan of the Edo period, “education seeks to create individuals that delight in the learning itself” cannot avoid the suspicion that it is an idealization, but this is a problem to be considered another time.

1 R. P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan. Translated by Matsui Hiromichi, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970.

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Not only in Japan, but also throughout East Asia during the early modern period, government and private schools were established widely throughout the region. Here, However, in studying the relation of education to the formation of culture, I wish to limit myself to considering private schools. The first reason for this limitation is that during the early modern period, private academies and schools for the first time spread widely throughout East Asia and underwent considerable development. This change gave rise to a new situation, namely, that knowledge instruction was no longer the province of the privileged elite (royalty, the nobility, and the governing class, as well as priests), but rather spread to the ordinary populace. The second reason is that private academies maintained a distance from the civi-service examination system. All East Asian nations other than Japan had instituted this system by the early modern period. Though one cannot deny that the civi-service examination system contributed to the development of learning and education, its contribution was markedly less than that of private academies and schools. Hence, to discuss the topic of the formation of culture and education, it seems better to consider private-sector education facilities, which were established apart from the civil-service-examination system, rather than discussing civil-service examinations and government schools, which were established to help students pass these examinations. The third reason is that comparative research is possible. Private academies and schools were a common cultural feature in East Asia in the early modern period. Moreover, in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, they developed in different ways, according to the circumstances in each country. As will become clear in the other papers presented this time, these different paths of development are not adequately reflected in simple claims of transmission of, or the influence of, Chinese culture. What were the common features of their development? How was their development different? Such cultural comparisons become possible in research on private academies. In this way, through the study of private-sector education facilities, namely, private academies and schools, we will become clearer, I believe, on the formation of traditional education in the countries of East Asia during the early modern period. I believe we will also attain a new perspective on the past.

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III.

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The Neo-Confucian Doctrines of the Zhu Xi School and Education

Here I would like to point out the influence of the Neo-Confucian doctrines of the Zhu Xi school during the early modern period. Though there were differences in strength among the countries of East Asia during this period, they all accepted the teachings of the Zhu Xi school. Kishimoto Mio, in his paper “Higashi Ajia, To¯nan Ajia dento¯ shakai no keisei” (The Formation of Traditional Society in East Asia and Southeast Asia), traces the formation of traditional societies in East and Southeast Asia to the chaotic period before and after the sixteenth century and finds that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these societies gradually became stable. This masterly essay is highly suggestive, but his hardly touching on the thought, especially Confucianism, of the period is problematic. For during this period, the teachings of the Zhu Xi school widely penetrated the thought of China, Korea, Vietnam, the Ryu¯kyu¯ Archipelago, and Japan, giving birth to a new form of wisdom, bringing about changes in the cultures of these areas, and contributing to the formation of traditional society. Thus, these facts bear emphasizing. Moreover, Zhu Xi’s philosophy had a great influence on the education of this region. A detailed discussion of Zhu Xi’s views on education is better taken up on another occasion, but here I wish to raise a few relevant points in passing. This, I think, will make clear the epochal effect of the doctrines of the Zhu Xi school on learning and education.

A.

View of humans and view of learning

Education, in a word, is fostering the latent abilities of a person. Zhu Xi and other like scholars of the Way (the Zhu Xi school) thought that it was possible for everyone to be thus improved. Here we have a variety of the view that humans are equal. Prior to the Neo-Confucianism of the Song dynasty, that is, from the Han dynasty to the Tang dynasty, the predominant theory of human nature was that humans at birth were divided into three ranks, the so-called “three-ranks theory of human nature.” Humans of the lowest rank are by nature incorrigible, and no amount of education will improve them. The Zhu Xi school did away with this prejudicial view of human nature and reintroduced Mencius’s high ideal that humans are by nature good, and that everyone, through instruction, can become a sage. This can be clearly seen in the following quotations: Cheng Yi (1033–1107) wrote, “Anyone can become a sage. The education of a gentleman never ceases until he becomes a sage. Whoever ceases learning before becoming a sage for-

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sakes himself.”2 Zhu Xi wrote, “The ultimate goal of learning is to be a sage. If one does not study, one is no better than a boor. How can one not apply oneself ?”3 Why can anyone become a sage? Because everyone has a good nature within. This is clearly stated in the following quotation from Zhu Xi: “Human nature is good. Hence, anyone can become a Yao or a Shun.”4 Here the Zhu Xi school is reviving the legacy of the Confucianism of the classical period, the Confucianism of Confucius and Mencius. Confucius said, “In education there are no class distinctions.”5 In the Mencius, there is the following exchange, “‘Can anyone really be a Yao or a Shun?’ Mencius replied, Yes.”6 Such thought, which attaches a positive value to education, stands in stark contrast with that of the Daoists, who cast a basically suspicious eye on the value of learning and education (see, for example, the Laozi, chap. 20, where it is asserted, “If you cease studying, there is nothing to worry about”).

B.

The purpose and method of study

The sage that the Zhu Xi school sought to produce was basically a person of high moral character. However, it takes more than just cultivation to perfect an individual; one must also improve the world through social practice. In the preface to Daxue zhangju (Commentary on the Great Learning), by Zhu Xi, the phrase “Cultivate oneself, govern people” shows how cultivating the self and social practice are united in Zhu Xi’s thought. Zhu Xi’s “Bailudong Shuyuan jieshi” (Precepts of the White Deer Grotto Academy) (Zhu Wen gong wenji [Collected Prose Works of Zhu Xi], vol. 74) became widely established as a guide for instruction in private academies in China, Korea, and Japan. In it we find the following precept: “Study widely, ask in detail, consider carefully, discuss clearly, and carry things out sincerely.”7 The exhortation to “study, ask, consider, discuss, and carry out” in The Doctrine of the Mean was better known as an exhortation to “study widely, ask in detail, consider carefully, discuss clearly, and carry things out sincerely.” According to Zhu Xi, studying, asking, considering, and discussing belong to the investigation of principles, whereas carrying out is 2 人皆可以至聖人， 而君子之學必至於聖人而後已。 不至於聖人而後已者， 皆自棄也。 （『河南程氏遺書』卷一五－16）(Writings of the Henan Cheng Brothers, Vol. 15, Ch. 16). 3 學之至則可以爲聖人，不學則不免爲鄕人而已。可不勉哉。（『論語集注』公冶長篇，十 室之邑章）(Collected Annotations on the Analects, Sec. 5, Ch. 28). 4 性善，故人皆可爲堯舜。（『朱子語類』卷五五－2 ）(Categorized Sayings of Zhu Xi, Vol.55, Ch. 2). 5 有敎無類。（『論語』衞靈公篇）(The Analects, Sec. 15). 6 人皆可以爲堯舜，有諸。孟子曰，然。（『孟子』告子篇下）(Mencius, Sec. 6, Part 2). 7 博學之，審問之，愼思之，明辨之，篤行之。.

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concerned with practice. Here too, it is advocated that learning should be directly connected with social practice. Thus, the main way of studying is to exhaust principles. When one exhausts principles, the proper attitude is asserted to be maintaining reverence. Simply put, exhausting principles is investigating affairs and knowing the principles and rules that one derives from such investigation. Maintaining reverence is being calm and rational at all times. By means of these methods, one seeks to cultivate oneself and govern people.

C.

Confirming convictions: Resolving

Because one can attain sagehood through study, one should resolve to realize such an ideal. Zhu Xi wrote as follows: The most important thing for the student is to form resolve. The resolve I am talking about is not impressing this spirit onto others, but rather simply directly studying Yao and Shun. “Mencius says that human nature is good. His words are no doubt intended to commend Yao and Shun” [Mencius, “Teng Wen gong” chap., pt. 1]. This is the truth: If the student forms resolve and is resolute and courageous, he will naturally make progress. Insufficient resolve is the greatest shortcoming of students.8 Friends of today indeed love hearing lore about sages and worthies, but their being unable in the end to rid the world of vile practices is due to none other than their inability to form resolve. What is important for students is to form resolve. The purpose of studying is to be none other than to be a sage.9

If one is resolute in one’s convictions, study will naturally follow. These quotations express well the idealism of the Zhu Xi school of thought.

D.

View of education: Renovating the people

What is important, along with personal cultivation, is the will to improve oneself and others. This is shown by the phrase “to renovate the people” in the passage that opens the Great Learning: “The way of great learning is to clarify true virtue, 8 學者大要立志。所謂志者，不道將這些意氣去蓋他人，只是直截要學堯舜。「孟子道性 善，言必稱堯舜」，此是眞實道理。……學者立志，須敎勇猛， 自當有進。志不足以有 爲，此學者之大病。（『朱子語類』卷八－28） (Categorized Sayings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 8, Ch. 28). 9 今之朋友，固有樂聞聖賢之學，而終不能去世俗之陋者，無他，只是志不立爾。學者大 要立志。 纔學， 便要做聖人是也。（『朱子語類』卷八－29 ）(Categorized Sayings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 8, Ch. 29).

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to renovate the people, and to rest only upon attaining the highest level of goodness.” The original text of the Great Learning (in the Book of Rites) had “to cherish the people” ( 親 民 ), but Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi revised this to “to renovate the people” ( 新 民 ), clearly calling for reform not only of oneself, but also of others. Though the change was of a single character, the import of the change was great indeed. Zhu Xi made the following comment about the term “renovate”: “‘To renovate’ means to reform the old vices. That is to say, when one is clear on true virtue, one should then recommend it to others and make them rid themselves of old vices.”10 He explicated the phrase “to renovate the people” (Great Learning, transmission, chap. 2) as “to encourage the people to renovate themselves.” People who develop and realize their own abilities should then take on the responsibility to encourage others to reform old vices. It seems that Zhu Xi’s concern for others stems from an empathy for others that makes him unable to overlook others’ unhappiness. In Daxue huo wen (Questions on the Great Learning), he wrote that when a person sees others tempted by this vile, corrupt world, he should no doubt want to save them: “Now I fortunately am enlightened, but when I see that the masses are likewise capable of becoming enlightened, yet fail to become so on their own, but rather are tempted by corruption and baseness without knowing themselves, is it not natural that I should sadly wonder whether there is not some way to save them?”11 That is, education that is based on the theory that human nature is good and that seeks to improve others is regarded as an obligation. Thus, the Zhu Xi school seeks to internalize in people the need for learning and education. The Zhu Xi school was concerned not just with members of a family or clan, but with humanity in general—a much broader concern than previously.

E.

The educational curriculum and texts: the Four Books and the Five Classics

In the educational curriculum, a distinction was made between advanced studies and elementary studies. As Zhu Xi indicated in the preface to his Daxue zhangju, students ideally begin elementary studies at age eight and advanced studies at age fifteen; elementary studies consisted of such virtuous conduct as cleanliness, responding to others, and entering and leaving a room, and such social skills as 10 新者，革其舊之謂也。言既自明其明德，又當推以及人，使之亦有以去其舊染之汚也。 （『大學章句』經）(The Great Learning Annotated by Zhu Xi, main text). 11 今吾既幸有以自明矣， 則視彼衆人之同得乎此而不能自明者， 方且甘心迷惑沒溺於卑汚 苟賤之中而不自知也，豈不爲之惻然而思有以救之哉。.

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etiquette and music, archery and horseback riding, writing and arithmetic; and advanced studies consisted of such courses of study as investigating principles, rectification of the heart, self-cultivation, and governing people.12 In the language of today, children learned by rote such basic skills as cleaning, greetings, deportment, etiquette, reading and writing, physical education (archery and horseback riding), and arithmetic, while juveniles studied and investigated more advanced matters such as theory, self-cultivation, politics, and society. There was thus a progression from training in daily matters to theory and social conduct. Appropriate texts were selected for this curriculum. For elementary studies, Zhu Xi’s newly compiled text Xiaoxue (Elementary Studies) was used, and at the advanced level, students read the Four Books and the Five Classics. The Four Books were read in the following order: The Great Learning, Analects, Mengzi, and The Doctrine of the Mean.13

F.

The liberation of education

Zhu Xi did not limit education to the privileged elite; rather, he expanded education to commoners. This is a natural consequence of the view of humanity of the Zhu Xi school, mentioned above. Thus, for example, in discussing elementary and advanced studies in the preface to Daxue zhangju, Zhu Xi wrote, “Upon attaining eight years of age, sons from all backgrounds, from nobility on down to commoner households, begin elementary studies. At age fifteen, all sons from the crown prince and other princes to the legitimate sons of nobility, ministers, grandees, and servicemen, as well as superior students among commoners, begin advanced studies.”14 Hence, elementary education was appropriate not only for the children of nobility, but also those of commoners, and superior students of commoner origin could receive advanced education. One source on the educational system of premodern China is the Shangshu dazhuan (Great Commentary on the Book of Documents), written by Fu Sheng in the Former Han period. Such ancient sources do not consider the common people at all. For example, Fu Sheng, in the “Jinteng” chapter of the Shangshu dazhuan, wrote, “The kings of ancient times invariably established elementary and advanced studies and had princes and the legitimate sons of nobility, ministers, grandees, and servicemen enter elementary study at age fifteen and ob12 人生八歳， 則自王公以下至於庶人之子弟皆入小學， 而敎之以灑掃應對進退之節， 禮 樂射御書數之文。 及其十有五年， 則自天子之元子・衆子以至公卿大夫元士之適子與 凡民之俊秀皆入大學， 而敎之以窮理・正心・修己・治人之道。 此又學校之敎大小之 節所以分也。. 13 『朱子語類』卷一四－1。 (Categorized Sayings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 14, Ch. 1). 14 See footnote 12.

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serve elementary virtue and practice elementary justice there. At age twenty, they entered advanced studies and observed more sophisticated virtue and practiced more sophisticated justice there.”15 Similar statements can be found in the Former Han works Da Dai Liji (Writings on Etiquette Compiled by the Elder Dai), “Baozhuan” chap., and Ban Gu’s Baihu tong (Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall), “Piyong” chap. The notes in these works say that these respective schools are for the sons of the elite (the royal family, the nobility, ministers, grandees, and court officers) (see Wang Pinzhen, Da Dai Liji jiegu (Commentary on Da Dai Liji), and Chen Li, Baihu tong shuzheng (Commentary on Baihu tong). This is no doubt a correct understanding of the premodern Chinese school system, but that is not the point here. What is important is that in premodern China, Zhu Xi advocated admitting commoner sons to schools and held this up as the ideal. It is often thought that medieval China lacked a clear notion of universal education not restricted to a particular social status or privileged class. If we call opening a privilege up to everyone “liberation,” then Zhu Xi advocated educational liberalization. Zhu Xi’s Jia li (Family Rituals) led to a similar expansion of the practice of family rituals from the houses of the privileged elite to commoners. The Jia li made family rituals more accessible to everyone.

G.

Criticism of the civil-service examination

Zhu Xi severely criticized study for the civil-service examination. An example is the following: “Generally, study for the civil-service examination leads one’s thinking astray and gives rise to harmful intentions. The more capable one is in the examination, the greater the harm.”16 For Zhu Xi, who sought to develop the path to sagehood, study for the civil-service examination was totally useless. He also criticized government-established schools. This is because ever since Wang Anshi (1021–1086) of the Northern Song, government schools mainly functioned as schools that trained students for the civil-service examination. Government schools included the School for Sons of the State (Guozijian) in the capital, as well as local schools established in prefectures, departments, and districts. 15 古之王者， 必立大學小學， 使王子公卿大夫元士之適子十有五年始入小學， 見小節 焉，踐小義焉。二十始入大學，見大節焉，踐大義焉。. 16 大抵科擧之學，誤人知見，壞人心術。其技愈精，其害愈甚。（「答宋容之」，『朱文 公文集』卷五八）(“In Reply to Song Rongzhi,” in Collected Writings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 58).

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Faculty at the government schools have titles suggesting teaching and fostering students, but they do not function in this capacity. Students conceal notes on themselves and play during their time there. Outstanding students make it their business to land high-paying government positions. However, when it comes to discussing the teachings of sages and worthies, to pursuing the original intent of education, all are at a total loss. Their behavior and attitude are no better than those of commoners, and some are even worse. Alas, this is the teachers’ fault. How can it be the students’ fault?17

About the School for Sons of the State, Zhu Xi had this to say: “The national university is totally useless. Where is there any effort made to enlighten the citizenry?”18 Again: “The so-called national university is merely a place to seek fame and fortune. Faculty seeks to excel at writing essays for the civil-service examination, and, students only seek to pass the civil-service examination.”19 As for local government schools he had this to say: “For several years there have been no rules for education. Teachers and students look indifferently upon one another, like strangers. Hence, the spirit of the place deteriorates day by day, and morale cannot be lifted.”20 He thus was of the opinion that these government schools were failures as institutes of learning.

H.

Instruction and private academies

Seeing such stagnation in government schools, Zhu Xi placed his hopes on, and promoted, private-sector centers of learning and education: I think of how in the past when there were no schools and students worried about not having a place to study, they would often select an attractive site and build a retreat for communal living and study. A government official would then visit and commend the place. Places like this include this private academy, the Yuelu Academy, and the White Deer Grotto Academy.21 17 學校之官，有敎養之名，而無敎之養之之實。學者挾筴而相與嬉其間，其傑然者乃知 以干祿蹈利爲事。 至於語聖賢之餘旨， 究學問之本原， 則罔乎莫知所以用其心者。 其 規爲動息， 擧無以異於凡民， 而有甚者焉。 嗚呼， 此敎者過也， 而豈學者之罪哉。 （「諭諸生」『朱文公文集』卷七四）(“Instructing Students Who Passed the Lowest Level of Official Examinations,” Collected Writings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 74). 18 太學眞箇無益，於國家敎化之意何在。（『朱子語類』卷一〇九－6）(Categorized Sayings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 109, Ch. 6). 19 所謂太學者但爲聲利之場， 而掌其敎事者不過取其善爲科擧之文， 而嘗得雋於場屋者 耳。（「學校貢擧私議」,『朱文公文集』卷六九）(“Personal Opinion on the Schooling and Examination System,” in Collected Writings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 69). 20 比年以來，敎養無法，師生相視漠然如路人。以故風俗日衰，士氣不作。（「福州州學 經史閣記」， 『朱文公文集』卷八〇）(“On Jingshi Tower of the Fuzhou Public School,” in Collected Writings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 80). 21 予惟前代庠序之敎不修， 士病無所於學， 往往相與擇勝地立精舍以爲群居講習之所， 而爲政者乃或就而褒表之。 若此山， 若嶽麓， 若白鹿洞之類是也。 （「衡州石鼓書院

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This quotation is from a letter to a friend who restored the Shigu (or Stone Drum) Academy in Hengzhou (the present Hunan Province). As in the present case, Zhu Xi himself built retreats, or private places of instruction, for the pursuit of learning and research, and he restored the Yuelu Academy and the White Deer Grotto Academy. Moreover, Zhu Xi left behind a vast quantity of records of lectures that he gave at retreats and private academies. These are contained in the 140 volumes of Zhu Xi yulei (The Collated Teachings of Zhu Xi). This work consists entirely of Zhu Xi’s lectures, along with students’ questions and Zhu Xi’s answers, vividly presented in a colloquial style. This massive collection of lectures is perhaps unmatched in history. One can thus get an idea of how Zhu Xi and his students thrived in the stimulating academic environment of private academies, in contrast to that of government schools. Surprisingly, however, Zhu Xi wrote hardly anything on the operation of private academies. As in “Bailudong Shuyuan jieshi” (Precepts of the White Deer Grotto Academy), he limited himself to stating briefly the basic philosophy of instruction and touched on neither the organization nor the operation of the academy. Rather, he was opposed to establishing detailed academic regulations: “In recent decades schools have instituted regulations, but they do little to support study. Moreover, they may not fulfill the intent of the ancients.”22 Zhu Xi’s ideas on the structure of the educational system were weak compared to his philosophy of education. This is perhaps owing to the fact that he freely lectured and instructed students without having to conform to rigid regulations. Though I cannot go into detail, I suspect that Zhu Xi held out more hope for a willingness to learn over coercive instruction. Indeed, Zhu Xi recommended the school rules of Cheng and Dong (Cheng Dong er xiansheng xueze) for elementary studies (“Ba Cheng Dong er xiansheng xueze,” Zhu Wen gong wenji, vol. 82). This still extant set of school rules establishes detailed rules covering greetings, posture, facial expressions, and attire during study. Zhu Xi, it seems, recommended such academic regulations for elementary students. Above I roughly summarized the notable features of Zhu Xi’s philosophy of education. It is essential to keep these points in mind when considering private academies and private-sector education in early modern East Asia. As is well known, in China from the Southern Song period on, the Zhu Xi school of Neo記」『朱文公文集』卷七九）(“On Shigu Academy in Hengzhou,” in Collected Writings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 79). 22 近世於學有規。 其持學者爲已淺矣， 而其爲法又未必古人之意也。 （「白鹿洞書院掲 示」， 『朱文公文集』卷七四）(“Objectives of Bailudong Academy,” in Collected Writings of Zhu Xi, Vol. 74).

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Confucianism spread among the populace, and from the Yuan period, private academies such as the Yuelu Academy and the White Deer Grotto Academy sprang up everywhere. In the Ming period the Wang Yangming school of NeoConfucianism established private academies and schools all over the land and promoted education down to the lower levels of society. In Korea, the ideas of the Zhu Xi school led to the growth of private academies. In Vietnam as well, Zhu Xi’s ideas led to the opening of private schools throughout the country—a development spurred, one can infer, by the acceptance of Zhu Xi’s Jia li (Family Rituals). In Japan as well, private-sector education during the Edo period received much impetus from the Zhu Xi school, as shown by Dore and by Emori Ichiro¯ (“Benkyo¯” jidai no makuake [The Raising of the Curtain on the Age of Study]). Of course, the intellectual world of early modern East Asia was not uniformly colored by the Zhu Xi school of thought. Yet one can say that in considering the culture and thought of China, Korea, and Japan during this period, the thought of Zhu Xi is a factor that one cannot overlook.

IV.

The Place of Private Academies

Originally, shuyuan ( 書 院 ) meant a place for storing books. During the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (712–756) of the Tang dynasty, shuyuan was a place for collating and storing books, and sometimes a place where a person could read books. The term first became the appellation of a private-sector educational facility with the establishment of the White Deer Grotto Academy early in the Northern Song period. Thereafter, shuyuan was used to designate private academies established all over China. The term was meant to contrast with government schools (the School for Sons of the State and prefectural, departmental, and district schools). The term continued in use all the way up to the end of the Qing dynasty, when these schools were reorganized as colleges (xuetang) for the study of Chinese and Western learning. In Korea, the term took hold in the middle of the sixteenth century with the founding of the White Cloud Grotto Academy, modeled after the White Deer Grotto Academy revived by Zhu Xi. Thereafter, it became a common term for private schools, as opposed to government schools such as the Seonggyungwan and local country schools. The term remained in use through the late Yi dynasty to the Japanese colonial period. In Japan, during the Edo period private academies (shoin) developed alongside private schools (shijuku) as schools of basically the same character. Representative private schools are Nakae To¯ju’s To¯ju-shoin (To¯ju Academy), Ito¯ Jinsai’s Kogido¯ (Hall of Ancient Meanings), Ogyu¯ Sorai’s Ken-en-juku, Nakai Chikuzan’s

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Kaitokudo¯ (Hall of Embracing Virtue), and Hirose Tanso¯’s Kangien (Garden of Harmony). Such private schools developed alongside government schools. In Vietnam, though much remains unclear, there is no doubt that after the Le dynasty established the civil-service examination in the fifteenth century, Vietnam imported much Chinese culture and formed its traditional educational system. The following table shows the place of private academies in the educational systems of the countries of East Asia during the early modern period. Schools in Early Modern East Asia China School for Sons of the State; prefecture, department, and district schools Yes

Korea Seonggyungwan, local schools

Private schools 1

Private academies

Private schools 2 (for commoners)

Government schools

Civil-service examination

Vietnam School for Sons of the State; prefecture, department, and district schools Yes

Japan Sho¯heizaka School, domain schools, local schools

Private academies

Private schools

Elementary Writing schools schools, free private schools, family schools

Private schools

Private schools and private academies Local schools, schools attached to temples (writing schools)

Yes

No

Government schools in China included the School for Sons of the State and prefecture, department, and district schools. Following this model, Korea established Seonggyungwan and local schools, and Vietnam had its School for Sons of the State and province, prefecture, and district schools. All of these schools had some sort of connection with the civil-service examination in these countries. Further, in Korea, local schools (郷校) were government schools, in contrast to the local schools of Japan. They were the equivalent of the prefecture, department, and district schools in China. Private-sector schools included private academies (書院) in China and Korea and private schools (私塾) in Vietnam and Japan. These are the schools labeled “private schools 1” in table 1. It is these schools that I wish to encourage research on. Schools labeled “private schools 2” were schools that taught reading and writing and proper behavior to the lower classes of society. These were elementary schools ( 小 学 ), free private schools ( 義 学 ), and family schools ( 家 塾 ) in China, writing schools (書 堂 ) in Korea, and private schools ( 私 塾 ) in Vietnam. In Japan, schools in this category included local schools and schools

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attached to temples ( 寺 子 屋 ) and writing schools ( 手 習 所 ), which were frequently established from the eighteenth century on. Thus, the distinction between government-established and private-sector schools is useful when considering education in early modern East Asia, but the situation is somewhat different in Japan, and the situation there requires some explanation. Because a civil-service examination was not instituted in Japan, there was no national orthodoxy. As a result, even the domain schools established by the feudal domains were free to carry out instruction as those authorities saw fit. Even the Sho¯heizaka School, run by the Tokugawa bakufu, was originally the private school of the Hayashi clan. In Japan, the distinction between governmentestablished and private-sector schools is not as clear as that of schools in China and Korea. There are those who think that the 1790 (late Edo period) promulgation of the Kansei Edict prohibiting schools of thought other than that of Zhu Xi was a form of national orthodoxy similar to that of China and Korea, but this is a misconception. The Kansei Edict was limited chiefly to the Sho¯heizaka School, which educated the sons of bakufu officials, and did not seek to control the content of instruction throughout the nation. Accordingly, the domain schools did not follow the educational policies of the bakufu and the Sho¯heizaka School. Rather, they freely taught various schools of thought—such as those of Zhu Xi, Ito¯ Jinsai, Ogyu¯ Sorai, etc.—in accord with the circumstances of each domain. The domain schools were established by the domain governments, but in terms of instruction, they were similar to private-sector schools. This is also true of Japanese local schools, many of which were semi-governmental and semi-private. There have been numerous studies about private academies. On private aca¯ kubo Hideko, Hayashi demies in China, there is the research of Sheng Langxi, O Tomoharu, Chen Yuanhui, Gao Mingshi, Li Guojun, and Deng Hongbo, and in their monographs of the history of education, Taga Akigoro¯ and Mao Lirui touch on private academies. On private academies in Korea, notable work is that of Yu Hong-nyo˘l, Watanabe Manabu, Cho˘ng Sun-mok, Yi T’ae-jin, Cho˘ng Man-jo, and Yamauchi Ko¯ichi. Fujiwara Riichiro¯, Shimao Minoru, and Tsuboi Yoshiharu study private schools in Vietnam. Numerous authors have produced outstanding works on private-sector schools and education in Japan, among them Ishikawa Ken, Ishikawa Matsutaro¯, Umihara To¯ru, R. P. Dore, Kawamura Hajime, and Emori Ichiro¯. Confucians who managed private schools have left behind numerous philosophical works, and among them are Yamazaki Ansai, Nakae To¯ju, Ito¯ Jinsai, Ogyu¯ Sorai, and Yoshida Sho¯in. There is therefore an abundance of individual studies on sundry topics and of philosophical research, but it must be said that there is a dearth of literature that considers the development of traditional education from the viewpoint of the spread of East Asian culture. As I have expressed above, I believe that inter-

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disciplinary research on the common theme of the blossoming of private schools in the early modern period (namely, from the Song to Qing dynasty in China, the late Yi dynasty in Korea, the Le and Nguyen dynasties in Vietnam, and the Edo period in Japan) has great potential.

V.

Research Perspectives

Here I would like to list and give the outlook for worthy research topics, while bringing to bear the points mentioned above. First I will mention a general topic of interest. With a focus on the early modern period in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, we should clarify, through research on private academies and schools, how traditional education formed and developed in East Asia. I would hope that scholars of various fields clarify, from the perspective of cultural interaction in East Asia, the common and divergent features of the intellectual tradition. They might do this by exploring such areas as the facilities of private academies, their manner of operation, form and content of instruction, curriculum, educational texts and their editions, library conditions, character of instructors, formation of schools of thought, expansion of education among different classes of society, connections with the national orthodoxy, and special features of thought. There are thus many themes for research, but I hope that researchers pay attention to the following areas of interest. 1) School rules and regulations. To discover the educational policies of private academies, we can look at school rules and regulations. Famous sets of rules and regulations include Zhu Xi’s “Bailudong Shuyuan jieshi” (Precepts of the White Deer Grotto Academy), Cheng Dong er xiansheng xueze (School Rules of Cheng and Dong) of the Southern Song period, Cheng Duanli’s Cheng-shi jiashu dushu fennian richeng (Mr. Cheng’s Yearly Schedule of Reading for Family Schools) of the Yuan period, and Xuegui leibian (School Rules, Organized by Category), edited by Zhang Boxing in the Qing period. Korea and Japan also made their own school rules. Hence research in this area is important. These materials can also inform us about the curricula and texts used. 2) Texts. Well-known works used as texts in private academies were Zhu Xi’s Xiaoxue (Elementary Studies) and Sishu jizhu (The Four Books, with Collected Annotations). A variety of other texts were also used. This topic is related to publishing culture and deserves greater consideration in the future. 3) The relationship with publishing culture. In China, with the development of printing in the Song period, books began to be published in large quantities.

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4)

5)

6)

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In previous ages, before the development of printing, knowledge was transmitted orally or by writing and was limited to a portion of the privileged elite. In contrast, printing suddenly made it possible to disseminate knowledge widely. It is not possible to consider the spread of instruction in private academies within China and from China to other East Asian countries without considering the circumstances of book publishing. In Korea, Vietnam, and Japan as well, the development of schools is related to rapid advances in printing. Many book collectors boasting collections of 10,000 volumes and private printers (booksellers) also cropped up from around this time. We thus also have to take a look at the connections of private-sector education with book-publishing culture. The formation of schools of thought. Private academies also served as the base of activity for some schools of thought. This is especially apparent in Korea, but it also applies to some extent to China and Japan. Hence, we need to explore the connection between the formation of schools of thought and the development of private academies. Connections with national orthodoxies. When considering education in the private academies, one cannot ignore connections with national orthodoxies. That is, we need to pay attention to the cooperation and resistance of private academies to the civil-service examination and government schools, such as the School for Sons of the State and the prefecture, department, and district schools in China, the Seonggyungwan and local schools in Korea, the School for Sons of the State in Vietnam, and the Sho¯heizaka School and domain schools in Japan. However, as mentioned above, though domain schools in Japan were government schools, because there was no civil-service examination in Japan, these schools were not uniform and were like private schools. Especially from the latter half of the eighteenth century, the samurai class came to view education as a matter of course, and “Among 210 domain schools, none viewed Confucian studies as dispensable” (Tsujimoto Masashi, Kyo¯iku no shakai bunka shi [A Social-Cultural History of Education], p. 57). Domain schools alone are a vast research topic, but here I would like to keep the focus on private academies and schools, and encourage researchers to consider their various connections with domain schools. The education of commoners. The education of commoners, especially the teaching of reading and writing, was undertaken by family schools, free private schools, and community schools (社 学 ) in China, by writing schools in Korea, and by schools attached to temples (writing schools) in Japan. We should also look at the education of commoners at the lower strata of society. Texts used for this beginning level of education include Zhu Xi’s Xiaoxue (Elementary Studies), Cheng Ruoyong’s Xingli zixun (Definition of the Terms of Neo-Confucianism), and, in Korea, Pak Se-mu’s Tongmong

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so˘nsu˘p (Primer for Children). Also well-known is Kaibara Ekiken’s Wazoku do¯ji kun (Precepts on Japanese Customs for Children). Comparing these texts would be a useful exercise, I believe. 7) Confucian education and non-Confucian education. Most schools during the Edo period were private schools of Chinese learning, especially Confucianism, with Zhu Xi studies having a large influence. Late in the Edo period, schools were established for Japanese classical studies (kokugaku), medicine, and Western learning, whereas Buddhist education continued from the past. We need to explore what Confucian and non-Confucian education was like not only in Japan, but also in the other countries of East Asia. 8) The ancient and medieval periods. To clarify the position of private academies in the history of education, we must also look at education in the ancient and medieval periods. 9) The modern period. From the nineteenth century, mission schools and schools of Western learning were established in China (such as Yinghua Academy and Gezhi Academy). We should explore the content of their instruction, their student bodies, their influence on society, as well as their transitions to the new educational system. We should also consider changes to the content of traditional education in modern Japan. 10) Cooperation with researchers abroad. Since the theme of private academies in East Asia spans a large area, we should regularly cooperate with researchers in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam. 11) A survey of the Hakuen Collection. An additional item on the agenda is a survey of the Hakuen Collection. The library of Kansai University houses the Hakuen Collection, the collection of books formerly belonging to the Hakuen Academy. Hakuen Academy was a private school established by Fujisawa To¯gai late in the Edo period during the Bunsei period (1818–1830) to teach Ogyu¯ Sorai studies. It, along with Kaitokudo¯, prospered as a school for Chinese studies in Osaka. We would like to survey the books in the Hakuen Collection, compile bibliographic information on important books, and construct a database.

Bibliography Abe Yoshio 阿部吉雄. “ Shina kyo¯ikushi jo¯ ni okeru Shushi no sho¯gaku” 支那教育史上に 於ける朱子の小学 (Zhu Xi’s Elementary Studies in the History of Chinese Education). To¯ho¯ gakuho¯. 東方学報 (Tokyo) 11, no. 1 (1940). Azuma Ju¯ji 吾妻重二, ed. Higashi Ajia ni okeru shoin kenkyu¯ 東アジアにおける書院研 究 (A Study of Academies in East Asia). Suppl. Vol. 2 of Higashi Ajia bunka ko¯sho¯

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kenkyu¯ 東アジア文化交渉研究 (Studies on East Asian Cultural Interaction). Suita, Japan: Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies, Kansai University, 2008. Azuma Ju¯ji 吾妻重二. “Jukyo¯ girei kenkyu¯ no genjo¯ to kadai: ‘Kerai’ o chu¯shin ni” 儒教儀 礼研究の現状と課題 —「家礼」 を中心に (The Present State of, and Topics in, Research on Confucian Etiquette, with a Focus on House Traditions). In Higashi Ajia no girei to shu¯kyo¯ 東アジアの儀礼と宗教 (East Asian Etiquette and Religion), edited by Azuma Ju¯ji and Nikaido¯ Yoshihiro. Tokyo: Yu¯sho¯do¯ Shuppan, 2008. Azuma Ju¯ji 吾妻重二. Shushigaku no shinkenkyu¯ 朱子学の新研究 (New Inquiries in Zhu Xi Studies). Tokyo: So¯bunsha, 2004. Azuma Ju¯ji吾妻重二. “To¯ju Shoin to To¯ju Matsuri: ‘Kerai’ no jissen” 藤樹書院と藤樹祭 — 「家礼」の実践 (To¯ju Academy and the To¯ju Festival: The Practice of House Traditions). Kanryu¯ 還流 (Center for the Study of Asian Cultures, Kansai University) no. 6 (2008). Chen Gujia 陈谷嘉 and Deng Hongbo 邓洪波, eds. Zhongguo shuyuanshi ziliao 中国书院 史資料 (Historical Material on Chinese Academies). 3 Vols. Hangzhou: Zhejiang Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1998. Chen Yuanhui. 陈元晖, Yi Dexin 尹德新, and Wang Bingzhao 王炳照. Zhongguo gudai de shuyuan zhidu 中国古代的书院制度 (The System of Academies in Premodern China). Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1981. Cho˘ng, Man-jo 鄭萬祚. “ Cho¯senki no shoin ni kansuru jakkan no mondai” 朝鮮期の書 院に関する若干の 問 題 (Several Issues Related to Korean Academies during the Yi Dynasty). Translated by Hiraki Minoru. Cho¯sen gakuho¯ 朝鮮学報, no. 163 (1997). Cho˘ng, Man-jo 鄭萬祚. Choso˘n sidae so˘wo˘n yo˘n’gu 朝鮮時代書院研究 (A Study of Academies during the Yi Dynasty). Seoul: Chimmundang, 1997. Cho˘ng, Sun-mok 丁淳睦. Choso˘n So˘wo˘n kyoyuk chedo yo˘n’gu 朝鮮書院教育制度研究 (A Study of the Educational System of So˘wo˘n Academies in Choso˘n). Taegu, South Korea: Yo˘ngnam Taehak Ch’ulp’anbu, 1979. Deng Hongbo 鄧洪波. Zhongguo shuyuanshi 中國書院史 (The History of Chinese Academies). Taipei: Guoli Taiwan Daxue Chuban Gongsi, 2004. Dore, R. P. Edo jidai no kyo¯iku 江戸時代の教育. Translated by Matsui Hiromichi. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970. Originally published as Education in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965. Emori Ichiro¯ 江森一郎. “Benkyo¯” jidai no makuake「勉強」時代の幕あけ (The Raising of the Curtain on the Age of Study). Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1990. Fang Yanshou 方彦寿. Zhu Xi shuyuan yu menren kao 朱熹书院与门人考 (A Study of the Zhu Xi Academies and Their Students). Shanghai: Huadong Shifan Daxue Chubanshe, 2000. Fujiwara Riichiro¯ 藤原利一郎. “Reicho¯ zenki no gakko¯.: Toku ni kakyo to no kankei ni tsuite” 黎朝前期の学校—とくに科挙との関係について (Schools in the Early Le Dynasty: Especially as Related to the Civil Service Examination). In his To¯nan Ajia shi no kenkyu¯ 東南アジア史の研究 (Studies in the History of Southeast Asia). Kyoto: Ho¯zo¯kan, 1986. Gao Mingshi 高明士, ed. Dongya jiaoyushi yanjiu de huigu yu zhanwang 東亞教育史研究 的回顧与展望 (Review of and Prospects for Research on the History of East Asian Education). Taipei: Guoli Taiwan Daxue Chuban Gongsi, 2005.

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Han’guk Kukhak Chinhu¯ngwo˘n (Korean Studies Advancement Center), ed. Kyo˘ngbuk So˘wo˘nji 慶北書院誌 (Gazetteer of So˘wo˘n Academies in North Kyo˘ngsang Province). Andong, South Korea: Han’guk Kukhak Chinhu˘ngwo˘n, 2007. Han’guk Minjok Munhwa Taebaekkwa Sajo˘n P’yo˘nch’anbu. Han’guk minjok munhwa taebaekkwa sajo˘n 韓国民族文化大百科事典 (Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture). So˘ngnam, South Korea: Han’guk Cho˘ngsin Munhwa Yo˘n’guwo˘n (Academy of Korean Studies), 1995. Hayashi Tomoharu 林友春. Kinsei Chu¯goku kyoikushi kenkyu¯ 近世中国教育史研究 (Studies in the History of Early Modern Chinese Education). Tokyo: Kokudosha, 1958. Hayashi Tomoharu 林友春. Shoin kyo¯ikushi 書院教育史 (A History of Education in the Academies). Tokyo: Gakugei Tosho, 1989. Ishikawa Ken 石川謙. Nihon gakko¯shi no kenkyu¯ 日本学校史の研究 (A Study of the History of Schools in Japan). Tokyo: Sho¯gakukan, 1960. Ishikawa Matsutaro¯ 石川松太郎. Hanko¯ to terakoya 藩校と寺子屋 (Domain Schools and Temple Schools). Tokyo: Kyo¯ikusha, 1978. Kawamura Hajime 川村肇. Zaison chishikijin no jugaku 在村知識人の儒学 (The Study of Confucianism by Rural Intellectuals). Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 1996. Kishimoto Mio 岸本美緒. Higashi Ajia, To¯nan Ajia dento¯ shakai no keisei 東アジア・東南 アジア伝統社会の形成 (The Formation of Traditional Society in East Asia and Southeast Asia). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998. Koyasu Nobukuni 子安宣邦. Kanjiron: Fukahi no tasha 漢字論—不可避の他者 (Chinese Characters: The Unavoidable Other). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003. Lee, Thomas. “Higashi Ajia no kyo¯iku, bunkateki isan e no shikaku” 東アジアの教育, 文 化的遺産への視覚 (East Asian Education, Viewed as a Cultural Legacy). Translated by Takatsu Takashi. Hiroshima To¯yo¯ gakuho¯ 広島東洋学報, no. 9 (2004). Li Bing 李兵. Shuyuan jiaoyu yu keju guanxi yanjiu 書院教育与科舉關係研究 (Studies in Education in the Academies and Connections with the Civil Service Examination). Taipei: Guoli Taiwan Daxue Chuban Gongsi, 2005. Li Guojun 李国鈞, ed. Zhongguo shuyuanshi 中国书院史 (A History of Chinese Academies). Changsha: Hunan Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1994. Li Guojun 李国鈞 and Wang Bingzhao 王炳照, eds. Zhongguo jiaoyu zhidu tongshi 中国教 育制度通史 (A Complete History of the Chinese Educational System). 8 Vols. Jinan: Shandong Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2000. Li Hongqi 李弘祺. “Chu¯goku shoinshi kenkyu¯: kenkyu¯ seika, genjo¯ to tenbo¯” 中国書院史 研究—研究成果・現状と展望 (Research in the History of Chinese Academies: Research Results, Present State, and Prospects). Translated by Shinno Reiko. Chu¯goku: Shakai to bunka 中国—社会と文化, no. 5 (1990). Mao Lirui 毛礼锐. Zhongguo jiaoyu tongshi 中国教育通史 (A Complete History of Chinese Education). 6 Vols. Jinan: Shandong Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1985. 1989. ¯ ishi Manabu 大石学, ed. Kinsei hansei, hanko¯ daijiten 近世藩制・藩校大事典 (A O Dictionary of the Early Modern Domain System and Domain Schools). Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2006. ¯ kubo Hideko 大久保英子. Meiji jidai shoin no kenkyu¯ 明清時代書院の研究 (A Study of O Academies in the Meiji Period). Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 1976. Sheng Langxi 盛朗西. Zhongguo shuyuan zhidu 中國書院制度 (The System of Chinese Academies). Taipei: Huashi Chubanshe, 1934.

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Shimao Minoru 嶋尾稔. “Betonamu-shi kara no komento” ベトナム史からのコメント (Comments from the Perspective of Vietnamese History). In Higashi Ajia ni okeru Kankoku Cho¯sen shakai 東アジアにおける韓国朝鮮社会 (Korean Society in East Asia) Vol.3. Tokyo: Fu¯kyo¯sha, 2004. Shimao Minoru 嶋尾稔. “Betonamu sonraku to chishikijin” ベトナム村落と知識人 (Vietnamese Villages and Intellectuals). In Chishikijin no shoso¯: Chu¯goku So¯dai o kiten to shite 知識人の諸相：中国宋代を基点として (Aspects of the Intelligentsia, with a Focus on Song China), edited by Ihara Hiroshi and Kojima Tsuyoshi. Tokyo: Benseisha, 2001. Taga Akigoro¯ 多賀秋五郎. Chu¯goku kyo¯ikushi 中国教育史 (A History of Chinese Education). Tokyo: Iwasaki Shoten, 1955. Tsuboi Yoshiharu 坪井善明. “Betonamu ni okeru jugaku” ベトナムにおける儒教 (Confucianism in Vietnam). Shiso¯ 思想 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), no. 792 (1990). Tsujimoto Masashi 辻本雅史. Kyo¯iku no shakaibunkashi 教育の社会文化史 (A Social and Cultural History of Education). Tokyo: Ho¯so¯ Daigaku Kyo¯iku Shinko¯kai, 2004. Umene Satoru 梅根悟, ed. Cho¯sen kyo¯ikushi 朝鮮教育史 (A History of Korean Education). Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1975. Umihara To¯ru 海原徹. Gakko¯ 学校 (Schools). Tokyo: To¯kyo¯do¯ Shuppan, 1996. Umihara To¯ru 海原徹. Kinsei Shijuku no kenkyu¯ 近世私塾の研究 (A Study on Private Schools in Early Modern Japan). Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 1983. Wajima Yoshio 和島芳男. Sho¯heiko¯ to hangaku 昌平校と藩学 (The Sho¯heizaka School and Domain Studies). Tokyo: Shibundo¯, 1962. Watanabe Manabu 渡辺学. Kinsei Cho¯sen kyo¯ikushi kenkyu¯ 近世朝鮮教育史研究 (Studies in Early Modern Korean Education). Tokyo: Yu¯zankaku, 1969. Yamauchi Ko¯ichi 山内弘一. “Cho¯sen jukyo¯ to shoin” 朝鮮儒教と書院 (Korean Confucianism and the Academies). Pts. 1–3. Kanbungaku kaishaku to kenkyu¯ 漢文學解釋 與研究 (Sophia University) 6.8 (2003–2005). Yi T’ae-jin 李泰鎮. Cho¯sen o¯cho¯ shakai to jukyo¯ 朝鮮王朝社会と儒教 (Korean Court Society and Confucianism).Tokyo: Ho¯sei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2000. Yu Hong-nyo˘l 柳洪烈. “Cho¯sen ni okeru shoin no seiritsu” 朝鮮における書院の成立 (The Establishment of Academies in Korea). Pts. 1–2. Seikyu¯ gakuso¯ 青丘學叢, nos. 29.30 (1937, 1939). Zhu Hanmin 朱汉民, Deng Hongbo 邓洪波, and Chen He 陈和, eds. Zhongguo shuyuan 中 国书院 (Chinese Academies). Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2002.

*Originally published in the Journal of East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies, Special Issue, Vol.2, ICIS, Kansai University (2008). Translated from the Japanese by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

UCHIDA Keiichi

The Peripheral Approach in Chinese Linguistics as an Area of Cultural Interaction Studies

I.

The Peripheral Approach

One frequently misses the true nature of things by looking only at the center. In the eye of a hurricane, there is no storm; the wind howls in the periphery. Indeed, the ancients often said as much, imparting their wisdom through such Japanese sayings such as “The base of the lighthouse is dark” (it is hard to see what happens under one’s very nose) and “Who looks on from the hill has eight eyes” (an outsider has the best perspective), and through Chinese proverbs such as “An involved person’s sight is clouded; an onlooker’s sight is clear” 当局者迷、傍観 者清 and “Standing upon Mount Lushan, one cannot see the shape of the mountain” 不識廬山真面目、只緣身在此山中. We can consider the relationship between the center and the periphery from many angles; the “compare-and-contrast” paradigm mentioned by Zhu Dexi 朱 徳煕 (1985) is a concrete example of such a perspective. Guest: What are the characteristics of Chinese grammar? I have not arrived at a clear answer on this issue, and today I’d like to hear your opinion. Host: Characteristics always become evident through comparison. Without any comparison, there are no characteristics to speak of. So if you ask me what the characteristics of Chinese grammar are, first of all, I must ask you: with what language are you comparing Chinese? (p. 2)

Current academic research is becoming increasingly compartmentalized, and as a result, while we can quibble over one miniscule phenomenon after another, we have become unable to produce arguments that survey the whole picture. In research on Chinese grammar, too, inquiry into the most specific phenomena has increased, which is certainly academic progress of a sort. However, at the same time, it has become impossible to construct a systematic grammatical theory that surveys Chinese language as a whole. Instead of explaining in the first place such basic facts as the definitions of a sentence or subject and predicate, the study of Chinese grammar has become an itemized mishmash of how the two

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kinds of 了 (le, liao) are used; definitions of the progressive 在 (zai); when 的 (de, di) is or is not necessary; the difference between a complement and an inflected modifier; and so on. Of course, clarification is needed on some of these specific issues. The most essential question, however, of “What is language?” is being neglected. The linguistic perspective—if I may overstate the case—lacks a worldview. Can we truly call this academic progress and growth?1 In addition, methods considered “interdisciplinary” or “transcending the field” have also come into vogue. Although these are actually the most common of methods, we must nonetheless bear in mind that even the interdisciplinary approach has not always existed. The interdisciplinary method is predicated upon rigidly fixed specialties, and we should not forget that without them, such notions as “interdisciplinary” or “transcending the field” are like plants with no roots. In any event, for the past decade or so we have proposed a “peripheral approach” upon which we have based our research in Chinese linguistics. In this paper I will discuss the validity of this method in conducting linguistic research, particularly grammatical research.

II.

The Validity of Peripheral Sources

A.

Chinese Linguistic Studies by Europeans

In China, the establishment of linguistics as an academic field occurred in the modern period. However, this does not mean that Chinese in ancient times never pondered the question, “What is language?” On the contrary—it is certain that from antiquity the Chinese gave that question deep consideration. As early as the third century BCE, in Zheng ming pian 正名篇 (On the Rectification of Names), Xun Zi 荀子 stated the following about “the purpose of language,” “the social normality of language,” “the relationship between the developmental process of human cognition and words,” and so forth:2 The goal of language: to differentiate objects from others, and to communicate the meaning in one’s mind. 1 In fact, this is true not only of grammarians, but also of experts in other fields. Phonologists think only of phonology, dialectologists only of dialect, and even among grammarians, contemporary grammarians think only of contemporary language and historical grammarians think only of historical grammar. The usual method of handling language from both the synchronic and diachronic perspectives tends to be disparaged. 2 See Uchida (1995).

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異形離心交喩，異物名實玄紐，貴賤不明，同異不別，如是則志必有不喩之禍， 故知者為之分別制名，以指實，上以明貴賤，下以辨同異，貴賤明，同異別，如是 則志無不喩之患, 事無困廢之禍，此所爲有名也。 If, faced with myriad different things, people grasp each thing with their own individual minds, then the correspondence between those things and their names becomes disordered. The distinction between high and low, and the differences and similarities between things, lose their clarity. When this happens, the evil of being unable to understand one another on a spiritual level arises, and the calamity of frustration and weariness at the circumstances comes about. Then, the sage classifies things and establishes their names; based on this, one can indicate an object and the distinctions between high and low, like and unlike are made clear. When the distinctions between high and low, like and unlike are made clear, the aforementioned evil will disappear. This is the reason why names are necessary. 名也者，所以期異實也。 A name is that which has the purpose of differentiating the object. 彼名辭也者，志義之使也。 That which is called a concept is a messenger that conveys the meaning in one’s mind. The social normality of language: there is no direct relationship between object and language; it is an agreement that becomes custom ( 約定俗成). 名無固宜，約之以命，約定俗成，謂之宜，異於約，則謂之不宜，名無固實，約之 以命實，約定俗成，謂之實名。 In a name, there is no intrinsic meaning, only something that has been named through agreement. When the agreement is fixed and becomes custom, we call that meaning, and if one deviates from the agreement, the meaning is missed. Similarly, there is no intrinsic substance or object to a name. It has only been named through agreement. When the agreement is fixed and becomes custom, we call that a true name. The relationship between the developmental process of human understanding (both concrete and abstract) and words: simple name (単 名), compound name (兼 名), general name (共名), particular name (別名) and so forth. 單足以喩單，單不足以喩則兼。 If we can fully understand it with a simple name, we use a simple name; if it is not fully understood, we use a compound name. 單與兼，無所相避，則共。 If a simple name and a compound name are of the same class, we use a general name. 萬物雖眾，有時而欲徧 (無) 舉，故謂之物，物也者大共名也。推而共之，共則有 共，至於無共，然後止。 The ten thousand things are many, but on occasion, we want to use a general term, so we call them “things.” “Thing” is the broadest general name. To include the appellations of

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various individual things we use a general name; to include a plural of general names we use a broader general name, and we stop when there is no more to include. 有時而欲徧舉之，故謂之鳥獸，鳥獸也者大別名也。推而別之，別則有別，至於 無別，然後 止。 It sometimes happens that we want to point out all the ten thousand things one by one. At these times, we call things “bird” or “beast,” and such a word is a broad particular name. We subdivide an appellation, using a more particular name, and then a still more particular name, until it can be broken down no further.

Aside from Xun Zi, Mozi 墨子 and Gongsun Long 公孫龍, among others, expressed excellent views on language. Nonetheless, until the emergence of Ma Jianzhong’s Mashi wentong 馬氏文通 (Basic principles for writing clearly and coherently by Mister Ma)3 in 1898 near the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), systematic grammar studies were ultimately subordinated to the study of the classics, with interpretation of individual words and even particles (助字)—in the form of annotation (or instructive study) of the classical texts—as the primary goal. In contrast, the academic field of linguistics was already firmly established in Europe from Greek and Roman times. In the sixteenth century, linguistic research into the Chinese language was conducted largely by missionaries, many of whom were excellent linguists. They gave accurate accounts of various characteristics of the Chinese language, such as its monosyllabic nature, the relationship between vowels and consonants, the predominance of vowels, part of speech inversion, the existence of classifiers, and the concrete property of verbs. Furthermore, they also studied the differences between standard Mandarin ( 官 話 ) and dialects (方 言 ), and between the written and spoken languages. In the field of Chinese grammar, specialized texts such as the following had already been authored by the mid-eighteenth century:4 Martino Martini (alias Wei Kuangguo 衛匡國), Grammatica Sinica, 1653 Francisco Varo (alias Wan Jiguo 萬濟國), Arte de la lenga Mandarina, 1703 T. S. Bayer, Museum Sinicum, 1730 Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare (alias Ma Ruose 馬若瑟), Notitia Linguae Sinicae, 1720 Étienne Fourmont, Linguae Sinarrum Mandarinicae hieroglyficae Grammatica duplex, 1742 3 In my recent research, I have mentioned that Bi Huazhen’s 畢華珍 Yanxu caotang biji 衍緒草 堂筆記 (Notes from Yanxu Cottage, c. 1840) existed before Mashi wentong, indicating a systematic theory of grammar based on traditional xushilun 虚 実 論 (empty/substantive theory). European scholars of the Chinese language such as Bazin and Edkins introduced Bi Huazhen’s theory of grammar in their own works. See Uchida (2005). 4 See Uchida (2004).

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In the nineteenth century, many works on the Chinese language, including grammar studies, emerged largely through the work of Protestant missionaries. These works included the following: (1) Joshua Marshman, Clavis Sinica ( Elements of Chinese Grammar) [中國言 法], 1814 (2) Robert Morrison (alias Ma Lixun 馬 禮 遜 ), A Grammar of the Chinese language 通 用 漢 言 之 法 , 1815 (3) Abel Rémusat, Elemens de la grammaire chinoise [ 漢文啓蒙], 1822 (4) J. A. Gonçalves (alias Gong Shenfu 公 神 甫 ), Arte China [ 漢字文法], 1829 (5) Stanislas Julien, Exercices pratiques d’analyse, de syntaxe et de lexigraphie chinoise, 1842 (6) Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (alias Guo Shilie 郭 實 獵 ), Notices of Chinese Grammar, 1842 (7) M. A. Bazin, Grammaire Mandarine, 1856 (8) Joseph Edkins (alias Ai Yuese 艾 約 瑟 ), A Grammar of the Chinese Colloquial Language, Commonly Called the Mandarin Dialect, 1857 (9) James Summers, Handbook of the Chinese Language, 1863 (10) W. Lobscheid (alias Luo Cunde 羅 存 德 ), Grammar of the Chinese Language, 1864 (11) T. P. Crawford (alias Gao Dipi 高 第 丕 ), Mandarin Grammar [ 文學書官 話], 1869 (12) S. Julien, Syntaxe nouvelle de la langue Chinoise, 1869 (13) P. Perny, Grammaire de la langue Chinoise, 1873 (14) J. S. McIlvaine, Grammatical Studies in the Colloquial Language of Northern China, 1880 (15) Imbault-Huart, Cours éclectique de langue Chinoise parlée, 1887 (16) Chaunchey Goodrich, How to Learn Chinese Language, 1893 (17) O. F. Winsner, Some Thoughts on the Study of Chinese, 1893

B.

Validity of European Chinese Language Research Sources

The main reasons for the validity of European linguistic studies on Chinese can be summarized as follows: (1) The discipline of linguistics, or grammatical studies, was firmly established early on in Europe. (2) As foreigners to China, Europeans were able objectively to describe features of the Chinese language by comparing and contrasting it with their own languages. They thus avoided missing phenomena that to native Chinese were blatantly obvious truisms.

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(3) Their writing system consisted of phonograms; they used the alphabet in phonetic annotation for Chinese characters and gave a more scientific account of phonemes (compared to the traditional Chinese fanqie 反切 method). (4) The majority were missionaries, and their efforts to spread Christianity ranged far and wide, so that they were even aware of the differences between “the official language” ( 官 話 ) and “country-speak” (郷 談 ), or dialects. In short, it is indeed the case that “an onlooker’s sight is clear.” The validity of European-language sources has been repeatedly emphasized ¯ ta Tatsuo 太田辰夫, since the 1950s in Japan by Ko¯zaka Jun’ichi 香坂順一, O Ogaeri Yoshio 魚返善雄, and Ozaki Minoru 尾崎実, among others. For instance, in Shindai no Pekingo 清代の北京語 (The Beijing Dialect in the Qing Dynasty, 1950) and Pekingo no bunpo¯ tokuten 北 京 語 の 文 法 特 點 (Grammatical Peculiarities in the Beijing Dialect, 1964), as well as his theoretical study “Ko¯ro¯mu” shintan『 紅 楼 夢 』 新 探 (A New Investigation of the Dream of the Red ¯ ta explained the characteristics of the Beijing and Southern Chamber, 1965), O dialects by making excellent use of the annotations in Calvin Wilson Mateer’s A Course of Mandarin Lessons ( 官話類編) and the Jiujiang Book Group’s edition of Compass of the Mandarin Language ( 官話指南). Ko¯zaka and Ozaki also used the notes in A Course of Mandarin Lessons and other European-language sources such as Thomas Francis Wade’s A Progressive Course Designed to Assist the Student of Colloquial Chinese ( 語言自邇集) and Dr. L. Wieger’s Chinese Characters ( 漢語漢文入門) to define the characteristics of modern Chinese. Ogaeri, too, noticed the Chinese linguistic studies of Europeans and Americans early on,5 and in addition to calling for a reprint of the Shengyu guangxun 聖諭廣訓, which was specified by Europeans and Americans as a must-read for learning Mandarin, he also made references to so-called “peripheral” sources such as Ryu¯kyu¯ Mandarin (琉球官話). Meanwhile, with the exception of Luo Changpei’s 羅常培 phonological research (1930), which utilized sources from early missionaries such as Nicolas Trigault, little use was made in China of European-language sources. There has been rapid progress over the last several years, however, mainly at the Beijing Foreign Studies University Research Center for Overseas Sinology. The same is

5 See, for example, Ogaeri’s “ Amerika no Shinago kenkyu¯” アメリカの支那語研究 (Chinese Linguistic Research in America, 1940) in Chu¯goku bungaku 中 國 文 學 no. 68. Of course, while works such as Ga Morizo¯’s 何 盛 三 Pekin kanwa bunpo¯ 北 京 官 話 文 法 (Beijing Standard Mandarin Grammar, 1928) also explained European and American studies of Chinese linguistics to a certain degree, the achievements of Ishida Mikinosuke 石田幹之助 and his circle should not be forgotten.

