My route into Asian studies is about as normal as it would have been unpre-dictable beforehand. As a third-generation American—all of my grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century—I was neither the first person in my family to get a B.A. nor even a Ph.D. I was, however, the first person to become interested in the history and culture of East Asia. Because there was such a bookish culture in my family, though, it was never seen as an unusual pursuit; in fact, I’m certain that my lefty parents were thrilled that one of theirs was studying China, given what was for them the exciting events in the years immediately preceding my birth in 1950. In fact, many people have commented (and occasionally reached some far-fetched conclusions) about the natural ties between Chinese and Jews. I personally don’t buy any of it, though of course I respect their right to have silly views.

Although born in Brooklyn, New York, I grew up from age seven in Berkeley, California precisely in those now famous years of political turmoil and excitement. Mine was a politically active, left-of-center family, and that meant countless marches and rallies for the important causes of the day: the civil rights movement, the movement in opposition to the American war in Viet Nam War, and many spin-offs of both. I spent my college years at the University of Chicago (1968–1972), continuing in those same activities and there developing a keen interest in modern China.

At the University of Chicago, I studied first with the late Professor Tang Tsou in the political science department and later with Philip Kuhn and Akira Iriye in history. In 1972 I entered graduate school at Columbia University where I initially studied with C. Martin Wilbur and, upon his retirement, with Wm.

Theodore de Bary. During those years, I studied Chinese (from 1970) and then Japanese (from 1973) relentlessly, day and night. Americans were unable to study in China throughout most of the 1970s, so that was still a romantic, though never actually a practical, desideratum. Columbia had a rather draco-nian language requirement (long since watered down), and thus I had taken the equivalent of a fair number of years of both Chinese and Japanese language (including summers) by the time I was searching for a thesis topic.

I forget who first suggested the topic of Naitō Konan (1866–1934), the great Japanese Sinologist, but I jumped at the suggestion. The next thing I knew I

Introduction: My Route into Asian Studies

was reading my first book in Japanese, cover to cover, a biography of Naitō

by one of his last students, Mitamura Taisuke of Ritsumeikan University. And, in late 1976 I was off on my first trip to Asia with support from the Fulbright Foundation and later from the Japanese Ministry of Education. I spent roughly eighteen months at Kyoto University, where Naitō had pioneered Chinese studies at the beginning of the twentieth century, reading through his works, soaking up as much of the Sinological world of Kyoto University as possible, and interviewing Naitō’s last students. I also made some of my best friends among the students of that generation in Kyoto at the time.

Historical studies were in those days largely compartmentalized by nations.

The idea of crossing borders and working on more than one national entity at the same time was not frowned upon, but it was not exactly encouraged either—anywhere in the world. Diplomatic historians at least paid lip service to working in multiple archives and multiple languages, but in reality few historians, diplomatic or otherwise, working in the West were actually doing that.

Professor Iriye was one of those few and a great inspiration to me.

Many times over the years I have been asked, in East Asia as well as the West, if I am first and foremost a historian of China or Japan. The answer I like to give—and usually do—is that I don’t make that distinction. I explain that I pick topics that cross the Sino-Japanese border and go where the research necessitates I go. We now have the language of “border-crossing” and “global studies” and even “globalization,” but that is a relative recent addition to the historian’s lexicon.

But, once I sensed the wealth of fascinating but still unstudied topics in Sino-Japanese interactions, I was an immediate convert. Subsequent research topics and books included: the life and work of a Japanese expatriate in China (Nakae Ushikichi, 1889–1942); Japanese travel writings about China (1862–

1945); the Japanese community of Shanghai; Japanese historiography (1784–

present) concerning the gold seal presented by the founding emperor of the Later Han dynasty in 57 CE to an emissary from somewhere in that space we now call Japan and soon lost before being found in the late eighteenth century; and most recently, the voyage of the Senzaimaru in 1862 and the restarting of Sino-Japanese diplomatic and commercial relations in the modern era. Many run-ups to and spin-offs from these (and other) projects are represented in the essays that follow in this collection.

In 1988 I called together a small group which met in my hotel room at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, and we formed the Sino-Japanese Studies Group. There were only about fifteen of us at the time—

Sherman Cochran reassured me that there were fewer participants at the first national congress of the Chinese Communist Party—and we weren’t exactly

Introduction: My Route Into Asian Studies

sure what we wanted to do, but we agreed that we would try to meet each year in conjunction with the AAS meetings and that I would launch the Sino-Japanese Studies Newsletter. It was to come out twice annually. I then sent out hundreds of announcements for subscriptions to this new periodical, and we were off. After two issues, we dropped “Newsletter” from the title. Aside from a short hiatus, we have been bringing SJS out ever since. It is now free and

online (www.chinajapan.org), and articles are posted as they are run through the reviewing mill and accepted.

I began my teaching career at Harvard University (1981–1988) at a time when there was no normal route to tenure candidacy there. I then moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara (1989–2005). My position in the History Department there was defined as “comparative East Asianist,” a designation I was extremely proud to flaunt. During that time I was blessed with a one-year visiting professorship at Kyoto University’s prestigious Institute for Research in the Humanities (Jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo) and blessed again with a two-year visiting professorship (2001–2003) at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 2005 I took up my present Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto.

I had hoped that the kind of “border-crossing” that my research entails would become a broader trend than it has in the larger world of East Asian studies. The systemic problems remain: difficult languages, institutional pressures to work on one country at a time, latent anti-Japanese feelings in the China field, and the like. In fact, many people have overcome these disabilities, though not all of them have come rushing to do inter-East Asian studies. I personally remained convinced that the modern histories of the two entities we now called “China” and “Japan” (to say nothing of “Taiwan” and “Hong Kong”) are so inextricably intertwined that one has to take the other into account when studying virtually any topic. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, this statement is more difficult to sustain, but there are those who are so convinced.

The essays in this collection represent work I have done over the past thirty-plus years, from my last days as a graduate student in the late 1970s through more recent times. The field of Sino-Japanese studies as I understand it can be roughly divided into comparative history and the history of interactions. Most of these essays take up the latter theme, though some address the former or employ both approaches.

■ Source: “Art History and Sino-Japanese Relations,” in The Role of Japan in Modern China Art (International and Area Studies, University of California, 2013), 1–10.

Art History and Sino-Japanese Relations

Following the reforms put in place by Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) and the opening up of China, the first cinematic Sino-Japanese joint venture was a movie entitled The Go-Masters (1982).1 It covers in sweeping, colossal fashion several decades in the lives a Chinese and a Japanese, both renowned go (Chinese, *weiqi) * masters whose bond forged through a shared passion for this ancient game transcends politics, war, family safety, and just about everything else.

Through personal trials and the devastations of World War II, it is ultimately the individual ties sealed in this cultural mold that continue when all else is gone. Implied is not only the fundamental fact that the insane policies of their respective governments—be it the imperialist invasions of the Japanese or the domestic upheavals of the Chinese, both involving unspeakable mass murder—

have proven to be devastating failures in every way, but that the only meaningful, lasting ties between the two peoples are the personal, cultural ones formed in the manner of the two men. As the film comes to a close, the two men, after many years of separation, pick up their game where they left off before devastation ravaged the continent.

Romance and melodrama aside, The Go-Masters offers some interesting instruction in Sino-Japanese cultural relations. There was a time not too long ago when the cultural interactions between Japan and China from the late nineteenth century through World War II were generally known to be important but still relatively unstudied. Although an enormous amount of work remains to be done, those many scholarly lacunae are gradually now being filled by scholars in China, Japan, Korea, and the West. One large area that particularly calls out for serious attention, though, is the realm of art history. In what ways did Japan and the Japanese of the Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa eras influence Chinese artistic movements and artists, and the development generally of art in China? What can be said about the interactions between Chinese and Japanese artists and art patrons? What role did Japanese and Chinese play in the revival and spread of artistic antiquarianism and art collecting? What role, in the final analysis, did Japan play in the institutional development of art in 1 Known in Chinese as Yipan meiyou xiawan de qi (The unfinished game of qi [ go]) and in Japanese as Mikan no taikyoku (The unfinished match).

Art History And Sino-japanese Relations

China? These are among the many questions this volume seeks to raise and discuss.

One force that has militated against bringing these sorts of questions up earlier has been the lack of ongoing communication between historians (even cultural historians) and art historians in the East Asia field. Nonspecialists in the art realm have shied away, as they rarely do vis-à-vis other subfields, from the distinctive language and specialized training needed to make sense of art history. While all subfields require a particular form of preparatory education, for some reason historical scholarship on art seems to strike other historians as especially daunting. Many scholars have thus largely drawn back from addressing the sorts of questions raised above. Yet, however, artists and art history played a major role in forging ties between the Japanese archipelago and the Asian mainland.

For over two centuries, from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth, actual Sino-Japanese interactions were severely curtailed. These restrictions did not end contacts between Chinese and Japanese, but they made them much more difficult. Many thousands of books (including painting manuals) traveled from China to Japan—in addition to much else—and influenced those who sought them out. Throughout these years of restricted exchange, though, many Chinese painters (usually nonprofessionals) nonetheless made their way to Japan. These men were invariably well treated, even venerated, as figures of great stature once they reached Nagasaki.2 By the 1860s when the ban on Japanese travel abroad began in stages to be lifted, well over one hundred such painters over the previous two centuries had made the trip to Japan for generally short stints, rarely more than one or two years.

In the 1850s and early 1860s, China was ravaged by the Taiping Rebellion, especially throughout the provinces of the lower Yangzi delta region. These heartlands of traditional Chinese culture had been targeted by the Taipings, and many thousands of members of the literate elite, including painters, made their way to the presumed safety of Shanghai with its foreign enclaves protected by extraterritoriality.3 Among these a few, such as Wang Kesan (b. 1822) 2 See, for example, Paul Berry, Unexplored Avenues of Japanese Painting: The Hakutakuan Collection; * * Joshua A. Fogel, “Lust for Still Life: Chinese Painters in Japan and Japanese Painters in China in the 1860s and 1870s.”

3 Although we are dealing with artists here, this phenomenon of migration to Shanghai in the face of the Taiping assaults was true of many other groups as well. For a discussion of the impact on the world of regional theater, see Meng Yue, *Shanghai and the Edges of Empire. *

Art History and Sino-Japanese Relations

and Xu Yuting (b. 1824) of Zhapu, traveled on to Japan by merchant vessel.4

Alighting in Nagasaki, they found a welcome reception especially from the community of Nanga (Southern School) painters there.

When the possibility actually emerged for Japanese to venture to China, although it was still technically illegal, among the very first to do so as individuals were three painters. These three—Yasuda Rōzan (1830–83), Nagai Unpei (1833–99), and Ishikawa Gozan (1844–1917)—planned to visit Shanghai as a group, study at the knee of a great Nanga painter, preferably Hu Gongshou (Yuan, 1823–86), and thus be able to inject fresh blood from the source into Nanga painting when they eventually returned home. Unpei and Gozan stayed in Shanghai for relatively short periods of time, but Rōzan remained there for nearly a decade and there he became the local Japanese expert on all things Chinese for Japanese visiting Shanghai.

Chapter 1 in this volume, by Chen Jie, examines Chinese artists and calligraphers who traveled to Japan to make contacts and sell their work. As Chen shows, there appears to have been a space opened up already in the early Meiji years for such Chinese visitors.5 Indeed, before long traveling to Japan, perhaps having a show there, and getting to know Japanese connoisseurs of Chinese art had become an avenue to acquire a reputation and earn the kind of money unavailable at home. Close relations between Chinese painters and calligraphers and their Japanese counterparts and patrons ensued. The importance of personal connections cannot, in fact, be overestimated. In this era, which turns out to be the last hurrah of traditional Sinic-style arts and culture, the Japanese were welcoming with open arms.

Moreover, the rapidity with which the Japanese adopted one Chinese artist or calligrapher after another in the early Meiji decades leads one to think that Japanese had been waiting for this moment for some time, preparing to allow this cultural enrichment to flow to Japan. As Kishida Ginkō’s (1833–1905) acerbic comments, cited in Chen’s chapter, make clear, the whole process of Chinese seeking Japanese legitimation, making some money, and heroically returning home had already become marketized by the mid-Meiji. But like a morning glory, this period of Sino-Japanese cultural enchantment in the traditional modes of painting and calligraphy was to be short-lived. As Chen 4 Tsuruta Takeyoshi, “Ō Kokusan to Jo Utei, raihaku gajin kenkyū roku”; Paul Berry, “The Meeting of Chinese and Japanese Literati: Hu Gongshou, Yasuda Rōzan, and the Controversy over National Style.”

5 For an earlier essay in English that discusses some of the same figures, though in nothing like the depth of this essay, see Wang Baoping, “Chinese in Japan in the Late Qing: How They Lived and Whom They Knew.”

Art History And Sino-japanese Relations

demonstrates, rather than launching a new era, the 1870s and 1880s were the end of an era, and the whole atmosphere would sharply change after the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95.

One other characteristic of their cultural ties, which Chen notes and crops up in other chapters, is the centrality of Shanghai and its art market to Japanese, be they artists or merchants. Shanghai plays a similarly pivotal role in chapter 2, by Yu-chih Lai, on the Japanese dealers, sponsors, and supporters of artistic culture as seen through a case study of sencha. As she demonstrates, the tea ceremony in the newer sencha style was radically Sinophilic, opposed to the earlier and highly formalistic *chanoyu. * It served as a ground for numerous gatherings of Chinese and Japanese men of letters and opened a space for a significant flow of culture between China and Japan. In the case study she examines, these gatherings were mediated by antiques dealers who hosted many of the seki (individual banquets which comprised a tea gathering as a whole) and used the occasion to sell their wares.

As stressed by Chen Jie, Lai also emphasizes that this extraordinary level of elite cultural interaction between Chinese and Japanese was the apex, not the beginning, of Sino-Japanese cultural relations. The Japanese dealers, with their heightened sense of the importance of Chinese artifacts and objects of art, poured mountains of wealth into purchasing these items for collectors back home, a process that led ineluctably to the outflow of great quantities of gold and silver to China from Japan. Eventually the disposable income used to make acquisitions began drying up, just as the interest in such exchanges began to appeal to fewer and fewer potential participants. It was, indeed, the end of an era.

In chapter 3, Shana Brown shines a light on the phenomenon of East Asian antiquarianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a close look at the case of Yang Shoujing (1839–1915). As she pointedly remarks, antiquarianism at this time was not a manifestation of opposition to modernity. Those Chinese and Japanese who took up this calling were trying to preserve their traditional culture as modernity unfolded, to safeguard or defend it from being the proverbial baby tossed out with the bathwater. She thus posits the term “antiquarian modern” to characterize their position. Attached to the Chinese Mission in Japan, Yang used his time to make contacts among the last generation of serious Kangaku (Chinese learning) scholars there. Yang served as lightning rod of sorts for Sinophilic Japanese who were anxious to have intellectual, poetic, and artistic exchanges with equally well-educated Chinese. In the years he spent in Japan, Yang thus amassed bibliographies of rare and ancient Chinese texts extant there but frequently no longer available anywhere in China. In part because the traditional East Asian literatus was

Art History and Sino-Japanese Relations

not a specialist in the narrow way we now understand that term, antiquarians of Yang’s day—unlike their counterparts in the West—not only collected old books, coins, and other objects but were often amateur artists and calligraphers in their own right.

Moving ahead to the early decades of the twentieth century, Walter Davis in chapter 4 focuses on the figure of Wang Yiting (1867–1938) and his wide artistic contacts in the Japanese art world. Because of his highly successful business career, Wang also had high-level contacts in Japanese political and economic realms. Once again, Shanghai is central to the story, for it was through his home and restaurants in the city that these connections were mediated. His friendships with Japanese artists and calligraphers lasted through years of political trouble, at least until 1932, when the first Shanghai Incident erupted and the state of Manchukuo (Manzhouguo) was later formed. As in the fictional movie about the culturally cementing power of go to forge and seal friendships, art and culture transcended politics for Wang and his Japanese associates. Art was eternal, he believed, while politics and war remained transitory.

These four chapters comprise four perspectives on artistic interactions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We next move into the realm of art collections, the art market, and art exhibitions. In chapter 5, Zaixin Hong concentrates on guhua (antique painting) as art and as substitutes for money with the development of a modern art market in China and Japan. Once again, Shanghai plays center stage, only this time in a more familiar commercial (and considerably less overtly cultural) role. He examines the increasingly complex mix of culture and economics as the trend toward the commercialization of art grew. He traces this development back to the high Qing, but in our period he demonstrates how Chinese began successfully to use the Japanese art market to make money, and he sees the Taishō International Exposition of 1914 as extremely important.

Aida Wong in chapter 6 addresses head on what appears to be the single most frightening technical subject for nonspecialists in the field of art history: brush stroke analysis. That is, she challenges us to take calligraphy and calligraphic styles seriously as a medium of Sino-Japanese scholarly and personal exchange. Calligraphy was dying in the early twentieth century at modern Japanese art institutions, but at the same time it was thriving privately largely through the efforts of Nakamura Fusetsu (1866–1943). Nakamura adopted a calligraphic style from stelae extant from the Six Dynasties period (220–589), though not as some sort of curmudgeonly obscurantist. He saw this calligraphic mode as a middle ground between the poles of Japanese conservatism and pro-Westernization. In 1936 he founded a museum devoted exclusively to Chinese calligraphy, and it would remain the only one of its kind for decades

Art History And Sino-japanese Relations

thereafter. For Chinese not prepared to dump their entire cultural past into the historical dustbin, Nakamura proved to be an inspiration in this regard.

The modern institution of the museum to house all forms, new and old, of art was just one way of exposing painting, calligraphy, sculpture, and other artistic expressions to a wide audience. Exhibitions and exhibition culture from Japan opened Chinese eyes to different sorts of possibilities. Exhibits were a way of organizing and representing knowledge for external consumption. They reveal as well the role of the visual in shaping Chinese modernity.

The Osaka Exhibition of 1903 has attracted considerable attention over the years for the way in which the Japanese organizers exhibited other Asian peoples. In chapter 7 Lisa Claypool examines the centrality of “race” to this exhibition and the Chinese response. She is careful to point out that the Chinese objected not to “race” as an organizing principle per *se, * but just to the degrading place of the “Chinese race” in the exhibition’s overall layout. She also looks closely at the architectural structure of the exhibition grounds, the pamphlets distributed, and how the Japanese presented themselves and others to visitors at the site in 1903.

Chapter 8, by Julia Andrews, is also concerned with the exhibition of art, although Andrews focuses on the case of the first Chinese National Arts Exhibition of 1929, held in Shanghai. She demonstrates the influence exerted by Japanese modernism on the same school in China. Modernism had a short life in prewar China, shunted aside when total war erupted and then banned after the Communist victory in 1949. Andrews asks why there were so many fine works by Japanese in the 1929 exhibition, and she points to the extremely important prefatory essay to the catalog by none other than the major cultural figure of the day, Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), the chancellor of Peking University at the time of the May Fourth Incident, and she translates from it at length. As Cai noted, four private Japanese painting societies were centrally involved in planning the Japanese contribution to this important event, especially so for the Chinese themselves. She finds not only enormous respect by Chinese for the Japanese art world but, possibly surprising to some, just as vast a reserve of respect by the Japanese for their hosts in China.

The next two chapters look at aspects of how the modern curriculum of art history came into being in Japan and China, respectively. Tamaki Maeda in chapter 9 addresses the issue of the role of Japan, in particular the Kyoto school, in the rejuvenation of literati painting *(bunjinga) * in China—not so much the practice but respect for the historical artwork itself. The Japanese book publisher and art dealer Harada Gorō (1893–1980) found himself with large quantities of Chinese art, especially paintings and works of calligraphy, in the years following the 1911 Revolution. He brought them to the attention of

Art History and Sino-Japanese Relations

the famed Sinologist Naitō Konan (1866–1934) who, in turn, consulted with his friend and colleague the émigré loyalist from the now defunct Qing dynasty, Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940). Luo had himself brought quantities of artwork from China to Kyoto. Naitō proceeded to steep himself in this material and ultimately to deliver a series of lectures on Chinese art history in which he glorified bunjinga and helped to revitalize a moribund tradition. This then led ultimately to a similar trend in China. One trend distinctive both of Naitō and his colleagues at Kyoto Imperial University was to bring “history” to Chinese painting. By offering a relatively simple periodization scheme (ancient-medieval-modern), he introduced the idea of progress into the scholarly discussion.6

Approaching a similar issue from the Chinese side, Kuiyi Shen argues in chapter 10 that China followed the Japanese modernization model for art history as a discipline in the 1920s. By examining the two cases of Teng Gu (1901–41) and Fu Baoshi (1904–65), he demonstrates that this trend developed further in the 1930s when Teng and Fu were most active. As we see in other chapters in this volume, here too politics and Sino-Japanese cultural ties do not always or necessarily march in lockstep. Thus, even in times of heightened nationalism in China, Shen finds significant Japanese influence on the construction of Chinese art history as a discipline and on the restructuring of the latter’s canon.

One of the most important innovations in modern art history was the marriage of print and publishing with works of art in many genres. Reproductions in book form, such as museum or exhibition catalogs, made available to a much wider audience in the prewar decades the richness of Chinese art. A central figure in this development was the Shanghai-based editor and publisher Di Baoxian (Di Pingzi, 1873–1941), the subject of chapter ii, by Richard Vinograd.

Di discovered in the Japanese national essence movement a way to preserve one’s traditional culture with a modern nationalist thrust that was neither xenophobic nor reactionary. Again, this meant harnessing nationalism to the preservation of traditional culture. In Di’s case, this direction meant packaging the Chinese artistic patrimony for the modern nation-state. Vinograd analyzes the 1930 volume Zhongguo minghua ji (Famous Chinese paintings), published by Di Baoxian’s Youzheng Press, as an effort to establish a new canon, and he sees this effort firmly rooted in the earlier Japanese volume Shina meiga shū

(Collection of famous Chinese paintings), dating to 1908. The larger question 6 Writing many years ago (and in a foreign language), one of Naitō’s students, the scholar of Chinese religion especially in the Six Dynasties era, Miyakawa Hisayuki (1913–2006), noted that Naitō was particularly considered a specialist in Chinese art history, but beyond that intriguing suggestion he offered no further evaluation. See his “An Outline of the Naitō

Hypothesis and Its Effects on Japanese Studies of China.”

Art History And Sino-japanese Relations

here, one tied to issues raised by both Maeda and Shen, is how canons take shape at any time technologically and intellectually.

Addressing the theme of print and art as well is Cheng-hua Wang, although she homes in more closely on the topic of collotype as a new technology for preserving antiquities. Through collotype-produced images, rare and valuable pieces became available to many, and in short order they enabled a re-canonization of Chinese antiquities. We thus ironically have the newest technology making possible the preservation of the most ancient heritage of China. Whereas lithography had proven superior to woodblock printing, collotype ultimately outstripped lithography. The Japanese had developed collotype to publish high-quality art books and magazines and thus to preserve their heritage, a lesson not lost on similarly inclined Chinese. She focuses on the figures of Di Baoxian and Deng Shi (1877–1951) as the creators of a space for sharing China’s cultural patrimony on a national basis through their publication of images of antiquities heretofore only available in private collections. In so doing, antiquities were transformed from dusty items in a handful of personal collections to the constituent elements of the national heritage.

Although it necessarily had to reduce the size of many objects, collotype nonetheless was able to convey the sense of a thing’s materiality because it was so accurate or authentic.

Vinograd and Wang both demonstrate that the meeting of print and art in China led to an extraordinary expansion of the populace that could enjoy the artistic heritage of their own nation. One need no longer establish an elaborate personal network to gain access to private collections or even travel to China’s major cities to gain entrance to China’s newly founded museums. Books and an increasing number of high-quality journals made reproductions available wherever they could be found. This trend is fully consonant with one that Naitō Konan identified with modernity in China, although he traced its roots back to the Song dynasty—that of a wider public taking part in the creation and production of culture.7 Our present era perhaps represents the next stage in the process: anyone with an internet connection can now have access to most of the world’s great art, although the computer screen is, if anything, even more restricted in conveying with exactitude the real contours of an original than collotype reproductions.

As should now be evident, the history of the development of art and art institutions in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China cannot 7 Naitō wrote about this in many places, such as “Cultural Life in Modern China,” a translation of his “Kindai Chūgoku no bunka seikatsu” of 1928. See my Naitō Konan and the Development of the Conception of Modernity in China History, * * pp. 100–119. See also my Politics and Sinology: *The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934). *

Art History and Sino-Japanese Relations

simply be described as tradition confronting modernity, with the latter winning in a revolutionary sweeping out of the old. Indeed, nowhere does this older, May Fourth-informed discourse seem to exert any noticeable impact on the story whatsoever. Instead, we find modern-minded entrepreneurs looking for ways to use all the most recent tools available—be it print, collotype, or museums—as a means of preserving the national heritage. Nowhere do we see hopelessly reactionary scholars confronting revolutionary students set on destroying the old in the interest of radical Westernization—that was to be the discursive spin during the Cultural Revolution several decades later. The heritage preservers and the devisers and entrepreneurs of the latest technology are frequently the same people.

From the start of Sino-Japanese contacts in the realm of art, we find predominantly healthy and respectful relations, something altogether different from the political and military realms. Initially, Chinese artists and calligraphers were treated with great deference and admiration in Japan, just as a handful of aspiring and courageous Japanese had traveled to Shanghai to receive instruction firsthand from Chinese painters. Japanese inclined toward shared East Asian traditions in the arts were completely open to sharing their spaces with visiting Chinese men of letters. Many of the Chinese attached to the official Chinese Mission—such as Huang Zunxian (1848–1905) and Yao Wendong (1852–1927), in addition to Yang Shoujing—spent a great deal of their time in Japan engaged in literary soirées with the last generation of Edo-period Japanese men of letters. This was to be the swan song of a shared Kanbun (“literary Chinese”) culture in which such hypereducated men and some women wrote poetry together as they drank tea or wine, shared their art work, and impressed one another with their respective stores of knowledge of earlier—often much earlier—Chinese culture. What Chen, Lai, and Brown in this volume describe as the end of an era had surprising staying power.

At time passed, and indeed the sheer numbers of such extraordinarily well-educated or trained men diminished, such interactions needless to say also became fewer and fewer. The Chinese eventually learned that their counterparts in Japan had figured out a way to retain the essence of their cultural patrimony without having to reject all the conveniences of modernity. Whether it was art publications or art exhibitions, the influence of Japan directly or by example from Japan’s experience was palpable. This is not to say that all Japanese and Chinese in their respective art worlds had unlimited love for one another. It does, however, strongly point to the fact that a sense of shared cultural history lasted well into the twentieth century before total war made it impossible to retain meaningful cultural ties. The Communists’ rise to power and the purposeful destruction (literally and educationally) of China’s cultural heritage by China’s own leaders until the late 1970s, as well as a defeated Japan’s

Art History And Sino-japanese Relations

place beneath the American Cold War umbrella, made for strained political ties in the first postwar decades. Perhaps, like our go masters, even decades of noncommunication will prove not to be an impediment to the further efflorescence of future Sino-Japanese interactions in the world of art, art historical studies, and other cultural realms as welt. One thing is certain: culture plays by a different standard of time from politics.

As noted earlier, the chapters in this volume aim to redress a lacuna in Western scholarship and to attempt to bring greater balance to a discussion of the complexity of Sino-Japanese interactions in the period under analysis.

In doing so, it may appear as though we have overplayed the positive at the expense of the negative relations between China and Japan. To this, we readily admit guilty as charged but with a plea that our aim has not been to write a comprehensive history of Sino-Japanese cultural relations, just fill in the gap in this extremely important subfield.

Bibliography

Berry, Paul. Unexplored Avenues of Japanese Painting: The Hakutakuan Collection.

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.

———. “The Meeting of Chinese and Japanese Literati: Hu Gongshou, Yasuda Rōzan, and the Controversy over National Style.” In Literati Modern: Bunjinga from Late Edo to Twentieth-Century Japan, the Terry Welch Collection at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, ed. Paul Berry and Michiyo Morioka, pp. 16–27. Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2008.

Fogel, Joshua A. “Lust for Still Life: Chinese Painters in Japan and Japanese Painters in China in the 1860s and 1870s.” In Acquisition: Art and Ownership in Edo-Period Japan, ed. Elizabeth Lillehoj, pp. 149–68. Warren: Floating World Editions, 2007.

———, ed. and trans. Naitō Konan and the Development of the Conception of Modernity in China History. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1984.

———. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934). Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984.

Meng Yue. Shanghai and the Edges of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Miyakawa Hisayuki, “An Outline of the Naitō Hypothesis and Its Effects on Japanese Studies of China.” Far Eastern Quarterly 14,4 (August 1955): 533–53.

Tsuruta Takeyoshi, “Ō Kokusan to Jo Utei, raihaku gajin kenkyū roku.” Kokka 1070

(1984): 20–31.

Wang Baoping, “Chinese in Japan in the Late Qing: How They Lived and Whom They Knew.” In Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors: Chinese Views of Japan in the Ming-Qing Period, ed. Joshua A. Fogel, pp. 185–99. Norwalk: EastBridge, 2002.

■ Source: “Miyazaki Tōten to Shingai kakumei” 宮崎滔天と辛亥革命 (Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution), Fukuoka Unesco 福岡ユネスコ 48 (October 2012), 1–11.

Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution

My name is Joshua Fogel, and I teach East Asian history, in particular the history of Sino-Japanese relations, at York University in Toronto, Canada. Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this symposium for inviting me and allowing me to offer some thoughts at this forum. I have another reason to be thankful for this invitation to Fukuoka which I shall mention at the end of my talk today. Many people, especially those living in warm climates like Fukuoka, believe that because Canada is so far north, it is always freezing cold. In the winter, yes, Canada can be very cold, but Canada is a big place—in fact, it’s the second largest country in the world. East of the Rocky Mountains, Toronto has one of the nicer climates—much milder than nearby Buffalo, New York or even Detroit, Michigan. Please come visit us some time.

My topic today concerns the role of several Japanese in the 1911 Revolution in China. This is not an unknown topic. Scholars have actually worked on it a great deal—in Japan, China, North America, and even Europe. In fact, the central role played by certain Japanese supporters of Sun Yat-sen has provided an important bridge for Chinese and Japanese scholars as well as ordinary citizens to find common ground. My talk today is not aimed at offering a new interpretation or revealing some new documents on this topic of Japan’s role in the 1911

Revolution. Instead, I would like to take a close look at one extremely important Japanese activist and a book by him—well known, I’m sure, to everyone here—Miyazaki Tōten and his autobiography, Sanjūsan nen no yume.

Most scholars mine this work for every possible detail they can find about Miyazaki’s work to help set Sun Yat-sen on a course to overthrow the Qing dynasty and establish a new republican government in China. Miyazaki decided early in life to devote himself to finding a hero in China who would perform such heroic deeds. He was a very young man when he made this decision, and it seems in retrospect very much like the decision of a very young man. The amazing thing is that he not that he had such a dream but that he actually accomplished it, although at the time his dream seemed to him to be a complete failure. That was the final message of Sanjūsan nen no yume. It was the early Meiji period when he began his quest, the Tokugawa bakufu had just been overthrown a few years before, and just about anything seemed possible.

