Organizer: Susan L. Burns, University of Texas, Austin
Chair: Tetsuo Najita, University of Chicago
Discussant: Nobukuni Koyasu, Osaka University
The discipline of Tokugawa Intellectual History takes as its object the textual traditions of Japan from 1600-1868. However, the chronological continuity of this era with the dawn of modernity, as well as the fact that the site of the production of this set of hermeneutic strategies is the modern period, has meant that inevitably this field has come to be implicated in the problematics of modern Japan. Our panel has the goal of rethinking the nature of the relationship that has been established between the "early modern" and the "modern" within this discipline by exploring the formation of the discipline itself, as well as the themes, genre, canon, and methods it has produced and upon which it has relied.
Susan Burns will focus on the transformation of one Tokugawa discourse, National Learning, into the modern form of knowledge known as National Literature by those posterity has identified as the "founders" of the discipline of Tokugawa Intellectual History. Miyagawa Yasuko explores the formation of a Japanese "National Language" and attempts to expose how the writings of Tokugawa intellectuals came to provide the formative concepts of the debates surrounding this linguistic and ideological construct. While Burns' and Miyagawa's focus is on the late Meiji period and its continued significance for contemporary times, Nobuhiro Katsurajima's concern is for the post-war period and the cultural imperatives at work in the production of a new object of study, popular thought, within this discipline.
The Prehistory of National Language
Yasuko Miyagawa, Chiba University
The idea of a National Language, as well as the linguistic forms and theory that articulate it, are products of modernity, but it is possible to discern the prehistory of this ideology of language within the discursive space of Tokugawa thought. In this paper, I explore the contesting theories of language that emerged in early modern Japan, which provided the constitutive categories of the debates that shaped modern language theory.
It was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that language first came to be the object of philosophical discussion when Ogyu Sorai cut off the chain of annotations that had accumulated within Neo-confucianism. In the "post-Sorai" era, two important theories of language emerged. The first was authored by Motoori Norinaga who argued that it was the mastery of a grammar that allowed for a linguistic mode of expression that was authentically Japanese. In contrast, critics of Norinaga such as Tominaga Nakamoto and Ueda Akinari attempted to historicize language, by arguing that meaning was the product not of a static and unchanging grammar but of the utterance.
The traces of these two loci of early modern language theory can be seen in the state-sponsored production of National language as well as the Enlightenment movements for "the unity of speech and writing" and "a revolution in vulgar language." By untangling the transformation of these two theories in modernity, it should be possible to reconsider the historical production of a "modern" Japanese language.
From National Learning to National Literature: Modernity and the Problem of
Kokugaku
Susan L. Burns, University of Texas, Austin
Kokugaku, literally "National Learning," was one of the most powerful forms of discourse in eighteenth and nineteenth century Japan. It produced a body of exegetical texts that continue to be utilized by scholars today, and a set of ideas, the validity and value of which are still debated within contemporary Japan. But the texts that are explored and the ideas that are discussed have an ambiguous relationship with the National Learning tradition of Tokugawa Japan. They are the product of the discipline of National Literature that began to take form in late Meiji when the earlier discourse was reconstituted within the context of the new imperial university, an organ of the Meiji state.
In this paper, I will examine the process of the transformation of National Learning into National Literature by focusing on the activities of Haga Yaichi, the Meiji figure most responsible for positioning National Learning as a nascent "human science" and thus the foundation for the "modern" discipline of National Literature. The continuing significance of this transformation through the postwar period will then be established by means of an exploration of the work of Kobayashi Hideo, the prominent literary critic of the post-war period. By establishing a "genealogy" in this way, I hope to expose the process by which notions of cultural identity and social order are produced through and authorized by the writing of intellectual history.
Rethinking the History of the History of Tokugawa Popular Thought
Nobuhiro Katsurajima, Ritsumeikan University
Beginning in the 1960s, the study of popular thought, pioneered by figures such as Irokawa Daikichi and Yasumaru Yoshio, emerged as a new genre within the discipline of Tokugawa intellectual history. Both these historians were influenced by Marxism and each thus premised his work upon notions of class conflict and historical stages of development. Underlying their work was a problematization of the heretofore standard notion of social formation, which was founded upon a "mechanical" conception of the relation of the classes. Since this generative period, however, the study of popular thought has stagnated methodologically, even as other areas of historical study have been transformed. For example, in the 1980s medieval history came to be strongly influenced by the Annales School and in the 1990s modern history has been shaped by post-modern conceptions of cultural production.
I will explore the status of the history of popular thought in contemporary Japan in order to examine the cultural imperatives that have shaped this new discipline in the post-war period. This requires a reconsideration of the textual "canon" that has been labeled "popular thought," as well as a critical reevaluation of the status of this field within the larger discipline of Tokugawa intellectual history. Proceeding in this way, I will attempt to explore the nature of the historical relation that has been established between the "early modern" and the "modern" in relation to concepts such as "class," "daily life," etc.