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happening in Europe; it appears that research using European-language sources is spreading on a global scale.

C.

Specific Content of Peripheral Sources

Apart from European-language sources, there are also works such as the following “peripheral” sources for Chinese linguistics. (1) Korean sources: the Nogeoldae 老乞大, Pact’ongsa 朴通事, Huayin qimeng 華音啓蒙, etc. (2) Manchu and Mongolian sources: so-called “close neighbor” sources, along the line of Qingwen zhiyao 清文指要 (3) Ryu¯kyu¯ Mandarin sources: Hakusei kanwa 白姓官話, etc. (4) Tang Chinese sources: the category of so-called “lesson-books” ( 課 本 ) on the interpretation of Tang Chinese, such as To¯wa sanyo¯ 唐話纂要 (Essentials of the speech of Tang), or sources from ships that ran ashore (5) “Lesson-book” sources in Japanese possession: Kanwa shinan 官 話 指 南 (Compass of the Mandarin language), etc. (6) Vietnamese sources: concentrated in Ming and Qing—Chữ nôm (Chinese writing), words from Chinese, etc. Besides these examples, so-called “travelogues” (those included in the Zouxiang shijie congshu 走向世界叢書 [Writings on Going Out into the World] are excellent examples), Chinese/foreign comparative dictionaries, and Chinese translations of the Bible, are of vital importance, particularly to lexical studies. Moreover, the “center” and “periphery” within the Chinese language are obviously another matter for consideration. In this case, another perspective from which to understand the Chinese language should emerge through the relationships between so-called “poetic speech” and “dialects,” “official language” and “country-speak,” or “standard speech” and “dialect,” as well as written/ spoken language and classical/contemporary language.

III.

Periphery and Center

A.

The Periphery and Center in Linguistic Research: The Relationship between the Discrete and the General or the Specific and Universal

In linguistics the relationship between the periphery and the center is connected with that of the discrete and the general, or the specific and the universal. The logical conclusion is that these respective pairs do not exist in mutual opposition,

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but complement one another—a this and that rather than a this or that relationship. Many linguists, however, fall into one of these traps. Those who study a discrete linguistic (for instance, Chinese, Japanese, or English linguistics) study only that particular language, while general linguists delude themselves into believing that general linguistics is a guiding theory that can solve all the various issues of discrete languages. As early as 1941, Tokieda Motoki 時枝誠記 pointed out the following relationships between the discrete/general, or special/universal in linguistics studies. While linguistics cannot be considered the study of generic language (for such a thing does not actually exist) removed from a specific language, Japanese linguistics itself must be elevated to the academic study of a generic theory of language that reveals the nature of language. (p. 4) The nature of language must become the most important issue in Japanese linguistics. Moreover, the ultimate problem of Japanese linguistics is to grasp through the unique aspects of the Japanese language, the nature of language being indiscernible in the background. An inquiry into the nature of language should also be the objective of Japanese linguistics. (Ibid., pp. 4–5) The mission of Japanese linguistics—i. e., scientific studies of the Japanese language— is to extract and describe all the linguistic truths to be discovered about the language, and in turn, to define the characteristics of the language. However, at the same time, Japanese linguistics must also participate in establishing a system of linguistics via an abstraction of the universal theory from the many phenomena of the Japanese language to language in general, and to contribute to fleshing out a picture of the true nature of language. (Attitudes in language studies [言語研究の態度], p. 3)

In other words, study of a discrete language through the unique qualities of that language should define the nature of language that lies indiscernible in the background. This is indeed a respectable position, but even in Tokieda’s time, there were opposing opinions. Moreover, opinions such as the following were the guiding principles of general and discrete linguistics, as well as of the normative theoretical system. As a matter of fact, linguistics today is considered to be distinct from Japanese linguistics, as something that provides a generic foundational theory vis-à-vis Japanese linguistics. Linguistics is the normative theoretical system for Japanese linguistics, a guiding principle. This is the generally accepted relationship between linguistics and Japanese linguistics. (Ibid., pp. 3–4)

This type of relationship as a constructed factor was also pointed out, as below. When linguistics was imported into our land, it was bound in a very special relationship with Japanese linguistics. That relationship is considered a phenomenon that appeared along with a myriad of academic fields when Occidental scholarship was imported after the Meiji Restoration. However, before the study of the object, the theory of academic

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methods was imparted, and the object came to be studied according to these methods. Rather than studying individual languages, Japanese linguistics aimed at linguistic thought as the guiding principle through which it would be established. (Ibid., p. 5) The following two reasons can be given for the field of Japanese linguistics becoming inured to such an abnormal state of affairs in the Meiji period. The first reason is that the standard of the native linguistics field prior to the Meiji is thought to have been abysmal in comparison to the field of linguistics in the West. Though it was a makeshift solution, the immediate situation had to be rectified by borrowing from others…. The second reason is that studies of the native language before the Meiji were not yet organized into a body of theory…. Meiji-era Japanese linguistics had no recourse but to seek out a foothold in the theories of Occidental linguistics. (Ibid., pp. 6–7)

This was really an inevitable phase in the course of Japan’s modernization. Fukuzawa Yukichi expounded upon “the argument for disassociation from Asia” (脱 亜 論 ) to move forward with modernization. Natsume So¯seki spoke through a character sitting on the train next to his protagonist in Sanshiro¯ 三四郎 to describe the perceived consequences of modernization occurring at the time: “Japan is going to perish.”6 Tokieda’s ideas resonate with So¯seki’s character on the train. Whatever the case, Tokieda concluded the following regarding the relationship between the specific and the universal. It is generally thought that the theory and methods of linguistics are universal, and that the theory and methods of Japanese linguistics are unique. However, this is a most superficial view, and is not necessarily a correct assessment…. The universal and the specific do not exist in mutual opposition. All of the specific phenomena simultaneously possess aspects of the universal; this is not unique to the study of Japanese, but rather, can be said about everything. The quest to discover unique phenomena in the Japanese language can simultaneously become the elucidation of universal aspects of language. (Ibid., pp. 8–9)

Those who study language, whether it is a discrete language or general linguistics, should consider once again Tokieda’s relationship between the specific and the universal. In particular, many English linguists in Japan would do well to ponder this issue. Looking at various trends, structural linguistics was once mainstream; when that lost favor, it was transformational grammar; when that failed, case grammar; and recently, cognitive linguistics has been the frontrunner. Relying only on mimicry, they never think to question the fundamental theory or principles. These words by Poe are apropos: You will see at once that all argument upon this head should be urged, if at all, against the rule itself; and for this end we must examine the rationale of the rule. (“The Mystery of Marie Roget,” 1842) 6 See Kang Sang-jung 姜 尚 中 (2007).

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In China, the situation is very much the same. Against the background of Western aggression toward China after the Opium Wars, and a “backwards” China, Ma Jianzhong could only imitate Latin grammar in order to describe a systematic grammar of Chinese. Still, after that, many Chinese linguists (though of course, in the so-called Shanghai school 海 派 , which included Chen Wangdao 陳望道 and Zhang Shilu 張世禄, there were also those who advocated theories of grammar unique to Chinese) came to describe Chinese linguistics within the framework of Western grammar. It is only recently that critical reconsiderations of this approach (for instance, by Zhu Dexi and Shen Xiaolong 申小龍) have appeared. However, methods such as Tokieda’s can easily fall prey to becoming narrowminded nationalism. This resembles the nationalist positioning that has been a trend among many scholars of historical kana orthography. Although I myself am a scholar of historical kana orthography, I have not taken such a position. Ultimately, adoption of methodology depends on whether it is scientific, or whether it is logical. Tokieda himself pointed this out. Therefore, the relationship between linguistics and Japanese linguistics is not that the former is a guiding principle upon which the latter rests, but that as a conclusion of studying one discrete language, linguistics becomes the critical object of Japanese linguistics, or indeed, an instructive example—a stone from another mountain…. Thinking of it in this manner prevents one from becoming uselessly self-righteous and taking an abysmally narrow-minded attitude to the exclusion of all else. This is the path that Japanese linguistics truly should take, for at the same time it will nourish the scientific spirit in which Occidental linguistics is grounded. (Ibid., pp. 9–10)

The same dichotomy found in the relationships between the discrete and the general or the specific and the universal described above holds for the periphery and center paradigm. It is my position that these relationships must exist in this way.

B.

The Individual as the General and Uniqueness as Universality: Empty/Substantive Theory (Xushilun)

In Indo-European languages, a sentence generally always has a subject, which is usually the agent of action. Thus, it is often explained a priori that a sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. Even Noam Chomsky, whose work is lionized as having revolutionized linguistics and has dominated an entire generation, naturally accepted the construct, “S=NP+VP,” as the premise on which to begin analysis of a sentence.

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However, this is not necessarily the case in Japanese and Chinese. In Japanese, the argument of “abolishment of the subject” has been advocated, and in Chinese too, sentences such as the following cannot be explained by the subject-predicate relationship found in Indo-European languages. 前边来了一个人。 (One person came from the front.) 台上坐着主席团。 (The executives are sitting on the stage.) 玻璃坏了。 (Glass broke.) 房子烧了。 (A house burned.) 这里的水可以喝。 (One can drink the water here.) 这些给你。 (I will give these to you.) 下雨了。 (It rained.) Whether they are called dependent sentences, natural passive, or topical sentences, they cannot completely fit in the same category as the Indo-European concept of subject-predicate. Since this is the case, the rule of “sentence = subject + predicate” rule is characteristic of certain individual languages, but can hardly be said to be the nature, or general feature, of language itself. Regarding this, Tokieda said the following. Something which does not exist in Japanese cannot be called a generality of language. Even if generalities were to exist, if they are not present in Japanese, they are no more than the specific qualities of certain languages. (Ibid., p. 9)

The relationship between verb and object also differs between Indo-European languages and Chinese or Japanese. In contrast to the “arrow/target” relationship in Indo-European languages, the relationship is exceedingly complicated in Chinese. Unlike the Indo-European view of a sentence as “subject + predicate,” in Chinese there is a theory called xushilun 虚実論 (empty/substantive theory),7 which is the traditional division of words into either xu 虚 (empty) or shi 実 (substantive). The following sentence is explained using the concept of xushilun,

7 Originally, this began with the Southern Song theory of words (cilun 詞 論 ). An empty character 虚 字 is one that expresses the feeling of the speaker (for example: 凡其句中所用虛 字, 皆以托精神而傳語氣 [Xuzi shuo 虚 字 説 ]), and a substantive character 実 字 is one that expresses the substance (target meaning). In former times, the xuzi were also called ci 辞 ( 以 名舉實, 以 辭 抒 意 [Mozi 墨 子 ]) or ci 詞 ( 詞, 意内而言外也 [Shuowen jiezi 説 文 解 字 ]). For more on this, see Uchida (1981). In the Wen xin diao long 文 心 雕 龍 (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) and other works they are also indicated with the terms mao 貌 and qing 情.

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構文之道，不過實字虛字兩端，實字其體骨，而虛字其性情也。(Preface to Zhuzi bianlue 助字辨略 [Brief notes on particles]) 構文之道，不外虛實兩字，實字其體骨，虛字其神情也。(Introduction to Mashi wentong)

In other words, the Chinese saw a sentence as that which is formed from xuzi 虚 字 , empty words, and shizi 実字, substantive words, and this viewpoint was also held by Edo period Japanese scholars of Chinese literature such as Ito¯ To¯gai, Minagawa Kien, and Ogyu¯ Sorai, as well as scholars of native literature such as Suzuki Akira and Fujitani Nariakira. Of particular note is Suzuki Akira’s Gengo shishu ron 言語四種論 (On the Four Categories in Language), in which he divided language into kotoba 詞 (which “indicate and express things, and thus are words”) and teniowa て に を は (“the voice of one’s intention, which is attached to those words”). He further broke down kotoba into karada no kotoba 体 の 詞 (body-words, or nouns), arikata no kotoba 形状の詞 (condition-words, or adjectives), and shiwaza no kotoba 作用の詞 (action-words, or verbs). On the classification of the four categories in language Words are classified into four categories. The first comprises the ten thousand things that have names, or body-words. The second is teniowa, or particles, which manipulate other words. The third is condition-words, and the fourth is action-words. These latter two are combined and generally called function-words, or performance-words, or active words. (front of second leaf) Compared to teniowa, the words of the other three categories indicate certain things. The teniowa indicate nothing. Whereas the three categories are truly words, the teniowa are naught but sound. The three categories indicate and express things, and thus are words; and the teniowa are the voice of one’s intention which is attached to those words. The words are like the beads of a necklace; and the teniowa, the string. The words are like tools; and the teniowa, the handles that allow us to manipulate them. (front of eighth leaf)

This analysis of language by Suzuki is based on the Chinese xushilun, and ultimately, Tokieda continued its legacy with shijiron 詞 辞 論 (shiji theory). According to Tokieda, language is divided into shi 詞 (objective expressions) and ji 辞 (subjective expressions), and a sentence is formed when “shi wrap up ji.” Therefore, “subject” and “predicate” are not mutually opposing concepts; in fact, both are simply “objective expressions,” and what incorporates them together is ji or “subjective expressions.”8 The idea is that “language is a mode of human

8 On the relationship between subject and predicate, Tokieda wrote: “We should understand that the subject expressed in a sentence is not expressed as something opposite the predicate, but brings out the things hidden or wrapped up in the predicate” (Ibid., p. 371). Regarding Chinese, To¯do¯ Akiyasu wrote in “Chu¯goku bunpo¯ no kenkyu¯” 中 国 文 法 の 研 究 (Studies in Chinese Grammar): “In the Chinese language, the subject is thought of as a component that

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expression, like music or painting, and has a process structure of object—perception—expression,” which is based on a linguistic view of “language as human subjective activity in itself.” This is clearly delineated from structural linguistics and other such fields, where we find ideas like the “constructivist view of language” and the “language-as-tool theory” exemplified by Stalin. Incidentally, if we turn to Chinese language studies by Europeans, it becomes clear that the traditional Chinese xushilun was skillfully incorporated, as below. (1) Prémare, Notitia Languae Sinicae (translated into English by Bridgman), Canton, 1847 The Chinese language, whether spoken or written, is composed of certain parts. These are called Parts of Speech. Each sentence or phrase, to be entire, requires a verb, without which it could have no meaning; and a noun, to designate who is the actor and what is done. It has prepositions, an adverb, and also many other particles, which are used rather for perspicuity and embellishment, than because they are absolutely necessary to the sense. The Chinese grammarians divide the characters which constitute the language into two classes, called hu tsz 虛子 (虛字=筆者), and shih tsz 實子 ( 實字=同上), i. e. (literally) vacant or empty and solid characters. The solid characters are those which are essential to language, and are subdivided into hwoh tsz 活子 ( 活 字 = 同 上 ), and sz tsz 死字, living and dead characters, i. e. verbs and nouns. (p. 27) Morrison, A Grammar of the Chinese Language (通用漢言之法), Serampore, 1815

(2) Morrison, A Grammar of the Chinese Language (通用漢言之法), Serampore, 1815 The verb is by the Chinese called sang tsee 生字, ‘a living word’, in contradiction from the Noun, which they call see tsee 死字, ‘a dead word’. (p. 113) The verb is also denominated tung tsee 動字, ‘a moving word’, and the Noun tsing tsee 静字, ‘a quiescent word.’ (p. 113)

(3) Morrison, Chinese Miscellany, London, 1825 The Chinese usually divide their words into three classes only, viz. “dead words,” by which they mean the names and qualities of things; secondly, “living words,” by which they mean those which denote action or suffering; and, lastly, words which they denominate “auxiliaries of speech.” (p. 28)

accompanies the predicate. Thus, it can also be said that in a broad sense, the subject modifies the predicate” (p. 139).

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(4) Edkins, A Grammar of the Chinese Colloquial Language, commonly called the Mandarin Dialect, 1857 If a common sentence be examined it is usually found to contain words of two kinds, viz. some that have a sense of their own independent of their use in any particular sentence, and others that are employed only for grammatical purposes, to express relations between words, to connect sentences and clauses, and to complete the sentence, so that it may be clear in meaning and elegant in form. 天 晚 了 都 是 睡 覺 去 了 。 In this sentence tu and liau mean nothing when viewed apart from the context. They are employed as subordinate words or particles, under the control of certain grammatical laws. We thus obtain the first and most obvious subdivision of words, and it is that commonly used by the Chinese. They call significant words, 實 字 shih tsi, full characters, while the auxiliary words or those which are non-significant, they term 虛字 hu tsi, empty characters, particles. Words may also be viewed as expressive of actions (verbs) and things (nouns). These two kinds of words are called 活 字 hwoh tsi, living characters, and 死字 si tsi, dead characters. (p. 99)

These authors referred to shizi as “solid characters” (Prémare) or “full characters” (Edkins) and xuzi as “vacant or empty characters” (Prémare) or simply “empty characters” (Edkins). They also divided shizi into huozi 活字, “living characters” (Prémare) or “living words” (Morrison), and sizi 死字 “dead characters” (Prémare) or “dead words” (Morrison). From this we can understand how they incorporated “the Chinese view of things” into their own linguistic studies. Excerpts such as Edkins’ explanation regarding xuzi—“In this sentence tu and liau mean nothing when viewed apart from context”—are legitimately derived from the way the ancient Chinese thought of xuzi: characters that mean nothing ( 不 爲 義 ).9 This is simultaneously proof that they grappled with the Chinese language directly and continued the “adaptive” work of the Jesuits. It also indicates the emergence of a view of translation as “respecting the other’s culture” or “immersing oneself in the other’s culture.”10 Nonetheless, we must consider one additional reason for the fact that they adopted the xushilun, which could be termed the traditional Chinese view of language: namely, that there was already a foundational structure into which it

9 The Tang-period scholar Kong Yingda 孔穎達 gave the following definition for ci 辞 (that is, xuzi): 漢有游女，不可求思，正義曰，以泳思，方思之等，皆不取思爲義，故辭也 (周 南・漢廣) In short, the word 思in 有游女，不可求思, as well as the 思 in 泳思 and 方思, are all called ci 辞 because they are meaningless (不 爲 義). In fact, it can also be said that Suzuki Akira’s view mentioned above—that the teniowa “indicate nothing”—is closely akin to this. 10 On views of translation by missionaries, self-aware self-immersion, and “cultural translation,” see Uchida (2001).

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could be incorporated. This was thanks to the existence of the Port-Royal Grammar in Europe. General and Rational Grammar: The Port-Royal Grammar was highly regarded as a standard grammar of Latin in Europe in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, and also greatly influenced English grammar in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. The most essential excerpts are contained in the following several lines: Grammar is the art of speaking. Speaking is to explain our thoughts by signs, which men have invented for that purpose. (p. 1) ’Tis the general doctrine of philosophers, that there are three operations of the mind: Perception, Judgment, and Reasoning. (p. 22) Hence it is plain, that the third operation of the mind is only an extension of the second. (p. 23) For men seldom mean to express their bare perceptions of things, but generally to convey their judgments concerning them. (p. 23) The judgment, which we form of things, as when I say, the earth is round, is called a proposition; and therefore every proposition necessarily includes two terms, one called the subject, which is the thing of which the affirmation is; as the earth; and the other is called the attribute, which is the thing that is affirmed of the subject, as round: and moreover the connection between these two terms, namely the substantive verb, is. (p. 23) Now ’tis easy to see, that the two terms belong properly to the first operation of the mind, because that is what we conceive, and is the object of our thoughts; and the connection belongs to the second, being properly the action of the mind, and the mode or manner of thinking. (p. 24) Hence it follows, that men having occasion for signs to express what passes in the mind, the most general distinction of words must be this, that some signify the objects, and others the form or manner of our thoughts […] (p. 24)

In the Port-Royal Grammar, based on an epistemology in which the operations of the human mind are largely classified as one of two things (technically there are three, but the third is an extension of the second operation, and for the most part the second and third operations can be combined into one), words are roughly divided into two categories: those that express “the object of our thoughts” and words that express “the form or manner of our thoughts.” What we call the subject and predicate of a sentence both belong to the former, as they are both “objects of perception,” while the word that connects them, or the copula, is the “form or manner of thought” that unifies the whole sentence. The “object of thought” is an objective expression, while the “form or manner of thought” can only be a subjective expression (words that express the feelings of the speaker). It could be said that this view of language is quite similar to the Chinese xushilun and Tokieda’s shijiron. What is more, it must be said that this, and precisely this, is

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the “universality of language”—here we have a prime example of the “individual” as the “general,” and “specificity” simultaneously being “universality.” When Chomsky reevaluated the Port-Royal Grammar,11 his assessment was that it was a precursor to the deep structure theory he advocated. One of the main reasons for the birth of Chomsky’s transformational grammar, hailed as a revolution in linguistics, was that structural linguistics, which until then gave precedence to the form of language to the exclusion of meaning or content, was unable to solve the problem of the polysemy (or “ambiguity”) of language—that is, the problem that a sentence or phrase might have multiple distinct meanings while being identical in form. An example is “light house keeper.” This phrase could refer to either “the keeper of a lighthouse” or “a light-weight housekeeper.” On the polysemy of such phrases, Chomsky said “the surface structure is the same, but the deep structure is different.” If it indicates the keeper of a lighthouse, the deep structure is broken down into “light house” and “keeper;” if it indicates “a light-weight housekeeper,” the deep structure is broken down into “light-weight” and “housekeeper.” By comprehending these differences in the deep structure, polysemy is resolved. However, where exactly is the deep structure? What we call language can be no more than the surface structure of what is expressed. However, linguistic expression has a process structure of “perception—object—expression,” and it is impossible to conceive of perception separately from its object. Even when we call it “polysemy,” in the realm of language as it is actually used, that is, according to the speaker, there is always only one meaning. Ultimately, the listener, with only the surface structure for clues, considers the object and traces the speaker’s perception as a vicarious experience. During that process, it may be the case that the listener perceives something different than the speaker’s intended object. This is how a misunderstanding arises. The deep structure named by Chomsky is actually the most abstract “perception” behind language. The problem is that he separated perception from the object, and took this perception as the pre-existing entity, using it to develop a concrete sentence (the surface structure). Such a view can end up defining the lexica included in dictionaries as “language” itself, and it can lead to a view that defines “language” as linguistic norms (grammar) that transmit language. As Tokieda says, the lexica in dictionaries are “formed from abstractions of concrete words, much like an illustration of cherry blossoms that appears in a natural history text; they cannot be any more than 11 On the nature of the Port-Royal Grammar and Chomsky’s reevaluation, as well as fundamental criticism of Chomsky’s transformational grammar, see Miyashita Shinji 宮 下 真 二 (1980).

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models of concrete particular things, and are not in and of themselves concrete language” (ibid., p. 13). In other words, even if we use the word “dog” from the same lexicon, as language, the “dog” of which I speak and the “dog” of which another person speaks might be different. However that may be, the correct solution to polysemy in language must be something like this. The fact that a single word is polysemic is a synthesis of the various usages of that word; in one sentence with a concrete linguistic environment, one word, after all, has one meaning. (Zhang Yufu 張魚甫, 1980)

IV.

The Future of Cultural Translation in Cultural Interaction Studies

In cultural interaction, or contact between different cultures, interaction through “things” naturally occurs, but in many cases, interaction occurs through the medium of language. Translation always becomes an issue. So, what is “translation”? Superficially, we can think of it as “replacing” a lexical item in A language with b lexical item in B language. However, when we arrive at the linguistic view that “language is a mode of human expression, like music or painting” and has the “object—perception—expression” progress structure, it follows that the existence of the “human” is crucial as the foundation of linguistic expression. Moreover, language does not have a direct relationship with the object in the first place, and the “sensibility aspect” in linguistic interaction is overlooked. Linguistic exchange occurs in an “über-sensibility aspect.” The über-sensibility aspect might also be called the “common perception,” or the “norms” or “concurrence of perception,” of an ethnic group. That common perception is a reflection of “culture”—the group’s history, ways of thinking, and so forth—and language is found in the context of that culture. Given this, “translation” becomes something more than simply lexical replacement. If one replaces a lexical item in A language with b lexical item in B language, there is also the question of what defines equivalency. For instance, in “犬 = dog, ” obviously it is not “ equal” in pronunciation or in the shape of the written characters. What exactly makes them “equal things”? In pursuit of “equal things,” translators feel the birth pangs of an endeavor, for “linguistic translation” is nothing other than “cultural translation.” It was surely because of this point that the missionaries were so attentive to the target language when they translated the Bible, their paramount text. When communicating between dif-

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ferent cultures, such problems are bound to arise. In cultural interaction studies, we should always seek to bear in mind this “cultural translation.” In the body of this paper, I have mentioned the state of Chinese linguistics and the “peripheral approach” as an area of cultural interaction studies, as well as individual/general and specific/universal relationships, and the issue of “cultural translation,” among other things. Yet countless topics in cultural interaction studies remain to be addressed. Speaking about my own field, I can think of questions of conceptual formations (such as “the state” [国家]), education and publishing, questions of printing, and how these are oriented in cultural interaction studies. As each of these should be discussed in separate articles, I wish to close with these words, both as a message to younger scholars and to state my own tenet. To adopt any essentialist argument in academia is to make a wager. This is because the true value of the scholar’s intelligence vividly emerges here, and the great truth that “human beings cannot comprehend objects outside the scope of their own logical abilities” pierces through all. For the scholar, this is a frightening wager. Those who cower from it steep themselves in contemporary academic doctrine without even examining it fully, and try to gain spiritual peace; but such attitudes that lack in subjectivity do not follow the true path of scholarship. (Suzuki Satoru 鈴 木 覺 , “Toward the nirvana of form and function: A systematic theory of English grammar” 形式と機能の 彼岸を衝く体系的英文法論, Honyaku no sekai, June 1982)

Bibliography Suzuki Akira 鈴木朖. Gengo shishu ron 言語四種論 (On the Four Categories in Language). First published 1824; reprint Benseisha Bunko 68, 1979. Tokieda Motoki 時枝誠記. Kokugogaku genron 國語學原論 (Principles of Japanese Linguistics). Iwanami Shoten, 1941. To¯do¯ Akiyasu 藤堂明保. Chu¯goku bunpo¯ no kenkyu¯ 中国文法の研究 (Studies in Chinese Grammar). Ko¯nan Shoin, 1956. Lancelot, C.C. and Arnauld, A. Trans. Minamidate Eiko¯ 南舘英孝. The Port-Royal Grammar (ポール・ロワイヤル文法). Taishu¯kan Shoten, 1972. Zhang Yufu 張魚甫. “ Qiyi shi zenyang chansheng de” 歧義 是 怎 樣 產 生 的 (How is Ambiguity Generated?) in Yuyan de aomiao 語言的奧妙 (The secrets of language). Juvenile & Children’s Publishing House, 1980. Miyashita Shinji 宮下真二. Eigo wa do¯ kenkyu¯ sarete kita ka 英語はどう研究されてきた か (How Has the English Language Been Studied?). Kisetsusha, 1980. Zhu Dexi 朱徳煕. Yufa dawen 語法答問 (Grammar: Questions and Answers). Commercial Press, 1985. Uchida Keiichi. “Chu¯gokujin wa go o dono yo¯ ni bunrui shite kita ka?—Mashi wentong izen” 中国人は語をどのように分類してきたか—『馬氏文通』以前 (How Did the Chinese Analyze Language before Mashi wentong?) in Gendai gengogaku hihan 現 代 言

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語 学 批 判 (Modern Linguistic Criticism), ed. Miura Tsutomu 三浦つとむ. Keiso Shobo¯, 1981. Later printed in Uchida (2001). —. “Xun Zi no gengoron” 荀子の言語論 (Xun Zi on Language). Tsuruga ronso¯ no. 10 (1995). —. Kindai ni okeru to¯zai gengo bunka sesshoku no kenk yu¯ 近代における東西言語文化 接触の研究 (Studies of Modern Linguistic Contact between East and West). Kansai University Press, 2001. Kang Sang-jung 姜尚中. “Natsume So¯seki nayamu chikara” 夏目漱石 悩む力 (Natsume So¯seki and the Power to Suffer) in Shiru o tanoshimu—watashi no kodawari jinbutsuden 知るを楽しむ—私のこだわり人物伝 (The Joy of Knowing—Favorite Biographies). Nippon Ho¯so¯ Shuppan Kyo¯kai, 2007.

*Originally published in the Journal of East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies, Vol. 1, ICIS, Kansai University (2008). Translated from the Japanese by Jenine Heaton. Translation published by permission of the author.

Material Circulation and Cultural Transmission in East Asia

NAKANISHI Susumu

Embassies and Ideas as the Third Type of Cargo

I.

Introduction

Of the items brought back by premodern Japanese embassies returning from Sui or Tang China, concrete items such as cultural artifacts and people have drawn most people’s attention, yet it is thought that the abstract elements contained within these concrete items—elements such as concepts, thought, technology, and customs—had more of an influence on the culture of Japan. These abstract elements I call “the third type of cargo,” the first two types of cargoes being cultural artifacts and people. I also point out that in addition to embassies, private individuals also brought the third type of cargo to Japan.

II.

Cargoes of Cultural Artifacts and People

In premodern times Japan sent numerous embassies abroad, including the embassies of the Suiko court (554–628) to Sui China (581–618), the embassies to Tang China (618–907) that lasted up to the Heian period (794–1192), as well as the embassies to Silla (57 BCE–935 CE) and Parhae (698–926) on the Korean peninsula. Naturally, there were also many embassies from abroad to Japan. It goes without saying that these numerous embassies brought all sorts of cultural artifacts back to Japan. The Chinese empire that these embassies encountered lay at the eastern end of the Silk Road, which stretched to the west. Hence, it is reasonable to believe that embassies from Japan traveled along a portion of the Silk Road and saw silk being transported. More recently, embassies brought so many Buddhist sutras and other works to Japan that the route that these embassies traveled came to be known as the Book Road. Even if we look at just these two items, silk and books, we find that embassies were responsible for their cross-national movement. As shown by the case of Kibi no Makibi 吉備真備 (695–775), who brought back great and varied quantities of

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cultural artifacts, we can thus say that embassies carried out massive imports of culture. Embassies returned home with cargoes of cultural artifacts, culture in concrete form. They also returned home with talented individuals in tow. A good example is Jianzhen ( 鑑 真 , 688–763). He was just the sort of proper monk that Japan at that time needed most. For as a monk who had formally taken vows, he could fashion a national Buddhism centered on the emperor. The Buddhism of those days was a national religion, and that meant that Buddhism was called on to protect the nation, or in fact was the prerogative of the throne. Under such circumstances, it was compelling that men such as Jianzhen be invited to Japan. It was compelling in the sense that just as ancient Japan sought culture through books, so it sought culture through men of culture. Thus, embassies brought to Japan cargoes of culture in two forms: books and men of culture. However, as is obvious, though concrete cultural artifacts—such as calendars, yardsticks, arms, ritual implements, etc.—have their uses, they wear out and disappear. Individuals are the same. No matter how knowledgeable and talented, their careers come to an end. Moreover, individuals are useful for only a limited period of time. In this regard, what matters is instituting the new system of telling time in the case of the calendar, or instituting a standard of length in the case of the yardstick. This shows that though the calendar and the yardstick can transcend the limits of individual objects, they are nonetheless physical objects. Unfortunately, the same is true for individuals, like Jianzhen. For at the end of his career as a monk, the monastic discipline would cease to exist. If others believed in the value of monastic discipline and continued the monastic tradition, then Jianzhen’s spirit would live on. But failing that, his coming to Japan would be nothing more than a one-time oddity. Hence, what is important is not the cargoes of cultural artifacts and educated individuals, but rather the thought and wisdom that they contained. In fact, the embassies were returning with cargoes that were all the more important even though the goods could not be seen or felt. Let me give a concrete example. According to Kaifu¯so¯ (Fond Recollections of Poetry, an eighth-century anthology of Chinese poetry written by Japanese), Chizo¯ left to study in China during the reign of Tenji (r. 668–671) and returned to Japan during the reign of Jito¯ (r. 690–697). Because he excelled in his studies, his fellow students became jealous and beat him up. This led Chizo¯ to feign insanity while secretly copying the main points of the Tripitaka. These he placed in a wooden cylindrical case, which he sealed with lacquer and always carried on his person. When Chizo¯ returned to Japan, the main points of the Tripitaka (the main teachings of the sutras, precepts, and treatises) that Chizo¯ sealed away in his case became a cultural artifact. If Chizo¯ had brought back only the wooden case, the story would have a simple

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ending. But the Kaifu¯so¯ adds the following: When they landed, Chizo¯’s fellow travelers opened up and aired out the sutras that they carried with them to prevent insect damage. Chizo¯ opened up his garment, faced the wind, and said, “I too am airing out the hidden meanings of the sutras.” Naturally, his fellow travelers laughed. “What nonsense!” they said, making light of him. Later, in a lecture session at court, Chizo¯ spoke profoundly and eloquently, and he fluently answered objections. Everyone yielded to his arguments, and all were amazed. Such surpassing knowledge as displayed by Chizo¯ was greatly needed in Japan, and Chizo¯ brought it forcefully to the country. If we understand such cargo as the third kind of cargo, then should we not pay particular attention to the fact it was brought to Japan by embassies?

III.

Three Types of Ideational Cargo

Let me present three types of ideational cargo. The first is language. Over a long period up to the present, the Japanese have imported many foreign loan words. The first wave was during the reign of Empress Suiko. It is known that during her reign, Japan transitioned from a collection of separate kingdoms to a unified state, and that a great number of words concerning state institutions were imported at this time. As I have already discussed elsewhere, the importation of such words of civil society as 殿 (den, the residence of an aristocrat), 君 (kun, lord), 郡 (gun, district in the ritsuryo¯ administrative system) was necessary for Japan to establish itself as a state. In fact, without such terms, the state might not have arisen. The cognitive word 死 (shi, death), conveying the notion of the end of life, greatly altered the ancients’ concept of death. There is also the word 仮 り (kari, provisional), a word used even today. The Japanese borrowed the Chinese word 假 ( jia, false, supposing) and added the inflected verb ending -ru to form the verb karu (provisional) and the adverb kari ni (temporarily, supposing). Thus, the ancient Japanese at first could not entertain hypothetical suppositions. Only after borrowing the Chinese word, could they do so. Is this not indeed a great cognitive advance? Even today, contemporaries regard history, which lacks suppositions, as factual, which means that they maintain the suppositions and established notions of Japanese of the past, at least as far as history is concerned. In contrast, Buddhism is replete with notions of impermanence. Our bodies are said to be temporary confluences (仮合), and the present world a world of impermanence (仮の世). This borrowed notion of impermanence was a violent attack on the steady view of life of the ancient Japanese. Intimately related to this impermanent view

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of life is the notion of death. Death is a change in the body. Through death, the living body becomes a corpse, carrion, a skeleton, and eventually leaches away. Importation of the notion of death gave rise to a new view of life. This idea of death accorded well with the Buddhist view of the body as arising from the temporary confluence of the five body constituents (tendons, blood vessels, skin, muscle, and bones), yet must have shaken up the Japanese, who until that time believed that life ends with the departure of the soul. Gradually the Japanese came to believe that people encountered (utsu) reality, and that reality, whether by movement or projection, was reflected (utsuru) in the perceiver. Though this process of perception can be called a copying of reality, it was basically an encounter of reality (genjitsu utsu). The end of the physical body is also a movement of reality. In perception based on encounter, is there any room for the secret ( 秘, hi) recesses of the soul? Contemporary Japanese use such words as hisoka ni (secretly), himegoto (a secret), himeru (to keep secret). All of these words derive from the Chinese word 秘 (mi). The ancient Japanese lacked a notion of keeping secrets. By borrowing the Chinese word 秘, they created great dark inner recesses of the mind. To the extent that 秘 and 私 (shi, private) designate the rice-farming private sector, the feelings that these concepts gave rise to hastened the conflict between the state and individual, though I realize that the private and the public have objective institutional aspects as well. The third cargo is thus complexly interrelated with the birth of the Japanese state, the establishment of Japanese institutions, and individuals’ feelings. Let me move on to the second type of ideational cargo: the aesthetics of the cultural relations between premodern Japan and Asia in general. In particular, I have already discussed the golden ratio in my essay “Takakukei no utsukushisa” (The Beauty of Polygons). Let Afghanistan or some other country be the crossroads of civilization. Then the intersections of a pentagon and a quadrangle, in particular, become very interesting. If one imposes a hexagon on these figures, one can see the Jewish Star of David from the Ise Grand Shrine. Unfortunately, we do not know when this aesthetically pleasing set of cultural relations came into being, but it was definitely around the seventh and eighth centuries, when the Ho¯ryu¯ Buddhist Temple and the combined Mausoleum of Emperor Tenmu and Empress Jito¯ were constructed. Following the aesthetically pleasing pattern of shapes ranging from a quadrangle to an octagon, third-cargo culture continued to arrive in Japan. Next I present the third type of ideational cargo: prophesy. I have written about this, too. Here I suppose from the appearance of the word murato in the Man’yo¯shu¯ (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, eighth century) that the man called 諸弟 (Moroto) was a Persian who prophesized using the entrails of sac-

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rificed animals. Some have speculated that this and Moroe are western names. The name “Morad” appears frequently in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt. “Morad” also appears in the Qur’an, where it means the supreme one. From there it naturally came to be used by many people. Hence, murato, which the tenth century Wamyo¯ ruijusho¯ (Japanese Names for Things, Classified and Annotated) takes to mean kidney, means to interpret the liver of a sacrificed animal in the Manyo¯shu¯. Also, the name Moroto, because it is close in pronunciation to murato, is perhaps the same word, and became the modern Middle Eastern given name Morad, meaning supreme one. In fact, unless we understand the words thus, all of this does not make logical sense. Hence, Moroto was a Persian. Now let us turn to the name Moroe. E 兄 and to 弟 (eto 兄 弟 ) refer to the ten Heavenly stems and are closely associated. It is possible that Grand Minister of the Left Tachibana no Moroe (684–757) took the name of a Persian and altered it ¯ kimi slightly for his own use. In any case, his name was originally Katsuragi no O (Prince of Katsuragi), and when he was demoted to grand minister, he is said to have taken the surname Tachibana, the name of a tree of paradise that never ages and never dies. It is reasonable to think that at that time he also assumed the given name Moroe. It is known that he built a villa in Tamamizu, Ide, overlooking the Kizu River; constructed an embankment by the spring; and planted kerria (Kerria japonica) there. This was a vision of utopia based on Persian myth. In the past, Soga no Umako (d. 626) constructed his grave in To¯genkyo¯, named after the utopian Peach Spring Village of Tao Yuanming’s poem Taohuayuan. And later in the Heian period, Fujiwara no Yorimichi (992–1074) built a garden reminiscent of the Amitabha Pure Land. In all three cases, there was an attempt to build paradise on Earth. Looking at the inferences about cultural influences above—a blessing in a Persian given name, this Persian man’s ability to prophesize, the utopian ideals that affected even a grand minister of the time—we can see that they all were brought to Japan as the third type of cargo. In the literature (Shoku Nihongi [the second of six national histories], 797), one can see that a Persian by the name of Li Miyi came to Japan, bringing his knowledge of prophesying hidden within his bosom.

IV.

Another Conveyor of Culture

I must add a few comments here. I selected the cases above pretty much at random, and I cannot deny that such cases involving abstract matters are extremely ambiguous. This is to be expected in cases where one cannot give a time when, or a means by which, the features of culture were imported. But it would be unfair to say that I am just discussing nebulous matters. Rather, nebulous car-

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goes not conveyed by embassies were the usual sort, and the culture that they conveyed more reliably took root. If we consider the types of goods included in the third kind of cargo, it becomes clear that they were not goods conveyed only by embassies. Such cultural goods were quite possibly imported by means other than embassies, and thus can be called the third type of cargo, in contrast with the cultural artifacts and people brought back by embassies. In any case, embassies were dignified, formal delegations linking the ruling courts of two nations. The goods that they carried were most likely important and precious. Yet there probably were also important items that commoners could use in their daily lives.

V.

Conclusion

Yet there was also a surprising amount of cultural influence conveyed, not by embassies, but by the comings and goings of private individuals. Here are a few examples. First, textile technology was brought to Japan by the Hata clan ( 秦 氏 ). The ancient Japanese called silkworms hime ( 蚕 ). When 蚕 is read as kaiko, etymologically the meaning is raised larvae, which amounts to the same thing, silkworms. Place names containing hime in the Seto Inland Sea region include ¯ ita Prefecture, Ehime Prefecture, Himekoso Shrine in Okayama Himeshima in O Prefecture, Himeji in Hyo¯go Prefecture, and Himekoso Shrine in Osaka, forming a veritable Silk Road in the Seto Inland Sea region. The terminus of this route was Yamashiro no Kuni, on the outskirts of Kyoto. Kaiko no Yashiro, a shrine dedicated to the silkworm, was a center of religious worship. Centered in Uzumasa (太秦), also on the outskirts of Kyoto, the Hata clan amassed vast wealth. Whereas the embassies brought ready-made silks to Japan, the Hata clan brought silk textile technology to Japan by bringing over a group of skilled workers. Second, as indicated by the name, brocade called koma nishiki (高麗錦) came from Korea. Later, Shandan brocade (山旦錦) came down the Amur River to the coast, where merchants transported it to Japan. A forerunner of such brocade is thought to have come directly south down the Korean peninsula in the eighth century. Third, Ama of the Seto Inland Sea region are said to have used purple clams (Hiatula diphos) to dye fabrics purple. This dyeing process came directly from Rome via the Indian Ocean. In contrast, the purple dyeing process used by ¯ kimi (fl. latter half of the seventh century) and his followers came Nukata no O from the continent. It was an herbal process that relied on zicao (purple gromwell, Lithospermum erythrorhizon). Zicao was a substitute dyestuff in the interior, where purple clams were unavailable. The zicao dye process was brought

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from the continent by official embassies. In contrast, the purple dye process of the Ama was passed from individual to individual as a life skill. Fourth, I have previously inferred that the story of the cowherd and the weaver girl (Qixi, Tanabata) was perhaps brought to Japan during the reign of Tenmu (r. 673–686) or Jito¯ (r. 690–697) (see my work Manyo¯shu¯ no hikaku-bungakuteki kenkyu¯ [Comparative Literature Research on the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves]). On the basis of this story, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (660–720) and his associates wrote poems on Tanabata. This leads one to believe that a group of textile workers must have already come to Japan. During the reign of Sho¯mu (r. 724–749), the Tanabata festival was celebrated at court. No doubt the official embassy in which Yamanoue no Okura (660–733) participated introduced the Tanabata festival to Japan as a Tang court festival. Thus, cases where it is difficult to conceive of an official embassy importing culture suggest that such culture must have entered Japan through a natural influx in the private sector. That such cultural imports involved customs and technology is consistent with their being intangible third-cargo imports. We should not forget that not just embassies acted as conveyors bringing culture to Japan. *Translated from “遣外使、第三の積荷,” by 中西進, 東アジア文化還流 2, no. 2 (July 2007): 1–9. This essay was based on a memorial lecture given at the symposium “Origins of East Asian Cultural Exchange,” commemorating the 1,400th anniversary of embassies to the Sui and Tang courts, held from September 14 to 18, 2007, and sponsored by the Institute of Japanese Culture Studies at Zhejiang Gongshang University. Translated from the Japanese (and Chinese) by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

WANG Yong

The Silk Road and Book Road in East Asia

I.

Introduction

Early European legends tell of trees full of wool.1 The peoples of the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago were already growing mulberry trees and silkworms to produce silk from ancient times. If you peruse Chinese history texts, you will discover that the queen of Yamataikoku 邪馬台国 (circa 300 BCE to 300 CE) had repeatedly exported silk and brocade as tribute to the Kingdom of Wei 魏王朝 (220–265) as early as the third century.2 At the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of a “silk road,”3 which was advocated by the Prussian geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905), not only excited people’s imagination concerning ancient times, but seems to have become a synonym for cultural interaction. Even if the expression is a vivid description of the trade that connected East and West from the Han period, however, it is not necessarily true that the term is applicable to cultural interaction within the East Asian sphere in ancient times. Not only do cultural forms become acculturated depending on the habitat and history of each area of the world, it is impossible for a uniform intercultural model to apply across various local areas. Further, there was very little sustained extensive silk trade among the various countries of East Asia that shared sericulture technology from early times.

1 For the Greek and Roman legends of wool-growing trees, see: George Coedes, Textes d’auteurs grecs et latins relatifs à L’Extrême-Orient depuis le IVe s. av. J-C. jusqu’au XVe siècle, 1910, translated into Chinese by Geng Sheng 耿 昇 (Xila lading zuojia yuandong guwenxian jilu 希 腊拉丁作家遠東古文献輯録(Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局), 1987. Until the Tang dynasty Westerners believed that silk could be picked from trees that grew wool. 2 According to the Weizhi Worenzhuan 魏志倭人伝 (Notes on the Japanese in the Annals of Wei, Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms), Japanese brocades 倭 錦 and miscellaneous brocades with exotic patterns 異文雑錦 were given as tribute from Yamataikoku to the Wei court. 3 The original term is Seidenstrassen.

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WANG Yong

Hints from the Sho¯so¯in Collection

The fifty-third exhibition of the treasures of Sho¯so¯in 正倉院展 was held at the Nara National Museum on October 27, 2001. The following day, an India ink inscription was discovered that read: “ Xianqing 4 [659], intercalary month 10, 27th day” 顕 慶 四 年 閏 十 月 廿 七 日 at the end of the fourth scroll of the Cheng Weishi Lun 成唯識論 (Discourse on Perfection of Consciousness-only) treatise. The information immediately made its way into academic circles. The ten scrolls of the Cheng Weishi Lun consist of sutras brought back by Xuanzang 玄奘 from India when he went in search of the Buddhist law. In the tenth month of 659, Xuanzang’s disciple, Kuei-ji 窺 基 (Ci’en 慈 恩 ), was put in charge of the project of beginning the oral translation in Chinese script (transcription of the oral explanation). He completed the translation in the twelfth month of the same year. The inscription “Xianqing 4, intercalary month 10, 7th day” marked completion of the translation. Considering the usual translation procedures, after completion of the translation, the text was probably polished, rhetorical flourishes were given to the lettering, and a clean copy was produced that was offered to the imperial court. There is a strong possibility that the fourth scroll of the extant Cheng Weishi Lun in the Sho¯so¯in is Kuei-ji’s handwritten draft, and as such carries great import in the history of Buddhism.4 Of the Japanese priests who went to Tang China at that time, Do¯sho¯ 道 照 (629–700) is said to have been given holy relics 舎利 and Abhidhammic texts 経論 to take back to Japan.5 It is thus surmised that the Cheng Weishi Lun was one of the Abhidhammic texts given to the Japanese by Xuanzang. There are a variety of treasures contained at Sho¯so¯in, including: texts, writing materials, Buddhist ceremonial objects, Buddhist altar equipment, toys, clothing and accessories, tableware, medicinal objects, weaponry, etc. Even if there is no shortage of silk products, they do not compare to the gold and silver objects, glass products, and lacquer ware in the collection. It is the texts, however, that are the penultimate of the treasures contained at Sho¯so¯in. There are several tens of thousands of texts and ancient books held in the Sho¯so¯in collection. For example, the mainly Buddhist texts in the Sho¯gozo¯ 聖 語 蔵 Tripitaka Collection include the handwritten transcriptions of twenty-two Sui Dynasty (581–618) Buddhist scrolls, and two-hundred twenty-one Tang Dynasty (618–907) Buddhist scrolls of the total of around 4,960 scrolls. The fourth Cheng Weishi Lun scroll comprises just one of this total. 4 Most handwritten manuscripts were destroyed before the clean copies were presented to the Qing court and are no longer extant. 5 Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀, Scroll 1, Do¯sho¯ Ko¯den 道照薨伝 (Do¯sho¯ Elegy).

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Every time I see treasures from the Sho¯so¯in, which is nicknamed the Museum of the Maritime Silk Road, I wonder if it was the brightly colored fragments of silk that made the deepest impression on the Japanese psyche, or if it was the books in Chinese script.

III.

Silk Trade in the Eighth Century

The East-West Silk Road began in the Han period (206 BCE to 220 CE) and reached its zenith in the Tang dynasty (618–907), but the Silk Road connecting the countries of Asia by sea is also said to have reached its peak with the dispatch of Japanese envoys to Tang China. Nara, which was Japan’s political and cultural center in the eighth century, received such a concentrated influx of Tang culture that it has even been called the “last stop on the Maritime Silk Road.” This being the case, it is often assumed that large quantities of silk were brought into Japan by the country’s envoys in the same way that envoys from the Western regions did, but in actuality this did not occur. First I will examine what Japanese envoys to the Tang court took as tribute. According to the Engishiki 延喜式 (927), a book that contains the rules and regulations set forth in the Ritsuryo¯ Code 律 令 (Ministry of Finance, Shibankyakurei 大蔵省、賜蕃客例 (List of the Gift-Giving Barbarian Guests), the majority of diplomatic presents, called kokushinbutsu 国 信 物 (tokens of honorable intentions), were silk fabrics.6 For example, the following were prepared for the “Great Tang Emperor”: five hundred taels of large silver pieces; two hundred rolls each of mizuorino thick silk 水織絁 and Mino thick silk 美 濃 絁 ; three-hundred rolls each of fine thread silk fabric 細 絁 and yellow thick silk fabric 黄 絁 ; five hundred yellow silk thread ornaments 黄絲五百絇; and onethousand tons of fine quality cotton 細屯綿. In addition, the Japanese envoys to Tang China sent many types of silk cloth “separately” (別送). In the Nara period, the presents sent to the two areas that were central to Japan’s diplomatic sphere—Silla and Balhae—were nearly the same as those sent to the “Great Tang Emperor,” even if the quantity differed. In the Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 there are no records of envoys from Silla taking silk tribute or from Balhae taking silk gifts, but nearly all of the return gifts taken by Japanese were of varieties of silk. Examination of Japan’s silk trade in the eighth century recorded in the Shoku Nihongi reveals unexpected results. Far from being a country that imported silk, Japan was actually solely an exporter of silk products. 6 The fifty scrolls of the Engishiki 延喜式 were commissioned by Emperor Daigo 醍醐天皇 in 905. Fujiwara Tokihira 藤原時平 (817–909) edited the compilation, which was organized in 967 and completed in 967.

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Japan

Imports

Tang 1

Silla

Balhae（ Tieli）

Total 1

Exports 4 6 16 26 (Sources: Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀, Jiu Tangshu 旧唐書 (Old Book of Tang), Cefu Yuangui 册府元龜 (Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau))

Japanese silk production technology was introduced during China’s Six Dynasties (220–589) period and from Baekje, but by the Nara period, not only had the Japanese developed their own production methods and designs, they were promoting production in areas around the country of silk as tribute in accordance with the Ritsuryo¯ Code. The imperial court held great quantities of silk. It is thought that the high level of technical skills and vast production of silk led to exports of the fabric overseas.

IV.

Silk as Currency

Japanese envoys to Tang China consisted of about five hundred people who rode in four ships at a time (thus, the term yottsu no fune 四 つ の 船 to refer to the envoys).7 The crew members, who played various roles, needed travel expenses after they crossed the sea to China as well as currency for shopping, so the Japanese government provided them with travel stipends according to their social ranks. Fortunately, a list of these travel expenses is given in the “Stipulations on Various Stipends for Envoys” 諸使給法 (Shoshikyu¯ ho¯) section of the Engishiki. The following is an excerpt: Head envoy 大使 ：60 rolls of thick silk, 150 rolls of cotton, 150 pieces of cloth Vice envoy 副使 ：40 rolls of thick silk, 100 rolls of cotton, 100 pieces of cloth Envoys of jo¯ 判官 rank: 10 rolls of thick silk, 60 rolls of cotton, 40 pieces of cloth Court recorders 録事 : 6 rolls of thick silk, 40 rolls of cotton, 20 pieces of cloth Interpreters 訳語, sho¯yakusho¯ 請益生 (short-term students), and kannushi 主神 (Shinto priests): 5 rolls of thick silk, 40 rolls of cotton, 16 pieces of cloth Long-term students 留学生 rugakusho¯, attendants to scholars 学問生の傔従 (gakumonsho¯ no kento): 4 rolls of thick silk, 20 rolls of cotton, 13 pieces of cloth Long-term students, scholar priests 学問僧 (gakumonso¯) : 40 rolls of thick silk, 100 rolls of cotton, 80 pieces of cloth

7 For example, according to the Fuso¯ryakuki 扶 桑 略 記 (Abridged History of Japan, 12th century), there were 557 Japanese envoys to Tang China. In the early period, however, the envoys rode in two ships, implying that somewhat fewer than 300 people would have been the norm.

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Short-term scholar priests 還学僧 (gengakuso¯) : 20 rolls of thick silk, 60 rolls of cotton, 40 pieces of cloth Sailors 水手 (kako): 4 tons of each kind of cotton, 2 pieces of cloth As is evident from the above, all members of the mission to China received mainly silk fabrics as travel expense payments. In other words, silk had monetary value in the Nara period, and through dispatch of envoys, large quantities of Japanese silk were taken to China. Many scholars contend that the dispatch of Japanese envoys to Tang China was part of a kind of trade that took the form of tribute (cho¯ko¯ 朝貢).8 If it were the case that the envoys crossed the seas with their silk to China at great risk to their lives, and then purchased silk from China, it could hardly be considered a profitable trade. There is no concrete evidence in Chinese or Japanese documents of silk purchases by the Japanese envoys. Then just what kind of mission did these envoys have when they traveled the great distance over rough waters to enter the land of Tang China?

V.

The Envoys’ Mission

What was it the envoys were seeking when they carried tribute and huge quantities of silk as currency to China? The answer is provided in the section on Japan in the Old Book of Tang called Ribenzhuan 日本傳: At the beginning of Emperor Xuanzong’s reign (713–741), envoys came again to Tang China and asked to be taught the classics from Confucian scholars…All of the valuable gifts 錫賚 they received from the Emperor were used to buy documents 文籍, and then they crossed the seas to go back home.9

This excerpt vividly portrays the Japanese envoys as being far fonder of books than of valuables. “Documents” obviously refers to books 書籍, but to what does “valuable gifts” refer? Upon analysis of the examples listed in both the Old Book of Tang and New Book of Tang (Xin Tangshu 新 唐 書 ), the term appears to be used to refer to money and assets. It wasn’t until the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907–960) and Northern Song period (960–1127) that large outflows of cash from China took on the function of a common currency in East 8 See: To¯no Haruyuki 東野治之著, Kento¯shi to Sho¯so¯in 遣唐使と正倉院 (Japanese Envoys to Tang China and the Sho¯so¯in) Iwanami Shoten 岩 波 書 店 , 1992, p. 38; Chen Yan 陳 炎 , Haishang Sichou zhi lu yu wenhua jiaoliu 海上絲綢之路與文化交流 (The Maritime Silk Road and Cultural Exchange) Beijing University Press 北京大学出版社, March 1996, p. 35. 9 I have quoted the terms sekirai 錫賚 and bunseki 文籍 as they appeared in the original.

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Asia. Thus, it is surmised that there is a strong possibility that the term “valuable gifts” here was being used loosely to refer to cloth, which served as a pan-Asian common currency before metal coins became the norm.10 In contrast to envoys from India and the lands west of China, whose sole interest in “valuable gifts” helped the Silk Road to prosper, envoys from Japan were using silk as currency to buy books. If it truly were the case that such incidents were not random or the result of individual preferences, and were instead Japanese state policy over a sustained period of time, it could be concluded that in East Asia there was a “Book Road” in contrast to the Silk Road that connected East and West. The Japanese envoys sent to Tang China followed seamlessly in the footsteps of those who had been dispatched to China during the previous Sui dynasty (581– 618).11 Although the aim of the Japanese envoys over this span of three hundred years did not remain static, the purchasing of books continued to be their main mission, which is quite evident from Chinese and Japanese documentary sources. For example, in the Keiseki ko¯denki 経籍後伝記 (Sequel to the Chinese Classics) quoted in the first volume of the Zenrin kokuho¯ki 善 隣 国 宝 記 (Records of Treasures Exchanged with Friendly Neighboring Nations), there is the following: We started using the lunar calendar on the first day of the first month of 604. There were few books in the country at this time, so we sent Ono no Imoko 小野妹子 as an envoy to the Sui court in order to buy books, and we also had him visit the Son of Heaven.12

This is the first mention in Japanese records of Japan sending a mission to China to buy books. Subsequently, a route for book transport was opened between the countries, which expanded during the Tang period with the arrival of more envoys from Japan. 10 There are no concrete references in the Tang period to lists of sekirai 錫賚 articles, but in the gifts to the “Japanese emperor” 日 本 皇 帝 (Riben Huangdi) entrusted by Emperor Shenzong to the Japanese monk Jo¯jin 成 尋 (1011–1081) when he visited the Song Dynasty court in 1073, there is reference to a gold-painted Lotus Sutra 金 泥 法 花 経 ( jinni fahuajing), and twenty scrolls of xi 錦. In the Can Tiandai Wutaishan ji 参天台五臺山記 (Records on the Visit to the Tiantai Wutaishan) there is also reference to the production locale, varieties, and patterns of twenty scrolls of xi (brocade). 11 Details concerning the petition for dispatching of Japanese envoys to the Tang court by Japanese who had returned from Sui China are recorded in the Nihon Shoki 日 本 書 紀 , scroll 22, entry for the seventh month, 623. 12 The Keiseki ko¯denki 経籍後伝記 (Sequel to the Chinese Classics) is also called juden 儒伝. It is conjectured that the book was compiled by the end of the Heian period. The original has already been lost; the lost sections appear here and there in the 善隣国宝記 (Records of National Papers of Great Value Exchanged with Friendly Neighboring Nations) and the Seisho yo¯ryaku 政書要略 (Abridged Book of Government).

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VI.