Miyazaki was born at the end of Meiji 3 (January 1871) in what is now Kumamoto-ken, and already many people in the western domains were

Miyazaki Tōten And The 1911 Revolution

unhappy about the way in which the Meiji Restoration had worked out. The next few years would witness the Saga Uprising and the Satsuma Rebellion.

Kyushu people sure seem to be an unruly group! In any event, for a variety of reasons, they were not pleased by the outcome of the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu. Miyazaki Tōten came to the view that a revolutionary movement to wipe away the decadent Qing dynasty would usher in an international movement aimed at freedom and righteousness everywhere, including Japan.

Sun would be China’s George Washington, and Tōten would be his General Lafayette, the Frenchman who came to Washington’s aid when the fortunes of the young American revolutionary forces were at their lowest.

When Tōten published his autobiography, though, in 1902, the Chinese revolutionary movement was in shambles. Sun was in hiding after the failure of an uprising in south China, and the future looked very grim. Sanjūsan nen no yume thus reads like an extremely self-pitying, romantic tale of total cataclysm. Tōten repeatedly characterizes his life as an utter failure—just a “dream”

without substance—despite his purest motives. He is forever blaming himself for his debilitating weakness for women and alcohol; his self-indulgence is on almost every page of his memoir, and it gets very tiring to read about it over and over again. And, all the time as he writes with an open bottle of sake nearby and a prostitute in his bed, one must remind oneself that he had a wife and child living in absolute poverty far away.

Something must be wrong. Miyazaki Tōten can’t both be a great figure in the Chinese revolution, a great friend to Sun, and also a whoring, self-pitying drunk who neglected his family almost completely. Yet, both statements are recognized as true. What’s wrong is the way I have framed the question. We can’t use early 21th-century eyes and early 21th-century values to evaluate events that took place over a century ago under altogether different conditions. So, I shall withhold evaluation of Tōten’s behavior until after we have a look at the details of his autobiography. Let us go back to the beginning and place Tōten in his proper place and time.

Tōten was born into a low-level samurai family, the youngest of eleven children. One older brother, Hachirō, died in 1877 during the Satsuma Rebellion.

His father died when he was nine years old, and many of his siblings died very young before reaching adulthood. Tōten’s own father possessed a bad combination of an elitist contempt for money and a sincere affection for alcohol. That made life in the Miyazaki household extremely difficult for everyone else. In addition, there was a consciousness bred among the younger family members that sacrifice for a great cause was worth more than living a sedentary, stable life. Growing up, Tōten was often told he should become a hero like his older brother, and his mother was no less stern in this regard than his father. She

Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution

admonished him to die like a hero, not of old age. When Tōten later avoided military service at the time of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, his mother was absolutely furious with him.

From my early 21st-century stance, it is almost unimaginable that a mother would wish her son to die young for some heroic cause. But, this is, of course, not something unique to Japan. It reads very much like the jihadist movement in the contemporary Middle East, or the famous line with which Spartan mothers would, allegedly, send their sons off to war: “Come back with it or on it!” The “it” here was their shield—in other words, their should fight and either return victorious with their shield in hand or die in battle and return (dead) on their shield, but never under any circumstances should they surrender and give up their shield and weapon.

Like his father before him, then, Tōten did not make practicality a priority in his life. Finding an objective for some, as-yet undefined heroic behavior was more important to the young Tōten. Even as an elementary school student, he distrusted all authority around him, be it his school teachers or the young Meiji government. The idea of going to school with the end of becoming an official in the new government was utterly abhorrent to Tōten. Like his brother and political comrade, Tamizō, Tōten imbibed the liberal ideas of the popular rights movement current in Japan of the 1870s and 1880s; that was a cause worth fighting for.

Throughout his teenage years and early twenties, Tōten would be attracted to one or another set of ideas or ideology. But, as soon as he wholeheartedly adopted one ideology, he would soon thereafter wholeheartedly reject it and move on to something else. For awhile he studied at the Ōe gijuku of Tokutomi Sohō and, although he enjoyed it for a time, he soon began to distrust everyone around him and then ran off to his next adventure, this time in Tokyo.

What saved him there—again, only for a short while—was his conversion to Christianity which he adopted with the same fervor as he embraced every new phase of his life. He also studied at the Tōkyō Senmon gakkō, forerunner of Waseda University. When he returned to Kumamoto because he was broke and despondent in the early 1880s—still a teenager, by the way—he led Christian church services for young people in his village and instantly became a local leader. He must have had a certain charisma about him.

Like other creeds, Tōten soon abandoned Christianity and later denounced in tones as fervent as he had earlier adopted it in his 1902 booklet. His brother Yazō, who was two and one-half years older than Tōten, had lingering doubts about the whole business of the Trinity and had never been as convinced about Christianity as Tōten, and Tamizō persuaded Tōten that social problems were far more important than otherwordly (religious) concerns. This was a time of

Miyazaki Tōten And The 1911 Revolution

great rural poverty in Japan, and many tenant farmers in their area could no longer pay their rent to their landlords. Tōten agreed to join the struggle as soon as his ongoing search and studies came upon a solution to these problems. Tamizō then found the answer in the then-popular “single tax proposal”

of Henry George. This won Tōten to the cause, but it was not only Tamizō’s stress on the here and now but Yazō emphasis on the fact that this solution would embrace all of Asia—that is, it was not just a solution for Japan. A very famous American politician once said that “all politics is local”; the young Miyazaki Tōten would certainly have disagreed.

Remember, Tōten is still barely into his mid-teen years. For Tōten, as for his older brothers, commitment was total; they approached everything with a ferocious intensity that could only lead to great exhilaration or equally great despair. It was all or nothing for Tōten and his brothers. Once he found the answer to the world’s problems, he was prepared to sacrifice everything—

family, possessions, anything—to see that cause realized. Most of us just don’t live like that any more.

So, the lifework that Tōten set for himself was nothing less than the revival of Asia. Yazō impressed upon him the lesson that Asia was suffering from oppression by the Western powers—Russian being the worst oppressor of them all.

The countries of Asia had to throw off the imperialist yoke and regain their sovereignty, their control over their own people, and their dignity as human beings. That immense struggle had to start at the epicenter of Asia—namely, China, the largest and thus most important country in Asia. If Japan suffered because of the inequities of the landholding system, as Tamizō had taught Tōten, then China was in an even worse situation. Rebuilding an equitable land-owning system in China which was terribly poor was, thus, essential to reviving Asia, but it was also an utterly immense task. This task would require heroism and self-sacrifice on a gigantic scale. It would require superhuman compassion and a spirit of universalism.

In a letter to his wife Tsuchiko written a few years later in 1897, he wrote:

“I believe in the Way but cannot as yet merged with it. . . . Today, there are millions of poor people in the world who are crying by the side of the road. This fact is as clear as day. A compassionate man of will who shares his fate with

[these poor people] and fights against injustice and inequality in the world is not false, does not err, and acts out of duty; he cannot prevent himself from doing so. He is a man of sincerity who will not forget that which is just and divine.”

It’s one thing to identify a problem and even write about it. But, it’s quite another thing to try to do anything about it, let alone actually try to solve the problem. Tōten had little money, knew few people, and initially had no practical

Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution

idea of what he would do. But, as we have seen before, once he decided on a plan or set his mind on an idea, he adopted it with thorough fervor. China was now the center of his thoughts. Solving the world’s social ills would have to start by solving China’s social problems. Reviving China from its present weakness and humiliation would serve as an impetus to reviving East Asia and from there the world. The key to transforming China was to overthrow the decadent Qing dynasty through a political and social revolution. And, again, revolutions demanded a heroic leader. In the 1890s, it was not at all clear who that hero was to be. Certainly, anyone associated with Qing dynasty was out, but the opposition was weak and scattered—and frankly it didn’t seem all that heroic. Yazō

and Tōten continued looking, however, and Yazō at one point even volunteered himself to perform the role of hero, if they were unable to locate a genuine Chinese one.

In the same letter to his wife that I quoted earlier, he wrote: “Resolution of the situation in East Asia will be decided by the fate of China, something known to us without input from intellectuals. Here we stand, ready to address the issue of China and then from there East Asia, the world, and society. Thus, we may for the first time be able to have full human rights and truly bring suc-cor to the poverty-stricken of the world. The situation today is such that we must thoroughly implement a portion of our ideals.”

There was an added poignancy to Tōten’s and his brothers’ sense of urgency about their adopted mission. At the time, Social Darwinism was becoming a widely accepted doctrine, and the idea was becoming accepted as fact that, if a humiliated country did not revive itself to power and dignity quickly, it faced the possibility of permanent extinction. The degradation to which China had fallen under Manchu rule, its victimhood in the face of the Powers’ relentless attacks, and its apparent inability to do anything right thus meant that China might, as the expression at the time put it, be carved up like a melon—and presumably gobbled up as a snack. This was a fate that the Miyazaki brothers simply could not accept. Their romantic idealism was not unusual in mid-Meiji Japan, but their internationalizing of the coming conflict and their willingness to physically throw themselves into the struggle in China was extremely rare. On the one hand, this attitude was similar to the selfless samurai tradition of Japan, but it also drew on the youxia tradition of the great romantic Chinese novels. They even referred to their headquarters as the Liangshanbo (J. Ryōzanpaku), by which they meant the hideout of the heroes of Shuihuzhuan.

One important difference between the approach of the Miyazaki brothers and that of most Japanese in the 1880s and 1890s was their willingness to join the victims. Public opinion at the time was for Japan to gain its own strength,

Miyazaki Tōten And The 1911 Revolution

independent of China, by imitating and even bettering the West at the imperialist and colonialist game. If that meant fighting wars against China and later Russia to do so, so be it! Those wars brought spoils—Taiwan, extensive rights in Manchuria, etc.—and if China was to be a victim to Japan’s self-strengthening, too bad for the Chinese! If Japan continued to be seen as one part of a rapidly declining East Asia, then it might just be gobbled up with China, Korea, Viet Nam, India, and elsewhere. Other Japanese argued that Japan was best advised to become the leader of a renascent Asia by taking control over the other parts—becoming the leader and reversing the traditional hierarchy in which China was Japan’s guide. Although this pose may have seemed as though Japan was merely leading a group of equals, it soon was clear that the followers would be second-class citizens in any Asian alliance.

In the face of all this, Miyazaki Tōten took an altogether different position.

He occasionally might work with one or another person from the two other groups I have just outlined, but he trusted none of them. His self-appointed task was to liberate the oppressed peoples of Asia—it was not service to his nation or to his emperor. At one point he took a temporary government job, but the reason was to make contact in 1897 with 孫文, not to serve his nation or state. He was a thorough internationalist before such an ideology had acquired much of a following in Japan.

So, Tōten decided in the early 1890s that, if he was going to become deeply involved in political and social affairs in China, he needed to learn to speak Chinese. He collected up what little remained of the money from his family for a trip to China, only to be cheated out of the money by some old “friends”

to whom he had lent it. It was now 1894 and he tried to work through his contact in Korea, but unfortunately that contact person was none other than Kim Ok-kyun who was murdered in a major incident at this time. So he traveled north to Hakodate which then had a Chinese community and, he thought, he might be able to find a teacher there. Unfortunately, again, most of that community had withdrawn to China when the Sino-Japanese War began that same year. Other attempts also were stymied, but the final blow came in 1896. His brother Yazō had gone to work for a Chinese company in Yokohama in 1895, tying his hair in a queue like other Chinese, and thus meeting a number of immigrant Chinese of importance, but the next year he became terribly ill and die suddenly of illness.

Tōten was profoundly saddened. And, he was also broke. At this very low point, he decided he might have to compromise his principles and accept employment from the Meiji state. He hated having to do this and he despised what it made him seem like to those who knew what his principles were. In a letter to his wife, he referred to himself as a geisha, selling his body to the rich

Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution

and powerful: “I have, alas, become a geisha. I have received the baptism of vulgarity.” But, this was probably the most important step he would take, because this post for the Gaimushō—which he only held briefly—enabled him to meet Sun. And, now Tōten had found the hero he had long been searching for.

After only meeting Sun once, Miyazaki (as was typical of his character) immediately was won over. Sun was his man, the hero he had been searching for! The year was 1897, they discussed the prospects for China’s revival and the future of Asia—and that was enough for Tōten. He pinned his future and the future of Asia on Sun, making himself Sun’s disciple and assistant thereafter.

Sun had been having a hard time and could use all the help he could get. He was involved in a failed revolt in the Canton area in 1895, and thereafter the Qing government had put a price on his head. He desperately needed support and, of course, money, and his Japanese friends were utterly essential to him. Through Tōten and the contacts he was able to establish in high places, Sun was able to take refuge in Japan—at least for awhile. By the same token, Tōten worked overtime to make Sun widely known to the Japanese people.

At first, he did this, interestingly, by translating Sun’s recently published work Kidnapped in London into Japanese for a Fukuoka newspaper he was working for. I believe Sun wrote this book in English; it was about his secret incarceration by the Qing authorities in England, and I’m not sure what language Tōten worked from when he prepared his translation, but I believe it was a Chinese translation.

And, when Tōten’s own Sanjūsen nen no yume appeared several years later in 1902, it was quickly translated into Chinese twice, and that made Sun better known in his own native land. For five intense years from 1897, then, Tōten was deeply involved in the affairs of Sun and the Chinese revolution. While in government service in 1897, Tōten used his connections to enable Sun to legally reside outside the treaty-port community of Yokohama; according to the treaties with the foreign powers, foreigners at the time were required to live in the restricted areas of the ports.

The next year, 1898, Tōten was sent on a secret government mission to Canton to investigate and report back on the revolutionary movement in China. At that time Kang Youwei was in Hong Kong; Kang had only recently escaped there to avoid arrest and virtually certain execution in the wake of the disaster of the Hundred Days Reform. Tōten helped him escape to Japan and to safety. And, for the next few years, Tōten and his colleagues did everything in his power to bring Sun and Kang together—or, more precisely, to mediate between the revolutionaries and the more reform-oriented group of Chinese.

He also worked as Sun’s agent to make contacts with the secret societies in

Miyazaki Tōten And The 1911 Revolution

Hong Kong and South China at a time when Tōten had more freedom of movement than Sun. Because he was a Japanese national, he was able to do things and take risks that Sun would have been risking his life to do.

One of the intellectual bonds that Sun and Tōten shared was a transnational concern for the future of Asia as a whole. That necessitated their willingness to assist the Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo in his fight against American imperialism. The logic was that, once the Philippine Islands were liberated, they could serve as a base to spark the revolutionary movement in China. Their efforts, as we all know, ended in complete failure. Then, they looked to Taiwan as a possible base. Taiwan had become a Japanese colony after 1895, and the Japanese presence there did not appear to constitute an obstacle to the liberation efforts in the surrounding lands. But, no sooner was the Huizhou Uprising of October 1900 set to erupt in South China, than it was betrayed by another Japanese before it really got started. Tōten was furious with his fellow Japanese, and found himself profusely apologizing to Sun.

This is the final episode recounted in Sanjūsan nen no yume, and I think you can see why Tōten, looking back on his life to that point, thought it was a complete failure. He resolved to abandon all of his grand ambitions for an Asian revolution and apprenticed himself to Tōchūken Kumoemon, the famous ryōkyokushi. He was ultimately no more successful as a singer.

As we look back on the Meiji period now a full century after it ended, we can see that there were any number of people working around the edges of society, unconnected to their government and trying to forge international ties in semi-legal fashion. As Japan rose ever greater respectability in the international arena, however, the kind of activities Tōten had been involved in—

including smuggling arms and laundering money to revolutionaries intent on overthrowing governments with which Japan had or was trying to establish diplomatic ties—such activities became ever more difficult and genuinely illegal. None of this would have stopped Tōten. He was himself every bit as much a revolutionary as Sun and many other Chinese revolutionaries in the years preceding the 1911 Revolution.

So, there he is at age 33—a complete failure in his own words. When I think back to a time when I was 33, Tōten’s life seems impossible to me. I don’t mean to compare myself to Tōten, but I am only trying to understand this extraordinary man. In his letters to his wife, Tōten is well aware of how desperately poor she is and how she and their young son, Miyazaki Ryūsuke, are suffering. And, yet, he makes no effort to change his plans, come home, and try to take care of them. On occasion he tried to help his wife find a job to support herself, but the thrust of his letters to her is to offer comforting words, words of affection

Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution

combined with excuses about why his own call to duty would continue to keep him far from home. Tōten was committed to a higher goal—the liberation of Asia starting with the Chinese revolution—and everything else was secondary.

Some years later, in 1929 (seven years after Tōten’s death) when Sun’s mauso-leum was dedicated in Nanjing, Tōten’s widow recalled some of these difficult times in a memoir. She mentioned a time when she was alone with a three-year-old Ryūsuke and an infant second son Shinsaku and she wrote Tōten a letter about of the dire circumstances they were in. His response to her was that he suffered poverty, too, and their allies in the unfair world were the poor and helpless, while their enemies were the rich and powerful. Poverty, he told her, was the natural order of things. His message then was to be courageous in their shared struggle against evil in the world.

The picture he gives in Sanjūsan nen no yume, though, is a bit different. Here was find a self-pitying Tōten, lonely, often drunk, usually sharing his solitude with a prostitute at some bordello. This was not a heroic pose but one of romanticism and harsh but brutally honest self-criticism which readers in the Meiji period would probably have admired. The pose he took in his letters to his wife and the pose he took in his memoir are, thus, wholly different. Obviously, his wife could easily have read the memoir after it appeared—in fact, I’m sure that she did—and she would have seen the stark difference here, but it does not seem to have changed her opinion of him. Which was the real Miyazaki Tōten?

I think the answer is both. He was by turns living a heroic existence but one also plagued by failure and consonant self-doubt and self-pity. I wonder, though, if the information in his letters and in Sanjūsan nen no yume can both be true. There certainly is nothing new in men lying to their wives. And, if he did fabricate some of the information in his autobiography, he would not have been the first nor the last person to do so. At the same time, Tōten seems fully prepared to die a premature death, as his cause was more important and far bigger than his own small life. There seems to me to be something both admirable and a little eccentric in that. It certainly makes Tōten likable, even if the way he treated his family members is anything but likable.

Tōten lived first and foremost not for his family or for himself but for the noble goals he set above everything else. That stance earned him the respect of his colleagues and of the Chinese revolutionaries with whom he was in touch.

A moment ago I ended my discussion of his involvement with the Chinese revolution with the completion of Sanjūsan nen no yume in 1902 and his decision to leave politics and take up ryōkyoku. He soon failed at that career, but in 1905 when Japan defeated Russia in war, many thousands of Chinese students came to Japan. They wanted to study and learn the secrets to gaining the kind of strength necessary to stand up to the imperialist Western powers.

Miyazaki Tōten And The 1911 Revolution

Sun himself returned to Japan and that year helped created the organization, the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance), that eventually in 1911 was in part responsible for toppling the Qing government. Tōten together with a small number of other Japanese was present when that group was founded and he held power of attorney for it. He also helped the Chinese publish their revolutionary journal, Minbao, and he traveled to China later after the revolution succeeded in 1911. Although Sun was only president of the new Republic for a few months before being forced from power by Yuan Shikai, he and Tōten remained stalwart friends until Tōten died eleven years later. During that time, Tōten wrote, traveled, and endlessly praised his friend and worked tirelessly to see him returned to power.

I have briefly mentioned his son Ryūsuke, but as is well known he went on to attend the finest high school, Number One Senior High School, and the most prestigious university, Tokyo Imperial University, in Japan at that time. That is quite a career route for someone from an impoverished family.

He was helped in part by his father’s Japanese and expatriate friends. When the Chinese revolutionary Huang Xing died in Tokyo in 1916, the home he had been living in (arranged by Tōten) passed to Tōten’s care, and a few years later Ryūsuke used it as a rooming house for members of the famous organization he helped found, Shinjinkai. While Ryūsuke worked for many of the liberal and radical journals of this period, the height of Taishō democracy, he also helped visiting Chinese students who would become important figures in the young Communist movement. The most famous of these Chinese students and activists was probably Shi Cuntong. He worked assiduously through the postwar period for the betterment of Sino-Japanese relations, organizing such group as the Nihon Chūzankai which honored the memory of Sun (or Sun Zhongshan

[Chūzan]).

Finally, let me once again thank the organizers of the meeting to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution for inviting me and all of you for coming today. I mentioned at the start of my talk that I had another reason for coming to Fukuoka.

■ Source: “New Thoughts on an Old Controversy: Shina as a Toponym for China,” Sino-Platonic Papers 229 (August 2012), at: http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp229_shina_china

.pdf.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy: Shina*** *as a **Toponym for China

Zhina dizi wu yanyu

支那弟子無言語

Chuan’er huseng xiao diantou 穿耳胡僧笑點頭

*Chinese youngsters stood there speechless, *

*While foreign monks wearing earrings smiled and nodded. *

(From “Ti fan shu” 題梵書** [inscription to a Sanskrit work], a poem by Tang Emperor Xuanzong 玄宗, ** r. 712–756, describing young Chinese looking at a piece of writing in Sanskrit).

Do toponyms provide an index of the position a nation, state, or country occupies on the evolutionary scale? Scanning the world in which we now live, we can see that only a relatively small number of states have more than one name (aside from official vs. popular names), usually the result—as in the case of “China” vs. Taiwan or the two “Koreas” (although England, Great Britain, Albion, etc. would be an obvious exception)—of a heightened or strained political consciousness. By the same token, the only places such concerns are obviously operative are at the United Nations and the Olympics, and in official state documents. Journalists, writers, ordinary citizens, and others usually could not care less—usually.

How is it then that, on the eve of the 1911 Revolution, the place we now call China had any number of toponyms for itself—from the “da Qing” * 大清* **(great Qing), *“da Qing diguo” * 大清帝國 *** ***(great Qing empire), and Zhongguo 中國, * * to others with a more traditional resonance: Zhonghua 中華, Hua-Xia 華夏, and Zhongtu 中土? While not wanting to impose later standards on earlier practices, there still seems to be some onomastic disorder here, as each of these terms (save *“da Qing” * and *“da Qing diguo” *) * * may have a slightly different nuance but would all translate into English pretty much as “China.” Perhaps this is

* An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the conference “From Qing to China: Rethinking the Interplay of Tradition and Modernity, 1860–1949,” organized by Professor Ori Sela at Tel Aviv University, May 2012.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

a result of the fact that on the eve of October 1911 (and perhaps even later),

“China” (any of the native toponyms will do) still conceived of itself as an empire and not as yet as a nation-state.1 Or, perhaps shedding all of the accoutrements of one’s solipsistic conceit, as well as those of empire, is part of the process of entering the modern world of (theoretically) equal nation-states.

In what follows I want less to trace the specific steps by which “China”

moved from the “great Qing dynasty” (or “empire”) to the Republic of China (Zhonghua Minguo 中華民國) and more to see how Japan perceived and/or adopted any or all of these toponyms plus one more. As arguably China’s keen-est observer and, on occasion, mercurial assessor, Japan had nothing to gain or lose—toponymically speaking—from which of the various names for China would carry on and which would be swept into the dustbin. That said, harsh and often incriminating debates, larded with misconceptions and outright ignorance (which never seems to inhibit fierce assertion of a point of view), ensued over much of the twentieth century.

Generally, before the Meiji period, Japanese referred to “China” either by the name of the dynasty in power (Han 漢, J. Kan; Tang 唐, J. Tō; Song 宋, J. Sō; Ming 明, * * J. Min; and Qing 清, J. Shin) or by some generic name, such as the synecdoche Nankin 南京 (Nanjing) or the more Japanese-sounding terms Kara から * (唐) or Morokoshi もろこし. Even today, the Chinatown section of Kōbe is known as Nankinmachi 南京町 (lit., Nanjing village, or Chinatown), just as states around the world often refer to others by the capital city (for example, Beijing, Washington, Tokyo) as a synecdoche for the entire nation or at least its government. Other generic Japanese terms included Chūka 中華 (C. Zhonghua; Yokohama’s and Nagasaki’s Chinatowns are today known as Chūkagai 中華街), * * Chūdo 中土 (C. Zhongtu), Ka-Ka 華夏 (C. Hua-Xia), and (of course) Shina 支那 * (C. Zhina), just to name a few. Although the Japanese rendering of the term now used by the Chinese themselves, Chūgoku 中國, ** * *

was on occasion employed in Japanese texts, it appeared with far less frequency. That term, incidentally, dates to the Zhou when it meant those “central states” which most assiduously followed the rituals associated with the Zhou dynasty; it apparently underwent a lexical shift at some post-antique time to mean a unified “Chinese” state/empire.

The use of dynastic names is more complicated than it appears at first blush.

Indeed, such toponyms were in use at the time these dynasties ruled, but only 1 See Peter C. Perdue, “Where Do Incorrect Political Ideas Come From? Writing the History of the Qing Empire and the Chinese Nation,” in The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State: Japan and China, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 174–99.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

an elite selection from them retained the staying power to be used for “China”

or “Chinese” in a more general, trans-temporal sense long after those dynasties ceased to exist. Actually, straight through until the very end of the Han dynasty in 220 CE, we know of no Japanese writings of any sort, as Japan was still a pre-literate society at the time. This means that the entire life of “Kan”

(at least in written form) has existed après le fait: * * for example, “Kangaku”

漢學 was the name in Japan for “China studies” for many centuries and not just *Hanxue *(Han-style learning or scholarship) most often associated with the late Ming and Qing eras in scholarship. Now that term’s generic sensibil-ity (meaning all of China studies, not just of a style associated with the Han dynasty) has acquired cachet as such in China and Taiwan. (Lest it go unno-ticed, the same process has transpired with the term Kanji 漢字, in which

“Kan” has stood in for all things “Chinese,” and that term has made the trip back to China now as well: Hanzi. There are probably many other examples, such as Kanbun/Hanwen 漢文**, * ***too.)

Equally productive as a dynastic toponym for China has been “Tō,” and here the association with the real, experienced Tang dynasty is critical. During the three centuries of Tang, several thousand Japanese students, religious and secular, traveled to and around China, often for decades.2 The image conveyed back to the home islands was one of utter magnificence, a centralized kingdom running like a massive Swiss watch on an equally powerful battery—pardon the anachronism. Song (Sō), Ming (Min), and Qing (Shin)—as far as I am aware—

ceased to have any staying power when those dynasties ceased to exist. Is it significant that “Han” and “Tang” are just as important as ethnonyms (especially in China—e.g., Hanren 漢人) as they are as toponyms and modifiers?

Chinatowns in Western cities are often, as in the case of San Francisco, known in Chinese as Tangrenjie 唐人街. Is this because the great majority of their inhabitants, at least at the time the term was coined, were from Guangdong?

The one Japanese expression used for China for centuries, but especially over the century from late Edo through 1945, Shina, has been the one that has most exercised Chinese opinion. It has caused what can only be dubbed fits of irrationality and binational name-calling, although a calming trend seems to 2 There are many books and articles in Japanese and increasingly in Chinese on this subject, though scarcely a word in English. I have found excellent, readable, and quite handy: Tōno Haruyuki 東野治之, *Ken-Tō shi * 遣唐使 (Embassies sent to Tang China) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2007); for a convenient chart of these embassies with names of their leaders and incidental information, see my Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space *and Time *(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 101–7, and online at: http://

chinajapan.org/resources/j-to-tang.html.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

have been setting in. That said, the following incident from 2010, as reported in that bastion of political equipoise, *Renmin Ribao * 人民日报, is telling. That year a patron in a shop in Beijing objected strongly to a poster hanging there depicting a scene from prewar Shanghai in which the word “Shina” appeared; it appears to my eye to be a blown-up version of a postcard. For this patron the word set off associations of Japanese aggression and Chinese “national shame,” and he believed it denigrated China and the Chinese people. Once this story became known, reporters descended on the shop in question, noted this poster among a few on the walls there, and then asked a scholar at the Institute of Modern History at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for an opinion. He understood full well the cachet attached to these pictures of “old Shanghai,”

but “they should not have used the photos that are open to various interpretations [Heaven forbid!]. If the company aims to remind the Chinese of the national shame, the meaning of the picture is not clear.”3 (Only clear messages, please!)

This state of affairs actually marks an improvement over previous decades in which even such marginal acceptance would have been impossible. But why such strong feelings over two all but meaningless characters? Without giving away too much of the game, the animus has a lot to do with the prewar years, China’s “national shame,” Japan’s success in the postwar years, and, of course, the inability to control iron-fistedly what others call you. Toponyms and ethnonyms are obviously not value-free entities; in fact, they often ironically tell us precisely what they do not denote, such as the “German Democratic Republic.”

Let us first look at the debate as it emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and then examine its longer and broader context. The first Japanese to address this issue squarely was the remarkable scholar of Chinese literature, Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好 (1908–1977), who has been exhumed in recent years particularly by postmodernists to serve causes with which I doubt he would have had much truck. Writing in the late 1930s and early 1940s for the journal Chūgoku bungaku 中國文學 * *(Chinese literature), probably the only prewar Japanese publication to use the Chinese toponym for “China” (in its Japanese reading, of course), Takeuchi offered by far the most insightful remarks for his time. How do we respond, he asked, to the claim by Chinese that the expressions “Shina” 支那 * *

and “Shinajin” 支那人 * *(a/the Chinese) are insulting? Whatever its premodern origins, to be discussed below, did the fact that in contemporary usage “Shina”

was a designation of foreign origin (different from the toponym of Chinese choice) imply that China had been denied an equal place in the world? By the same token, how in the modern world of independent nations could other 3 http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/7090148.html.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

countries be expected to refer to China by a name that conjured up a bygone world view based on clear lines of inequity with China at the center of the universe (Zhongguo 中國)? One might raise just as much doubt about whether

“Shina” carried negative connotations simply in its usage as one could with Chinese use of the term “Zhongguo” (Chūgoku). I would add: Just imagine if a new nation were today to decide to baptize itself “Center of the World” and demand that the United Nations and all states with which it had relations call it just that. (Now imagine if that new state had copious oil or other mineral reserves.)

As was so often the case in modern Chinese linguistic innovations, it was Liang Qichao 梁啟超 * *(1874–1929) who pioneered the reformulation of

“Zhongguo” as a modern national designation for China. Others may have preceded him, but not in the consistent way by which he attempted to forge such a designation shorn of its earlier trappings. Yet it was this same Liang Qichao who on many earlier occasions had used the Chinese correlate of

“Shina”: “Zhina.” In the inaugural issue (December 23, 1898) of the serial Qingyi *bao * 清議報 *, * which he famously began publishing in Japan shortly after arriving there, he wrote: “Alas, the dangers to the state of our China (Zhina 支那) * *

have now reached an extreme.” He then went on to list briefly four tasks that confronted all like-minded people concerned for China’s future, and the term Zhina appears exclusively—no Zhongguo and, of course, no Qingguo (correlate of a Japanese term in use, Shinkoku 清國). This is especially interesting because in the run-up to the 1898 Reform Movement, he had been using Zhongguo in his pieces for *Shiwu bao * 時務報. With the failure of that movement and his taking refuge in Japan, he began replacing Zhongguo with Zhina.

