Organizer and Chair: Alan S. Christy, University of California, Santa Cruz
Discussant: Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University
The members of this panel are concerned with reevaluating the standardized opposition between Western rationality and Japanese irrationality. Each paper addresses the relation between irrational phenomena—spirits, monsters and communal feeling—and science as the modern production of knowledge, not to maintain the distinction, but to explore their imbrication. For the Japanese intellectuals discussed in these papers, the irrational became an opportunity to reevaluate science; not to deny it, but to revise and strengthen its ability to function as universal knowledge. At the same time, the rational offered an opportunity to investigate the irrational; not so much to dispose of it but to recover its truth. The result was a very fluid set of possibilities for discussing the foundation of truth in modern Japan.
In many ways, this was a specifically Japanese, or at least a non-Western, encounter with science. For all of the thinkers considered in these papers, science may have claimed universality, but it had clearly been produced in the culturally relative site of the West. There was a strong suspicion that it as yet lacked the ability to fully explain the particular conditions of Japanese experience. At the same time, the authority of science, with its ties to the notion of civilization, made it impossible to chauvinistically reject it. Each of the papers specifically examines ways in which through an engagement between the rational and the irrational, a universally valid, but culturally specific understanding of the national experience could be constructed in prewar Japan.
Gerald A. Figal, University of Delaware
The familiar trope of bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) in Meiji Japan has obscured the place of monsters in Japanese modernity by popularly identifying the spirit of modernization in Meiji Japan with a scientific rationalism that denied the supernatural while reordering how the world would be known, managed, and acted within. This reordering of things fundamentally involved categorization as a means to organize knowledge, be it in the form of administrative units, animal species, social classes, civil codes, or cultural norms. As embodiments of difference and confounders of categories, monsters framed what was newly constituted as real and legitimate even as they threatened to collapse that frame. In this respect, monsters were integral in the definition and critique of "civilization" in Meiji Japan.
Drawing on recent theoretical work on monsters as cultural historical products, I take up the question of monsters in Meiji Japan by considering their conspicuous appearance in elite and popular discourses of the time. Against a background of public fascination with forms of the supernatural, the monstrous, and the fantastic (fushigi), I foreground several writer-intellectuals—rationalist educator and neo-Buddhist philosopher Inoue Enryo, naturalist Minakata Kumagusu, folklorist Yanagita Kunio, and fantasy writer Izumi Kyoka—who variously placed monsters within discussions of modernity, cultural identity, civilization, and enlightenment. The resulting picture of "Japanese Enlightenment" is shaded with more ambiguity and variation than is usually associated with Japan’s modern development and places Japan’s modernizing experience within a larger global context.
Lisette Gebhardt, Deutsches Institut fur Japanstudien
Fukurai Tomokichi (1869–1952) is one of the most fascinating persons in the modern Japanese history of thought and science. He studied psychology at the Faculty for Philosophy of the University of Tokyo and in 1905 earned his doctoral degree with a study on hypnosis (saiminjutsu). He became an assistant professor at the faculty in 1908. Then, his interests shifted more and more to the fields of "abnormal phenomena." While testing several persons, Fukurai encountered a strange phenomenon he called nensha (psychography), the existence of which he vigorously tried to prove during the next years. Fukurai’s inclination to a world of mysteries was not approved by his academic colleagues, who interpreted his research as non-scientific and declared that the phenomena belonged to the realm of popular belief (meishin) and should not be studied by modern scientists. Finally, Fukurai was forced out of the University of Tokyo.
In my paper I shall show how Fukurai’s position is typical for those intellectuals in modern Japan who were disappointed by Western scientific "rationalism" and looked for alternative ways to explain the conditions of human existence. In doing so, they turned to premodern Japanese models as well as to Western ideas outside of the academic mainstream such as spiritism.
Alan S. Christy, University of California, Santa Cruz
As a study of the culture of "one nation," a study of popular customs and superstitions from the past, and a study which has as its goal the revelation of ethnic identity, Japanese native ethnology (minzokugaku) has often been judged deficient in the attributes of a modern social science. Instead, it has been seen as a cultural nationalist discourse, an atavistic reaction against the West and the foundation for postwar nihonjinron. While this critique has some merit, it lures us into misrecognizing how ethnographic knowledge has been produced and validated.
This paper takes seriously "the will to science" evinced by the field in its formative years towards two ends. First, in light of the ethnologists’ enthusiastic pursuit of materials that had been rejected by the other social sciences—as too common or insubstantial—I discuss their critique of production. Second, I analyze how scientific models were incorporated into ethnologists’ methodological experiments. With emphasis on the work of the Attic Museum group, I discuss the adaptation of natural historical and biological methodologies to the study of material culture. These methodological discussions return us back to the larger questions of why the ethnologists valued science as a model for their work and how it supported the ethnologists’ claims to truth. Finally, I show how the model of science addressed a fundamental contradiction in Japanese ethnology: how a unified ethnic identity could be recovered from a heterogeneous terrain of individual communities.