157

The Zenith of the Book Road

According to Tang documents, over fifty countries sent envoys to Chang’an to pay tribute. Of those countries, only Japan, Silla, and other East Asian countries sent regular missions seeking books. In the case of Japan, it is apparent that the government provided a budget for their envoys to purchase written texts.13 The Tang court, for its part, gave preferential treatment to foreign envoys who sought actively to adopt Chinese culture. This situation facilitated relatively simple acquisition of the texts in question. For example, the scholar priest Genbo¯ 玄昉 (?–746) brought back over 5,000 volumes of the Buddhist Abhidhammic texts at one time. This rivals the total number of texts in the complete Buddhist canon at Kaiyuan Temple 開元 in Fujian.14 A Japanese student who studied in China, Kibi no Makibi 吉備真備 (695–775), brought back a total of 150 scrolls, including the Tangli 唐 礼 (To¯rai; Tang Rites), Dayanli jing 大 衍 暦 経 (Daienreki, The Dayanli Lunar Calendar), Dayanli Licheng 大 衍 暦 立 成 (Daienreki Rissei, The Dayanli Licheng Lunar Calendar), and Yueshu yaolue 楽 書 要 略 (Gakusho yo¯ryaku, Digest of the Book of Music). In addition, the eight Japanese monks who visited China during the Heian period brought back thousands of Buddhist texts, which are listed in the Sho¯rai mokuroku 将 来 目 録 (A Memorial Presenting a List of Newly Imported Sutras and Other Items). The eight monks were: Saicho¯ 最 澄 (767–822); Ku¯kai 空 海 (774–805); Jo¯gyo¯ 常 暁 (dates unknown); Engyo¯ 円 行 (799–852); Ennin 円仁 (794–864); Eun 恵運 (798–869); Enchin 円珍 (814–891); and Shu¯ei宗叡 (809– 884). Here I would like to look at the well-known case of the invitation of Jianzhen 鑑真 (Ganjin Wajo¯ 和 上 , 688–763) to Japan in 754 by the Japanese envoys after their return from Tang China. There is a document in the Sho¯so¯in Collection entitled Ho¯sha—Issaikyo¯ shokai (Copy of Commentaries on the Buddhist Canon to be Offered Respectfully), in which is listed the Buddhist texts brought back by the Japanese envoys to Tang China. The list shows that of twenty-four volumes, seven scrolls are missing. On further inspection it appears that the term “missing 欠” is clearly written on only four volumes; there is no such designation on the remaining three. Why?

13 According to the “Stipulations on Various Stipends for Envoys” 諸使給法 (Shoshikyu¯ ho¯) in the Engishiki 延喜式, stipends for students and student monks rivaled that of vice envoys. It has been conjectured that a budget for book purchases was included in the stipend. 14 Entry for the 18th day of the sixth month of 746, scroll 16, Shoku Nihongi 続 日 本 紀 . According to the Kaiyuancang 開元蔵 (Kaiyuan Compilation; Kaiyuan shijiaolu 開元釈教 録, Record of the Kaiyuan Teachings of Shakyamuni) compiled in the first part of the Tang dynasty (713–742), there were 5,048 scrolls total.

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At the conclusion of the list it is stated: “These Buddhist Abhidhammic texts were requested by the Japanese envoys to Tang China in 754; none of them were in Japan.” In other words, these texts were not extant in Japan until the envoys brought them back from China.15 Ishida Mosaku 石田茂作 (1894–1977), a specialist in Buddhist archaeology, theorizes that the Japanese envoys made a catalogue of the texts that Japan did not have and then asked for the missing items. For example, since the second scroll of the two Daijogon homonkyo¯ 大荘厳法 門 経 (Manjusri sutra) scrolls were already in Japan, the Japanese monks brought back only the first scroll.16 Then why is the term “missing” ( 欠 ) written only on the fourth volume of the seven volumes of the missing scroll? Quite possibly the envoys had no choice but to take back a volume with missing texts, which they designated as such in the expectation that they would ask for the missing item to be searched for by the next mission sent to China. How many texts were brought to Japan using this meticulous sustained planning for book acquisition? This is not an easy question to answer, but the Nihonkoku kenzaisho mokuroku 日本国見在書目録 (Catalogue of Books Available in Japan, 875) provides a clue. The catalogue contains 1,579 volumes and 17,345 scrolls, or about half of the Suishu 隋 書 (Book of Sui) ( 経籍志 Jingjizhi, Treatise on Classics and Books), and a little over a third of the Old Book of Tang ( 経籍志 Jingjizhi). If this was the catalogue of texts extant after the fire at the Imperial library or Reizei’in 冷泉院, then it was an astounding number of texts.

VII.

East Asian Currents

As mentioned above, the Sino-Japanese Book Road in the era of envoys to Tang China introduced a vast number of Chinese books to the East and facilitated the development of Japanese culture. Yet this Book Road was not one-way; there were also books written by Japanese in kanbun 漢文 (literary Chinese) that traveled the same path back to China. I will discuss some examples of this phenomenon. Limiting discussion to the era of envoys to the Tang court, in 772 Kaimei 誡明 and other Japanese monks took Prince Sho¯toku’s Sho¯mangyo¯ gisho 勝 鬘 経 義 疏 (Annotations on the Srimala Devi Sutra) to Yangzhou 揚州. In 838 Ensai 円 載 (?–877) and others presented Prince Sho¯toku’s Hokke gisho 法華義疏 (Anno15 Dai Nippon kobunsho 大日本古文書 (Ancient Documents of Greater Japan), scroll 4, p. 496. 16 Ishida Mosaku 石田茂作 Shakyo¯ yori mitaru Naracho¯ Bukkyo¯ no kenkyu¯ 写経より見たる 奈良朝仏教の研究 (A Study of Nara Period Buddhism as Seen in Sutra Transcriptions), (To¯yo¯ Bunko 東洋文庫, 1930), p. 40.

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tations on the Lotus Sutra) to the Guoqing Temple 国 清 寺 on Tiantai Mountain 天 台 山 .17 Further, when Saicho¯ and Enchin traveled to China, they distributed Japanese kanbun texts.18 Even though the pair of top Nara-period Japanese scholars19 Oumi no Mifune 淡海三船 (722–785) and Isonokami no Yakatsugu 石 上宅嗣 (729–781) were not able to travel to Tang China themselves, their works and kanshi 漢詩 (Chinese-style poetry) did.20 Such examples illustrate the point that the Book Road was a reciprocal affair. Actually, on the Chinese side many works were lost or destroyed during the Anshi Rebellion 安 史 之 乱 (755–763) and Great Buddhist Persecution 会 昌 毀 佛 (845). During the Five Dynasties period (907–960), and the Wu Yue Kingdom 呉越 (907–978), the Tiantai monk, Xiji 羲寂, planned to restore religion, and lamented that there were very few texts of the Buddhist canon left extant. The King of Wu Yue, Qian Hong Chu 銭弘俶 (929–988), offered a large sum to send envoys to find the texts that were scattered abroad. Che Gwan 諦観 of Goryeo and Nichien 日延 of Japan each responded by sending large numbers of texts.21 Return of the Buddhist texts to China occurred repeatedly and with growing intensity over the period from the end of the Qing period (1644–1911) to the beginning of the Republic (1911–). During the Qing period, merchant ships sailing to Japan became the main vehicle for transporting texts in concordance with the dramatic improvement in printing technology and Sino-Japanese trade. Japan’s private and public libraries and bookstores ordered great quantities of books, which Qing period merchants sought out and loaded on ships headed for Japan. The Chinese book market helped drive the market economy, and because it was directly connected to the trend toward mass consumption in early modern Japan, the speed and quantity of influx rapidly increased, lending a new aspect to the Book Road panorama.

¯ ba Osamu 大庭脩 and Wang Yong 王勇, editors, “ Nitchu¯ bunka ko¯ryu¯shi so¯sho” 日中文化 17 O 交流史叢書 9 (Sino-Japanese Cultural Interaction History Text Series, Number 9), Tenseki 典 籍 (Classics), Taishu¯kan Shoten 大修館書店, May 1996. 18 Wang Yong 王勇, “Oumi no Mifune wo meguru Higashi Ajia no shibun ko¯ryu¯” 淡海三船をめ ぐる東アジア の 詩 文 交 流 (Poetic Interaction in East Asia Centering on Oumi no Mifune), Yang Rubin 楊 儒 賓 and Zhang Baosan 張宝三, editors, Nihon Kangaku kenkyu¯ shintan 日本漢学研究新探 (New Studies in Japanese Sinology), (Bensei Shuppan 勉誠出 版, October 2002), pp. 278–304. 19 Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀, scroll 36, entry for the 24th day of the sixth month, 781. 20 Wang Yong 王勇, “Oumi no Mifune wo meguru Higashi Ajia no shibun ko¯ryu¯” 淡海三船をめ ぐる東アジア の 詩 文 交 流 (Poetic Interaction in East Asia Centering on Oumi no Mifune), Yang Rubin 楊 儒 賓 and Zhang Baosan 張宝三, editors, Nihon Kangaku kenkyu¯ shintan 日本漢学研究新探 (New Studies in Japanese Sinology), (Bensei Shuppan 勉誠出 版, October 2002), pp. 278–304. 21 Wang Yong 王 勇 , et.al., Zhong-Ri “shuji zhilu” yanjiu, (Beijing Tushuguan Press 北 京 図 書 館 出 版 社 , October, 2003), pp. 146–171.

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VIII. Conclusion The differences between the Silk Road and Book Road must be considered as not limited to geographic features, but based on the realities of the cultures involved. Even when the silk that was transported in ancient times to India and lands to the west of China is excavated from the desert today, most of it has rotted and cannot be worn. In contrast, the books that the Japanese envoys to the Sui and Tang courts brought back to Japan are still a source of knowledge. Metaphorically speaking, they are the seeds of civilization that have put down roots and sent out shoots over a long period of time, blossoming and bearing fruit to grow into the giant trees that they are today, reaching towards the skies. There is a Chinese proverb that says something to the effect that: Give a man a fish, he will have a meal. Teach him to fish, and he will have food all his life.22 If the example is changed from fish to silk, books are obviously “fishing skills.” It was the initiation of the productivity and continuity of these fishing skills that is characteristic of East Asian cultural interaction, and that has fostered the uniqueness of Japanese culture. *Translated from the Japanese by Jenine Heaton. Translation published by permission of the author.

22 This expression has been attributed to Laozi, but the source is unidentified.

MATSUURA Akira

Chinese Sea Merchants and Pirates

I.

Introduction: The Course of Research in Chinese Maritime History

Studies of global maritime history have frequently dealt with questions involving the Mediterranean and Atlantic, focusing on the history of Western Europe. However, there have been few studies dealing specifically with the waters surrounding East Asia. It would be fair to say that up until now historical studies looking at the seas lying within the area contained by the Chinese mainland, the Korean peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands, Taiwan, the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos, the Malay peninsula, and mainland Indochina, namely the Bohai, Yellow, East China and South China Seas, have been slow to appear. This is perhaps because existing studies of Chinese history have mostly taken a continental view of history, as Kawakatsu Heita points out in “Launching Maritime History” (Kaiyo¯ shikan no funade): “postwar Japanese have not had a view of history that takes account of the sea.” It has been said that Chinese history emerged from the Yellow River basin. Although the importance of the culture of the Yangtze River basin has recently been acknowledged, the cultural activity of the maritime regions, with their broad coastline, has been neglected and for a long time has received little attention. As archaeological surveys of the coastal regions have progressed, the history of the maritime life of Chinese people living in coastal areas has gradually come to be reconsidered. Especially as China’s policy of opening up to the outside world has progressed since the 1980s, the history of its coastal regions has been re-evaluated. With historical studies of the special economic zones (SEZs) being particularly prolific, research on the port cities of the coastal regions has received much attention, and historical studies focused on the famous trading ports of Tianjin, Shanghai, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Guangzhou have begun to be published.

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Research on port cities and the economic relations with the hinterland surrounding them has been evolving from previous court-centered histories into research on regional histories. I would like to reflect on research into regional history by looking at previously land-focused Chinese history from a marine perspective, and especially by looking at Chinese sea merchants (haishang), who have played a central role in maritime life. “Chinese sea merchants” refers to the Chinese merchants who traded by sea. Among the important results of Japanese research into Chinese sea merchants, mention must be made of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯’s1 The Exploits of Pu Shougeng (Ho Juko¯ no jiseki). Kuwabara first reported on his research on Pu Shougeng2 at the 1915 meeting of the Tokyo Historical Society, and published the results of his studies in five editions of Shigaku zasshi between October 1915 and October 1916. These were published in book form, with the addition of subsequent research, as The Exploits of Pu Shougeng, State Agent Trade Supervisor from the West (So¯matsu no teikyo shihaku seiikijin Ho Juko¯ no jiseki) in 1923. This book does not appear from the title to be directly related to Chinese sea merchants, but it is one of the best and most indispensable Japanese studies on East Asian history, as it contains various research on the diverse activities of Chinese sea merchants. Other studies worthy of note include Kuwabara’s Essays on the History of EastWest Communication (To¯zai ko¯tsu¯shi ronso¯), Fujita Toyohachi’s3 Studies on the History of East-West Interaction: South Seas (To¯zai ko¯sho¯shi no kenkyu¯: nankai hen), and Ishida Mikinosuke’s4 Chinese Historical Documents on the South Seas 1 Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ (1870–1931): Japanese scholar of East Asian history. Professor at the College of Letters of Kyoto Imperial University, he made a great contribution in the areas of the history of east-west communication, cultural history, and the history of law, and established the basis of education in East Asian history. His work is collected in The Complete Works of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ (Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ zenshu¯) published by Iwanami Shoten in five volumes plus appendix. 2 Pu Shougeng (dates unknown): a Muslim south seas trader of Arabian or Persian origin in China’s Southern Song and early Yuan dynasties. He became a trade official in Quanzhou, Fujian province in the mid-thirteenth century. 3 Fujita Toyohachi (1869–1929): Japanese scholar of East Asia. After graduating from the Tokyo Imperial University College of Letters, he worked in education in Qing China, where he contributed to the development of Chinese academia, before becoming a professor at Waseda and Tokyo Imperial Universities. In 1928 he became director of the History Department at the newly established Taipei Imperial University, but died soon afterwards. His research is collected in Studies on the History of East-West Interaction (To¯zai ko¯sho¯shi no kenkyu¯, in two volumes: Nankai hen and Seiiki hen). 4 Ishida Mikinosuke (1891–1974): Japanese scholar of East Asia. After graduating from the Tokyo Imperial University College of Letters, he devoted his energies for many years to managing To¯yo¯ Bunko (Komagome, Bunkyo¯-ku, Tokyo), which collected important books on East Asian studies. He seems to have published over 400 volumes of research, but apart from his generally know Spring in Chang’an (Cho¯an no haru, Ko¯dansha Gakujutsu Bunko), part of his research is collected in A Library of East Asian Cultural History (To¯a bunkashi so¯ko¯, To¯yo¯ Bunko) and the

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(Nankai ni kansuru Shina shiryo¯). These earlier studies built up a repository of research focused on Chinese historical documents in the area of interaction between east and west. However, although these studies have been taken up in the history of the various nations and in regional history, they have not been developed from the viewpoint of maritime history. In this paper, I would like to pursue these historical documents with a focus on maritime history.

II.

Problems Concerning Chinese Sea Merchants

A.

The Business of Chinese Sea Merchants

There are few concrete examples to clarify the economic activity of Chinese sea merchants, but I would like to relate the following example, which is known in some detail. This is a story of foreign trade, found in Volume 12 of Yue Jian by Wang Zaijin from the latter half of the sixteenth century. In the Wanli era (1567–1619), a certain Lin Qing from Fuqing in Fujian province built a large ship with a ship owner, Wang Hou, and employed Zheng Song and Wang Yi as baduo (helmsmen), Zheng Qi, Lin Cheng and others as shuishou (lower ranking sailors), along with Jin Shishan and Huang Chenglin as silversmiths, Li Ming, who was familiar with navigation, as a guide, and Chen Hua, who spoke woyu (Japanese), as an interpreter. The ship set sail for Japan, loaded with shaluo,5 pongee, silk, bupi,6 white sugar, porcelain, fruit, scented fans and combs, sewing needles, and paper. They planned to trade these in Japan for Japanese silver, which the silversmiths would smelt onboard for them to bring back. This account gives a concrete example of what shipping operations in overseas trade were like at that time. This kind of practice followed from the immense profits that could be made from overseas trade. It was not necessarily the case that those onboard ships were all of the same nationality. The crew of a shogunate ship that arrived in the Korean peninsula in 1604 included Japanese and Portuguese, as well as Chinese. Wen Jin, from Haicheng county in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, who was 35 at the time, had set off the previous February on a trading journey from Fujian to Giao Chi in Vietnam, four-volume Collected Works of Ishida Mikinosuke (Ishida Mikinosuke chosakushu¯, Rokko¯ Shuppan). 5 shaluo (silk gauze): silk woven into a thin fabric, which was highly prized because of the complexity of its manufacture. 6 bupi: generally a woven cotton cloth, in which China had the most advanced technology in the world at this time. From the eighteenth century onwards, cotton cloth exported to Europe was highly prized as “Nankeen cotton.”

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but was attacked by a Japanese ship just before landing. Over one hundred were killed, with only twenty-eight survivors. Wen Jin and the other survivors went with the Japanese ship to Jianpuzhai, present day Cambodia, where they bought leather goods, wax, pepper, sumu,7 ivory, rhinoceros horn, daimei,8 gold, and silver before heading for Japan. The Portuguese onboard had been involved in trade between Macau and Jianpuzhai, and joined the ship to trade with Japan along with the Japanese crew. The Japanese set out with Chinese living in Nagasaki and Satsuma, with the intention of trading with Cambodia. The ship with these people onboard encountered a storm on the way to Japan and was blown off course to the Korean peninsula. This ship was one of the socalled shuinsen9 that had been granted licenses by Tokugawa Ieyasu in the form of a red seal (shuin) to voyage overseas. One of the Japanese on board had been provided with five hundred taels of silver in trading capital from Ieyasu, in addition to the license. What kind of profit could be made from overseas trade at this time? For example, one hundred catties of Chinese-made Huzhou silk10, which Chinese merchants took to Luzon in the Philippines in the mid-seventeenth century, could make one hundred taels of silver, but if it were exported abroad it could apparently fetch as much as three hundred taels. If one could overlook the potential danger and succeed in the venture, huge profits were guaranteed. Both in the East and in the West, in commerce that sought to exploit interregional price differences, the greater the danger the greater the riches it offered. The shipping business that targeted instant riches of this sort saw the appearance in the Qing dynasty of ships specializing in ocean-going transport. Take the example of Jiang Long-shun’s ship from Yuanhe county in Suzhou, Jiangnan (later Jiangsu) province, which was carried off course to the Ryu¯kyu¯ islands in January of 1786 (year 51 of the Qianlong era). It was hired with a crew of twenty in 7 sumu: sappan wood, an evergreen tree grown in the tropics, the bark of which is used for red dye. 8 daimei: a turtle, which grows up to one meter in length. Its shell is boiled and used for tortoiseshell work. 9 shuinsen: ships that made trading voyages to Southeast Asia, licensed with a permit to travel overseas, in the form of a shuin (red seal), from the Momoyama period to the early Tokugawa period. Those who traded using the licensed ships included the daimyo¯ of western domains, such as Shimazu and Hoso-kawa, and merchants from Kyoto, Osaka, Sakai, and Nagasaki. Exports included silver, copper, and lacquer ware, while imports included raw silk, silk cloth, deerskins, sappan wood, and sugar. Between 1604 and 1635, as many as 350 such licensed ships were sent to what are now Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. 10 Huzhou silk (husi): raw silk from Huzhou, a famous center for the production of raw silk, in Zhejiang Province, south of Lake Tai. Rice and mulberry cultivation and sericulture progressed from the late Song dynasty onwards, and from late Ming and early Qing the manufacture and weaving of silk developed. “Huzhou silk” in particular established itself as a brand name.

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(intercalary) March of year 49 of the Qianlong era by a Mr. Huang of Zhenjiang to transport ginger to Tianjin. It was then hired in Tianjin by a Mr. He from the port of Niuzhuang in the northeast to transport rice from Niuzhuang to Tianjin. Then it was hired by a Mr. Shi of Shandong Province to take spices from Tianjin to Huang County. Unable to find an employer in Huang County, it headed for its port in the northeast, where it was chartered by a Mr. Huo to take rice to Huang County again. It headed back to its north-east port again and was chartered by Mr. Huo to take rice to Lijin County in Shandong Province. When that was finished, it went again to its northeast port, where it was chartered to transport rice to Tianjin. In Tianjin, it was chartered by You Huali, a merchant from Fujian, to go to Ningbo, and it was loaded with jujubes in Haifeng County in Shandong before setting sail, but it got into difficulty at sea on the way to Ningbo and was blown off course to the Kingdom of the Ryu¯kyu¯s. In this actual example, the ship was chartered seven times in the space of two years, earning transportation fees in the process. As for the transportation fees for ships engaged in this shipping and transportation business, Xu Wansheng’s ship from Ninghaizhou in Dengzhou, Shandong Province was chartered with a crew of twenty in July 1862 (the first year of the Tongzhi era) by a timber merchant from Niuzhuang to transport 1,350 pieces of timber from Ninghaizhou, near the city of Yantai, to Niuzhuang, for which the charter fee was four hundred taels of silver. The same ship was chartered by a traveling merchant in Niuzhuang to transport twenty lou (bamboo crates) of oil and 630 piculs of soybeans to the Jiangnan area, for which the transportation fee was 535 taels of silver. The first of these journeys was from Ninghaizhou, present day Muping County, to Niuzhuang, the second from Niuzhuang to, presumably, Shanghai, which is four times the distance by sea, but the charter fee was around 1.3 times. It is impossible to generalize, since it depends on the volume of cargo, but fees must have been decided by the distance traveled and the volume carried. In the case of coastal sand-junks in the reign of the Qing emperor Daoguang, if they were requisitioned by the government to carry loads of 70 % designated rice and 30 % other cargo for unloading in Tianjin, they were paid a fee of five qian per picul of rice. The fee for transporting a cargo of 3,000 piculs to Tianjin, with 2,100 piculs of rice, was therefore 1,050 taels, and for a cargo of 1,500 piculs, with 1,050 piculs of rice, it was 525 taels. Since money would also have been earned from trading the cargo, the transportation earnings from one sand-junk would seem to have been from seven or eight hundred taels up to over one thousand taels, and since it would likely have made over a thousand taels on the return journey as well, high earnings would seem to have been obtainable as long as the journey was accomplished safely. On the other hand, as far as the costs of building a ship were concerned, large seagoing ships of this sort, carrying 3,000 piculs, cost as much as

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10,000 taels of silver. Medium-size ships cost several thousand taels, but, given the earnings that could be made from a single journey, the cost could be recovered within a few years if several safe journeys could be accomplished. The merchants who operated these Chinese ships had a wide range of activities in a variety of forms, making large profits in the process.

B.

Cargo Carried by Chinese Ships

The cargo carried by these seagoing ships varied enormously between times and regions. Carried from the south seas to China were pepper and sappan wood, cloves11 and other spices, while exports from China to other countries generally included woven silk, china and porcelain. China and porcelain in particular are found even today in the wrecks of sunken ships that are discovered from time to time. A well-known wreck, a long-distance ocean-going sailing ship thought to be from the end of the Southern Song dynasty and discovered off Quanzhou in Fujian in 1974, was carrying a variety of objects, including spices, medicine, bronze coins, china and porcelain, bronze- and woodenware, textiles, and leather products. A wreck found off the coast of Mokpo, in southwest Korea, the “Xin’an ship,” thought to be an ocean-going sailing ship from the Yuan dynasty, was found to have been carrying more than twenty thousand pieces of china and porcelain, including celadon and white porcelain, eight million bronze coins weighing as much as twenty-eight tons, and red sandalwood. Up until the Song dynasty, low volume, high value products, which had a large interregional price difference, were common, but from the beginning of the Qing dynasty cargoes of coastal ships in particular are often large volumes of commodities. These would include rice, soybeans, and sugar. Fujian, which had constant shortages of rice, shipped it in from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Taiwan. Soybeans, which were used as food and soil fertilizer in the Jiangnan region, were transported by ship from the coastal areas of Huabei and the Northeast to Shanghai and on to Zhejiang and Fujian. The cargoes of a Chinese ship that sailed from Zhapu in Zhejiang to Nagasaki in Japan in January 1824 and another that sailed in the same month from Xiamen in Fujian to Singapore were very different. Whereas the Chinese trading ship that went to Nagasaki carried mostly silk textiles, sugar, and a wide variety of medicine, the ship that went to Singapore carried mostly everyday items that seem to have been for Chinese living there, and which were of various kinds. There were 660,000 pieces of china and porcelain of thirty-two kinds, ten thousand tiles, 11 cloves: the dried buds of syzygium aromaticum. Used as a spice or medicine. Cloves originate from the Moluccas, and are a scented shrub of the Myrtaceae family that grows in the tropics.

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twelve thousand paper umbrellas, and various items that one might find in a department store today: sweets, dried mushrooms, salted fish, shoes made from silk, cotton or straw, tobacco, combs, writing brushes, pickled vegetables, cotton cloth, yarn, and tea. It seems perfectly natural that two Chinese trading ships that left China at the same time for different destinations should have carried different cargoes, but there is little historical evidence to make this clear.

C.

The Construction of Chinese Ships

Recent archaeological surveys have revealed the construction of Chinese junks, which could operate over a wide area as long as there was wind. Sunken ships have been found and studied in archaeological surveys since the 1970s. The site of a Qin or Han dynasty shipyard, which was the subject of a dig in Guangzhou in late 1974, suggests that sailing ships of up to twenty meters in length and weighing twenty-five to thirty tons were built there. Previously, in August 1974, the hull of the wooden seafaring ship mentioned above, known as the “Quanzhou Bay Song dynasty ship,” was discovered in the ground at the port of Houzhu, in the southeast of Quanzhou, Fujian Province. The structure of this ship already had something like a keel, timber that functioned like a backbone, running along the bottom of the ship from the prow to the stern, called the longgu. If the ship got into difficulty at sea, this seems to have acted to limit flooding even if part of the hull was damaged, giving the vessel an excellent structure. Studies of the excavations suggest that this was a ship from around the end of the Southern Song in the second half of the fourteenth century, measuring around thirty-four meters in length and weighing around four hundred tons. Studies of the “Xin’an ship” found off the coast of southwest Korea between 1976 and 1984 show that it was a seafaring three-masted sailing ship from the Yuan dynasty, thirty-four meters in length and weighing around two hundred tons. The discovery of sunken Chinese ships has thus made up for the lack of written historical material on ships, and provides much more concrete information than excavated material. Chinese junks were an environmentally friendly form of transport, requiring no oil like today’s cars. Of course, from the perspective of an age that stresses speed, they are slow. However, if we think of the history of Chinese seafaring ships, particularly junks, as the 2,000 years of the Western calendar, then we should remember that, dividing it at Fulton’s invention of the steamship at the start of the nineteenth century, the period when junks were in use covers the not inconsiderable period of 1,800 years. This also suggests that the history of Chinese junks is of great significance.

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Chinese Piracy

The slowest area of maritime historical studies to develop has been the history of piracy, which is seen as anti-history. In the field of Japanese history, these began with Naganuma Kenkai’s Japanese Piracy (Nihon no kaizoku) and Studies in Japanese Maritime History (Nihon kaijishi kenkyu¯) and have seen major developments recently in Amino Yoshihiko’s Ruffians and Pirates (Akuto¯ to kaizoku) and elsewhere, but in relation specifically to Chinese history, piracy has been largely ignored, with the exception of the wokou (Japanese pirate) problem in the Ming dynasty and the problems of piracy by Cai Qian and others. Some pirates surrendered to the government and were given positions something like that of the navy by the government, in order to put down pirates, as was seen in the late Song and Yuan dynasties and again in the late Ming dynasty. The question cannot therefore be understood simply in positive or negative terms. As the development of Chinese society gradually spread from the hinterland of the Yellow River delta to the coastal regions, Chinese piracy began to appear over a wide area, but the region where it left most of a record was the coast of southern China. The reason it occurred frequently in southern China is probably because pirates, always accustomed to the sea, made their bases in the islands, where it was easier to evade capture by the authorities after their depredations, and in the complicated geography of the coastal areas.

III.

Sea Merchants and Pirates in the Tang, Song, and Yuan Dynasties

A.

The Origins of Chinese Overseas Trade

The term haishang (sea merchant) seems to have come into general use from the Tang dynasty onwards, but mentions of maritime trade can be found in official histories before that. China’s trade with countries to the west was at first carried out overland. One person who thought of sending an envoy to the country of Da Qin in the west, thought to be the Roman Empire, was the Later Han Protector General of the Western Regions (xiyu dufu12), Ban Chao. 12 Xiyu dufu: A dufu (Protector General) was appointed for the first fifty-nine years of the Former Han dynasty to suppress the Western Regions, managing the colonies and protecting communications and trade. After the Protector General was killed at the end of the Former Han, in the Xin era of Wang Mang, no appointment was made. Subsequently in 74 AD in the Later Han the post was revived but soon abolished, and in 91 AD Ban Chao was appointed. The post was abolished in 107 AD.

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Ban Chao tried to send his subordinate, Gan Ying, to Da Qin in 97 AD. Gan Ying passed through the Western Regions to reach the country of Tiao Zhi (thought to be Syria), where he reached the “great sea.” Planning to cross the great sea, he was told by a sailor from the country of An Zi (thought to be Parthia) that the voyage would take three months even with a favorable wind, and that, considering the prevailing winds, he should prepare at least two years’ and up to three years’ provisions for the sea crossing. He therefore gave up on sailing to Da Qin. However, around seventy years later, an envoy was sent by sea from Da Qin. In 166 AD an envoy of An Dun, king of Da Qin, thought to be the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, arrived from Nhat Nam in central Vietnam, initiating relations with China with an offering of ivory, rhinoceros horn, and tortoiseshell. Consequently, it seems people traveled from Da Qin to Funan, and people from Nhat Nam, Giao Chi and elsewhere traveled to Da Qin. In 226, under Sun Quan of Wu in the Three Kingdoms era, Qin Lun, a merchant from Da Qin, arrived in Giao Chi, and met Sun Quan with the support of Wu Mo, prefect of Giao Chi. Sun Quan asked Qin Lun about the manners and customs of Da Qin and was given a substantial report. It is recorded in the Zhong tian zhu guo chapter in volume 54 of the Liang Shu that Wu Mo, prefect of Giao Chi, later tried to take Qin Lun to China proper, but Qin Lun decided to return to his country when Wu Mo died on the way. Thus it seems that communication with countries overseas became active from around the Later Han, and sea merchants began to arrive in China. Later, as overseas relations became more active, mentions of Chinese sea merchants become more frequent in official histories as well.

B.

Birth of the Maritime Trade Supervisor

Officials responsible for work relating to overseas trade in the Tang dynasty were known as shiboshi13 (maritime trade supervisors). The first appearance of the title shiboshi is around the time of Emperor Xuanzong. In 714 You Wei, who was appointed shiboshi of Annan, and Commander Zhou Qingli reported to the court 13 shiboshi (or shibosi): The first appointment of an official to supervise overseas trade in China was that of the shiboshi in Guangzhou in the second year of Kaiyuan (714) in the Tang dynasty. Under the Tang, only the title shiboshi is known, but in the Song dynasty we find shibosi established as a title. The Song shibosi dealt with all affairs relating to the business of trade, including inspecting the cargo of trading ships entering port and imposing import taxes. The Yuan dynasty largely carried on the Song system of shibosi. However, in the Ming dynasty, as a policy of isolation was pursued, the shibosi became mainly a post for dealing with tribute ships. In the Qing dynasty, there was no shibosi as under previous dynasties, but the same work of dealing with the arrival and departure of trading ships was handled by customs (haiguan).

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that Persian priests could make intricate works of art. The next record is found in 763, when the eunuch and shiboshi Lü Taiyi expelled the governor ( jiedushi) of Guangnan, Zhang Xiu, and instigated a revolt in Guangzhou. It is recorded in the Jiu Tangshu that, when the rebel forces of Huang Chao from Shandong joined the rebellion of Wang Xianzhi14 and threatened Guangzhou, the center of overseas trade, in 879, there were great fears that the profit from maritime trade and gems, including the south sea pearls brought in every year, would be stolen by the rebels and that the exchequer would be bankrupted. The Tangguo shibu, which records the history of the Kaiyuan era (713–741) to the Changqing era (821–824), records that overseas trade was carried on actively from the eighth century, mainly in Guangzhou, and that for this purpose the post of shiboshi was established to take charge of trade affairs. The Xin Tangshu says that it was a rule in the past that, if a sea merchant sank, his property would be disposed of by the government, and if the merchant’s wife did not report to the authorities within three months, the whole of it would be appropriated. As this makes clear, the activities of sea merchants were not entirely free, but were subject to certain forms of government restriction. Cases of Chinese sea merchants who ventured overseas in the Tang dynasty are also frequently mentioned in Japanese sources. From around the time when Japan stopped sending envoys to China in 894, a large number of sea merchants started coming to Japan from the Chinese mainland. It is easy to find cases of people visiting China on these Chinese merchants’ ships in the records of Japanese monks. Names of Chinese sea merchants are also found in Ennin’s Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law, made famous by Reischauer’s15 Ennin’s16 Travels in T’ang China. The entry for 8 January of the sixth year of Sho¯wa (839) in Volume 1 of Ennin’s diary records that in 819 the Chinese merchant Zhang Jueji set sail with a cargo of various items for trade, but encountered adverse winds and was adrift for three months before blowing ashore in the province of Dewa. The entry for 5 July in the fifth year of Huichang (Sho¯wa 12, or 845) states that the Japanese priest Egaku made a pilgrimage to Wutaishan in the second year of 14 Rebellion of Wang Xianzhi: Wang Xianzhi (?–872), a salt trader at the end of the Tang dynasty, led a revolt of three thousand landless peasants around 875 to 878 from the mid and lower reaches of the Yellow River to the mid-Yangtze. 15 Reischauer: Edwin O. Reischauer (1910–90), born in Tokyo to Presbyterian missionaries who had come to Japan. After graduating from high school, he obtained his degree from Harvard, after which he became a professor at Harvard, and US ambassador to Japan. 16 Ennin (794–864): a priest of the Tendai school in the early Heian period. In 838 he went to Tang China, where he spent ten years, including at Tiantai-shan in Zhejiang Province. His diary from the period is Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law. After his return to Japan, he became chief priest of the Tendai school and was given the posthumous name of Enkaku Daishi.

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Huichang (842) and that when he returned to Japan he went on the ship of Li Linde, presumably a Chinese sea merchant. These examples also show that the overseas activity of Chinese sea merchants increased from around the first half of the eighth century. These Chinese sea merchants faced not only shipwreck from the forces of nature, but also frequent man-made disasters, in the form of piracy. Jianzhen17 (Ganjin), who founded To¯sho¯daiji in the western part of Nara after reaching Japan on his sixth attempt, was plagued by the fear of piracy, as well as natural disasters at sea. The entry in the To¯daiwajo¯ to¯seiden for his first attempt to reach Japan in the second year of Tianbao (743), states that his voyage to Japan was prevented because pirates were very active and the coasts of Taizhou, Wenzhou, and Mingzhou (known as Ningbo since the Ming dynasty) had suffered at their hands. Since the Zizhi tongjian reports that pirates including Wu Lingguang attacked Taizhou and Mingzhou in February of 744, the third year of Tianbao under the Emperor Xuanzong, the pirate who prevented Jianzhen from reaching Japan at this time was presumably the same Wu Lingguang. The leader of Hainan, Feng Ruofang, who rescued Jianzhen when he was blown off course there, was in fact a pirate who had grown rich by attacking a Persian ship that was on its way to China along the coast of Hainan. The Tang capital of Chang’an is described as the start of the Silk Road, but that is clearly a perception that focuses on overland communication. However, if we take a different perspective and look at communication between China and other countries by sea, it is clear that an increasing number of countries were visiting China by sea as the Tang court internationalized. The starting point for this communication by sea was Guangzhou, which was visited by merchants not only from Southeast Asia, but from far-off Arabia as well. The Tales of China and India, written in Arabic in the second half of the ninth century, makes clear that Guangzhou gathered goods brought by Arabs and Chinese.

C.

Expansion of Overseas Trade

Song China established a shibosi in Guangzhou in 971, soon after the founding of the dynasty, to oversee ships from overseas and the movement of Chinese merchant ships, and subsequently established them in Hangzhou and Mingzhou as well. Consequently, Arabian merchants and others began visiting for trade 17 Jianzhen (689–763): born in Yangzhou in present-day Zhejiang, he became a monk at the age of fourteen and subsequently trained and became a priest in Chang’an. He taught in Yangzhou, but resolved to go to Japan in response to the request for monks. He reached Japan in 753 after five unsuccessful voyages. He later established To¯sho¯daiji and is known as the founder of the Ritsu school in Japan.

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from overseas countries such as Da Shi (Arabia), Zhan Cheng (Champa) and Sanfoqi (Srivijaya), carrying foreign products such as spices, ivory, rhinoceros horn, and sappan wood, and seeking Chinese-made silk textiles and porcelain. In response to this, sea merchants heading overseas from China in 989 for the purposes of trade were required to have papers issued by the authorities at the Liangzhe shibosi. Sea merchants not in possession of official papers were punished and had the goods they were carrying seized by the authorities. The official papers that sea merchants were required to have when venturing abroad named their cargo, the destination of their voyage, and a guarantor, and were only issued once they had confirmed that they were not carrying arms, articles for the manufacture of arms, or contraband. One example of Song dynasty sea merchants is found in the Record of a Pilgrimage to Mt. Tiantai and Mt. Wutai by Jo¯jin18, who went to China during the Song dynasty and visited Mt. Tiantai in Zhejiang and Mt. Wutai in Shanxi. According to Volume 1 of his Record, he crossed to China from Matsuura in Hizen on one of three Chinese ships in March of the fourth year of Enkyu¯ (fifth year of Xining, under the Northern Song, 1071). The captain of the first of these three Chinese ships was Zeng Ju, called Zeng Sanlang, from Nanxiongzhou, the captain of the second ship was Wu Zhu, called Wu Shilang, from Fuzhou, and the captain of the third was Zheng Qing, called Zheng Sanlang, from Quanzhou. The captains’ homes were in present day Nanxiong in Guangdong, and Fuzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian, so they were presumably sea merchants from Guangdong and Fujian. There were many such Chinese sea merchants who visited Japan. The entry in the Cho¯ya gunsai19 for 20 August in the second year of Cho¯ji (fourth year of Songning under the Northern Song, 1105) records that a trading ship arrived in Shigashima at Hakata, in Kyushu. The gangshou, or owner, of this ship was Li Chong, from Quanzhou in Fujian. He was in possession of a gongping, in other words a certificate of passage, issued by the Director of the Liangzhe Shibosi in Mingzhou (Ningbo). The certificate reads: “This ship is the property of Li Chong, who has recruited its crew of sailors to go to Japan to trade, and has already paid taxes at the shibosi in Mingzhou and received a permit to sail.” It also lists the names of Li Chong and his crew of sixty-nine, and mentions the cargo, 18 Jo¯jin (1011–81): A priest of the Tendai school in the late Heian period. He became a monk at the age of seven, and went to Song China in 1072 at the age of 62, where he visited Mt. Tiantai in Zhejiang and Mt. Wutai in Shanxi, and was highly revered by both the government and people in the Song capital, Bianliang (present day Kaifeng, in Henan). Record of a Pilgrimage to Mt. Tiantai and Mt. Wutai, which is a diary of his voyage to and sojourn in China, was entrusted to a traveler returning to Japan, who brought it back. Jo¯ji himself died of illness in China, without returning to Japan. 19 Cho¯ya gunsai: Compiled by the mathematician Miyoshi Tameyasu, with an introduction from 1116, but with later additions. An important historical document containing Heian period official writings.

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including forty rolls of inlaid work, ten rolls of raw silk, and twenty rolls of figured silk. Japanese records are not the only historical documents revealing the activities of sea merchants in the Song dynasty. The names of many Chinese traders are also found in the Koryo sa, which is the record of the Koryo dynasty that came to power in the Korean peninsula. In the Koryo sa, the names of Chinese are frequently recorded as ‘Song shang’ or ‘Song dugang.’20 In either case, geography suggests that they had come to Koryo by ship, and they were surely Song dynasty sea merchants. Looking at mentions of Chinese sea merchants in the Koryo sa, we find that many are listed just as Chinese merchants, without giving their place of origin. The table lists only those where the place of origin is stated. Based on the few cases where the place of origin is stated, most of the sea merchants were from Quanzhou in Fujian, and Mingzhou (Ningbo) or Taizhou in Zhejiang, in other words from the present day provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian. It is also known that some Chinese sea merchants made regular trips between China and Koryo over several years. These various Song dynasty sea merchants sailed repeatedly to Koryo with goods for trade and took Koryo-made products back to China. The trade items taken from Song China to Koryo included new learning and culture, such as the Chinese Taiping yulan21 and other publications.

D.

Sea Merchants, Pirates, and Trade Supervisors in the Southern Song

When the Northern Song fell in 1126 and the Jin army advanced south, the Imperial family fled to Jiangnan and re-established the Southern Song dynasty with their provisional capital of Lin’an in Hangzhou. The Southern Song era saw development spread to the south of China, as the area under Song control was to the south of the Yangtze and as its capital was in Hangzhou, in the coastal part of

20 dugang: Particularly interesting entries give the titles dugang and gangshou. The authority on the history of Song dynasty commerce, Shiba Yoshinobu, has written of dugang that “the representatives of trading ships coming from China are frequently described in the Koryo sa as ‘dugang Such-and-such,’ interpreting dugang to be the representatives of ships, and that gangshou ‘must have been the leaders of the crew,’” or the captain. Saeki Tomi interprets it as follows in his Gazoku kango yakkai (Understanding Classical and Colloquial Chinese): “Gangzhu: owner. Cargo is referred to as gang. This refers to cargo tied up with rope.” 21 Taiping yulan: (Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era) 1,000 volumes in 55 sections in all. An encyclopedia of the Song court, completed around 982/983, thought to have been published in woodblock print in the reign of Emperor Renzong (1022–62). It was subsequently in demand throughout East Asia. A feature of the book is its almost 1,700 types of quotations, which quote books that have not survived into the present.

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Zhejiang. The maritime activities of sea merchants in the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, on the coast south of Zhejiang, therefore increased. In July of the fourth year of the Jianyan era (1130), the Southern Song government prohibited sea merchants from Fujian, Guangdong, Huai, and Zhe from going to trade in Shandong and acting as guides for the Jin army. Sea merchants from the coast were actively engaged in maritime trade even in a time when the Jian and Southern Song were facing each other across the Huai River, as we know from the fact that powerful families in the Jiang, Zhe, and Fujian regions were ordered to bolster their defenses by conscripting armies. Quanzhou Yang Ke in dingzhi volume 6 of the Yijianzhi22 contains the following anecdote. In over ten years as a sea merchant, Yang Ke built a fortune of two million taels. Whenever he got into difficulty at sea, he would pray to the gods to save him and would vow to build temples in various places, but when land came into view he would forget his promises and not give them another thought. When he was becalmed at sea in the tenth year of the Shaoxing era (1140), a god appeared to him in a dream and admonished him for his previous insincerity. Yang Ke told the god in his dream “I am just on my way to Lin’an now,” and it is recorded that he subsequently fulfilled his promises to the gods. This story suggests that there were sea merchants who made huge profits from the maritime trade centered on Fujian and Zhejiang. An inscription from the eighth year of Shaoxing (1138) in Putian in Fujian records that Zhu Fang, a gangshou from Quanzhou, offered incense to the Xiangying Temple to pray for a safe sea voyage to Srivijaya. This is clear evidence that merchants went as far as present day Indonesia for trade. We know that the thirty years or so of the Shaoxing era (1131–62) saw the rise not only of sea merchants, but also of many pirates. According to the Songshi (History of the Song), the pirate Zhu Cong raided Guangzhou and then Quanzhou in the fifth year of Shaoxing (1135). In (intercalary) February, the pirate Chen Gan raided Leizhou. In March, the Southern Song court ordered the capture of Zhu Cong. In August, Zhu Cong surrendered to the authorities and was appointed naval commander. Han Yanzhi, eldest son of General Han Shizhong, who served with distinction in the founding of the Southern Song, was administrator of the Zhejiang region around 1174, and it is said that the seas became peaceful while he was regional administrator, as he captured alive the leader of pirates who had been engaged in pillaging there. There are frequent mentions of the appearance and subjugation 22 Yijianzhi: 180 volumes, 25 additional volumes and one further addition. Completed by Hong Mai (1132–1202) around 1198. It was compiled by Hong Mai as a collection of various unusual popular stories during his term of office as a regional official, and is an important historical source for matters not found in official compilations.

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of pirates later under the Southern Song. This presumably is partly due to the Southern Song court having its capital near the coast at Hangzhou and to its aggressive promotion of overseas trade. Among those active in Quanzhou in Fujian at the end of the Southern Song and the start of the Yuan dynasty was Pu Shougeng, mentioned earlier. Pu Shougeng’s ancestors had come to Guangzhou from somewhere near Arabia, and had apparently moved from Guangzhou to Quanzhou in his father’s generation. Pu Shougeng was appointed to the Southern Song court for his service, along with his brother, in suppressing pirates in the southern seas at the end of the Southern Song era, and was appointed Trade Supervisor (tiju shibo) in Quanzhou. As the office of trade supervisor dealt with the comings and goings of foreign ships, and consequently brought the privilege of receiving various gifts for his involvement in negotiations with foreign merchants, and as he engaged in overseas trade himself, he would have accumulated considerable wealth. When the Southern Song court collapsed a short time later, he changed his allegiance to the Yuan court that succeeded it. As the Yuan court also treated Pu Shougeng well as regional administrator for Fujian, he took steps to expand trade with invitations to the countries around the southern seas. Between the late Southern Song and the early Yuan dynasties, Pu Shougeng was active in the role of trade supervisor, overseeing foreign ships and foreign trade, for around thirty years.

E.

The Sea and the People of the Plains

In 1277, before Kublai Khan subjugated the Southern Song south of the Yangtze in 1279, the Yuan court established a shibosi, equivalent to a modern customs office, in Quanzhou. They subsequently established shibosi in Qingyuan (Ningbo), Shanghai, and Ganpu (on the coast of eastern Zhejiang), and also had them in Wenzhou (Zhejiang), Guangdong (Guangzhou), and Hangzhou. The purpose of thus establishing shibosi was to promote trade with foreign countries and consequently increase tax receipts. The shibosi issued all ships leaving or entering the harbor with official documents that were largely based on the Song dynasty system, and that detailed their destination and cargo. The law code of the Yuan court, the Yuan dian zhang, required that sea merchants pay duty at the shibosi when returning to China from foreign countries or Hainan, and provided that, if there were any concealed goods that had not been declared, these should be seized by the authorities and a heavy penalty applied.

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Quanzhou in Fujian, where the Yuan government established its first shibosi, was an important port for overseas trade at the time. This is known from mentions in Marco Polo’s23 Description of the World. For every one ship that arrives in Alexandria and other ports to sell pepper to the lands of Christendom, a hundred ships arrive in Zaytun. Judging from the volume of trade, Zaytun is undoubtedly one of the two greatest seaports in the world. (The Travels of Marco Polo volume 2, translated by Atago Matsuo, Heibonsha, p. 114)

As this quotation shows, Quanzhou, which Marco Polo calls Zaytun, was the largest port in the world in the thirteenth century, along with Alexandria in Egypt. Naturally, not only merchant ships from India and other countries to the west, but also many Chinese ships passed through it. The Mongols who founded the Yuan dynasty were people of the plains, but they were more aggressive in advancing overseas than the successive dynasties of Han Chinese. Not only did they voyage to Java and Japan, but they also transported grain paid as tax from the Jiangnan region to their capital of Dadu (Beijing) by sea rather than rowing it up the Grand Canal.

F.

South Sea Trade in the Yuan Dynasty

The Zhenla feng tu ji24 by Zhou Daguan shows that many people traveled to Southeast Asia in the Yuan period. It states that many Chinese went to Zhenla (Cambodia) because it was easy to trade there, as clothes were simple, rice was easy to come by, women were many, it was easy to build a house, and there was an abundance of daily goods. The Dao yi zhi lüe25 by Wang Dayan is an important Yuan geographical work on the countries of the southern seas, and the entries for most countries mention 23 Marco Polo (1254–1324): A Venetian merchant. He traveled with his father and uncle through central Asia to Yuan China, where he was favored by the Yuan Emperor Kublai and served the Yuan court for around fifteen years. He left from Quanzhou by sea in 1290 and arrived back in Italy in 1295. The Description of the World (The Travels of Marco Polo) is thought to be a record of Marco Polo’s account of his great journey. He is also well known for introducing Japan as “Zipang.” 24 Zhenla feng tu ji: The Mongol Zhou Daguan accompanied an embassy from the Yuan court to Cambodia in 1296 and returned to China in 1297. This is an account of what he saw and heard during his stay in Cambodia. It was written in 1297. 25 Dao yi zhi lüe: Completed in 1351, this relates the experiences of Wang Dayan, from Jiangxi, who spent several years visiting the countries of the southern seas. Its importance lies in the fact that it is said to have been composed from Wang Dayan’s actual experiences in personally visiting these countries. It is invaluable for understanding Chinese people’s knowledge of the countries of the southern seas in the Yuan dynasty. It mentions one or two hundred areas, and Ishida Michinosuke points out that the Dao yi zhi lüe already uses the terms “East” and “West” in the sense in which they were used from the Ming dynasty onwards.

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their products and the (presumably Chinese) goods for which they traded them. It is not difficult to imagine that the blue-patterned and white porcelain that was popular everywhere at that time refers to Jingdezhen porcelain, which was produced in great quantities in the Yuan dynasty. Another work that is of interest as an important historical source on the southern seas in the Yuan dynasty is the Yuan Dade nanhai zhi, remains of which are preserved in the Beijing Library and parts of which are quoted in the Yongle dadian.26 It is said to have been originally written by Chen Dazhen in 1304, and books six to ten are still extant. It is a regional gazette of present day Guangdong Province, and what is left of it includes entries on trade with countries of the southern seas. On “cargo” (bohuo) “sent to barbarian lands” it states at the beginning that “goods are sent to Shiziguo (Sri Lanka)” and that Guangzhou is a focal point for foreign ships where many treasures are to be found, listing among the treasures imported from abroad: ivory, rhinoceros horn, houding,27 pearls, coral, and tortoise shell; and mentioning among the ‘barbarian lands’ overseas: Giao Chi, Zhancheng (Champa), Zhenla, Xianguo (Siam), Danmalingguo (Tambralinga on the Malay peninsula), Sanfoqi (Srivijaya), and Shepo (Java). These were presumably places from which ships voyaged to and from Guangzhou.

IV.

Sea Merchants and Pirates in the Ming Dynasty

A.

Maritime Trade in the Ming Dynasty

The Ming court imposed a maritime ban (haijin),28 forbidding maritime trade to civilians, but permitted the visits of foreign tribute ships. It was only in the latter half of the Ming period that overseas trade by civilians became common. It was in the sixteenth century, from the Jiajing era (1522–66) onwards, that the word haijin (maritime ban) came into use. The maritime ban, conventionally described by the phrase “The Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang,29 will not 26 Yongle dadian: Compiled on the orders of Emperor Yongle. It was ordered phonetically, based on the Hong wu zheng yun, from existing works in all fields. It included works of which the originals had already been lost. Most of it was destroyed in the Second Opium War. 27 houding: Thought to be the skull of a water bird the size of a peacock or a bird similar to a crane. Used to make ornaments. 28 Maritime ban: This was a policy of restricting or prohibiting voyages or activities at sea by ships in China, but these were often imposed to maintain order or prevent smuggling for political reasons, or to prevent disputes with foreign countries. The chief instances of this policy were the haijin policy imposed for almost the whole of the Ming dynasty, and the qianjieling ban announced by the Qing government to deal with Koxinga in Taiwan. 29 Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98): The Emperor Hongwu, first emperor of the Ming dynasty. He made his capital in Nanjing, laying the foundation for 250 years of Ming rule.

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permit a single ship’s timber to set sail,” was not established at a stroke. In 1371, when he discovered that Li Xing and Li Chun, who were in command of the Xinghua guards in Fujian, were secretly employing others to engage in overseas trade, the Emperor Hongwu ordered the dadu dufu30 to ban all coastal troops from engaging in overseas trade. In 1381, he also banned the populace along the coast from trading with foreign countries. Then in 1394, Emperor Hongwu cut off travel with overseas countries on the grounds of frequent counterfeiting, and allowed tribute only from the Ryu¯kyu¯s, Zhenla (Cambodia), and Xianluo (Siam). He also strictly prohibited not only the coastal people’s frequent journeys abroad to trade spices, but also their invitation of foreigners for immoral purposes. Thus, the Da Minglü compiled in 1397 provided for laws forbidding secret trips abroad and illegal journeys overseas; in particular, the construction of illegally large ships, with two or more masts, journeys abroad to trade with cargos of goods prohibited from export, and conspiring with pirates were strictly forbidden. While it prohibited the Chinese populace from traveling overseas for the sake of envoys coming from abroad, it established a method to confirm the authenticity of envoys in 1383 by providing authentication documents for three countries that brought tribute to China: Xianluo, Zhancheng (Champa), and Zhenla. These countries were identified as having come to bring tribute out of devotion to the Chinese emperor. They were each enfeoffed by the Emperor Hongwu as the kings of Xianluo, Zhancheng, and Zhenla, and treated as the official envoys of their countries. The imperial gifts bestowed in return for their tribute provided these countries with their only opportunity to obtain Chinese products. However, Emperor Hongwu’s limited relations with overseas countries were greatly changed by the later Emperor Yongle. Emperor Yongle dispatched the eunuch Zheng He31 to countries overseas and welcomed tribute from many more countries. Japan was one of these countries, and in 1404, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu was enfeoffed as the king of Japan, Yuan Dao Yi; tribute trade with the Ming court began with his dispatch of tribute ships. Countries were not free to send tribute ships whenever they chose; there were times for sending tribute (gongqi) set by the Ming court. Different times were set for each country: once per year, once every two years, once in ten years, and so on. One tribute per year was possible, as in the case of Koryo/Korea. The Kingdom of the Ryu¯kyu¯s sent tribute once every two years. Japan was only allowed to send 30 dadu dufu: The highest military body established in the Ming dynasty, with the power to control the army. 31 Zheng He: A Muslim from Yunnan, who is said to have become a eunuch of the Emperor Yongle after King Yan when the Ming army subdued Yunnan around 1382. He made seven voyages to the southern seas after the Emperor Yongle succeeded to the throne in 1405.

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tribute once every ten years. There was also a tribute route stipulating the place at which China could be entered when bringing tribute. For Southeast Asian countries, this was Guangzhou, for the Ryu¯kyu¯s it was originally Quanzhou in Fujian, but this was later changed to Fuzhou, which it remained until the Qing period. For Japan it was Ningbo in Zhejiang. Countries that brought tribute overland also had a designated point of entry. In the case of Korea, after the capital was moved to Beijing, entry to China was near the mouth of the Yalu River, and the designated route ran through Liaoyang in present day Liaoning Province, along the coast of the Bohai Sea and to Beijing via Shanhaiguan. In charge of their first entry to China from overseas were the Ming shibosi, who judged the validity of the authentication documents provided in advance by China and brought by the tribute bearers of each country. Items presented as tribute to the Ming emperors were gongwu (tribute), which were designated for each country. From Japan, they included horses, armor, short swords, and sulphur, while from the Ryu¯kyu¯s they included horses and sulphur and Southeast Asian spices such as costus root, cloves, and pepper. Siam’s included ivory, rhinoceros horn, and peacock feathers, and specialties of each country were designated as tribute. The gifts given by the Ming emperors in return for the offering of tribute were mainly high quality silk textiles, as well as products from among those offered by other countries, which were not available in the receiving country. Books were also important imperial gifts. In the Yongle era, apart from silk textiles, Japan received gold and silver, antiques, and pictures and books.

B.

Pirates and Wokou in the Ming Dynasty

References to the wokou (Japanese pirates) who attacked coastal regions of Ming China can be found almost throughout the Ming period. Looking particularly at records of attacks by wokou, their main targets were from the Korean peninsula to the northern coastal regions of the Chinese mainland in the early Ming period. In the second half of the period, from the Jiajing era onwards, there are reports of them attacking Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and southwards to Fujian and Guangdong. Records frequently show that wokou and pirates were associated with each other. One of the reasons for the appearance of Japanese pirates in the Jiajing era, as given in the entry for 6 April in the thirty-fifth year of Jiajing (1556) in the Shizong shilu, is that Wang Zhi, Mao Haifeng and others led bands of pirates on raids because they were unable to make great profits due to the severity of the maritime ban. It theorizes that another reason was that famine in Japan had caused the price of rice to rise and people were suffering from starvation, while pillaging was rife, but the rulers of Japan were unaware of this. As this analysis

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indicates, this clearly coincided with a rise in demand for maritime and overseas trade among the Chinese population in the coastal regions. Japanese pirates appeared during the rule of Ashikaga Yoshiteru,32 the thirteenth shogun of the Muromachi bakufu, reflecting the fact that the authority of the Muromachi bakufu had collapsed, and that warring daimyos had divided up the country. It is difficult to distinguish between wokou and pirates in this period. The historical terminology beilu nanwo (Mongols in the north and Japanese pirates in the south) that has been used in the past results from nanwo and wokou having been studied in terms of Japanese history or the history of Sino-Japanese relations. However, since Ming era pirates are indivisible from wokou, as explained above, research on wokou needs to be refocused in terms of the history of maritime East Asia and the history of the East and South China Seas.

C.