As a pioneer in introducing all the new Japanese neologisms into the Chinese language, Shina/Zhina had a fresh cachet about it, even if he may have known its linguistic origins in medieval times. There is ultimately no way for us to know his actual reasoning on this matter, but it is clear that he made the switch promptly—and completely, at least initially.4

Eventually, however, he returned to using Zhongguo. Writing in 1900, Liang explained his thinking a bit:

4 See *Shiwubao * 1 (1896), as discussed in Saitō Mareshi 齋藤希史, “‘Shina’ sairon” 「支那」再論

(A reconsideration of “Shina”), in Kyōsei kara tekitai e, daiyonkai Nit-Chū kankei shi kokusai *shinpojiumu ronbunshū * 共生から敵対へ、第四回日中関係史国際シンポジウム論

文集 (From coexistence to antagonism: Essays from the fourth international symposium on the history of Sino-Japanese relations), ed. Etō Shinkichi 江藤瀋吉 (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 2000), pp. 226–27, 231.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

Initially, was our China (Zhongguo) in antiquity a state? Or, was it just a dynastic court? We descendents of the Yellow Emperor have lived on the globe as a group for several thousand years, but when asked what the name of this land is, we have none. Tang, Yu, Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Wei, Jin, Song, Qi, Liang, Chen, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing are all dynastic names. A dynasty is the private property of a single family, whereas a land ( *guo * 國) * * is the jointly held property of a people. . . . The China of which I speak has not as yet appeared, but at present it has just begun to sprout. Heaven and earth are immense, and the future far, far off. How magnificent will our young China be!5

(且我中國疇昔**. 豈嘗有國家哉. 不過有朝廷耳. 我黃帝子孫. **聚族而

居**. 立於此地球之上者既數千年. 而問其國之為何名. 則無有也. **夫

所謂唐**. 虞. 夏. 商. 周. 秦. 漢. 魏. 晉. 宋. 齊. 梁陳. 隋. 唐. 宋. 元. 明. **清者則

皆朝名耳**. 朝也者. 一家之私產也. 國也者. **人民之公產也 . . . 於吾所

謂中國者何與焉**. 然則吾中國者. 前此尚未出現於世界. **而今乃始

萌芽雲爾**. 天地大矣. 前途遼矣. 美哉. **我少年中國乎.)

Obviously, there was no derogation intended in Liang’s usage, just an effort to overcome mere dynastic names (which could always be counted on to change) with a generic toponym but one also that could have life breathed into it anew.

The process by which “Zhongguo” became the established, generic term and

“Zhina” dropped out of currency in Chinese would seem to have more to do with the development of anti-Japanese sentiments in twentieth-century China than with the intrinsic and relative linguistic values of these two terms. The most outspoken opponent of “Shina” was, doubtless, Guo Moruo 郭沫若

(1892–1978) who railed against it, to the point of noting that in multiple national designations (such as “Sino-Japanese” in English) Japanese newspapers always placed the element for China (the “Shi” of “Shina”) last: thus,

“Nis-Shi” 日支 (Sino-Japanese), “Nichi-Ei-Shi” 日英支 (Japanese-English-Chinese), and the like.

Takeuchi found this line of argument utterly specious. “Shina” was the term to which he had become accustomed when writing in his native language; and, even if words do take on a life of their own, it had not a trace of ridicule attached to it, he claimed, in his usage. China and the Chinese people, as far 5 Liang Qichao, “Shaonian Zhongguo shuo” 少年中國說 (On a young China), Qingyi bao 36 (1900), in *Yinbingshi heji, wenji * 飲冰室合集、文集 (Collected writings from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio, essays) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 5: 9–10. See also Saitō Mareshi, pp. 228–29.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

as Takeuchi was concerned, could not be reduced to words. In addition, all of these discussions were meaningless to the everyday, ordinary people Takeuchi had come to know in the years he spent in China. How knowledgeable were those people who had suggested replacing “Shina” with “Chūgoku” with the actual feelings of the Chinese people about the term “Shina?” How confident were they that the term “Chūgoku” could be inserted into the quotidian Japanese lexicon? Would simply changing the term to “Chūgoku” insure that any alleged abuse inherent in the former term “Shina” disappear? Was this not like humoring a child? “Must we love the Chinese people?” he asked. I may love certain Chinese, he claimed, but it is not simply because they are “Chinese.” “I couldn’t care less whether you say ‘Shina,’ ‘Chūgoku,’ or whether you spell out

‘Zhongguo’ in *katakana. * I don’t wish to believe that this is simply a problem of language.”6

Takeuchi was not the only Japanese concerned with this issue before the end of the war, just arguably the most perceptive. In the postwar period, he came to grips with the change in toponyms and accepted Chūgoku, but he insisted that this not only did not solve any problem of residual bad feelings of Japanese toward China—it actually might serve just to cover it up. And, it also covered up the question of why the Chinese had come so thoroughly to detest Shina. As he understood it at this point, Chinese antipathy for the toponym Shina only arose with the rise of Chinese nationalism in the face of Japanese imperialism in the 1910s, spreading further in the 1920s—that is, the Nationalist era when

“Japanese government, newspapers, people all simply ignored the demands of Chinese nationalism. . . . The root of this evil was a historical legacy of belittling Chinese nationalism.”7

A fascinating exchange, which would seem to have been altogether unaware of earlier discussions of this issue, transpired in the pages of the Asahi *shinbun * 朝日新聞 in December 1952. The renowned Sinologist, Aoki Masaru 青木正児 (1887–1964), was struck by the sudden shift in usage, following the end of the war, from Shina to Chūgoku in Japan, and he was at a loss to understand why the Chinese apparently so hated the term Shina. True, he agreed, the term as utilized by many Japanese had accrued a negative nuance, but there 6 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Shina to Chūgoku” 支那と中國 (“Shina” and “Chūgoku”), *Chūgoku bungaku * 64 (August 1940), as reprinted in his *Nihon to Chūgoku no aida * 日本と中国のあいだ

(Between Japan and China) (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1973), pp. 178–83, quotation on p. 185. See also his “Shina o kaku to iu koto” 支那を書くということ (On writing the term “Shina”), *Chūgoku bungaku * 80 (January 1942), as reprinted in Nihon to Chūgoku no aida, pp. 222–26.

7 Cited in Saitō Mareshi, “‘Shina’ sairon,” in Kyōsei kara tekitai e, daiyonkai Nit-Chū kankei shi kokusai shinpojiumu ronbunshū, pp. 219–20.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

was nothing intrinsically derogatory about it, despite Chinese arguments to the contrary. The two-character expression derived, he argued, from an early Sanskrit transcription of “Qin” 秦, the ancient dynastic name which had become associated beyond China’s borders with the country’s name, much as Han/Kan (and Tang/Tō) later would become in Japan. There was certainly nothing inherently evil about the two characters—they were just phonograms with no nuance attached—nor was there anything evil in the initial Japanese adoption of the term (from the Chinese from the Sanskrit).

Aoki claimed simply that many Japanese preferred some generic toponym for the country of China over the name of a specific state or regime, such as

“Zhonghua minguo” 中華民國** **(J. Chūka minkoku) after 1912, just as had been the case under the Ming and Qing dynasties earlier. Indeed, the expression Shina often appeared for China in the Buddhist canon, as did various other two-character transcriptional approximations for however the character “Qin”

was pronounced at that time.8 Actually, Aoki averred, the several theories for what those two characters for “Shina” might imply—“country where the people have much on their minds,” “country of civilization,” and the like—all clearly indicated praise, not derision, for China. Many Japanese expressions had been developed as designations for China, and Shina—a term significantly not of Japanese innovation—could be traced back to at least the Kamakura period in Japanese usage. It became current late in the Edo era through the writings of Dutch Studies scholars (see below) and even more so through the Meiji era. In fact, it had even been adopted by some Western scholars (for this no proof is presented). Clearly, even if the term was perceived by Chinese as loaded with negative connotations, he concluded, there was no such original intent on the part of the Japanese who adopted it.9

Two weeks later an exceedingly angry reply by Liu Shengguang 劉勝光, ** **a Chinese journalist in Tokyo, was published in the same newspaper. Repeating entire paragraphs from Aoki’s piece, Liu interspersed his rebuttals. Yes, he began, Japanese had chosen at the time of the Qing to refer to China by what they took to be the dynastic designation, rather than a generic toponym; but, they had gotten it wrong. The term used by Japanese was Shinkoku (C. Qingguo) or “Qing nation,” when it should have been Shinchō 清朝 *** ***(C. Qingchao) or 8 For a detailed examination of the etymology of the term “Shina,” see Uemura Nizaburō 植村

仁三郎, “Shina meigi kō” 支那名義考 (A study of the meaning of the term “Shina”), Shigaku *zasshi * 史學雜誌 7, *furoku * 附録 (supplement), attached to 7.11 (November 1896), pp. 1–16; and to 7.12 (December 1896), pp. 17–40.

9 Aoki Masaru, “‘Shina’ to iu meishō ni tsuite” 「支那」という名称について (On the term

“Shina”), Asahi shinbun, December 17, 1952, p. 6.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

“Qing dynasty.” The former had never existed; there was no such animal as the

“Qing nation.” Liu admitted that Aoki had cleverly marshaled numerous old references where “Shina” had a positive or neutral connotation, but the simple fact, Liu declared, was that when Chinese people saw those two characters, Shina, they saw Japanese militarists and imperialism. And, he denied “absolutely” that any other foreigners had ever used the expression Shina; it was only the Japanese!

Liu went on to cite a passage written by Jiang Jieshi 蔣介石 * (1887–1975), who must have known Japanese well at an earlier stage in his life, in which the Generalissimo claimed that the term itself sounded like “a person at death’s door,” apparently because of its similarity to the Japanese verb shinu * 死ぬ *‘to die’ (more precisely, shina * 死な was the negative root of the verb shinu). * * Indeed, Liu claimed, the use of the term seemed to deny the very life of China. It was thus extremely humiliating to Chinese. “I can say with surety that this expression [Shina] absolutely does not appear in Chinese books.” He concluded with a note indicating what must have touched off this discussion. In recent Sino-Japanese negotiations, Yoshida Shigeru 吉田茂 **(1878–1967), wartime foreign minister and postwar prime minister (following the American Occupation’s

“reverse course”) with decidedly rightwing views, had occasionally misspoken

“Shina,” indicating a pre-1945 mentality and education and causing considerable offense.10

We have here two clear, polar statements of the arguments over the nuances (intended and unintended) of this particular Japanese designation for “China.” It is part of one of the more confusing stories in the development of Japanese Sinology and Japanese views of China generally. First of all, as we have seen above and will see further below, Liu Shengguang was dead wrong about Chinese never having used “Zhina.” Although it never emerged as the default term for “China,” it was used by many different Chinese. Sanetō Keishū

實藤惠秀 * *(1896–1985) reports an instructive story dating to 1907. In that year’s graduating class from Waseda University, ninety-five students from “China”

signed some sort of commemorative ledger. Most did not indicate a country of origin, but of the thirty-seven who did, eighteen listed “Zhina,” twelve gave

“Qingguo,” and only seven wrote either “Zhongguo” or “Zhonghua.” He suggests that “Zhina” was a way of implicitly rejected the Manchu-Qing state, thus 10 Liu Shengguang, “Chūgoku ni wa nai kotoba, ‘Shina’ ni tsuite hanron” 中国にはない

言葉、「支那」について反論 (A rebuttal concerning “Shina,” a word that does not exist in China), Asahi shinbun, December 30, 1952, p. 6.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

indicating a revolutionary mentality.11 “Zhina” was as well later to be found in the name of a Republican-period Buddhist school, “Zhina neixueyuan” 支那

内學院 (Chinese Inner Studies Institute), founded in 1922 by Ouyang Jian 歐陽漸 * *(1871–1943) and Lü Cheng 呂澂 * *(1896–1989) in Nanjing with funds from Zhang Binglin 張炳麟 (1868–1936), Liang Qichao, and Xiong Xiling 熊希齡 * *(1870–1937), among others; it continued in existence until 1952, although its name changed to “Zhongguo neixueyuan” 中國內學院 * * in 1949.12

(There was even a “Zhina gongchandang” 支那共產黨 * * or Chinese Communist Party, not to be confused with the “real” one, in the early 1920s, and the young Shi Cuntong 施存統 [1899–1970] used the term Zhina in proselytizing for a socialist revolution in his homeland.)13 Liu was also wrong to assume that the Japanese were alone in using Shinkoku, as at least one Chinese association of overseas students used that expression (C. Qingguo) in its title.

The unspoken thrust of Liu’s vituperative was the simple fact that the Japanese did not (jump through the proper hoops and) use the Chinese term of choice, an unspoken but nonetheless clear indication that they had not accepted the fact that they lost the war and were now required to take their marching orders from the former Allies (including China). Electing this option meant that they were no better than recalcitrant children. The Japanese had come in the prewar era to use Shina as naturally as Anglophones came to use its cognate “China,” but there was no hue and cry about that. Now that Japan had been thoroughly defeated in the war, it was time to pile on.

It was time for a thorough study of the Japanese use of the term Shina across all genres of texts from the Edo period through the early Shōwa decades—

easier said than done, indeed a massive undertaking. Nonetheless, Satō Saburō

佐藤三郎 (1912–2006) set out to do just that several decades ago. He examined 11 Summarized in Saitō Mareshi, “‘Shina’ sairon,” in *Kyōsei kara tekitai e, daiyonkai Nit-Chū *

kankei shi kokusai shinpojiumu ronbunshū, p. 214. Clearly, Sanetō was at pains to explain away any Chinese use of “Zhina” in a positive light, though this by no means eviscerates his argument.

12 Shi Dongchu 釋東初, *Zhongguo Fojiao jindai shi * 中國佛教近代史 (History of modern Chinese Buddhism), in *Dongchu laoren quanji * 東初老人全集 (Collected works of Old Man [Su] Dongchu) (Taibei: Dongchu, 1974), 1: 205–6.

13 Ishikawa Yoshihiro 石川禎浩, *Chūgoku Kyōsantō seiritsu shi * 中国共産党成立史

(History of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2001), p. 145. On its leader, Zhang Minquan 張民權, an Esperantist and anarchist, see Ishikawa, pp. 383–84. One example of Shi Cuntong’s use of the term appears in: CT (Shi Cuntong),

“Women yao zenmeyang gan shehui geming?” 我們要怎麼樣幹社會革命 (How are we going to make the social revolution?), *Gongchandang * 共產黨 5 (June 1921), as cited in Ishikawa, p. 323.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

a multiplicity of texts over these years in an effort to describe, first, the emergence and predominance of Shina and, second, its subsequent supersession by Chūgoku.14

Satō demonstrates conclusively that there was no consistency in the Japanese use of terms for “China” before bakumatsu * 幕末* **times (last years of the Edo period, 1600–1868). Indeed, one often finds two or more different expressions for China in the same text. Shina was rarely used prior to the middle years of the Edo period, and the *bakufu * usually used Tō. When Arai Hakuseki 新井白石 (1657–1725) employed the term Shina in 1713, it carried only positive connotations. Hakuseki had heard a cognate of the word in his 1709 interrogations of the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Battista Sidotti (1668–1714) who had (unsuccessfully) tried the previous year to enter Japan illegally while the ban on Christianity was in force; he was soon arrested and died in prison in Japan six years later. Hakuseki noted that the word Sidotti used for China (presumably, Italian “Cina”), which Hakuseki rendered as “Chiina” ** **チイナ, was cognate with Shina, and thereafter he used the latter word himself as a toponym for China irrespective of dynasty, just as the word “China” is used in English.15 At the time “Shina” was believed to reflect an Indian pronunciation of the toponym for China that Buddhist travelers, such as Xuanzang 玄奘 (ca.

596–664) and others, had often used many centuries earlier. It was thought to have derived from the dynastic name Qin and carry the sense of a vast, 14 Satō Saburō, “Nihonjin ga Chūgoku·o Shina to yonda koto ni tsuite no kōsatsu” 日本人

が中国を支那と呼んだことについての考察 (A study of the Japanese use of [the

term] Shina for China), in his *Kindai Nit-Chū kōshō shi no kenkyū * 近代日中交渉史の

研究 (Studies in the history of modern Sino-Japanese relations) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1984), pp. 25–66.

15 Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988), pp. 328–29.

On the basis of his questioning of Sidotti, Hakuseki wrote both *Seiyō kibun * 西洋紀聞

(Chronicle of the West) and *Sairan igen * 采覽異言 (Strange stories acquired). There is a question about what language Hakuseki would have used to question Sidotti, and the involvement of the Dutch interpreters in Nagasaki as well as the Dutch themselves (who may have known Latin) is fair to assume, although Hakuseki claims to have been able to make out what Sidotti was saying (highly doubtful). Concerning Hakuseki and this usage in the context of Japanese world geographies of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, see Torii Yumiko 鳥井裕美子, “Kinsei Nihon no Ajia ninshiki”

近世日本のアジア認識 (Early modern Japanese perceptions of Asia), in Kōsaku suru *Ajia * 交錯するアジア (Asia entangled), ed. Mizoguchi Yūzō 溝口雄三, Hamashita Takeshi 浜下武志, Hiraishi Naoaki 平石直昭, and Miyajima Hiroshi 宮島博史 (Tokyo University Press, 1993), vol. 1 of a 7-volume series, *Ajia kara kangaeru * アジアから考える

(Reconsiderations from Asia), pp. 226–27, 234–38.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

unified empire.16 For Buddhists of the Six Dynasties period, when Buddhism spread widely in China and Chinese traveled in ever greater numbers to India to acquire the texts of the religion firsthand, the term Zhongguo was reserved for India,17 as the central land on the map, thus requiring a different name for their own homeland. According to Fayun 法雲 (twelfth century), a Chinese monk of the Song period, the term implied a “nation of culture” ( wenwu guo 文物國) and was originally a term of high praise, which was how it had been understood in China. By the eighteenth century, no Chinese were using the term any longer, although Hakuseki held a reverential attitude toward China and could only have used it in a positive sense.

Nonetheless, “Shina” did not come into regular usage until the nineteenth century. And, interestingly, it may have been scholars of Dutch Learning with special expertise in the modern discipline of geography who played the most significant role here. The map of the world drawn in Holland (and presumably those elsewhere in Western Europe) did not resemble the conception of the world derived in China, and Dutch influence served in its way to relativize Japanese views of China’s place *in * the world geographically. Dutch Learning scholars in Japan thus began to use “Shina” in place of those toponyms—

such as Chūka or Chūgoku—that stressed China’s universal centrality. Three examples should suffice. Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, 16 Some years ago, a fascinating article on this issue was published in China’s leading historical journal, though it has gone (almost) totally ignored. In a study of the origins of the two-character expression pronounced “Zhina” in Chinese, Su Zhongxiang 苏仲湘

argues (with immense amounts of supportive evidence) that originally it was indeed an

“Indian” (i.e., Sanskrit) effort to transcribe the name for China. But, although it dates to the Qin era, the term derives not from a reading of “Qin” but from the Chinese rendering for the ancient state of Jing 荆, much revered by those who wrote the documents in which “Zhina” first appeared; in fact, it was emblematic of the entire Chinese mainland itself to them, an ancient synecdoche, if you will. Second, it was south China to which the term principally pointed, that part of China with which Indians who came to China had the closer contact. Finally, Su argues on the basis of an analysis of the ancient pronunciations of the Chinese characters involved, Jing is the better candidate. Although Su gets a little carried away at the end of his essay, lauding the greatness and wonders of Sino-foreign contacts even way back when—and concluding “Oh, how this makes our thoughts go back in time!”—still this is one of the best pieces on the subject. Also, there is conspicuously no mention of the Japanese reflex “Shina” anywhere in this essay. See Su Zhongxiang, “Lun ‘Zhina’ yici de qiyuan yu Jing de lishi he wenhua” 论「支那」一词的

起源与荆的历史和文化 (On the origins of the term “Zhina” and the history and culture of [the state of] Jing), *Lishi yanjiu * 历史研究 4 (April 1979), pp. 34–48.

17 See Xiaofei Tian, *Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China *(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), p. 97.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

Sugita Genpaku 杉田玄白 (1733–1817) noted: “The earth is one big sphere with numerous countries distributed around it. Every one of them [believes] the place they inhabit is at the center. . . . Shina, too, is a small country in a corner of the Eastern Sea.” Shortly thereafter, Maeno Ryōtaku 前野良澤 * *(1723–1803) wrote: “Ever since high antiquity, China has changed dynasties in power any number of times, and it has had no specific name throughout that time. ‘Shina’

is what people in the lands of the West—Europe and India—call it, which is just like our use of the expression ‘Morokoshi,’ in use from past to present.

Thus, I use it [Shina].” And, in a similar vein, Ōtsuki Gentaku 大槻玄澤 * *(1757–

1827) would note: “‘Shina’ is a name from the countries of the West for the land from past to present now inhabited by the Qing dynasty. The pronunciation of its [two characters] has been set by translators. Thus, at present I shall use this place name.”18

It should be noted that Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century, building on their Catholic predecessors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, doggedly stressed the idea of a spherical Earth. The outside of a sphere—where people lived and countries claimed terrain—had no center.

All spots were equal from a geographical point of view. It has been strongly suggested that William Medhurst, a Protestant missionary, purposefully placed a globe of the Earth in the guestroom of his quarters in Shanghai as a reminder of such to his Chinese visitors.19

To count the number of times the various terms for China were used in all Japanese texts is virtually impossible, but Satō examines one large body of sources, the collections of accounts written by people who were shipwrecked during the Edo period and found themselves washed up on Chinese soil. Since travel to China was illegal under the *kaikin * 海禁 * *(maritime restrictions or seclusion; also known later as *sakoku * 鎖國) policy, these accounts were effectively the only primary materials concerning China by Japanese at the time.

18 Sugita Gentaku, *Kyōi no gen * 狂醫之言 (Words of a crazed doctor); Maeno Ryōtaku, *Kanrei higen * 管蠡祕言 (Secret words about narrow views); Ōtsuki Gentaku, Rangaku *kaitei * 蘭學階梯 (Introduction to Dutch Learning). All can be found in Numata Jirō 沼

田次郎, Matsumura Akira 松村明, and Satō Shōsuke 佐藤昌介, eds., Nihon shisō taikei *64: Yōgaku jō * 日本思想大系 64: 洋學上 (Compendium of Japanese thought, vol. 64: Western Learning, part 1) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976): pp. 227–43, 127–80, and 317–72, respectively.

19 Liu Jianhui 劉建輝, *Mato Shanhai, Nihon chishikijin no “kindai” taiken * 魔都上海：日本

知識人の「近代」体験 (Demon capital Shanghai, the “modern” experience of Japanese intellectuals) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000), pp. 78, 107–8; English translation by Joshua A. Fogel, Demon Capital Shanghai: The “Modern” Experience of Japanese *Intellectuals *(Portland, Me: MerwinAsia, 2012), pp. 62–63, 87–88.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

His conclusions show that, although there were as many as eleven individual terms for China and somewhat fewer for the Chinese people, the overwhelming favorites were Tōkoku 唐國 (or similar terms with Tō as the first element, such as Tōdo 唐土) and Tōjin 唐人, respectively. Although Shina was at the time a scholarly or technical term for China, it was rarely used to designate the real thing.

During the early and mid-nineteenth century, use of Shina began to increase, and its connotation began to decline, according to Satō. In a famous letter of 1855, for example, Yoshida Shōin 吉田松陰 * *(1830–1859) referred to

“Shina” as an object for Japan to conquer (though, it should be added, the word itself was not distinctive in this way); earlier, in 1808, Satō Nobuhiro 佐藤信淵 * *

(1769–1850) offered high praise for the Qing government and encouraged close Sino-Japanese ties, but only fifteen years later he was calling for the Japanese conquest and annexation of “Shina.” During the same period, however, Yokoi Shōnan 横井小南 (1809–1869) was urging close ties between “Shina” and Japan, and clearly the term did carry a negative sense for him. While it is rather easier to understand how the general image of China was declining in Japanese eyes during the age of Western encroachment, defeat in war with the British and the French, the Taiping Rebellion, and the like, it still remains difficult to explain why during these years the use of Shina increased. The diarists and chroniclers aboard the *Senzaimaru * 千歲丸 voyage of 1862, the first legal Japanese trip to China in several centuries, often used “Shina” as well as Shin (Qing) and Tōkoku, and from that point forward it seemed to carry the special sense of “contemporary China.”20

In the early Meiji period, elementary school textbooks and newspapers often glossed the two Chinese characters now pronounced “Shina” with a variety of *furigana * expressions: *Chaina * チャイナ, * Kara * から, * Nankin * ナンキン, as well as *Shina * しな. This would indicate that there was still no fixed reading for the Chinese characters, but, as the term Nis-Shi 日支 * *(Sino-Japanese) came into currency, Shina became the preferred reading.

Satō examines four kinds of written materials for the early and mid-Meiji era. First, in official government documents, Shina was used, but so too were 20 Satō mentions the interesting case of one of the earlier shipwrecked Japanese by the name of Hamada Hikozo 濱田彥藏 (1837–1897), who was picked up by an American ship, taken to the United States, educated and naturalized there. He later returned to Yokohama, with the new name of Joseph Heco, where he inaugurated Japan’s first modern newspaper; he always used the terms Shina and Shinajin in his paper. Satō suggests that the reinforcing influence of the English term “China” on his usage, and perhaps eventually on general Japanese usage.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

“Kando” 漢土, Tōkoku, and Shinkoku. Gradually, Shina and Shinkoku became the general terms and were often employed in the same documents. Second, diaries and letters also preserved the dual usage of Shina and Shinkoku—if only to avoid redundancy. Third, newspapers were using Shina widely by the second decade of Meiji (1877–1886); through an analysis of articles from selected years, he shows that Shina predominates and that the only other name used for China was Shin (with Shinkoku as a variant). Finally, as noted above, the Chinese characters for “Shina” were in wide use in textbooks, though not always glossed with the pronunciation “Shina.”

These four genres of writings demonstrate that Shina had already become entrenched, though not unilaterally, in popular Japanese usage by the mid-1880s, certainly well before the Sino-Japanese War. Satō thus successfully supersedes the argument made some years ago by Sanetō Keishū that Shina came into general use only after the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894–1895.21

Until the end of the Meiji era, which happened to coincide with the end of the Qing dynasty, the official Japanese designation for China remained dai Shin *teikoku * 大清帝國, and this usage is reflected in the Japanese names for such major events of the day as *Nis-Shin sensō * 日清戰爭 * *(Sino-Japanese War [of 1894–1895]) and *Hoku-Shin jihen * 北清事變 (North China Incident, namely the Boxer Uprising).

From 1912, however, “Shin” ceased to have meaning as a generic designation for China, and Shina finally attained complete dominance, which it held until 1945. The official Chinese designation for the Republic, Zhonghua minguo, * * never came into wide use in Japan, as even official Japanese documents usually used the expressions *Shina kyōwakoku * 支那共和國 * *(a direct Japanese translation of “Republic of China”) or simply Shina. That “Shin” dropped out of usage virtually overnight should not be taken as self-evident just because the Qing dynasty ceased to exist. Long after both the Han and Tang dynasties, Han/

Kan and Tang/Tō continued in use, as we have seen, and indeed right down until today in certain well circumscribed areas. The fact that Qing represented in the popular imagination the dynasty of the Manchus may help explain its quick disappearance or lack of relevance. It would be going too far, however, to assume that the Japanese were relieved in 1912 to be rid of “Shin” and its Manchu overlords and to celebrate the return of China to the Shinajin. By the same token, centuries earlier, Gen 元 * *(Yuan) was used either for the dai Gen 大元 * *(great Yuan dynasty of the Mongols) or for Genkō 元寇 * *(“Mongol” pirates or invaders who attacked Japan several times in the thirteenth century). The confluence of ethnonyms and toponyms can get very muddy.

21 See Sanetō Keishū, *Kindai Nit-Chū kōshō shiwa * 近代日中交渉史話 (History of modern Sino-Japanese relations) (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1973), p. 87.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

Before looking at Satō’s discussion of the debate over the nuances of the term Shina, let me add a few historical observations to its background. The national renewal in Japan occasioned by the ousting of the Tokugawa shogunate and the return of the symbol of the emperor to center stage at the beginning of the Meiji period brought a concomitant decrease in respect for China in many quarters. If Japan had been able to withstand the pressures of Western encroachment, why had the considerably bigger and theoretically more powerful China apparently failed so miserably to do the same? How could such a country still consider itself the “Central Kingdom?” Central to what? The earliest Japanese allowed to travel to China after the lifting of the *sakoku * ban returned with mixed reports, but the overall picture was not an especially pretty one, even if the Chinese people were not to be blamed for the obvious decline of their country. The growing disrespect for Japan’s former teacher in the ways of civilization found popular expression in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s 福澤

諭吉 (1834–1901) derisive call to *datsu-A * 脫亞 or “escape from Asia” in the mid-1880s. At the same time, popular expressions of derogation for the Chinese people, such as “Chan chan bōzu” チャンチャン坊主, appeared more frequently in Japan and to be used with respect to the ethnic Chinese living in Japan’s larger cities.22

Let us now take a closer look at the elusive problem of the nuances that accrued to the expression Shina as used by Japanese. Through the third decade of the Meiji era, Chinese scholars were feted whenever they visited Japan by their counterparts in Kangaku 漢學 or scholarly Chinese studies; they exchanged Chinese-style poems (Kanshi 漢詩) and engaged in countless “brush conversations” ( *hitsudan * 筆談, * * or C. bitan). * * At least through these years and in these circles, Shina retained its generally positive connotations.

Meanwhile, a continued spread in use of the term Shina from the bakumatsu and early Meiji eras forward coincided with great tumult on the Asian mainland and increasing Japanese intellectual fascination with Western civilization.

From these sources, the negative connotations of filth, ineptitude, laziness, and weakness seemed to agglutinate to the term “Shina.” This perspective on 22 Yamane Yukio 山根幸夫, “Nihonjin no Chūgoku kan” 日本人の中国観 (Japanese views of China), *Tōkyō joshi daigaku ronshū * 東京女子大学論集 (September 1968), pp. 1–2.

Unexpectedly, Fukuzawa has enjoyed a largely positive reappraisal in the newly rising economies of East and Southeast Asia today, including the People’s Republic of China; see Imanaga Seiji 今永清二, “‘Datsu-A ron’ to Chūgoku bunkatsuron ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu: Fukuzawa shisō no gendai teki igi o megutte” 「脱亜論」と中国分割論に関

する一考察：福沢思想の現代的意義をめぐって (A study of the thesis of “escape

from Asia” and the partition of China: On the contemporary awareness of Fukuzawa’s thought), *Kindai Nihon kenkyū * 近代日本研究 2 (1985), pp. 261–90.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

Shina, though, remained latent until after the humiliating Japanese defeat of China in 1895. That victory transformed the view of Japan held by a generation of Chinese intellectuals and spurred thousands to go study there. The first group of thirteen Chinese students arrived in March 1897, and by April four of them were already back in Japan, victims of bad food and the ridicule of Japanese school children, they claimed.23

Although originally derived from Chinese Buddhist texts, probably a term of praise, and even popular for a time in China, as noted above “Shina” never caught on as a general designation for China among the ordinary Chinese population. Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848–1905) arrived in Japan in late 1877

to help open the first Chinese Legation there and soon became extremely interested in Japanese history and culture. In his Riben zashi shi * 日本雜事詩* **

(Poems about various things in Japan), which caused a sensation in Japan, he offered an explanation for the Japanese reading of the Chinese characters for

“Shina,” arguing that this pronunciation came to Japanese from renderings for

“China” in European languages. This assertion would seem to imply that Huang had never heard the expression before coming to Japan.

In modern China, the use of Shina—or Zhina—dates primarily to the years just after the Sino-Japanese War when large numbers of Chinese came to Japan as students. In the many books about the West and China that they translated from Japanese into Chinese, “Shina” was often rendered “Zhongguo” and sometimes left as “Zhina,” as in one volume translated by Liang Qichao.

What about the Chinese opposition to the use of Shina? Anti-Japanese feelings were on the rise among Chinese as a result of events in the 1910s and 1920s. Some claimed that, while “Shina” may have shared its roots with English

“China” and French “Chine,” in the mouths of Japanese there was something else that was missing from European enunciations. In his piece (mentioned above) of September 1936, Guo Moruo (who knew Japanese well) admitted that the expression Shina was not evil in and of itself, nor did it have pernicious origins. But, when used by Japanese, it was comparable, indeed worse, than the derogatory way in which Europeans often spoke the word “Jew” (or “Juif” or

“Jude”). In a less convincing argument, he added that in all Japanese binational designations, the element for China came last. Yu Dafu 郁达夫 * *(1896–1945), who spent a number of allegedly unhappy years in Japan, expressed similar sentiments in several of his novels.24

23 See Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–

*1905 *(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

24 Satō Saburō, “Nihonjin ga Chūgoku·o Shina to yonda koto ni tsuite no kōsatsu,” in his Kindai Nit-Chū kōshō shi no kenkyū, pp. 46–55.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

Several other Chinese arguments against the use of Shina, noted by Satō

and others, are even more far-fetched. Wang Gongbi 王拱璧 (1886–1976) claimed that “Shina” was homophonous with Japanese expressions implying

“imminent demise” 將死 * *(I think there is something wrong here linguistically) and “thing” or “item” ( *shina * 品). Others claimed that the first syllable of Shina (支那) implied the Japanese expression *shihai * 支配 * * or ‘control,’ while the second syllable implied (this time, only in Chinese) a grammatical third person; hence, the term belittled the Chinese people in the sense of “control them.”

Some even suggested that the *shi * element in Shina implied the idea of “branch store” ( *shiten * 支店) with Japan as the “main store” ( *honten * 本店). These arguments are, frankly, specious to the point of incredulity.

In early June 1930 the Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun * 東京日日新聞* **editorial-ized against the use of the Chinese expression for the Republic of China, Zhonghua minguo, because both of the elements of the first term, Zhong and Hua, contained outdated conceptions of the Chinese as civilized and the others as, implicitly, barbarous. With “Shina,” all people stood on an equal footing, the newspaper argued, and there was no room for self-flattery. To the alleged Chinese claim that Zhonghua minguo was a Chinese translation of the English expression “National Republic of China,” the Japanese newspaper retorted that

“Shina” was just as much “China.” The next day, June 8, the newspaper ran a rebuttal by the pseudonymous “Jittō” 實東 (later demonstrated to be the work of Sanetō Keishū who used the first character as his pen name) which put the problem simply: If the Chinese want to be called Zhonghua or Zhongguo, then that is their business. It is no different from a personal name, chosen by the person who bears it. (There is a problem here, for how many of us actually chose our own personal names? They are given to us at birth by others, usually parents or other relatives, and for reasons reflecting many different ethnic and religious traditions.) The term “Nihon” 日本 also, he argued, carried self-aggrandizing connotations when viewed from abroad (he had to have meant only the *Kanji * countries). Agreed, Shina has no intrinsically negative sense, but it is simply not the name the Chinese have chosen for themselves. (They didn’t choose “China” either, but never complained about it.) Sanetō, thus, knew full well the long and distinguished pedigree of the term Shina/Zhina, but he was also suggesting that words acquire nuances with the passage of time, and this one no longer sounded good to Chinese ears.25

25 Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun, June 5, 1930, and June 8, 1930; and Satō Saburō, “Nihonjin ga Chūgoku·o Shina to yonda koto ni tsuite no kōsatsu,” in his Kindai Nit-Chū kōshō shi no kenkyū, pp. 55–57. See also the excellent article by Kawashima Shin 川島真, “‘Shina’

‘Shinakoku’ ‘Shina kyōwakoku’: Nihon Gaimushō no tai-Chū koshō seisaku”「支那」

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

Sanetō summarized the arguments against adopting “Chūgoku” in four points: (1) It (“center of the world”) is an arrogant name; (2) there is no historically more popular toponym in Japan than Shina; (3) as a cognate of “China,”

it is an international name; and (4) Japan itself has a place name Chūgoku (in the Hiroshima area) that confuses things. Sanetō then rebutted each of these points. First, names of countries are all more or less arrogant, and contemporary China is not an overly confident state. As for the third point, China (the world’s largest country) did not use a form of Shina for itself, and the Soviet Union used Kitai (китай), meaning that “Shina” and cognates are hardly international, if the two most populous countries in the world did not use them.

Concerning the region of Japan known as Chūgoku, Sanetō suggested changing the area’s name to what would translate as “the Western region of Honshū”

(Honshū saibu chihō 本州西部地方). * * Most ink, though, was spilled over the second point, the roots of “Shina” in the Buddhist canon going back to India and the like. Sanetō claimed that this may be true, but “Shina” in Japan had no such origins; it had only entered Japanese with the tale recounted above concerning Arai Hakuseki and his subsequent use of the term in Sairan igen of 1713.26

In October of 1930, the Japanese government decided to change its position and adopt “Zhonghua minguo” (J. Chūka minkoku) as its official designation for the Republic of China. “Shina” remained far and away the popular favorite, and the war that began soon thereafter was soon to be dubbed Shina jihen 支那事變 or the “China Incident.” During the allied occupation of Japan in which China participated, the Chinese demanded an official end to Japanese use of the term Shina. The demand was accepted by the Japanese government on June 6, 1946.

In the postwar period, when scholars of Chinese history and culture in Japan were trying to atone for the sins of the prewar period and any complicity for which their profession may have been responsible in the war effort on the mainland, considerable scrutiny was focused on this issue of toponyms for China. It has become second nature now to refer to the expression Shina as a derisive prewar designation for China; that is, by not accepting the Chinese

「支那国」「支那共和国」：日本外務省の対中呼称政策 (“Shina,” “Shinakoku,”

Shina kyōwakoku”: The policy of the Japanese Foreign Office in names for China), *Chūgoku kenkyū geppō * 中国研究月報 49.9 (September 1995), p. 4. Kawashima’s essay concentrates largely on the toponyms in its title as a problem in Sino-Japanese diplomatic encounters.

26 Saitō Mareshi, “‘Shina’ sairon,” in Kyōsei kara tekitai e, daiyonkai Nit-Chū kankei shi kokusai shinpojiumu ronbunshū, pp. 214–216.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

term Zhongguo, the Japanese are alleged to have committed an act of intellectual or cultural imperialism no different in their realm from the military actions of others in other realms.

I have no intention of becoming involved in the exculpating process, nor of offering advice to Japanese colleagues. However, the postwar mass mea culpa has tended toward a rejection of many of the finest achievements of prewar Sinology, often because of the political views of the authors or the connotations of their language. This is probably no different from saying a given German scholar of the 1930s was a fine historian, even if he was a virulent anti-Semite. Bernard Wasserstein’s recent exposé of Hannah Arendt’s use of sources is extraordinarily revealing in that connection.27

First, as noted, Liu Shengguang was wrong; Japanese were not the only ones to use the expression “Shina.” Such Chinese figures of diverse political persuasions as Liang Qichao, Zhang Binglin, Song Jiaoren 宋教仁 * *(1882–1913), Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 * *(1866–1925), and Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉 * *(1865–1953) all had occasion to use its Chinese correlate, Zhina. All five men were among those intellectuals and political figures at the turn of the last century who were involved in China’s effort to reassess its place in the world, a world in which China was no longer realistically the Central Kingdom and had no business so advertis-ing itself. All spent time in Japan. While Liang became, for a while, an open Japanophile, Zhang’s ethno-nationalism served to make him considerably less respectful of his Japanese hosts, while in Japan Zhang famously initiated the founding of the “Zhina wangguo erbai sishi’er nian jinianhui” 支那亡國二百

四十二年紀念會 (Commemorative society for the 242nd anniversary of the loss of China) from Tokyo shortly after his arrival there after being released from prison in China. Song launched the journal *Ershi shiji zhi Zhina * 二十世

紀之支那 * *(Twentieth-century China) in Tokyo in 1904 as the revolutionary organ of students from Hunan and Hubei provinces; the Tōkyō asahi shinbun 東京朝日新聞 * * of July 30, 1905 carried a notice about it and mentioned that this new journal was extremely critical of Japan. Sun’s association with the term involved one of his Japanese associates by the name of Umeya Shōkichi 梅屋庄吉 (1868–1934);28 and Wu’s intellectual peregrinations are too complex to trace here. Nonetheless, all adopted the use of the Japanese expression for China, a term whose ultimate etymon is, as noted, a Sanskrit rendering from Buddhist texts. For all the well-known scholarly and political differences 27 Bernard Wasserstein, “Blame the Victim—Hannah Arendt among the Nazis: The Historian and Her Sources,” *Times Literary Supplement * 5558 (October 9, 2009), pp. 13–15.

28 See the excellent if excessive treatment at http://baike.soso.com/v795437.htm.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

among Liang, Sun, Zhang, Song, Wu, and Shi Cuntong, all of them opted for the more neutral Zhina, albeit not permanently.

Second, there is a certain naturally temporal quality to the designations used in naming. Of course, the power to establish a name that sticks presup-poses some sort of authority of enforcement, but many other factors come into play before a name takes hold, not the least of which is comparable names for other states and ethnicities (the two thorniest and most easily offended group-ings). Many terms have been offered as names for countries and ethnic groups that have simply not withstood the pressures of time and circumstance and have, accordingly, changed. Before the mid-1960s, virtually every well-meaning American, black or white and regardless of political affinity, referred to blacks as “Negroes” with no intention of offense or slight. It was simply the respectful name in use; and it was superior to the openly reviled and offensive term “colored,” still in legal use by Southern bigots (to say nothing of the highly offensive term in colloquial use by this group). Use of “Negro” thus carried with it the self-proclamation of liberal or progressive or simply evolved. By the late 1960s, few if any liberals were still using “Negro” but had shifted to “black,” because that was declared the ethnonym of choice by the group so named. Did that mean that people who had used the term “Negro” prior to the late 1960s were all racists, as it was clearly indicated it did for those who continued to use it after the late 1960s? No one to my knowledge began the silly process of relexify-ing “Negro” (as Shina was forced to endure) and hence to discover hidden bias within. The newer ethnonyms, “Afro-American” or “African-American” (the latter sometimes without a hyphen), have been put forth in more recent times as candidates to replace “black,” but while gaining considerable ground have not as yet completely replaced “black.” We may witness yet another name shift in the not-too-distant future, and “black” may fall out of currency in certain quarters.29

Of course, in the prewar period most Chinese used Zhongguo (not Zhina) as a designation for their country, while most Japanese used Shina. However, the use of Shina, I would argue, was not a conscious choice on the part of those Japanese, nor was it a way of taking a peculiarly anti-Chinese stance. In the postwar period, Japanese have all moved to adopt Chūgoku in imitation of the 29 Since I first put forth this argument more than twenty years ago, I am happy to say that it has become a standard part of numerous websites in Chinese, Japanese, and English, usually without attribution; perhaps plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. See my “On Japanese Expressions for ‘China,’” *Sino-Japanese Studies * II.1 (December 1989), pp. 5–16, reprinted in *The Journal of Intercultural Studies *(Kansai University of Foreign Studies) 17–18 (1990–1991), pp. 31–40.

New Thoughts On An Old Controversy

Chinese. The logical extension of the argument that Shina is offensive would be for Japanese to go one step further and use the Chinese term Zhongguo (pronounced in Chinese or in something akin to Chinese). That would be inconceivable, as Takeuchi Yoshimi sarcastically suggested. By the same token, continuing in the face of this shift to use Shina would be a retrograde act—

and in the few instances in which it crops up, it has been soundly and roundly vilified.

There are instances in which the shift has not been so easy, as toponyms tend to be conservative by nature. The two most readily available examples are the place names in Japanese for the East China Sea (Higashi Shinakai 東シナ海) * * and the South China Sea (Minami Shinakai 南シナ海). * * Replacing

“Shina” with “Chūgoku” in such instances is easier said than done. Thus far, the usual tack has been to replace the characters for “Shina” with the two *katakana * syllabaries—which is incidentally the first choice on the Microsoft Word Japanese program for these two place names. Similarly, “Indochina” (a term which has dropped out of contemporary usage even in English but which retains historical significance) is now rendered in Japanese as インドシナ, though it used to be written with the characters 印度支那 and pronounced exactly the same way. During the American-led war in Viet Nam in the 1960s, mainland Chinese newspapers regularly employed this term (pronounced

“Yindu-Zhina” in Chinese) in their reportage. The same procedure, rendering the two characters as two *katakana * syllabaries, is frequently used when referring to many prewar proper nouns.30

Surveying the present scene indicates much less sensitivity on the part of Chinese to the term Shina and growing ignorance of it in Japan—I am eliding the infamous case of the notorious troublemaker Ishihara Shintarō 石原慎

太郎 * *(b. 1932), present governor of Tokyo prefecture and hardcore rightwing politician, who went out of his way to use the expression “Shinajin” at a public venue. If the case with which I began this essay is any indication, even when China and the Chinese find the term offensive, they are nonetheless beginning to historicize the term. I would argue that this reflects a growing sense of 30 There are some other oddities that this dramatic shift in nomenclature has left behind:

“Shina soba” 支那そば (aka ramen) is now rarely used, and if it is, it is all written out in katakana; and “Shinachiku” 支那竹 (lit., Chinese bamboo; a topping for ramen composed of dried bamboo shoots) has more recently been replaced with *menma * メンマ.

The Sino-Tibetan language group is still, though, known as “Shina-Chibetto gozoku” シ

ナ・チベット語族 and, last time I checked, no one was losing any sleep over it. See also Lin Siyun 林思雲, “‘Zhina’ wenti zonghengtan” 「支那」問題縱橫談 (Thorough discussion of the “Shina” question) at www.epochtimes.com/b5/4/10/20/n695630.htm.

New Thoughts on an Old Controversy

Chinese self-confidence in the world, specifically vis-à-vis Japan and the United States. As China grows richer, capable of manipulating international financial dealings, United Nations declarations, and even military power plays—and especially as Japan remains mired in economic stagnation—debates over the perniciousness of “Shina” have receded into the realm of near irrelevance.

Witness similarly the way in which a much more confident Taiwan with little or no fanfare accepted *pinyin * after decades of holding on for dear life to the Wade-Giles Romanization scheme—if only because the PRC had devised the

“Communist” *pinyin * system.31

31 For helping me to end on a note of humor about the punning ways in which “Shina/

Zhina” is joked about in China today, I thank Victor Mair for sending this URL: http://

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4026.

■ Source: **“**The Gold Seal of 57 CE and the Afterlife of an Inanimate Object,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73.3 (July 2012), 351–69. Copyright © by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 73, Number 3 (July 2012).

The Gold Seal of 57 ce and the Afterlife of an Inanimate Object

This essay operates on the assumption that objects can inspire thought, and thought can generate debate, and the consequences of that debate can be of ontological importance. Thus, the inanimate object plays no “conscious” role in engendering ideas, but humans invest in it a range of meanings which can reach levels of great cultural and historical significance. The object in question is a golden seal, presently on display in the Fukuoka City Museum in Japan.

According to the official Hou Han shu (History of the Later Han dynasty), in the year 57 ce an emissary from the statelet of Nu in the kingdom of Wo (“Wa”

in Japanese, somewhere in what is now “Japan”) arrived at the court of the Guangwu Emperor of the Later Han. The emissary was seeking investiture, as had other foreign states, within the Later Han’s ritual system for his homeland in the Wa federation, and the court awarded him with a seal and a ribbon. This one-line entry in the massive *Hou Han shu * would doubtless have remained just one among many unprovable items from the Chinese dynastic histories had not something utterly extraordinary occurred over 1,700 years later. In 1784

a rice farmer in Fukuoka domain (Kyushu) was repairing an irrigation ditch in his rice paddy when he happened upon something shiny lodged between some rocks. He pulled it out, washed it off, and found that he had discovered some sort of inscribed seal. Unaware of just what it was or what value it might possess, by various hypothesized routes it was brought to the local magistrate who showed it to a local scholar, Kamei Nanmei (1743–1814), a famous Confucian teacher in his day. Nanmei looked at its inscriptional face (see below—its meaning remains debated till this day), and he knew immediately that this was the very seal mentioned in the *Hou Han shu. *

Before more than a small handful of people knew of its existence, Kamei Nanmei penned a lengthy essay explaining the meaning and defending the authenticity of the seal—an utterly brilliant piece of writing—and in so doing launched a debate that continues unabated till today, over two centuries later.

Every aspect of this small piece of gold, roughly one inch to a side, with a small handle in the shape of serpent or snake has been debated over the years—who received it, the meaning of the inscription, what the snake-shaped handle signifies, the significance of its gold composition as opposed to some other metal,

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

FIGURE 1

*Oversized image of the gold seal; original *

*roughly one inch square at its base. *

how it might have ended up where it did, and its overall importance (or irrelevance) in Sino-Japanese relations—altogether over 350 books and articles. In what follows I would like to outline the contours of that debate as a series of four historiographic waves, looking at how it has changed and, more importantly, why. It offers in microcosm a look at the changing nature of Japanese commentary on the relationship of Japan with Mainland culture.

Whatever may have been the interactions between the proto-Chinese and the proto-Japanese in the centuries before the launching of diplomatic interactions, we now generally accept the fact that the year 57 ce marks the first state-to-state meeting of the two (though it was certainly an unequal one). This fact is attested in the Hou Han shu, * * and even those who may have serious doubts about the gold seal do not as a rule question the testimony of the Chinese historical record. For example, writing shortly after the conclusion of World War II, the famed scholar Tsuda Sōkichi (1873–1961) was hesitant about claiming this meeting as the “first time the king of Na [“Nu” on the seal’s inscription]

had paid tribute” to the Han court, but the weight of subsequent scholarship confirms that is surely was.1 The gold seal given by the Later Han emperor to the emissary from the “Japanese” archipelago stands as the first material object of significance exchanged between the two lands, and the fact that it remains extant (despite seventeen centuries of being hidden in the ground) should not be underestimated.

1 See Tsuda Sōkichi, Nihon koten no kenkyū (Studies in the Japanese classics), * * in Tsuda Sōkichi *zenshū (Collected works of Tsuda Sōkichi) *(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1963), 1:18; Itō Terufumi,

“Nihonkoku to sono kokusai kankei no kigen ni tsuite: Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō no seiji-shi kenkyū” (“On the origins of the state of Japan and its international relations, a study in political history of the [gold seal inscribed to] King of the state of Na in Wa under the Han”), Hokuriku hōgaku 11.1–2 (2003): 11.

The Gold Seal Of 57 CE

FIGURE 2 * Inscriptional face of the seal, actual (left) and schematic (right). *

It also effectively marks Wa’s entrance into the world of “international” affairs, a world defined by the Han empire. The five-character inscription on the seal also marks the first instance in which written Chinese characters functioned in and of themselves in the archipelago. Objects with Chinese graphs on them were certainly imported to the archipelago earlier, but they were little more than impenetrable symbols or decorations with no intrinsic significance to the visitors. Kume Masao (b. 1948) has thus asserted that this exchange denotes

“Japan’s” first awareness of the universe of Chinese characters and hence its entrance into that world, where it remains, mutatis mutandis, to this day, a point strongly emphasized by the great Chinese Japanologist, Wang Xiangrong (1920–2006).2 But, long before Kume’s recent work, Kamei Nanmei noted in his defense of the seal’s authenticity: “The five characters of this seal mark the first time writing from a foreign country was transmitted to our land.” The seal’s discovery in 1784 was, according to him, a “good omen *[shōzui] * for civilization”

itself, as it marked the real start of such in his homeland by virtue of the Midas-like touch of continental culture.

Nanmei clearly understood the extraordinary significance of this find.

Equally important to confirmation of the story in the Hou Han shu was the fact that the seal’s actual discovery had taken place in his own domain in Fukuoka, 2 Kume Masao, “Kin’in Nakoku setsu e no hanron” (“Response to the thesis of the gold seal

[having been presented] to the state of Na”), in Ko bunka ronsō: Fujisawa Kazuo sensei koki kinen (Essays on ancient culture in commemoration of the sixtieth birthday of Professor Fujisawa Kazuo) (Osaka: Fujisawa Kazuo sensei koki kinen ronshū kankōkai, 1983), 112–13; Wang Xiangrong, *Xiemataiguo (The state of Yamatai) *(Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1982), 231–32.

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

thus marking an event of great auspiciousness as he was just then about to open the doors of one of his domain’s Confucian academies. Here was that early icon of Sino-Japanese ties unearthed just as his own academy was taking off. Nanmei was more than a devout Confucian. One might even think of him as a kind of Confucian fundamentalist. He believed that one could find most answers to questions of a philosophical or moral nature without looking further than the Lunyu (Analects [of Confucius]), * * the central text of the ancient Chinese philosopher. He was also a medical doctor and thus a man of science.

He argued in his other philosophical writings that knowledge and practice had to inform one another or neither would be of much use.3

Roughly three weeks after first being shown and allowed to analyze the gold seal in the spring of 1784, Nanmei wrote his famous piece about it, entitled 3 Yoshida Yōichi, “Kamei Nanmei no igaku shisō” Kamei Nanmei’s medical thought**), ** Yōgaku 8 (1999): 1–21; “Kameigaku koborebanashi” (“Tidbits of the Kamei school”), Kishi Noko hakubutsukan dayori 31 (1997): 7–9; Shōno Hisato, “Kokuhō ‘kin’in’ shutsudo ni tsuite” (“On the unearthing of the national treasure, the ‘gold seal’”), Kishi Noko hakubutsukan dayori 30

(1996): 10–12; Inoue Tadashi, “Kamei Nanmei to Takeda Sadayoshi, hankō seiritsu zengo ni okeru”) (“Kamei Nanmei and Takeda Sadayoshi, around the time of the establishment of the domainal schools”), in *Fukuoka ken shi, kinsei kenkyū hen, Fukuoka han (yon) *( History of Fukuoka Prefecture, section of early modern studies, Fukuoka domain, * * vol. 4), ed. Nishi Nihon bunka kyōkai (Western Japan cultural association) (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Prefecture, 1989), 23–24; Takanoe Mototarō, *Jukyō Kamei Nanmei: Nanmei sensei hyakkaiki kinen shuppan *( Confucian hero Kamei Namei, published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Nanmei’s death) (Fukuoka: self-publ., 1914); Tsujimoto Masashi, “Kansei ki ichi igakusha no shisō: Kamei Nanmei ni tsuite” (“A heterodox thinker in the Kansei period: Kamei Nanmei”), Kōka joshi daigaku Kōka joshi tanki daigaku kenkyū kiyō 17 (1979): 113; Tokuda Takeshi, ed.

and annot., Bunjin: Kameda Bōsai, Tanomura Chikuden, Nishina Hakukoku, Kamei Nanmei ( Literati: Kameda Bōsai, Tanomura Chikuden, Nishina Hakuboku, Kamei Nanmei), in series *Edo Kanshi sen *( Selections from Edo-period poetry in Chinese) * *(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996), 1:333; Nakaizumi Tetsutoshi, *Nihon kinsei gakkō ron no kenkyū *( Studies of views on schools in early modern Japan) * *(Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 1976), 310–16; Jin Peiyi, “Guijing Nanming Lunyu yuyou zhi jiejing fa” (“Kamei Nanmei’s method of explicating the classics in his Rongo goyū”), Hanxue luntan 1 (2006): 63–91; Terashi Bokusō, “Kamei Nanmei, sono hitotonari to gyōseki” (“Kamei Nanmei, his personality and accomplishments”), Nihon Tōyō igaku zasshi 54.6 (2003): 1023–33; Kasai Sukeharu, *Kinsei hankō no sōgōteki kenkyū *( Comprehensive study of early modern domainal schools) * *(Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1960), 3; Tsujimoto Masashi,

“Kamei Nanmei no gakkō ron to Fukuoka hangaku no setsuritsu” (“Kamei Nanmei’s views on schools and the establishment of domainal learning in Fukuoka”), Kōka joshi daigaku Kōka joshi tanki daigaku kenkyū kiyō 18 (1980): 117–18.

The Gold Seal Of 57 CE

*Kin’in no ben (On the gold seal). * 4 This piece was preceded by an authentication that the local magistrate asked him to make of the seal in which he merely gave its dimensions and shape and included a drawing. Unlike the seal itself, this drawing and copies of it circulated among Japanese intellectuals who far more often than not made their own (often strident) comments on it based solely on his drawing. The longer essay, written in a traditional style known as mondō

(“question and answer”), is primarily a series of hypothetical questions that might be (and later definitely were) raised about the genuineness of the gold seal. One by one Nanmei poses these points of doubt in as strong a way as he can, and one by one he demolishes them. For example: Is it possible that gold could remain underground surrounded by malicious rocks for nearly two millennia and come up without a scratch? Yes, Nanmei replies to his own straw-man question, and he proceeds to marshal scientific data to demonstrate that gold can hold out extremely well even for many centuries. Another example: Doesn’t the middle character of the inscription, *nu, * with its meaning of “slave”

or “servant” or simply “underling,” imply a decidedly negative evaluation of the statelet receiving it and hence of early Japan? Indeed, Nanmei replies, one finds the character in such tribal names as Xiongnu where a deprecatory implication may be read, but that would not have applied here, and he heads into a lengthy exegesis of what this graph would have meant at the time: It being a time in which we did not have writing [in Japan], when our emissary to the Han dynasty [in 57 ce] was asked there what the name of our country was, he would have responded orally ‘Yamato no kuni’ [the land of Yamato]. They attached the character 倭 to our national name.

Through the end of Han dynasty, they added the character 奴 to convey

‘Yamato no kuni’ with 倭奴國. In the Chinese language, [the character] 奴 is pronounced *no *[actually nu, but occasionally used to render Japanese no—JAF].

In [such Ming-period texts as] Wubei zhi [Treatise on military preparedness] * and Riben kao [Study of Japan], * * Mino [a Japanese place name] is transcribed with the Chinese characters 米奴* **and Kii 紀伊 [another] is rendered 乞奴苦藝 [‘Ki kuni’]. In the [Ming-period work] *Yinyun zihai *

[Dictionary of sounds and rhymes], words from our land are translated, such as *ushitsuno *(ox horn) rendered as 吾失祖奴 and tsuru no kubi (crane’s neck) as 它立奴谷只. Given these [examples], the term Xiongnu 4 Reprinted a number of times; see Kamei Nanmei Shōyō zenshū ( Collected writings of Kamei Nanmei and [Kamei] Shōyō) (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1978), 1:360–68.

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

represents a euphonic change from Xianyun [an early Chinese name for the Xiongnu]. These graphs [including 奴] are there for their pronunciation, not for their meaning. . . . There is [thus] no derogatory meaning to the character 奴 in the various writings of that land [i.e., China]. In our understanding of the character usage of that land, this should be something quite easy for us to comprehend.5

On the whole Nanmei’s defense is based on a recipe drawn from a range of disciplines: a little science, a little philology, and a lot of Confucianism. In the immediate years following the gold seal’s discovery and Nanmei’s essay, numerous pieces of varying length would be written by many of Japan’s leading intellectuals of the late eighteenth century. In fact, so many people over a wide geographic area contributed essays that one has frequently to remind oneself that this was an age not only prior to modern communications, of course, but one in which even inter-domainal communications and transportation were anything but smooth and travel was sharply monitored or curtailed.6 Somehow ideas transcended those barriers, even as it was people who necessarily carried the information.

The debate that followed Nanmei’s seminal essay took up many of the issues he raised. Many were based only on news of the discovery or just Nanmei’s authentication. In other instances, his longer essay was copied and circulated.

The contours of the debate, though, soon came down, on the one hand, to Confucians who understood Japan’s cultural heritage as intricately linked to that of the mainland and recognized that anything in which Japan might excel culturally found its roots in China (possibly via Korea). For this group, as for Kamei Nanmei, their progenitor, the seal was a testament to the antiquity of Japan’s ties to the Mainland. Their defenses of it tended to invoke the Confucian classics as the fount of truth and were less sanguine about native Japanese sources. Opponents of this group were, on the whole, men based in the nativist *(kokugaku) * tradition for whom the Confucian classics were an alien body of literature with little importance in Japan. These men tended to marshal evidence from the ancient Japanese classics, such as the Kojiki (Record 5 *“Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō” kin ’inten, kin ’in hakken nihyaku nen (Exhibit of the goal seal *

[inscribed] to the “King of Na of Wa under the Han”: Two hundred years since the discovery the gold seal) (Fukuoka: Fukuoka shiritsu rekishi shiryōkan, 1984), 74–75.

6 On travel restrictions in the Edo period, see Constantine N. Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1994).

The Gold Seal Of 57 CE

*of ancient matters) * and the *Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan). * They went out of their way either to downplay the importance of the unearthing of the gold seal or to cast anything from mild to serious aspersions on the small statelet whose emissary had received it from the court of the Later Han dynasty. Interestingly, though, it would be another five decades before anyone—significantly, a nativist scholar—would actually claim that the gold seal was a complete fake. That was to be Matsuura Michisuke (1801–66), a disciple of the notorious nativist scholar Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), writing in 1836.7 Matsuura’s essay would likely have remained entirely obscure if not for its republication by Miyake Yonekichi (1860–1929) at the end of the nineteenth century. As we shall soon see, Miyake completely disagreed with Matsuura’s thesis, but he thought it deserved the light of day.

Although Japanese Confucians did not completely ignore the Japanese classics any more than nativist Japanese completely ignored the Confucian classics, each group worked overtime to emphasize the importance of its own set of books as the source of truth. Thus, at one significant level, the debate took on almost a religious quality making it all but impossible for either side to convince the other of anything. The starkest contrast in the two main opposing sides was how each viewed the gold seal in connection with their own identity, or more broadly how each side saw its identity in relation to China and Chinese culture. The debate did have the positive effect (for later scholars) of bringing to the surface numerous topics in the more general Confucian-nativist debate which were otherwise submerged, and virtually all the traditional sources extant were brought to the fore, even if modern scholars may now approach them differently. And, as noted, much of the debate rehearsed points made in question-answer fashion by Kamei Nanmei.