The Reality of Chinese Pirates in the Ming Dynasty

Where did most periods in the Ming period originate? Did the people especially in the coastal regions seek a living at sea and overseas because they were unable to bear the burden of heavy taxation? Or were they ex-officials forced out of the Ming political system at the time, and other dissatisfied elements? Which coastal regions were most involved, for example, merchants from Fujian? I shall illustrate what they were actually like mainly from records in the most fundamental historical source for the Ming dynasty, the Ming shi lu (Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty). According to an entry for 19 August in the twenty-fourth year of Hongwu (1391) in the Taizu shi lu within the Ming shi lu, the pirate Zhang Ama carried out a raid with a band of Japanese barbarians, but government forces repelled them. It is recorded that Zhang Ama was a scoundrel from Huangyan County in the district of Taizhou in Zhejiang, who was a frequent visitor to Japan and led other gangs to ravage the coast, bringing great misery to people on the coast. This Zhang Ama must be the first pirate known in the Ming period. As is recorded in the Records, he was a dissolute man from Huangyan County in the district of Taizhou in Zhejiang. The men Zhang Ama used as his accomplices were clearly gangs of Japanese pirates. This is because he is said to have had constant contact 32 Ashikaga Yoshiteru (ruled 1546–65): Thirteenth shogun of the Muromachi bakufu. Eldest son of the twelfth shogun, Yoshiharu. He succeeded his father as shogun when the authority ¯ nin War, and was shogun in name only, of the Ashikaga shogunate had slipped following the O as his father Yoshiharu had ceded power to the Kanrei Hosokawa Takakuni, and Yoshiteru’s rule was a time when the power of the Hosokawa Kanrei was growing, as was that of the Miki and Matsunaga families.

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with Japan. This shows that there were close connections between what the Ming called wokou and Chinese pirates. In 1407, Chen Zuyi, a pirate from Jiugang (Palembang) was taken by the eunuch Zheng He, who had been sent to the West. Chen Zuyi, who had been captured alive, was sent to the capital and sentenced to death. He was a Chinese pirate who had laid waste to the southern seas. In 1449, Chen Wanning, a pirate from Fujian, attacked Chaoyang County, on the coast northeast of Guangdong. Chen Wanning had lured people from the coast of southern Fujian and Chaozhou to go to sea with him and engage in piracy.

D.

The Expansion of Trade in the South China Sea

In the first year of the Longqing era (1567–72), when the Governor of Fujian, Tu Zemin, sought to trade with the countries of Southeast Asia—except for Japan, which was seen as the ringleader of the wokou—the maritime ban was relaxed and overseas trade flourished. The number of Chinese ships venturing to Southeast Asia, especially in the second half of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries, grew from fifty in around 1567 to eighty-eight in 1589, one hundred in 1592, and 137 in 1597. This subsequently grew to forty per year from Fujian alone by 1612. Forty-three ships are recorded for 1628. Thus, dozens of Chinese merchant ships were traveling to Southeast Asia every year. The destinations for Chinese merchants from the coast, principally Fujian, were port cities in Luzon in the Philippines, the Moluccas, the Indonesian archipelago, and the Malay peninsula, where they traveled to trade. In these island ports they encountered trading ships from Europe, which was entering its socalled Great Age of Sail. One of the best known ports at the time, Bantam (Xiagang) in the east of Java, was known for the visits of Dutch and British ships seeking to import raw and woven silk and other Chinese products brought there by visiting Chinese vessels. In 1623 a sea merchant from Fujian went trading, as he did every year, in the Kingdom of Dani (Sultanate of Pattani) on the east coast of the Malay peninsula, in what is now Thailand, and in Java in Indonesia. The merchant, Pan Xiu, met a Dutchman in Pattani and recommended him to trade in the Penghu Islands west of Taiwan. The Dutchman therefore tried to trade with Chinese in Penghu, but was rejected by the Ming authorities.

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V.

Sea Merchants and Pirates in the Qing Dynasty

A.

Maritime Trade in the Qing Dynasty

Overseas trade in the Qing dynasty was characterized by greater entrenchment, compared to the Ming period, of the countries with which coastal merchants traded. Chinese merchants ventured abroad with large volumes of Chinese goods designed to satisfy the demands of the countries with which they traded. The cargo of a Chinese merchant vessel that reached Singapore from Xiamen in 1824 included around 660,000 pieces of porcelain of thirty-two kinds, 10,000 floor tiles, 200 coping stones, 15,000 paper umbrellas, confectionery, dried foods, silk products, tobacco, pickled vegetables, cotton, and tea, while the cargo of another Chinese merchant vessel that visited Nagasaki at the same time consisted almost entirely of drapery, sugar, and medicine. In the case of Singapore, these were mostly goods for the huaqiao33 (overseas Chinese) living there, building materials, and ordinary tableware, foodstuffs, and fancy goods, without which the lives of the local Chinese would clearly have been difficult, while in the case of Japan they were so-called hakuraihin (imported goods) and luxury goods. Trade that had been irregular in the Ming period became regular and frequent in the Qing. This was also why Japanese who had been shipwrecked in various parts of Southeast Asia were able to make their way back to Japan. As Chinese merchant ships frequently visited the islands in the South China Sea and elsewhere, shipwrecked Japanese went with them when they returned to China proper and were taken from their port of arrival to ports from which ships departed to Japan. A broad network had been built up by Chinese merchants, which allowed Japanese to return on ships going to Japan. This network developed not only for overseas trade, but also as a coastal trading network. Along the coast of the Chinese mainland, sailing ships from Tianjin and Shandong in the north, sand junks from the vicinity of Shanghai, ningchuan from Ningbo, and niaochuan34 from Fujian traversed the Bohai, Yellow Sea, East Sea (East China Sea), Taiwan Straits, South Sea (South China Sea) and other seas, engaged mostly in the transport of goods. 33 huaqiao: A word that came into use at the end of the nineteenth century, meaning Chinese, or people of Chinese descent, who had moved or were staying abroad. Qiao suggests temporary settlement, and recently the terms huaqiao and huaren have become more widely used (huaren refers to foreign nationals of Chinese origin). 34 niaochuan (bird boats): Ocean-going sailing ships developed mostly in the coastal areas of Fujian from the end of the Ming dynasty onwards. In the Qing period increasingly large ships were used, and the niaochuan that went to Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Edo period for the Nagasaki trade carried a large amount of cargo and crews of over one hundred. They seem to have been so called because, as they floated on the sea, they resembled resting birds.

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There were also ports that linked this coastal activity with overseas trade. A good example is Zhapu in Zhejiang, which specialized in trade with Japan. Chinese sugar imported into Japan was produced in southern Fujian or at Chaozhou in southeast Guangdong, and in the first half of the Edo period it was shipped directly from these locations to Nagasaki. From the mid-Edo period onwards, Zhapu became a base for trade with Japan, and sugar was brought by coastal trading boats to Zhapu, from where it was exported on specialist ships for the Japan trade.

B.

Chinese Sailing Ships in the Qing Dynasty

Thus, in the Qing dynasty, there was a flourishing of maritime activity that had not been seen in Chinese history before. In particular, coastal transport and overseas transport were seen to be integrated, with a network developing throughout almost all the coastal regions of the Chinese mainland. Sea transport in these regions was carried out by Chinese sailing ships. Coastal and ocean-going ships sailed these waters. Their names reflected the contemporary construction of the ships: the weichuan found mostly in Tianjin, the shachuan (sand junks) that were based in Shanghai south of the Yangtze and that plied the northern coastal waters, the ningchuan that traveled to northern waters from Ningbo in Zhejiang, and the ocean-going niaochuan that were mostly from Fujian and were found in all sea areas. Some of these also visited Nagasaki, and they were often seen in commemorative photographs taken by visitors to Nagasaki and in the Nagasaki hanga that were used as postcards. As maritime activity flourished using these sailing ships, some who were unable to participate in their commercial activities pursued illegal activities at sea, and pirates made an appearance. The areas where pirates made their bases were the coastal islands from the Zhoushan archipelago to Wenzhou in Zhejiang, and islands along the coast from Fujian to Guangdong, while the range of their activities extended over the whole coast of mainland China. The names of many pirates throughout the Qing period are known, but the most famous was Cai Qian, from Dong’an County in Fujian, who appeared in the Jiaqing era. He grew to be a rebel who caused considerable trouble to the Qing government, tried to occupy Taiwan, and almost made a maritime empire for himself.

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Piracy in the Qing Dynasty

Who looked enviously on these ships that crisscrossed the oceans, as described above? Of course there must have been people who targeted the merchant ships laden with treasure. At the start of the Qing dynasty, any political forces who opposed the Qing, such as Koxinga, were called pirates. However, apart from these forces, there were also true pirates, known as haidao or yangdao. In the first year of the Yongzheng era (1723), Guangdong and Fujian had the most pirates, followed by Zhejiang. Within Guangdong, Chaozhou on the northeast coast and Huizhou on the central coast were problem areas for piracy. Places on the coast of Jiangnan and Zhejiang where pirate boats congregated were the islands scattered where Jinshan and the ocean side of Huaniao meet Xiabashan and Yangqushan, which belong to Zhejiang. This is where present day Hangzhou Bay meets the East China Sea. These were all places where it was difficult for the eyes of the government to see, located as they are on the provincial border of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Gao Qidao’s report to the Emperor Yongzheng dated 21 April in the sixth year of Yongzheng (1728) reads: “The Nan’ao area is most important and is the entry and exit point for pirates from Guangdong and Fujian. It will allow us to search the area thoroughly and block off the entrance for pirate ships, and to search out the pirates’ hideaways.” The Nan’ao Islands were a good place to escape from the authorities, as they are made up of a complex series of islands. Towards the end of the Qianlong era frequent mention is made of yangdao as pirates who terrorized the seas. Recent pirates are mostly gathered on islands at sea, and investigations into the criminals Wang Kunshan and Wang Masheng, who were arrested in Zhejiang and Guangdong, have shown that they are originally from Fujian. It is currently difficult to investigate all of the islands in the short term. However, the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou regions in Fujian are places where pirates frequently appear, and laws must be established to prohibit them. (Qianlong shang yu dang, Vol. 15, p. 29)

This shows that around the fifty-fourth year of Qianlong (1789) pirates known as yangdao made frequent appearances in the seas from Zhejiang to Guangzhou. An edict dated 7 April in the fifty-sixth year of Qianlong (1791) shows that bandits appeared in the seas off Jinzhou in Shengjing, who turned out to be from Fujian. Damage from raids at sea off Jinzhou and Gaizhou was very costly, and since the pirates were originally from Fujian, it was deduced that they had local guides throughout Jinzhou and Gaizhou. Pirates were also found on the coast of the Bohai, in the northeast. The remote cause was said to be the coastal activity of Fujian merchants.

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According to an edict dated 2 March in the fifty-sixth year of Qianlong, bandits appeared at sea throughout Zhejiang and Fujian, not only attacking merchant vessels, but even attacking a naval patrol boat on patrol in the area. These pirates were all people from coastal regions, who were short-tempered by nature, and as the regional administrators had been unable to change them or show leadership, they had turned bad and become people who were only too willing to break the law. An important function of the navy was originally to suppress piracy, and it had been successful in this, but there were those in the navy who illegally sold weapons to pirates. As mentioned already, the members of pirate gangs had local characteristics from their places of origin. An edict for 18 March in the fifty-sixth year of Qianlong mentions four huodao, including Gao Zao, captured by a Zhejiang patrol boat, and the daoshou (pirate leader) Lin Qi and twenty-eight huodao, including Chen Qiu, from Fujian, as well as more than twenty yangdao. As the mention in this edict shows, there were pirates known as daoshou and huodao. This shows that pirate gangs had an order of precedence, with pirate leaders known as shoudao and their subordinates known as huodao, with the addition of huo meaning “comrade.”

VI.

Conclusion

In Relations Between Taiwan and Southern China, Current Institutions and Future Strategy, compiled in the sixth year of Taisho¯ (1917) by the Police Headquarters in the Welfare Department of the Governor General’s Office of Taiwan, Part 1 Chapter 3, “The Control of Piracy and Relations with Southern China” states that pirates operating in the coastal regions of southern China were frequently seen in the seas around Taiwan, especially in the Taiwan Straits, attacking ships, and engaging in brutal activities that terrorized the inhabitants. Pirates appeared in the summer to take advantage of the seasonal winds, and every year between June and September they attacked ships sailing the coast of Taiwan or traveling between Taiwan and the mainland. In terms of the pirates’ origin, it was reported that the most brutal were “those based in the regions of Xiaoxi, Meizhou, Da Niaogui, Xiao Niaogui, and Nanridao” along the coast of Fujian. It is clear that the activities of pirates were also a problem in Taiwan under Japanese rule. The same book also mentions forty-one cases of pirate attacks in the Taiwan Straits and elsewhere. The earliest case is from 6 June 1898, when a Taiwanese ship, the Shunwanyi, was attacked by pirates. The ship was suddenly ordered to stop in mid voyage and, in addition to the killing of one crew member and serious injuries to two others, 190 koku of brown rice and various articles were stolen.

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When the Taiwanese Xinrifa was attacked by pirates on 24 June Taisho¯ 4 (1915), “127 bags of rice, thirty hakamas, five coils of rope, one lock, three sails, two yen and forty sen in cash, with an estimated value of over 650 yen” were plundered from onboard. The pirate ship that attacked the Xinrifa was a three-masted sailing junk with a capacity of around three hundred koku, painted red above and white below. On 3 September Taisho¯ 5 (1916), the Taiwanese ship, Jinlianmei, was attacked by three pirate ships at sea off the Chinese mainland; the pirates stole its cargo of timber worth 1,167 yen 98 sen at the time, as well as the crew’s clothing worth 402 yen, and also the ship and its fittings worth 2,716 yen and 50 sen. I have discussed the questions of Chinese sea merchants and pirates, and what is clear throughout is that, although it has received little treatment in studies of Chinese history to date, the people of China have left many traces of their involvement with coastal waters and the high seas. The history of the coastal regions of mainland China, from Liaoning in the north to Hebei, Tianjin, Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and Hainan cannot be told without mentioning their relationship with the sea. Current and future economic development is intimately connected with the sea. The inland provinces adjacent to these also affect, and are affected by, the sea to some extent. Sea merchants have been responsible for one part of economic activity in the coastal regions, and the wealth they have brought from overseas has contributed to the economic development of China. From overseas, Chinese sea merchants brought back spices, silver, rice, dried goods, and marine products. In return, to countries overseas they took raw and woven silk, ceramics, Chinese medicine, tea, and all kinds of necessities, which many countries sought. Harming the operations of these Chinese sea merchants and sometimes living off them were the pirates, some of which were a serious problem to the government of the time. In this sense, too, China’s involvement with the sea is an indispensable angle from which to look at the country’s history. *The original title in the World History Libretto Series is Chu¯goku no kaisho¯ to kaizoku (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2003). Translated from the Japanese by Trans Factory Inc. Translation published by permission of the author.

China’s Experience of Cultural Interaction with the West

ZHOU Zhenhe

Culture Surmounting Space: Sino-Western Cultural Encounters and Adaptations from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

I.

Introduction

World history can be roughly divided into two portions: that preceding 1500 and that following 1500. In the first period, world history is made up of the histories of different regions, and in the second period, we can roughly say that disparate regions became connected and gave rise to global history. It so happened that in the fifteenth century, China in the East and Portugal (and later Spain) in the West began navigating the oceans over vast distances. Of course, compared to fleets in the West, Zheng He (1371–1433) in China had a larger, more powerful fleet and began navigating the oceans at an earlier date. Supporting his fleet was an empire that had a history of thousands of years, a territory spanning millions of square kilometers, and a population of tens of millions of people. In contrast, the ocean voyages of Portugal, organized by Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), relied on the resources of a small kingdom with a history of only 300 years, territory of only 90,000 square kilometers, and a population of only one million people. Zheng He started navigating the oceans to the west in 1405, sailing farther each time until he reached the shores of East Africa, the farthest that any Chinese fleet had ever sailed. Though through this effort Chinese culture was spatially transmitted farther than ever before, and though China could have used this brilliant achievement to become master of the seas, it abandoned the effort and let Zheng He’s accomplishment become a one-time happenstance of history. If we examine the “Da Ming hun yi tu” (Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire), made early in the Ming period (1368–1644), we can see that the Chinese already had sufficient geographical knowledge to round the southern tip of Africa and enter the Atlantic Ocean, but in the end, it failed to do so. Yet the Portuguese, starting in 1419, carefully navigated south along the African coast, proceeding farther each time until, in 1488, they rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Ten years later they finally entered the Indian Ocean. They then began colonizing the East, and in this way they in effect brought East and West into direct contact. That is, they in effect brought European culture and Asian culture centered

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around China into direct contact, causing culture to surmount the barriers of space. Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) once said, “It is precisely the wicked passions of man—greed and lust for power—which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development” (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, sec. III). This truly captures the events of the age of navigation.

II.

Cultural Interaction between China and Catholic Nations

From the sixteenth century, Western diplomats, navigators, merchants, and missionaries came east, searching for a way to enter China. Until the early nineteenth century, all such diplomatic missions—whether from Portugal, Spain, Holland, or England—all ended in failure. Only merchants and missionaries obtained a measure of success, and the missionaries in particular contributed greatly to cultural exchange between China and the West. In 1583 the Jesuits Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) arrived in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, and established the church Xianhuasi to spread the Catholic religion. Later Ricci gradually made his way north to Beijing. The Jesuits sought to spread Catholicism among the literati, and though they did not develop many converts, in terms of the quality of their converts, they were quite successful. Their success was due to their adaptive tactics and their use of science to propagate Catholicism. Their adaptive tactics extended to not only learning Chinese and adopting their converts’ respect for Confucianism and worship of ancestors, but also to cartography. In drawing maps of the world, they did not draw the meridian in the center, as in European maps, but rather made the 180 degree latitude the center. In this way they made China the center of the world, and thus appeased the sensibilities of Chinese literati. Such adaptive tactics later came to be called “Ricci practice” (Li Madou guiju). Most people think that religion and science contradict one another; they hardly realize that science can be used to show God’s glory. It was just in this fashion that Ricci and other Jesuits could convert such intellectuals as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), Li Zhizao (1565–1630), and Yang Tingyun (1557–1628). And most people suppose that these men converted to Catholicism because they were depressed at a low point in their careers. Little do they know that science played a large role in their conversion. Xu Guangqi thought that everyone should study Jihe yuanben (a partial Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry). Euclid’s Elements is a mathematics book. (It was no ordinary book of mathematics, of course. In the West, only the Bible is reputed to have had more copies printed.) Why should everyone study it? The answer is simple: the geometry contained in this work was a discipline lacking in China. Geometry is the study of

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forms; algebra is a form of arithmetic. In premodern China, algebra was quite advanced, whereas geometry was nonexistent. This fact must have given educated men like Xu Guangqi a great intellectual shock. Even such a rich culture as that of traditional China had its shortcomings. Hence, geometry was not just for specialists but for everyone, since it involved the study of new culture. At this point it is natural to think that the religion of the missionaries who introduced this new culture also has its progressive points. This, I think, is the primary reason that Xu Guangqi converted to Catholicism. Some people think that he turned to religion because he was unsuccessful in the civil-service exams, but this, I fear, misses the key point. Li Zhizao’s case is similar. When he was young, Li liked drawing maps of the world, but the maps that he drew were limited to the fifteen provinces of the Ming empire. Only when he saw Matteo Ricci’s “Shan hai yu di quan tu” (Complete map of the geography of mountains and seas) did he realize that his “world maps” comprised only a small portion of the world. He too received a great intellectual shock. After Feng Yingjing, a man of lesser status, saw Ricci’s world map, his firm belief that “the enlightenment of the sages extends widely without limits” (sheng jiao guang bei, wu yuan fu jie) was cast into doubt, and he came to realize that the places he enumerated as having received the influence of Chinese culture amounted to no more than one-fifth of the world. Wang Zheng, who had a keen interest in Western instruments, reacted deeply also to Western thought, later recalling with emotion how many matters and many passages struck him to the core. Of course, Matteo Ricci entered China at an opportune time, a time of great changes. At the time, many Chinese literati had already assimilated the Wang Yangming school of the mind (xinxue) and began to regard their own solipsistic notions of right and wrong as right and wrong per se and no longer adhered to Confucius’s doctrines of right and wrong. Under such circumstances, it was relatively easy for the literati to accept the advanced aspects of foreign thought. The Chinese, from the beginning, have not had a profound understanding of religion. After Buddhism came to China, some people could believe in Buddhism. And after Christianity came to China, some people could believe in Christianity. In this regard, Christianity is no different than Buddhism. In historical research, why is it regarded as natural that medieval Chinese believed in Buddha, while it is surprising that late Ming literati believed in Christianity? In those days, believing in a religion merely meant accepting the culture that the religion represented; it did not mean abandoning one’s own culture. This is precisely what Xu Guangqi meant by “substituting Buddhism to supplement Confucianism” (yi fo bu ru). There were, of course, Chinese literati who identified with Western science but who certainly did not believe in Christianity. The late Qing (1644–1911) scholar Guan Xiaoyi was just such a man. But Xu, Li, and Yang of the late Ming, were hardly Westernized just because they believed in Christianity. They were still

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Confucians at heart; it is just that they were Confucians who also accepted new thought from the West. To take this line of thought a little further, because Chinese culture is vast, ancient, and continuous, it can naturally accept foreign culture and transform it into Chinese culture. Did not Indian Buddhism become transformed into the Chan sect of Buddhism in China? This, of course, depends on the amount of time. As a worthy of the past said, we have feasted at the table of Buddhism for over a thousand years. But this was not Christianity’s fate. The Nestorian Christianity (Jingjiao) of the Tang period (618–907) and the Nestorian Christianity (Yelikewenjiao) of the Yuan period (1279–1368) were but transitory flowerings of Christianity. Properly calculated from late in the Ming period (1368–1644), Christianity has only a 400-year history in China. It is still being assimilated into Chinese culture. Not only did Chinese literati come to understand European culture through Catholic missionaries, European intellectuals also gleaned a smattering of Chinese culture through the letters and books of Catholic missionaries. The Catholic missionaries who came to China directly experienced Chinese culture, but the European intellectuals who depended on hearsay were at a remove from China, and among them the same information could give rise to approbation and disapprobation. Those who exalted China either sincerely did so, or they borrowed another man’s wine cup to drown their own sorrows, that is, they glorified Chinese culture to express opposition to the European order of the time. Those who disapproved of Chinese culture regarded European culture as the normal form of historical development and viewed Chinese culture as an oddity. Regardless of how the two sides viewed each other, the undeniable fact is that Chinese culture and Western culture could surmount the limitations of space because of the efforts of Catholic missionaries, and because both sides adapted to one another. Adaptation is a cultural phenomena worthy of attention in the study of Sino-Western cultural interaction. Adaptive strategies were the great discovery of the Jesuits. And in the case of an advanced culture like China—with its completely different language, ethical system, political model, and territorial scale—how to adapt seems even more important. The Qing Kangxi emperor clearly demanded of the missionaries that they follow Ricci practice, which in effect meant adapting to Chinese culture. This demand, once issued, was generally complied with, but doing so later gave rise to a confrontation over etiquette that ended up causing a rupture between the Vatican and the Qing court. In reaction to the pope’s resistance, the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors restricted the influence of the Catholic missionaries to the court, thus reducing many famous missionaries to service at court. Later even this sort of influence at court came to an end. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, spreading Catholicism among commoners went underground and waned. The period of

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Sino-Western cultural encounters and adaptations mediated by Catholic missionaries thus drew to a close.

III.

Cultural Interaction between China and Protestant Nations

After the seventeenth century, Portugal and Spain gradually declined. Replacing them on the high seas were the two Protestant nations of Holland and England. The Protestant nations were not as serious about propagating religion as the Catholic nations. They sought national economic profit, specifically, the profit of holding companies organized by merchants in their nations. In 1793 a British delegation headed by George Macartney (1737–1806) came to China, and though it did not accomplish its objective, free trade, it did manage to use this opportunity to see what the Qing empire was really like. The British came by sea and left by inland waterways, gaining a thorough view of a declining empire. The British then bided their time for several decades, provoking several diplomatic failures and thereby laying the ground for using extraordinary measures. That opportunity came half a century later in 1842, when, after the Opium War, the British forced the Qing empire to sign a humiliating treaty and open itself up to trade at five ports. In fact, even as early as the late sixteenth century, some Spaniards thought that the Ming empire could not withstand an attack, even though on the surface it appeared at the time to be a great state. Today in China some scholars still extol the prosperity of the Kangxi (1662–1722) to Qianlong (1736–1796) period. In the West, some scholars still show that down to the eighteenth century China was economically the most capable nation in the world. They fail to see that the sun was setting on China, that China’s glory was but the afterglow of the setting sun. Hence, in the nineteenth century, Sino-Western cultural interaction had a different character than that of the previous three centuries. Another year worthy of note is 1807. That was the year when Robert Morrison (1782–1834), of the London Missionary Society, came to China. This was the beginning of direct contact between Protestant Christianity and Chinese culture. Though on the whole the Protestant missionaries were not of the high caliber of the Catholic missionaries of the late Ming and later, they did engage in cultural activities associated with proselytizing in southeast China and in Chinese settlements in Southeast Asia prior to the Opium War. Such cultural activities included establishing a modern news industry, introducing Western science and technology, and creating new modern vocabulary in Chinese. Even after the Opium War there were still some outstanding missionaries, such as Alexander Wylie (1815–1887) and John Fryer (1839–1928), who contributed considerably to Sino-Western cultural exchange. The culture introduced from the West included not only science and technology but also politics, law, society, and the human-

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ities. But because most of the Protestant missionaries and the new round of Catholic missionaries came to China accompanied by guns and cannons, Chinese officials and commoners alike were naturally repulsed by them. In addition, many missionaries were of low caliber. Their forgetting their high-minded principles at the sight of profits and their disdain for the decline in Chinese society often gave rise to conflict in Sino-Western cultural encounters, which in turn frequently resulted in law suits against the churches in the late Qing. In other quarters, because all types of Westerners swarmed into China after the Opium War, Sino-Western cultural conflicts occurred not just between missionaries and the Chinese. All sorts of Western material culture, social organization, and thought came pouring into China, greatly influencing China’s modernization in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

IV.

The Rise of Sinology in the West and Western Studies in China

Another important result of Sino-Western encounters in the nineteenth century was the rise of the discipline of Sinology in the West. France’s establishing lectures in Sinology in 1814 marked the beginning of steady progress in the European discipline of Sinology and laid the foundation for today’s Western Sinology and China studies. This is quite distinct from Chinoiserie, the appeal of Chinese tastes in art that flared in Europe at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Sinology is not a set of aesthetic tastes; rather, it is a proper field of study. In the 1980s I once had a brief conversation with a Western Sinologist in which I asked him, “Do you study Sinology because you love China?” He straightforwardly replied, “No, I study Sinology as a field of learning.” This answer can leave one a little disappointed, but one must say that it is the proper attitude for pursuing a field of study. In the twentieth century Sinology continued to develop, grew into a flourishing field, and became an established discipline. Just the studies related to Catholicism on the website EUCHINA are enough to amaze one. Not only that, even the history of Sinology has become a specialized field of study and is attracting more and more scholars. And even past seemingly unimportant topics in the history of Sino-Western cultural relations have begun to attract attention from scholars. The Sino-Portuguese blends and Sino-English blends that arose from Sino-Western linguistic interaction, an obvious example of Sino-Western adaptation in the area of linguistics, also began to be studied in the twentieth century. Studying the great increase in new Chinese vocabulary since the late Ming dynasty as a result of Sino-Western cultural encounters involves research into linguistic contacts among China, Japan, and Europe, and such research too has gradually developed into a field of study.

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The development of new fields of history in the twentieth century enabled Chinese and Western scholars nearly simultaneously to produce scientific research in such fields as the history of Sino-Western relations, the history of SinoWestern communications, and the history of Sino-Western cultural exchange. Not only were specialized fields of history developed; there was also remarkable progress in the division of history into periods, the spread of specialized topics, the adoption of new perspectives, the creation of new theories, archival discoveries, exhaustive bibliographic searches, and so on. Owing to these developments, the history of Sino-Western cultural relations from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries is an inexhaustible topic of conversation, an area of research with limitless vistas, and a field of scientific research with great potential for development. *Originally published as the Preface of Kuayue kongjian de wenhua: 16–19 shiji Zhong-Xi wenhua de xiangyu yu tiaoshi (Culture Surmounting Space: Chinese and Western Cultural Encounters and Adaptations from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries), edited by Fudan Daxue Lishi Dili Yanjiu Zhongxin (History and Geography Research Center, Fudan University). (Shanghai: Dongfang Chuban Zhongxin, 2010). Translated from the Chinese by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

ZHANG Xiping

Returning to a Dialog of Equals

I.

Introduction: The West’s Discovery of China

In ancient times, Eastern views of the West and Western views of the East were shrouded in myths and legends. The ancient Greeks called the Chinese “Seres” (Σῆρες, the silk people). They thought that these people “grew as tall as thirteen podes (feet),”* “live to be over two hundred years old,” and “have skin as thick as the hide of a hippopotamus, which hence is impervious to arrows.” Thus, the Chinese, in the eyes of the ancient Greeks, were super human. The “Guyue pian” (Chapter on Ancient Music) of Lü-shi chunqiu (Mr. Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals), “Wanghui jie” (Presentation of Tribute to the King) in Yi Zhou shu (The Unincluded Book of Zhou), and other pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) works indicate that our forbearers had some acquaintance with the West. For example, in the Shanhai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), men of the western regions are described as “outwardly appearing like men, but with leopard tails and tiger teeth.” From this, one can see that to Chinese eyes, Westerners of those times also appeared as superhuman. During this plodding, dark period of history, when all that linked East and West were caravans of camels traveling over the vast desert expanses, intercourse between East and West was mostly limited to the exchange of implements. During the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), traffic between East and West flowed freely, and the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (c.1254–1324) came to China and was an honored guest of the great khan. It is said that he was sent to Yangzhou to serve as a “father-and-mother official” (fumu guan) for a few years. Yet his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, a work that startled the Western world, mentions not once either Confucius or Confucianism. No wonder that even today some doubt that he ever visited China. Perhaps, as Hegel said, in those days human self-awareness had not yet reached the stage of religion and philosophy, and hence people were not capable of engaging in exchanges of substantive thought and philosophy. The dawn of the modern world first arose on the azure oceans when Columbus —called by some a swindler, scoundrel, thief, and debaucher—began the process

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of global modernization by sailing to the New World. One of the prime motives for undertaking this great navigation of the oceans was to “find the Khitan,” to find the mystic, affluent East mentioned in The Travels of Marco Polo. Bearing a letter from Queen Isabella to the great khan, seeking to find the Khitan, and dreaming Quanzhou, with its piles of spices and swarms of junks plying the harbor, Columbus embarked on his historic voyage. Who knew that the winds of the Atlantic would take him to Cuba? Thus began the Age of Navigation and the Age of Discovery. Columbus never did reach China, but another Italian by the name of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), a Jesuit missionary who entered China in the Wanli period (1573–1619), laid the foundation for East-West exchange in the fields of religion and philosophy, and even for East-West exchange in all of modern culture. Ricci was born on October 6, 1552, in the Italian city of Macerata to an important family whose coat of arms included a hedgehog (riccio). According to the astrologers, when Matteo was born, Libra was positioned above, and Jupiter had just ascended—a sign that he was no ordinary individual. Whether or not this story is true, Ricci’s coming to China brought Eastern and Western philosophical and religious thought into contact and led to great changes in the thought of both East and West. In this regard, Fang Hao (1910– 1980) is quite correct when he says, “Matteo Ricci was the first person to bridge the cultures of East and West.” Unfortunately, in the history of East-West intellectual exchange, Ricci was an anomaly without predecessors or successors. Intellectual interaction is dialog. Only by means of intellectual dialog can cultural exchange advance at this high level.

II.

Achievements of Jesuits Who Went to China

A.

Transmission of Western Learning to the East

Ricci and the Jesuits who came to China after him accomplished two momentous achievements. One was to proffer Western learning to the East, to turn a new page in the evolution of modern Chinese thought. Ricci was the first to introduce Western astronomy to China. The compilers of Siku quanshu (Complete Library in the Four Branches of Literature) called Qiankun ti yi (On the Structure of Heaven and Earth), by Ricci and Li Zhizao (1565–1630), “the beginning of the transmission of Western learning to China.” Continuing his collaboration with Li Zhizao, the great Confucian of the late Ming, he also translated Christoph Clavius’s (1538–1612) Astrolabium as Hungai tongxian tushuo (Illustrated Explanation of the Sphere and the Astrolabe). From this point on, the Jesuits in China were mainly responsible for the introduction of Western astronomy in

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China, and for much of the Ming and Qing dynasties, they managed the Calendar Bureau. Throughout the ages, calendar science and mathematics have been inseparable. Jihe yuanben (Elements of Geometry), translated by Ricci and Xu Guangqi (1562– 1633) from Euclid’s Elements, exerted great influence in China, the most of any Western work translated by the Jesuits, according to Ruan Yuan (1764–1849). For this reason, Liang Qichao (1873–1929) later said of this work, “It is as if every character were written in gold. This work will not become stale even in a thousand years.” Generating even more interest was the map drawn by Ricci, Kunyu wanguo quantu ( 坤舆万国全图] Complete Map of the Countries of the World), which was reprinted more than twelve times during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Wanli emperor (r. 1572–1620) even used this world map as the design for a folding screen, and hence viewed it daily in his private chamber. Ricci introduced to China what appears on the surface to be pure scientific knowledge, but this scientific knowledge in fact contains within it Western cosmology and philosophy. Though the Western calendar science introduced to China was that of the Middle Ages, its theories were distinctly different from similar Chinese theories. Mathematics introduced Western scientific logical thinking to China. Western geography, the new Western conception of the world resulting from navigation, also radically altered the traditional Chinese conception of China’s place in the world. This hedgehog Ricci was very smart: science was but a means for him to spread Catholicism, which was his real purpose. As he himself said, “Especially when I was young, I occasionally dabbled in the science of calculating the paths of heavenly bodies. As tribute, I presented to the emperor some products of my country and some instruments that I brought with me. Their workmanship delighted the emperor, but this is not to say that the emperor thought that I was intimately familiar with them. I could do no more than nod in agreement. In the schools of my country, these ideas are seen as trifling. The instruments are reproduced by craftsmen. Who could know that your country, at a distance of over forty thousand kilometers, would not have these things?** What is the purpose of my braving the vast seas for three years and suffering innumerable hardships to bring them to the capital? I do this to serve the Lord and bring about his will” (“Li xiansheng fu Yu Quanbu shu” [Mr. Ricci’s Letter in Reply to Yu of the Ministry of Personnel]). Ricci and other Jesuits in China did much to transmit Western philosophical thought to China. Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi (translated as The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven) was the first work of comparative philosophy, and also the first substantive dialog, in Sino-Western cultural history. This work, full of literary color and brimming with erudition, discusses the classics and discourses about

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God. It soon received favorable mention by many literati and during the Ming and Qing dynasties was reprinted many times. For a long time some people have considered the Catholicism introduced by Ricci to be pernicious, but such thinking is superficial. Throughout the ages, the spread of religion has always been an important route for the transmission of culture. Without the translation of sutras since the time of Xuan Zang (602–664), China would not know about Indian culture. An immediate cause of Xu Guangqi’s conversion to Catholicism was that he saw a finely painted image of the Virgin Mary, but the fact is that he was also overwhelmed by Christian culture. Even today, many people think that such ancient Greek and Roman thinkers as Aristotle, Pythagoras, the Stoics, and Cicero were introduced to China during the time of the New Culture Movement (1915–1921), but that is not true. To mention just the case of Aristotle, for example, many of his works were translated into Chinese during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Giulio Alenio (1582–1649), the Jesuit missionary called “Confucius from the West,” thought that logic occupied pride of place in Western philosophy, that it was the foundation of the sciences. Francois Furtado (fl. 1636) and Li Zhizao translated a portion of Aristotle’s works on logic under the title Mingli tan (Investigation into the Principles of Names). The Belgian Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) organized the materials for the unpublished latter half of this work, added various Western works translated by other Jesuit missionaries, and published these materials under the title Qiong lixue (Philosophia), which he presented to the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722). These transmitters of Western logical thought had a great impact on traditional Chinese thought, providing a breath of fresh air in the stale intellectual climate of the Wang Yangming School-of-Mind Neo-Confucianism then in decline. During the Ming and Qing dynasties from Ricci’s coming to China to the prohibition of Catholicism under the Qianlong and Jiaqing emperors, SinoWestern cultural interaction flourished. During this time, the modern Western sciences (astronomy, calendar science, mathematics, physics, medicine, philosophy, geography) and arts (music, painting) all entered China. The scale and influence of the dissemination of Western culture was unprecedented in Chinese history. Particularly striking is the attitude of the literati of that time toward Western learning. Though conservatives were not lacking in number and on occasion stirred up controversies, most intellectuals were receptive to Western learning. Ricci late in the Ming period was on good terms with over 140 literati. Nearly all important court and local officials had contact with him. Many of the literati of the time, while they neither flocked to the Western learning introduced by the Jesuits nor blindly followed it, also did not exclude it only to engage in selfabsorbed enjoyment of native culture. Rather, they adopted an impartial attitude. When it was appropriate to criticize Chinese culture, they engaged in self-ex-

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amination and open-minded learning, and when it was appropriate to acknowledge Chinese traditions, they did not engage in parochial conceit. For example, in the preface to Tongwen suan zhi (Treatise on European Arithmetic, an edited translation of Christopher Clavius’s Epitome of Practical Arithmetic), Xu Guangqi offered as one reason why the tradition of arithmetic died out in China, the fact that “Neo-Daoist scholars of logic (mingli) handled all the affairs of the world,” and saw as an advantage of Ricci’s Western learning the fact that “in presenting methods and principles, it always returns to origins and proceeds by concrete steps, eschewing all the recondite and abstruse Neo-Daoist theories.” And only by studying Western learning could China revive the lost arithmetic of the Yellow Emperor and the Duke of Zhou. Educated people of the time did not have pressing fears about Sino-Western cultural relations, as did late-Qing intellectuals, when the West set about destroying the countryside, nor did they have the sense of urgency of the elite during the May Fourth Movement. As Feng Yingjing (1555–1606), a noted scholar of the late Ming, said, “In East and West, the hearts and minds of people are the same” (preface to Jiaoyou lun [On Making Friends]). Self-confident, magnanimous—these two words sum up his attitude. This attitude contrasts clearly with the stark divisive attitude between the cultures of East and West evident during the May Fourth Movement—an attitude of their gain is our loss. Hu Shi (1891–1962), in discussing the evolution of modern Chinese thought, once said something very important: “The last three centuries of Chinese thought have tended toward finer and finer scientific precision…All of this is due to the influence of Matteo Ricci after he came to China” (“Zhongguo kaojuxue de laili” 中 国 考 据 学 的 来 历 [The Origins of Chinese Textual Criticism]). Western learning began seeping into the East; East and West came into contact. Thus did Chinese culture begin to transform itself into its modern form.

B.

Transmission of Chinese Culture to the West

The second accomplishment of Ricci and the other Jesuits in China is that they transmitted Chinese culture to the West. On account of the success of Ricci’s policy of accommodating Confucianism, the Jesuits in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties communicated well with Confucians, though there were occasional conflicts. As a result of this policy, the first order of business for new Jesuit arrivals was to learn to read, speak, and write Chinese, and this practice greatly influenced later missionaries. Ricci himself produced over twenty works in Chinese. This level of productivity far outdoes that of even the greatest Sinologist of today.

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Because these Jesuits could speak and read Chinese, they acquired an understanding of Chinese culture. The Jesuits in China over the next one or two centuries wrote letters, wrote books, and translated Chinese books into various Western languages. The Jesuits were truly remarkable for their industry, broad interests, and great success in transmitting Chinese culture to the West. They translated into the languages of the West the Analects, Classic of the Way and Its Virtue (Daodejing), Classic of Poetry (Shijing), Classic of Documents (Shujing), Records of Ritual (Liji), Mencius, Doctrine of the Mean, and Great Learning. They even translated such specialized works as Xiyuan jilu ( 洗 冤 集 录 Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified, 1247), the earliest work in China on forensic science. Most of the Jesuits who came to China were well-read erudite scholars knowledgeable about past and present, as well as experts in the humanities and sciences. After coming to China they wrote a great quantity of works on Chinese culture and science. Their Sinological works were also published in the West one after another, including Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella Cina (The Entry of the Society of Jesus and Christianity into China) by Ricci, Relação da propagação da fé no reyno da China e outros adjacentes (translated as The History of That Great and Renowned Monarchy of China) by Alvaro Semedo (1585/6–1658), Sinicæ historiæ decas prima (A History of China, Part 1) by Martino Martini (1614–1661), Doze excelências da China (translated as A New History of China) by Gabriel de Magalhães (1610–1677), and Flora Sinensis (The Flora of China) and Clavis medica ad Chinarum doctrinam de pulsibus (Medical Key to the Chinese Doctrine of the Pulse), both by Michał Boym (1612– 1659). If in the beginning their Sinological works included much secondhand and introductory material, later their scholarship attained a high level of achievement. For instance, two works by Antoine Gaubil (1689–1759), Histoire abrégée de l’astronomie chinoise (A Brief History of Chinese Astronomy) and “Traité de l’astronomie chinoise” (Treatise on Chinese Astronomy), use the dates of solar eclipses given in the Classic of Documents, Classic of Poetry, and Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) to determine the designation of Chinese dates. This method is nearly the same as one of the methods used in the contemporary Chinese Xia, Shang, Zhou Chronology Project. As a result of more than a century of Jesuit efforts under Ricci’s policy of accommodation, a new field emerged in the Western study of the East: Sinology. Sinology was truly a product of China and the West accommodating and learning from each other. Though the Jesuit introductions to Chinese culture inevitably contained inaccuracies, and though the Jesuits in China included a number of important scholastics, these facts in no way diminish their contribution to SinoWestern cultural exchange and to China. Of interest here is that the Jesuits in China, in order to show the correctness of their policy of accommodation and to gain European support for their mis-

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sionary work in China, inserted numerous passages defending Christianity in their works. But their works greatly upset the European intellectual order from the use to which they were put by progressive thinkers. The French thinker Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) highly praised China’s tolerant intellectual climate in an attack on the Church’s rejection of heretical thought. Voltaire (1694–1778) extolled Confucius’s humane attitude in criticizing the backwardness of West European culture during the Middle Ages. And Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) relied heavily on the natural rationality of Chinese philosophy in fashioning his theology. This truly was a case of unintended consequences. Misunderstandings in the reception of culture are a fascinating topic, but however the writings of the Jesuits were misunderstood, the accepted view is that the culture of the East and the intellectual climate of China were an important element in the crumbling of the West European worldview of the Middle Ages.

III.

Mutual Understanding between the East and the West

At the time, East and West were like first-time lovers, the lover seeing in his beloved a goddess. Each side studied the other according to its needs. Xu Guangqi saw the “Far West” as the ideal human society. Voltaire often thought of himself as a disciple of Confucius and revered Confucianism. At this time, relations between East and West were characterized by mutual study, mutual respect, and mutual fascination. This attitude infected even emperors and kings. The Kangxi emperor studied Western mathematics and listened to Western music, and he permitted the bannermen to practice geometry and study foreign languages. Men like Xu Guangqi and Gu Yanwu (1613–1682) read Western books and discussed calendar science and arithmetic. School-ofMind Neo-Confucianism declined and practical studies prospered as a direct result of Western studies. And in France, on the other side of the Eurasian landmass, Louis XIV kept Huang Jialüe (Arcadio Huang), a Chinese brought to France by a Jesuit missionary, at his side, and also drank Chinese tea, built a Chinese pavilion, used Chinese lacquerware, and viewed Chinese shadow plays using shadow puppets. Soon a passion for things Chinese swept over all of Europe. It was an age of mutual accommodation and mutual learning. Though there were illusions and concealment of the truth, China and the West were equal in stature, and they approached each other in a composed frame of mind. Of course, it was not an age when the birds were forever chirping in the trees. The Age of Discovery was an age of expansion of European capitalism and culture, and for most third-world nations, it was a cruel and bloody age. History continually lurches from iniquity to iniquity. A romantic view of history can neither face or explain the actual events of history. Just as capitalism has two

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aspects, so the Age of Discovery was full of contradictions. We need to emphasize the significance of the Age of Discovery because in the past we have focused on the iniquities of history and have neglected to see, in the broader sweep of history, that these great discoveries “not only overthrew the society and system of Europe of that age but also laid the foundation for complete liberation in each country” (Friedrich Engels). At the time, relations between East and West, especially relations between China and the West, were quite different from relations between the West and North and South America. The West faced a more powerful and prosperous nation and had to adopt a conciliatory policy based on equality. And many of the Jesuits in China, who came to spread Christianity, were astonished when faced with a culture much older than Christian culture, and they came to esteem it. In the midst of their study of Chinese culture, Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, using China as a means to criticize European society. In contrast, Chinese study of the West had little effect on society. After the Qianlong and Jiaqing emperors prohibited Catholicism, though there was an burst of Sinological activity during this period, the late-Qing policy of national isolation prevented such bursts of activity from greatly affecting society. As a result, the route for crossfertilization was closed off, and Chinese intellectuals failed to receive fertile stimulus from the outside. Sea routes were closed off, foreign intercourse was blocked, the emperor closed the door on all progressive elements, and as a result, a great empire was left to thoroughly decline. During this period there were, of course, some fortuitous occurrences. The Chinese Rites Controversy, for example, was an important affair marking a turning point in Sino-Western relations. On the Western side, this affair exposed the exclusivity of Christian culture and its lack of tolerance. Hans Kung, a Catholic theologian of our time, has said that among the popes’ many mistaken decisions, the greatest error was not to permit Chinese Christians to carry out Chinese rites. After four hundred years, the West has finally come to appreciate Ricci’s wisdom and the value of his policy of accommodation. On the Chinese side, China missed an opportunity to develop in step with the rest of the world. In intellectual circles, there was no Voltaire who dared to pick at the scabs of society, and China’s ancient culture became a burden holding China back. By the time that the view arose in the early Qing that Western science originated in China (Xixue Dong yuan, Mei Wending), the Chinese intellectual world had already lost its vitality. And when intellectual thought had thoroughly ossified, the nation faced a grave crisis.

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Deterioration of Sino-Western Relations

Then from 1840 on, after a hiatus of three hundred years, the tables were turned, and Sino-Western relations were the reverse of what they were before. Using compasses invented by the Chinese, Westerners aboard warships began plying the waters off the coast of China, and using gunpowder invented by the Chinese in their powerful cannons, they destroyed the fortifications of Humen, in Guangdong Province. In Nanjing, late-Qing government officials signed the first of the unequal treaties on paper invented by the Chinese. The sun was setting on the Chinese empire. There was no longer any dialog of equality. China was no longer admired by the West. The nineteenth century was the Western century, the century of the strong, the century when Westerners bullied Easterners and subjected them to force. The desperate state of affairs in the late-Qing period affected every Chinese. At this time, “national salvation” ( jiuwang tucun) and “reform” (bianfa weixin) became slogans of the Chinese nation, and the only way to accomplish these goals was to study the West. As Liang Qichao said, “We must follow Western methods to save China,” and “We must study what Westerners study.” Later in a description of the circumstances of the time, Mao Zedong said, “To save the nation, China had to reform and to study foreign nations.” Under these harsh circumstances, relations between East and West lost all sense of balance. At this critical juncture when the nation was struggling to survive, the people had no alternative but to go this route of studying the West, and this situation lasted until the May Fourth Movement. From this time on, relations between East and West, between the modern and the traditional, played out like the standard moves in a chess game. Now, a hundred years later, when relations between East and West have returned to relations between equals, when the world first navigated by Columbus has become thoroughly globalized, in looking back over the course of nearly four hundred years of exchanges of ideas, we need to explain anew Sino-Western relations as a whole. In particular, we should point out China’s role in the global process of modernization, and we should reconsider how to rehabilitate Chinese culture and thought in the world as a whole. If we look at the Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century as a continuation of efforts at modernization since the late Qing, then today—at a time when China has already been integrated into the global world economy, when China has established itself in the community of nations, when modernization has permeated most aspects of our lives—we Chinese ought to cast aside our compulsion to accept suffering, and the West ought to stop its bullying, traits that have characterized Sino-Western relations since the nineteenth century. We need to reexamine China’s view of the West and the Western view of China that have been with us ever since the late-Qing period.

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In a sense, the contemporary dialog of ideas between East and West is returning to the situation that existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in perhaps what Hegel described as a negation of the negation. History has an abundant tendency to produce similarities and repetitions, but at least we can say that there is a great historical affinity between Sino-Western intellectual exchange in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that of today.

V.

Some Reflections

Viewing the historical process objectively, we can say that the present is the beginning, the embryo, of the world of tomorrow. It contains all the elements for explaining the world of tomorrow. From this rich historical process, we can garner at least the following two insights about East-West cultural relations. First, the world is becoming increasingly globalized, and no nation can separate itself from this process. Whether this process of globalization produces harm or benefits, no one can reject it. “Overpowering is the great wind, engulfing is the great tide” (from Ershi shiji Taipingyang ge [Song of the Twentieth-Century Pacific], by Liang Qichao). There is no denying history. In a globalized world, no nation can again engage in intellectual discourse in isolation; no culture can continue to develop as a sealed-off tradition, as in the past. Just as economic activity has forced formerly independent nations to unite to form one market, so political and economic associations will inevitably lead to cultural associations and blendings. Like the Kangxi emperor, Xu Guangqi, and Li Zhizao, we should approach Western culture with an open mind. And we should look at ourselves and others with a calm mind. Xu Guangqi put the matter well: “Accommodate and learn, in order to surpass.” There is no need to fear globalization. Of the legacy of our ancestors, what is meant to be lost cannot be retained, even if we so desire, and what cannot be lost will be retained. We must rid ourselves of the traditional notion of foreign nations versus China. We should study and use whatever belongs to any part of humanity if it is beneficial. We must look at the cultures of the East and the West not just through Chinese eyes, but also through the eyes of humanity in general. May we never again experience the tense atmosphere of the May Fourth Movement, when it seemed that the only path available to us was to accept the whole of Western culture, and when it seemed that the only way to make the nation rich and strong was to reject entirely the legacy of our ancestors. This is not to criticize the leaders of the May Fourth Movement. The situation of that time was urgent and did not allow thorough consideration, but rather called for overcorrection. In that situation, the West was all that mattered, and the East mattered not at all. Now, after a hundred years, we have a breathing spell and can consider the issue of culture from a broader and

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longer-term perspective, and we can look at the issue of culture in the midst of globalization in a deeper and more complete way. The last more than one hundred years since the late Qing have been an unusual period—a period among the most tragic and most heroic in all of Chinese history. Yet it has also been a period of abnormal relations between East and West. In the vast sweep of history, a century is but an instance, a click of the fingers. More important, in those days both Easterners and Westerners were operating under duress, and interactions conducted under threat of gunfire and cannon fire tend to be distorted, and judgments made amid sword and fire tend to be extreme. Only recently—at a time when we can read the literature of U.S. libraries over the Internet, when China has become an important member of the community of nations as a result of its rapid economic development over the last two decades—has the meaning of recent history begun to become clear. The anxious shouting, morose groans, and ignorant rashness of the time are all past. It is only now, when we have reached a parity with the West, that we can re-evaluate the contradictory paradigm that has been produced between the East and the West over the last more than one hundred years. Have we returned to the Kangxi period? No! This is an entirely new, glorious age. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Hegel). It is time for the philosopher to come forth. We anxiously await for the owl to take flight. Second, the West ought to stop its bullying. Cultures with a tendency to spread include not only Christian culture but also Chinese culture. In a globalizing world, we can discover common perspectives and common values. For sure, some of these common standards originated in the West, but others arose in the East. Just because some common standards originated in the West, it does not follow that Western culture should be followed in all respects. Every drop of water can refract all the colors of the rainbow, every life has its own sanctity, and the culture of every people has a basis for survival. Likewise, Chinese culture is a source of universal human values. In Westerners’ eyes, Chinese after 1840 lost their dignity. The Chinaman, with queue and opium pipe, was no longer liked by Westerners. According to Hegel, Confucius was an unattractive vulgar old man who hawked moral maxims. The West over the last nearly hundred years has created a distorted view of China. Having forgotten the affection that it first had for China, the West transformed the former fabled country of superhumans into a country of devils. It used its discourse of power to concoct a myth about the East. As a matter of fact, the Chinese are neither superhumans nor devils. Heaven created a common Way; humans are of the same mind. Chinese and Westerners alike have their own sanctity, their own values, their own dreams. The tidewaters of the Atlantic mingle with the tidewaters of the Pacific; the Alps connect up with the Tanggula Mountains. “The myriad phenomena of the world reach the same goal by dif-

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ferent routes.” Over the four hundred years since the Age of Navigation, not only has the East studied the West; the West too has studied the East. This has been convincingly shown by the U.S. scholar Donald Lach in his monumental work Asia in the Making of Europe (1965–1993). Here I seek not a return to the lateQing view that Western science originated in China. Rather, I wish to drive home the point that East and West should return to a stance of equality, to the state that existed in the sixteenth century. The West should cast aside its nineteenth-century view of the East and of China and return to Ricci’s policy. As Edward Said (1935–2003) said, the West should rid itself of its nineteenth-century perspective on the East and look at the East anew. This proposal should not be identified with the late-Qing notion of national essence or the contemporary view of China’s saving the world. One of the purposes of this proposal is to let Westerners know that we cannot view ourselves only from the perspective of Western culture. Rather, we should view Western culture from the perspective of world culture. The commercial culture that Western civilization gave rise to is a contradiction. On the one hand, it provides the individual with more space for individual development. Yet on the other hand, it has made individuals more uniform, more homogeneous. And such mainstream Western culture has been criticized within Western culture itself from the time of Rousseau and the Romantic Movement. History is a circle. From any point on the circle, an adjacent segment looks like a straight line, but from the point of view of all of history, it is merely a point. Now we must look at history as a complete circle. East and West, especially the West, need to reexamine their nineteenth-century views of each other. Cultural interaction and dialog are premised on mutual recognition and respect. Without these, there can be no dialog. For this purpose, China and the West should return to the late-Ming and early-Qing period, the Age of Navigation, when they first encountered each other, to reorder the four-hundred-year history of SinoWestern relations, so that we can return to a dialog of equals. Translator’s Notes: *Podus (pl. podes) is the ancient Greek measure approximately equal to a foot (1 podus = 16 fingers). 肘尺 (hasta) is an ancient Indian measure (分一肘为二十 四指). I suspect that some Chinese author is using a foreign-sounding measure (肘尺) to translate podus without converting any numbers. ** In the Ming period, 1 li = 559.8 m

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*This essay first appeared as the Preface to the author’s Zhongguo yu Ouzhou zaoqi zongjiao he zhexue jiaoliu shi (The History of Early Sino-European Religious and Philosophical Exchanges) (Beijing: Dongfang Chubanshe, 2001). It has also been published in the newspaper Guangming ribao, September 18, 2001. Translated from the Chinese by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

SHEN Guowei

Modern Keywords and the Modern History of Ideas

I.

Modern Keywords

The linguist Wang Li once pointed out the following: [From the nineteenth century on] the production of new compound words in modern Chinese was much greater than during any other period. The import of Buddhist vocabulary into China was a historically significant event in history, yet it paled in comparison to the import of vocabulary from the West…In the present age, a political essay will frequently consist more than 70 percent of the new vocabulary. In terms of vocabulary, the development of Chinese over the past fifty years has surpassed that of the several millennia prior to this period.1

The reason for this production of new vocabulary in Chinese is the import of new modern concepts from the West, primarily scientific terms, including many abstract notions. Among the new compound words are some very important terms expressing core concepts that Chinese society can perhaps not do without. Such terms I call “keywords.” The distinction between keywords and ordinary vocabulary differs according to the field of study. In this essay I will call abstract terms intimately connected with modern features of Chinese society “modern keywords.” “Concepts are code, or the expression of thought,” as one scholar has said.2 And words are the outer expression of concepts. We cannot formulate thoughts without concepts, and we cannot express concepts without words. In discussing this issue, we frequently use another technical term: “idea.” How are ideas different from concepts? These two technical terms correspond to the Chinese terms guannian and gainian. My definition here is that an idea is a

1 Wang Li, Hanyu-shi gao (A Sketch of the History of Chinese), (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1980), p. 516. Originally published by Kexue Chubanshe, 1958. 2 Fang Weizhi, “Gainian-shi yanjiu fangfa yaozhi” (Outline of a Methodology for the History of Concepts), Xin shixue (Beijing) 3 (2010): 3–20.

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concept that has entered a community’s ideology.3 Hence, only concepts that can enter into the ideology of a linguistic community can become ideas. Let us tentatively call this process the “ideation” of a concept. One topic of the study of our modern conceptual history (or more precisely, the history of East Asian borrowing of new concepts from the West) is why modern keywords became keywords (ideas) of East Asian societies. This is not the history of certain vocabulary, yet one object of the study of the history of modern vocabulary is the facts leading to the formation of modern keywords. Sorting out the process whereby Western concepts were borrowed (and the process whereby a portion underwent ideation) is not research in the history of the development of our lexicon. And vice versa, the study of the lexical history of keywords is not research in the history of ideas. Nonetheless, modern keywords form a part of the Chinese lexical system. Hence, on the one hand, they display features such as the creation, diffusion, and taking root of translation terms for the new vocabulary, and on the other hand, as the vehicles of modern ideas, they reflect the process of East Asian acceptance of Western civilization. At the same time, we must also recognize that modern keywords may have different degrees of importance in lexical history and in the history of ideas. For example, the creation and taking root of the two words zhexue (philosophy) and shuxue (mathematics) are equally important in lexical history, but in the history of ideas, they have quite different significance. In discussing keywords, I need to mention another technical term, “lexification.” A concept takes form with the help of language. One can express a concept by means of an explanatory or analogous phrase, a short expression, or a sentence, as well as by means of a single word. Using a compound word (be it a preexisting word or a neologism) to express a concept is called “lexification.”4 Lexification is giving a name to a concept. A basic principle of modern linguistics is that language cannot be divided into highbrow or lowbrow. Whether it is the language used by highly developed scientific and technological communities or the language used by primitive agricultural communities, language can express any concept for which there is a need. Not every concept, however, can achieve lexification.5 When a new concept is introduced from another region, whether that concept can be lexified as a single compound word depends on various factors. Generally, concepts that appear frequently in a community easily undergo lexification. Otherwise, the concept remains expressible only by means of 3 A concept is the meaningful content of language. It contrasts with the form of language. The relation between form and content, that is, between signifier and signified, is the object of the study of semantics. Hence, linguists more frequently use the term “concept.” 4 It is also called “lexiconification.” Without lexification, there is no ideation. 5 In natural languages, not all concepts have a corresponding word. For example, the Chinese words xiong (elder brother), di (younger brother), jie (elder sister), mei (younger sister) require multiword phrases to express these concepts.