Roughly one hundred years later by the middle of the Meiji era, with Confucianism on the wane and Central European academic benchmarks all the rage in scholarly circles in Japan, the well known historian Miyake Yonekichi brought the latest standards of philology and historical phonology to bear on a study of the gold seal, penning an essay which has set the standard ever since in the area of a proper reading of the seal’s five-character 7 Yamada Yoshio. Hirata Atsutane (Tokyo: Hōbunkan, 1940), 161. See Matsuura Michisuk, “Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō kin’in gisaku ben” (“On the forged gold seal [inscribed] to the king of Na in Wa under the Han”) rpt. in Miyake Yonekichi, “Wa no Na no kokuō kin’in gisaku setsu no hihyō” (“A critique of the theory that the gold seal [inscribed] to the king of the state of Na in Wa is a forgery”), Kōkogakukai zasshi 2.5 (1898), 10–13; and in *“Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō” *

kin’inten, kin’in hakken nihyaku nen 94–95.

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

inscription.8 There have been dissenting voices since his essay appeared, but they have been largely relegated to the sidelines as the minority opposition or as curiosities—a fact all the more fascinating when viewed in the light of the numerous essays before his that closely debated the reading of the seal’s inscription. Once Miyake’s extraordinary essay appeared, that discussion—on the reading and meaning of the inscription—was, as it were, over, even if some disagreed with it and, more recently, the debate has been somewhat revived.

Philology as the discipline of choice ruled the day from mid-Meiji Japan, and with its universalist claims that the surest way of searching for and reaching the origins of historical problems was by means of language, it had the power to shift paradigms.

The central claim of Miyake’s essay was that the inscription on the face of the gold seal should be read (in Japanese) as “Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō,”

meaning that this seal was presented to “the sovereign [or king] of the state of Na in Wa under the [aegis of the] Han” empire. The implication that this Japanese state of Na or the larger confederation of Wa were subservient in some way to the Later Han dynasty, anathema to nativists earlier, was no longer a serious issue, as it had been until that time. Miyake was also solving two other problems with this reading. First, the second character of the inscription 委, he claimed, echoing Kamei Nanmei himself, was merely a short form for Wa 倭, and thus not the first of a two-character approximation (倭奴) in Chinese for some other ancient Japanese state. Many had read those two graphs as “Ito” or “Ido”. Second, that troubling middle character 奴 was not, in his view, a Chinese stand-in for the genitive particle no, * * as even Nanmei had believed; nor, of course, did he think it bore any patronizing or derogatory view of Japan on the part of China. Instead, historical phonology deemed that it was to be read *na, * and it represented the Chinese approximation for the small state that had sent the emissary to the court of the Later Han.

As Miyake makes clear, however—and this provides another indication that the Confucian-nativist debate was a thing of the past—before the discovery was made, two scholars (one usually associated with Confucianism and the other a major figure in the nativist school) had already identified this troubling graph with the proper site in Kyushu at which the seal was later discovered. Writing in 1716, the celebrated historian Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725) identified the state of Na (as indicated in the *Wei zhi [Chronicle of the kingdom of Wei]) * as Naka-no-kōri in Chikuzen domain, Fukuoka. In his *Koshi tsū *

8 Miyake Yonekichi, “Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō in kō” (“A study of the seal [inscribed] to the King of the state of Na in Wa under the Han dynasty”), Shigaku zasshi 3.37 (1892): 874–81.

The Gold Seal Of 57 CE

wakumon (Questions concerning an understanding of ancient history), Hakuseki was not directly discussing the seal itself, of course, but the state referred to in the Wei zhi as “Nuguo” in Chinese, which he noted “was Naka-no-kōri in Chikuzen domain” in his own time. In the absence of the seal itself, not discovered until six decades after his death, this association accrued no followers and as such was not built upon in subsequent years.9

Sixty years later, the famed scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), writing in 1777, only a few years before the seal’s discovery, associated the same character with two different toponyms in the same region of Kyushu, and he assigned

“Na” to both of them as the correct reading. Arguably the greatest of the nativist scholars, Norinaga would later (after the seal was unearthed and became a topic of debate) go to pains to note that mention of this state of Na in the Wei zhi bore no relation at all to the state named in the middle three characters on the gold seal’s inscriptional face. This middle character, which he claimed was to be read to (and hence all three as “Ito no kuni”) and nu in the context of the three-character expression in the Hou Han shu, * * had now acquired a third reading *(na). * In this last incarnation, Norinaga associated it with the local place names, Na-no-agata and Nanotsu, in the Kyushu region. Although he struck gold with this assertion, it seems to have gotten lost in the mix of opinions flying fast and loose at the time and would not be revived until the essay by Miyake Yonekichi at the end of the following century.10 Thus, despite some apparent confusion, Norinaga made an extremely important point which emerged from his undeniable talents as a philologist. Like Arai Hakuseki before him, he associated the middle character of the seal’s inscription (奴) (though not specifically in this instance of the seal itself, which had yet to be unearthed, but as it appears in the Wei zhi where it should be, he claimed, pronounced *na) * with the character 儺 (also pronounced na and appearing as an ancient toponym from the very region in which the seal was discovered) and additionally with the character 那 (again, pronounced na and also linked with local place names).11

9 Arai Hakuseki, Koshi tsū wakumon (Questions concerning an understanding of ancient history), in Arai Hakuseiki zenshū (Complete works of Arai Hakuseki), ed. Imaizumi Sadasuke (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1977), 3:388.

10 Motoori Norinaga, “Gyojū gaigen” (“Karaosame no uretamigoto”) (“Words of lament to drive out the barbarians”), in Motoori Norinaga zenshū (Collected works of Motoori *Norinaga) *(Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1972), 8:30–34.

11 This passage from Norinaga’s “Gyojū gaigen” is also excerpted in Mishina Akihide, Yamataikoku kenkyū sōran ( Overview of research on the state of Yamatai) (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1970), 55.

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

Instead of sustaining this argument and anticipating Miyake Yonekichi’s paradigm-shifting essay of 1892, Norinaga jumped to the conclusions that the expression 倭奴國 from the Hou Han shu should be read “Wanukoku” (in Japanese) and that this state had nothing whatsoever to do with the kingdom of Wa. Undoubtedly these conclusions were influenced by the discovery of the gold seal and the need in his own mind to disassociate it at all cost either from importance in genuine Japanese history or at least disassociate it from the ancient kingdom of Wa.

Miyake Yonekichi’s conclusions met with rebuttal in the 1890s, but interestingly those scholars who initially disagreed with him in print—Kume Kunitake (1839–1931), Kan Masatomo (or Suga Masatomo, 1824–97), and Hoshino Hisashi (1839–1917)—one by one all switched their positions and came on board with Miyake’s conclusions. These three men were considerably older and more established than Miyake, but they nonetheless recognized that his arguments—especially his resolution of the proper understanding of the seal’s inscription—were correct. Hoshino and Kume were professors at the recently founded Imperial University in Tokyo; Kan, the oldest of the group, was the chief priest of Grand Ise Shrine dedicated to the Sun Goddess, fountainhead of the Shinto religion. What won the day for them was Miyake’s use of philology.

Although philology has all but become a term of derogation in most academic disciplines in North America, it was the queen of the disciplines in mid-Meiji Japan.

It should be noted that Miyake’s achievement was made not by obliterat-ing the entire model and all studies that preceded his own, but by building on them and elevating the entire discussion to a new level with the introduction of modern philological methods. The advance here may, then, be understood as a form of shifting paradigms on the model of Thomas Kuhn’s (1922–96) The *Structure of Scientific Revolutions. * 12 * * The nature of the discord between schools of thought from the time of Kamei Nanmei’s initial essay through most of the nineteenth century was simply spinning its wheels and no longer producing anything new or innovative. It would take a change in approach to relaunch the discussion into a more productive direction, and that was precisely Miyake’s contribution.

The decades following Miyake’s essay mark the maturation of modern Japanese historical scholarship. Overall there were fewer essays on the gold seal in the Taishō and early Shōwa years, though the topic never disappeared from research interests. One of the problems plaguing continued research, 12 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

The Gold Seal Of 57 CE

especially after Miyake had “solved” the enigma of the inscription’s meaning, was the simple fact that the seal was not readily available for viewing, to say nothing of physically examining it. Then came the run up to Japanese aggression and expansionism on the mainland and full-fledged war.

There were efforts to assess the gold seal within the system of seals awarded by the Former and Later Han courts to domestic and foreign entities, and frequently the gold seal was considered an outlier. Few seals made of gold and few with the snake-shaped handle had been discovered prior to the end of World War II. These facts led a number of scholars to question the authenticity of the gold seal, and a small number of scholars were even prepared to judge it a fabrication.

The problem, of course, with Chinese artifacts has been that there are countless items deep in the soil but they are not so easily unearthed. The discipline of archaeology needed to be developed and well funded, as it would be after the war. The new regime in China following the Communists coming to power in 1949 discovered promptly that there was no discipline so intimately tied to national pride, national identity, and national unity as archaeology, especially in a culture that for millennia had tended to revere the old and privilege the ancient over the new and the modern. Even the Communists, who had long made a business of destroying everything that smacked of traditional Chinese culture, found “Chinese” heritage too tempting to ignore as it built its own claims to being the legitimate heirs of its numerous predecessors.

Thus, archaeology was supported and got off the ground in China soon after the new regime consolidated its power. And, sure enough, artifacts underground were more than accommodating. In 1956 another gold seal with a snake design at its top was discovered in a Former Han tomb in Shizhaishan, Yunnan Province, and this Yunnan find more or less shut the door on claims that the gold seal found in Japan was bogus. The Yunnan seal was inscribed “Dian wang zhi yin” (seal of the sovereign of [the state of] Dian [Yunnan]), and its face is a square measuring 2.4 centimeters to a side; it is thought to date to the end of the Former Han dynasty, and its coiled snake is much more easily recognizable as such than that of the gold seal discovered in Japan.13 The Yunnan seal 13 See Li Kunsheng, “‘Dian wang zhi yin’ yu ‘Han Wei Nu guowang’ yin zhi bijiao yanjiu”

(“A comparative study of the ‘Seal of the king of Dian’ and ‘Han Wei Nu guowang’ seal”), Sixiang zhanxian 3 (1986): 78–81; Nishitani Tadashi, “Shikai ni atatte: Nit-Chū ryōkoku nisen nenrai no bunka kōryū to ‘Ten ō no in’ kin’in” (“Chair’s remarks: Cultural relations between China and Japan over the past 2,000 years and the gold seal to the king of Dian

[Yunnan]”), in Chū-Nichi ryōkoku nisen nenrai no bunka kōryū to “Ten ō no in” kin’in, kōkai *shinpojiumu (Public symposium on cultural relations between China and Japan over the past *

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

FIGURE 3 * The gold seal with coiled snake handle (left) unearthed in Yunnan and its* *inscriptional fact (right). *

was unearthed in Tomb No. 6 * * and dates to a time when “Dian” (which has now come to be the single-graph, short-form for Yunnan Province) connoted a non-Han ethnicity living in this southern region; Emperor Wu of the Han (r. 157–87

bce) conquered the area in 109 bce, and when the king of Dian surrendered, the historical record tells us that he was given a royal seal (undoubtedly the very one discovered in 1956).

Then, in 1983 another gold seal—this one with a dragon-shaped handle—

was discovered in the excavated tomb of the king of the early “Vietnamese”

state of Nam Viêt in what is now Xianggangshan, Guangdong Province in southeastern China. It is a bit larger, measuring 3.1 centimeters on each side, and bears the inscription “Wendi xingxi” (seal of Văn Ðế), namely the seal of the second ruler of Nam Viêt, whose personal name was Triệu Mạt (Chinese, Zhao Mo, r. 137–122 bce), grandson of the dynastic founder, Triệu Ðà (Chinese, *2,000 years and the gold seal to the king of Dian [Yunnan]) *(Nagasaki: Nagasaki Kōshibyō

Chūgoku rekidai hakubutsukan, 1993), *6; * Yoshikai Masato, “Sekisaisan bunka shūdanbo bunseki shiron” (“A tentative analysis of the cemeteries of Shizhaishan culture”), Tōnan Ajia kōkogakkai kaihō 10 (1990), 90–91; Wang Rencong and Ye Qifeng, Qin Han Wei Jin Nanbei chao guanyin yanjiu (Studies of official seals in the Qin, Han, Wei, Jin, and Northern *and Southern Dynasties) *(Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue wenwuguan, 1990); Okamura Hidenori, “Zen Kan kyō no hennen to yōshiki” (“The dating and form of Former Han mirrors”), Shirin 67.5 (1984), 1–41; Ōtani Mitsuo, “Samazama naru inju” (“Various and sundry seals and ribbons”), in Kin’in kenkyū ronbun shūsei (Collection of research essays on the gold seal), ed. Ōtani Mitsuo (Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu ōraisha, 1994), 83; Ōtani Mitsuo, “Kodai Chūgoku kara sakuhō sareta kan’in ni tsuite” (“On official seals used for infeudation from ancient China”), Chōsen gakuhō 119–20 (1986): 42–45.

The Gold Seal Of 57 CE

FIGURE 4 * Golden seal with dragon-shaped handle (right) of the ruler of Nam Viêt and* *its inscriptional face (left). *

Zhao Tuo, c. 230–137 bce). It is widely believed to have been privately produced, not imperially bestowed on the ruler of Nam Viêt.14

Around 183 bce, under the influence of Empress Lü (d. 180 bce), the Han dynasty began restricting trade with outlying areas. Zhao Tuo protested, and she had his relatives all murdered and his ancestral tomb demolished. Soon thereafter, according to the treatise on the kingdom of Nam Viêt in the Shi ji (Records of the Grand Historian, * * fascicle 113) of Sima Qian (145–86 bce), Zhao Tuo began calling himself di (emperor) without informing the Han court, and Emperor Wen (r. 180–157 bce) sent a high official by the name of Lu Jia (240–

170 bce) to investigate. Zhao responded apologetically in the form of a letter which he signed “Manyi dazhang laofu chen Tuo” (“your aged subject [Zhao]

Tuo, a barbarian chieftain”), by which he effectively demoted himself (rather dramatically) from putative “emperor” to “barbarian” and, like other Han 14 Mai Yinghao and Li Jin, “Guangzhou Xianggang Nan Yue wangmu muzhu kao” (“Analysis of the main figure buried in the royal tomb of Nam Viêt at Elephant Ridge, Guangzhou”), *Kaogu yu wenwu 6 *(1986): 83–87; Diana Lary, “The Tomb of the King of Nanyue—The Contemporary Agenda of History, Scholarship and Identity,” Modern China 22.1 (1996): 3–27. For a brief but interesting comparison of Dian and Yamatai, see Imamura Keiji, “Ten ōkoku ni okeru dansei kenryokusha to josei kenryokusha: Yamataikoku to hikaku shite”

(“Male and female power holders in the Dian kingdom, as compared with the state of Yamatai”), Yūsei kōko kiyō 18 (1992): 113–29. Kajiyama Masaru argues for a number of reasons that the Nam Viêt gold seal may have been produced in Nam Viêt (and not in or near the Han capital); see his “Zen Kan Nan Etsu ōbo shutsudo no kin’in ‘Buntei gyōji’ ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu” (“A study of the gold seal [inscribed] ‘Wendi xingxi’ unearthed at a royal Nam Viêt tomb from the Former Han era”), Kodai bunka 36.10 (1984): 23–30.

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

officials, dropped his surname. His grandson took the further step of issuing himself an imperial seal, ironically with the same imperial name of Wendi.15

One further gold seal deserves mention in this comparative context. It was unearthed in 1981 from the second tomb at Ganquan, a village about twenty kilometers to the northwest of the city of Yangzhou. At its base it forms a square 2.3 centimeters to a side, bears a tortoise handle, and carries the inscription

“Guangling wang xi” (“seal of the prince of Guangling [a fiefdom awarded by Emperor Ming, r. 57–75, to his younger brother, Liu Jing, 37–67]”).16 Liu Jing was the ninth son of Emperor Guangwu, founder of the Later Han; he was enfeoffed at age two (in 39 ce) as gong (“duke” or “prince”) of Shanyang and elevated two years later to wang (prince or king) of Shanyang. When Guangwu died in 57 ce, he was succeeded by his fourth son Liu Zhuang (28–75 ce) as Emperor Ming, and the next year Liu Jing was promoted to “prince of Guangling.” He committed suicide in 67 after being exposed in a treasonous incident, and his seal was buried with him.

Because it was forged in the year 58 ce, only one year after the Later Han gold seal was presented to the ruler of the state of Na, Okazaki Takashi (1923–

90) has argued (and Kajiyama Masaru concurs) that, given their uncanny resemblance—such as the presence of scales on the animal figures of their respective handles, the similarities in the calligraphy of the inscriptions, and the similar way in which the inscriptions were cut—they were most likely fashioned in the same workshop in Luoyang.

Although both are made of gold, there are some important differences. The Guangling seal was designated a xi, * * while the Na seal does not even bear one of the three Chinese graphs designating a “seal.” Second, the Guangling seal has a tortoise handle, while the Na seal has a coiled snake. Finally, the color of the ribbon originally accompanying the seals differed as well, with the Guangling’s 15 See Tsuruma Kazuyuki, Faasuto enperaa no isan, Shin Kan teikoku (Bequest of the first emperor, the Qin-Han empire) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2004), 172, 235.

16 Kajiyama Masaru, “‘Kōryō ōji’ kin’in to ‘Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō’ kin’in, kin’in to Higashi Ajia sekai” (“The gold seal [inscribed] ‘Guangling wang xi’ and the gold seal

[inscribed] ‘Han Wei Nu guowang,’ gold seals and East Asia”), in Chūka jinmin kyōwakoku *Nankin hakubutsuin meihōten *( Exhibition of treatures from the Nanjing Museum of the People’s Republic of China) * *(Nagoya: Nagoya City Museum and Chūnichi shinbun, 1989), 16–22. See also Ji Zhongqing, “Guangling wang xi he Zhong-Ri jiaowang” (“The Guangling wang seal and Sino-Japanese interactions”), Dongnan wenhua 1 (1985): 233–34, wherein Ji also recounts the great excitement the discovery of the seal elicited in Japan; and Ōtani Mitsuo, “Go Kan to Gi no shokōō no shinshaku” (“The rise in nobility for feudatory princes of the Later Han and Wei dynasties”), in *Kin’in kenkyū ronbun shūsei *( Collection of research essays on the gold seal), ed. Ōtani Mitsuo (Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu ōraisha, 1994), 77.

The Gold Seal Of 57 CE

FIGURE 5

Seal with tortoise-shaped handle (top) presented to the *prince of Guangling, and its inscriptional face (bottom). *

green ribbon assigned to imperial princes *(zhuhou) * and the Na’s purple one reserved for adjunct marquises (liehou), one notch down. The prefixing of the character Han to the Na seal, as noted by Okazaki Takashi (in the essay to be discussed below), was deemed necessary only for an external subject state *(waichen) * such as Na, but unnecessary for Guangling, an internal subject *(neichen) * of the Han throne. Both recipients enjoyed the position of wang or prince, but they were nonetheless at different levels because of the external versus internal nature of their respective places within the Sinosphere—that is, the China-centered world of culture and international relations.17

17 Okazaki Takashi, “Arata ni hakken sareta ‘Kōryō ōji’ ni tsuite: Kōso shō Kankō ken Kansen nigōbo” (“On the recently discovered ‘Seal of the Prince of Guangling’: Tomb Number Two, Ganquan, Hanjiang County, Jiangsu Province”), in Ine fune matsuri: Matsumoto Nobuhiro sensei tsuitō ronbunshū (Rice, boats, festivals: Essays marking the death of Professor *Matsumoto Nobuhiro) *(Tokyo: Rokkō shuppan, 1982), 625–30; Kajiyama Masaru, “‘Kōryō

ōji’ kin’in to ‘Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō’ kin’in, kin’in to Higashi Ajia sekai,” in Chūka jinmin kyōwakoku Nankin hakubutsuin meihōten, * * 17–18; Okamura Hidenori, “Kōkogaku kara mita Kan to Wa” (“Han and Wa as seen from archaeology”), in Wakoku tanjō (The birth of the state of Wa), * * ed. Shiraishi Taiichirō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2002), 225–26; Shiraishi Taichirō. “Wakoku tanjō” (“The birth of the state of Wa”), in Wakoku tanjō (The birth of the state of Wa), * * ed. Shiraishi Taiichirō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2002), 64–66; Keiji Imamura, “Jomon and Yayoi: The Transition to Agriculture in Japanese History,”

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

As these new finds and many more like them indicate, a whole new approach was required in the postwar years to make sense of the field of seals, sigillography, into which the gold seal discovered in Kyushu in 1784 would be placed. The normative texts about seals dating from centuries past were no longer seen as the best guide and certainly not the only guide to understanding where the gold seal fit. The new model discipline supplanting the philological paradigm established at the end of the nineteenth century would now be science. In a sense, just as Japan had lacked truly scientific thinking but had been led down the primrose path to irrational, mystical thinking in the 1930s and 1940s in which decisions of great import were made on the basis of tenuous, xenophobic thinking rather than reason, leading to the insanity of war and aggression, so now the postwar era would be one grounded in reasoned thought and science. Archaeology was only one part of this shift, although certainly an important part. The representative essay that marks this paradigmatic change was published in 1968 by Okazaki Takashi, the noted historian of early China and Japan. In many ways, the shift in studying the gold seal was into a world governed by science: the same world we inhabit today. The power of science is all around us, upending (potentially errant) human judgments and past mis-deeds all the time. One of the rare scholars allowed to actually examine the seal, Okazaki (and his assistants) applied a host of scientific tests to it in an effort to allay the least doubt about the seal’s authenticity. Cold, hard science recognizes no human frailty or prejudice; it is its own universe of verifiability which we ignore at our peril. This was a universe in which “science,” because of its putative claims to universal applicability and pure objectivity, had become the final arbiter of “truth.” The intent of Okazaki’s fine essay was to put an end to any and all allegations of fabrication. And, inasmuch as the seal was not at all easily available for scientific investigation, his study loomed all the larger.18

in *The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, * ed. David R. Harris (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 460–61.

18 Okazaki Tadashi, “‘Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō’ kin’in no sokutei” (“Measuring the gold seal

[inscribed] to the ‘King of the state of Na in Wa under the Han’”), Shien 100 (1968): 265–80; rpt. in Shikanoshima: “Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō” kin’in to Shikanoshima no kōkogakuteki *kenkyū *( Shikanoshima: The gold seal [inscribed] “Han Wei Nu guowang” and archeologi-cal research at Shikanoshima), ed. Kyūshū daigaku Bungakubu Kōkogaku kenkyūshitsu (Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Letters, Kyushu University) (Fukuoka: Kin’in iseki chōsadan, 1975), 84–92.

The Gold Seal Of 57 CE

Both hard science and archaeology have advanced beyond the stage they were a generation ago, but the status of science remains exalted. It has come under attack by postmodernists from one side and religiously inspired men and women from another; its putative sanctity has been criticized from other realms as well, but it still enjoys enormous veneration, as much outside the academy as in. The gold seal is, for example, the shining treasure of the Fukuoka City Museum where it now resides.

As of this writing, we may be seeing a fourth phase in the study of the gold seal, what might be called constructivism. This view, heavily indebted to postmodernism, effectively sees much of reality and certainly the historical past as a construction of the individual perceiver. Few would disagree with the idea that everyone’s sense of reality is different, though most would find it difficult to accept the idea that such differences—with the exception perhaps of schizophrenics—amount to anything fundamental. In 2006 a scholar of ancient Japanese literature by the name of Miura Sukeyuki (b. 1946) from Chiba University published a volume aimed at toppling all supports underpin-ning the authenticity of the gold seal.19 That meant debunking every aspect of the received story and coming up with an elaborate conspiracy theory for how it was forged (in both senses of the verb) in the months or years prior to its putative unearthing in 1784. This he does with a fair degree of expertise, though, to be sure, there are holes (some small, some gaping) in his argument.

Miura is not simply a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorist run wild, though conspiracy theory is at the core of his argument. He makes a great deal of every point in the seal’s known history where confusion enters the picture, and he sees actors behind many of these points of uncertainty. It is not enough for him simply to raise numerous points where the story gets murky and thus claim forgery, and he knows it. Instead, he goes the next step and offers an elaborate thesis of how and why the seal was fabricated (in 1784) and who the culprit behind the conspiracy was. In the end he points a finger directly at none other than Kamei Nanmei himself. To make his case even more dramatic, he claims that, if he is proven wrong with further scientific tests—he is interestingly willing to accept the independent proof offered by science which presumably can distinguish a 2000-year-old seal from a 200-year-old one—he will go to Nanmei’s grave, fall to his knees, and apologize to his spirit.

19 Miura Sukeyuki, Kin’in gizō jiken: Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō no maboroshi (The incident of the forged golden seal: The illusion of “King of Na in Wa, under the Han”) (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2006).

The Gold Seal of 57 CE

Riding the wave set in motion by Miura’s book and the newspaper articles and debates that followed as well as a series of his own essays, in 2010 Suzuki Tsutomu (b. 1949) published a volume which approached the gold seal from the heretofore unexplored realm of the history of metallurgical technology.20

Although his ultimate position remains a bit vague, in no small part because of the hyperscientific nature of his specialty, Suzuki effectively cast great doubt—not from the perspective of constructivism but from that of better science—on the capacity of Han-era Chinese to cast a seal of the quality of the gold seal. It is still much too early to tell if constructivism or better (newer and more sharply penetrating) science will constitute the discipline of a new paradigm, or if neither will force us to shift gears. The jury remains out.

Where does that leave us now? The likelihood of finding new documents is extremely small. Ōtani Mitsuo (b. 1927), the scholar who has done more research on and unearthed more materials concerning the gold seal than anyone, is unlikely to have an heir. Whether the fourth wave of historiography on the gold seal will be able to sustain itself—and whether that wave will be predominantly social constructivism or better science—remain to be seen.

The first three waves, though, have fully made themselves felt. While each was transcended by the next, it is hard to imagine the present state of scholarship on the gold seal, or much of anything else, without the preceding stages. Thus, Kamei Nanmei’s world of Confucianism in Fukuoka or Miyake Yonekichi’s world of philology in the straitlaced world of Tokyo at the turn of the last century may be far from our own, but they nonetheless produced indispensable scholarship which we ignore at our intellectual peril. And, despite the use of what are now probably outdated scientific methods in the 1960s, Okazaki Takeshi’s work remains finely tuned and balanced. To ignore any of this work would not only be perilous—it would be downright foolish.

20 Suzuki Tsutomu, “Kan no Wa no Na no kokuō” kin’in tanjō jikūron: Kinseki bungaku nyūmon I, kinzoku inshō hen (The time and place of the birth of the gold seal [inscribed to] “the king of the state of Na in Wa under the Han”: Introduction of epigraphic literature, vol. 1, metallic *seals) *(Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 2010).

■ Source: “Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective,” * China Heritage Quarterly * 29

(March 2012), at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/tien-hsia.php?searchterm=029_

fogel.inc&issue=029.

Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective

I have given many talks over the past thirty-five years here at the Jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo 人文科学研究所 (Research Institute for the Humanities) of Kyoto University and over in the *Bungakubu * 文学部 * *(Faculty of Letters), but never have I had the leisure to do so in English. For that alone I would owe the organizers of this conference, the Australian Centre on China in the World at The Australian National University and our hosts here at Kyoto University, an immense debt of gratitude. But, even beyond that, I want to thank all of the organizers for inviting me to take part in this event. I must say, though, that as a Westerner coming to the Temple of modern Sinology here at Kyoto University and lecturing on that topic bespeaks a little more *chutzpah * הפצוח than even I am usually prepared to utter.

Many years ago, actually in mid-December 1976, while I was a graduate student at Columbia University, I first came to Japan—to Kyoto University and to the Jinbunken—to pursue research on my dissertation which was to be on Naitō Konan 内藤湖南 (1866–1934). By the way, at that time, Professor Iwai Shigeki 岩井茂樹, the present head of the Jinbunken, was a third-year college student here. For some reason, I assumed that all Japanese scholars of China were intimately familiar with their own long traditions of scholarship on China and that I would be able to talk with everyone of my own generation about my thesis topic. Among the older, mostly retired scholars I found that they were and I could. I was lucky to have been able to interview such giants of Japanese Figure 1

*Entrance to the Institute for Research *

on the Humanities ( Jinbun kagaku

kenkyūjo 人文科学研究所 *), Kyoto *

University. (Photograph: GRB, November 2011)

Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective

sinology as Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎 (1904–80), Kaizuka Shigeki 貝塚

茂樹 (1904–87), and Miyazaki Ichisada 宮崎一定 (1901–95), among others—it was indeed a time when giants still walked the Earth. As it turned out, though, few younger scholars—the people my age give or take a few years—knew much beyond general theories and secondary books on Naitō and his generation of Sinological luminaries. It took me awhile before I realized this, in part because I always assumed that Japanese scholars knew more than I would—

usually true—and in part because I assumed—wrongly—that Japanese scholars would have assimilated somewhere along the line knowledge of all their predecessors’ work. When it all dawned on me, though, it seemed perfectly natural—and unfortunately so.

**Negating the Past to Bolster the Present **今是昨非

How many Westerners still read Sir George Sansom (1883–1965) on Japan or Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) on China or numerous other Sinological giants of two or more generations ago? In the West we tend to work from a model of scholarship which is akin to patricide; that is, we make a name for ourselves only by disproving or debunking the theses or ideas of our predecessors—not our own advisors, of course, but theses that developed a generation before our own time. After a generation or two passes, we don’t even bother to read those old guys anymore on the completely mistaken assumption that anything old is like last week’s newspaper—it’s old news and hence disposable. There are many people in the West who have elevated this kind of purposive ignorance to the level of an positive argument—claiming that Sinology is all about facts, cut-and-paste scholarship, and that what really matters is interpretation; those old fogies like Pelliot just piled up huge footnotes, etc. And, I should note that, at present, the very word ‘philology’, at least in the United States, has actually become a form of deprecation.

The fact of the matter is that we would all stop reinventing the wheel in countless ways if we bothered to read a few of those older studies from time to time. If you doubt what I’m saying, go back to old issues of T’oung Pao or *Journal asiatique or Monumenta Serica. * French isn’t that hard; German is of course a bit harder, true. To be sure, it would take years to read through the mountains of secondary material that has accumulated in the major European languages, but I honestly believe that it might just be worth the effort. Now, throw in Japanese as a secondary field of scholarship on China and you present young graduate students with a Gargantuan task. And, just as they are trying to keep abreast of work in their field—to say nothing of the mountainous,

Japanese Views Of China In Historical Perspective 67

Chinese-language secondary scholarship that seems to grow exponentially with each passing year.