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an explanatory (nonlexified) phrase or short expression. New concepts from outside the community are often first expressed with a phrase or short expression, and this phrase or short expression, through repeated use, gradually congeals into a single compound word, thereby completing the process of lexification. It is worth emphasizing that the core concepts of modern society are often lexified keywords that arise through force. The lexification of a concept makes for ease of expression, yet it also brings the danger of conceptual dissimilation, that is, the divorcing of word and reality. When we use a compound word to refer to a concept, we often overlook that concept’s true intention (sense) and its subtle evolution. For example, Chinese speakers use lead pencils (qianbi) and banks (literally, silver traders, yinhang), but no one notices that the lead is missing or that banks no longer deal in silver. This is especially true of terms that have become ideas, that have been incorporated into the community’s ideology. People carry out practical affairs according to ideas of what is right and proper; they do not understand reality according to thought or the strict definitions of concepts. Changes in ideas of the individual, freedom, revolution, etc., in the Chinese context have excited strong interest in academic circles.6 Geren (individual), ziyou (freedom), and geming (revolution) became keywords unique to China not because they are translations of the English words “individual,” “freedom,” and “revolution,” but because these technical terms have a special place in China’s ideological system. This special place is a result of their configuration with other terms that make up the ideology.

II.

The Acceptance of New Concepts from the West

The history of ideas that I speak of is the history of the formation of modern ideas, that is, the history of how East Asia used Chinese characters to express new Western concepts and build modern ideological systems similar to those of the West. In China, the import of Western concepts can be divided into three periods, namely, the period from the early nineteenth century to the First Sino-Japanese War, the period from 1895 to 1915, and the period of the New Culture Movement. During these three periods, keywords were created, spread, and took root. In particular, during the first period, missionaries created new compound words and disseminated them to a limited extent. During the second period, a great 6 Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, Guannian-shi yanjiu: Zhongguo xiandai zhongyao zhengzhi shuyu xingcheng (A Study in the History of Ideas: The Formation of Important Political Terms in Contemporary China), (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008).

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quantity of Japanese translation terms entered Chinese.7 And during the third period, already existing new compound words and translation terms were blended and incorporated into the Chinese lexical system. From 1897, when Robert Morrison landed in Guangzhou (Canton), the introduction of new knowledge faced the problem of creating accurate translation terms. Chinese generally has two ways of accepting new concepts from abroad: translating and borrowing.8 “Translation is transcription” (Xu Yuanchong); that is, it uses the morphemes of the target language to express the concepts of the source language. There are two principal ways of doing this. One is to use preexisting compound words to render the source meaning idiomatically. The other is to create translation terms to convey the source meaning literally. The former method presupposes that all humans have a common semantic apparatus or at one time had such a common semantic apparatus, or common semantic background. Some scholars deny such a presupposition and assert that true translation is impossible.9 Yan Fu (1854–1921) wrote, “When it comes to translating difficult important nominal terms, I often have to consider the original meaning of a Western term, check all its derived meanings, then ponder similar terms in Chinese. I thus usually hit upon the right translation, and once I get it, I do not

7 The influx of Japanese translation terms, in my view, is causally related to the failure of foreign missionaries and Chinese to create new terms. 8 Borrowing involves creating loanwords. Loanwords can borrow either the pronunciation or the form. Loanwords that borrow the pronunciation are transliterations. Loanwords that borrow the form are like the borrowings of Chinese words in peripheral countries that make up the East Asian cultural sphere (Japan, Korea, Vietnam). The creation of translation terms requires time and effort. Yan Fu, an early translator, once said, “When I create a word, I hesitate for anywhere from a week to a month.” But translation terms possess a certain logicality and are easily incorporated into the vocabulary system of Chinese. In contrast, loanwords are quick and easy to create, but the creation of the new loanword is much quicker than the penetration of the concept it conveys. The East Asian cultural sphere has yet another, unique way of introducing a new concept: creating a new character to serve as a translation term. Creating new characters was especially favored by missionaries. See Shen Guowei, “Zao xinzi wei yici yu Xifang xin gainian de rongshou: Yi Riben Lanxuejia yu lai Hua chuanjiaoshi wei li” (Creating New Characters to Serve as Translation Terms and the Acceptance of New Western Concepts: The Case of Japanese Scholars of Dutch Learning and the Case of Chinese Missionaries), Zhejiang Daxue xuebao (Renwen shehuikexue ban) 2010, no. 1: 121–134. 9 My own attitude is as follows: The lexical system of a language is extremely flexible and can adjust and perfect itself. Theoretically, perhaps, there is no absolutely perfect literal translation, but with increasing exchanges of people and goods, people can always find the closest semantic equivalent. Otherwise, speakers of different languages, or even dialects, will forever live in a state of misunderstanding—contrary to fact. It is also not possible to accept completely the view that all humans have or once had a common semantic background. The structure of a semantic system and the culture in which the language is embedded are inseparably related. Speakers of different languages parse the world differently and bestow incongruent names on the myriad phenomena of the world.

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easily get lost.”10 What Yan Fu called “difficult important nominal terms” were keywords expressing modern core concepts. For such terms as “freedom,” “rights,” and “economy,” Yan Fu explored the meaning in detail and in depth. The biggest problems that idiomatic translation has to overcome are differences in the concepts, styles, and associations of words in two different lexical systems. These differences are often systematic.11 A source word and its translation often correspond in just one particular. It is just not possible for the entire lexical systems of two different languages to fully correspond. There are two ways of creating new translation terms: direct (literal) translations and idiomatic translations. These two methods require considerable proficiency in both the foreign source language and Chinese. Hence, during the first period of translation, when Westerners would orally explain and Chinese scholars would take notes, few translation terms were created in this way. The missionaries advocated using preexisting compound words or ancient, obscure characters to translate Western concepts, or when these stratagems failed, creating a new character. In general, the first period of translation was not very successful either in terms of translation content or in terms of creating new translation terms. During the second period, the First Sino-Japanese War broke out, and the tottering old empire suffered defeat at the hands of a small island country. A sense of crisis developed in which Chinese feared that their country and race were in grave danger. Prior to this, the missionaries, who had played a leading role in disseminating Western learning, retreated from the stage of Chinese politics.12 Though Yan Fu assiduously labored away in solitude, he could not meet China’s pressing need to acquire new Western knowledge, and as a result, many Chinese turned their attention to Japan. Students studied in Japan, and translators 10 Yan Fu, “Yu Liang Qichao shu” (Letter to Liang Qichao), in Yan Fu ji (Works of Yan Fu), vol. 3, edited by Wang Shi (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1986), p. 518. Yet for ordinary terms, Yan Fu thought that as long as he had a serviceable translation term that the reader could sufficiently understand, he could accomplish the purpose of an initial translation, and that even a better translation term would be subject to all sorts of criticism. 11 As Yan Fu points out, the English word “constitution,” for example, is an abstract noun derived from the verb “to constitute,” meaning to organize, to establish. The noun applies not only to states but also to animals, plants, and even social organizations. It can apply to anything having form and structure. But “constitution” can be translated as xianfa only when the former applies to states. One can thus see that this term for translating “constitution” is not always accurate. (Yan Fu, “Xianfa dayi” [The General Meaning of Xianfa (Constitution)], Yan Fu ji, vol. 2, p. 239.) 12 Paul A. Cohen in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, Late Ch’ing 1800–1911, part 1, edited by John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Among the causes that Cohen lists, the first one is that the missionaries themselves gradually distanced themselves from political issues. See also Douglas R. Reynolds, ed. China, 1895–1912: State-Sponsored Reforms and China’s Late-Qing Revolution (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1995).

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translated Japanese books into Chinese, with the result that Chinese acquired a large number of new translation terms from Japanese. This influx enabled modern Chinese to rapidly develop its lexical system, as well as to unify the written and spoken language of learning. Chinese not only imported new compound words; it also gave new meanings to old compound words. One result of the influence of Japanese is that during this second period, modern keywords were matched up with traditional vocabulary. During the third period, the period of the May 4 Movement and its aftermath, the import of new compound words into Chinese of necessity led to a reorganization of its semantic system, and a large number of compound words became ideas and served as keywords. The lexical system of every language has self-adjusting mechanisms for accepting foreign concepts and reconstructing the preexisting semantic system. A linguistic community bestows upon its words peripheral connotations and ideological import, such as associations, styles, and appraisals. Words form a system; that is to say, words as the names of concepts do not exist independently. Rather, they maintain certain given relations with other words, coming together to form a semantic web. When one word appears, disappears, or changes semantically, such change affects other semantically related words in the lexical system. Semantically, words can be said to exhibit the ripple effect. This is especially true of keywords situated at the center of a semantic field. For this reason, we cannot confine our considerations to a single word, but must also consider other concepts in the same semantic field. For example, in discussing the idea of minzhu (democracy), we must also consider minquan (civil rights), minzhi (self-government), minzheng (civil administration), gonghe (republicanism), lixian (constitutionalism), demokelaxi (democracy). Likewise, the idea of jingji (the economy) is connected in Chinese with jingshi (managing the economy), jixue (economics), fuqiang (prosperous and strong, said of a nation), shengji (livelihood). And the idea of kexue (science) is tied up with gewu zhizhi (abbreviated as gezhi, categorizing things to acquire knowledge), qiongli (investigating principles), bowu (natural science), shengchanli (productivity). Only in such specific semantic fields can we accurately observe the origin, diffusion, and taking root of keywords. Hence, study of the history of ideas, taking as its starting point the investigation of keywords, must rest on a foundation of research in lexical history. The tasks of such research are to investigate the development of terms rendering Western concepts, including the following particulars: – The origins of the term. Who first used the term? When? How was the term created? – The completeness of the term. How transparent is the meaning of the term as a construction of its components?

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– Its connection with other, preexisting terms. Does it build on other terms or conflict with them? How is it tied to other terms? – Its transmission and dissemination. How did the creator’s usage become the common social knowledge of all users? – Changes in usage. After the new term entered the lexical system of the language, did it undergo changes in meaning or usage? The first appearance of a term might be in a translation or in a dictionary (such as a bilingual dictionary or a technical dictionary). In the former, there is a context, while the latter presents correspondences with foreign terms. Usage dictionaries, like Xin erya (1903), presented both.13 Studies of modern lexical history frequently end with the new compound words and translation terms entered in large-scale language dictionaries, but this often is the beginning for research in the history of ideas, which focuses on the descriptive content of technical dictionaries and encyclopedic dictionaries and the development of such content. Through the compound word we can understand the word creator, the motivation, and the first literary appearance of a new translation term. And the creation of a new compound word out of preexisting word components gives rise to the issue of motivation. By “motivation” I mean the reason for calling the thing thus, that is, the reasoning uniting signifier and signified.14 The motivation reflects the understanding, the thinking, of the word creator (often a pioneer, an enlightener) in adopting a new foreign concept. Research in the history of ideas seeks to interpret the process whereby a concept became an idea by analyzing the motivation for that concept. In contrast, while lexical research regards the motivation of a compound word as important, whether the motivation of a compound word is logical does not determine whether a compound word survives. For example, Yan Fu, in Tianyan lun (his translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics), translated “evolution” as tianyan and “ethical progress” as jinhua. Even though the sense, the motivation, of tianyan was quite logical, it was later replaced by the Japanese translation of “evolution”: jinhua.15 13 The long entries seen in the technical dictionary Xin erya and Liang Qichao’s planned dictionary Xin shiming (New Explanations of Terms) are common works introducing concepts. Shen Guowei, Xin erya, fu jieti suoyin (Xin erya, with an Index of Explanations), (Shanghai: Shanghai Cishu Chubanshe, 2011). 14 Since Ferdinand de Saussure, a basic principle of linguistics has been that for simple words other than onomatopoeic words, the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary. In contrast, for compound words, the relation is inevitably logically motivated. 15 At the turn of the twentieth century, when China borrowed many translation terms from Japanese, the lexical system of Japanese was nearly completely modernized. That is to say, what China acquired was the Japanese semantic system after it had undergone adjustment. Even though these translation terms could be found in Japanese, in Chinese they were not original semantic creations.

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Wang Li once wrote that translation terms coming from Japanese were of two types: translation terms that Chinese would never translate thus and translation terms that Chinese too might come up with.16 This is because, though the Japanese use Chinese characters to make compound words, Japanese translators’ understanding of Chinese characters and Chinese traditional literature is not equal to that of Chinese. After all, Chinese is not their native language. In the eyes of Chinese literati, many translation terms borrowed from the Japanese do not seem properly motivated as Chinese. For example, many Chinese readers and translators, including Yan Fu and Liang Qichao, were opposed to translating “economy” as jingji because the meaning of keizai in Japanese is quite different from the meaning of jingji in the Chinese classics, even though the characters are the same.

III.

The Usefulness of Chinese Linguistic Databases

With the spread and increase in performance of computers, linguists are increasingly constructing and using linguistic databases. Because of a distinctive feature of Chinese, namely, that it does not separate words as in Western languages, Chinese databases of literature throughout the ages often end up being databases that do not separate or mark compound words in any way. Such Chinese databases have limited usefulness for linguistic research.17 Nonetheless, they have some use in that one can easily discover whether a given character string (not a given compound word) exists within a given body of literature. Hence, the scope of the literature included and errors in the data are the key to constructing a linguistic database useful for research in the history of ideas. The Database of Modern Chinese Literature developed by Uchida Keiichi has images corresponding to digital texts to insure the accuracy of search results, and this enabled the research team Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to bring together a linguistic database and research in the history of ideas and produce rich research results. The database created by these two researchers, the Specialized Database of the History of Modern Chinese Thought (1830–1930), contains 120 megabytes covering the literature of more than a century. This database exhaustively includes source literature in the history of ideas selected by experts in the field. Researchers using this database can find the earliest occurrence of a keyword in the literature (which can be con16 Wang Li, Hanyu-shi gao (Sketch of a History of Chinese), pp. 329–331. 17 Such databases can only provide example sentences containing strings of given characters. Searches for single-character components produce results that are so extensive as to be not very useful.

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firmed in a database of classical literature), and then can trace its subsequent historical development. Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng summarize their methodology as follows: First they develop a hypothesis concerning a term in the history of ideas, and then they give evidence for this hypothesis by pointing to usage of the term. Or in the opposite direction, they look at changes in the use of a term to understand a particular historical occurrence.18 In contrast to previous research, they seek to sketch the development of modern thought by examining keywords. In their own words, they “use the method of data mining to ferret out all the keywords used to express an idea, and then by means of a statistical analysis of the importance of the core keywords, reveal the origin and development of the idea.”19 We need to be careful: the frequency of occurrence of a compound word in a text (or group of texts) does not necessarily reflect the status of the compound word in the lexical system, since the character of the text, the topic, and the author’s tendencies all have a bearing on frequency of occurrence. In recent years great strides have been made in the digitalization of the literature of the past. Available for use today are databases of even such large publications as the newspaper Shenbao. Researchers can use their search results to describe in detail the diachronic or synchronic use of relevant terms, as permitted by the database.

IV.

Western Learning from the East and Japanese Knowledge

No one denies that our modern keywords arose in the context of our borrowing new concepts from the West, or that translations and dictionaries were the main routes by which such concepts entered and became fixed compound words in the language. With new terms (in contrast to maxims, aphorisms, and poetry), creation is only half the process; new translation terms (even those created by such literary masters as Yan Fu) also have to be adopted by a linguistic community. The content and form of a new term are established by usage, not by how rationally they are constructed. Literati of the time thought that some modern Guangdong translation terms such as yinhang (bank), baoxian (insurance), peishen ( jury service), yangqi (oxygen), and qingqi (hydrogen) were intolerably vulgar and held up Yan Fu’s tianyan (evolution) and jixue (economics) as models of apt creations. Yet it does not matter whether translation terms are apt or off the mark as compound words, since the relation between form and content is ar18 Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, Guannian-shi yanjiu (Studies in the History of Ideas), (Beijing: Falü Chubanshe, 2009), p. 253. 19 However, is extracting the core keywords from all the keywords, as well as deciding on a criterion for the selection, an issue in the history of ideas or an issue in lexical history? Jin and Liu seem to take the former view, while I contend that this is a matter for sociolinguistics.

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bitrary. At the same time, because they are translations, they have to be faithful to the source text; that is, they have to correspond in form. Note that here I talk of correspondence in form, not of correspondence in semantic value or the like. Hence, the presupposition here is that the source word can be analyzed. As for semantic values, the lexical system of any language has mechanisms for adjusting to new semantic meanings, accepting foreign concepts, and reconstructing the original semantic system. All that is needed is time. In the first period and early in the second period, native translation terms slowly become accepted and naturalized. But at the turn of the twentieth century, Japanese translation terms flooded into Chinese and interrupted the natural evolution of Chinese. The Chinese construction of a modern system of knowledge—including everything from the various branches of science at the beginning of the century to socialism and communism in the 1920s and to the theories of literature, art, and drama— was intimately connected with Japanese knowledge. Thus, Western learning and Marxism-Leninism came from the East. In studying the formation of Chinese ideas from 1895 to 1915, one cannot avoid Japanese knowledge. By making maximal use of Japanese research materials, including the relevant historical literature and research results, we can gain a more complete perspective. This is especially important in analyzing and comparing commonalities and differences in the course of modernization in the countries of East Asia. For we are concerned not just with lexical history, with the creation or borrowing of a translation term, but with the description of the whole of modern East Asian history. Douglas R. Reynolds’s view of developments—that East (China) meets East (Japan)—and my study of the flow of modern knowledge both seek objectively to assess Japanese knowledge.20

V.

Some Remarks on the Keyword Kexue

In the East Asian cultural sphere, Chinese characters were for an extended period the external form (the purveyors) of concepts. After the dawn of the modern age, Chinese characters, and the new compound words and translation terms that they formed, offered the only way to formulate and express new Western concepts. Hence, the problem of absorption in essence becomes, How did the East use Chinese characters to absorb new Western concepts? Sino-Japanese cultural exchange and linguistic contact especially from the nineteenth century enabled Chinese, in absorbing and adopting Western concepts into the language, to cross 20 Shen Guowei, “Shidai de zhuanxing yu Riben tujing” (The New Age and the Japan Connection), in Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi de zhuanxing shidai (The New Age in the History of Modern Chinese Thought), by Wang Fansen et al. (Taipei: Lianjing, 2007), pp. 241–270.

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over the language barrier. This is an age that we create and reap the benefits of together.21 We should examine keywords in the context of the East Asian cultural sphere. From this perspective, let us reexamine below the keyword kexue (science), a term greatly influenced by Japanese (or Japanese sources) as it spread and took root in the Chinese language. Tetsugaku jii (Dictionary of Philosophy), published in Japan in 1881, clearly gives kagaku (kexue in Chinese) as the translation of “science.” From then on, kagaku was gradually accepted in Japanese society and became the standard translation of “science.” Sometime after 1887 kagaku became a popular term in Japan.22 Yet according to Japanese dictionaries, kagaku at this time primarily meant the natural sciences. For example, Nihon dai jisho (Great Dictionary of Japan, 1893) has “Kagaku, another name for science (rigaku).” Teikoku dai jiten (Great Dictionary of the Empire, 1896) has “The things of nature follow principles. All of the disciplines that study these principles are called sciences. Science contrasts with philosophy. Science is the study of the physical realm; philosophy is the study of the abstract realm.” And Nihon shin jirin (New Dictionary of Japan, 1897) has “Science contrasts with philosophy.” The dictionaries thus reflect the tendency of Japanese society in those days to view science in opposition to philosophy. As Tsuji Tetsuo points out on the relation between modern Japanese philosophy and science, when Japan first began to absorb modern science, scholars did not realize that critiques of scientific approaches and theoretical cognitive frameworks are an essential part of science. Hence, their grasp of science was superficial, but the introduction of modern Western philosophy advanced Japanese understanding of the nature of science.23 In China, kexue (science) in 1899 appeared sporadically in the literature about Japanese knowledge. After the turn of the twentieth century, however, use of the term surged so much that people had no time to absorb it. One person who pondered the term was Yan Fu. For Yan Fu, “science” (xue) and “art” (techne¯, shu) were two opposing concepts. The goal of science is the pursuit of natural laws (Yan Fu’s term). That of art is “to establish practice so that one may know how to proceed.” Hence, art tended toward the practical. For art to rise to the level of science, the observation of phenomena must be systematized. About science, Yan Fu thought as follows: Science in premodern times was divided into the study of form and material force and the study of the Way and virtue (i. e., into the physical and abstract sciences). Logic, as a branch of philosophy, was a physical 21 Shen Guowei, Zhong-Ri jindai cihui jiaoliu yanjiu (Studies in Borrowings of Modern Vocabulary between China and Japan), (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2010). 22 Hida Yoshifumi, Meiji Umare no Nihongo (Japanese New Words Born in the Meiji Period), (Kyoto: Tanko¯sha, 2002), pp. 206–210. 23 Tsuji Tetsuo, Nihon no kagaku shiso¯ (Japanese Scientific Thought), (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ Ko¯ron Sha, 1973), pp. 179–180.

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science, but after the advent of the modern era, the principles of physical science (measurement, comprehensive study, experiment) were also applied in the abstract sciences. Hence, the study of form, of material force, of the Way, and of virtue all became sciences. In particular, logic, the study of reasoning (investigation, induction, deduction), became the study of all the sciences. Yan Fu pointed out that traditional Chinese sciences “had no methods of observation,” nor did investigators “verify their findings,”24 that “hence, the people were not knowledgeable, and the nation, as a result, was poor and weak,”25 and that thus the nation urgently needed to pursue the sciences of physics, chemistry, zoology, botany, astronomy, geology, physiology, psychology, etc. These physical sciences, based on induction, would profit the people and increase their knowledge. Such new and systematic science would change the old society; it was also China’s only way to survive. These were Yan Fu’s reasons for promoting science, especially logic and the physical sciences.26 At the level of translation terms, Yan Fu, in Tianyan lun, translated “science” primarily as gezhi. Beginning with Yuan fu (his translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), he started translating the term as kexue, literally meaning a field of study, and this was the common understanding of the term in China at the time. Yet in contrast to his compatriots, Yan Fu noted why kexue has the meaning it does. We can thus say that behind Yan Fu’s decision to switch to kexue were deep considerations related to the history of ideas, though he left no word as to what those considerations were. What needs pointing out is that Yan Fu, throughout his career, used xue (science, learning) to designate the total sum of human efforts at systematic knowledge and scholarship. For example, when Yan Fu served as compiler-in-chief in the Office of Examining and Approving Terms in the Qing Ministry of Education, he oversaw the approval of nearly 30,000 technical terms. As the standard translation for “science” (the term approved by the Ministry of Education), this office selected xue. Kexue, the runner-up term, was retained, but was only for general use for society at large.27 The example of kexue raises two questions. First, is it possible to compare the modern history of ideas of China and Japan? As I have repeatedly emphasized, the penetration of Western science in the East required the East to absorb new concepts. Hence, in the study of keywords, whether it is in lexical history or in the 24 Wang Shi, ed. Yan Fu ji, p. 281. 25 Wang Shi, ed. Yan Fu ji, p. 285. 26 For details, see Shen Guowei, “Yan Fu yu yici ‘kexue’” (Yan Fu and the Translation Term Kexue [Science]), Fanyi-shi yanjiu (Chinese University of Hong Kong), inaugural issue, December 2010. 27 Shen Guowei, “Guanhua (1916) ji qi yici: Yi ‘xinci,’ ‘Bu-ding ci’ wei zhongxin” (Mandarin [1916] and Its Translation Terms, with a Focus on New Words and Ministry-Approved Words), Ajia bunka ko¯ryu¯ kenkyu¯ 2008, no. 3: 113–129.

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history of ideas, it is not possible to confine ourselves to one language, be it Chinese or Japanese, and this makes possible the comparative study of the history of the formation of ideas. Nishi Amane (1829–1897) in Japan and Yan Fu in China both played important roles in the introduction and absorption of the concept of science. Despite their different linguistic environments, these two men occupied surprisingly similar circumstances. It is not surprising that these two men, dealing with Western sources, would share some features. What would be surprising is whether the concept of science coming from the West underwent the same process of ideation in China and Japan, and why it underwent the same process is an important topic for research in the history of thought. Second, what sort of effect can enlighteners and social luminaries have on keywords? The formation of terms in a language reflect individual characteristics of the creator and social characteristics of users who identify with the language. Keywords and the modern core concepts that they express, in contrast to ordinary concepts, are often introduced by visionaries and notable figures, and after public discussion, they are accepted by the society as a whole. In my view, the historical influence of visionaries and notable figures lies mainly in getting society to accept the concept, and thus not at the level of lexical history. A basic principle of lexical research is that whether a new compound word or translation term will spread and be accepted by the linguistic community depends not on the term itself (an internal factor), but on the values of the linguistic community (an external factor). In any age, users, for what-ever reason, discard obsolete terms like rubbish. *Translated from the Chinese by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

Transformation of Japanese Scholarship from Early Modern to Modern Times

CHOI Gwan

War, Memory, and Imagination: Japanese Depictions of the Imjin War

I.

Introduction

Wars occurred repeatedly on the Korean peninsula for the seven years between April 1592 and December 1598 in conjunction with the Age of Discovery that reached East Asia at the end of the sixteenth century. These were the wars in which the Ming court dispatched reinforcements to Korea as an ally to preserve China and Korea. Korea was attempting to defend itself against the Japanese forces sent there by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536?–1598), who felt it was his moral duty to invade China. Korea, as the site of the battles, suffered such tremendous damage that it took the next hundred years for the nation to return to its prewar state. In Japan, Toyotomi’s government was replaced by the Edo Bakufu; in China, the war was one reason the Ming court was devastated, declined, and collapsed. Thus, the Imjin War shook the very foundations of the East Asian world, leaving an indelible impact on Korea, China, and Japan in the areas of history, society, and culture. In terms of Japanese-Korean relations, the problems arising from this war still exist today. Numerous accounts and creative works have been written in Korea, China, and Japan on the Imjin War.1 Yet no comprehensive research has been done on 1 There are many names for this war in Japan. In the early modern era, when the Taiko¯ (Hideyoshi) advanced into Korea, the terms used were: Ko¯raijin 高麗陣 (Goryeo Campaign), Cho¯senjin 朝鮮陣 (Joseon Campaign), Cho¯sen eki 朝 鮮 役 (Joseon War), seikan eki 征 韓 役 (battle to subjugate Korea), Cho¯sen seibatsuki 朝鮮征伐 (subjugation of Joseon), and Sankan seibatsuki 三韓征伐 (subjugation of the three Korean kingdoms of Silla, Baekje, and Goguryeo). Later, other terms appeared, such as Cho¯sen shuppei 朝 鮮 出 兵 (dispatch of troops to Joseon), Bunroku/Keicho¯ no eki 文禄・慶長の役 (Japanese war during the Bunroku and Keicho¯ periods), and Cho¯sen shinryaku 朝鮮侵略 (Japanese invasions of Korea). In world history, the war is called variously the Imjin War, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s Korean Invasions, and Japanese Invasions of Korea (1592–1598). What is implied by the fact that there is no definitive Japanese term for this war is that historical sensibilities toward it have changed over time and in perception. In China, the war has been called Wanli Chaoxianyi 万暦朝鮮役 (Expedition to Joseon during the Wanli reign); in North Korea it is called the Imjin choguk jeonjaeng 壬 辰 祖 国 戦 争 (Imjin Homeland War); and in Korea it has been called the Imjin Jeong-yu jaeran 壬

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their entirety. Here I will be examining how the war was written up in Japan and how it has been imagined. I will summarize the larger trends in all genres of the literature, indicating aspects of its development chronologically from the early modern period to today. First, before I get into the heart of my subject, I will examine the background of the accounts of the Imjin War in Japan. After Hideyoshi’s illness and death in 1598, the Japanese troops in Korea retreated, and the political situation in Japan became enveloped in a vortex of power struggles. The Battle of Sekigahara, two sieges of Osaka, and the Shimabara Rebellion formed a continuous state of internal strife. Most of the troops who were on the losing side in these wars were from Kyushu and Western Japan, and were veterans of the Imjin War. It can be surmised that even the troops who survived the Imjin War were in no position to write about their war experiences, considering the drastic domestic changes in which they found themselves. This is perhaps the reason that there are relatively few accounts written by the over 30,000 troops directly involved in the fighting of the Imjin War for so many years in Korea. The Edo Bakufu, which declared that there was no relation between it and Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea, reestablished relations with Korea but did nothing to record the Imjin War. In fact, regulations forbidding publication of materials concerning Ieyasu or his name were gradually strengthened even for issues other than the Japanese Christians. Narratives concerning the Imjin War naturally also became the target of government censorship, with some works even being forced out of print.2 Yet Japan’s first war for foreign conquest was not something that could be so easily forgotten. It was impossible for Japanese consciousness toward Korea, a country it had just fought and which was now the only nation with which it had formal diplomatic relations, to be the same as that toward other countries. Many issues kept the memory of the Imjin War alive: the experiences of tens of thousands of Japanese in Korea during Japan’s national isolation (sakoku); the existence of similar numbers of Koreans who had been forcibly taken to Japan; and the numerous arrivals of magnificent Korean missions to Japan. It is a fact that

辰・丁酉倭 乱 (1597 Imjin Japanese War), or more generally, the Imjin waeran 壬辰倭乱 (Imjin Japanese War). In this text I use the term, “Imjin War.” 2 I will list just a few titles, such as Hori Masamune’s 堀正意 Cho¯sen seibatsuki 朝鮮征伐記 (Subjugation of Joseon) and Oze Hoan’s 小瀬甫庵 Taiko¯ki 太閤記 (Biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi). Hori’s book and some simplified and illustrated versions of Oze’s book called Ehon Taiko¯ki 絵本太閤記 can be found in Miyatake Gaikotsu’s 宮武外骨 Kaitei zo¯ho hikkashi 改定増補筆禍史 (Revised and Enlarged Edition of the Bibliographical Notes on the Banned Books and the Punishments on Their Authors and Publishers in the Tokugawa Period, 1926).

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whenever there were rumors of the arrival of a Korean mission to Japan, a jo¯ruri puppet play would be written and performed about wars in Korea.3 Consequently, although there are no official Bakufu reports of the Imjin War in early modern Japan, an accounting of the war and artistic renditions were the only recourse for the public, whose access to information was restricted, but who wished to know something about the war. In this respect, Japan is unique when compared to the other two parties of the war; Korea boasts an accurate historical record, Joseon Wangjo Sillok 朝鮮王朝実 録 (Annals of the Joseon Dynasty) and a semi-historical record, Chingbirok 徴 毖 録 , while China has the official historical records, the Ming shi (History of the Ming), and Shenzong shilu 神宗実録 (The True Records of Shenzong).

II.

Early Modern Japan and the Imjin War

A.

Types of Accounts in the Initial Period

The Edo Bakufu had no intention of compiling a history of Toyotomi’s government, and all attempts at non-official accounts of the Imjin War were extremely restricted. The result was that there are no records that were written in the period immediately after the war; the vast majority is from the war. The range and perspective of the records are thus for the most part fragmentary and limited. In many cases the records took the form of verbatim notes, memoranda, letters, reports, diaries, and tales of the experiences of the distinguished military service and war experiences of the battle participants. They are preserved as copybooks. As stability grew in the society during the early modern period, a movement emerged of recording the military exploits of lords, ancestors, or even of the participants themselves in some particular vassalages and domains. Through categorization of the rank and position of the authors of these initial chronicles, it is clear that they were mainly lower-ranking warriors of learning or Buddhist priests traveling with the troops. The following is a list of the main titles of the initial accounts of the war. Chronicles by lower-ranking warriors: Yoshino nikki 吉野日記 (Yoshino Diary), Ko¯rai nikki 高麗日記 (Goryeo Diary), Kiyomasa ki 清正記 (Chronicle of Kiyomasa), Kimura Matazo¯ oboegaki 木村又 3 The works known to have been performed in anticipation of the Joseon missions to Japan in 1719 were Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Honcho¯ Sangokushi 本朝三国志 (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms of Japan) and Ki no Kaion’s 紀 海 音 Jingu¯ Ko¯go¯ sankanseiki 神功皇后三韓 征記 (Empress Jingu¯’s Subjugation of the Three Kingdoms of Korea).

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蔵覚書 (Kimura Matazo¯ Memorandum), Kiyomasa Ko¯raijin oboegaki 清正高麗 陣覚書 (Kiyomasa Goryeo Troops Memorandum), Cho¯sen tokai nikki 朝鮮渡海 日記 (Joseon Ocean-Crossing Diary), Cho¯sen monogatari 朝鮮物語 (Tales of Joseon), Tachibana Cho¯senki 立花朝鮮記 (Chronicle of Joseon Tachibana), Wakizaka ki 脇坂記 (Chronicles of Wakizaka), etc. Chronicles by Buddhist priests traveling with the troops: Tenkei’s 天荊 Seisei nikki 西征日記 (Diary of Western Subjugation), Kyo¯nen’s 慶 念 Cho¯sen hibi ki 朝鮮日日記 (Daily Records of Joseon), Shukuro Shungaku’s 宿 蘆俊岳 Shukuro-ko¯ 宿蘆稿 (Shukuro¯ Manuscript), etc. When the accounts are categorized by military corps during the initial stages of the war, it is evident that there are many chronicles about Kato¯ Kiyomasa 加 藤 清 正 (1562–1611) of the second corp. Owing to space limitations, I will note only the titles of these works in the footnote.4 4 First Division: Konishi Yukinaga 小西行長, So¯ Yoshitomo 宗義智, Matsuura Shigenobu 松浦 鎮信: Seisei nikki 西征日記 (Diary of the Western Expedition); Senso¯ko¯ 仙巣稿 (Keitetsu Genso Manuscript); Yoshino Jingozaemon oboegaki 吉野甚五左衛門覚書 (Yoshino Jingozaemon Memorandum) Utsunomiya Ko¯rai kijin monogatari 宇都宮高麗帰陣物語 (Tales of Utsunomiya’s Return from Goryeo Campaign); Cho¯sen hibi ki 朝鮮日日記 (Daily Records of Joseon), etc. Second Division: Kato¯ Kiyomasa 加藤清正, Nabeshima Naoshige 鍋島直茂 and others: Kiyomasa ki 清正記 (Annals of Kiyomasa); Kiyosmasa Ko¯raijin oboegaki 清正高麗陣 覚書 (Memorandum on Kiyomasa’s Campaign in Goryeo); Kiyomasa Cho¯sen ki 清正朝鮮記 (Annals of Kiyomasa in Joseon); Ko¯raijin nikki 高麗陣日記 (Diary of the Campaign in Goryeo); Kiyomasa kunseki ko¯ 清正勲積考 (On Kiyomasa’s Meritorious Record); Kimura Matazo¯ oboegaki 木村又蔵覚記 (Memorandum on Kimura Matazo¯); Cho¯sen hibi niki 朝鮮日々記, (Daily Records of Joseon); Cho¯sen monogatari 朝鮮物語 (Tales of Joseon); Ko¯rai nikki 高麗日 記 (Goryeo Diary); Nabeshima Naoshige ko¯ fu 鍋島直茂公譜 (Record of Lord Nabeshima ¯ tomo Yoshimasa 大友義統 and Naoshige), etc. Third Division: Kuroda Nagamasa 黒田長政, O others: Kuroda Nagamasa ki 黒田長政記 (Annals of Kuroda Nagamasa); Kuroda kafu 黒田家 譜 (Kuroda Genealogy); Mashaku ki 魔釈記 (Annals of Mara the Demon and Sakyamuni), etc. Fourth Division: Shimazu Yoshihiro 島津義弘, Mo¯ri Yoshimasa 毛利吉成 and others: Ishin ko¯ jiki 惟新公自記 (Personal Writings of Lord Shimazu Yoshihiro); Tadamasu tokai nikki 忠増 渡海日記 (Diary of Tadamasu’s Crossing the Sea); Shimazuke Ko¯rai gunhitsuroku 島津家高 麗軍秘録 (The Shimazu Family’s Record of Military Secrets in Goryeo); Omodaka Tsuracho¯bo¯ Ko¯rai nikki 面高連長坊高麗日記 (Omodaka Rencho¯bo¯’s Goryeo Diary); Nisshin bosatsu ki 日 新菩薩記 (Annals of Starting Every Day Anew with the Bodhisattva); Seikanroku 征韓録 (Record of Subjugation of Korea); Kawakami Hisakuni zakki 川上久国雑記 (Kawakami Hisakuni Miscellany), etc. Fifth Division: Fukushima Masanori 福島正則, Cho¯sogabe Motochika 長宗我部元親 and others: Motochika ki 元親記 (Annals of Motochika); Fukutomi oboegaki 福富覚書 (Fukutomi Memorandum); Tosa monogatari 土佐物語 (Tales of Tosa), etc. Sixth Division: Kobayakawa Takakage 小早川隆景, Tachibana Muneshige 立花宗茂 and others: Tachibana Cho¯sen ki 立花朝鮮記 (Annals of Tachibana in Joseon); Ryu¯sai kyu¯bunki 立 斎旧聞記 (Annals of Old News of Tachibana Muneshige). Seventh Division: Mo¯ri Terumoto 毛 利輝元, Yoshikawa Hiroie 吉川広家: Shukuro¯-ko¯ 宿蘆稿 (Shukuro Manuscript); Cho¯sen tokai nikki 朝鮮渡海日記 (Diary of Crossing the Sea to Joseon); Ko¯rai monogatari 高麗物語 (Tales

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Military Chronicles on Korea

Chronicles written of the initial period of the Imjin War have the least number of sources and are short because they are limited to the experiences of the authors or lords, and therefore lack an overall perspective on the war. People who wanted to understand the Imjin War in its entirety began recreating the war in a new form by synthesizing the short depictions of the initial stages of the war. Here I will call these military chronicles that portray the war overall “military chronicles on Korea.”5 The military chronicles passed through the following three stages before becoming complete. 1. Taiko¯kimono: Biographies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi The number, content, variety, and scale of accounts concerning the ruler of Japan at that time, Hideyoshi, are staggering in comparison with that of other warriors. The seven-year Imjin War and the situation before and after the war overlaps with the last half of Hideyoshi’s career; all accounts of Hideyoshi necessarily touched on the war overall, regardless of what form those records took. Efforts at portraying the Imjin War in its entirety appeared in many of the biographies of Hideyoshi. The Taiko¯ki 太閤記 published by Oze Hoan 小瀬甫庵 (1564–1640) in 1633 was one such biography. Oze Hoan integrated the accounts by ¯ mura Yu¯ko 大村由己 (1536?–1596), and O ¯ ta Gyu¯ichi 太 田 牛 一 (1527–1613), O and tried to collect as much material on the war as possible. He wrote his biography of Hideyoshi’s life based on his understanding of history as a Confucianist. Oze’s Taiko¯kimono gained such wide popularity that all subsequent works relating to Hideyoshi also came to be known under the generic rubric, Taiko¯kimono. Later generations of Taiko¯ki-styled biographies were all influenced to some extent by Oze. Oze’s work has profound significance as the first in Japan of Goryeo); Mo¯ri Hidemoto ki 毛利秀元記 (Tales of Mo¯ri Hidemoto);Yoshida monogatari 吉 田物語 (Tales of Yoshida); Onko shiki 温故私記 (Personal Chronicles of the Past); Matsui monogatari 松井物語 (Tales of Matsui); Kamiyama Sukeuemon Ko¯raijin oboegaki 上山助右 衛門高麗陣覚書 (Memorandum on Kamiyama Sukeemon’s Campaign in Goryeo). Eighth Division: Ukita Hideie 宇喜多秀家: Togawa ki 戸川記 (Togawa Annals). Naval Command: Kuki Yoshitaka 九鬼嘉隆, To¯do¯ Takatora 藤堂高虎, Wakizaka Yasuharu 脇坂安治, Kato¯ Yoshiaki 加藤嘉明: Satsuma gunki 薩摩軍記 (Satsuma War Chronicles); Wakizaka ki 脇坂記 (Annals of Wakizaka); Ko¯rai sensenki 高麗船戦記 (Annals of Naval Battles in Goryeo); Takayama ko¯ jitsuroku 高山公実録 (True Records of Lord Takayama); To¯do¯ke oboegaki 藤堂家 覚書 (To¯do¯ Family Memorandum). 5 In a broad sense the initial short chronicles on the Imjin War belong to the category of military chronicles on Korea, but here I wish to consider the actual military chronicles on Korea that deal with overall aspects of the war. Nakamura Yukihiko 中 村 幸 彦 defines Cho¯sen gunkimono 朝 鮮 軍 記 物 as realistic novels of the campaign of large armies that Hideyoshi sent to fight in Korea in 1593 and 1596. See: Nihon koten bungaku daijiten 日本古典文学大辞典 (Iwanami Shoten 岩波書店 1986).

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to organize an overall narrative of the war. It has the problems of being a personal work limited by availability of sources, arbitrary treatment of sources, and above all, a lack of any information on Korea or Ming China, the two countries with which Japan was at war. As the first organized history of the entire Imjin War, however, Oze’s Taiko¯kimono exerted great influence on later related works. I have listed the various Taiko¯ki-styled biographies in the footnote.6 2. Cho¯sen seibatsuki: Subjugation of Joseon Cho¯sen seibatsuki 朝鮮征伐記 (Subjugation of Joseon) published by Hori Masamune 堀正意 over twenty years after Oze’s Taiko¯ki, is the first work to highlight the Imjin War period of Hideyoshi’s life as an overall, independent war history. Unlike the Taiko¯ki, for which Oze Hoan was compelled frequently to adapt materials in order to offset the limitations on available source materials, descriptions in the Cho¯sen seibatsuki are relatively consistent with the actual development of the war. Further, the Cho¯sen seibatsuki is unique in that it refers to documents from China. Many sections in the book could not have been written without reference to Chinese sources; the book shows familiarity with the movements of Ming forces, the organization and names of people active in the Ming court and the Ming army. On the other hand, Korean names are missing from the book, or even if included, differ from the names considered the norm in Korean sources. The content of the Cho¯sen seibatsuki is an improvement over the Taiko¯ki, and exerted great influence over the development of subsequent accounts of the “subjugation of Korea.” In fact, a series of books appeared with the prefix Cho¯sen

¯ mura Yu¯ko 大村由己, originally 6 Tensho¯ki 天正記 (The War Chronicles of Hideyoshi) by O twelve scrolls; eight scrolls extant. Taiko¯-sama kunki no uchi 大かうさまくんきのうち (Among the Military Chronicles of the Great Taiko¯, Toyotomi Hideyoshi), Ota Gyuichi 太田牛 一, one scroll, one volume, 1604. Kawazumi Taiko¯ki 川角太閤記 (Kawazumi’s Biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi), Kawazumi Saburo¯emon川角三郎右衛門, five scrolls, five volumes, published between 1615 and 1624. Taiko¯ki 太閤記 (Biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi) Oze Hoan 小瀬甫庵, 22 scrolls, 22 volumes; Author’s Preface, 1625; Published in 1633. Toyokagami, 豊鏡 (Toyotomi Mirror) Takenaka Shigekado 竹中重門, two scrolls, four volumes, 1630. Toyotomi Hideyoshi fu 豊臣秀吉譜 (Genealogy of Toyotomi Hideyoshi), Hayashi Razan 林羅 山, Author’s Epilogue, three scrolls, three volumes, 1642. Taiko¯ Shinken ki 太閤真顕記 (Record of Toyotomi Hideyoshi), Hakueido¯ Cho¯bee 白栄堂長兵衛 12 compilations, 360 scrolls, before 1787. Ehon Taiko¯ki 絵本太閤記 (Woodblock Print Biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi), author: Takeuchi Kakusai 武内確斎, illustrator: Okada Gyokuzan 岡田玉山, seven compilations, 84 volumes; Published 1791–1802. Ehon Toyotomi kunko¯ki 絵 本 豊 臣 勳 功 記 (Woodblock Prints of the Meritorious Record of Toyotomi), authors: Hakkosha Tokusui 八功 舎徳水 and Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳; illustrator: Matsukawa Hanzan 松川半山, nine compilations, 90 volumes; Published 1857–1884.

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seibatsu in their titles, indicating that they were directly or indirectly influenced by the original work.7 3. Completion of Military Chronicles on Korea At the end of the 17th century, an epochal change occurred in the development of the military chronicles on Korea with the influx and circulation of sources from the Korean side. In 1695, a Japanese woodblock print book was published in Kyoto of Yu Seong-ryong’s 柳 成 龍 (1542–1607) Chingbirok (Book of Corrections: Reflections on the National Crisis during the Japanese Invasion of Korea, 1592–1598), a semi-official history of Korea. From the fact that an excerpt of Chingbirok had already appeared in Matsushita Kenrin’s 松下見林 (1637–1703) Isho¯ Nihonden 異 称 日 本 伝 (Japanese Traditions in Foreign Lands) indicates that the book had arrived in Japan earlier than this period, but the channel by which the excerpt reached Japan is still unclear. At any rate, it is certain that at this time important documents from Japan’s wartime enemy Korea had followed those of China into Japan, as can be seen in the Cho¯sen seibatsuki. Here I would like to summarize Yu Seong-ryong’s Chingbirok, which played a definitive role in the completion of the military chronicles on Korea. During the Imjin War, Yu Seong-ryong unified efforts at the Korean court for the war. His Chingbirok is a detailed and critical account of the war shortly after its conclusion based on his own experiences and written from a dispassionate perspective. The book clarifies the inside facts, and distinctly manifests a patriotic allegiance that serves as a lesson for future generations. The accomplishments of the warrior Yi Sun-sin, currently considered the greatest hero of the Korean people, as well as the contributions of volunteer militias, are provided in detail, and the book concludes with his heroic death in battle. The Japanese woodblock excerpt of Chingbirok (Cho¯hiroku) was a great intellectual shock to early modern Japanese society, which had sought to learn the true nature of the war. It became the impetus for Yi Sun-sin’s renown in Japan;

7 Cho¯sen seibatsuki 朝鮮征伐記 (Subjugation of Joseon), nine scrolls, nine volumes; in the later Yamatoya edition, the author is cited as Hori Masamune 堀正意. 1659. Zo¯ho Cho¯sen seibatsuki ¯ zeki) Sadamitsu 宇佐 増補朝鮮征伐記 (Supplement to the Subjugation of Joseon), Usami (O 美（大関）定祐 42 scrolls, 42 volumes, 1665. Cho¯sen Seibatsugunkiko¯ 朝鮮征伐軍記講 (Lectures on the Chronicles of the Military Subjugation of Korea), Zessai Sanjin, 節斎散人, editor, 27 or 30 scrolls, 1758. Cho¯sen seibatsugunki hyo¯ban 朝鮮征伐記評判 (Estimation of the Chronicles of the Military Subjugation of Korea), 24 scrolls, 4 volumes; published at about the same time as Cho¯sen seibatsugunkiko¯ 朝鮮征伐軍記講 (Lectures on the Chronicles of the Military Subjugation of Korea). Ehon Cho¯sen seibatsuki 絵本朝鮮征伐記 (Woodblock Prints of the Subjugation of Joseon), Tsurumine Shigenobu, editor 鶴峯戊申, Hashimoto Gyokuran, illustrator 橋本玉蘭, two compilations, 20 scrolls. First compilation published 1853; later compilation published 1854.

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the author Yu Seong-ryong even appeared in jo¯ruri as the top retainer in all Korea.8 Japan at this time surpassed China and Korea in terms of information and materials regarding the Imjin War with publication of Korea’s Chingbirok after the Cho¯sen seibatsuki, and with its incorporation of Chinese sources. Japanese now finally had a complete picture after a century of pursuing the truth concerning the war. Korean actions recorded in the military chronicles of Korea quoted nearly verbatim from the Chingbirok, and with synthesis with the already existing Cho¯sen seibatsuki, the volume of information increased dramatically. Ten years after publication of Chingbirok, the result of this change was the publication of two masterpieces of Baba Nobunori 馬場信意 (1669–1728), Cho¯sen taiheiki 朝鮮 太平記 (Grand Pacification of Joseon) and Seiki’s 姓貴 Cho¯sen gunki taizen 朝 鮮軍記大全 (Complete Military Chronicles of Joseon).9 Completion of these military chronicles of Korea opened a path in Japan for an integrated, objective treatment of the Imjin War. It was possible for the Japanese to have a much profounder understanding of the war than either Korea or China at this time. This series of works, however, had contained a latent, strong Japancentric perspective as a legacy from the Taiko¯kimono. The contradiction posed by these two contradistinctive aspects—that is, the pursuit of truth and a Japanese version of the Chinese concept of huayi 華夷 (a civilized center versus a barbarian periphery), left a legacy that did not stop with the military chronicles on Korea, but continued into Japanese understanding and research of the Imjin War even after the Meiji Restoration. 8 For example, of the protagonists in Chikamatsu Hanji’s 近松半二 Yamashiro no Kuni chikusho¯-zuka 山城の 国 畜 生 塚 (Brute Mound, Yamashiro Province) a character named Yu Seong-ryong 柳 成 龍 is called “Korea’s First Subject.” The Chingbirok 懲毖録 (Book of Corrections: Reflections on the National Crisis during the Japanese Invasion of Korea, 1592– 1598), had already been published in Japan. Hanji’s inclusion of Yu Seong-ryong and his spirit of loyalty and patriotism most probably reflects Hanji’s positive appraisal of Yu. 9 The main military chronicles on Korea are as follows: Cho¯sen taiheiki 朝鮮太平記 (Grand Pacification of Joseon), Baba Nobunori 馬場信意 30 scrolls, one scroll of table of contents, 31 volumes, 1705. Cho¯sen gunki taizen 朝鮮軍記大全 (Complete Military Chronicles of Joseon), Seiki 姓貴 (unidentified), 38 scrolls, two appendix scrolls, 20 volumes, 1705. Cho¯sen seibatsuki gunkiko¯ 朝鮮征伐軍記講 (Lectures on the Chronicles of the Military Subjugation of Korea), Zessai Sanjin 節斎散人, 27 or 30 scrolls, 1711. Cho¯sen seibatsuki hyo¯ban 朝鮮征伐記評判 (Estimation of the Chronicles of the Military Subjugation of Korea) 24 scrolls, four volumes. Completed around 1711. Ehon Cho¯sen gunki 絵本朝鮮軍記 (Woodblock Prints of the Military Chronicles of Korea), Akisato Rito¯ 秋里離島, ten scrolls, ten volumes, 1800. Ehon Cho¯sen seibatsuki 絵本朝鮮征伐記 (Woodblock Prints of the Subjugation of Joseon), Tsurumine Shigenobu, editor 鶴峯戊申, Hashimoto Gyokuran, illustrator 橋本玉蘭, two compilations, 20 scrolls. First compilation published 1853; later compilation published 1854. Cho¯sen seibatsuto¯ shimatsuki 朝鮮征討始末記 (Record of the Defeat of Joseon), Yamazaki Naonaga 山崎尚長, four scrolls, one scroll of introduction, five volumes, 1855.

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C.

235

Dramatization of Battle Scenes

After the military chronicles on Korea were completed in the 18th century, a new trend appeared toward dramatization of the war rather than pursuit of historical truth. Over a century had elapsed since the conclusion of the war, and for the majority of Japanese the Imjin War only conjured up vague images. Thus, special incidents and war heroes became fictionalized, and a trend toward emphasis of specific images emerged. This trend toward fictionalization can particularly be seen in the works of the early modern plebian theater of kabuki and jo¯ruri. In the dramatizations, Korean commanders are cruelly killed by Japanese commanders; Korean commanders also appear dramatized as sorcerers or insurrectionists who cross over to Japan with schemes of overturning the government. The one figure who has been clearly identified in this genre is a representative character named Mokusokan 木曾官.10 In 1719 Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s 近松門左衛門 (1653–1725) Honcho¯ Sangokushi 本朝三國 志 (Sangoku, or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms), which the Takemoto Bunraku Theater in Osaka performed as its first play, anticipated rumors of a visit by the Joseon missions in the fall of that year. The work is noted for its value as the first Taiko¯ki-styled play. A local magistrate called Mokuso 牧 司 appears in the play as Mokusokan. This character had already been depicted as a pillar of Joseon, a valiant general whose tragic demise was caused by Kato¯ Kiyomasa 加 藤 清 正 and Konishi Yukinaga 小 西 行 長 (1555?–1600). Chikamatsu’s dramatized image of Mokuso acquired a new image in early modern theater. In Chikamatsu Hanji’s 近松半二 (1725–1783) Tenjiku Tokubee sato no kagami 天竺徳兵衛鄕 鏡 (Mirror on the Hometown of India Tokubee), played at the Osaka Takemoto Theater, Yoshioka So¯kan 吉岡宗観 (whose real name was Mokusokan 木 曾 官 ), was vilified in Japan and dramatized as an evil magician who crossed the sea to Japan in order to topple the bakufu government. Tenjiku Tokubee, a legendary figure from the early modern era, receives the will and testimony of his father, Mokusokan, as well as magic powers, which he uses for the purpose of treachery. These kinds of plays, with the Korean general Mokusokan’s son Tenjiku Tokubee as the protagonist who attempts to overthrow the bakufu, continued to be staged with some plot variation as Tentokumono 天徳物. Tentokumono included the renowned Tenjiku Tokubee ikokubanashi 天竺徳兵 衛韓噺 (India Tokubee in Strange Lands), in which the kabuki actor Tsuruya

10 See my Bunroku/Keicho¯ no eki (Teiyu¯ Waran): bungaku ni kizamareta senso¯ 文禄・慶長の役 （壬辰・丁酉倭乱）—文学に刻まれた戦争 (The Imjin War: A War Engraved in Literature (Ko¯dansha Métier Sensho 講談社メチエ選書, 1994).

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Nanboku 鶴屋南北 achieved acclaim, as well as Otonikiku Tenjiku Tokubee 音菊 天竺徳兵衛 (Otonikiku India Tokubee) in the Meiji period. Dramatic pieces other than those concerning Mokusokan and Tenjiku Tokubee that took up the theme of the Imjin War included jo¯ruri that depicted Keyamura Rokusuke’s 毛谷村六助 departing for battle in Joseon, Hikosan gongen no chikai no sukedachi 彦山権現誓助剣 (The Incarnation at Mt. Hiko and the Oath of Assistance, 1786; bivouac was set in Kyushu and Paldo, representing Joseon’s eight provinces). The overall image of these works is still not entirely clear.11 If we refer to the research that has been done so far, we can categorize the dramatic pieces related to the Imjin War as being a series in which Mokuso is a representative villain and his son, Tenjiku Tokubee, an insurrectionist; pieces in which Keyamura Rokusuke dies in battle in Joseon, and others.

III.

Modern Japan and the Imjin War

A.

Modern Japan and the Imjin War

Whether military chronicles on Korea or dramatic pieces, works portraying battles with foreign peoples in the early modern era in Japan evoked a sense of Japan-centered superiority that transcended the bounds of the domain (han) system in which people lived during the Tokugawa period. This aspect of the works became associated with the national ideology of the Meiji era, and extended its influence toward conceptualization and policies toward Korea. Perception of Korea became a reenactment of the Imjin War as living history. Interest was rekindled toward the politics and military aspects of the Imjin War during the Meiji period when the country began debating invading Korea, and eventually fighting the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). This clearly underscored Japanese ambitions of advance on the continent, and the first SinoJapanese War. Simultaneously, a variety of military chronicles on Korea were printed and published. With the 300th anniversary in 1898 of Hideyoshi’s death, 11 Many dramatic works related to the Imjin War were performed during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Titles include: Kanazo¯shi kokusenya jitsuroku 仮 名 草 紙 国 性 爺 実 錄 (True Record of Nanakusa Shiro¯, 1759); Keisei Katsuo¯-ji 傾城勝尾寺 (Katsuo¯ Temple Courtesan, 1761); Keisei Momoyamanishiki 傾城 桃 山 錦 (Courtesan Mountain Orchid, 1768); Sugata kurabe morokoshi banashi 容 競 唐 土 噺 (Tales of Comparison with China, 1768); Kyu¯shu¯ Yojibee nada 九州与次兵衛灘 (Yojibee of the Kyu¯shu¯ Seas, 1771); Sanzen sekai yarikuri o¯rai 三 千 世 界 商 往 來 (Road to the Great Buddhist Trichiliocosm of Management, 1772); Kara Yamato kikigaki zo¯shi 韓和聞書帖 (Verbatim Record of Korea and Japan, 1778); Karanishiki enjo no Isaoshi 唐 錦 艶 書 功 (Meritoriousness of Chinese Brocade Love Letters, 1794). In some of these productions, Chinese play the role of insurgent.

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various commemoration projects were undertaken to lionize Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi was treated not only as someone who rose from humble beginnings to the highest position in the country, but as someone who extended Japanese military prowess throughout the East. As such, he became revered as a historical precedent for the expansionist policies of imperialistic Japan. The Imjin War was also reevaluated as the realization of Hideyoshi’s lofty ambition to subjugate the continent. Consequently, the Imjin War came to be construed solidly in Japanese society as one incident in the life of the great Taiko¯-sama in which he “conquered Korea” or “invaded China.” It was in the Meiji era that the Imjin War became the focus of academic study. What connected military chronicles on Korea in the two eras was the Seikan iryaku 征韓偉略 (1831, Records of the Japanese Grand Invasions of Korea), published by Kawaguchi Cho¯ju 川 口 長 孺 (1772–1835) of the Mito domain. The work is admired as including historical criticism to portray a factual account of Hideyoshi’s “great exploit of the subjugation of Korea.” Most research on Hideyoshi’s Korean invasions in the historiographical studies of modern Japan have been appraised as following the lines of Kawaguchi Cho¯ju’s narrative, and while adding new perspective, actively or critically incorporating the Seikan iryaku.12 Besides the Ching-birok, the Cho¯sen seibatsuki, Seisei nikki 西 征 日 記 , Seikanroku 征 韓 録 (Record of Korean Subjugation), Ryo¯cho Heijo¯ roku 両朝平 攘録 (Yangjo Pyongyang rok; A Record of the Pacification of Two Imperial Courts) and other works in the Seikan iryaku were recognized as having value as historical sources. This consciousness extended to the Meiji period. Cases of fallacies also appeared in which fictitious elements in various initial annals and military records of Korea were accepted as “fact.” Perceptions toward the Chingbirok, which received attention from the point of view of early modern Japan’s advance into the Chinese continent, transformed from that of forcible annexation of Korea by the Empire of Japan into principally control of a colony. Tokutomi Soho¯ 徳富蘇峰 (1853–1957) reviewed documents on Korea and Japan in his hundred-volume Kinsei Nihon kokuminshi 近世日本 国民史 (A History of Modern Japan), and published a three-volume tome entitled Hideyoshi shi jidai: Cho¯sen eki 豊 臣 氏 時 代 朝 鮮 役 (The Hideyoshi Era: The Korean Expedition). In 1924, the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office edited and published the Nihon senshi Cho¯sen eki 日本戰史朝鮮役 (History of Japan’s Wars: The Expedition to Korea) to treat the colonization of Korea.