The point I am trying to make is not that we should spend most of our time reading secondary literature, but that we need to both know what’s out there and, more important, be aware or how much it has influenced the scholarly world which we enter into and in which we live today, often unawares.

One more personal example: Until recently the most popular textbook for teaching the history of East Asian civilization was East Asia: Tradition and Transformation by Edwin O. Reischauer, John K. Fairbank, and Albert Craig. It has gone through many editions and actually survived the deaths of its first two authors, Reischauer and Fairbank, but one very important thing remains the same in its many editions. The authors suggest that the most important breaking point in Chinese history before the nineteenth century was in the late Tang through early Song dynasty, roughly the tenth century. Periodizing Chinese history in this way shows the influence of Naitō Konan’s famous periodization at the Tang-Song divide. Naitō explicitly called the early Song and what followed until his own time in the early twentieth century: modern history, *kinsei shi * 近

世史 * *(now usually translated as ‘early modern history’). Reischauer, Fairbank, and Craig speak of it in similar terms, though nowhere in their text is any attribution to Naitō mentioned. In his memoirs, Reischauer later explained that he had learned of this thesis during his prewar years in Japan.

This is a fascinating idea, that modernity isn’t something we have fashioned all for ourselves in our own times, but that it just might date back 1,000 years.

Unfortunately, this idea had to basically go underground for most of the twentieth century. Naitō died in 1934, then came the war and the Japanese aggression on the Asian mainland intensified, and Japan’s cataclysmic defeat in 1945.

After the war, Naitō’s ideas and he himself were roundly attacked by scholars of many persuasions, but mostly by Marxists. In the early postwar decades, any view not completely sympathetic to Communist China’s aspirations for independence and its efforts to build socialism came under heavy fire. Many scholars who were implicated in the Japanese war efforts were swept out of their jobs and those posts filled by left-leaning or outright Marxist scholars.

Now, to claim that China had entered modernity as long as ten centuries ago meant not that China was way ahead of everyone else but that China had in fact been mired in stagnation for a millennium, and to hint that China needed external stimulus to arouse itself from ‘stagnation’—a term, by the way, that Naitō scarcely if ever used—was depicted as a justification for imperialism.

Thus, all of the fascinating ideas associated with Naitō’s periodization scheme for China were tarnished. Some scholars at Kyoto University continued—

usually, very quietly—to support those ideas, but their impact was limited.

Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective

Some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, the Marxists in Japan began to lose their stranglehold on China Studies. In part this was a consequence of the obvious failures and disasters of the Cultural Revolution and earlier campaigns in China, and in part a younger postwar generation was coming of age, taking jobs at Japanese universities, and articulating their own ideas. This is just when I began coming to Japan regularly, and it was a fascinating phenomenon to observe. I was, of course, an outsider, but as someone deeply interested in postwar Japanese historiography on China, I was also keenly watching and reading what was going on around me.

Now, over three decades later, the situation has completely changed, in part fueled by the flood of Chinese students who have come to Japan to study and have helped to revive interest in Naitō and prewar Japanese Sinology in both Japan and China. In fact, after this conference is over, I am going to Osaka to meet with a handful of mostly young Chinese scholars who have organized a Naitō reading and study group. I need also to mention the seminal role played by Professor Tanigawa Michio 谷川道雄, now retired but formerly of Kyoto University. Tanigawa sensei has for over fifty years studied what we call in the English-speaking world the Six dynasties period, more specifically the era from the end of the Late Han dynasty through the founding of the Tang. He has written voluminously and, I think, brilliantly on many aspects of this period in Chinese history. I got to know him in the mid-1980s when I was translating one of his books in which I tried to introduce to the English-speaking world to the Japanese analytical concept of *kyōdōtai * 共同体 which he and his late colleague Kawakatsu Yoshio 川勝義雄 (1922–84) were using as a tool for explaining what transpired in China over those four centuries of division between the early third and early seventh centuries. It struck me that kyōdōtai as used by Tanigawa *sensei * and a concept used by Naitō, kyōdan 郷団, were very similar.

When I mustered the courage to ask Tanigawa sensei if it might be more than a coincidence, he was very pleased by the association. Since his retirement some years ago from Kyoto University, he has run a number of study groups in which ordinary citizens as well as scholars meet to read and discuss texts by Naitō.

They have published several extremely interesting volumes. I only wish I could do the same thing in Canada where I now live.

Why am I telling you all this seemingly personal information? I want to stress what I more or less said moments ago. We don’t all face the history and culture of China we are studying with a clean slate. We are heirs to traditions which have deeply influenced many of the ideas we now take for granted. Even more important, if we ignore much of the research our forbearers produced, we risk proceeding to reinvent the wheel. Is this such a bad thing? No, this is not the equivalent of committing a crime, but it is faintly disrespectful, it is definitely a colossal waste of time, and historiographically it bespeaks ignorance.

Japanese Views Of China In Historical Perspective

Figure 2

*A scene at the Hakusa Sonsō Hashimoto *

*Kansetsu Garden and Museum * 白沙山

荘橋本関雪記念館 *, Kyoto. (Photograph: *

GRB, November 2011)

Let me now turn to a related issue and try to tie them together. My own two pet peeves—or two parts of one pet peeve—are the ways in which politics and theory have been used to purposefully ignore wonderful scholarship of times gone by. Let me briefly explain. Both politics and theory—in similar as well as differing ways—have been used to stifle discussion—not always, of course, but sometimes. Politics can be used to stifle discussion by claiming such and such a scholarly view is consonant with a disreputable political stance. Thus, as I mentioned earlier, as soon as someone’s views can be linked to imperialism—and the same now goes for racism, sexism, etc.—all of that person’s scholarship becomes tainted, must be rigorously ignored or virulently criticized, and certainly must not be read. I am not speaking here of someone whose views are linked to Nazism or fascism or advocates of mass murder and who may have used some scholarly window-dressing to spruce up what are clearly repugnant ideas. What I am thinking of is so much of prewar Japanese scholarship on China which, however dated it may appear in some ways, still offers pearls of wisdom.

This sort of blatant use of politics to shut down a discussion was much more common several decades ago, and we thankfully don’t see that much of it anymore—at least not in our field. However, rushing to fill the void has been the advent of ‘theory’. In the West, as I’m sure you are all well aware, when we speak of ‘theory’ without any modifier, we are almost always speaking of post-modernism. While post-modernism hasn’t pushed us to ignore libraries

Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective

full of scholarship, as politics used to, it has more often than not been used as a substitute for doing hard nuts-and-bolts research in archives and in difficult languages. By no means all, but many of those who toss about post-modern language and pretend to be doing scholarship claim that they are uncovering hidden biases in the discourses in which we all find ourselves irrevocably embedded. They rarely move our understanding of anything forward, and they almost never write clear prose.

I would venture to say that the field of Japanese Studies in the West has suffered much more than Chinese Studies by the invasion of what one Sinological joker has called the stormtropers—that is, the theory-mongers. One can usually point to some small positive byproduct but in this case I fail to see it. The reason I feel so strongly on this issue is, and this relates to my earlier point, postmodern theory has provided a crutch to those who either won’t or can’t do the old-fashioned, nuts-and-bolts research essential to the advancement of scholarship. Again, I want to caution that this is not true 100 percent, as there are some theory-driven scholars who can and do regularly produce fine scholarship, but they are like an old man’s teeth: few and far between.

I am being purposefully provocative today, because I want to provoke discussion on this issue. Fifteen years ago I gave talks here in Kyoto and elsewhere in Japan in which I began by asserting that the scholarly world in the West was divided into the *shiryōha * 資料派 * * and the *rironha * 理論, a group based in textual sources and an opposing group based in theory, and described their differences as the essence of the what was then called the culture wars. There were other issues at stake, but this is the one I focused on. That fight has now calmed down—no one side can really claim victory, but neither do they engage in battle like they used to, largely because the two sides no longer talk much to each other and publish in different journals.

**The **

***kenkyūkai *** 研究会

I have long felt that one of the great strengths of academic Sinology in Japan—

and this is especially true of Kyoto and the Kansai region as a whole—is the emphasis placed on group work or *kenkyūkai * 研究会 *. * Many in the West are petrified of the prospect that through the kenkyūkai system they might lose their individuality and their independence as researchers because the larger interests of the group might take control. It is unquestionably true that the professors at the big universities, Kyoto University in particular, exercise a great deal of power, but it is usually, at least in my experience, with the interests of the group at heart. For example, a professor with the resources of a Kyōdai

Japanese Views Of China In Historical Perspective 71

faculty member has the power to name a research theme for a kenkyūkai for two or three or more years and, in fact, to name the people who will be invited to attend from outside his or her university. By the same token, it would never be in the interest of such a professor to alienate his or her constituency by selecting a seminar topic no one is interested in but him or her. Also, while the kenkyūkai system is the heart of academic life in this part of Japan, it is not the totality of it.

Insofar as the humanities are concerned, the system dates back at Kyoto University to 1906 and the very inception of the Bungakubu itself which celebrated its centenary just five years ago. Naitō Konan and several of his colleagues used to meet on Tuesday evenings, and together they read the Shi ji 史記 * * of Sima Qian 司馬遷 *. * As this group evolved, they invited graduate students to join them as well, and thus an informal network was established that set the mold for future study groups of this sort. Now, while such study groups began at Kyōdai when its Bungakubu got started, this is not necessarily the origin of the institution of the *kenkyūkai. * The Kyōdai scholars of a century ago consciously fashioned what they were doing on the Chinese intellectual tradition of *kaozhengxue * 考證學 *. * They were not, of course, simply going to write moral tracts or commentaries on the Confucian classics or for that matter reflections on the Yijing 易經. By the same token, they consciously sought to establish a basis for pursuing research on Chinese history and culture that was as far removed from politics as humanly possible and as contrary to traditional hierarchies as they could, both perversions they associated with the Imperial University in Tokyo. The contemporary political world might be understood—

in fact, should be understood in their view—with the tools available from a broad understanding of the past, but that was a far cry from allowing contemporary political concerns to intrude on the scholarly world and play any role in determining courses of study and the like.

Why am I so hot on the kenkyūkai (or kenkyūhan 研究班 * * as it’s now called at Kyōdai) as an academic institution? First of all, there are several different kinds of research groups. Some, like the first ones 100 years ago, were comprised of a group of people who studied or translated a text together, and the end product might be an annotated translation of a given text. Such an undertaking would, if even possible, often take an individual many, many years to accomplish on his or her own. A group makes it possible in just a few years.

Other research groups might take the full run of one or more journals specific to a time or place or historical event and read them together, with individual members responsible for specific issues of the journals. The end result of such a venture would be that everyone involved would have a thorough reading at his or her disposal of entire runs of seminal journals, again something that

Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective

Figure 3

A scene at the Hakusa Sonsō Hashimoto Kansetsu Garden and Museum 白沙山荘橋本関雪記念館 *, *

*Kyoto. (Photograph: GRB, November *

2011)

an individual would need years and years to accomplish all alone. And, yet another kind of research group organized around a theme enables everyone involved to learn from others. The end product would typically be a collection of essays drawn from the best individual projects under the umbrella of the research group’s theme. There are many example of this.

Thus, in all such instances, the kenkyūkai not only makes large projects possible, but it also builds bridges among scholars that can last for decades.

The last ones with which I had contact were concerned with Liang Qichao. In retirement, Professor Shimada Kenji 島田虔次 * *(1917–2000) organized a group ranging in ages to translate Liang’s nianpu 年譜 (chronological biography).

This turned out to be a phenomenally difficult task, and the finished product in five volumes (and at an exorbitant price) only appeared after Professor Shimada had passed away. Nonetheless, we now have a complete translation of this important work—and it is so good that a modern Chinese translation of it (and its new appendices) would not be a bad idea at all. I think a number of the participants signed on with the project because they realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work closely with Professor Shimada.

In this way, I have been more a visitor and observer of this institution than a long-term participant in various kenkyūkai, * * but as an observer I have found the whole thing utterly fascinating. Many years ago, I tried to organize such a research group in the United States that would meet to read texts together, but it just didn’t work for an assortment of reasons. The main reasons are fairly simple—there are fewer China scholars in North America, and we’re spread out over a vast terrain, while Japan is much smaller; even more important, though, are the facts that North American scholars are much more individualistic about their research and much less willing to share primary and secondary work until it’s really much closer to a finished product and ready to show

Japanese Views Of China In Historical Perspective 73

the world. There are plenty of seminars for graduate students and professors to showcase their work, but they are rarely organized around anything more than a vague theme such as ‘modern China’. One exception that worked remarkably well and demonstrates the value of one other irreplaceable element I haven’t mentioned yet was the three-year seminar in the early 1990s run at the University of California, Berkeley on Shanghai history. The irreplaceable element is, of course, money—money to support the transportation and lodging for scholars flown in from various and sundry places, money to support invita-tions to Chinese scholars to participate, etc. The University of California is now completely broke, and few other places have any money to speak of—except, of course, for The Australian National University.

One other thing related to the kenkyūkai system and historical scholarship in Japan is the repeated publication of new multi-volume series of all sorts. These are invariably useful. Why, I always ask myself, do the major Japanese presses continue to publish such multi-volume series? They are not in the business of being nice guys, and they’re not a branch of UNESCO. Obviously, as expensive as they are, these series continue to be at a high quality and are bought up by Japanese scholars in sufficient numbers to warrant doing it again. The only comparable series I can think of in the Anglophone universe is the Cambridge *History of China * which has been coming out for over thirty years and is still missing a few volumes. A number of the original editors—John Fairbank, Denis Twitchett, Liu Kwang-ching, Fritz Mote, and Herbert Franke—have all passed away, and the whole project dropped into the lap of the next generation. I should add that the Cambridge History of Japan (in far fewer volumes) came out much more smoothly.

Slow Reading

How is it that Japan has been able to do this and we in the Anglophone world have not? What’s needed would seem to include money (lots or it), proximity (namely, shorter distances between universities), leaders and would-be leaders willing to give of their time, organization and staff, and a group of scholars committed for the long-term. I think connected to all of this as well is the system of graduate school study in Japan that significantly differs from ours, even as the Japanese system is changing. In North America, Europe, and (I imagine) Australia, students enter graduate school often with a research topic already in mind, take a few years of courses, pass (or possibly fail) a series of written and/or oral examinations, and then set off to write a book-length piece of original scholarship (i.e., their PhD theses) based on original research which

Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective

often includes a year or two of study and research in China or Taiwan. Speed is of the essence and, considering that language training almost always takes up a huge chunk of time even for native speakers, the sense of being rushed through graduate school is almost palpable.

There is, I have to admit as well, a certain underlying irrationality to this whole process. How can someone who has never written a book and probably has no published articles to be expected to write a book all of a sudden while still in their mid- to late-20s? Dissertations are, of course, not books, though most advisors expect them to be pretty close to books. With funding to support graduate students seemingly always getting smaller and with a ferociously difficult job market out there, the leisurely approach to grad school is definitely a thing of the past. Meanwhile, and this is definitely changing, my Japanese friends had to take rigorous, cut-throat tests to get into graduate school, but once in they received support, studied and worked with professors, and in the process established bonds for life. Through the famous ‘old-boy networks’, they got jobs and only much later did they put together several decades of scholarship into a book which would stand in for a PhD dissertation. Most of them did this final step in their late forties or fifties; some of the older generation never bothered with the PhD at all. As the market in Japan has gotten more competitive and especially with so many Chinese students now studying at Japanese universities, getting a PhD has become a more pressing issue. My good friend Ishikawa Yoshihiro got his PhD in his early forties, so things are definitely changing.

I would like to make one final, related point that concerns both academic Sinology in Japan and elsewhere in the world. This is the enduring power of the disciplines to establish barriers that often inhibit communication and whose overcoming can lead to extremely fruitful results. What do I mean? In the prewar period, Kyōdai Sinology in particular *—Shinagaku * 支那学—aimed specifically at bringing different approaches to the study of China: literature, history, classical textual studies, epigraphy, whatever; what was usually not part of the mix was contemporary China, though some scholars did address issues of relevance to the China of their day. The idea was, obviously, that the disciplines may have been useful was to organize knowledge and to pass that knowledge from teacher to student, but the disciplines were nonetheless artificial, and there was no good reason for a historian of Ming China, to take but one example, to ignore evidence from the great novels of the Ming into his or her historical research; similarly, a historian of Tang China would surely want to incorporate information from Tang poetry into research on Tang-period history. My sense is that—and I maybe wrong here—after the war with the reorganization of education in Japan, the disciplines which were

Japanese Views Of China In Historical Perspective 75

then so important to American education began to exert a powerful influence on Japanese academic life. In China Studies that meant that people working in different divisions of the same university might not know of each others’

work. And, people working in similar topics in other parts of East Asia—such as Japanese Confucianism or Korean Buddhism or whatever—would rarely have much contact at all. Happily, I think these barriers are falling, and more cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary work (all meaning the same thing) is being produced that before.

This practice mirrors a similar phenomenon in the West, especially the United States—and I mention the United States in particular because it had such a powerful impact on postwar Japan. In the postwar era, the American government funneled a good deal of money into what was called ‘area studies’, and the areas to be studied were those that the U.S. government deemed hot spots around the world. One of the lessons it had learned from World War II was being caught off guard and finding itself fighting an enemy—Japan—it hardly understood and had few people who knew its language. So, the newly risen Communist China was one of those important hot spots that the government wanted to be sure would have experts to advise it about as the Cold War progressed. ‘Area studies’ concentrated its attention on the modern and contemporary period and it stressed language training, but it did all this in an inter-disciplinary way; that said, it didn’t have much time or patience for the humanities and emphasized the social sciences in a big way—and I think it took the ‘science’ part of social science far too literally. The topic, though, was (in our case) ‘China’ and not literature or history or sociology or whatever.

The idea was to understand China by whatever means were required. While I much appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of this approach when I was a student, it did have the fatal flaw of ignoring pre-contemporary history and culture almost completely.

More recently, area studies has been vigorously criticized for other reasons as well. In addition to a reinvigoration of the disciplines, especially the social sciences, which thus criticized the use of ‘China’ as a meaningful topic, the use of Western-derived theory which I discussed a moment ago has made an all-out effort to break down the entire Sinological approach of the past as representing an elite discourse. I shan’t say any more about this, but I think it might for an interesting topic for discussion.

Finally, I have always felt that Kyoto was the exception to all the rules in Japanese Sinology. Just when I would feel most frustrated about the development of Sinological studies here, I would run into the exception here. Kyōdai may the last place on planet Earth where literary Chinese, literary Chinese *(wenyanwen * 文言文 ), * * is still rigorously taught in the Bungakubu, while at the

Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective

same time contemporary China is being studied here in a kenkyūkai at the Jinbunken as well as probably elsewhere. Also, in recent years topics of concern to the entire East Asian region have been taken up in research groups.

Why this last theme has taken so long to develop in Japan as elsewhere might be an interesting subject of speculation as well.

But, I shall end here and thank you all for your patience and the organizers for inviting me to participate.

Post-script

Several days after our conference concluded I had a private discussion with a faculty member of the Jinbunken who was in attendance that day. I asked him first if he followed my talk and if he agreed. He was able to follow most of it, and he suggested that the discussion of the kenkyūkai system was an accurate description of the ‘good old days’. In recent years, faculty members at Japanese universities have been increasingly saddled with enormous quantities of bureaucratic work—which, like everywhere else, is all but completely a waste of everyone’s time and sanity. The problem has apparently become so acute over the last few years that kenkyūkai, * * in order to have a core group of members, had to start meeting on weekends. That was, of course, not a satisfactory solution, and it meant that aside from the few that continued to meet during the week had fewer members and were in fact fewer in number themselves. No one knew exactly why there has been such a precipitous increase in the amount of bureaucratic paperwork, but it has nonetheless become a fact of life. Let us all pray to our respective source of divine powers that it is temporary.

■ Source: “Translator’s Preface,” in Books and Boats: Sino-Japanese Relations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, by Ōba Osamu (MerwinAsia, 2012), vii–xi.

Translator’s Preface to Books and Boats**** (Ōba Osamu)

Ōba Osamu was born in Kyoto in 1927. Three months later his family moved to Osaka, where he grew up. Virtually his entire academic life has been tied to the Kansai region, which generally refers to that area in central Japan encompassing Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. He received both undergraduate and graduate training in East Asian history at Ryūkoku University in Kyoto.1 After serving in several teaching positions in the 1950s, he moved to Kansai University in Osaka, where he taught for most of his career. Retiring in 1997, Ōba followed the Japanese practice of teaching elsewhere in post-retirement, in this case, at Kōgakkan University in Mie Prefecture.2 There, he served as its president until his death in 2002. During his distinguished career, he lectured at countless venues around the world, and he was a visiting professor at numerous Chinese universities as well as at Princeton University in the United States.

Ōba would readily admit that he was not the first scholar to examine Qing-dynasty (1644–1912) cultural relations with Japan of the Edo (Tokugawa) period (1600–1867), but he was without a doubt the most active. After publishing his magisterial Edo jidai ni okeru Tōsen mochiwatarisho no kenkyū (A study of books imported [to Japan] on Chinese ships in the Edo period) in 1967,3

he spent decades producing highly specialized, detailed works that served as the groundwork for books aimed at a more general audience, such as Edo jidai no Nit-Chū hiwa (Chinese relations with Japan in the Edo period), which is translated here, and Tokugawa Yoshimune to Kōkitei (Tokugawa Yoshimune and the Kangxi emperor).4 His studies on pre-Tokugawa Sino-Japanese relations include Shin Gi Waō (The ruler of Wa who submits to the Wei), Kodai-chūsei ni okeru Nit-Chū kankei shi no kenkyū (Studies in ancient and medieval Sino-Japanese relations), and Kanseki yunyū no bunku shi: Shōtoku Taishi kara Yoshimune e (A cultural history of the importation of Chinese texts, from 1 This university is affiliated with the Nishi Honganji True Pure Land Sect of Buddhism.

2 This university is affiliated with the Ise Shrine.

3 (Suita: Kansai daigaku Tōzai gakujutsu kenkyūsho).

4 Edo jidai no Nit-Chū hiwa (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 1980); Tokugawa Yoshimune to Kōkitei (Tokyo: Taishūkan shoten, 1999).

Translator’s Preface to books and boats

Prince Shōtoku to Yoshimune).5 Ōba also strove to republish rare books in Japanese and Chinese dating from the Edo period, which has been a huge boon to scholars in this field.6 Yet one of his greatest contributions has been to train extraordinary young scholars, such as Matsuura Akira and Tao Demin to name just two, whose work he fostered for four decades.

Ōba also built a parallel career in another field, where he was among the world’s most outstanding and productive scholars—that of unearthing, deciphering, and explicating Chinese wooden strips dating from the Han (206 bce–

220 ce) and later dynasties. His many writings in this field include: Mokkan (Wood strips), Mokkan: Kodai kara no messeeji (Wood strips, messages from antiquity), Kankan kenkyū (Studies of Han wood strips), Shin-Kan teikoku no iyō (The glory of the Qin-Han empires), and Shin-Kan hōsei shi kenkyū (Studies in the history of Qin-Han Law).7 In addition, two volumes of his uncollected essays were published to coincide with his retirement in 1997: Shōwa gannen umaretachi (Those born in 1925) and Zō to hō to (Elephants and Laws).8 A volume of his posthumously collected essays was published in 2007 under the title *Kigire ni nokotta moji: * Ōba Osamu ikōshū (Writings left on pieces of wood: A collection of Ōba Osamu’s posthumous manuscripts).9

5 Shin Gi Waō (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1971, 1989 rpt.), Kodai chūsei ni okeru Nit-Chū kankei shi no kenkyū (Kyoto: Dōhōsha, 1996), and Kanseki yunyū no bunka shi: Shōtoku Taishi kara Yoshimune e (Tokyo: Kenbun shuppan, 1997).

6 Three such works, edited by Ōba, would include: Kyōhō jidai no Nit-Chū kankei shiryō (ni), Shu *shi san kyōdai shū: kinsei Nit-Chū kōshō shiryōshū san *(Materials on Sino-Japanese relations in the Kyōhō era, part two: The writings of the three Zhu brothers; Part three of documents on early modern Sino-Japanese intercourse) (Suita: Kansai daigaku Tōzai gakujutsu kenkyūjo, 1995); *Kyōhō jidai no Nit-Chū kankei shiryō (san), Ogyū Hokkei shū: kinsei Nit-Chū kōshō *

shiryōshū shi (Materials on Sino-Japanese relations in the Kyōhō era, part three: The works of Ogyū Hokkei; Part four of documents on early modern Sino-Japanese intercourse) (Suita: Kansai daigaku Tōzai gakujutsu kenkyūjo, 1995); and Hōreki sannen Hachijōjima hyōchaku Nankinbune shiryō: Edo jidai hyōchaku Tōsen shiryōshū (Materials concerning a Nanjing vessel shipwrecked at Hachijōjima in Hōreki 3: Documents on Chinese vessels shipwrecked in the Edo period) (Suita: Kansai daigaku Tōzai gakujutsu kenkyūjo, 1985).

7 Mokkan (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1979); Mokkan: kodai kara no messeeji (Tokyo: Taishūkan shoten, 1998); Kankan kenkyū (Kyoto: Dōhōsha, 1992); Shin Kan teikoku no iyō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1977); Shin Kan hōsei shi kenkyū (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1982).

8 Both: (Kyoto: Dōhōsha, 1997). They total nearly 1200 pages.

9 (Kyoto: Yanagihara shuppan, 2007).

Translator’s Preface to books and boats 79

The volume translated here, Ōba’s only book thus far to appear in English, contains a certain degree of his personal reminiscences.10 He unpretentiously describes decades of labor to unearth so many of the sources now deemed basic in this area of scholarship. In his first chapter, the most autobiographical, Ōba describes his principal scholarly premise: only after debunking commonsensical historical knowledge can true historical study begin. To give one example, he takes pains to demonstrate that, despite all received wisdom about the centrality of the Dutch to Nagasaki in the Edo period, that city’s actual cosmopolitan flavor derived overwhelmingly from the Chinese and their cultural imports. Perhaps this point is more important for Japanese readers, some of whom tend to glamorize the West and slight things Asian, but it is also important for us to bear in mind.

Ōba, however, goes a step further. He contends that the cultural and intellectual bases for Japan’s modernization in the Meiji era (1868–1912) lay in

“Kangaku” or “Chinese Learning” as it developed in the Tokugawa period.

This point may seem nonsensical given the universal assumption that Tokugawa Western Learning (Yōgaku) had been the key, since “modernization”

would seem to be synonymous with rapid and far-reaching Westernization.

According to Ōba, however, this “commonsensical” but fallacious viewpoint results from the lack of historical perspective. He asks: How did Japanese of the late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji eras learn about the West? In fact, with certain exceptions, their major texts on Western affairs were classical Chinese texts ( Kanbun), often translations of Western books made by European missionaries together with their Qing collaborators. Ōba’s attention to this central importance of classical Chinese texts was the crowning achievement of his career, and it has earned him extraordinary praise from both Japanese and Chinese historians.

10 Several of his books have appeared in Chinese translation, such as Jianghu shidai Zhongguo dianji liubo Riben zhi yanjiu (Studies of the transmission to Japan of classical Chinese texts in the Edo period), trans. Qi Ylnping, Wang Yong, and Wang Baoping (Hangzhou: Hangzhou daxue chubanshe, 1998), which originally appeared as Edo jidai ni okeru Chūgoku bunka juyō no kenkyū (Studies of the reception of Chinese culture in the Edo period) (Kyoto: Dōhōsha, 1984); and Qin Han fazhi shi yanjiu (Studies in the history of Qin-Han law) trans. Lin Jianming et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1991), a translation of *Shin Kan hōsei shi kenkyū. *

Translator’s Preface to books and boats

Some Chinese scholars, a minority, have not been as approving of Sino-Japanese contacts in the Edo period. They are outspokenly critical of Japan’s efforts to cut itself off from China and the rest of the world; indeed, this minority on occasion seem to resent this presumed attempt by Tokugawa Japanese to reject China’s great cultural gifts. Ōba offers a different approach, unencumbered by nationalism. He recognizes that both Japan and China imposed severe restrictions on contact with the outside world, interestingly for similar reasons: to create domestic security. But, he sees private parties on both sides striving to maximize contacts with the other side. Japanese consumers craved any and all things Chinese—books, plants, foodstuffs, medicines, lacquer and other art ware, even elephants. And, Chinese traders and ship captains sought out this business in Nagasaki. No restriction on either side was so strict that its enforcement could not be circumvented. In the chapters that follow, readers will discover a field with considerable depth and sophistication of research that Western historians have long yearned to enter. Perhaps the appearance of Ōba’s book in English translation will encourage young scholars outside of Japan to move in this direction.

It behooves me to acknowledge the assistance of several colleagues at this point. Perhaps the great bane of working in this field is the many different and difficult languages one must master: classical and modern Chinese as well as literary, epistolary, and modern Japanese. The premodern epistolary style, sōrōbun, is the Achilles heel for many scholars raised in the postwar era, both Japanese and Western alike. I was fortunate to have two colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara who have mastered that linguistic dev-ilry well, Luke Roberts and Haruko Iwasaki. Luke was especially generous in helping me decipher numerous lines of text. On those few occasions when the text got the better of us both, Haruko stepped in and usually unlocked the mystery. In many instances, the only person who could really help was Professor Ōba himself. To my long list of queries, he invariably faxed a response within twenty-four hours. In addition, I would like to thank my colleague at York University, Bob T. Wakabayashi, himself a friend of Ōba’s from their Princeton days, who helped me reconceptualize how this work might be best organized in English. All * * errors of translation, however, are my own.

A note on this translation. I have reorganized the chapters of Ōba’s text slightly, so that all the materials concerned with the book traffic appear in Part 1, and all those other materials concerning interpersonal interactions between Chinese and Japanese appear in Part 2. This involved placing the final chapter of the original several chapters earlier. Otherwise, the translation follows the original.

■ Source: “The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71.2

(April 2010).

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

The past two decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest within the field of China studies in Shanghai’s modern history and culture. As if in replication of China’s exploding economy, this attraction to China’s largest city has by no means been limited to the Anglophone world (most non-native Anglophone westerners who work on China now publish much of their scholarship in English), but has been equally matched if not surpassed in quantity by work in Chinese and Japanese. After examining why Shanghai has become so popular to researchers, I will look at the kinds of work that have been done on the city’s history, examine a few recent works of cultural and intellectual history more closely, and suggest a number of avenues for future scholarship.

One of the reasons for the attraction to Shanghai history in the West is that Shanghai was arguably the most Western of all Chinese cities before the Communist victory in 1949. Although Harbin with its largely Russophone community of foreigners in China’s far northeast may lay claim to that dubious distinction in the prewar decades, given Shanghai’s much greater size, it has received the lion’s share of attention.1 Many of Harbin’s Russian expatriates ultimately migrated to Shanghai after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria from the early 1930s.2 In the 1920s and 1930s, however, westerners and East Asians alike referred to both cities as the “Paris of the Orient,” apparently on the assumption that Paris was a glamorous, international city. All Western trends, whether in fashion, film, music, radio, or other forms of popular culture, found resonances in Shanghai before they were felt elsewhere in China or often elsewhere in East Asia. At the same time, Shanghai was home to a relatively large Western émigré community from the middle of the nineteenth 1 A few recent books in English on Harbin deserve mention: Søren Clausen and Stig Thøgersen, The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.

Sharpe, 1995); James H. Carter, Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City, 1916–1932 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); David Wolff, To the Harbin Station: *The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914 *(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

2 Marcia R. Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); despite its subtitle, this book primarily concerns the Russians in the city. See also E.E. Aurilene, Rossiiskaia diaspora v Kitae (Khabarovsk: Chastnaia kollekt-siia, 2008).

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

century. Multinational and multi-religious in composition, this community largely lived unto itself in the Concessions, those areas which by unequal treaty regulations fell under foreign jurisdiction, known as extraterritoriality.

One might expect to find a hybrid culture in Shanghai, a kind of Sino-Western amalgam, but nothing of this sort ever really emerged, perhaps because this was never a full-fledged colonial setting. The “modern” culture that did emerge before the onslaught of World War II and the coming of the Communists soon thereafter was either entirely Western or a Chinese imitation of Western fashions, films, art, and the like.

While there is now a fascination with Shanghai culture in Western, Chinese, and Japanese scholarship, westerners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely evinced more than a passing interest in the surrounding multitudes of Chinese and only rarely learned their language. Business with westerners was almost always conducted in English or through compradors.

The major exception among the foreign community were the Japanese, especially members of their larger enterprises, who most often sought to do business directly with the Chinese, necessitating the acquisition of one or more topolects of Chinese. Indeed, the major Japanese conglomerates initially sent representatives to China for long periods of study and language training to break into local markets, especially networks of trade that the Chinese had long dominated throughout the region.3

Although home primarily to foreigners, the Concessions also played a central role in the unfolding of modern Chinese history. Perhaps most significantly, the French Concession of Shanghai (beyond the reach of the Chinese police) played quiet, unknowing host to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921. Not surprisingly, while this topic was much more popular among Western (and East Asian) academics in the 1960s and 1970s than it is today, that may be changing once again.4 The tiny schoolroom where that initial meeting 3 Motomiya Kazuo, “Sōgō shōsha no keisei” (“The Formation of [Economic] Conglomerates”), in Kindai Nihon no kiseki, * * 8: Sangyō kakumei (The Tracks of Modern Japan, vol. 8: The Industrial Revolution), * * ed. Takamura Naosuke (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1994), 168–74.

4 Recent work indicating more interest in this field would include: Patricia Stranahan, *Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927–1937 *(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); S.A. Smith, A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–1927 (Richmond: Curzon, 2000); and S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Smith’s work covers the decades before Stranahan’s. The fullest recent book on the early Chinese Communist Party is Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Chūgoku Kyōsantō seiritsu shi (History of the Formation of the Chinese *Communist Party) *(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2001); Chinese translation by Yuan Guangquan,

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

took place is now a modest museum—it used to be more like a shrine—but with few visitors, reflecting the changing fortunes of socialism in China itself.

The mix of leftists living in or traveling through Shanghai has been another impetus to scholarship on this city. All manner of international conspiracies were hatched in Shanghai. It was here that the famed spymaster Richard Sorge (1895–1944) met with Ozaki Hotsumi (1901–44), Agnes Smedley (1892–1950), and others whom he brought into his extraordinary ring in the late 1930s and early 1940s.5 It was here that China’s most famous modern writer of fiction, Lu Xun (1881–1936), hid out from the police in the upper storey of the bookstore owned by Uchiyama Kanzō (1885–1959), a longtime Japanese resident of Shanghai and close personal friend to Lu Xun and numerous other Chinese writers.6

Another reason for the considerable attention paid to Shanghai history of late is the growing recognition that, in the waning months before the beginning of total war in Europe, it was the one open port in which Jews escaping from Central Europe could find a haven from Nazi terror. Roughly 20,000 of them, mostly from Germany and Austria with smaller numbers coming from Poland and Lithuania, made their way through a variety of routes, usually via Japan, to occupied Shanghai, where they lived out the war. Later, many of the Jews who had similarly fled to Harbin migrated south to Shanghai.

*Zhongguo Gongchandang chengli shi *(Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006).

Part I.3 is devoted to the spread of Marxism in Shanghai; Part III.1 is devoted to the Communist movement in Shanghai culminating in the formation of the Party. Similarly, radical activities in Shanghai at the time of the May Fourth Movement have been less of a focus of concern than in the past. One exception would be: Eda Kenji, Goshi jiki no Shanhai rōdō undō (The *Shanghai Labor Movement during the May Fourth Republic) *(Kyoto: Dōbōsha, 1992).

5 Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring (rev. ed., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Janice R. MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (Berkeley University of California Press, 1990).

6 Uchiyama Kanzō, Kakōroku (Diary) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten shōshi, 1960); Takatsuna Hirofumi, “Shanhai Uchiyama shoten shōshi” (“A Short History of the Uchiyama Bookstore in Shanghai”), in *Shanhai, jūsō suru nettowakku (Shanghai, a Stratified Network) *(Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2000), 361–400; Yoshida Hiroji, Ro Jin no tomo: Uchiyama Kanzō no shōzō (A Friend *of Lu Xun: A Portrait of Uchiyama Kanzō) *(Tokyo: Shinkyō shuppansha, 1994). Discussion of Japanese leftists in Shanghai forms a large part of Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen (Shanghai *in 1930) *(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990); Joshua Fogel, “The Other Japanese Community: Leftwing Japanese Activities in Wartime Shanghai,” in Wartime Shanghai, * * ed. Yeh Wen-hsin (London: Routledge, 1998): 42–61. Since the 1950s, Uchiyama’s descendents have operated that bookstore (devoted to Chinese subjects) in Tokyo.

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

This particular chapter in world history has helped bring proper acclaim to Sugihara Chiune (1900–86), the Japanese consul in wartime Kovno (Kaunas), who wrote semi-legitimate transit visas through Japan to Shanghai for thousands of Jewish refugees, a humanitarian move that cost him his diplomatic career, but has gained him considerable posthumous acclaim.7

In the early 1990s, the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley began a well-funded Luce project in which a number of senior scholars and graduate students worked in conjunction with their counterparts at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. A similar project at Cornell University also funded by the Luce Foundation was carried out at about the same time. The main figures at Berkeley were the late Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Yeh Wen-hsin, and Elizabeth Perry, and at Cornell, Sherman Cochran; their work will be discussed below. Though not directly related to either of these projects, Leo Ou-fan Lee, then at the University of California, Los Angeles, was pursuing his own research on modern Shanghai culture, ultimately producing *Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945. * As at Berkeley and Cornell, a number of Lee’s students went on to produce theses and books principally in the cultural history of the city.8 Two other centers, both in Europe, also began generating works on Shanghai, in part in interaction with Berkeley, Cornell, and UCLA and in part independently. One was at the University of Lyon under prolific historian Christian Henriot, and the other was at the University of Heidelberg under Rudolf Wagner. Henriot has 7 Irene Eber, “Overland and by Sea: Eight Centuries of the Jewish Presence in China,” Chinese Journal of International Law 4.1 (2005): 235–56; Hillel Levine, In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1996); David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945 (Hoboken: KTAV Publishing House, 1988). Most recently, see Irene Eber’s collection, Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Xu Buzeng, Xunfang Youtairen: Youtai wenhua jingying zai Shanghai *(Locating the Jews: The Jewish Cultural Elite of Shanghai) *(Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2007). Incidentally, the entire Yeshiva of Mir (a city then in Poland, now in Belarus) escaped extinction thanks to Sugihara; see Elkhanen Yoysef Hertsman, Mirer yeshiva in goles, ven di velt hot gebrent (Brooklyn: n.p., 1950).

8 Lee (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Among his students: Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Leiden: Brill, 2005); and Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). I should note in this context the recent publication of a work on prewar Shanghai artistic culture which I have not as yet been able to read: Lynn Pan, Shanghai Style: Art and Design between the Wars (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2008).

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

been single-mindedly focused in his research on Shanghai for several decades, while Wagner’s wide-ranging interests focused for a number of years on the emergence of the public sphere, especially via the press, in nineteenth-century Shanghai. The seminar he ran on the latter theme—conducted in English—

has since produced several important books on early Chinese newspapers from Shanghai and their publishers.9

If Western imperialism was partly responsible for the transformation of Shanghai into its present size and shape, however, we now know as well that the widespread perception that Shanghai was a sleepy fishing village before the arrival of Western merchants, missionaries, and gunboats in the aftermath of the Opium War (1839–42) is simply a myth. While the origins of this myth are unknown, it may have been generated by self-serving Western interests in the city. As Linda Johnson demonstrated in Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074–1858, * * Shanghai has a history almost a millennium long. By 1760 it had become the most important domestic port of trade of the entire Qing empire and the main hub for regional trade. By the 1830s, before the Opium War and the residence of westerners in the city, the volume of shipping through Shanghai was on a par with that of London.10

This point is made equally strongly by Meng Yue of the University of Toronto and Qinghua University (Beijing) in her recent, highly thoughtful book, *Shanghai and the Edges of Empire. * At least as important as the arrival of the West to the rise of Shanghai as a Chinese city was the Christian-inspired Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), which devastated vast areas throughout south China, killing millions.11 The Christian rebels, intent as they were in destroying what they deemed idol-worshipping traditional Confucian civilization, attacked the major centers of Chinese culture in the lower Yangzi region—

Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Yangzhou, among others. Chinese figures of cultural prominence who were able to escape with their lives (to say nothing of the countless thousands of ordinary folk) frequently made their way to Shanghai.

The presence of a zone into which they presumed the rebels would fear to tread—the foreign Concessions—made the city all the more attractive. And, it meant that not only did Shanghai’s population soar, but its standing as a 9 Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Rudolf Wagner, ed., Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870–1910

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).

10 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), esp. 155–75.

11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

center of cultural production rapidly outstripped the rest of the country. Thus, Shanghai was ironically the cultural and intellectual beneficiary of the rest of the lower Yangzi’s catastrophe.

Thus, Shanghai owes its prominence neither solely to westerners nor to domestic rebels alone. The native culture it would produce in the aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion was a rich amalgam of regional Chinese cultures, increasingly over time with influence from westerners and Japanese. Mainland Chinese scholars and many non-Chinese following them have depicted Shanghai as “semi-colonial,” a distinctly unproductive designation. While westerners in the city did enjoy extraterritoriality, they had little authority outside the Concessions, and the Chinese population of Shanghai was always many times larger than all the foreign communities combined. In addition, numerous Chinese owned property and lived in the Concessions, making this whole topic much more satisfyingly complex than any easy appellation might afford.

Meng convincingly demonstrates that focusing solely on the Western component of the city as a reason for its rise is myopic and needs to be integrated into a broader understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history.

She deals with a number of topics in Shanghai history, though I shall limit myself here to just one, what she dubs “semiotic modernity.” From the last years of the nineteenth century, hundreds of Western works were translated into Chinese, most of them retranslations from the Japanese. In rendering these works into their own language roughly a generation earlier, the Japanese coined hundreds of new words (using Chinese characters) to represent the many foreign terms from Western sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The great majority of these neologisms were rapidly and so seamlessly integrated into Chinese that virtually no native speaker can now detect which terms are native and which of Japanese coinage.12 The linguistic story is all background, as Meng proceeds to a discussion of the Commercial Press of Shanghai, which was responsible for bringing out many of these volumes of translation and for inaugurating the 12 The Italian linguist, Federico Masini, demonstrated that the Chinese, together with missionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century had, in fact, coined many such terms, which Chinese scholars largely ignored. Unlike the crisis of the late nineteenth century, the need for the “new learning” (as Western knowledge became known) was not then recognized. When thousands of Chinese students traveled to Japan to study—just as tens of thousands now are studying in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere—they were introduced to the Japanese neologisms, many of which, it should be added, were borrowed from the earlier Chinese-missionary coinages. See Masini, The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898, * * monograph series #6, * Journal of Chinese Linguistics* (Berkeley: University of California, 1993).

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

practice of bianyi (literally, compiling and translating). Rather than explaining the term and then using the Romanized Chinese, Meng opts for the infelicitous coinage “transcompilation” to convey the two halves of the Chinese term bianyi (bian “compile”; yi “translate”), a choice that obfuscates rather than clarifies.

The contribution of the Commercial Press to Shanghai (and Chinese) culture is happily recounted here, if Meng’s brilliant analysis is occasionally confused by excessively “theoretical” prose. Regrettably, the University of Minnesota Press did not edit this book carefully.

While Western residents in Shanghai may have been largely—though by no means totally—ignorant of Chinese culture, such has not been the case in recent scholarship. Nineteenth- and prewar twentieth-century Shanghai cultural history has been among the most productive areas, including literary, film, art, and intellectual history. In recent studies of Shanghai history in this domain, however, there has been a tendency (unconscious, to be sure, and a trend not limited to East Asian history) to use “theory” to replace thought. One wonders what invoking everyone from Walter Benjamin (1895–1943) to Janet Abu-Lughod to Régis Debray can possibly offer the scholar of Shanghai history and culture. One thing these theorists do have in common—and this would include many more than just the three named here—is a total ignorance of anything having to do with the history, culture, and language of Shanghai in particular and China in general.

In 2007 Alexander Des Forges (University of Massachusetts, Boston) published a fine book entitled Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural *Production. * 13 What does it add to Des Forges’s excellent work, I had to ask myself, when he invokes the vaguest of similarities with Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” other than joining the chorus of those who have adopted Benjamin as the prophet of the age? This reader, at least, found it painfully tiresome.

Even if Benjamin’s confusing interests coincidentally accorded with those of early twentieth-century Chinese writers, what possible meaning could that have, other than pure coincidence? True, both were concerned with the advent of “modernity,” however one might choose to define that uniformly fungible term, but comparisons need to be justified both internally and externally. This is similar to people who posit linguistic influence between two words from entirely different language groups based solely on sound, what linguist call klang association, without any genetic linkage. That is not, I would argue, how language or culture or history works. Elsewhere, Des Forges invokes Benjamin’s ubiquitous essay, “The Task of the Translator.” I, too, like many who work in the trenches of translation—that is, who actually translate rather than 13 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007).

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

simply write about it—have read that essay numerous times, though I still have only a faint idea about what Benjamin was trying to say. Maybe Des Forges actually does understand this piece, although Benjamin’s best friend, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), has written of this essay that it “contained all the ingredi-ents that gained for his writings the reputation of incomprehensibility.”14

Although his book would have been just as good without reference to the term “mediasphere,” a concept taken from Régis Debray (b. 1940),15 Des Forges has produced a fascinating addition to the field of Shanghai studies. He argues that it was serialized fiction in the new newspapers and periodicals that made Shanghai into the unique cultural space that it was at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Even more intriguing, he notes that the long novels carried in installments were largely written in “Wu dialect”

(“lect” would have been a better choice of term)16 of the Shanghai region, and his text is full of marvelous instances substantiating this point.

Another work in cultural history that deserves to be on everybody’s Shanghai reading list but appears in the bibliography of none of the English-language books published to date is Liu Jianhui’s *Mato Shanhai: Nihon chishikijin no *

“kindai” taiken (Demon Capital Shanghai: The “Modern” Experience of Japanese *Intellectuals). * 17 * * Liu (International Research Center for Japanese Studies) jux-taposes the two spheres of Shanghai: the walled Chinese city and the foreign Concessions, the former symbolizing everything backward and premodern about China and the latter the modern world. He looks at the experiences of numerous Japanese who came to Shanghai or stopped over in the city en route to the West from the 1860s through World War II. As his title indicates, it was there that these men and women, particularly in the nineteenth century, first experienced the modern world—whether that meant their first piano bar, cup 14

Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, * * trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society), 121.

15 Although I had not heard Debray’s name dropped for decades, I must admit that seeing it here brought a huge smile to my face as I remembered the spoof of his character by Mel Brooks in The Producers (Roger De Bris).

16 Calling both Chinese “language” and Shanghai “dialect” lects enables us to avoid the unproductive language vs. dialect debate. Half a century ago, Max Weinreich summed it up beautifully with the aphorism: “a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot” (“a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”). See his “Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt” (YIVO and the problems of our time), YIVO bleter 25.1 (January–February 1945): 3–18.

17 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000). Chinese translation by Gan Huijie, Modu Shanghai: Riben zhishiren de ‟jindai” tiyan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2003). See draft translation into English carried serially at http://www.chinajapan.org/articles.

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

of coffee, Greta Garbo movie, or mattress-and-box-springs bed. The hustle-bustle of the city was unlike anything they had ever experienced before, but it was also a wake-up call, for the root of all the activity in the city was the Western presence. Only the Western half of the city was worthy of emulation; the Chinese city was pitiable at best.

Liu also looks at the transmission of Western scientific knowledge to China via the translation efforts of missionaries, especially the London Missionary Society which, in addition to distributing a quarter million Bibles in Chinese, published 171 religious and scientific texts in Chinese. The first and most important figure in this effort was the missionary William Muirhead (1822–1900) who actually met several of the first Japanese to visit the city. Of course, none of this activity could have occurred without considerable Chinese help, although the names and careers of the missionaries’ Chinese collaborators are considerably less well known. Whatever impact the Christian texts may have had notwithstanding, the scientific works and the Western news summaries distributed by missionary presses were of great importance. For example, when the theory of a spherical Earth was introduced as a proven scientific fact, it was no longer possible to posit any country at the center of the world. Any Chinese who accepted this thesis would perforce find his native land decentered, one country among many in a world of nation-states. There is much more in Liu’s book worthy of consideration, especially the place of Shanghai in the writings of Japanese novelists in the twentieth century. Perhaps the Chinese translation of 2003 will enable other Sinologists interested in Shanghai’s place in the transnational flow of ideas to take advantage of this marvelous book.18

Another extremely popular Shanghai topic is the world of the nascent cinema there. Several scholars—some more schooled in “cinema studies,” some more in modern Chinese history, but rarely in both—have written recent books on the topic.19 While the Western element in the production of Chinese films 18 The Chinese series in which Liu’s book appears—“Shanghai shi yanjiu yicong” (Collection of works on Shanghai history in translation)—features eleven titles either out or imminent, including two of Wakeman’s three books (Shanghai Badlands and Policing Shanghai), Bryna Goodman’s Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History (1849–1949) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Kohama Masako, Kindai Shanhai no kōkyōsei to kokka (The “Public” and the State in Modern Shanghai) (Tokyo: Kenbun shuppan, 2000); and Lu Hanchao’s Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

19 Zhang Zhen, *An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 *

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Zhang Yingjin, ed., *Cinema and Urban *

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

in Shanghai in its early years is well handled in these works, there is scarcely a mention—let alone a detailed examination—of the importance of Japanese influence, sponsorship, direction, and production of films in Shanghai, such as the company operated by Kawakita Nagamasa (1903–81).20

One cultural topic deserving more attention, mentioned occasionally but only studied of late in one book, is the modern architecture of Shanghai, namely the Western-style buildings built post-Opium War, many of which survived the Japanese invasion and occupation. Muramatsu Shin’s extraordinary text marks an excellent beginning, with its maps, charts, and detailed graphics.21 It begins with a chapter entitled “Shanghae 1852” (reflecting British spelling of the city at that time, itself a reflection of the Shanghainese lect before imposition of a national standard). As he tells the stories of successive waves of architectural booms in the city, Muramatsu includes countless old photographs and a treasure trove of citations. Anyone seriously interested in old photographs of the city of Shanghai, though, should consult the incomparable website, http://

virtualshanghai.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/, created and maintained by Christian Henriot.

Another topic in the cultural history of the city that has elicited considerable interest among scholars is Shanghai’s central place in the history of the modern or quasi-modern Chinese press and the role of the Concessions in its development. Some of the best works in this sub-field have emerged out of Rudolf Wagner’s ongoing seminar at the University of Heidelberg. Thus far, arguably the most important product of that seminar is a monograph by Barbara Mittler (herself at Heidelberg), A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912, a * * study of what is generally considered the earliest Shanghai newspaper (dating to 1872), *Shenbao. * Founded, interestingly enough, by a British merchant, Ernest Major (1841–1908), the subject of ongoing research by Wagner himself, Shenbao became the most successful Shanghai paper of its day—until 1949 when the Communists came to power—despite the fact that until 1904 it was written in literary Chinese without punctuation, Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

20 See, for example, Shimizu Akira, Shanhai sokai eiga watakushi shi (A Personal History of *Films in the Shanghai Concessions) *(Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995). Poshek Fu looks at this phenomenon in a relatively short essay: “Projecting Ambivalence: Chinese Cinema in Semi-Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1941,” in Wartime Shanghai, * * 86–109.

21 Muramatsu Shin, Shanhai, toshi to kenchiku, 1842–1949 nen (Shanghai, the City and its *Architecture, 1842–1949) *(Tokyo: Parco shuppankyoku, 1991). A slightly older book on a much more modest scale with similar concerns is Fujiwara Keiyō, Shanhai, shissō suru *kindai toshi (Shanghai, Modern City at Full Speed) *(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988).

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

insuring an elite readership only. Chinese businessmen took over ownership of the paper upon Major’s death. Mittler spends a great deal of time trying to assess the impact that this newspaper had—an extremely difficult topic—and comes away somewhat skeptical of much in this regard.22

An earlier study dealing with a slightly later Shanghai newspaper, Shibao, is Joan Judge’s Print and Politics: “Shibao” and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing *China. * 23 * * Founded in 1904 during a surreptitious visit to Shanghai from Japan by the exiled reformer and polymath Liang Qichao (1873–1929), then with a price still on his head, Shibao was aimed at creating a middle-level readership, between government officials and a largely illiterate common folk. In response and fearful of losing readership, Shenbao made similar compromises at that time. Judge effectively demonstrates that this paper with its constitutional reformist objectives played a major role in the late Qing government’s efforts to reform itself before ultimately being undone by the 1911 Revolution.

Ernest Major inaugurated another important serial in Shanghai, Dianshizhai *huabao (Dian-shizhai Illustrated). * During its fourteen years of publication from 1884 until 1898, it produced 4,509 illustrations with explanatory commentary.

Many of these beautifully drawn and lithographically produced illustrations were sensationalist in the extreme, highlighting both the scientifically novel (air balloons) and the scientifically impossible (half-human, half-beast creatures). There have been a number of introductions to Dianshizhai huabao, but Ye Xiaoqing’s (Macquarie University) The Dianshizhai Pictorial: Shanghai Urban Life, 1884–1898 is the first full-length study.24 As Ye demonstrates, it was an important news outlet, not just for international news but for domestic news outside Shanghai as well. It also exposed and lampooned political hypoc-risy. Perhaps Ye’s greatest service is the inclusion of numerous reproductions from the serial and her fluid translations of the difficult, appended prose.

22 See note 9 above. For a more scientific study of print in Shanghai, see Christopher Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004).

23 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

24 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003). The earlier studies would include: Don J. Cohn, ed., ** ** Vignettes from the Chinese: Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth Century** **(Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987); Nakano Miyoko and Takeda Masaya, ed., ** ** *Seikimatsu Chūgoku no kawaraban, eiri shinbun *

“Tensekisai gahō” no sekai (Chinese Tile Block Printing at the End of the Century: The World of the Illustrated Newspaper, ** Dianshizhai huabao) (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 1999); and Shi Xiaojun, “Tensekisai gahō” ni miru Meiji Nihon (Meiji Japan as Seen from **Dianshizhai huabao) (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 2004).

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

One issue that has recently been brought to light by an especially brilliant young Chinese scholar, Lai Yü-chih (National Palace Museum, Taipei), is the origin of all of the illustrations in Dianshizhai huabao, a topic scarcely mentioned in work that preceded her groundbreaking essay.25 She shows clearly through comparative and textual analysis—which will please both historians and art historians—that the art work in Dianshizhai huabao came from pro-totypes in earlier Japanese woodblock prints. Lai’s work may need more time to filter down in the Shanghai studies field, but as it gains greater currency, the Sino-Japanese connections in the sub-field as a whole should attract greater attention.

The entire topic of Japanese influence in Shanghai has been left largely untouched in the English-language literature to date. This topic would fall into at least two subfields: the years of the Japanese military occupation of the city (1937–45) and Chinese collaboration; and the Japanese community of Shanghai and its ties both to the other foreigners in the city and to the Chinese there (1860s–1945). The former has received somewhat more attention than the latter. Poshek Fu’s Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1945 was a pioneering examination of “collaboration,” needless to say an extremely sensitive topic to this day. Fu attempted to address the ways in which Chinese living under Japanese occupational authorities articulated their interests, or remained significantly silent, within the obvious constraints of the time.26 More recently, a similar topic was under-taken in In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation, a collection of essays edited by Henriot and Yeh.27 What neither of these studies conveys, however, nor was it the aim of the authors to do so, is much about the occupiers themselves. An additional contributing force to this lacuna is the poor training in Japanese language of most Western Sinologists. It also oddly reflects a Chinese piety that Chinese history is somehow *sui generis. *

Not surprisingly, the latter topic, the history of the Japanese expatriate community of Shanghai, has been pioneered and developed by Japanese scholars 25 Lai Yü-chih, “Fuliu qianjie: 1870 niandai Shanghai de Riben gangluo yu Ren Bonian zuo-pin zhong de Riben yangfen” (“Surreptitious Appropriation: Japanese Contacts in 1879s Shanghai and the Japanese Nutrients in the Works of Ren Bonian”), ** ** Meishu shi yanjiu jikan 14 (March 2003): 159–242.

26 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Donald Jordan has written two books about Sino-Japanese bellicose relations in the early 1930s Shanghai, relying on Chinese and Western sources: China’s Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and *Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs: The Failure of China’s *

“Revolutionary Diplomacy,” 1931–32 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

of China. The Japanese have written a tremendous amount about Shanghai, site of the first expatriate Japanese community anywhere in the modern world.

The first and, in many ways, still the most important contributor to research on ties between Japanese nationals and Shanghai was Okita Hajime (1905–85).

Coming to Shanghai as an English teacher shortly after the occupation of the city began, Okita discovered that his fellow Japanese evinced little interest in the history of their own community and had done next to nothing to preserve the material record. He thus made Herculean efforts to document the distinctive history of the Japanese in the city, poring over old newspapers and journals in various languages, and wrote a handful of books on the subject.28 After repatriation to Japan at the close of World War II, however, he soon ceased research on this topic. Those of us who have followed in his wake owe him a great debt of thanks.29

A general history of modern Shanghai in Japanese, richly illustrated and documented, is Shanhai shi, kyodai toshi no keisei to hitobito no itonami (A History of Shanghai, the Formation of a Giant City and the Businesses of Its People), * * edited by Takahashi Kōsuke and Furumaya Tadao.30 The work of nine men and women, this volume looks at the formation of the modern city, its Chinese, Western, and Japanese components, and brings the story from the 28 Okita Hajime, Kojō shi dan: Shanhai ni kansuru shiteki zuihitsu (Tales from the History of *Shanghai: Historical Notes about Shanghai) *(Shanghai: Tairiku shinpōsha, 1942); Nihon to *Shanhai (Japan and Shanghai) *(Shanghai: Tairiku shinpōsha, 1943); Shanhai ni kansuru *bunken mokuroku (Bibliography of Materials on Shanghai) *(Shanghai: Akita Masao, 1944);

“Shanhai shiwa” (Historical tales of Shanghai), Shanhai kenkyū 1 (February 1942): 37–68.

See also Takatsuna Hirofumi, “Nihon ni okeru Shanhai shi kenkyū no senkusha: Okita Hajime” (“Japanese Pioneer in Shanghai Historical Research: Okita Hajime”), Kindai Chūgoku kenkyū ihō 17 (1995): 25–40.

29 The centerpiece of Shanghai historical and cultural studies in Japan and particularly studies of the city’s Japanese community is the Research Group on Shanghai History which meets monthly in Tokyo. As their website (http://www.ricoh.co.jp/net-messena/

ACADEMIA/SHANGHAI/) makes clear, they periodically sponsor conferences, have ongoing joint research projects (often together with scholars from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences), and maintain an invaluable bibliography of works on Shanghai. One of their first and most impressive projects was Shanhai, jūsō suru nettowakku (Shanghai, *a Stratified Network) * of 2000. This 550-page book contains eighteen essays (by Japanese, Chinese, and one Korean), with summaries of the essays in Chinese and English. It covers such topics as Shanghai entrepreneurs and the image of “public” spaces (such as parks), local reforms and the roles played by local gentry, local communal and public works projects, Buddhism and the Japanese Residents Association of Shanghai, and much more.

30 (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 1995).

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

mid-nineteenth century through the war years and up to the Communist take-over in 1949 *. * 31

One scholar who has spent years studying the history of the Japanese of Shanghai is, interestingly, a Chinese at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Chen Zuen. In an online series now numbering over ninety installments, entitled “Shanhai ni ita Nihonjin” (“The Japanese who were in Shanghai”), Chen wrote extensively about any and every aspect of that community before the end of World War II. Much of this series has now largely been transformed into book form as Xunfang Dongyangren, jindai Shanghai de Riben juliumin (1868–1945) (Searching for the Japanese, Modern Shanghai’s *Japanese Residents, 1868–1945). * 32 * * Many topics are covered in this fine book, though at the expense of covering none of them in great depth. He has also co-authored with Takatsuna Hirofumi, former head of the Japanese Research Group on Shanghai History, a volume of photographs from this same community: Riben qiaomin zai Shanghai, 1870–1945 (Japanese Expatriates in Shanghai, *1870–1945). * 33

There are a number of sub-fields in the realm of Shanghai studies that touch on the history of ideas. Two of the most impressive contributions (published the same year, 1997) dealt with the issue of prostitution. Working separately for many years, Christian Henriot and Gail Hershatter (University of California, Santa Cruz), produced wonderful and completely different perspectives on the subject, although Henriot’s did not have an immediate impact (outside France) until it was translated into English as Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai and published in 2001. While these works do not deal centrally with intellectual history, Hershatter’s book, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai, did address the issue of the conceptual constructions of prostitution in Shanghai. On the topic of more traditional courtesanship in the last decades of the Qing empire, Catherine Yeh’s (Boston 31 A shorter volume with far more humble aims is Tsuji Kōgo, Nakano Kenji, Takeyoshi Jirō, and Uno Kazuo, Shanhai shi, sekai ni hiraku shōkōgyō toshi (The City of Shanghai, a *Commercial-industrial City Opening to the World) *(Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1992).

32 (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2006). On the Japanese Residents Association of Shanghai, see Joshua Fogel “‘Shanghai-Japan’: The Japanese Residents’

Association of Shanghai,” Journal of Asian Studies 59 (November 2000): 927–50.