12 Kitashima Manji 北島万次, Toyotomi seiken no taigai ninshiki to Cho¯sen shinryaku 豊臣政 権の対外認識と 朝 鮮 侵 略 (The Toyotomi Government’s Perceptions of Foreign Countries and the Invasion of Korea), (Azekura Shobo¯ 校倉書房, 1990), p. 23.

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As such political and military objectives became mainstream even short stories about the Imjin War by representative early modern writers began to emerge. Mori Ogai’s (1862–1922) Sahashi Jingoro¯ 佐橋甚五郎 (1913) and Akutagawa Ryu¯nosuke’s (1892–1927) Kin Shogun 金将軍 (Shogun Kim, 1924), which was written just after the Great Kanto Earthquake, are two examples. Akutagawa’s historical views can be seen in how he cleverly uses the Korean tale of the death of Konishi Yukinaga 小西行長 at the hands of Gye Wolhyan 桂月香 (?–1592?) at Pyongyang Castle. It is the only work Akutagawa ever wrote about Korea. I have not found any other works from early modern Japan on the Imjin War; Nakajima Atsushi’s 中島敦 (1909–1942) Junsa no oru fu¯kei 巡査の居る風景 (Scenes of Constables), however, which includes material on the Imjin War, is a good indicator of the contradictions in colonial strategies and dual nature that characterized Japan at that time.

B.

Contemporary Japan and the Imjin War

After Japan’s defeat in World War II, there was no longer any sense of moral authority to engage in wars instigated by the country, and interest in the Imjin War lessened. In 1964 a short story entitled Cho¯senjin shu¯i 朝鮮陣拾遺 (Gleanings of the Camps in Korea) by Takiguchi Yasuhiko 滝 口 康 彦 (1924– 2004) was published that was pioneering in purport. This anti-war work describes the tremendous suffering inflicted on the Japanese people by Hideyoshi’s reckless war. After diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan were normalized in 1965, works have been published on the Imjin War with content and source materials that have never been seen before. In particular, many contemporary novels on the Imjin War began to appear after 1990, a year that marked the 400th anniversary of the Imjin War, and saw an unprecedented flurry of interaction between the two countries at the popular level. The following is a chronological list of publications that had appeared by 2000. Kang Wi Dan’s (Kyo¯gido¯) 姜魏堂 Ikiteiru ryoshu¯ 生きている虜囚 (Living Captives, 1966); Shiba Ryo¯taro¯’s 司馬遼太郎 Kokyo¯ bo¯jigataku so¯ro¯ 故郷忘じが たく候 (The Heart Remembers Home, 1968); Endo Shu¯saku’s Tetsu no kubikase 鉄の首枷 (Iron Pillory: Biography of Konishi Yukinaga, 1977); Mori Reiko’s 森 礼子 Sansai no onna 三彩の女 (Tri-colored Woman, 1983); Miyamoto Tokuzo¯’s ¯ shi 王使 (Imperial Envoy, 1991); Miyamoto Tokuzo¯’s 宮本徳蔵 宮本徳蔵 O Koho¯ki 虎砲記 (Matchlock Annals, 1991); Oda Makoto’s 小田実 Mingan Taiko¯ki 民岩太閤記 (People Power Taiko¯ki, 1992); Kosaka Jiro¯’s 神坂次郎 Umi no kayagum 海の伽耶琴 (Gayageum of the Sea, 1993); Hasegawa Tsutomu’s 長谷 川つとむ Kikashita shinryakuhei 帰化した侵略兵 (Naturalized Invaders,

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1996); Arayama To¯ru’s 荒山徹 Ko¯rai hicho¯—Ri Shunshin shogun o ansatsu seyo 高麗秘帖—李舜臣将軍を暗殺せよ (Secret Goryeo Memorandum: Assassinate General Yi Sun-sin, 1999); and Miyamoto Tokuzo¯’s 宮本徳蔵 Kaiko¯hi 海虹妃 (Queen Kaiko¯, 2000).

IV.

Conclusion

I would like to conclude by presenting a summary of the most prominent characteristics of works relating to the Imjin War in modern Japan that differ from early modern military chronicles of Korea, bunraku, and kabuki pieces. First, in early modern Japan, the Imjin War was perceived simply as a political or military objective, and did not receive attention as a subject with independent meaning for most Japanese writers. Second, after normalization of relations between Korea and Japan, cultural exchanges began to mushroom, and long novels that dealt seriously with the Imjin War began to appear. Third, the trend in contemporary Japanese works is to have protagonists with symbolic meaning in Korean-Japanese relations, such as Sayaka (Kim Chung-seon 金忠善, 1571?– 1643), Chin Jukan (Chim Su-gwan 沈 寿 官 ) of Satsuma-ware fame, or Julia Ota, who graces the pages of the history of Catholic martyrs. Fourth, compared with other fields, most current writers are permanent Korean residents of Japan, married to Koreans, have had experience of living in Korea, or in some way have a profound relationship with Korea. The most important of these recent works have also been published in Korean translation.13 Fifth, the majority of works after the early period take a critical anti-war stance against Hideyoshi’s invasions rather than extolling Hideyoshi and Japanese military commanders and exploits. As is evident from the above, the early modern era is being fictionalized in Japan even today through works on the Imjin War that have different characteristics, depending on the era. Regardless whether the works are early modern novels, traditional theatrical pieces, modern short stories, novels, or even movies, plays, or video games, the Imjin War has continued to be adapted to new genres, and it isn’t difficult to imagine that artistic renditions of the Imjin War will continue to grow and evolve. Owing to space constraints, I cannot cover them here, but there have naturally been a plethora of works related to the Imjin War published in Korea and China. They will probably constitute an expanding common ground for new comparative literature and comparative culture studies. In the global age, and in an increasingly Asia-centric world, amicable relations ¯ shi 王使 (Imperial Envoy), Umi no kayagum 海の伽耶 13 Koho¯ki 虎砲記 (Matchlock Annals), O 琴 (Gayageum of the Sea), Kikashita shinryakuhei 帰 化 し た 侵 略 兵 (Naturalized Invaders), etc. are all translated into Korean.

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between Korea and Japan will only grow in importance. The Imjin War holds current meaning as living history, a point from which to consider an ideal relationship for both Korea and Japan—and even for China as the three major nations of Northeast Asia. It will probably continue to be a theme that demands our constant reevaluation. *Translated from the Japanese by Jenine Heaton. Translation published by permission of the author.

FUJITA Takao

The Establishment of the Field of “Oriental History” in Japan: Facilitating Understanding of East Asian Studies in Modern Japan

I.

Introduction

In modern Japanese universities the study and teaching of history is comprised of three central pillars: Japanese history, Oriental history, and Western history. These areas are reflected not only in the organization of subjects taught at universities, but also in the composition of academic associations. Even the distribution of research grants by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology distinguishes these as separate academic fields. The same division can be seen in the disciplines of philosophy and thought, or literature and language. It is common for universities to offer lectures on Chinese or Eastern philosophy among their philosophy courses, or include the subject of Chinese literature among their literature courses. In contrast, among the academic organizations focused upon China or East Asia, a small number of them, such as The Institute of Eastern Culture (To¯ho¯ Gakkai 東方学会), traverse the disciplines of philosophy, history, and literature. Others, such as the Sinological Society of Japan (Nihon Chu¯goku Gakkai 日本中 国学会), directly state their field of study as “Sinology.” It goes without saying that the exact form a discipline takes within academia varies depending upon the subject and is also dependent upon the demands of the time. However, as a specialist in historical studies, I believe that the academic category of “Oriental history” seen as self-evident in Japan is an expression of the uniqueness of Asian and Chinese studies in modern Japan. In this essay I shall trace the development of the unique character of Oriental history from its origins, and offer my own observations on that process. Allow me to preface these writings by stating that all names, such as those of places and academic fields, are used as they were in their respective eras.

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Establishment of Modern Japanese Historical Research

The establishment in Japan of the modern study of history dates back to the middle of the Meiji period at the end of the nineteenth century. Historical research existed prior to this period, with a long list of prolific historians coming easily to mind. The study of history as it is directly related to our system of learning today, however, began in the Meiji period concomitant with the process of modernization, as was the case with many other academic fields. Let us look briefly at this process, starting from the organization of university learning. In 1886 (Meiji 19), the Japanese Ministry of Education promulgated the Imperial University Order and changed the name of Tokyo University to the Imperial University.1 In the following year, 1887 (Meiji 20), history was first included in the College of Humanities (Department of Literature) at the Imperial University. The Ministry of Education invited Ludwig Riess (1861–1928) from Germany that year to lecture in history.2 Riess was a student of the historical scholar Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) at Berlin University, and he brought with him to Japan the concept of positivist history, founded in the Ranke school of source criticism. During his fifteen years in residence, Riess played several roles in the founding of modern Japanese historical research, among them being the use of physical historical materials; pioneering in the history of East-West interaction; and promotion of compiling historical materials, which had a particularly strong influence on the direction that Japanese historical research took in the years that followed. Soon after Riess took up his position, he suggested that national history be founded as a subject in the College of Humanities in reply to an inquiry by the first chancellor of the Imperial University, Watanabe Hiromoto 渡辺洪基 (1848– 1901). This was approved, and in 1889 (Meiji 22), the Department of National History was established. The result, however, was a slightly odd situation when considered from the perspective of today in that the College of Humanities began offering both history and national history as subjects.3 In 1904 (Meiji 37), after Riess left Japan, the history courses were again reorganized and three special training courses were founded: national history, Chinese history, and Western 1 Tokyo University was founded in 1877 through the amalgamation of the Tokyo School of Western Learning (Kaisei Gakko¯ 開 成 学 校 ) and Tokyo Medical School. The Tokyo School of Western Learning was reorganized into the three departments of law, literature, and science (divided into colleges by subject); the Tokyo Medical School became the medical department. 2 Records show that these lectures only covered ancient to modern European history, providing in three years an outline up until the French Revolution. 3 The reason for this remains unclear, but as the early Imperial University history course was heavily philological, Riess’ decision may have focused on the merits of keeping “national history” separate, as it used separate historical sources.

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history.4 In 1911 (Meiji 44), the designation of Chinese history was changed to Oriental history,5 marking the appearance of the national, Oriental, and Western classification system that is still in place today. Just what position did Chinese or Oriental history hold in academia until the emergence of Chinese or Oriental studies as history courses? When Tokyo University was established in 1877 (Meiji 10), Sino-Japanese literature was established as a second discipline in the College of Humanities.6 However, English literature, and French and German language were also required subjects, while courses in Sino-Japanese literature were very cursory. In 1882 (Meiji 15), a course on the classics was added in the College of Humanities that mainly taught the four categories of classic Chinese literature (Confucianism, history, the hundred schools of thought, and literature) and legislation. This course was terminated in 1885 (Meiji 18). Sino-Japanese literature was reorganized in 1889 (Meiji 22) into national literature and Chinese literature. Courses on the history of China and the Orient, therefore, consisted of reading Chinese classical texts, and were treated as part of Sino-Japanese literature or the classics. From another perspective, it can be discerned that the process of gradual change in the initial organization of the academic fields of national, Chinese, and Western studies of the Edo period were being gradually replaced by the fields of philosophy, history, and literature.

III.

The Birth and Background of Oriental History Studies

Here I will provide an overview of how the terms “Oriental history” and “study of Oriental history” originally came to indicate a field within the study of history.7 “Oriental history” appears first not as the title of an academic field, but as the 4 At this time the College of Humanities itself was reorganized into three departments: philosophy, history, and literature. 5 The title “Oriental history” was first used as a course name in the College of Humanities at Kyoto Imperial University, established in 1906 (Meiji 39). The first Oriental history lecture was given at Kyoto Imperial University in 1907 (Meiji 40) by Naito¯ Konan 内藤湖南. 6 The first subjects were history, philosophy, and politics, with Sino-Japanese literature handled separately. 7 There are already numerous works explicating how the study of Oriental history was formed, including Nakayama Kyu¯shiro¯’s 中 山 久 四 郎 “Recollections of and Prospects for the Development of Oriental History Studies” (To¯yo¯shigaku hattatsu no kaiko to tenbo¯ 東 洋 史 発 達 の 回 顧 と 展 望 ), History Education Research Society, ed. (Rekishi kyo¯iku kenkyu¯kai hen 歴 史 教 育 研 究 会 編 ), Development of Historical Studies after the Meiji ( Meiji igo no shigaku hattatsu-shi 明 治 以 後 の 史 学 発 達 史 ), Shikai Shobo¯ Publishing 四 海 書 房 , 1933); Ogura Yoshihiko 小 倉 芳 彦 “Development of Oriental History Studies in Japan” (Nihon ni okeru To¯yo¯shigaku no hattatsu 日本における東洋史学の発達), Iwanami Lectures / World History Iwanami ko¯za sekai rekishi 岩波講座世界歴史) Separate volume, Iwanami Shoten Pub-

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name of a subject taught in secondary education (normally ages thirteen to seventeen). Naka Michiyo 那珂通世 (1851–1908), a teacher at the Higher Normal School, is generally considered its first advocate. Naka’s friend, Miyake Yonekichi 三宅米吉 (1860–1929), gives the following account of the event. In Meiji 27 (1894), the principal of the normal school, Mr. Kano¯ Jigoro¯ 嘉納治五郎 (1860–1938), gathered the teaching staff from his own school, university teachers, and teachers from the advanced secondary school (later the prewar high school) and held an inquiry into the teaching of each subject in secondary schools (Author’s note: both the subjects and their content). When he (Naka Michiyo) suggested during the discussion on history that foreign history should be divided into Oriental history and Western history, all in attendance agreed. This marked the starting point of the academic subject of “Oriental history.”8

To give a little additional background, in secondary education at the time the textbook used most often for teaching foreign history was Samuel Griswold’s Peter Parley’s Universal History (1859), an American publication. This text focused primarily on Europe and America. It was problematic in that there was scarce mention of Persia and India in the text, and it all but ignored the East Asian countries that have the deepest relationships with Japan, such as China and Korea. It was therefore considered necessary to treat the history of East Asian countries as a totally different subject. It is symbolic that this proposal was made in 1894, the year in which the First Sino-Japanese War started. In the 1880s, terms such as “Oriental philosophy” and “Oriental literature” had already emerged, and the occurrence of the First SinoJapanese War certainly did not directly lead to the creation of “Oriental history” as an academic subject. However, there is no doubt that the Sino-Japanese War provided an opportunity for the Japanese people to become deeply interested in the Asian continent. The range of historical teachings to be covered by secondary education was determined by the Ministry of Education based upon the suggestions of Naka Michiyo.9 The following are the principal points. lishers 岩波 書 店 , 1971); and Yoshizawa Seiichiro¯’s 吉 澤 誠 一 郎 “China and the Formation of Oriental History Studies: The Case of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯,” To¯yo¯shigaku no Keisei to Chu¯goku —Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ no baai 東洋史学の形成と中国—桑原隲蔵の場合）Iwanami Lectures (Iwanami ko¯za: Teikoku Nihon no gakuchi 岩波講座・帝国日本の学知 Knowledge of Japanese Empire, Volume 3, Magnetic Field of Oriental Studies To¯yo¯gaku no jiba 東洋学の磁場, (Iwanami Shoten Publishers 岩波書店, 2006). In particular, the final essay by Yoshizawa is closely related to the points made here; I highly recommend reading it as a companion to this text. 8 Miyake Yonekichi 三 宅 米 吉 “Biography of Naka Michiyo, Doctor of Letters” (Bungaku hakase Naka Michiyokun den 文学博士那珂通世君伝) The Posthumous Writings of Naka Michiyo ( Naka Michiyo isho 那珂通世遺書) Dainippon Tosho, 1915). 9 See footnote 8.

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World history shall be divided into Oriental history and Western history. Oriental history shall be primarily focused on China. Oriental history shall explicate the repeated cycle of wars and peace, and the rise and fall of the countries of the Orient, centered on China. It shall comprise half of world history in contradistinction to Western history. In the teaching of Oriental history note should be taken of the mutual influence between Japan and the countries of the Orient from ancient times. The relationships between the countries of the Orient and the West should also be explained. Until now, Chinese history has principally focused on the rise and fall of dynasties, telling nothing of the vicissitudes of the people’s lives, but Oriental history must include not only the rise and fall of the countries of the Orient, but also of the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the Chinese people, Turkic people, Jurchen people, Mongol people, and so forth.

Accordingly, a number of textbooks were written in the 1890s as teaching materials for “Oriental history” in secondary education, within the overall boundaries outlined above. The most influential of these was most probably Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯’s (1871–1931) Intermediate History of the Orient (Chu¯to¯ To¯yo¯shi 中等東洋 史), published in 1898 (Meiji 31).10 The strength of this textbook is considered to have figured largely in the spread of the term “Oriental history.” Naka Michiyo provided the following foreword to the textbook: The inconvenience of using the name “world history” or even “universal history” and yet focusing only on the rise and fall of the countries of Europe is nothing new…As the Empire (Japan) is placed at the farthest Eastern point of the Orient, and our past, present, and future are all linked most closely with the other countries of this region, our citizens should possess a clear understanding of historical events in the Orient since ancient times…Though there are a great number of texts in recent years proclaiming to deal with Oriental history, all deal in detail only with the vicissitudes of China, abbreviating all events in the periphery, and often totally omitting any discussion of that vital point of contact between East and West: Central Asia. The lack of these elements makes it impossible to accurately consider the overall situation in Asia, either now or in the past, a situation that I have always regretted. Recently, Mr. Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯, a man of letters, penned the text Intermediate History of the Orient and presented it to me. Having read it, I see that it is succinct, to the point, and uses copious references from both East and West to cover the vicissitudes of Oriental peoples and the rise and fall of nations.11

If the previous points and this foreword by Naka are considered together, the composition and characteristics of Oriental history start to emerge. That is, Oriental history is regarded as a vital component of world history, alongside

10 Its content, along with the teachers’ reference text, Teaching Materials for Oriental History (To¯yo¯shi kyo¯ju shiryo¯ 東 洋 史 教 授 資 料 ), can be seen in full in The Complete Works of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ (Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ zenshu¯ 桑原隲蔵全集) Vol. 4, Iwanami Shoten Publisher 岩波書店, 1968). 11 The Complete works of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯, Vol. 4, Page 3.

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Western history, and should emphasize the history of interaction between the East and West, as well as the rise and fall of many peoples, not just the Chinese. It is well known that Kuwabara’s Intermediate History of the Orient was translated even in China (Guangxu 25) under the title Dongyangshi yao 東 洋 史 要 and published in 1899 by Dongwen Xueshe in Shanghai. The foreword by Wang Guowei ( 王國維, 1877–1927) to the book is as follows. It is a little long, but I would like to quote it in full here. My schoolmate, Fan Bingqing (樊 炳 清 , 1877–1929), of Shanyin [present-day Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province], translated Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯’s Chu¯to¯ To¯yo¯shi (Intermediate History of the Orient) as Dongyangshi yao (Essentials of Oriental History 東 洋 史 要 ), and it was recently published. My teacher, Prof. Fujita [= Fujita Toyohachi (藤 田 豊 八 , 1869– 1929)] then discussed the main points of this book and had Wang Guowei write a foreword, which reads as follows: From the early modern period, history has been a science, in which events are presented systematically. Whatever the field of study, if there is no systematic knowledge, it cannot be called science. China’s so-called histories are nearly all lacking in system, being nothing more than collections of the events randomly seen in society. These can only be called historical materials, not history. There are two types of history: national histories and world history. National histories relate the events of a nation with one another; world history narrates the events relating the nations of the world historically. Both are proper fields of study, but they cannot be viewed as one outside a system. From ancient times the nations of the West have formed a historical unit, making up the Western culture of today. The nations of the East also form a historical unit, and make up the millennia-old culture of the East. Only in recent decades have these two regions, whether in cooperation or resistance, come into close contact. Hence, today it is still not possible to write a world history. Thus the reason for dividing world history into Oriental history and Western history is that these two fields of regional history focus on the study of the events historically connecting countries of these regions, and this focus is different from that of national histories. Moreover, what has previously passed for Western history has for the most part not been a collection of national histories of the countries of the West. To be called Oriental history or Western history, a work must cull from the myriad events that make up the national histories those events that exert influence on the other nations, so that it can explain the present state of affairs in those other nations. In the East, there are countless events that we can adduce where events in one country influenced later events in another country. For example, the birth of Buddha in India led to the spread of his teachings through China and Korea to Japan. The Han’s repelling of the Xiongnu opened up the western regions. The rise of the Tang occasioned China’s westward expansion to Congling (the Pamir Mountains), its southern inclusion of Cochinchina, and the opening up of sea and land routes to Persia and the Islamic empires. With the ascendency of Genghis Khan, Mongol armies shook the very foundations of the central empire and western Asia, and his posterity swept over China and Korea, and even threatened Japan. Japanese pirates and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) had no small effect on the rise and fall of Ming China and Korea. The present state of societies in the East has detailed antecedents worth investigating. Hence, to explain the present state of these societies, we must study the

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essentials of Oriental history. In writing this book, Kuwabara made extensive use of Chinese official histories for events pertaining to China and its periphery, and relied heavily on Western works for events pertaining to India and Central Asia. Though there are a few mistakes, the book is simple yet inclusive, extensive yet pertinent. The knowledgeable reader can discern for himself the advantages and disadvantages of this presentation over works that unsystematically gather facts. I would especially like readers to use these many kinds of historical connections to explain present societal conditions in the nations of the East, without sacrificing scientific rigor. Wang Guowei of Haining, China, in the lunar Eleventh Month 1899.

As can be immediately understood, the main points of Oriental history outlined here are basically in concordance with those proposed by Naka Michiyo and the area stipulated by the Ministry of Education. Not only that, but it incorporates an awareness of systematic history as a science, the Orient as a historical entity, and the relationship between national and world histories. Although Wang Guowei is given as the author of the foreword, the content is clearly in the voice of Fujita Toyohachi, whom Luo Zhenyu (羅 振 玉 , 1866–1940) had invited to be instructor at the Dongwen Xueshe at the time. It is regrettable that there is no way of knowing what Wang Guowei himself thought of the academic field of Oriental history that originated in Japan. Fan Bingqing’s translation of the work was also soon released under the new title Outline of History in China and the Periphery (Lidai Zhongwaishi yao 歴代中外史要) and was subsequently translated many times into Chinese by other translators.12 The concept of Oriental history, which originated from a textbook for secondary education, did not simply begin and end as the name of an academic subject. As we have seen, before long it was reflected in the organization of academic fields at the Imperial University itself. In other words, when Oriental history was established as a field of academic research, it retained all of the unique properties it contained when first designed as a subject for secondary education.

12 For research on the Chinese translations of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯’s textbook, Chu¯to¯ To¯yo¯shi, see Suzuki Masahiro’s 鈴 木 正 弘 “Translations of Oriental History textbooks at the end of the Qing: Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯’s Oriental History” (“Shinmatsu ni okeru ‘To¯yo¯shi’ kyo¯zai no kanyaku: Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ chojutsu ‘To¯yo¯shi’ kanyaku kyo¯zai no kosatsu,” 清末における「東 洋史」教材の漢訳—桑原隲蔵著述「東洋史」漢訳教材の考察）(Hiroshima University, Historical Research ( Shigaku kenkyu¯ 史学研究), Issue 250, 2005).

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Unique Characteristics of the Study of Oriental History

Before I proceed further, first I shall demarcate the Orient designated by the proponents of Oriental history. Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯’s Intermediate History of the Orient divides the Asian continent into five areas: Eastern Asia (the area of land surrounded by the three mountain ranges of the Himalayas in the south, Pamir in the west, and Altai in the north; China and Korea are included in this area), Southern Asia (India, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan), Central Asia (the Russian territory of Turkestan, north of the Hindu Kush, west of the Pamir, and south of the Syr Darya), Western Asia (west of the Amu Darya, Persia, Asia Minor, and Arabia), and Northern Asia (what is today called Siberia). Based on these areas he then makes the following statement in the opening of the text. Oriental history mainly clarifies the origin and development of East Asia from past to present, but at the same time, the origins and development of South and Central Asia that are directly or indirectly related should also be outlined. North Asia…is not the site of any great changes that influence the situation in East Asia, while West Asia is indivisible from Europe, so these two areas are outside of the Orient.13

In other words, while the term Orient is used, it does not indicate Asia excluding the West (Europe and the Americas) and Africa, but includes parts of Central and South Asian history. In actuality, it clearly centers on the region today called East Asia. Nevertheless, the fact that it was called “Oriental history” and not “East Asian history” is most likely because “East Asian history” would not have been an appropriate designation in contraposition to the category of “Western history.” I will come back to this issue of an awareness of opposition to the “West” later. What should be pointed out here is that Japan is not included in East Asia. Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯’s “Foreword and Ten Provisos” that preface Intermediate History of the Orient explains this in the following way. As we have national history to cover events in our own country, repetition is to be avoided, and events in Japan are to largely be omitted, aside from those that have a significant connection to other countries.14

That is, Japanese history is treated in Oriental history only as it relates to the other countries of the Orient. The premise underlying Oriental history is that national history [Japanese history] exists as a separate system from it. This is an issue that cannot be reduced to a simple problem of convenience of “avoiding repetition.” To the creators of Oriental history, the subject was not something in which they themselves were included, but that referred first and last to other people. Indeed,

13 The Complete Works of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯, Vol. 4, pp. 17–18. 14 The Complete Works of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯, Vol. 4, p. 6.

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it may well be possible to extend this thought paradigm to the general stance toward Asia taken by early modern Japanese intellectuals. There is another unique characteristic of Oriental history that cannot be overlooked. While China was central to Oriental history, as evidenced repeatedly in the quotes above from Naka Michiyo, Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯, and Fujita Toyohachi, Oriental history was conceived as a discussion of the history of the rise and fall of all the races of the Orient. In other words, this was a relativizing of Chinese history on the great stage of the “Orient.” It can be deduced that Naka Michiyo aimed to escape the overemphasis on Chinese history in his vision of Oriental history, from his statement quoted earlier: “Though there are a great number of texts in recent years proclaiming to deal with Oriental history, all deal in detail only with the vicissitudes of China, abbreviating all events in the periphery, and often totally omitting any discussion of that vital point of contact between East and West: Central Asia. The lack of these elements makes it impossible to accurately consider the overall situation in Asia, either now or in the past.” Naka Michiyo is famous as the author of The General History of China (Shina tsu¯shi 支那通史).15 The work aims to give a general history of China, finishing before the start of the Mongol era, but this is because of the many problems found in the historical sources of The History of Yuan (Yuan Shi 元 史 ). Naka proved himself to be a practical exponent of seeking documents outside of traditional Chinese classical texts as can be seen from his personally annotating a translation of The Secret History of the Mongols ( Mongolyn nuuts tovchoo). Narrating a relativization of Chinese history on the stage of Oriental history emphasized the histories of the periphery and interaction between East and West. As is well-known, Kuwabara’s greatest achievement was the preeminent work Vestiges of Pu Shougeng (Ho Juko¯ no jiseki 蒲 壽 庚 の 事 蹟 ), which highlighted the activities of Muslim traders during the Yuan Dynasty, and should be called the apogee of East-West intercultural histories at the time. The relativization of Chinese history also facilitated research into materials other than those pertaining to Chinese history. Let us now look, then, at Shiratori Kurakichi 白 鳥 庫 吉 , 1865–1942), founder of Oriental history at Tokyo Imperial University. Shiratori entered the first class in the History Department in the Humanities College at Imperial University just after it opened in 1887 (Meiji 20). He was Ludwig Riess’ (1861–1928) first student. As a professor at Gakushu¯in after graduating from the history department, he was in charge of lectures pertaining to the countries of the Orient starting with Korea, and eventually expanding to research on Manchuria, Mongolia, and the Western Regions (Xiyu) 15 As this work was written in classical Chinese, it was also published in China by Luo Zhenyu in 1899. In the foreword Luo Zhenyu writes, “We should be ashamed that our own history had to be written not by one of our own countrymen, but by someone from another country.”

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of Central Asia. In 1903 (Meiji 36), after completing a two-year period of study in Europe, he was appointed professor at Tokyo Imperial University the year following his return to Japan.16 For the next twenty-one years he would study and teach in Tokyo Imperial University’s Oriental Studies Department, and continue to greatly influence the department at that time. Shiratori’s work touched in part upon ancient Japanese history and the history of West Asia, but its central focus was the history of areas such as Manchuria, Korea, the periphery, and Central Asia. His aim was to raise the standard of Japanese scholarship to the same level as that of Europe through handling Chinese historical materials in a way superior to but based on the research of European scholars. Shiratori made the following comments concerning his own field of research: Even though it is only convenient and proper that people of the Orient should research the Orient, the fact that Western scholars have taken the initiative and that the realm of Oriental studies has been violated and infringed upon in the same way as has the world of politics is enough to make one’s blood boil. If the countries of the Orient are currently falling into ruination and death, then it may well be asking too much to desire of the scholars of these countries to promote such studies. But as for our country…we must aspire to surpass them [Western scholars] in Oriental studies and compensate for their deficiencies.17 European scholars have been putting effort into the study of the Orient for many years… the results of their academic research into all of the countries of Asia are truly awe-inspiring. The scholars from our own country depend on it, and can only know about it based on the teachings of Westerners. While feeling a deep-rooted respect and gratitude to Western scholars, I also feel humiliated by the exceedingly small number of contributions the people of the Orient have made to worldwide academics. However, when it comes to the regions of Manchuria and Korea they are so remote from the West that Westerners seem not to have been able to research many of them. Thus, we are fortunate to find that this academic area is wide open to us, and that the geographical and cultural relationship to our own people makes this research uniquely convenient. Scholars of our country must not miss this opportunity, but pour all of their efforts into research of everything concerning these regions, then contribute the resulting achievements to world academia.18

What can easily be discerned from these comments is that Shiratori was keenly aware of European Oriental studies and believed that in order to raise the do16 As stated previously, this is the year in which academic courses were rearranged and the three pillars of national history, Chinese history, and Western history were created. 17 Shiratori Kurakichi’s “Influence of Outside Barbarians on the Han People” (Iteki ga Kanminzoku no ue ni oyoboshita eikyo¯ 夷狄が漢民族の上に及ぼした影響) Eastern Philosophy ( To¯yo¯ Tetsugaku 東洋哲学, 8–1, 1901). 18 Shiratori Kurakichi’s Historical Geography of Manchuria (Manshu¯ rekishi chiri 満州歴史地 理) Preface, 1913.

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mestic standard of Oriental studies to compete with Western scholars, Japanese should choose regions that European scholars had not studied in depth. While it is true that the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) had expanded Japanese power on the Korean Peninsula and into northeast China, making it much easier for researchers to actually go to these places and examine historical materials, one certainly cannot admire today Shiratori’s naive assessment of this state of affairs as an “opportunity.” However, the point I wish to highlight here is that Shiratori’s pioneering move into the fields of history in Manchuria and Korea is in complete alignment with the stance of Oriental history placing focus on regions other than China.

V.

Conclusion: “Oriental History” and “Chinese History”

How have the Chinese, then, looked upon historical research on the Orient that concentrates on countries other than China? It is my personal view that direct commentary on the propriety of “Oriental history” as an academic field is extremely limited. The modern Chinese scholar Sang Bing 桑兵 evaluates it as one of the “erroneous tendencies in China studies which focus on China’s peripheral regions and ethnic minorities” (siyi pianxiang 四 裔 偏 向 ), alongside trends in European research, but statements made by the scholars of the time are difficult to find. Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯’s harsh critique of Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 (1873–1929) Research Methods in Chinese History (Zhongguo lishi yanjiufa 中 国 歴 史 研 究 法 ) includes the following words: Liang Qichao’s evaluation of “Chinese history” and “Oriental history” as created by the Japanese is as follows: “These countless Japanese books on Oriental history and Chinese history that are in the bookstores are all tiresome fabrications that lead everyone to ignominious ruin; they are worthless. But today the national history books that are commonly used in our schools are furthering sales of many translations. This is truly an utter disgrace to our people.” A thorough condemnation, I’m sure you’ll agree. This is also quite a shocking change in attitude from Mr. Liang, who over twenty years ago promoted Japanese Oriental history in his article, “An Evaluation of Japanese Books” (“Dongji yuedan” (東籍月旦) in his Collected Works from the Ice Drinker’s Room (Yinbingshi heji 飲 冰 室 合 集 ), even praising highly my own Intermediate History of the Orient by describing it thusly: “the composition is well organized, and is excellent in that it is both detailed yet lucid. The arguments and judgments showed the author’s insight.” (条理頗整…繁簡得宜。論断有識).19

19 The Complete Works of Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯, Vol. 2, p. 476. Liang Qichao’s original statement is as follows: 其（日本）坊間之東洋史支那史等書、累々充架、率皆歯莽滅裂、不値一盼。 而現今我国学校通用之国史教科書、乃率裨販迻訳之以充数、真国民莫大之恥也。

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It is important to clearly understand here that what Liang Qichao is angry about is the spread of “national histories” by foreigners and textbooks on Chinese history throughout the world, and that it is not a denunciation of “erroneous tendencies” concerning Oriental history. It is certainly not unnatural, considering the political situation in the early twentieth century, for Chinese to desire to establish Chinese historical research themselves, rather than by Japanese.20 Indeed, it is likely also worth pointing out here that Liang Qichao is cavalier about the directionality of relativizing Chinese history that was included in Oriental history. Therefore, the academic field of Oriental history was created with the aim of reintegrating the history of the region, including China, while at the same time creating a study of the Orient that originates in the East to compete with “Orientalism,” the study of the Orient in Europe. Establishing the historical space of East Asia and narrating the history of the entire region, rising above the confines of the various national histories, was an attempt to transcend traditional Chinese studies, with their heavy emphasis on Confucianism. Also, it served to “place Japan in its relative place within the region to fulfill patriotic desires.”21 That Chinese historians offered no clear reaction to the formation of Oriental history is likely intimately intertwined with the lack of Oriental studies in China at the time. The concept of placing their own culture into perspective within East Asia is one that is unlikely to emerge within China as the center of the traditional East Asian cultural paradigm. However, it is also true that the “distancing from China” that Oriental studies sought was difficult to observe from the outside. Simply looking at the index page of Kuwabara’s Intermediate History of the Orient makes this plain. Ancient Times: Age of Expansion of the Han People Section 1: Pre-Zhou Second 2: Zhou Dynasty Middle-Ancient Times: Age of Han Dominance Section 1: Qin Dynasty and the Early Western Han Dynasty Section 2: Western Han Dominion over Foreign Countries Section 3: The Late Western Han Dynasty and Early Eastern Han 20 Zhang Binglin’s 章炳麟 (1868–1936) attack on Japanese scholars, “Letters to Luo Zhenyu” 與 羅振玉書 in Xuelin 学林, first printing, 1911, later included in the first edition of Records of Taiyan (Zhang Binglin) (Taiyanwenlu chupian 太炎文録初編) can be considered in the same context. 21 See footnote 7, Yoshizawa’s text page, 61. Here Yoshizawa perfectly captures the nature of the problems associated with the creation of Oriental history: “The issue of the position of Japan was one of the hidden themes of Oriental history.”

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Section 4: Eastward Spread of Buddhism Section 5: End of Eastern Han Dynasty, Three Kingdoms and Western Jin Section 6: Sixteen Kingdoms and Northern and Southern Courts Section 7: Sui Dynasty and the Early Tang Dynasty Section 8: Tang Dominion over Foreign Countries Section 9: Middle and End of Tang Dynasty Medieval Times: Golden Age of Mongol Peoples in China Section 1: Khitans and the Northern Song Section 2: Jurchens and the Southern Song Section 3: Mongols Section 4: Yuan Dynasty and Beginning of Ming Dynasty Section 5: Formation of the Periphery at the End of the Yuan and Beginning of the Ming Dynasties Section 6: Middle and End of Ming Dynasty Modern Times: Age of Europeans Moving Eastward Section 1: Beginning of Qing Dynasty Section 2: Qing Dominion over the Periphery Section 3: Eastward Advance of the British Section 4: Situation in Central Asia Section 5: Situation along the Pacific Coast Putting aside the issue of novelty of these classifications, the axis of Oriental history is obviously Chinese history. Even given the inclusion of content from non-Chinese areas, it was simply inevitable that Chinese history would form the framework of the narrative. Thus, the distinction between Oriental and Chinese history is necessarily vague. Clarification of this boundary was difficult even for the people who envisioned Oriental history as a separate discipline from Chinese history. This is well illustrated by the comments of Suzuki Shun 鈴木俊 (1904– 1975), who would later go on to become professor of Oriental history at Tokyo University: “A narrow reading of Oriental history is synonymous with Chinese history, and to the Chinese, it is none other than national history.”22 Oriental history that originated in Japan about one century ago was faced with the need for fundamental reevaluation concerning its methods and viewpoints after the Second World War. Oriental studies were excoriated for being complicit

22 Suzuki Shun, “Concerning the Recent Influence in China of Our Oriental Studies” (最近に於 ける我が東洋史学の支那に与えし影響について), in A Collection of Papers on Historiography of Japan (本邦史学史論叢) Vol. 1, Fuzambo 富山房, 1939.

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with Japan’s invasion of Asia. Postwar Oriental history was based on these selfcriticisms. Recently, as members of the G-COE Program at Kansai University, we have been trying to achieve both an integrated and multifaceted understanding of the contacts, clashes, fusions, changes, and exchanges among the cultures of East Asia in order to paint a new picture of East Asian cultures. It is my belief that it was imperative to begin the program with an examination of the idiosyncrasies of Oriental history created as an attempt to relativize Chinese history within East Asia. *Originally published in East Asian Cultural Exchange and Classical Interpretations, CSAC, Kansai University (2009). Translated from the Japanese by Jenine Heaton; Chinese excerpt by Wang Guowei translated by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

SUZUKI Sadami

A Reevaluation of the East Asian Modern System of Knowledge

I.

The Need for and Significance of Research on the History of Concept Formation

From the 1970s, according to an increasing circle of international opinion, the focus on production has led to depletion of global resources, global environmental problems have surfaced, and the viability of the biosphere has come into question. Developments in science—such as biotechnologists’ meddling in the reproduction of life—have also led to various problems. Developments in the political-economic system of nation-states and ungoverned multinational corporations have led to great ruptures and are forcing upon us a reconsideration of these matters. Each of these issues needs to be discussed, for without doubt, new situations are cropping up that require us to reevaluate the humanism and control of nature by science and technology that arose in early modern Europe, and these situations are forcing us to radically reflect on knowledge in general and the values that support such knowledge. For some time now, European scholars have been calling for breaking away from Eurocentrism. It is not an exaggeration to say that all scholarship seeks to liberate us from modern values and to discover the new form that knowledge should take. Moreover, in Japan the entire educational and research system is undergoing reorganization to accommodate the low birthrate, cultural globalization, and changes in needs for mass education. Yet we continue to remain ignorant of what form such radical policies should take.

II.

Reevaluating the Knowledge System in East Asia

How should we radically reevaluate the modern? One proposal that I have offered is to reevaluate the knowledge system of modern and contemporary East Asia and the values supporting it. In adopting the knowledge system and values of

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modern Europe, the regions and countries of East Asia have been creating their own knowledge systems and values. They did this by comparing their systems and values to those of Europe and America, studying the historical forces driving the process of modernity, and relativizing the modern system to their own histories and geographies. (This system, or network, of knowledge is clearly revealed in the conceptual scheme, or conceptual organization, that is, the interrelated concepts of the arts and sciences supporting the cultural system.) For example, in Japan’s universities, at first there was nothing corresponding to a faculty of theology, which constituted a core part of European universities. Eventually (in 1904), religion, which in European universities was attached to the faculty of theology, appeared along with philosophy in the Faculty of Letters of Tokyo Imperial University. This is perhaps related to the government’s decision in 1882 that Shinto is the ancestor worship of the imperial household.1 This organization and decision played a great role in differentiating Japanese letters (later divided into the humanities and the social sciences) from European letters. In contrast, the imperial universities were ahead of the rest of the world in establishing faculties of engineering in 1886. In Europe and America, there were colleges of engineering. The steam engine was at the height of use, and at the behest of industry, which began to take an interest in electricity, energy engineering became recognized as a science and became a department in the faculty of science. However, the distance between science and engineering was as great as ever, and incorporating civil engineering as a field into academia did not come easily. The first instance occurred early in the twentieth century, and there were also some cases in the 1940s, but it became common only from the 1960s. In the English-speaking world, “science and technology” became a set term only in the 1970s.2

1 The “University Regulations” of 1870 called for a faculty similar to a faculty of theology that would include pedagogy, imperial studies, and Confucianism. Imperial studies focused on the works of Japan studies, including such works as the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan), Man’yo¯shu¯ (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), and Kogo shu¯i (Collection of Omitted Ancient Sayings). (See: Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no “bungaku” gainen (The Japanese Concept of Literature) (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1998, pp. 179–180.) These regulations were part of the Meiji Restoration program of restoring imperial rule, extending the reach of political thought by evoking the gods, excluding Buddhism from the pantheon of Shinto, Confucian, and Buddhist deities worshiped by the imperial household, and to rank among the military powers of Western Europe. This it sought to do by placing the Meiji emperor at the end of a long line of emperors that began with Jinmu, Japan’s first mythical emperor, and that was longer than the lines of the royal families of Western Europe. However, Tokyo Imperial University, which began in 1877, lacked a faculty similar to a faculty of theology. Imperial studies and Chinese classical studies were taken over by the Department of Japanese and Chinese Literature in the Faculty of Letters. 2 From a lecture by Murakami Yo¯ichiro¯.

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Schools (or faculties) of engineering were set up in Japan’s imperial universities because of a combination of historical and cultural circumstances, namely, that the Meiji intellectual class feared that Japan might become a colony, that this class consisted of samurai, who took an interest in the military, that the system of the Zhu Xi school attributed the workings of all the sciences to the principles of Heaven, and that these leaders early on discerned the coming of the age of energy engineering.3 The samurai class readily accepted European science and technology without seeing them as alien genres by receiving them into the Zhu Xi system of thought4. For this reason, Kikuchi Dairoku, the mathematician who sought to establish a European-style overarching theory of science (rigaku no setsu), was largely ignored.5 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, energetics, a reductionist unified theory of energy, swept the world of European physics.6 Ernst Mach and Wilhelm 3 The pioneer of the late Edo period Sakuma Sho¯zan, in his September 1862 memorial to the shogunate calling for the manufacture of cannons, straightforwardly asserted that students of the Zhu Xi school of thought should all study Western arts and sciences. [See: Suzuki Sadami, Seimeikan no tankyu¯: Ju¯so¯susu kiki no naka de (Explorations on Life Outlook within the Deepening Crisis) (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2007), p. 66]. Moreover, in his lectures Hyakugaku renkan (Encyclopedia), Nishi Amane, who studied at the University of Leiden in the late Edo period, clearly saw the theory of energy reductionism being developed in Britain. Eight British instructors—including Henry Dyer, a student of William John Macquorn Rankine, who unified concepts of energy in Britain—came to Japan at the invitation of the Ministry of Industry and began a school of engineering in 1873. With the founding of Tokyo Imperial University in 1877, they renamed this school a “college of engineering” and made it into a professional school with a six-year course of study. (See: Suzuki Sadami, Seimeikan no tankyu¯, p. 97.) 4 The receptor methodology is way of analyzing the framework for receiving concepts and new ideas from abroad. (See: Suzuki Sadami, Seimeikan no tankyu¯, chap. 1, sec. 4.) It is effective for analyzing general trends as well as the cases of individual thinkers. By means of this method, we can test received theories about translation terms and the system of disciplines in the Meiji period. To date, various tests have been run on hypotheses concerning the impact of Western concepts on Eastern concepts. This work is an attempt to establish this methodology. 5 Suzuki Sadami et al., “Higashi Ajia no chiteki shisutemu no kindaiteki saihensei” (A Modern Revision of the Knowledge System of East Asia), January 24, 2009. A collaborative research project of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Based on a report by Kaneko Tsutomu. 6 Energetics is the theory that all phenomena, including life, can be explained with the concept of energy. This view is also called energy reductionism. Consistent with this view, Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Ostwald, who won the 1909 Nobel Prize in chemistry, believed that the notion of the atom was just a model with no basis in reality—a view widely held in the world of European physics from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Yet the view was refuted when Ludwig Boltzmann, a staunch defender of atomic theory, explained that entropy was the average value of the random motions of molecules, and helped develop statistical mechanics. Also leading to the demise of the theory was Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905), the development of quantum mechanics, and Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (1927), which states that one cannot precisely determine both the position and momentum of a particle at a given moment. (I will say more on this later.)

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Ostwald held that the notion of atoms was nothing more than a hypothesis. This theory of energy was tied in with biology in the theory of vital energy (élan vital), a theory that spread from country to country and greatly affected the humanities and the arts. In Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, this current of thought gave rise to Taisho¯ vitalism, which exerted vast influence. East Asian universities lacked faculties of theology, yet they possessed engineering faculties and a few years later added faculties of agriculture. Lying behind this difference in organization between East Asian and European universities was the traditional East Asian view of scholarship. In this view, the purpose of scholarship is to investigate the principles of nature (tianli, a core Neo-Confucian concept) that govern the world. It was not necessary to create a special field corresponding to European theology. Science and technology are guided by the principles of nature. Such thinking led East Asia to accept Western science and technology without concern about the theological foundations of European scholarship or about efforts to rid science and technology of such foundations. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European and American scholarship became less rooted in theology, and especially after World War II, the various branches of science and technology became more integrated. In this situation, we today find it difficult to see how the organization of knowledge in Japan, brought about during the Meiji period, differs from that of Europe. This difficulty makes it all the more imperative that we not ignore these differences. For these differences have led scholarship in Europe and Japan to follow different paths in the twentieth century and even up to the present. Well, then, why did Japan create a modern conceptual system different from that of Europe? A comprehensive answer will become clear only after we look at how Japan reorganized East Asian traditional knowledge and at what the new values were that prompted such a reorganization. For this, we have to comprehensively study the concepts making up the organization, or structure, of knowledge and the change in the meaning of these concepts over time. The dynamics of such changes in conceptual networks is called conceptual history.7 7 Here I use the term “concept” to mean the denotation of the semantic content of a word, as commonly understood. I will use the term “category” when the focus is on the scope (Akita dogs, bulldogs, Chihuahuas) of a concept (dog). When a certain individual uses a word to indicate semantic content not in general use, I will speak of an “idea.” A person who says “A cat is a pet, but a dog is not” is expressing his own particular values. Hence, his use of “pet” does not express a concept. If the same dog or cat strays from its owner and becomes wild, then, of course, it longer falls under the scope of “pet.” A conceptual nexus is a set of connected concepts. Dogs and cats are different species, but these concepts can be subsumed under the category of pets as subcategories. At this level, these concepts exist on the same level as such contrasting concepts as (pet) birds. Here at this level, such zoological categories as mammals, birds, etc., become irrelevant. Or we can also say that dogs, while belonging to the mammalian family of canids, are also a type of pet. Thus, the same term can be associated with concepts

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Reevaluating the systems of modern culture in this fashion may undermine the preexisting conceptual system and lead to the reorganization of scholarly societies and university systems finely divided into the various fields of study. But it is not easy to contemplate reorganizing knowledge acquired with arduous study, that is, to relativize one’s field of endeavor. For many scholars, this is like having the ground crumble beneath one’s feet. Those brave enough to continually bear the pain of an open wound and committed enough to withstand the rejection of the present system can perhaps lead knowledge to new vistas. And yet, revising and reorganizing our concepts is a huge task. To accumulate a series of results requires intellectual cooperation from scholars in all the fields of East Asian studies. Today, such efforts can already be seen among the ranks of scholars in China and South Korea, since Asian intellectuals strongly sense the need for us to reflect on our own intellectual history. What must we do in particular to carry out this program? Let me present an example with reference to historical changes in the concept of Japanese literature. When we think of Japanese literature, what most people think of are the Man’yo¯shu¯, The Tale of Genji, Basho¯’s haiku, Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s jo¯ruri (accompanied narration), and the novels of Natsume So¯seki, Kawabata Yasunari, ¯ e Kenzaburo¯. But when we look at a chronology of the history of Japanese or O literature, we find the Kojiki, Fu¯doki (Regional Gazetteers), and Nihon shoki, listed first. The Kojiki consists mostly of myths, the Fu¯doki provides descriptions of the provinces, and the Nihon shoki blends myths with history. Hence, we use differently positioned in a conceptual nexus. A concept is different from a term. The Japanese word inu and the English word “dog” are terms belonging to different language systems, but they correspond to the same concept. The word “dog” is the same word in “cats and dogs” and “running dog” (lackey), but the word has different meanings, and is associated with different concepts, in the two contexts. In Japan, when “national language” and “Japanese” are used with the same meaning, the words differ, but the associated concepts are the same. But if we consider “national language” in the sense of the official language of a country as determined by national policy, then Canada, for example, has two national languages: English and French. Hence, the same term, “national language,” is associated with two different concepts. “National language” (kokugo) is also used in a more specific sense. In the 1872 educational system, middle school students in the elite educational system studied classical Chinese as part of their national-language curriculum. Students were required to read and write straight classical Chinese, without the markings for transforming it into Japanese. But after the first SinoJapanese War, because students were no longer required to recite and write classical Chinese, there was a dramatic drop in the ability of the intelligentsia to write in classical Chinese, and there was a decline in the number of people who could read straight classical Chinese without the aid of markings for reading off the Japanese. This decline is separate from the increase in the number students studying modern Chinese after the Russo-Japanese War. Thus, one word can have multiple meanings, and in the opposite direction, the same concept can be associated with two different words. From this, it is apparent that we must clarify the connections between the semantic contents of words.

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“literature” in two different senses, one of which includes poetry, novels, and plays, and the other of which also includes histories and gazetteers, that is, writings in the humanities in general. As to why there are these two senses, we cannot come up with an answer just by racking our brains. We must needs turn to history.

III.

Peculiarities of the Use of “Japanese Literature”

The term Nihon bungaku first appeared in a published work in “Nihon bungaku no fushin o tanzu” (Lamenting the Dullness of Japanese Literature, 1875) nearly eight years after the Meiji Restoration. In this work, the author deplored the tendency of intellectuals of the time only to introduce knowledge from Western Europe and went on to call for a revival of the humanities, and especially the language arts, in Japanese. This essay appeared as an unsigned article in the To¯kyo¯ nichinichi shinbun (Tokyo Daily News). Since the author of this piece understood bungaku as corresponding to the word “literature” in English and other European languages, had visited Europe several times after the end of the Edo period, and had worked as a newspaper manager, there is little doubt that he was Fukuchi ¯ chi. Fukuchi, who knew French and English well, used bungaku to refer to the O humanities literature, including the teaching of writing composition. This was the first time that such genres as waka poetry, novels, and plays written in Japanese, were referred to as Japanese literature.8 From premodern times, classical Chinese poetry was one of the genres of literature, but up until the end of the Edo period, waka poetry and epic tales (monogatari) were not called bungaku (literature), since bungaku referred only to genres contained in Chinese books imported from China, or to Japanese works that imitated such genres. This norm was so strong that one does not even find exceptions where waka poetry or epic tales are referred to as bungaku. Moreover, there was no category, with whatever sense, corresponding to the modern concept of literature.9 8 Though the term Nihon bungaku was not used prior to Fukuchi’s essay, the word bungaku, in the sense of the arts and poetry, does appear in government newsletters after 1872. Taguchi Ukichi, in Nihon kaika sho¯shi (A Short Cultural History of Japan, 1877–1882), uses bungaku in a sense that includes everything from Confucian literature to light literature of the late Edo period (gesaku). (See: Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no “bungaku” gainen, pp. 150–152.) 9 The traditional Chinese concept of literature comprised four branches: the classics, histories, masters, and collections. From premodern times through the Edo period, there was systematic awareness that Japanese histories resembled Chinese histories, that waka poetry corresponded to Chinese poetry, and that Japanese epic tales were similar to Chinese tales of the strange, yet there was no systematic conception of the four branches of Japanese literature in general. That is, there was no systematic idea of humanities literature, or just plain literature. In the Edo

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¯ chi also lamented the fact In “Nihon bungaku no fushin o tanzu,” Fukuchi O that a history of Japan had yet to be written in Japanese. Excluded from the category of history were such works as Eiga monogatari (original, 1028; sequel, after 1092; translated as A Tale of Flowering Fortunes), about the Fujiwara regents; ¯ kagami (Great Mirror, early 12th the four mirror histories, the first being the O cent.); Heike monogatari (early 13th cent., translated as The Tale of the Heike); and the Taiheiki (late 14th cent., partially translated as Taiheiki, a Chronicle of Medieval Japan). Fukuchi is lamenting the fact that the official histories were written in classical Chinese. It is as if the history of England were written only in Latin, not in English.10 In the twentieth century, scholars of Japanese literature began calling mirror histories “historical tales” and war chronicles “war tales” because these two genres resemble tales in form. But historians, even today, consider these types of works to be histories. As for the classification of the Taiheiki, which describes the chaos of war during the Middle Ages when the imperial line split into northern and southern factions, historians at imperial universities during the Meiji period considered it a historical source describing Kusunoki Masashige, a general loyal to the southern court. They considered this bias in favor of Kusunoki problematic and viewed the northern and southern courts as equally legitimate. However, in the 1911 controversy over the legitimacy of the northern and southern courts, the chaos after the Russo-Japanese War was attributed to this view of equal legitimacy, and the southern court came to be considered the more legitimate. From then on, most historians treated the Taiheiki as a work of history, and scholars of literature added nothing contrary to this view. period, reading material for the masses was increasingly illustrated. In the ballad genre, though Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s jo¯ruri (accompanied narration) was popular as reading material at one time, most of this material included musical accompaniments, so it appears to have lacked independent value as simple reading material. Nakamura Yukihiko, in Kinsei jusha no bungaku kan (Early Modern Confucians’ View of Literature, 1958), divided the literature of the Bunka (1804–1818) and Bunsei (1818–1830) periods into highbrow and lowbrow literature, which he thought of as two categories making up the class of literature. But this is a misconception that reflects the division of literature after World War II into pure literature and literature for the masses. Later, influential scholars of modern literature perpetuated this error. (See: Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no “bungaku” gainen, chap. 3, sec. 2.) 10 The four mirror histories (kagamimono) were compiled by those in government. In this sense, they were official histories. Again, The Tale of the Heike and the Taiheiki, which were recited at ceremonies of the Tokugawa shogunate, served as tales, or even myths, of the warrior clans—first the Fujiwara, then the Taira—that served the imperial court. In the Meiji period, the catalog of Tokyo Library (Ueno Library) classified the mirror histories and the war tales as “Japanese-language works, histories, miscellaneous histories.” In its catalog (first published in 1889), Kyo¯eki Kashihon Sha, a book lender lending expensive typeset books and English books to students, followed this categorization.

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Yet one recent dictionary of literature provides this evaluation of the work: “This work of literature—a work that, through the tragedy of war, emphasizes the morality of humans and expresses the heart-felt grief of people confronted with a politics of endless contesting for the reins of power—has unprecedented value.”11 Prior to World War II, the Taiheiki was read as history, and after the war too, historians treated it as a work of history. Postwar scholars of literature, in my estimation, appreciated the Taiheiki as a work of literature that gave expression to people’s emotions. Thus, in exploring the history of the appraisal of the Taiheiki, we find ourselves having to decide whether to read this classic as a history compiled from a certain point of view or to read it as literature expressing a set of emotions. The issue is what genre of work we should treat the Taiheiki as. Here we can see the value of evaluating the concept of genre as a historically relative notion, including the concept of genre in our own age. Yet it is not as easy to separate history from literature as we today are inclined to think. As is well known, the Chinese word xiaoshuo (novel) came from the phrase baishi xiaoshuo (anecdotal histories and light fiction based on street talk), the idle talk of the streets that low-level officials would gather. Anecdotal histories and light fiction based on street talk were thus seen as being similar. In Europe, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, known as the father of history, accepted legends, oracles, and portents as true in his Histories (5th cent. BC). His narrative style consisted of storytelling leading up to the climax of the Greco-Persian Wars. The French word histoire and the German word Geschichte are polysemous terms that can also mean fiction. One has to determine their meaning in context. From these few facts alone, one can see that it is not easy to distinguish history and literature. Throughout the Meiji period, the word bungaku (literature) referred to the literature taught in the literature departments of the universities and corresponded to the European concept of humanities literature. Hence, history too was a genre of literature. Based on this conception of literature, the history of Japanese literature began to be compiled around 1890. From then on, Japanese literature was conceived to begin with the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan), and Fu¯doki (Regional Gazetteers), historical works compiled in the seventh century, and this conception is with us even today. The Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and Fu¯doki were first subsumed under the concept of Japanese literature in the Meiji period. In this regard, Japan imitated the European nations, which compiled histories of literature that showed literature to express their national spirit, the essence of their national cultures. The nation 11 Shincho¯ Nihon bungaku dai jiten (The Shincho¯ Great Dictionary of Literature) (Tokyo: Shincho¯sha, 1968). See also Shincho¯ Nihon bungaku jiten (The Shincho¯ Dictionary of Literature) (Tokyo: Shincho¯sha, 1988).

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thus created a history of Japanese literature that brought together works separated by class and region to form the core of a Japanese national culture. It was a proud history, longer than the histories of the European nations, and it differed from the histories of literature of the European nations in three basic ways. First, its scope differed from the scope of European nations’ histories of literature, which included the humanities of those nations. Basically, the humanities in Europe was the domain of human expression. The humanities thus stood in contrast to Christian theology. Accordingly, in universities with substantial traditions, the departments teaching the humanities, though variously named, were organized under a separate hierarchy from the departments of theology, and the Christian Bible was usually not taught in humanities departments.12 In contrast, Japanese literature and its history encompasses ancient myths, as well as Shinto, Confucian, and Buddhist works. This is because Japanese literature modeled itself on European literatures, which, on account of ties with Nationalism and Romanticism, included Greek and Roman mythology, as well as local myths and legends (such as the Germanic myths of Northern Europe). In modern Europe, where the dominant Christian view is that foreign religions and folk beliefs are heretical, religious studies study Christianity, as well as foreign religions and folk beliefs, and humanistic studies study the written and artistic works of such faiths. By this standard, they did not question including native religious works in their nations’ histories of literature. Simply put, this entire view is Eurocentric. But if the faith of one’s nation, Christianity, can be studied in religious studies, then it should be considered one of the humanities. This model of including the religions of East Asia in the humanities later fundamentally regulated the development of the humanities in Japan. For example, state Shinto infected all the fields of the humanities, and even legal and constitutional studies.13

12 With the appearance of modern notions of art, there have appeared suggestions that the Psalms and Revelation of the Bible be taught as literature, and today as well, there are scholars who advocate doing so. But even today, such suggestions provoke strong criticism, especially in the United States. And in Muslim countries, such teaching of the books of the Bible is strictly forbidden. 13 Though after World War II up to the present, liberals have ridiculed constitutional scholars of Tokyo Imperial University like Hozumi Yatsuka and Uesugi Shinkichi as “divine constitutional scholars,” their theories did not implicate the gods. According to their theory of the national polity, as proclaimed in their attack on the theory that the emperor is an organ of the government, for example, “Shinto is the ancestor worship of the imperial family and is not a religion.” In this regard, they followed the government position of 1882 and the view institutionalized in the Meiji constitution. The man who wove state Shinto into constitutional theory was Kakei Katsuhiko. (See: Suzuki Sadami, Seimeikan no tankyu¯, chap. 10.)

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The second point on which Japanese literature differs from the European humanities is that the field of Japanese literature did not engage in linguistic nationalism. The history of literature of the nations of Europe covered only works written in the languages of the individual nations and gave rise to linguistic nationalism. In contrast, in the history of Japanese literature, the Kojiki is written in rather Japanized classical Chinese, and the Nihon shoki is written in the style of the language of Chang’an, the capital of the Tang dynasty. The regional sections of the Fu¯doki were compiled at different times, and though the style varied by region, each region’s report is written in classical Chinese. Moreover, nearly all chronologies of the history of Japanese literature list Japanese-written anthologies of classical Chinese poetry, beginning with Kaifu¯so¯ (Fond Recollections of Poetry, 751), and other works in classical Chinese. This is because Japanese intellectuals from ancient times were bilingual, at least in terms of literacy, though there were differences in greater or lesser use of classical Chinese throughout the ages. This cultural basis was given a legal basis in the 1872 educational system, which required that the middle school curriculum for Japanese language studies include classical Chinese (see section 1 for the cultural conditions of this requirement). In this sense, Japan is the only nation, other than a few composite nations, that has a history of a bilingual national literature. Throughout the whole world, this is a rare, or even unique, state of affairs.14 14 Composite nations form under various circumstances, but even though they have histories of bilingual or trilingual national literatures, the focus of education in a language region is the literature of the language of that region. In the opposite direction, it is also possible for a history of literature to exceed national borders, as in the case of the French-speaking world. Again, in the Arabic-speaking world, which for a long time was under control of the Ottoman Empire, early modern literature is called “Arabic literature,” and literature after colonial unification is called, for example, “Egyptian literature.” In any case, no other nation has a history of truly bilingual literature other than Korea, which, like Japan, was for a long period under the influence of Chinese culture. There, regular documents were written in classical Chinese, and the vernacular was written in Chinese characters used phonetically or in Hangul. Currently, however, the classical Chinese works in the history of Korean literature are said to be given short shrift. Moreover, the eight-volume Nihon bungei shi: Hyo¯gen no nagare (The History of Japanese Literature: The Flow of Expression) includes Ainu literature and Okinawa literature. [(See: Nihon bungei shi: Hyo¯gen no nagare, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo¯ Shinsha, 1986–2005)]. Later works have followed this model. Hence, if we consider the Ryukyuan language as a separate language, present-day history of Japanese literature comprises works in four languages. In addition, some contemporary scholars of Japanese modern literature use the term “Japanese-language literature.” This term is meant to include Japanese works written by non-Japanese in Taiwan and Korea during Japanese imperial rule as a result of the language policy of the time. But this term falls into linguistic nationalism, since it excludes works written in Ainu, Okinawan, and classical Chinese composed in Japan. Multilingual works were created in Taiwan, Sakhalin, and Korea under imperial Japanese rule, and in Manchuria under the Japanese puppet regime. These works should be considered in light of the historical limitations under which they were created. Works written for a Japanese audience but outside of Japan, for instance, in Okinawa under U.S. occupation after

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A third point of difference is that the European concept of literature, in an intermediate (neither broad nor narrow) sense, refers to polite literature and excludes popular literature, whereas the Japanese concept of Japanese literature ¯ chi considered haikai renga, a form of includes popular literature. Fukuchi O linked verse engaged in by the masses during the Edo period, as Japanese “poetry”; he considered reading matter and light fiction as “novels and romances”; and he considered jo¯ruri (accompanied narration) and kabuki scripts as “play scripts.”15 In the division of Edo culture into courtly and folk forms, these genres were classified as folk forms. Japan superseded this traditional division of culture into courtly and folk forms by importing from Europe an attitude of surveying its culture and seeing appropriate value in various genres. In particular, Fukuchi ¯ chi and Taguchi Ukichi, two liberal spirits, did not disdain folk culture. Yet the O reason that they adopted this attitude is that folk culture in Japan, more than in Europe, blossomed in many fields and attained high levels.16 To repeat, “literature” in this restricted sense of Japanese literature and “literature” in the contemporary sense of the literary arts in general (focusing on poetry, novels, and light fiction) are two different categories. In that the contemporary sense of “literature” means the literary arts, we must give consideration to the word “art” (yishu). In particular, we must explore how the Chinese premodern notions of art (yi) and science (shu)—the six arts (liuyi: propriety, music, archery, riding, writing, arithmetic) and the various sciences ( fangshu: astronomy, medicine, Daoist immortal arts, divination, etc.)—were transformed into the contemporary notion of art. This concept, the (fine) arts, together with the concept of the literary arts, makes up the concept of the humanities in the languages of Europe, yet the term “(fine) arts” is polysemous, with broad, intermediate, and narrow senses. These senses, through translation terms, gained currency in Japan and produced a rather confused situation until “(fine) arts” was narrowed down to its present sense. Below I will broadly discuss this situation. World War II, should also be treated as Japanese literature. As for translations, though there are various arguments as to what category such works belong to, since most readers enjoy them as translations, they should be categorized as translations. 15 It is inferred that “literature” (literally, letters), in the strict sense, was not used, like the Chinese word xiqu, to include song accompanied by music. In Chinese scholarship, xiqu (plays, operas) were considered lower in taste than baishi xiaoshuo (anecdotal histories and light fiction based on street talk). 16 When academism, which disdained folk culture, finally reached Japan in the latter half of the Meiji period, light fiction came to be looked down upon. Exceptions were the works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the Shakespeare of Japan, and of Kyokutei Bakin, a Confucian moralist. But in the liberal climate after the Russo-Japanese War, people again saw value in folk literature. In general, great changes in value systems that supersede scholarly genres often alter standards of appraisal. See the case of the Taiheiki above.

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SUZUKI Sadami

The Fine Arts versus the Arts

Bijutsu (fine arts) was a newly created term not originally found in Chinese. As Kitazawa Noriaki has shown, the word was first used in Japan in January 1873 in a proclamation of the Meiji Grand Council of State promoting entries in the Vienna International Exposition. The word was first used, he writes, to translate the German word Kunstgewerbe (craft arts) and bildende Kunst (visual arts or plastic arts), with the added sense of schöne Kunst (the arts in general).17 And in 1876 the Ministry of Labor used bijutsu in the name of a school that it established: Ko¯bu Bijutsu Gakko¯ (Ministry of Labor School of Fine Arts). From there it is held to have spread out into society at large.18 In the early Meiji period, the craft arts were undoubtedly emphasized as part of the program of promoting industry. Well, then, how did the concept of the fine arts, meaning the plastic arts, cast off the notion of craft arts? From the late Edo period to the early Meiji period, most intellectuals acquired European knowledge through English. Those who studied Dutch learning in the latter half of the Edo period also switched over to English. In Shanghai, Protestant missionaries, with the aid of Chinese assistants, translated English works in various fields into Chinese, and these books were imported into Japan in large quantities toward the end of the Edo period. Also, intellectuals increasingly read works directly in English. Amid these intellectual developments, the word bijutsu gained currency as the translation of “the fine arts” in the intermediate sense of the arts in general, namely, music, painting, sculpture, poetry, etc., as in the West. Thus the sense that Westernizers gave to bijutsu displaced the sense and usage that bureaucrats gave to the term when they created it in the early Meiji period. A concept is the special sense of a word that has gained general currency in a certain period. The word bijutsu in the sense of the early Meiji bureaucrats who created it (craft arts) conceptually never took root and later died out. Research in conceptual history thus involves investigating and considering the origin, diffusion, and establishment of a term in a specific sense and usage. A word and its sense and usage are not independent of those of other words but rather are interrelated

17 Kitazawa Noriaki, “‘Bijutsu’ no kigen: Hon’yakugo ‘bijutsu’ no tanjo¯” (The Origin of “Bijutsu”: The Birth of the Translation Term “Bijutsu”), chap. 2, sec. 3 in his Me no shinden: “Bijutsu” juyo¯shi no¯to (A Temple for the Eyes: Notes on the History of the Acceptance of the Term “Bijutsu”) (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1989). 18 Kitazawa Noriaki, “‘Bijutsu’ gainen no keisei to riarizumu no ten’i” (The Formation of the Concept of the Fine Arts and the Dislocation of Realism), in his Kyo¯kai no bijutsu shi: Bijutsu keisei shi no¯to (The Boundaries of Art History: Notes on the History of the Formation of the Fine Arts) (Tokyo: Buryukke, 2000). See also Sato¯ Do¯shin, Nihon bijutsu tanjo¯: Kindai Nihon no kotoba to senryaku (The Birth of the Fine Arts in Japan: The Words and Strategies of Modern Japan) (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1996), p. 35.

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with them. For this reason, unless one looks at the organization of the nexus of related concepts, one cannot clarify the history of individual concepts. Nishi Amane, in an address on the occasion of the founding of the Japan Academy, “Meiji bungaku kaisha so¯shi no ho¯ho¯” (How to Begin a Meiji Literary Society), called the French Académie des beaux arts a bijutsu kan.19 This academy dealt only with painting and sculpture. Other fields were handled by other academies. This was the beginning of the concept bijutsu. Yet the concept was not soon generalized. The man who criticized the teaching methods of the Académie des beaux arts was Eugène Véron, in L’Esthétique (1878, translated as Æsthetics). In 1884–1885 the Ministry of Education published Nakae Cho¯min’s translation of this work under the title I-shi bigaku (Mr. Véron’s Aesthetics). Even reliable sources do not give us much information on Véron, but the Parisian liberalism of the time is well conveyed in Nakae’s perceptive translation. For the Ministry of Education to publish a work criticizing French academism prior to the formation of fine-arts academism in Japan is rather remarkable. Véron listed painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and dance as the range of the arts, and stressed the importance of the artist’s expressing his individuality, emotion, and the national character in his work. Véron then criticized academism’s interfering in the artist’s freedom, advocated that the artist avoid copying classical works, and pointed out the need for the artist to display individuality and emotion in realistically portraying the actual world. He thus advocated the romantic idea of expressing individuality in a realistic manner. While advocating a thoroughgoing realism, he nonetheless held that the painter should convey individuality in his painting’s composition, color treatment, and touches. As is well known, prior to the publication of I-shi bigaku, Ernest Fenollosa, an American hired to come to Japan to lecture in philosophy, gave a set of lectures published in Japanese as “Bijutsu shinsetsu” (The True Meaning of Art, 1882), in which he introduced the modern theory of art. In this lecture, Fenollosa listed music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance as examples of the fine arts, and among these he saw music, poetry, and painting as prototypical examples. These genres, he argued, have beauty as their purpose.20 Then, explaining his views on painting, he criticized the trend toward realism in oil painting, saying that works of art are artificially created and should strive for unity. While both Fenollosa and Véron thought that the purpose of art is beauty, they differed in their attitudes toward realism. Also, both of them did not include ¯ kubo 19 Nishi Amane, Nishi Amane zenshu¯ (The Complete Works of Nishi Amane), edited by O Toshiaki (Tokyo: Munetaka Shobo¯, 1962), vol. 2, p. 585. 20 Ernest Fenollosa, “Bijutsu shinsetsu,” in Meiji geijutsu, bungaku ronshu¯ (Essays on Meiji Art and Literature), edited by Hijikata Teiichi (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1975), p. 37.

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architecture in the fine arts. Already by the mid-nineteenth century, architecture, because of its practical nature, tended to be excluded from the fine arts. After reading widely in the art journals, Yanagida Izumi, the great authority on Meiji literature, said, “Poetry became considered one of the fine arts around 1882 or 1883.”21 In the early 1880s, spurred partly by Fenollosa’s lectures, the word bijutsu spread as the translation term of “the fine arts,” in the intermediate sense of the arts in general (the broad sense being culture in general). However, bijutsu in the sense of the arts in general seems to have been common only among specialists and intellectuals with an interest in the humanities. Ordinarily, specialized scholarly terms begin life in scholarly journals and spread to the generalinterest periodicals. In contrast, the newspapers choose translation terms that can be understood by the general populace over those that are strictly accurate but not widely recognized. Dictionaries help in determining when a term has taken root in a certain sense. In William Lobscheid’s English and Chinese Dictionary (1884),22 under the word “fine,” there is the example “the fine arts,” which is defined in Chinese as “liuyi, sishu, jiyi” (the six arts, the four skills [poetry, writing, propriety, music], artistry). The word meishu (bijutsu) does not appear. Meishu first appears in the explanation of “the fine arts” in the 1897 Yokohama edition of Lobscheid’s dictionary. The explanation given is “liuyi, meishu, jinggong” (the six arts, the fine arts, intricate craftsmanship). Meishu here probably has the sense of the fine arts. Though one cannot judge from this dictionary alone, it is judged that by this time, bijutsu had taken root in the sense of the arts in general. Futsu¯ jukugo goi (Common Compound Terms, 1905) gives geijutsu its traditional broad sense of culture in general, an intermediate sense of the fine arts (bijutsu) in the sense in which this latter term was usually used, and a narrow sense of painting and sculpture. Thus, we have confirmed that bijutsu, as usually used, corresponded to the arts in general, and that by the turn of the twentieth century, this sense had taken root. Kitazawa Noriaki writes that leading up to the Ministry of Education Art Exhibition in 1907, bijutsu tended to be limited to painting and sculpture, and that in the dictionary Jirin of 1911, s.v. bijutsu, this restricted sense was noted in a qualification.23 Also, Bungaku shingo sho¯ jiten (A Small Dictionary of New Literary Terms, 1913) states that bijutsu had become restricted in usage to painting and sculpture.24 From these facts, we can see that 21 Yanagida Izumi, Meiji shoki no bungaku shiso¯ (Literary Thought in the Early Meiji Period) (Tokyo: Shunju¯sha, 1965), vol. 2, p. 50. 22 William Lobscheid, English and Chinese Dictionary / Zengding Ying-Hua zidian, revised and enlarged by Inoue Tetsujiro¯ (Tokyo, 1884). 23 Kitazawa Noriaki, Me no shinden, p. 299. 24 Kotoba konseputo jiten (Dictionary of Word Concepts) (Tokyo: Daiichi Ho¯ki Shuppan, 1992), s.v. geijutsu.

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around 1910 bijutsu became used in the more restricted sense of painting and sculpture.

V.

Conclusion

With the reorganization of the college of letters of Tokyo Imperial University into the clearer divisions of philosophy, history, and literature, young intellectuals began using the word bungaku (literature) in the narrow sense of the language arts. Then in place of bungaku, they turned increasingly to using bungei in the sense of the language arts. This change in usage occurred around the same time that bijutsu became limited to painting and sculpture, that is, the visual and plastic arts. In other words, from 1904 to about 1910 a correspondence arose and took root in which the language arts were called bungaku or bungei and the visual arts were called bijutsu. Bungaku and bijutsu, in connection with one another, together became established in their narrow senses. Here too one can see that it necessary and effective to consider concepts in combination rather than following their development separately.25 Thus, while bungei and bungaku were in parallel use, from the end of the Russo-Japanese War to around 1910 the concept of bungaku in the narrow sense of language arts took root in society. This is corroborated by the fact that bundan (literary circles), which included political commentators in the mid-Meiji period, came to designate specialists in literature in the narrow sense after the RussoJapanese War and especially after about 1910. Yet the generation that became active around this time used bungaku in a broad sense extending beyond Japanese literature, and this sense lasted until the prewar Sho¯wa period. (The narrow sense of bungaku of the Meiji period was called bi bungaku [fine literature] or jun bungaku [pure literature].) Other traditional concepts such as geijutsu (art), shu¯kyo¯ (religion), tetsugaku (philosophy) were also reordered into new concepts in Meiji Japan. In a strict sense, so was rekishi (history).26 By unraveling such concepts, we can clarify the mutual relations among concepts, the position of each concept, and the values lurking in each concept; that is, we can clarify how the fabric of concepts was reordered. Up to the present, studies have used their own conceptual schemes to analyze and discuss periods before such conceptual schemes arose. But clarifying conceptual schemes promises to lead literary and cultural research to new ho25 In Nihon no “bungaku” gainen (The Japanese Concept of Literature), I treated geijutsu and bijutsu in only a general way, and hence I was not clear on this point. 26 On the concept of history, see, for the present, Suzuki Sadami, “Nihon ni okeru ‘rekishi’ no rekishi” (The History of “History” in Japan), Nihon kenkyu¯, no. 35 (March 2007).

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rizons. The task before us is no less than reevaluating the great assumptions implicit in previous discussions. *Translated from the Japanese by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

YAN Shaodang

A Reconsideration of Japanese China Studies

I.

Introduction

Scholars in China are increasingly realizing that Chinese culture has made significant contributions to world history. More and more scholars recognize the global relevance of knowledge and research on Chinese culture in the development of world civilization—an appreciation based on the rich legacy of Chinese culture for humanity worldwide and on the significance of Chinese culture for world civilization. Chinese scholars in the humanities, not only in their own fields of research, but in other areas as well, can make use of the rich international scholarly materials available and, using their own insights, can positively respond to a wide range of international scholarship. We can perhaps say that since the mid-1970s, this was the greatest development in humanities scholarship in China and is a great indication of our improvement, for it shows on a wide scale and at a deep level that Chinese humanities scholarship in the classics is approaching the level of international scholarship.

II.

A Proposal for “China Studies”

At this conference, I would like to discuss four areas of observations and reflections related to international studies of Chinese culture. The first issue that I think we need to discuss about the field is what term should we use to standardly refer to international studies of Chinese culture. Since the mid-1970s, when China began to revive across all fields, this field too produced rich and profound results, but those in scholarly circles refer to the field in conceptually different ways. For the field of China cultural studies in modern world culture, I have consistently advocated using the term “China studies” (Zhongguoxue). I used this term throughout my Riben Zhong-guoxue-jia (Japanese Scholars in the Field of China Studies, 1980), Riben Zhongguoxue-shi (The History of China Studies in

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Japan, 1991), and Riben Zhongguoxue-shi gao (A Draft History of China Studies in Japan, 2009). In Haiwai Zhongguoxue-shi yanjiu congshu (Overseas China Studies Series) and Haiwai Zhongguoxue pinglun (Overseas China Studies Review), both published out of East China Normal University, Zhu Zhenghui, He Peizhong, and Liu Dong, in their several studies, all call this field of research “China studies.” Yet at present, nearly all Chinese university institutes and courses concerned with this area of research use the term “Sinology” (Hanxue) in their name or title. Likewise, relevant conferences and the news media also mostly use the term “Sinology.” The audience that hears the term “Sinology” is rather large. But these different ways of designating the discipline signify a great disparity in our understanding of the nature of the field and show that in the history of the field there remain many disagreements and insufficiently clear notions. As a result, in their dialog with the international scholarly world, researchers hold contrary and corrupted scholarly notions. It is the history of a scholarly field that gives rise to the scholarly notions and core research methods of the discipline. I cannot fully explicate my understanding here, but one thing I should mention is that the historical process imbues “international studies of Chinese culture” with a scholastic significance relevant to the time period. And the scholastic significance determines the value outlook and expandability of research. In different countries and in different historical periods within the same country, international studies of Chinese culture are not fixed and static, but dynamic and multifaceted in nature and expression. In ascertaining the nature of research in this field, we have to appreciate the values implicit in this dynamism. For example, prior to the advent of modern civilization, the major European countries and East Asian countries pictured Chinese culture as the Confuciancentered culture of the Han race, and this became the focus, or even sole interest, of research on China. Scholars in Europe before and during the Scientific Revolution of the eighteenth century and scholars in Japan prior to the mid-nineteenth century not only made Han culture the object of such research, but also, whether intentionally or not, used Han culture as material for transforming their own subjective ideology. I define such international studies of Chinese culture as Sinology and research in this area as Sinitic research. In Europe, with the coming of the Enlightenment, Sinologists increasingly extricated research on Chinese culture from its role in transforming European subjective ideology. For Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and the German classical philosophers all the way down to Marx, Chinese culture was simply or primarily one form of culture, which could be objectively studied. The modern study of foreign cultures gradually emerged, and China studies took their place beside Indology, Egyptology, Japanology, etc. Researchers in the field did not

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regard the results of their studies as material for the construction of ideologies, but rather took their studies to be a field for knowing and understanding a world culture and used their scholarship to enrich their discipline. At the same time, owing to the advances of the Age of Navigation, the rise and development of cultural anthropology, and the spread of European colonialism, China studies in Europe branched out from the Han race and Han culture. Under the impetus of exploration, archaeology, and colonization, China studies diversified to include the study of Mongolians, Manchus, and Tibetans. This situation first developed in eighteenth-century Europe, and Japan began to move in this direction in the middle to late nineteenth century. In light of these modern changes in international studies of Chinese culture, I think that the term “Sinology” (Hanxue) can no longer cover the modern aspects of the field and can give rise, and indeed has given rise, to misunderstandings within the field and beyond. Under these circumstances, it is appropriate and necessary, I think, to use the term “China studies.” We ought to regard China studies as the core and governing field of international studies of Chinese culture. Sinology is its historical antecedent. Fields like Mongolian studies, Manchu studies, Tibetan studies, Western region studies, Tangut studies, and even Balhae studies are all branch, or secondary, fields of China studies.

III.

Value of Japanese China Studies

The second issue is what sort of value researchers in the field of international China studies should attach to their discipline. We frequently like to borrow from outside the field to give value to international China studies, to see the value of China scholarship in its contributions to outside the field, and this is perfectly acceptable. But if we limit ourselves to this approach, we may miss the value of China studies as a discipline with a cultural context that spans several cultures. If we fail to adequately perceive the cultural context inherent in the field, if we fail to appropriately analyze the intellectualhistorical factors implicit in the findings of the field, then we cannot effectively grasp how international China studies can serve as a globally significant paradigm of scholarship. Then our research will at times be weak, fragmented, and even illusory in its explications. Let me explain a bit using twentieth-century Japanese China studies as an example. Japanese China studies is first and foremost an aspect of Japanese modern culture, a cultural form of expression created by Japan in forming and developing a modern nation and state. It is primarily a facet of Japanese culture. For example, we frequently speak of the Tokyo school of China studies, which explicates Chinese culture in a distinctly different way, but we have yet to clarify

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in intellectual-historical terms the substantive nature of these differences. From the 1880s to after World War II, the works of Inoue Tetsujiro¯ (who gave the Lectures on Chinese Philosophy at Tokyo University), Hattori Unokichi, Uno Tetsuto, etc., created the Japanese system of Confucian China studies that was socially most influential. In the early 1890s, Inoue Tetsujiro¯ began by explicating the Confucian values of filial piety (xiao), brotherly love (ti), loyalty (zhong), and honesty (xin) as exhibiting the modern value of patriotism. This induced the Meiji emperor to issue the Imperial Rescript on Education so that these ideas could have the widest audience possible. In the 1920 to 1940s, Hattori Unokichi wrote and lectured on the original intent of Confucianism, established Confucianism as an authority in the new age, and emphasized that the true spirit of Confucianism was to be found only in Japan. In the 1950s, Uno Tetsuto again stressed that the core of Confucius’s teaching lies in establishing an authoritarian ethics of each according to his status (dayi mingfen). Yet at nearly the same time, Shiratori Kurakichi, a graduate of Tokyo University, suggested that the sage-kings Yao, Shun, and Yu never existed and went on to doubt the entire corpus of ancient Chinese literature. In this same vein, Tsuda So¯kichi—focusing on the Book of Changes, the Analects, the Commentary of Zuo, and the Daodejing, and venting an ultra-critical mindset—sought to wipe out, with a stroke of the pen, the core of several millennia of East Asian culture, especially the two millennia of Chinese culture that nurtured Japanese civilization. When we make use of these scholarly sources, we often select a fragmentary summary that suits our purposes. We fail to notice the basic cultural context that led these authors to espouse their theories of Chinese culture; that is, we fail to notice that they produced their scholarly works to serve the needs of constructing a national zeitgeist suited to the modern Japanese nation. Their exposition of Chinese culture and the original significance of Chinese culture itself do not exist on the same plane of thought. These authors are merely elaborating on Chinese culture according to their needs. Put another way, Chinese culture, where it is amenable to such interpretation, is grist for scholarly ideas that authors elaborate, which then give rise to societal notions in the cultural contexts in which they write. These societal notions are the implied basic values of Japanese China studies. Two contrasting notions in the Japanese cultural context perfectly characterize the age. One, Confucianism, is the cultural context that specifically gave rise to Pan-Asianism. The other, the thesis that Japan should disassociate itself from Asia and align itself with Europe, is the cultural context that is ultracritical of Pan-Asianism. Over the past 130 years down to the present, PanAsianism or disassociating from Asia have informed the basic consciousness of mainstream modern Japanese society. Perhaps incredibly, these two diametri-

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cally opposed schools of thought on China are two flanks of the same cultural context.

IV.

Japanese China Studies in the Global Context

The third issue is that when we examine and accept the results of Japanese China studies, we need to consider Japanese China studies in the relevant context of global culture. A notable feature of the modern world is the formation of a global cultural network. International studies of Chinese culture by itself is just a global field of study. Only by understanding the relation between international China studies and world culture, by progressively grasping the interpenetration of the spirit of the China studies of each country, can we accurately and clearly grasp the special features of the China studies of a given nation, and hence accurately and clearly grasp the value of its research. Some of the main ideas and methods of Japanese China studies were developed in the context of Japanese culture. Others came from the cultures of Europe and America, or were adapted from the cultures of Europe. For example, to examine a line of thought that we can reflect on, the major advocates of Confucianism at Tokyo University nearly all studied or conducted research in Germany, and they nearly all were attracted to the Prussian authoritarianism espoused by such men as Otto von Bismarck, Lorenz von Stein, Heinrich Rudolf Hartmann, and Friedrich Geneist. In contrast, Shiratori Kurakichi’s advocating that the sage-kings Yao, Shun, and Yu never existed was connected with his acceptance of the French philosopher Pierre Lafitte’s view that human culture passes through three stages. I believe that in international China studies, grasping the global cultural connections of research in each country will not only significantly aid research on Japanese China studies, but also have positive value for research on international studies of Chinese culture in general.

V.

Sources and Text Versions

The fourth issue is that in research on Japanese China studies, we ought to pay attention to sources and text versions. In the past before the appearance of various methods of dissemination, transmission of culture throughout the world depended on the migration of peoples, the flow of material goods, and the transmission of texts. Among these means, texts without doubt were the main means of transmitting culture. Texts were the sources, the basic materials,

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making up the international study of Chinese culture. Nearly all outstanding international scholars of Chinese culture were experts in the study of Chinese texts. Practical experience in the field of international China studies shows that whether one studies a country or an individual, past scholars based their scholarship on an acceptance of Chinese culture. Hence, in tracing their scholarship back to its sources and following the course of its development, we must sufficiently appreciate and research the many forms by which texts are transmitted and the many means by which they emerge. My own personal experience is that researchers of China studies must pay close attention to the routes and forms of transmission of Chinese culture in the relevant country. In the general course of the history of culture, the spread of Chinese texts in the world has given rise to various forms of dissemination of Chinese culture. Sometimes researchers cannot imagine the reach of the influence of Chinese culture. We urgently need to sort out how Chinese texts circulated in recipient countries and how Chinese culture was transformed. At the suggestion of senior scholars, I spent over twenty years researching Chinese books in Japan. I discovered 10,800 rare Chinese books in Japan and compiled the three-volume Ricang Hanji shanben shulu (A Catalog of Rare Chinese Books in Japanese Collections). Reviewers in China and abroad have estimated that this bibliography accurately captures the flow of Chinese texts into Japan and their penetration into Japanese culture over the course of more than 1,500 years. One Japanese scholar in particular wrote that this book “adds a third wheel to the two-wheeled study of Japanese culture.” The Agency of Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology conferred special recognition on this book. The Chinese Ministry of Education conferred on the book its First-Class Award for Outstanding Research in the Humanities, thus highly evaluating this research and expressing the importance it attaches to source literature in research in the humanities. On the dissemination of Chinese texts in Vietnam, we have a relatively detailed report published by scholars at Tsinghua University. On the dissemination of Chinese texts in Korea, scholars at Nanjing University have published considerable research in anthology form. Unfortunately, researchers in China in the field of international China studies still lack an overall survey and study of the dissemination of Chinese texts in Europe, the Americas, and other regions. Happily, the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2008 set up a state-level research project titled “Chinese Classics and Literature in the World in the Twentieth Century,” to be managed by Beijing Foreign Studies University. The completion of this project will provide international China studies with information on the dissemination of Chinese classics and literature in countries and regions speaking over thirty different languages, and this will likely further advance Chinese research in international China studies.

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Here I would like to urge researchers in international China studies to link up with librarians and traditional catalogers, and to rid themselves of their traditional disciplinary focus, in order to build on this scholarly foundation from a transcultural perspective. This academic conference has provided us with ample space to expound on our discipline. In the spirit of the topic of this conference, we can use our results and accumulated experience to create a broad scholarly world of international China studies. But to do this, we must rationally examine our scholarly achievements, reflect on our scholarly ideas, adjust our scholarly perspective, and standardize our methodologies, all from a broad scholarly point of view. And of course we must not neglect to take a far-sighted approach, gather our wisdom, maintain our scholarly integrity, and place our scholarship above all else. *This essay was translated from “Wo dui guoji Zhongguoxue yanjiu de zaisikao,” Shijie Hanxue, Spring 2010. Translated from the Chinese by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

The Wisdom of Selective Adaptation and Constructive Dialog

TANG Yijie

The Coexistence of Cultural Diversity: Sources of the Value of Harmony in Diversity

I.

Introduction

Though one cannot say that present world conflicts are mainly the result of cultural clashes, they certainly are related to clashes between cultures. A debate taking place in the world over cultural clashes and cultural coexistence might lead to greater mutual understanding, tolerance, and peace or, as a result of cultural isolation and hegemony, to political clashes. In either case, this debate will affect the destiny of humankind in the twenty-first century. Owing to the collapse of colonialism after the end of World War II, Western cultural imperialism gradually faded, and greater cultural diversity emerged in the world. In the past half century, developments in world trade and communication have led to ever more frequent cultural interactions between different peoples, nations, and regions, and have made the world an increasingly indivisible whole. In the present stage of world culture, two different tendencies have arisen: Some Western theoreticians, seeking to protect their traditional interests and customs, continue to maintain a Western-centric perspective. Others, adopting an indigenous romantic feeling toward an independent or revitalized people, create a nationalism that seeks to return to roots and preserve native culture, and a conservativism that seeks to return to past traditions. Some East Asian scholars, looking at the suffering wrought by Western culture throughout the world and the oppression that they personally suffered, even suggest a cultural perspective focused on East Asia. A great problem that we presently face is how we can prevent these two conflicting tendencies from developing into a large-scale confrontation and how we can dispel confrontations that do arise. At the same time, we must be careful about conflicts that may arise between the West and East Asia owing to differences in cultures and traditions.

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Harmony in Diversity

How do we enable peoples, nations, and regions of different cultural traditions to develop together while remaining different, and in this way create a globally conscious environment for the development of cultural diversity? I think that the Chinese principle of harmony in diversity (he er butong) provides us with a source of positive value for doing precisely this. The Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals for the 20th year of Duke Zhao of Lu (520 BCE), records the following conversation between Jing marquis of Qi and Yan Ying: The marquis of Qi said to Yan Ying, “‘Does only Liangqiu Ju [an official close to the marquis] act in harmony with me?’ Yan Ying replied, ‘Ju conforms. How do you get harmony (he) from conformity (tong)?’ The marquis said, ‘Is harmony different from conformity?’ Yan Ying replied, ‘Yes. Harmony is like the blending of ingredients of a good soup. The chef uses various condiments to cook a thick meat soup over a blazing fire, blending them together, adjusting the flavor, adding to make up for deficiencies, and draining off excesses. The gentleman eats the soup to calm his mind. The relation between ruler and minister is similar…Now Ju does not operate like this. Whatever you approve, Ju also approves, and whatever you reject, Ju also rejects. This is like adding water to water. Who can eat such “soup”? Again, this is like a zither that can produce only one note. Who can listen to such “music”? In all such cases, sameness/conformity (tong) is unacceptable.’” Also, Discourses of the States (Guoyu), in the chapter “Discourses of Zheng,” has Shi Bo’s reply to Duke Huan of Zheng (d. 771 BCE): “Now blending (he) various substances can in fact produce many things, whereas things of the same (tong) substance do not maintain well. Balancing one substance with another is called blending. Things so produced are rich and long-lasting, and substances naturally come together in this fashion. Supplementing one substance with the same substance produces nothing but rubbish. Thus the kings of the past had clay mixed with metal, wood, water, and fire to produce ceramics of all kinds.” These two passages make clear that he and tong are completely different in meaning. Confucius said this even more clearly: “The man of virtue harmonizes without conforming (he er butong). The narrowminded man conforms without harmonizing (tong er buhe)” (Analects, “Zilu”). From the passages above, one can see that the significance of “harmony in diversity” (he er butong) is that when two different cultural traditions achieve a common understanding through cultural intercourse and dialog, they are in some sense attaining a commonality from their diverse perspectives. This commonality consists not of one side vanquishing the other side, nor of one side converting the other side, but of finding points in common in the two different traditions and on this foundation advancing both traditions. Precisely herein lies

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the power of harmony. We can see this effect in the development of Chinese culture. Confucians sought to establish propriety and create music to actively maintain (you wei) the harmony of society. Daoists, in contrast, sought to follow nature to passively maintain (wu wei) peace in society. These two originally very different cultural traditions, over the course of nearly two thousand years of development, achieved a certain common understanding through continuous dialog. In the Western Jin period (265–317), Guo Xiang, in an effort to harmonize the Confucian and Daoist traditions, proposed that active administration of government (you wei) is a form of passive administration of government (wu wei). In a comment on “Autumn Floods” in the Zhuangzi, he wrote, “Can men, in eking out a living, forego plowing with oxen or riding horses? In plowing with an ox and riding a horse, can one avoid ringing the ox in the nose or bridling the horse? The ox does not resist being ringed in the nose, and the horse does not resist being bridled, because Heaven wills it. If this is mandated by Heaven, then though these beasts of burden are placed in the service of man, this circumstance is rooted in the will of Heaven.” The point of this passage is that though the ox is ringed in the nose, and the horse is bridled, through the active efforts (you wei) of man, these relations conform to what is natural (wu wei). Both Confucians and Daoists could accept this perspective of Guo Xiang even though this view does not fit squarely within either the original Confucian or original Daoist tradition. Active engagement (you wei) and passive following (wu wei) are quite different concepts. If both perspectives are to be accepted to some extent, both sides must find, through a process of negotiation, points of commonality (points of harmony). These points of commonality can serve as universal principles that both sides can accept. These universal principles are principles that both sides can accept without their negating the distinguishing features of either side. This state of affairs would indeed be a case of harmony in diversity. We can also illustrate the significance of harmony in diversity with developments resulting from the encounter of traditional Chinese culture and a foreign cultural tradition. Originally, Indian Buddhist culture and traditional Chinese culture (Confucianism, Daoism, etc.) were quite distinct, but from the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) to Tang (618–907) dynasties, Chinese culture continuously strove to accept and adapt the quite alien culture of Buddhism, and Indian Buddhism, for its part, continuously strove to change aspects of itself ill-suited to the demands of Chinese society. As a result, during the nearly one thousand years in which Indian Buddhism was transmitted to China, Chinese culture highly benefited from Indian Buddhism. Indian Buddhism profoundly influenced Chinese philosophy, literature, art, architecture, and popular customs. At the same time, Indian Buddhism was able to promote and perfect itself throughout the immense Chinese empire. During the Sui (581–618) and Tang dynasties, for example, there

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formed several more-Sinitic sects of Buddhism (the Tiantai sect, Huayan sect, and Chan sect). Yet Chinese culture remained Chinese culture and did not lose its distinctive features because it adopted Indian Buddhism. Such cultural exchange and mutual influence serves as an excellent illustration of the principle of harmony in diversity. As a matter of fact, the development of European culture also exemplifies this principle. Bertrand Russell, in The Problem of China (1922), wrote, “Greece learned from Egypt, Rome from Greece, the Arabs from the Roman Empire, medieval Europe from the Arabs, and Renaissance Europe from the Byzantines.”1 The reason that one culture could adopt another culture was often because the notion of harmony in diversity was embedded in the interactions and negotiations of the two cultures.

III.

Commonalities across Cultural Traditions

There are various circumstances under which the principle of harmony in diversity appears in the interactions of two different cultural traditions. One is that in the negotiations between cultures, the two cultures discover that they have similar concepts. For example, Christianity has the concept of love for humanity, Buddhism has the concept of compassion, and Confucianism has the concept of concern for the masses. In an abstract sense, all of these concepts signify love. Love can thus serve as a universal principle that all these different cultural traditions can accept. At the same time, love for humanity, compassion, and concern for the masses are concepts that preserve the distinct features of their respective traditions. Another circumstance is that one culture, in its intercourse with another culture, discovers that it lacks important ideas present in the latter culture, and that these ideas can be accepted into the former culture. By accepting the new ideas through cultural interaction, transforming them, and fitting them into its culture, the receiving culture can enrich itself. For example, China originally lacked a clear notion of sudden enlightenment, but by the Song (960–1127) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties, Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi had adopted the notion of sudden enlightenment into their Rational School of Neo-Confucianism, as did Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Shouren (Yangming) in their School-ofMind Neo-Confucianism. A third circumstance is that one culture, in its intercourse with another culture, discovers that it lacks significant ideas present in the latter culture, and that though these new ideas are incompatible with some ideas of the receiving culture, interactions with the other culture force it to forsake the old ideas and accept the new foreign ideas in order to develop. For example, after the idea of democracy penetrated China, it had to give up such traditional notions 1 Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (New York: Century, 1922), p. 195.

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as the “three guides” (san’gang; the ruler guides the minister, the father guides the son, and the husband guides the wife). A fourth circumstance is that in the interaction of two or more cultures, these cultures discover, through repeated discussions, significant new ideas previously missing in their cultures—ideas such as peaceful coexistence and the coexistence of cultural diversity—that, when incorporated into a system of diverse cultures, are undoubtedly significant for the individual cultures. There may, of course, be other circumstances leading one culture to adopt ideas from another, but here I will say no more. When, as described above, different cultures create commonalities by harmonizing their differences, when they find common principles in their differences, when they find common understanding in their different circumstances, such indeed is realizing harmony in diversity through cultural interaction and negotiation.

IV.

Regional Diversity and the Bidirectional Nature of Cultural Selection

In this discussion of harmony in diversity as a principle of intercourse between different cultures, there are two other points worth noting. One is the issue of regional differences in cultural development. The other is the bidirectional nature of culture selection. Having persisted for a long period or having encountered some special cause, a culture may decline or even die out in one particular region or among a particular people and continue to develop in another region or among another people. For example, Buddhism, having been transmitted in India down to the fifth and sixth centuries, stagnated, but in China, having absorbed aspects of Chinese culture and having been developed at the hands of eminent monks during the Sui and Tang dynasties, it became more Sinified. Then from China it was transmitted to the Korean peninsula and Japan, where it blended in with the local cultures. In Japan especially, there developed some distinctly local sects of Buddhism. This is why I say that Chinese culture benefited from Indian Buddhism, and that Indian Buddhism was promoted and perfected in China. Such regional differences in development occurred not only in China but also in Europe. As Russell said in the passage quoted above, presentday European culture arose in Egypt, was transmitted to Greece, passed through Rome and Arabia, and reentered Europe. Such regional development of culture thus laid down many milestones in the development of human civilization. The reason for such development is that when culture a is transplanted within culture b, it may acquire aspects of culture b. These acquired aspects may be originally lacking in culture a or may have not received much development. After being added to culture a, these aspects then lead culture a to be developed within

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culture b. Such cultural development is perfectly consistent with the principle of harmony in diversity and is a good example of the idea that “blending various substances can in fact produce many things, whereas things of the same substance do not maintain well” (“Discourses of Zheng”). As for the bidirectional nature of culture selection, as we know, it is not the case that any alien culture transmitted to a region or a people at any time and under any circumstances will always be accepted and developed. For example, during the Sui and Tang dynasties, not only did Buddhism have a tremendous influence on Chinese society; “Buddhist sutras were over ten times more common among the populace than Confucian classics” (Sui shu [Book of Sui], “Jingji zhi” [Treatise on Classics and Books]). At this time Nestorianism (a type of Christianity) was transmitted to China and had a degree of influence, yet it could not establish itself. This failure was due to the bidirectional nature of culture selection. Even different sects of Indian Buddhism fared differently in China. For instance, Esoteric (Tantric) Buddhism flourished for a while in the area of Han society after the mid-Tang—a fact verified by the relics excavated from the underground palace at Famen Temple. But later, Esoteric Buddhism fell into decline and had little lasting influence on Han society. Yet in Tibet, Indian Esoteric Buddhism blended in with the local religion to produce Tibetan Buddhism, which has persisted down to the present as the religion of Tibetans. What brought about this difference? The first type of Buddhism to enter the area of Han society consisted of the Theravada meditation techniques associated with An Shigao (d. 168 CE). Later, Lokaksema (b.c. 147 CE) brought Prajña¯ Buddhism to China. From the Jin dynasty (265–420) on, the form of Buddhism that spread in China was Prajña¯ Buddhism, not the Theravada meditation techniques. The reason was that Prajña¯ Buddhism was similar to Neo-Daoism (whose core teachings were those of Laozi and Zhuangzi); that Chan Buddhism (which developed during the Tang dynasty after Prajña¯ Buddhism was adopted during the Eastern Jin dynasty [317–420] and the Southern Dynasties [420–589]) was different from Indian meditation techniques, its philosophical foundation arising from Prajña¯ Buddhism; and that Chan Buddhism adopted not only some elements of Daoism but also some elements of Confucianism in order to adapt to the needs of Chinese society. Here we see mutual selection between cultures. Moreover, such mutual selection between cultures is another typical manifestation of the principle of harmony in diversity.

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Conclusion

In the early Tang period, Xuan Zang (602–664) propagated the ConsciousnessOnly School of Thought, but this school of thought lasted only thirty some years. The reason that it was not respected by the Chinese is that this mode of thought was thoroughly Indian in style, and thus quite different from the Chinese manner of thinking. In contrast, Chan Buddhism spread quickly from the mid-Tang on because Chan thought was similar to Chinese thought and jelled into a Sinified sect of Buddhism. It then went on to influence the Rational School of NeoConfucianism during the Song and Ming dynasties. This shows that in the intercourse between two different cultures, there is often mutual selection, and this mutual selection is to some extent a manifestation of the principle of harmony in diversity. For only if there is diversity between cultures can there be selection among diverse elements. If the thought of two cultures is entirely the same, there is nothing to select, and thought that is completely alike cannot add to preexisting thought any new ideas, and so cannot stimulate or promote the development of the preexisting culture. We can thus see that the principle of harmony in diversity has great significance for the mutual selectivity of interacting cultures. We have seen that the principle of harmony in diversity can spur healthy cultural exchange and promote rational development of culture, in accord with the present world trend toward cultural diversity. If we want Chinese culture to develop for the better, if we want it to make a contribution to future world civilization, then we must approach the culture of other peoples, nations, and regions with an attitude of harmony in diversity, sufficiently absorb the achievements of other cultures, and renew our own traditional culture so that we can create a new culture suited to modern social life. *Originally published in Kua wenhua duihua, Vol.1 (Cross-Cultural Dialogue, I), Yue Daiyun, ed., (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenhua Chubanshe, 1998). Translated from the Chinese by Alan Thwaits. Translation published by permission of the author.

TAO Demin

Abraham Lincoln’s Reception and Destiny in East Asia

I.

Introduction: Lincoln’s Attitude toward China and Japan

Abraham Lincoln’s image in East Asia ranges widely, from an exemplar of honesty and self-reliance to a larger-than-life champion of human equality and popular rights. This essay moves beyond the realm of legend and myth to examine some of his concrete influences in China and Japan by tracing his contacts with the region during his presidency. It then assesses the construction and adaptation of Lincoln’s image in East Asia, which has been used for a range of purposes, including as a role model for promoting an industrious spirit and democratic values, as a political tool of opposition party leaders, and as a means of criticizing American politics and foreign policy.1 During the mid-nineteenth century, Western imperialism and capitalist expansion brought the world together to an unprecedented extent. Karl Marx noted this globalizing tendency in a letter of 1858 addressed to his colleague, Friedrich Engels: “The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process.”2 From the date of the letter, October 8, it is clear that Marx took the Treaties of Tientsin between China 1 I am grateful to Mr. Hitoshi Honda of Meisei University Library, who kindly allowed me free use of the rich collection of the Tokyo Lincoln Center. I also wish to thank Mr. Davis Mengel, chief of the Special Access and FOIA staff at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, DC; Mr. Pan Kuang-che, director of Hu Shih Memorial Hall, Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica; and Ms. Shen Weiwei, doctoral student at Kansai University, for their assistance in discovering relevant materials in the United States, Taiwan, and China. In this essay, Japanese names are presented in the Western convention of personal names preceding family names, whereas Chinese names follow the Chinese convention of family names preceding personal names, for the sake of notational consistency with the existing literature. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 “Marx to Engels in Manchester,” Marx & Engels Internet Archive, accessed October 10, 2010, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_10_08.htm.

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and four Western powers, and the Ansei Treaties between Japan and five Western powers signed respectively in June and July that year, as the symbol of the full opening of East Asia. The former was concluded as the result of China’s defeat in the Arrow War with Britain and France, which led to the opening of the capital city of Peking and the nearby port city of Tien-tsin to foreign diplomats, traders, and missionaries. This paved the way for further Western penetration into northern China, given that the five treaty ports, including Canton and Shanghai, had already been opened along China’s southeast coast in the wake of the Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking in the early 1840s. The latter was initiated by Townsend Harris, the first American consul general to Japan, by taking advantage of the Arrow War’s impact on the Shogun government, and thereby gaining what Commodore Perry failed to achieve during his ice-breaking visits of 1853 and 1854—opening of trading ports and extra-territoriality for American citizens in Japan.3 It was under these circumstances that Lincoln had to deal with some difficult issues arising from the newly developed foreign relations with China and Japan early in his presidency. In late 1860, just three days before Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election, Samuel Wells Williams, secretary of the American legation in Beijing, submitted a letter to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, stating that a total of $400,000 had been paid by the Chinese government for claims on account of losses sustained by American citizens during the Arrow War. After paying the claims, “there will remain the sum of a little more than $200,000 in the hands of the United States’ authorities in China, and subject to their direction.” Williams proposed that the surplus funds be used to establish “a school of a high rank in China, where the natives of that empire can be taught the languages and science of western countries, under the tuition of competent men, with the object of making them serviceable to their own countrymen and government.”4 It appears that Lincoln favored this proposal to establish a Western-style academy for Chinese students. Although such an academy did not materialize until fifty years later, the occasion demonstrated Lincoln’s foresight in embracing an alternative that would have served as the basis for an amicable relationship between China and the United States.5 Lincoln’s diplomatic contact with Japan was similarly cordial. In the spring of 1860, the first Japanese diplomats arrived in Washington, D.C., to exchange the

3 See John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), chap. 16–17. 4 U.S. State Department, “Dispatches from U.S. Ministers to China 1843–1906” (M92-Roll 20: February 13, 1860-July 26, 1861), at NARA in Washington, DC. 5 Tyler Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of United States’ Policy in the Far East in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 330.

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Ansei Treaty.6 Based on its terms, Japan had already opened the three treaty ports of Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Hakodate in 1859 and was obliged to open the two major cities of Edo and Osaka and the two treaty ports of Kobe and Niigata in 1862. However, the inflation and political conflicts caused by the opening of Yokohama prompted the Shogun to seek a five-year postponement in the opening of these cities and ports. Lincoln replied on August 1, 1861 with characteristic tact, ensuring that his representative Townsend Harris, now the first minister to Japan, would be fully instructed to “proceed not less from a just regard for the interest and prosperity of your empire than from considerations affecting our own welfare and honor.”7 Treating the Japanese ruler as a kind of equal, Lincoln ended the letter: “wishing abundant prosperity and length of years to the great state over which you preside, I pray God to have your Majesty always in His safe and holy keeping.” As a result, the United States, along with the allied powers, agreed to grant a five-year extension to the Shogun.8 Lincoln’s direct interactions with East Asia during his presidency, limited though they were, nevertheless displayed a sense of graciousness and compassion toward the region, thereby contributing, in no small manner, to his rising popularity in the decades to come.

II.

The Spread of the Lincoln Story from Tokyo

As a matter of fact, on March 12, 1862, some seven months after sending that letter to the Shogun, Lincoln had a chance to chat in the White House with Joseph Heco, a young Japanese American who had served as an interpreter for the American legation in Edo (or Tokyo, as it became known after the Meiji Restoration in 1868), and who was seeking a position in the U.S. Navy with the help of Secretary of State William Seward. A native of Banshu¯ Province, Heco’s ship was cast adrift in the Pacific in early December 1850 on his way home from a sightseeing trip to Edo. Fortunately, the thirteen-year-old boy and his fellow shipmates were picked up by the American freighter Auckland, which brought the survivors to San Francisco. Once in America, Heco attended a Catholic school in Baltimore, got 6 See Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 7 Abraham Lincoln, “Reply to the Tycoon of Japan on Opening of Treaty Ports,” in The Works of Abraham Lincoln: State Papers 1861–1865, ed. John H. Clifford and Marion M. Miller, (New York: The University Society, Inc., 1908), 2:246. The Shogun was referred to as “Tycoon” in formal diplomatic communications at the time. 8 However, due to the war between Cho¯shu¯ domain and the combined fleet of four powers including the United States in 1864, Japan had to open the named cities and ports (except Kobe) in 1865.

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baptized at the age of seventeen, and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen at the age of twenty-one.9 Heco recalled the brief but pleasant meeting: “The President was tall, lean, with large hands, darkish hair streaked with grey, slight side-whiskers and clean shaved about the mouth… He shook hands with me very cordially, and then he made a great many inquiries about the position of affairs in our country.” Thus, he confirmed through personal experience the president’s reputation as “a most sincere and kind person, greatly beloved by all those who came in contact with him, and more especially by his party and his friends.”10 In 1863, Heco resigned his job at the American legation and returned to Japan, where he became a prominent journalist, government official, and businessman. He published Japan’s first newspaper, Kaigai Shimbun (The Overseas News) in 1864, which earned him the reputation as “the father of Japanese journalism.” Indeed, it was through Heco’s paper that many Japanese learned of Lincoln’s assassination in July 1865. Many English books were translated and edited for popular consumption after the 1868 Meiji Restoration as part of the national push toward learning from and catching up with the West.11 For example, Japanese versions of Samuel Smiles’s Self Help and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, published in 1870 and 1871 respectively, quickly became bestsellers. In December 1890 the first biography of Abraham Lincoln by Kaiseki Matsumura (1859–1939) appeared in Tokyo. Matsumura had an eclectic and wide-ranging education in many different private academies, where he learned Confucianism in Kyoto, English in Osaka, and Christianity in Yokohama. His Lincoln biography, which raced through thirteen editions, was the product of an education that emphasized moral development.12 Its pages stressed, at times superlatively, Lincoln’s guileless honesty and determination in the face of adversity, describing him as a “good teacher for the impoverished,” as well as a “model for our nation’s politicians.”13 Matsumura compared Lincoln’s death to that of Wang Yangming’s, the famous neo-Con9 See Haruyoshi Chikamori, Joseph Heco [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1963); Haruyoshi Chikamori, Joseph Heco: Documenting the Unexpected Life of a Japanese Who Had Met Lincoln [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Japan Britannica, 1980). Heco’s native name was Hikozo¯ Hamada. 10 Joseph Heco, The Narrative of A Japanese: What He Has Seen and the People He Has Met in the Course of the Last Forty Years, ed, James Murdoch (San Francisco: American-Japanese Publishing Association, n.d.), 1:299–302. 11 During the Meiji Restoration, the Tokugawa shogunate was defeated, and power and land ownership were returned from the samurai class to the emperor. The uprising was orchestrated by a group of young, reform-minded men from the domains of Satsuma and Cho¯shu¯ who later formed the core of the new leadership—also known as the Meiji oligarchy—that set out on major political and social reforms based on Western models. 12 Kaiseki Matsumura, Biography of Lincoln [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Maruzen Sho¯sha Shoten, 1890). 13 Ibid., introduction.

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fucian philosopher and politician of early modern China, in its dignity and to Jesus Christ’s in its heroic martyrdom.14 Matsumura’s pioneering biography undoubtedly inspired many of his contemporaries and later generations, including subsequent authors of Lincoln’s Japanese biographies. For example, Sakusaburo¯ Uchigasaki (1877–1947) made the following statement in the preface to his own 1929 enlarged biography of Lincoln. It was in 1890 when I was studying at an elementary school in Sendai that I first got to know Lincoln’s name. Reading Kaiseki Matsumura’s Biography of Lincoln, I began to admire the great man who was entirely different from heroes of the traditional mold. Every time I encountered a crisis and had to overcome temptation during my youth, it was this biography that gave me direction and courage. When I was twelve years old, I repeatedly read the Taiko¯ki (Biography of Hideyoshi Toyotomi), but when I became a fifteen-year-old boy, I began to worship Lincoln, and read his biography whenever I got depressed.15

Uchigasaki had studied at Tokyo Imperial University’s English department before going to England for training in theology. Later, he became a popular publicist and a professor at Waseda University and was six times elected a member of the House of Representatives beginning in 1924. Lincoln’s story became even more widespread in Japan upon its inclusion in 1903 in the national textbook for moral education for upper-level pupils in elementary schools. This booklet, containing twenty-eight lessons, preached values such as patience, courage, loyalty to the family, and patriotism, through the use of anecdotal stories to highlight the moral of the lesson. Lincoln was featured in five lessons including those on studying, honesty, sympathy, and personal freedoms. These themes were exemplified through episodes in Lincoln’s life that were more personal than political in character. Though emancipation appeared in the text, the Lincoln introduced to Japanese schoolchildren was the young Abe who worked for three days to make up for damaging a neighbor’s book, the young man who walked a mile to return a few pennies to a store customer, and the frontiersman who rescued a distressed pig stuck in the mud.16 The space allotted to Lincoln is noteworthy, especially considering that the contemporary Meiji emperor’s achievements and teachings were introduced in three lessons, and a famous Tokugawa Shogun’s merits and insights were appraised in just two lessons. Given the very high rate of compulsory elementary school attendance during this time in Japan (95 percent in 1905)17, a whole generation of Japanese effectively grew up with Lincoln as a foreign, yet familiar, role model, alongside 14 15 16 17

Ibid., 179. Sakusaburo¯ Uchigasaki, preface to Lincoln [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Jitsugyo¯ no Nippon, 1929). Ministry of Education, An Advanced Elementary School Textbook of Morals, 1903. Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig, East Asia, 532.

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more traditional figures from Japanese and Chinese histories. For instance, Yaichi Akiyama, another Japanese Lincoln biographer, recalled in The Great Man Lincoln: “When I was a fourth grade pupil, I studied Lincoln’s story for the first time through the textbook for moral education, which left a dramatic impression on my mind.”18 The prominent Japanese biographers of Lincoln in the early twentieth century ¯ son Sakurai—were all in—Sakusaburo¯ Uchigasaki, Yaichi Akiyama, and O debted to Inazo¯ Nitobe (1862–1933). A famous scholar and diplomat whose likeness can still be found today on the 5,000 yen banknote, Nitobe assisted scholars through encouragement and help in obtaining Lincoln-related materials. Nitobe attended the Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido¯ University), where he received an American-style education rooted in Christian principles. He pursued further studies at Johns Hopkins University in the United States and at Halle University in Germany. His multifaceted career included stints as a technocrat responsible for agricultural policies in Taiwan and Manchuria, a professor at his alma mater and the Kyoto Imperial University, and an undersecretary general of the League of Nations where he was the founding director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (the predecessor to UNESCO). Nitobe was best known for his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), which was written in English and introduced samurai ethics and Japanese culture to Western readers. Bushido reflected his lifelong goal to become a “bridge across the Pacific,” serving as a cultural broker between his countrymen and the international community.19 As such, in addition to introducing Japan to the world, he also wrote and helped others to write books to introduce the outside world to Japanese audiences. ¯ son Sakurai is one such work. In its afterword, Tales of Lincoln (1912) by O Nitobe revealed that he had written several chapters jointly with Sakurai. Nitobe began the project in 1909 as part of the commemoration of the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, but was too busy to finish the work himself, so he passed it on to Sakurai to complete. In the afterword, he enthusiastically called Lincoln “the kindest man among the great men, and the greatest man among the kind men,”20 which surely left the reader with a strong impression of Lincoln’s character. At the end of his life, Nitobe also wrote a foreword for Yaichi Akiyama’s The Great Man Lincoln (1933). The following passage reveals Lincoln’s appeal to the Japanese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

18 Yaichi Akiyama, The Great Man Lincoln [in Japanese] 3rd. ed. (1933; Tokyo: Kyobunkan, 1940), 1. 19 Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig, East Asia, 532. ¯ son Sakurai, Tales of Lincoln [in Japanese) 3rd. ed. (1912; Tokyo: Teibi Press, 1913), preface 20 O and 424–26.

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It is an old story around 1879 or 1880 that I first got to learn about Lincoln. One day at a library in Sapporo, I came up with the foolish ambition to read all the books that I could get my hands on to, and thus a book entitled From Log-cabin to the White House caught my attention. Without even knowing it was a biography, once I started reading it, I was fascinated by almost every page, and could not help but read through it without rest. When I finished reading, I got a deep feeling that this was truly a great man, and a biography of a great man was truly interesting. From that day on, I became a passionate worshipper of Lincoln; my study was full of books about Lincoln, and he became an idol in my kamidana [a home altar]. Lincoln lived in a different time and space, and therefore we cannot physically follow his steps. However, we can take him as a standard of our thought and action. Even Lincoln himself, had he not read George Washington’s biography, would not have thought about becoming a man like Washington, and might have ended up as an ordinary person, and died in obscurity among the commoners. If Lincoln is likened to a golden temple, we at least can become a golden needle. Marble could be a grand monument to be looked up at by all people, but it also could be used as a stone weight for making pickles. In other words, although there are differences in position and achievement between Lincoln and us, we can draw no distinction in terms of personal quality. There are a few books on Lincoln by our countrymen. But to study a great man as Lincoln, is equivalent to studying Mount Tai [the great mountain near Confucius’ hometown in Shandong Province, China]; that is to say, it can be approached from anywhere and observed from all sides. And the truth about Lincoln cannot be exhausted by just a few books. For example, it is not an easy task to gain a full understanding of Lincoln, even if we limit our interests to only his religious faith…. Biographies on extraordinary men like Lincoln are not only a stimulus to young people with lofty ambitions, but should be read by all persons—regardless of his or her occupation, age, or class.21

After Nitobe’s death, Toyohiko Kagawa, the Christian social reformer and international preacher in early twentieth-century Japan, made a pilgrimage to the historic sites connected with Lincoln. He was invited to give the Rauschenbusch Lectures at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in April 1936, in memory of the American social gospel leader. During his travels, Kagawa made thoughtful and impressive comments at every Lincoln site he visited. When he observed the log cabin at Rockport Municipal Museum in Indiana, he reflected on the modest origins of a man he judged the world’s greatest giant. When he traveled across the state of Illinois, and saw the vast prairie and the Mississippi River, he concluded 21 Yaichi Akiyama, Great Man, ii–iii. It is said that Lincoln shared the spot on Nitobe’s home altar with Jesus Christ and Socrates. Nitobe’s memory of his first contact with the Lincoln story may have been flawed, for he graduated from the Sapporo Agricultural College in 1881, and From Pioneer Home to the White House: Life of Abraham Lincoln: Boyhood, Youth, Manhood, Assassination, Death by William M. Thayer was first published in 1882 (Boston: James H. Earle). The same author’s From Log-cabin to White House (Norwich, CT: Henry Bill Pub. Company) published in 1881 concerned the life of President James A. Garfield.

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that the eloquence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address made him the plains’ greatest poet. He attributed Lincoln’s greatness to his love of learning. After visiting the site where Lincoln had worked as a ferryman on the Ohio River, Kagawa reflected: [O]ne cannot say the reason that the young worker became a giant of the world was just a product of the environment… [W]e have to think about Lincoln’s spiritual strength. Today [because of the Great Depression], millions of laborers are in the same situation. However, Lincoln did not stop reading books even when he was doing a ferryman’s job. He kept reading even when he was hired by someone else, and this was the reason that he could rise in life to become a giant.22

After visiting the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Kagawa commented that Lincoln was the father of America’s restoration and the teacher of mankind forever, stating, “as long as Americans remember Lincoln over George Washington, the American spirit will be everlasting, and flourish forever.”23 When Kagawa greeted the largest crowd ever gathered in the Knights of Columbus auditorium in Springfield in February 1936, he told them: It is quite an honor and privilege for me to visit this city of President Lincoln. Today I was given a chance to visit New Salem, and it was an inspiration to me. An Emperor of Japan once said that the greatest personality in the world’s history is Abraham Lincoln. Even the great Emperor of Japan considered himself inferior to Abraham Lincoln… Abraham Lincoln does not belong to this country alone. He belongs to the world. He belongs to Japan also. Millions and millions of souls in Japan are inspired by his life. Millions and millions of people of the colored race are inspired because he emancipated the colored people. And we, too, especially respect him.24

The image of Lincoln promoted in prewar Japan was predominately that of a “success story” to inspire diligence and industriousness in individuals. What was lacking was a discussion of Lincoln’s political principles and commitment to democracy. Even in Nitobe’s praise for the Gettysburg Address, he did not mention the famous phrase, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”25 This is because by the time of the publication of Matsumura’s Lincoln biography in 1890, the Satsuma-Cho¯shu¯ faction, which preferred the German22 Toyohiko Kagawa, “Making the World as My Home,” in The Complete Works of Kagawa Toyohiko [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Kirisuto Shinbunsha, 1963), 23:417. 23 Ibid., 417–22. 24 Emerson O. Bradshaw, Charles E. Shike, and Helen F. Topping, eds., Kagawa in Lincoln’s Land (New York: National Kagawa Coordinating Committee, 1936), 18–19. As a pacifist, Kagawa was critical of the martial decoration at Lincoln’s tomb: “It is regrettable that the monument was decorated with tanks and cannons, but no images of the emancipator. I felt deeply that the Republicans of the United States did not understand the spirit of emancipation.” Toyohiko Kagawa, Complete Works, 23:421. 25 Sakurai, Tales, 418–20.

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style authoritarian state, had monopolized the major positions in the government and responded to the increasing calls for popular rights with a conservative turn in its policies.26 The promulgation of the Meiji Constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education in February 1889 and October 1890 respectively, elevated the emperor to a living god and emphasized loyalty and devotion to the throne. Therefore, the word “democracy” (expressed in Japanese as Minken, people’s rights, or Minshu, rule by the people), which had motivated a generation during the early Meiji period, gradually became a kind of taboo in society. Even Sakuzo¯ Yoshino, the leading political scientist at Tokyo Imperial University, had to resort to borrowing the old Confucian term Minpon (people are the basis and source of the governance) to articulate his ideas for a real constitutional government and party politics. Only after World War II, when the allied occupation authorities initiated a series of “democratization” policies in Japan, did such aspects of Lincoln’s legacy begin to receive their due attention in Japanese publications. The most symbolic and influential events in the process of democratization were the emperor’s renouncement of his divinity on January 1, 1946 and the adoption of a new constitution drafted mainly by the American officials on November 3 the same year. The significance of the former was best described by the following poem written then by the French-trained sculptor Ko¯taro¯ Takamura: The Occupation army saved us from starvation And we narrowly escaped destruction. At that moment the Emperor came forward And proclaimed “I am not a living god.” As day followed day, the weight was lifted from my eyes, The burden of sixty years disappeared at once.27

Now that the taboo was removed, the democratic principles of Lincoln that had been downplayed for decades assumed center stage in the new Lincoln biographies. For example, the prominent biographer Ken Sawada placed the “government of the people…” phrase on the title page of his life of Lincoln, and the leading geographer Usao Tsujita pointed out in his Lincoln that “today, when our country is going to restart as a democratic nation, in spite of our different personal preferences, we have to take a new look at and do new research on Lincoln. Intellectuals should be free from a preconceived notion and unreasonable prejudice that Lincoln was merely a famous self-made man who could serve as a role model for boys for encouraging their learning and cultivating their honesty… Lincoln as 26 See Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig, East Asia, chap. 18. 27 Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, trans. and ed. Marius B. Jansen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 9–12. See also Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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a figure needs to be accepted once more by our Japanese society for getting to know America and what a democracy means. We may get a sense of where Japan is heading by just parroting the phrase of ‘government of the people.’… Unless our country is able to turn out many persons like Lincoln, it can never be a civilized nation.”28

In addition, Takeo Ono used Lincoln: The Embodiment of Democracy as his book title and Toshihiko Sato¯’s was The Father of Democracy: Lincoln.29 This version of Lincoln became the subject of postwar school textbooks.30 Lincoln as champion of democracy, however, did not preclude his commercial deployment, most notably in comic book form, by Japan’s answer to Walt Disney—Osamu Tezuka.31

III.

China’s Opposition Party Leaders’ Embrace of the Gettysburg Address

Lincoln did not reach the same level of popular recognition in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century China as he did in Japan. When he featured in Chinese journal articles, it was often as the translation of originals written in Japanese. His appearance in Chinese school textbooks appears to have been limited to English language readers, which would have been beyond the capabilities of most Chinese.32 Nonetheless, Chinese intellectuals were undoubtedly attracted to Lincoln’s story, both for its example of the self-made man and for the democratic principles that the American politician embraced. This was particularly the case with Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China (ROC), and Mao Tse-tung, the major leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), both of whom were longtime opposition party leaders. When a larger Chinese fleet was defeated by a smaller, yet tactically superior and better disciplined, Japanese navy in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, some observers concluded that the battle highlighted China’s inability to keep pace with Japan’s Western-style modernization. However, inspired by Japan and the United 28 Ken Sawada, A Biography of Lincoln [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Cho¯bunkaku, 1946); Usao Tsujita, Lincoln [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Daigado, 1947). 29 Takeo Ono, Lincoln: The Embodiment of Democracy [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Hoe¯i-sha, 1959); Toshihiko Sato¯, The Father of Democracy: Lincoln [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Iwasaki shoten, 1960). 30 See Kunio Yanagita and Masakatsu Naruse, New Language Reader (for 1st year student of Junior High School) [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 1962), 104–11. 31 Osamu Tezuka, ed., The Day of Emancipation [in Japanese], World History, Vol. 1 I (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron-sha, 1984). 32 See, for example, “The Assassination of American President Lincoln” [in Chinese] Zhongwai Dashi Bao, 2, August 25, 1899; “Lincoln’s Childhood House,” illustration, Xinmin Congbao, 19, October 31, 1902; “Calligraphy by Lincoln,” [in Chinese] Zhonghua xueshengjie, 1: no. 9, September 25, 1915. The 1915 article includes a printed image of a handwritten letter by Lincoln.

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States’ experiences in nation-building, China launched its own series of reform programs, which eventually led to the 1911 Revolution under Sun’s influence that changed Asia’s largest monarchy into a republic, and the Northern Expedition of 1926–28, which defeated the powerful warlords and established the Nanking government under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the new leader of the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) founded by Sun. These political miracles in which opposition leaders of common background rose to power were closely watched and admired by some Japanese. As the Lincoln biographer and politician Sakusaburo¯ Uchigasaki stated: When I investigated our country’s history of party politics, I found unexpectedly that it drew indirectly on Lincoln… When the news [of emancipation] arrived, people realized that this was the spirit of the age and the direction of world opinion, and the movement for a constitutional government [in Japan] thus began to rise. Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles of the People” finally took shape and the nationalist government was established in Nanking. The new thinkers in the south who had been under the oppression of the northern military dictatorship, now grasped the government. This had a great impact on Japan’s movement for a constitutional government. Sun’s Three Principles… derived from the hint he got from Lincoln when he was learning in the United States. If this was true, the Lincoln that had passed away has now been revived in the Republic of China.33

Uchigasaki’s view was not an isolated one. Fellow provincial and prominent political scientist Sakuzo¯ Yoshino thought similarly,34 as did Tsuyoshi Inukai, a famous opposition leader and a great admirer of Sun.35 Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) was a transnational figure heavily influenced by Western ideas, just like Inazo¯ Nitobe. The son of a Cantonese peasant, Sun’s childhood hero was Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion of 1851–64 against the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). When he was a teenager, Sun joined his older brother for three years in Honolulu, where he enrolled in a Church of England boarding school and learned the ideas of Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton.36 Beginning in 1895, he was forced to live in exile in Europe, America, Canada, and Japan for sixteen years because of his radical politics. His kidnapping by the Chinese Legation in London in 1896 earned him international fame as 33 Sakusaburo¯ Uchigasaki, Lincoln [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Jitsugyo¯ no Nippon, 1929), ix. 34 Demin Tao, “The Japanese Responses to the May Fourth Literary Revolution: The Cases of Yoshino Sakuzo¯ and Aoki Masaru” [in Japanese], in China as Cultural Phenomena (Osaka: Kansai University Press, 2002). 35 Demin Tao, “Naito¯ Konan and the Eastern Cultural League: Pan-Asianism in the Early Showa Period” [in Japanese], Supplementary Issue No. 3 to Journal of East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies (Osaka: Kansai University, December 2008); Neil Martin, “Sun Yat-Sen: In Defense of Nationalism, the Republic, and the American System of Political Economy,” The Schiller Institute, accessed March 4, 2008. 36 Martin, “Sun Yat Sen”; Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig, East Asia, 743.

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China’s leading revolutionary.37 After the 1911 Revolution, Sun became the provisional president of the ROC and a founder of the KMT. Sun’s Three Principles of the People—which refers to People’s National Consciousness (minzu), or nationalism; People’s Rights (minzhu), or democracy; and People’s Livelihood (minsheng), or socioeconomic well-being—was often compared to Lincoln’s famous expression in the Gettysburg Address, a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”38 In a 1919 lecture on the history of Western politics, he used the expression to praise the United States for establishing a truly democratic republic, and maintained that in the political system championed by Lincoln, the people became the rulers and the leaders became public servants.39 Sun invoked Lincoln’s phrase as a sort of democratic ideal toward which China— whose people were growing increasingly disillusioned with the rule of its Manchurian dynasty—should aspire. To be sure, Sun’s Three Principles were actually an eclectic combination of ideas that drew from his transnational background, and its specific essence differed from that of Lincoln’s in significant ways.40 Nevertheless, insofar as Lincoln’s message was appropriated by Sun to unify the will of a nation at a historical watershed, it could be said that Lincoln’s spirit was, indeed, revived in China. Compared with Sun Yat-sen, Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976) was born into a richer peasant-merchant family. He was exposed to ideological debates on liberalism, democratic reformism, anarchism, and utopian socialism during World War I and its aftermath, before eventually becoming a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. When the CCP formed the first United Front (1923–27) with the KMT for preparation of the Northern Expedition, Mao was responsible for political propaganda. Unlike many other politicians, he was concerned more about the peasants, who constituted the great majority of China’s total population of four hundred million. After the Long March, Mao finally became the undisputed leader of the CCP and its Red Army based in Yan’an, located in northwest China. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on 37 Wang Ke-wen, ed., Modern China: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1998), 339–41. 38 Ibid., 352. 39 Wang Er-min, “The Concept of Public Servant and the Idea of People as Sovereignty in Modern China” [in Chinese], in Wang’s Second Series of Essays on Modern Chinese Intellectual History (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2005), 427. 40 For example, Sun’s Principle of National Consciousness (minzu) was originally conceived as a rallying call for the Han Chinese—organized along narrow ethnic lines—to wrest back control of their land from the Manchurian rulers and imperialist foreigners—as opposed to the Lincolnian notion of preserving the Union from potential dissolution. Concerning the differences in Chinese and American understanding of democracy, see Elizabeth J. Perry, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’: From Mencius to Mao—and Now,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 1 (2008), 37–50.

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July 7, 1937, he formed the second United Front (1937–45) with the ruling party KMT to withstand the Japanese invasion, and his bases and troops were reorganized as part of the national administrative and military systems under Chiang Kai-shek. He told the American reporter Edgar Snow that sometime before or after the 1911 Revolution “I learned about the United States for the first time from an article on the American Revolution, and still remember a sentence from it: ‘after eight years of hard fighting, Washington won out and established his nation.’ From Biographies of Great Heroes, I further got to know Napoleon, Catherine II, Peter the Great, Wellington, Gladstone, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Lincoln.”41 The defeat of the Japanese invasion resulted in a new conflict in China, this time waged between Communists and Nationalists. This struggle spawned a competition between the two sides to enlist foreign support and sympathy. It is a sign of Lincoln’s reach and elasticity in East Asia that both sides deployed him as an instrument of public diplomacy. When a Reuters correspondent asked Mao in late September 1945 what his conception was of a free and democratic China, the Communist leader invoked Lincoln. “A free and democratic China,” Mao asserted, will have the following characteristics. Its government officials at all levels, including even the central government, will all be chosen in universal elections with secret ballots, and will be responsible to their electors. It will carry out Mr. Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles, Lincoln’s principle of ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’ as well as Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter. It will guarantee the independence, solidarity, and unity of the country, and its cooperation with other democratic powers.42

The ensuing Civil War of 1946–49 invited further comparisons with Lincoln. Mao drew power from peasants by launching a series of land-reform programs, a tactic not unlike Lincoln’s mobilization of African Americans during the American Civil War. Indeed, the power Mao drew from the peasantry turned the tide of the conflict in favor of the CCP, leading to the retreat of the KMT government to Taiwan. Despite their many differences, both Sun Yat-sen and Mao Tse-tung echoed the Gettysburg Address when they were in the position of an opposition party leader. While Sun did not live to see the KMT hold power, he had anticipated that a true democracy must be gradually and patiently cultivated—indeed his vision would be realized in Taiwan in the 1990s. By contrast, although Mao ruled the PRC

41 Edgar Snow, Autobiography of Mao Tse-tung [in Chinese], trans. Wang Heng (Taipei: Taiwan shufang, 2002), 22. 42 “Answers to Questions Raised by Reuters News Agency Correspondent Gamble, September 27, 1945,” quoted in Arthur Waldron’s editorial, “What Should Bush Say at Tsinghua University,” Taipei Times, February 2, 2002; Minoru Takeuchi, ed., Collected Works of Mao Tsetung (Tokyo: Sososha, 1971), 9:335.

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for twenty-seven years after 1949, he never put his democratic promises into practice. Even today, democratic reforms remain elusive on the mainland, though campaigners are working hard toward these ends.

IV.

The Uses of Lincoln in Diplomatic Interchanges between the United States and East Asia

As elsewhere, a notable feature of Lincoln’s image in East Asia has been its malleability. This in part reflects the elasticity of his words and deeds, which has allowed him to be invoked in diplomatic exchanges for purposes ranging from the strengthening of alliances to self justification in disputes over issues of human rights and national sovereignty. The former case was manifested by a special stamp issued in the United States in 1942 and by its equivalent issued in Taiwan in 1959. As part of efforts to express American support for the “overrun countries” and their “heroic resistance” against the Axis Powers in World War II,43 a five-cent “China Commemorative Stamp” was issued on July 7, 1942 in Denver by the U.S. Post Office Department. While the stamps for other overrun countries were simply an image of their respective national flags, this featured Lincoln and Sun, side by side, along with their famous democratic doctrines written in English and Chinese characters, respectively. Between the two likenesses, there is a map of China with the image of a sun from the national flag of the ROC, with the inscriptions “July 7, 1937,” “July 7, 1942,” and the Chinese government’s wartime guidelines of “Fight the War and Build the Country” (in Chinese). The particulars of the stamp were chosen with great care (perhaps reflecting not only President Roosevelt’s interests in stamps, but also the importance he assigned to the China front during the Second World War):44 July 7, 1942 was exactly five years after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which marked the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War; Denver was the very city in which Sun resided when the 1911 Revolution occurred; and the value of the stamp, five cents, was the normal rate for sending a letter from the United 43 Maud and Miska Petersham, America’s Stamps: The Story of One Hundred Years of US Postage Stamps (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 116–19. 44 FDR noted to his son during the Cairo Conference: “You should consider that if China were not around, or if it were to be defeated, how many divisions of Japanese troops would be transferred to other fronts to fight. They could immediately occupy Europe, occupy India. They could do so without effort, and advance into the Middle East…and join Germany to make pincer attacks and get together in the NearEast, shutting out Russia, smashing Egypt, and severing all the transportation lines that pass through the Mediterranean.” Yang Tianshi, “Refuse German Suggestion for a Joint Attack on India and Prevent the Joining of Forces by Germany and Japan: An Interpretation of Chiang Kai-shek’s Diary” [in Chinese], Minpao Monthly, 45, no. 9, (September 2010), 70–74.

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States to China. In addition, at a ceremony on July 7, 1942, at the White House, Frank Walker, then U.S. Postmaster General, presented a set of stamps to the Chinese ambassador in Washington, D.C., and a first-day cover to Chiang Kaishek, after which a total of twenty-one million stamps, including 170,000 first-day covers, were sold.45 If the stamp reflected in part the imperatives of wartime propaganda, it also embodied the transnational movement of ideas that had created a global democratic consciousness.46 Since both China’s Nationalists and Communists were allies of the United States at the time, they competed to claim the mantles of Sun Yat-sen, Lincoln, and other heroes. When the relationship soured between Chiang Kai-shek and U.S. Chief of the General Staff Joseph Stilwell in 1944, Mao’s secretary Hu Qiaomu seized the opportunity to present the Communists as the legatees of American traditions. In a special editorial in Jiefang Daily (Liberation Daily) that appeared on the Fourth of July, Hu declared that “The work we Communists are carrying out right now is exactly the work that Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and others have already achieved in the United States; there is no doubt it will earn the sympathy of a democratic America… The United States is currently providing generous aid to China’s war of resistance and democratic movements, for which we are very grateful. Long live the Fourth of July! Long live democratic America!”47 During the Cold War, it was Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT government, now based in Taiwan, who appropriated Lincoln in their effort to secure American support. Perhaps the most visible example occurred during the 1959 sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s birth when the government issued a commemorative stamp, which placed Sun and Lincoln shoulder to shoulder in front of the backdrop of the colorful national flags of the ROC and the United States. As a news report described, the decision was made at a time “when Chinese and American nations are joining hands to resist Communist invasion,” as well as “for the cause of carrying on the traditional Sino-American friendship, commemorating the two great democratic prophets, and protecting human rights and upholding justice.”48 45 “FDR and the First Stamp of Sun Yat-sen in the United States” [in Chinese], American ed., Wenhuibao, November 13, 2007, accessed October 10, 2010 http://www.chinese-today.com/ news/show/id/26652. 46 One of the reasons for this judgment was that World War II has been propagated as a war between the “democratic powers” and the “fascist powers,” although countries like Soviet Russia and the ROC—whose status as a permanent member of the United Nations’ Security Council was replaced by the PRC in 1971—were not democratic countries by Western standards. To some extent, the propaganda-derived perception of World War II still matters in today’s post-Cold War world. 47 Yang Yusheng, Chinese Views of America [in Chinese] (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 1996), 183. 48 “A Stamp in Which the Two Great Democratic Prophets of China and the United States are Put Together” [in Chinese], United Daily News (Lianhe pao, a major newspaper in Taiwan), December 16, 1959.

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The political uses of Lincoln as a means for promoting Sino-American relations were not restricted to the periods of World War II and the Cold War. In fact, it was continued and renewed in the 1990s, when both Beijing and Washington attempted to construct a strategic partnership. President Jiang Zemin’s familiarity with Lincoln served as a conversational ice-breaker during his 1997 meeting with President Bill Clinton. Upon being shown an original manuscript of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Jiang pleasantly surprised his American hosts by reciting aloud the document that he had memorized as a high school student in the 1940s. This episode, as one commentator observed, had the effect of facilitating “the most probing and candid discussion of the human rights issue in their five meetings.”49 The uses of Lincoln, however, were not limited to polite socializing. Prior to his 1997 trip, Jiang cited Lincoln’s opposition to slavery in an interview with the Washington Post, attempting to deflect criticisms over Tibet by accusing the United States of applying a double standard in its treatment of the issue. “Lincoln was a remarkable leader, particularly in liberating the slaves in America… When it comes to slavery in China, most of China got rid of slavery long ago, except in Tibet, where it was not until the Dalai Lama left that we eliminated serfdom… The impression I get is that you [Americans] are undoubtedly opposed to slavery, yet you support the Dalai Lama.”50 Taiwanese separatism also offered Chinese Communists the opportunity to deploy the image of Lincoln the national consolidator on behalf of their objectives. “The purpose of your civil war was to unite America together,” Jiang asserted on another occasion, “yet on the issue of Taiwan your people support separating Taiwan and China and cannot understand how strongly 1.2 billion people feel about reunification of the motherland. This makes people think the standards you apply to others are not the same as those you apply to yourselves.”51 Jiang has not been the only recent Chinese statesman to interpret Lincoln and the American Civil War through the lens of the Taiwan issue. A similar use of Lincoln was made by Zheng Bijian, a high-ranking advisor to China’s leadership who popularized the term, “China’s peaceful rise.” In an article for the journal Chinese Youth, Zheng likened the Taiwan issue to the problem faced by Lincoln during the Civil War: “Look at President Lincoln, and how adamantly he opposed secession… How come Lincoln’s battle to preserve the Union was completely justified, whereas our steadfast efforts to maintain a unified motherland are not?”52

49 Robert L. Kuhn, The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004), 321. 50 Ibid., 316. 51 Ibid., 316–17. 52 Zheng Bijian and Ye Xiaoshen, “Zheng Bijian: Peaceful Rise and Peaceful Development are One and the Same” [in Chinese], China Economic Net (originally published in Chinese Youth),

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As in China, Lincoln’s name was also used by some influential leaders in Japan to criticize America’s unfair treatment of its citizens, especially concerning the two major issues of Japanese immigration and its postwar constitution. The Asian Exclusion Act (known more commonly in Japan as the Japanese Exclusion Act) of 1924 came as a deep blow to many Japanese, some of whom had previously been strong believers in the openness of American society. The Act imposed a ban on Japanese immigration to the United States on the grounds that such immigrants were crowding the job market and causing social unrest, a problem first raised by the California legislature after the Russo-Japanese War. Notable Japanese such as Viscount Eiichi Shibusawa “could not believe that this restrictionist legislation came from the country that gave birth to Washington and Lincoln, and has advocated justice and equality as its national creed ever since its inception.”53 Shibusawa, a pioneering banker and industrialist who was involved in the founding of hundreds of companies and schools during his lifetime, was one of the few Japanese who recognized the rising influence of the American business model and political leadership on the world stage early in the twentieth century. He thus sought to avoid the kind of conflicts that would lead to a fatal clash with the United States. In 1909, he led a business delegation on a threemonth tour of the United States to build ties with American business, religious, and academic circles. He encouraged Japanese participation in the 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition in San Francisco, and persuaded the Japanese delegation to accept the Washington Naval Treaty while attending the Washington Conference of 1921–22 as an observer.54 Thus, it was not at all unaccountable that he was so disillusioned with the Act. Toyohiko Kagawa, who happened to be in the United States during the passage of the Asian Exclusion Act, used a sermon to tell a fifteen-thousand-strong audience in Southern California: “I have stopped singing America’s national anthem… The white people may enjoy freedom, but the yellow race does not. In the name of Abraham Lincoln, I am ashamed of the United States!”55 And Inazo¯ Nitobe, the foremost advocate of Lincoln in Japan, who lectured widely in America to counter anti-Japanese sentiments there, was especially shocked at the news of the passage of the Act. “It is absolutely outrageous,” he declared, “I am deeply sorry for the United States. Until this law is revoked, I swear I will never

September 21, 2007, accessed August 4, 2009, http://www.ce.cnlxwzx/gnsz/szyw/200709/211t2 0D70921_12994705_1.shtml. 53 Shibusawa Seien Kinen Zaidan Ryu¯monsha, ed., Biographical Material on Shibusawa Eiichi [in Japanese], 46 vols. (Tokyo: Shibusawa Seien Kinen Zaidan Ryu¯monsha, 1958–1963), 34:182. 54 Masato Kimura, Shibusawa Eiichi: The Pioneer of Popular Economic Diplomacy [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron-sha, 1991), 61–152. 55 Kagawa, Complete Works, 23:423.

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step foot on American soil.”56 It is apparent that many Japanese people perceived the Act as Japan’s national humiliation, an idea that played no small role in the escalation of U.S.-Japanese tensions in the interwar years. As mentioned earlier, Japan adopted the American-drafted Constitution of Japan in 1946 under Allied Occupation. This, too, was considered an act of national humiliation by some Japanese leaders. On July 30, 1953, Yasuhiro Nakasone, a young politician who was attending a summer seminar at Harvard University chaired by Professor Henry Kissinger, indicated his discontent in a speech at an international forum there. Nakasone argued that “If Lincoln’s words ‘Government…by the people’ have any truth, a constitution for the Japanese should be made by the Japanese… I have no doubt that when such a constitution is made, Americans will be satisfied and pleased with the result—the birth of a real democracy in Japan.”57 Two years later, he joined the non-partisan “League of the Diet Members for an Autonomous Constitution,” and publicized a song called “Revising the Constitution.” In 2007, the league was renamed as “League of the Diet Members for Making a New Constitution,” and Nakasone became its president. Nakasone has devoted much of his long political career, which has included three stints as prime minister in the 1980s in which he aligned with Ronald Reagan (the socalled “Ron-Yas” relationship), to the issue of constitutional reform. In conclusion, when both China and Japan were in the process of a historical transition from a traditional to a modern state in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they turned increasingly outward in search of potential models to follow. The values that Lincoln represented had strong appeal to these nations, whose dramatic rise on the global stage mirrored that of Lincoln’s nineteenth century America. Lincoln’s personal values also found traction in East Asian cultures, not least for the prescription they offered for individual and national development—perseverance, hard work, liberty, and democracy. While certain aspects of his legacy were selectively applied in the process of adoption, and still others are increasingly employed as a foil for diplomatic interchanges between the region and the United States, such versatility of use also speaks to the fundamental reach of Lincoln’s ideas, which have transcended various boundaries to function as a common point of reference between all nations. *Originally published in The Global Lincoln, Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, eds., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), with some revisions in the title and text by the author. Published by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. 56 Sadao Asada, U.S.-Japanese Relations between the Two World Wars: The Navy and the PolicyMaking Process [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1995), 310. 57 William Theodore de Bary et al., Sources of Japanese Tradition: Volume 2, 1600 to 2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1088–89.

Contributors

NOMA Haruo（ 野 間 晴 雄 ）is a Fellow at the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies and Professor of Geography and Regional Environment at Kansai University. He received his PhD in Literature from Kansai University and is the author of Historical Ecology of Lowlands in Japan: A Comparative Study on Rice-Growing Societies (低地の歴史生態システム—日本の比較稲 作社会論,2009), and the editor of Magnetic Field of Cultural Systems: A History of Intra-Asia Exchanges from the 16th to the 20th Centuries (文化システムの磁 場—16 ～ 20 世紀アジアの交流史, 2010). Chun-chieh HUANG（ 黃 俊 傑 ）is currently a Distinguished Chair Professor at National Taiwan University (NTU) and a Member of Academia Europaea. He was the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at NTU from 2008 to 2017. Professor Huang received the National Chair Professorship and the National Academic Award from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan, ROC. He is the author of East Asian Confucianisms: Texts in Context (2015, Slovene translation, 2016; Spanish translation, 2017); A Historical Treatise on Humanity in East Asian Confucianisms (東亞儒家仁學史論, 2017); and Xu Fuguan in the Context of East Asian Confucianisms (東亞儒學視域中的徐復觀 及其思想, 2018 revised & enlarged edition; French translation, 2015; Japanese translation, 2018; English translation, 2019). SHIBA Yoshinobu（ 斯 波 義 信 ）is Executive Curator of the To¯yo¯ Bunko Research Library and Professor Emeritus of Osaka University and the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD in Literature from the University of Tokyo in 1962 and became a member of the Japan Academy in 2003. He was granted the Person of Cultural Merit Award in 2006, the Order of Culture in 2017, and the Tang Prize in 2018. He is the author of Commerce and Society in Sung China (Ann Arbor, trl. by Mark Elvin, 1970), and Chinese Socioeconomic Diversity: 960–1279 (2011).

308

Contributors

GE Zhaoguang（ 葛 兆 光 ）is a Distinguished Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He is the author of An Intellectual History of China (中国思想 史, Volumes 1–2. Chinese Version, 1998, 2000; English Version, 2014, 2018; Korean Version, 2013); Here in ‘China’ I Dwell: Reconstructing Historical Discourses of China for Our Time (宅茲中国：重建有関中国的歴史論述, Chinese Version, 2011; English Version, 2017); What is China: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History (何為中国: 疆域,民族,文化与歷史. Chinese Version, 2014, Japanese Version, 2014; English Version, 2018). He was selected as the first “Princeton Global Scholar” in the United States in 2009, and was a recipient of the 2014 “Paju Book Award” in the Republic of Korea and the 2014 “Asia-Pacific Award” in Japan. AZUMA Ju¯ji（ 吾 妻 重 二 ）is Director of the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies and Professor in the Graduate School of East Asian Cultures, and has served as Dean of Faculty of Letters at Kansai University. He received his PhD in Literature from Waseda University and PhD in Cultural Interaction Studies from Kansai University. He is the author of New Studies of Zhu Xi’s Thought and Learning (朱子学の新研究, 2004); Studies on Song Period Thought: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism (宋代思想の研究— 儒教・道教・仏教をめ ぐる考察, 2009); and A Series of Documents Concerning Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals in Japan: Volumes 1–8 (家礼文献集成 日本篇, 2010～2019). UCHIDA Keiichi（ 内 田 慶 市 ）is Professor Emeritus and Director of the Kansai University Open Research Center for Asian Studies. He received PhDs in Literature and Cultural Interaction Studies from Kansai University, and served as Vice-Director of the Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies from 2007 to 2012. He is the author of A Study of Cultural Interaction and Linguistic Contact: Approaching Chinese Linguistics from the Periphery (文化交渉学と言語接触; Japanese Version, 2010; English Version, 2017), and Research into East-West Linguistic and Cultural Intersections in the Modern Era (近代における東西言 語文化接触の研究, 2001). He is also a coeditor of Wakumon (或問, Journal of studies in cultural and linguistic exchanges between China and the West). NAKANISHI Susumu（ 中 西 進 ）is Professor Emeritus at the Kyoto City University of Arts. He received his PhD in Literature from the University of Tokyo, and was granted the Person of Cultural Merit Award in 2004 and the Order of Culture in 2013. He is the author of Comparative Literary Studies on the Manyo¯shu¯ (万葉集の比較文学的研究, 1963) ; Genji monogatari and Haku Rakuten (源 氏 物 語 と 白 楽 天 , 1997); and A Sentimental History of Japanese Culture (こころの日本文化史, 2011).

Contributors

309

WANG Yong（ 王 勇 ）is Chair Professor of East Asian Studies and Director of the Institute for Japanese Culture Studies at Zhejiang University, China. He received his PhD from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan, and the Japan Foundation Award in 2015. He is the author of The Image of Japanese Envoys in the Tang Dynasty: A Tang Empire of Mixed-Blood Peoples (唐から見た 遣唐使—混血児たちの大唐帝国, 1988); The History of Book Exchanges between China and Japan (書物の中日交流史, 2005); and Ten Lectures on the Circulation of Cultures in East Asia (東亜文化還流十講, 2018). MATSUURA Akira（ 松 浦 章 ）is Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Fellow of the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies at Kansai University, and formerly served as Director of the Institute and Director of the Center for the Study of Asian Cultures. He received PhDs in Literature and Cultural Interaction Studies from Kansai University, the Institute of Eastern Cultures Award in 1987, and the Zhedong Cultural Forum Prize in 2008. He is the author of Qing Dynasty Foreign Trade History (清代海外貿易史の研究, 2002); Cultural Interaction in the East Asian Seas in Early Modern Times ( 近世東アジア海域の文化交渉, 2010); The Junk Shipping of Southern China and Economic Exchange in the Qing Dynasty (清 代華南帆船航運與経済交流, 2017); and The Maritime Silk Road and Exchanges between Asian Sea Areas (海上絲綢之路與亞洲海域交流, 2018). ZHOU Zhenhe（ 周 振 鶴 ）is Senior Professor at the Institute of Historical Geography, Fudan University, and was among the first to receive a doctorate in History after the Cultural Revolution in China. He is the author of Dialects and Chinese Culture (方 言 与 中 国 文 化 , 1986) and the editor of A Collection of Shanghai Historical Maps (上海歴史地圖集, 1999); The Sacred Edict: Colloquial Rendering and Research (聖諭廣訓：集解与研究 2006); A General History of Chinese Administrative Districts (中国行政区劃通史, 2007); Biographies of Christian Missionaries to China (基督教傳教士傳記叢書); and Biographies of Foreign Diplomats in Late-Qing China (晩清駐華外交官傳記叢書). ZHANG Xiping（張 西 平 ）is Director of the Academy of Comparative Civilization and Intercultural Communication at Beijing Foreign Studies University and Vice-President of the International Confucian Association. He is the author of Reconstructing the Philosophy of History (歴史哲学的重建, 1997); A History of Religious and Philosophical Encounters Between China and Europe ( 中国和欧洲 早期哲学与宗教交流史, 2001); and The Early History of European Sinology (欧 洲早期漢学史, 2010). He is also the chief editor of the Journal of International Sinology and a coeditor of A Collection of Robert Morrison’s Works (馬禮遜文集, 2008).

310

Contributors

SHEN Guowei（ 沈 国 威 ）is Professor of Foreign Language Studies and has served as Director of the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies at Kansai University. He received his PhD in Literature from Osaka University and PhD in Cultural Interaction Studies from Kansai University. He is the author of A Study of Sino-Japanese Lexical Exchange in the Modern Era: The Creation, Reception, and Sharing of New Chinese Vocabulary (近代 中 日 詞 彙 交 流 研 究 — 漢 字 新 詞 的 創 制、容受与共享, 2010); Yan Fu and Science (嚴復與科学, 2017); and A Study of Two-Character Words Coined and Redefined in Modern East Asia: Linguistic Exchange and the Transformation of the Chinese language (漢語近代二字 詞研究—語言接触與漢語的近代演化, 2019). He is also a coeditor of Wakumon (或問, Journal of studies in cultural and linguistic exchanges between China and the West). CHOI Gwan（ 崔 官 ）is Director of the Independent Institute for East Asian Studies in Seoul. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo, and served as Director of the Center for Japanese Studies at Korea University and President of the Korean Society for Japanese Studies. He is the author of Japanese Invasions of Korea: The Imjin War in Literature (文禄・慶長の役〔壬辰・丁酉倭乱〕文 学に刻まれた戦争, 1994), editor of A Bibliography of Japanese Documents in the Korean Peninsula and the Manchurian Area, and translator of the bunraku play Kanadehon Chu¯shingura ( 仮名手本忠臣蔵) and Nitobe Inazo¯’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan ( 武士道). FUJITA Takao（ 藤 田 高 夫 ）is Vice-Director of the Kansai University Open Research Center for Asian Studies and Vice-President of the University. He received his PhD in Literature from Kansai University, and served as Vice-Director of the Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies (2007–2012) and Dean of the Faculty of Letters. He has written extensively on Qin-Han legal and administrative history, and is a coeditor of New Horizons in the Study of Persons Involved in Modern Sino-Japanese Relations (近代日中関係人物史研究の新し い地平, 2008). SUZUKI Sadami（ 鈴 木 貞 美 ）is Senior Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto. He received his PhD from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan. His publications include: The Concept of Literature in Japan (日本の「文学」を考える, 1994), with an expanded version translated by Royall Tyler as part of the Nichibunken Monograph Series (2006); and An Investigation into the Views of Lives Facing Crises in Succession (2007).

Contributors

311

YAN Shaodang（ 嚴 紹 璗 ）is Senior Professor and Director of the Institute of Comparative Literatures and Cultures at Peking University and the recipient of the Yamagata Banto Prize, Osaka Prefecture, Japan in 2011. His major works include: Japanese China Scholars (日本的中国学家, 1980); Studies of the Diffusion of Chinese Books in Japan ( 漢籍在日本的流布研究, 1992); and A History of Japanese China Studies (日本中国学史稿, 2009). He is also the editor of the three-volume Pictorial Account of Chinese Rare Books in Japan (日蔵漢籍善本 書録, 2007). TANG Yijie（ 湯 一 介 1927–2014）was a Senior Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Institute for Confucian Studies at Peking University and President of the Confucius Society of China. He received Honorary Doctorates from McMaster University, Canada and Kansai University, Japan. His major works include Guo Xiang and Metaphysics in the Wei and Jin Dynasties (郭象與魏晋玄 学, 1983) and Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Chinese Culture. He was also the editor of the Selected Works of Tang Yongtong (湯用彤選集, 1995) and Collected Confucian Scriptures (儒藏). TAO Demin（ 陶 德 民 ）is Professor Emeritus at Kansai University. He received his PhD in History from Osaka University and worked as a Reischauer Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and a Research Fellow of the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation. He served as Director of the Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies at Kansai University from 2007 to 2012. He is the author of A Study of the Kaitokudo¯ Neo-Confucianism (懐徳堂朱子学の研究, 1994); The Meiji Sinologists and China (明治の漢学者と中国, 2007); The Origins of Modern Japanese Sinology (日本における近代中国学の始まり, 2017); When Christianity Met with the Religions of China and Japan (西教東漸と中日事情, 2019); and An Alternative Image of Naito¯ Konan (もう一つの内藤湖南像, 2021).

Translators

Alan THWAITS is a freelance editor and translator of Chinese and Japanese. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Claremont Graduate University with a thesis on propositional attitudes as opaque contexts. Early in his career he served as an in-house editor at the MIT Press, editing works mostly in philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics. After leaving the press, he began editing encyclopedias as a freelancer. Having a background in Japanese and having studied Chinese at Harvard University, he expanded the scope of his services to include translation from Japanese and Chinese into English. He focuses on history, East Asian thought, the classics, and art history. Jenine HEATON received an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and has a PhD, ABD from Stanford University in Japanese literature with a minor in Chinese literature. She has taught modern Chinese literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, and comparative East Asian history, Japanese sociology, Japanese art history, and academic English at Kansai University. Her articles include “Gained in Translation: Hu Shi, Ezra Pound, and Literary Revolution” (2012, in English), and “Isawa Shu¯ji’s Study Abroad in America and Educational Practices in Taiwan,” (2015, in Japanese). She also edited Trans-Pacific Relations in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries: Culture, Commerce, and Religion with Martin Collcutt and Tao Demin (2015). ZENG Minhao graduated with an advanced degree in English literature, Department of Foreign Language and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai.

FUJITA Takao

Afterword

As the coeditor, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all contributors, translators, and editorial assistants whose efforts made this volume possible. When we were designing our G-COE program in early 2007, we had already set the goal of strengthening the multilingual abilities of the faculty and students in academic communication and presentation, including in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English. After the founding of the SCIEA, which has about threehundred members from twenty-two countries and regions now, we felt even more keenly the need and urgency for multilingualism. So far, the annual meeting has rotated from Kansai University in Osaka (2009), to National Taiwan University in Taipei (2010), and Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan (2011). It will be held at Korea University in Seoul this year and at City University of Hong Kong in 2013. Many attendants have recognized the value of this new scholarly platform and have expressed their willingness to participate. While we hope the Society will continue to grow both in terms of multinational membership and academic excellence, and become a true forum for spreading transnational and crosscultural ideas and opinions, a problem we always encounter is how to communicate efficiently in multiple languages. Fortunately or unfortunately, it has turned out that in many cases, English, rather than East Asian languages, has proved to be the most useful medium for understanding each other. We thus decided to publish the Society’s journal in English. Two American scholars have been instrumental in translating from Chinese and Japanese into English: Dr. Alan Thwaits, an independent translator and editor based in Boston who worked as an editor at MIT Press over ten years, and Ms. Jenine Heaton, an ABD in Japanese and Chinese literatures from Stanford University, who has lived in Japan for over thirty years.1 In addition, Ms. Heaton made 1 As part of our educational program, we offered academic Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English classes, which proved effective and fruitful. Besides presentations in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, many students have also presented scholarly topics in English since 2007 at

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FUJITA Takao

selfless efforts to help Professor Tao and myself in editing the articles, for which both of us are highly appreciative and for which we wish to make special acknowledgment here. March 2012

Note: The annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia (SCIEA) takes place during the second weekend of May, and is held in a different location each year. From 2012 to 2019, the meetings were sponsored by the following schools: Korea University in Seoul (2012), City University of Hong Kong (2013), Fudan University in Shanghai (2014), Ho¯sei University in Tokyo (2015), Kansai University in Osaka (2016), Beijing Foreign Studies University (2017), City University of Hong Kong (2018), and FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg (2019). While the meetings are usually held at the sponsoring institution, an exception was made in 2015: Professor Wang Min of Ho¯sei University, the SCIEA president that year, made a special arrangement to co-sponsor the meeting with the Town of Kaisei-machi, Kanagawa Prefecture. Kaisei-machi is home to a historical monument dedicated to China’s legendary flood-taming king, Yu the Great (Da Yu), as well as a middle school named after the king’s personal name Wen Ming, thus providing evidence of a shared tradition and experience between Japan and China in their efforts to control the floods. October 2020

the annual meeting in Tokyo of the Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ), a branch of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) of the United States. This year, a panel was accepted by the AAS to participate in its annual meeting held in March in Toronto. Here I would like to acknowledge Ms. Heaton and Dr. Zhao Jian, lecturers in our Academic English program, as well as Dr. Kimura Masato, Director of Research Department of the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation, and Okamoto Yoshiko, Research Fellow at ICU’s Institute of Asian Cultural Studies, who all very kindly offered advice on English presentation skills and participated on the panels, which helped students to realize their dream of presenting the results of their research at learned societies in English.

Notes about this new edition

Thanks to Professor Chun-chieh Huang’s kind suggestion, we are delighted about the inclusion of this book, co-authored with him and other colleagues, into his reputable “Global East Asia” series. We have updated information about the contributors and corrected errors in the texts for this new edition. TAO & FUJITA October 2020

“I remain confined to quarters as the plague rages; 14,300 have died in Massachusetts alone, 509,000 currently infected. It is a very depressing time, and the political crisis has been very distracting. It was hard to focus as fascists stormed the U.S. Capitol…”. In the morning of this day, while putting the final touches on the Index of this new edition, I received an e-mail from my old friend, Professor Gary P. Leupp of Tufts University, with whom I studied together in the 1980s under the guidance of Professor Wakita Osamu of Osaka University and who is currently my co-editor on a volume titled The Tokugawa World (forthcoming from Routledge later this year). Watching the Trump-Biden presidential transition and the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am aware that we are now experiencing an unprecedented historical change. But I believe our engagement in Cultural Interaction Studies from 2007 has proved meaningful. It is my hope that this academic field will continue to flourish in the years to come. TAO Demin January 29, 2021

Index

Ainu literature 264 Aisin-Gioro Puyi 32 Amino Yoshihiko 168 Another conveyor of culture Arabic literature 264 Asia-centric world 239 Ashikaga Yoshimitsu 178 Axis Powers 302

147

Barraclough, Geoffrey 37, 56, 61 Basho¯ 259 Battle of Sekigahara 228 Bunroku/Keicho¯ no eki 227, 235 Bohai Sea 179 Book Road 10, 53, 60, 143, 151, 156–160 Buddha 191, 246 Cass, Lewis 290 Catholic nations 190, 193 Catholicism 26, 190–192, 194, 199, 200, 204 Chan Buddhism 286, 287 Chang’an 157, 162, 171, 264 Chen Yinke 80, 84, 85 Chen Yuanhui 113, 117 Cheng Yi 103, 106, 284 Chiang Kai-shek 299, 301, 302, 303 Chikamatsu Monzaemon 229, 235, 259, 261, 265 Chinese characters 15, 40, 43, 58, 99, 100, 118, 126, 213, 218, 220, 264, 302 Chinese Linguistic Databases 218 Chinese sailing ships 183 Chinese sea merchants 161–163, 169–173, 186

Chomsky, Noam 130, 136 Christianity 10, 73, 83, 84, 126, 191–193, 202–204, 263, 284, 286, 292 Civil service examination 45, 47, 86, 95, 102, 108, 109, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118 Colonization 24, 28, 30, 38, 40, 237, 273 Commonalities across cultural traditions 284 Communism 220 Conceptual history 212, 258, 266 Confucian temples in Japan 94 Confucianism 42, 43, 57, 100, 103, 104, 116, 118, 119, 190, 191, 197, 201, 203, 243, 252, 256, 274, 275, 283, 284, 286, 287, 292 Confucius 47, 48, 50, 53, 94, 104, 191, 197, 200, 203, 207, 274, 282, 295 Contact zone 39, 40 Cultural anthropology 15, 63, 273 Cultural diversity 281, 282, 285, 287 Cultural history 38, 43, 48, 56, 67, 115, 119, 162, 199, 260 Cultural nationalism 37 Cultural selection 285 Cultural translation 134, 137, 138 Cultural transmission 51, 141 Daoism (Taoism) 24, 283, 286 Dialog of equals 197, 208 Diplomatic interchanges 302, 306 Doctrine of the Mean 104, 107, 202 Dore, R. P. 101, 111, 113, 117 Dunhuang 80, 81, 85, 86, 96 Dutch learning 214, 266

320 East Asian modern system of knowledge 255 East China Sea 23, 25, 26, 31, 71, 89, 182, 184 East-West contact 62, 64, 65, 68, 73 Egami Namio 66, 89 Emancipation 293, 296, 298, 299 Emori Ichiro¯ 111, 113, 117 Emperor Shun 104, 105, 274, 275 Emperor Xuanzong 111, 155, 169, 171 Emperor Yao 104, 105, 274, 275 Emperor Yongzheng 184, 192 Emperor Yu 274, 275 Engels, Friedrich 190, 204, 289 Ethnology 17, 18, 60, 62, 63, 70 Eurocentrism 255 Extra-territoriality 290 Fairbank, John K. 215, 290, 293, 294, 297, 299 Family schools 112, 114, 115 Fang Hao 93, 198 Fine arts (bijutsu) 88, 265–269 First Sino-Japanese War 31, 90, 213, 215, 236, 244, 251, 259 Four Great Discoveries 80, 84 Free private schools 112, 115 French Annalès school 67 Fu Si-nian 79, 80, 86, 91 Fujita Toyohachi 64, 87, 162, 246, 247, 249 Geertz, Clifford 48, 57 Genghis Khan 84, 246 Geographic determinism 40 Germanic myths 263 Gettysburg Address 296, 298, 300, 301, 304 Giao Chi (Vietnam) 163, 169, 177 Global history 38, 39, 45, 46, 55–60, 189 Grand Canal 176 Great Wall 30, 50, 89 Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere 16, 41 Guanyin (Kannon) 54, 93 Haiguan (customs) 169 Hakuen Academy 116

Index

Hakuen Collection 116 Hakuraihin (imported goods) 182 Harmony in diversity 281–287 Harmony of Five Races 132 Hattori Unokichi 274 Heco, Joseph 291, 292 History of concept formation 255 Hu Shi 85, 86, 96, 201, 289 Huang Jialüe (Arcadio Huang) 203 Huang Zongxi 49, 50, 58 Huayi (a civilized center versus a barbarian periphery) 127, 234 Hundred schools of thought 243 Huzhou silk 164 Ideas as the Third Type of Cargo 143 Iggers, Georg G. 37, 38, 48, 58 Imjin War 227–229, 231–234, 236–240 Imperial Rescript on Education 274, 297 Indian Buddhism 192, 283, 284, 285, 286 Indo-European languages 130, 131 Inoue Tetsujiro¯ 268, 274 Interdisciplinary research 66, 70, 71, 72 Integrative history of the world 66 Intellectual history 79, 82, 83, 88, 259, 300 Ishida Mikinosuke 65, 126, 162, 163 Islam 10, 23, 246 Ito¯ Jinsai 53, 60, 111, 113 Jade Gate Pass 85 Japanese China studies 271, 273, 274, 275 Japanese literature 259, 260–265, 269 Jesuits 134, 190, 192, 198–204 Jianzhen 144, 157, 171 Jingdezhen porcelain 177 Kabuki 235, 239, 265 Kagawa Toyohiko 295, 296, 305 Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians) 26 Kangxi emperor 192, 193, 200, 203, 206, 207 Kato¯ Kiyomasa 230, 235 Kibi no Makibi 143, 157 Kissinger, Henry 306 Kitazawa Noriaki 266, 268 Knowledge system in East Asia 256

Index

321

Kojiki 100, 256, 259, 262, 264 Konishi Yukinaga 230, 235, 238 Koyasu Nobukuni 11, 40, 54, 58, 99, 118 Kuwabara Jitsuzo¯ 64, 65, 87, 89, 162, 244– 249, 251, 252

Montesquieu 272, 301 Morrison, Robert 125, 133, 134, 193, 214 Motoori Norinaga 54, 59 Mulberry cultivation 164 Mutual understanding 203, 281

Laurel forest culture 18, 19, 21, 34 Lexical history 212, 216, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223 Li Zhizao 94, 190, 191, 198, 200, 206 Liang Qichao 90, 96, 97, 199, 205, 206, 215, 217, 218, 251, 252 Lincoln, Abraham 289–306 Linguistic nationalism 264 London Missionary Society 193 Luo Zhenyu 247, 249, 252

Naito¯ Konan 50, 90, 243, 299 Naka Michiyo 84, 87, 89, 244, 245, 247, 249 Nakae To¯ju 111, 113 Nakao Sasuke 18, 33 National history 37–40, 42, 45, 46, 55, 58, 89, 242, 248, 250, 251, 253 Nationalism 37, 80, 87, 89, 90, 130, 263, 264, 281, 299, 300 Natsume So¯seki 129, 139, 259 Neighboring countries 40, 50, 81, 82, 85– 87, 89–93 Neo-Confucianism 94, 95, 103, 111, 115, 200, 203, 284, 287 Nestorian Christianity 84, 192 Ningbo 17, 161, 165, 171–173, 175, 179, 182, 183 Nishi Amane 223, 257, 267 Nishijima Sadao 43 Nitobe Inazo¯ 294–296, 299, 305

Ma Jianzhong 124, 130 Macartney, George 193 Macro-history 66, 67, 72 Magnetic field of cultural systems 11, 15, 22, 23, 34 Manchukuo 32 Mandarin 124–127, 134, 222 Man’yo¯shu¯ 146, 256, 259 Mao Tse-tung 298, 300, 301 Marco Polo Bridge Incident 300, 302 Maritime ban (haijin) 177, 179, 181 Maritime East Asia 61, 69, 71–73, 180 Maritime history 61, 64, 72, 161, 163, 168 Maritime trade supervisor 169 Marxism-Leninism 220 Matsumura Kaiseki 292, 293, 296 May Fourth Movement 201, 205, 206 Mazu 25, 29, 34 Meiji Emperor 256, 274, 293 Meiji Restoration 128, 234, 256, 260, 291, 292 Mencius 45, 50, 53, 54, 58, 103–105, 202, 300 Miyazaki Ichisada 87, 93 Modern keywords 211, 212, 216, 219 Modern history of ideas 211, 222 Mongolian oak forest zone 19 Mongolian studies 273 Monsoon 39

Oba Osamu 69, 159 Ogyu¯ Sorai 53, 54, 60, 111, 113, 116, 132 Okinawa literature 264 Opium War 130, 177, 193, 194, 290 Oriental History 75, 89, 241, 243–249, 251– 254 Oriental Mode of Production 67 Orientalism 252 Overseas Sinology 87, 126 Oze Hoan 228, 231, 232 Pan-Asianism 274, 299 Panama-Pacific International Exposition 305 Paper umbrellas 167, 182 Patriotism 91, 234, 274, 293 Peripheral approach 16, 27, 34, 121, 122, 138 Peripheral sources for Chinese linguistics 127

322

Index

Pirates (haidao, yangdao) 24, 161, 168, 171, 173–175, 177–186, 246 Private academies 99–102, 104, 109–116, 292 Private sector 100, 102, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 146, 149 Professional intermediate agents 52, 53, 55, 60 Protestant nations 193 Pu Shougeng 65, 162, 175, 249 Regional history 10, 39, 40, 45, 46, 48, 56– 59, 162, 163, 246 Reischauer, Edwin O. 170, 290, 293, 294, 297, 299 Ricci practice (Li Madou guiju) 190, 192 Ricci, Matteo 190, 191, 198–202, 204, 208 Rice culture 25, 33, 63 Riess, Ludwig 41, 61, 62, 64, 71, 242, 249 Roosevelt (FDR) 301, 302 Russo-Japanese War 31, 251, 259, 261, 265, 269, 305 Ryu¯kyu¯ Mandarin 126, 127 Sakuma Sho¯zan 257 Scientific Revolution 272 Seasonal winds 25, 185 Selective adaptation 279 Shibosi (maritime trade supervisors) 169, 171, 172, 175, 176, 179 Shibusawa Eiichi 305 Shimabara Rebellion 228 Shiratori Kurakichi 87, 90, 91, 249–251, 274, 275 Sho¯heizaka gakumonsho 112, 113, 115, 119 Shuinsen (licensed ships) 164 Silk Road 43, 53, 85, 143, 148, 151, 153, 155, 156, 160, 171 Sinology 80, 87, 126, 159, 194, 202, 241, 272, 273 South China Sea 23, 33, 88, 89, 161, 180, 181, 182 Sun Yat-sen 298–301, 303 Taguchi Ukichi

260, 265

Taiheiki 261, 262, 265 Taiping Rebellion 299 Taisho¯ vitalism 258 Takaya Yoshikazu 21, 22, 27, 35 Tea 18, 67, 167, 182, 186, 203 Theology 203, 256, 258, 263, 293 Tokugawa Ieyasu 75, 164, 228 Tokutomi Soho¯ 237 Toynbee, Arnold 66, 67 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 75, 227, 228, 231, 232, 236–239, 246, 293 Tribute system 25, 81 To¯a Do¯bun Shoin 16 To¯yo¯ Bunko 64, 158, 162 Uchigasaki Sakusaburo¯ 293, 294, 299 University of Leiden 257 Uno Tetsuto 50, 57, 59, 274 Vatican

192

Wade, Thomas Francis 126 Wang Guowei 96, 246, 247, 254 Wang Yangming 111, 191, 200, 284, 292 Washington, George 295, 296, 301, 303, 305 Watsuji Tetsuro¯ 39, 60 Western Regions (Xiyu) 85, 153, 168, 169, 197, 246, 249 Western learning 34, 81, 111, 116, 198, 200, 201, 215, 219, 220, 242 White Deer Grotto Academy 104, 109– 111, 114 Wokou (Japanese pirates) 168, 179, 180, 181 World War II (Second World War) 17, 37, 41, 46, 238, 261, 262, 274, 281, 302, 303 World units 21, 22 Xu Guangqi 190, 191, 199, 200, 201, 203, 206 Xuan Zang 200, 287 Xun Zi 9, 122, 124, 139 Yan Fu 223

214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222,

323

Index

Yanagita Kunio 20, 298 Yangtze River Basin 161 Yellow River 16, 20, 29, 30, 42, 161, 168, 170 Yinghua Academy 116 Yokohama 268, 291, 292 Yoshida Sho¯in 113 Yoshino Sakuzo¯ 297, 299 Yuelu Academy 109–111

Yunnan Province

18, 20, 83, 178

Zhang Zhidong 84 Zheng He 178, 181, 189 Zhu Xi 47, 54, 60, 86, 100, 103–111, 113– 117, 257, 284 Zoroastrianism 83, 84