33 (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2000). See also the fine essays in Kojima Masaru and Ma Honglin, eds., Shanhai no Nihonjin shakai, senzen no bunka, shūkyō, kyōiku *(Japanese Society in Shanghai, Prewar Culture, Religion, and Education) *(Kyoto: Ryūkoku daigaku Bukkyō bunka kenkyūjo, 1999); and Katsuragawa Mitsumasa, “Shanhai no Nihonjin shakai” (“Japanese society in Shanghai”), in Kokusai toshi Shanhai (Shanghai, International City) (Ōsaka: Ōsaka sangyō daigaku, sangyō kenkyūjo, 1995), 29–97.

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

University) Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 is a major contribution to this genre.34

Another topic related to elite intellectual history is covered in Yeh Wenhsin’s recent work from the Shanghai project at Berkeley: Shanghai Splendor: *Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 *(University of California Press, 2007). Yeh looks at the entire period from the immediate post-Opium War years through the coming to power of the Chinese Communists.

Her focus is on the rise of a middle class in the city, whom she dubs “petty urbanites” *(xiao shimin). * This was the class, she argues, responsible for the city’s economic modernization and the rise of urban culture in Chinese Shanghai. Chapter 6 examines the history of ideas as popularized in the periodical and popular press directed at this new class, and its treatment of the popular journal *Dushu shenghuo (Readers’ Life) * is especially deft. Beginning in 1934, this twice-weekly serial appeared in Shanghai for several years. Dressed in Aesopian language, it was (seen with 20–20 hindsight) a Marxist-oriented journal, with several writers already members of the Chinese Communist Party. In straightforward, idiomatic, and vernacular Chinese they addressed the common concerns of the urban reading public, but always provided solutions to everyday problems that led to radical transformation. Several members of the team that produced it were murdered for their political views. One of the most prolific, Ai Siqi (1910–66), would later escape to the Communist wartime lair of Yan’an in the mountains of the Northwest and teach Mao Zedong (1893–1976) about Marxism-Leninism.35

Many other areas of Shanghai history not directly related to the history of ideas have, of course, been studied in recent years. After a brief overview, let us move to topics for future research. Before his untimely death, Frederic Wakeman was the unofficial dean of Shanghai studies in the West. After many years working in Chinese social, intellectual, and political history, he launched the Shanghai project at Berkeley and went on to produce three of his own books on Shanghai topics (all translated into Chinese), several edited volumes, and numerous essays in little more than a decade. These works concerned the 34 Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures** *(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai. * See the excellent review of these two books by Angela Ki Che Leung, “Prostitution in Modern Shanghai: Two Recent Studies,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China **2.1 (2000), 180–87.

Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), a book beautifully produced with numerous images.

35 Joshua A. Fogel, Ai Ssu-ch’i’s Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987).

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

creation and operation of the Shanghai police, the secret police and gangsters in the city, and similar undercurrents in first half of the twentieth century.36

Undeniably, the prewar history of gangsterism, gambling, and the urban demimonde of Shanghai have been major attractions of westerners to the city at least since Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express graced the screens of movie houses worldwide in 1932. A pioneer in the serious study of Shanghai gangs and their nefarious connections with business and political interests in the city was Brian Martin, whose study of the Green Gang, a secret society and immense criminal enterprise with tentacles going in many directions, and its leader Du Yuesheng (1887–1951), was the first significant work of its kind.37

Two leaders of Shanghai political or political-economic history have been Parks Coble (University of Nebraska) and Marie-Claire Bergère (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales). Coble’s first book, The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927–1937, * * had a major impact on our understanding of the Shanghai bourgeoisie during the period of Guomindang rule in the city and the relationship between political and commercial leaders in the city, complicating the simplistic idea in vogue before then that the Guomindang and the Shanghai capitalists had completely overlapping interests.38 Most recently, his Chinese Capitalists in Japan’s New Order: The Occupied Lower Yangzi, 1937–1945 picks up the story of his earlier work and examines the years of Japanese occupation, following their landing and assault on Shanghai in the summer of 1937, and the collaboration of China’s bourgeoisie.39 Bergère’s L’âge d’or de la bourgeoisie chinoise, 1911–

1937 addresses a similar topic but in a slightly earlier period. Her more popular Histoire de Shanghai aimed at a broader readership.40 One other book 36

Policing Shanghai: 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and *Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service *(Berkeley: University of California, 2003).

37 Brian G. Martin, *The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919–1937 *

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

38 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1980, rpt. 1986).

39 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

40 The former: (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), trans. Janet Lloyd as The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The latter: (Paris: Fayard, 2002). Precursor to these and other studies of Shanghai commercial and social institutions before the Opium War: Susan Mann-Jones, “The Ningbo Pang and Financial Power in Shanghai,” *The Chinese City between Two Worlds, * ed. Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 73–96; and even earlier: Negishi Tadashi, *Shanhai no girudo (Shanghai Guilds) *(Tokyo: Nihon hyōronsha, 1951).

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

deserving mention in this context, Shanghai Sojourners, edited by Wakeman and Yeh, brings together essays by many of the people who subsequently wrote full-length books on the topics and whose earlier essays can still be read with profit: Bergère, Cochran, Bryna Goodman (University of Oregon), Jeffrey Wasserstrom (University of California, Irvine), Hershatter, Emily Honig (University of California, Santa Cruz), Martin, and Perry, in addition to the two editors.41 And, for his part, Sherman Cochran produced several volumes as well, largely in the field of business history.42

None of these works in business or economic history are the equation-driven sort that occupy many a library shelf. They are full of fascinating history of people and social and political forces in China’s largest city. Other topics not directly tied to the history of ideas that have been plumbed in modern Shanghai historical studies would include the labor movement in the work of Elizabeth Perry (Harvard University), the student movement in that of Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the life of ordinary Shanghai dwellers in that of Lu Hanchao (Georgia Institute of Technology), and the world of British expatriates in that of Robert Bickers (University of Bristol).43

41 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992). Although it came out too late for me to assess, similar themes appear to be addressed in the recent volume edited by Jean Oi and Nara Dillon, At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks and State-building in Republican Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); editor, Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

43 Elizabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Shanghai Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Lu Hanchao, see fn. 18; Robert Bickers, *Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai *(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Bickers, “Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai, 1843–1937,” Past and Present 159 (May 1998): 161–

Among other things, Perry’s work was a critique of the earlier, Marxist-inspired book by Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919–1927, * * trans. H.M. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968). Chesneaux was one of the first foreigners, if not the very first, allowed to use Chinese historical archives; nearly two decades would pass before anyone else outside China was permitted access. Following in his teacher’s footsteps is Alain Roux (INALCO). See two of his books: Le Shanghai ouvrier des années trente: coolies, gangsters et syndicalistes (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1993); and Grèves et politique à Shanghai: les désillusions, 1927–1932 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1995).

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

Where may Shanghai historical studies go from here? While all the usual avenues for research remain open and full of possibilities, some recent research offers hints about directions for the future. These include comparative urban history. Comparisons of Shanghai with other megalopolises need to have some meaningful grounding, or the results may be vaguely interesting but largely meaningless. Can Shanghai be compared, for example, with New York City on the basis of the fact that each is a port, the largest city on its respective continent, a major cultural center, not a political capital, and contains a multicultural mix, among other factors? One such joint Sino-Japanese research project produced an impressive volume, Yokohama to Shanhai, kindai toshi keisei shi hikaku kenkyū (Yokohama and Shanghai, Comparative Studies in the History of the Formation of Modern Cities), * * in 1995.44 Scholars from China primarily looked at Yokohama’s history, while Japanese scholars were primarily responsible for Shanghai. A similarly notable volume on Edo (former name for Tokyo) and Paris, both political capitals and major population centers in the early modern period, appeared in English in 1994.45

Future researchers on Shanghai may also wish to address the internal comparison: Shanghai pre-1949 with Shanghai post-1978, the year that Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) launched the contemporary reforms that have opened China up. Yeh Wen-hsin touches on this in *Shanghai Splendor, * and Jeffrey Wasserstrom looks at it more closely in Global Shanghai, 1850–2010, a book I have only seen but not as yet had an opportunity to read closely.46 Interestingly, the Chinese themselves have not in the least shied away from the comparison—which needless to say puts the harshest years of Communism in a less than flattering light—largely, it would appear, to promote tourism.

More international cooperation in Shanghai studies would be a salutary development as well. At present and for obvious reasons, the most multi-laterally involved national group is the Chinese, involved with researchers from Europe, North America, Australia, Korea, and Japan. This is largely, of course, because all non-Chinese scholars have had to come to Shanghai to access materials and have forged bilateral ties with scholars at the Shanghai Academy, Fudan University, and elsewhere in the city. By comparison, Western scholars with a few exceptions are inattentive to developments in Japanese studies of Shanghai, whereas Japanese scholars are better informed about the Anglophone world. A multinational website for Shanghai studies might be a start, or perhaps links on Christian Henriot’s Virtual Shanghai website.

44 (Yokohama: Yokohama kaikō shiryō fukyū kyōkai, Yokohama kaikō shiryōkan, 1995).

45 James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru, eds., Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

46 (London: Routledge, 2009).

The Recent Boom In Shanghai Studies

While the Europeans in Shanghai have been studied, and the Japanese community is now getting its due, the significant Korean expatriate community deserves some attention. The Korean Communist Party was founded in Shanghai in 1921, the same year as the Chinese Communist Party. At the time Koreans, their country having been annexed by Japan in 1910, were considered Japanese nationals, making the ethnicity issue that much more complex. And, what about Vietnamese in Shanghai? We know that Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), for example, passed through the city in the late 1920s. Did the French secret police exchange information with their Guomindang counterparts?

How did the Japanese—or any of the foreign communities of Shanghai—

living in the Concessions differ from their counterparts in other treaty port concessions (Chongqing, Tianjin, Hankou, Hangzhou, or elsewhere)? In some cities’ concessions, the Chinese were allowed to own land, while in others they were not. Comparative analysis would help explain such important differences in historical experience.47 And, how did Shanghai as a treaty port differ from other treaty ports? There have been many recent books on urban Chinese history (Suzhou, Hankou, Tianjin, in addition to those about Harbin mentioned above), though these have not been centrally focused on the treaty port quality of those cities.

One last thought for such comparative research would be to examine foreign and Chinese fiction set in Shanghai. Attempts by westerners to examine Yokomitsu Riichi’s (1898–1947) novel Shanhai (Shanghai) have been notably poor, and the recent English translation leaves much to be desired.48 But other Japanese authors also situated their tales in Shanghai, and everyone knows of André Malraux’s (1901–76) *La condition humaine *(translated into English as Man’s Fate), a particularly sympathetic, fictional look at the Shanghai labor movement on the eve of its destruction. The Malraux-Yokomitsu comparison deserves a much closer look, as well as the broader international literary world of Shanghai in the prewar era. Both books appeared in the early 1930s to acclaim; both followed their authors’ respective visits to Shanghai several years before; and both reflected an almost instinctive support for the young Communist movement in the city.49

47 A good place to start: Ōsato Hiroaki and Son An-suk, eds., Chūgoku ni okeru Nihon *sokai: Jūkei, Kankō, Kōshū, Shanhai *( Japanese Concessions in China: Chongqing, Hankou, Hangzhou, Shanghai) (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 2006).

Shanghai: A Novel, * * trans. Dennis Washburn (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001).

49 One interesting work in this vein is: Wada Hirofumi, Ōhashi Takehiko, Shindō Masahiro, Takematsu Yoshiaki, and Wada Keiko, Gengo toshi Shanhai, 1840–1945 (Shanghai, City of *Languages, 1840–1945) *(Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 1999).

100

The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies

This review essay has concentrated on books published within the past two decades. Were it to have included journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, as well as older works, it would have been considerably more unwieldy.

Notwithstanding, it should be clear that great energy, particularly in the English- and Japanese-language worlds, has been devoted to the modern history of Shanghai over the past two decades. A fuller inclusion of Chinese-language publications would bloat this review beyond tolerable proportions.

Let me, however, conclude with a (not “the”) *magnum opus * of Shanghai studies, the fifteen-volume Shanghai tongshi (Comprehensive History of Shanghai), * *

edited by the leader of Shanghai studies and former head of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Xiong Yuezhi.50 Oddly, it begins with Shanghai’s validation as the “Paris of the Orient,” as if this might somehow warrant the immense collection that follows, but this is largely for internal Chinese consumption. The thousands of pages in this collection may not offer distinctively new approaches to historical research on Shanghai, but they do reveal countless new materials often based on data held exclusively in the immense Shanghai archives. They are the product of years of individual and group labors, and although not the final word on the subjects under study, they often provide a new first word for researchers around the world who can make use of Chinese-language materials.

50 Xiong Yuezhi, Shanghai tongshi, vol. 1: *Daolun *( Comprehensive History of Shanghai, 1: Introductory volume) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1999), p. 1.

Subsequent volumes all bear this overall title and the following subtitles: 2. Ma Xueqiang, *Gudai (Antiquity) *(note: in PRC parlance “antiquity” now refers to anything premodern); 3. Xiong Yeuzhi and Yuan Xieming, Wan-Qing zhengzhi (Politics of the Late Qing Period); 4. Chen Zhengshu, Wan-Qing jingji (Economy in the Late Qing Period); * * 5. Zhou Wu and Wu Guilong, Wan-Qing shehui (Society in the Late Qing Period); 6. Xiong Yuezhi and Zhang Min, Wan-Qing wenhua (Culture of the Late Qing Period); 7. Zhang Peide, Wang Yangqing, and Liao Dawei, Minguo zhengzhi (Politics on the Republican Period); * * 8. Ban Junxiang, Wang Yangqing, et al., Minguo jingji (Economy in the Republican Period); * * 9. Luo Suwen and Song Zuanyou, Minguo shehui (Society in the Republican Period); * * 10. Xu Min, Minguo wenhua (Culture on the Republican Period); * * 11. Chen Zuen, Ye Bin, and Li Tiangang, *Dangdai zhengzhi (Contemporary Politics) *(note: “contemporary” in PRC parlance means roughly the Communist period, 1949–present); 12. Zhu Jinhai, Gan Huijie, et al., Dangdai jingji (Contemporary Economy); 13. Cheng Zai, Dangdai shehui (Contemporary Society); 14. Chen Tong, Song Zuanyou, and Ma Jun, Dangdai wenhua (Contemporary Culture); 15. Wu Jianxi, Li Zhiwu, and Tian Yiping, eds., Fulu (Appendices).

■ Source: “Chinggis on the Japanese Mind,” Mongolian Studies: Journal of the Mongolia Society XXXI (The Mongolia Society, 2009), 259–69.

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

A specialist on neither Mongolian nor Inner Asian history, my discussion of Chinggis Khan centers on the uses to which his perceived heroic stature was put in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japan. I came across the stories that will unfold in this essay twice in the process of other, tangential research. Most recently, I completed the translation of a novel about the life of Chinggis Khan by the great historical novelist Inoue Yasushi 井上靖 (1907–91), entitled *Aoki ōkami * 蒼き狼 (The Blue Wolf), which appeared in 2008 from Columbia University Press. It was made into a blockbuster movie released in

2007 (http://www.aoki-ookami.com/) and shot on location in Mongolia. The earlier occasion was the translation of a work by Masuda Wataru 増田渉

(1903–77), *Seigaku tōzen to Chūgoku jijō, “zassho” sakki * 西学東漸と中国事

情、「雑書」札記 (The eastern movement of western learning and con-

ditions in China, notes on “various books”), which appeared in English as Japan and China: Mutual Representations in the Modern Era in 2000.1 Rough contemporaries, Inoue and Masuda came of age in the vibrant Taishō era and would have encountered the second incarnation of the Chinggis tale in Japan firsthand.

The name of Minamoto no Yoshitsune 源義経 is extremely well known, indeed a household name, in Japan, although likely to be recognized only by specialists elsewhere. He was born in 1159 during the tumultuous times at the end of the Heian period (794–1185). That same year Yoshitsune’s father and two of his older brothers were killed amid the civil wars of the time, while he and his mother found protection in a temple near Kyoto. He later joined the fighting, allegedly became a great hero, performed extraordinary feats, was famed for his ability to cut leaves with his sword as they floated to the ground from trees and various other exemplary talents, and has had his tale sung in countless fictional and semi-fictional renditions ever since. He was ultimately betrayed and compelled to commit ritual suicide in 1189—at the tender age of 29 or 30. He later became the heroic central figure of the celebrated historical novel, *Heike monogatari * 平家物語 (Tale of the Heike).

However, for those Japanese unable to accept his death—something he seems prepared to have acknowledged himself, if his seppuku** **切腹 or ritual 1 Original: (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979); translation: (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000).

102

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

self-disembowelment is any indication—legends soon grew up around his stunning escape from the jaws of death. The massive Edo-period collection, *Dai Nihon shi * 大日本史, for example, claims that Yoshitsune may indeed have died in 1189, but goes on to note that it was generally believed that he escaped to Ezo 蝦夷, the toponym associated with what is now Hokkaidō, there to be deified by locals: “The story has been passed down that Yoshitsune did not die at Koromogawa no tate, but escaped to Ezo” 世伝義經不死於衣河館、遁至

蝦夷. “However, perhaps Yoshitsune’s death was faked and he escaped. To this day, Ezo locals revere Yoshitsune. They have enshrined and deified him” (然則

義經偽死而遁去乎、至今夷人祟奉義經、祀而神之).2 In fact, according

to some late Edo texts, Yoshitsune’s devoted retainer, Benkei 弁慶 (immortalized in a statue of him standing with sword raised at the Gojō Bridge in Kyoto), helped him flee to the north.

Yet this was not the end of speculations about Yoshitsune as evidenced in the work of Suematsu Kenchō 末松謙澄 (1855–1920), who was born into a low-ranking samurai family in Fukuoka in 1855. Like many men of such backgrounds, he became a journalist, but in his case with extraordinary connections in the political world, notably to Itō Hirobumi 伊藤博文, one of the most important political figures of the entire Meiji era. Suematsu eventually married one of Itō’s daughters. He somehow made his way to London, England in 1878 and two years later to Cambridge to study law. Given the bizarre views he published there, I was suspicious that he may have fabricated this part of his life story. I thus wrote the registrar at St. Johns College, Cambridge University, and learned that their records indicate that he did indeed complete his degree there.

In 1879, the year after he arrived in England, Suematsu published (possibly, self-published) a volume in clearly non-native, though nonetheless highly impressive, English entitled: The Identity of the Great Conqueror Genghis 2 On Yoshitsune and the Dai Nihon shi, see Honda Mitsugi 本多貢, ** ** Naze Yoshitsune ga Jingisu *kan ni naru no ka * なぜ義経がジンギスカンになるのか *** ***(Why did Yoshitsune become Chinggis Khan?) (Sapporo: Hokkaidō kyōikusha, 1986), pp. 51–54. Arai Hakuseki 新井

白石** *(1657–1725) suggests a similar story in his Takushi yoron * 読史余論 **(Lessons from history):「義經手ヲ束ネテ死ニ就べキ人ニアラズ、不審ノ事ナリ」(Yoshitsune

was not the sort of man who would meet death passively. This is a highly suspicious story.)「今モ暇夷ノ地ニ義經家跡アリ。マタ夷人飲食ニ必マツルモノ、イハ

ユル『オキクルミ』ト云フハ即義經ノ事ニテ、義經後ニハ奥へ行シナド云伝

へシ卜モ云フ」(Today there remain traces of Yoshitsune’s home in Ezo [=Hokkaidō].

Furthermore, there is something called “okikurumi” [there], which the locals claim, if one imbibes it, will cause one to be deified, and this refers to Yoshitsune, for Yoshitsune is said to have escaped to the interior).

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

103

Khan with the Japanese Hero Yoshitsuné: An Historical Thesis.3 “Preposterous,”

“absurd,” and various other sneering adjectives have been used to characterize the utterly unusual thesis of this book, which was translated by Uchida Yahachi 内田弥八 (1855–1920) into Japanese in 1885 as Yoshitsune saikō ki 義経再興記 (Yoshitsune rides again) and the next year by Shimizu Ichijirō 清

水市次郎 in a popular edition under the title *Tsūzoku Yoshitsune saikō ki * 通俗

義経再興記; both became bestsellers and went through numerous editions.4

The story was retold in fictional form in 1958 by Takagi Akimitsu 高木彬光 as *Jingisu kan no himitsu * 成吉思汗の秘密 (Chinggis Khan’s secret),5 although the original was already about as close to fiction as putative non-fiction can be.

What sorts of evidence did Suematsu provide for his extraordinary thesis?

His analysis offers a case study in one kind of nineteenth-century historiography which still finds advocates and contributors today. Inasmuch as his story has been told extremely briefly in a few obscure places,6 I shall not belabor it here, but move on to the second incarnation of this thesis in Japan—which has as yet not received any significant scholarly attention, though raised quite a tumult in its day. Discussion of Suematsu’s ideas should not be construed as my believing that there is so much as a scintilla of evidence for any of Suematsu’s claims. What makes them interesting is, thus, not his conclusions but how he reaches them and how they became so popular in certain quarters in Japan.

For example, Suematsu will often tentatively put forth a notion, offer equally tentative evidence (full of maybes and possiblys), and then conclude with utter certainty. Thus, although the rumor that Yoshitsune escaped to Ezo has been mentioned by historians as just that—a rumor—it was never accepted by any serious historian. Suematsu, nonetheless, throws it out, mentions as “evidence”

that Yoshitsune was deified by Hokkaidō “aboriginals,” and then concludes (all in the space of two pages): “Indeed, Yoshitsuné’s escape to the island of 3 (London: W.H. and L. Collingridge, 1879).

4 “Absurd” is the word of respected Mongolist Nakami Tatsuo, “Mongol Nationalism and Japan,”

in Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945, * * ed. Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. 90–106, citation on p. 90; and Junko Miyawaki-Okada, “The Japanese Origin of the Chinggis Khan Legends,” Inner Asia 8 (2006), pp. 129–31.

5 (Tokyo rpt: Kadogawa shoten, 1982). This novel has appeared in numerous editions.

6 Margaret Mehl, “Suematsu Kenchō in Britain, 1878–1886,” Japan Forum 5.2 (October 1993), pp. 185–86; Li Narangoa, “Japanese Geopolitics and the Mongol Lands, 1915–1945,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 3.1 (2004), p. 62. Mentioned but not discussed in: Ian Rushton,

“Suematsu Kenchō, 1855–1920: Statesman, Bureaucrat, Diplomat, Journalist, Poet and Scholar,” in Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, * * ed. Hugh Cortazzi (Folkstone: Global Oriental, 2005), vol. 5, p. 66.

104

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

Ezo is an indisputable fact” (p. 14). He claims the American editor of the Tokyo Times, * * Edward H. House, had earlier identified Chinggis and Yoshitsune, thus pushing the idea of this identification off on another—that is, by denying originality for the idea, he effectively disavows all responsibility for the Chinggis-Yoshitsune identification and thus effectively downplays any personal credit for an innovative “historical thesis.” There is, incidentally, no mention at all of this topic in the writings by House cited by Suematsu.

Getting Yoshitsune to Hokkaidō, though, is a relatively minor point in Suematsu’s overarching argument; as he notes, it is something many had long been prepared to entertain, if not wholeheartedly believe, but most of those who were prepared to accept the possibility of his escaping there were satisfied as well to accept the fact that he died on Japan’s northernmost island.

For Suematsu, however, this point is only the beginning. Once he had gotten Yoshitsune to Hokkaidō, he needed to find a way for him to sail or swim to mainland Northeast Asia. Thus, while it may have seemed like a minor point to acknowledge the off chance of Yoshitsune’s escape from betrayal and death in 1189, it is a slippery slope. Now one must follow Suematsu’s “reasoning” to the end. There are few more slippery slopes.

Once we are resigned to Yoshitsune’s escape, the voyage to mainland East Asia actually proves a minor stumbling block—at least as compared with what will follow—especially inasmuch as there is no mention of how he might have made the trip: navigation, ships, and the like. By citing several works from the late Edo period, he claims: “From this light we can see that Yoshitsuné not only crossed over the sea, but became the king of Mantchoo. If this be so the custom of shaving the head of the Tartars might be an imitation of the shaven crowns of ‘Benkei and the other monk soldiers who accompanied him,’ ” (p. 24). And, before the reader can so much as catch his or her breath in the face of these wildly unsubstantiated claims, let alone voice any doubt, just a few pages later Suematsu writes in italics: “one thing is quite certain, that Yoshitsuné and his followers crossed the sea from Yezo to Tartary” (p. 33). Suematsu has worked some clever “logic,” here: while the reader may find his statements following Yoshitsune’s arrival on mainland East Asia troubling—such as his gaining sovereign control over Manchuria or the influence of Benkei on local fighters—

acceptance of his arrival now pales by comparison with these new claims. A susceptible reader might think that the less outlandish claims are—at least for the moment—passable, but the wilder claims cannot stand. The slope just got more slippery.

It is one thing to get Yoshitsune to Manchuria, let alone Mongolia, and it is quite another to claim that he was to become Chinggis Khan one and the same.

Here we find Suematsu deploying another form of discursive legerdemain.

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

105

“Well, my readers,” he writes “it is indeed wonderful, as Mr. Howorth [author of the multi-volume History of the Mongols, * * 1876–80] observes, if Genghis Khan was really a Tartar; but can you be so shortsighted as to suppose, even after you are in possession of the information which fairly contradicts it, that the barren deserts of Tartary should produce such a wonderful man? I shall at once reply, Certainly not. Such anomalies can never be possible” (p. 35). How, he is arguing, could a world conqueror emerge from out of virtually nowhere? It would require Chinggis to be an extraordinary historical anomaly. Thus, Suematsu uses this constructed form of common sense to disabuse his readers of this utter impossibility. Without even a discussion of that place from whence Chinggis Khan was “alleged” to have hailed, Suematsu has written off Mongolia as capable of producing a world conqueror. Once a reader accepts this kind of madly stretched but nonetheless feeble reasoning, the end is nowhere in sight.

Suematsu continues: “We know very well he was no exception. We know he had a previous career of contest and glory. He was one Yoshitsuné, the very man whose early life and greatness we have spoken of before” (p. 36).

Suematsu marshals many such random occurrences, in a fashion not unlike conspiracy theorists, to prove that there are no random occurrences in the world. So, Yoshitsune escapes to Hokkaidō and then sails to Manchuria, and to prove that he became a great leader, Suematsu proceeds negatively. How could someone of Yoshitsune’s military prowess sit around on his haunches and do nothing? Destined for greatness he was, and so he became Chinggis Khan.

Even a generous reader, willing to accept some of Suematsu’s line of argument, might justifiably aver that this last bit is an enormous leap—where is the written evidence? Suematsu is ready, though, for the reason we have no solid written data on Chinggis’s early life in Manchuria, he writes, is not because the Mongols had no written language during those years, but of course because the man who was destined to become Chinggis was not yet on the mainland.

The most interesting of Suematsu’s evidence—again, all of it completely bogus—is linguistic. We still see this kind of argumentation made by some scholars and lay people, almost always by non-linguists. Linguistic sleight of hand of this sort should stand as a cautionary tale of sorts. For example, Yoshitsune’s family name of Minamoto 源 is pronounced gen in its on (Chinese-based) reading, which happens to coincide with the first syllable of the Great Khan’s name; and, of course, the later Mongol dynastic name is a precise hom-onym *yuán * 元 (also pronounced *gen * in Japanese). Both imply origin, source, or root, and obviously, Suematsu states, this was behind Khubilai’s choice of the name for his dynasty (p. 72).

The “tsune” 經 of Yoshitsune is read kei in its on reading, only a stone’s throw away from *khan. * What about the great khan’s birth name, Temüjin?

106

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

Chinggis’s father Yisügei gave him the name Temüjin (after the chieftain he had just defeated). Actually, however, Suematsu informs us, “Temüjin” comes from the Japanese *tenjin * 天神, which Yoshitsune used as cover in the new land (and, presumably, with a bit of inside humor to boot) (p. 107). And, Yisugei’s own name derives from Ezo-kai 蝦夷海 (sea of Ezo, pp. 73, 81–2). Suematsu does not bother to explain how Yoshitsune’s father made the trip to the mainland, given the fact that he had died in 1159, nor does he try to resuscitate the father as he had the son. It would have bogged him down in annoying details.

Chinggis took as the name for his eldest son Jochi, and where might that have come from? Mount Fuji, of course (p. 110), the sacred Japanese mountain, and thus Chinggis was able to keep his beloved Japanese heritage alive on the mainland. Why then would his beloved grandson have tried so hard to conquer Japan? Khubilai was only trying to avenge the maltreatment visited on his grandfather. It would be extremely difficult to make this stuff up.

There are many other, similarly impossible linguistic resonances cited by Suematsu as direct proofs, but let us look at just one of the more eccentric.

He often refers to a long French work, Histoire du grand Genghizcan premier empereur des anciens Mogols et Tartares, by François Pétis, dating to 1710.7 Pétis alleges that the Secret History, * * a work Suematsu has gone overboard to debunk for many obvious reasons, refers to the descendants of the early Mongol figures in its opening pages as “Nouranyoun.” Indeed, Pétis does make this claim with no substance whatsoever, and it is altogether unclear what Mongolian term he may have been trying to replicate in French. Suematsu then claims that “Nouranyoun” became corrupted to Niron which, apparently only in Pétis’s Mongolian lect, means “children of light.” Suematsu could not have prayed for a more amicable colleague, removed so far in time and space: both terms are much too close to the Japanese term, Nihonjin 日本人 (the Japanese people), which like “children of light,” he goes on to claim, means the “sun’s origin men.” It never dawns on any of our critics that the pronunciation of Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian might have changed over the intervening seven centuries. All of this is what genuine linguists call *Klang * association, from the German word for sound, making etymological connections between words on the basis of sound alone without any external or historical evidence of substance.

There are many more such inanities in Suematsu’s work, but one can only wonder what he was really up to. Here was a man intent on studying Greek and Roman law at Cambridge University in an era when Japan was supposed to be learning modern historical science through the empirical method and 7 (Paris: Chez la veuve Jombert, 1710), p. 13.

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

107

under the influence of Leopold von Ranke. Why would he have adopted such a fantastic thesis? Nagayama Yasuo 長山靖生 refers to Suematsu in his book on why people fabricate history and hypothesizes that it was all an attempt on Suematsu’s part to overcome the discrimination he must have felt as a poor Japanese student in Victorian Britain. With his earlier training in literary Chinese texts and alleged contact with the Chinggis=Yoshitsune idea through the American newspaper editor, he used this “historical thesis” as a way to demonstrate to the literate Anglophone world that Japan was not only once great but in fact had produced the greatest military figure in history.8 Nagayama’s theory may ring true, but it is entirely speculation.

Perhaps, Suematsu knew from the start that his thesis was entirely bogus, but was either making his claim tongue-in-cheek or in an effort to cash in on a potentially gullible Anglophone readership.9 Conspiracy theorists are often motivated by monetary gain. As a journalist in Japan just prior to his departure for England, Suematsu had covered the rebellion in 1877 of Saigō

Takamori 西郷隆盛 (1827–77). Disgruntled by many of the Meiji government’s policies, Saigō led a rebellion against the regime which was quickly crushed and in which he perished, possibly taking his own life. Soon thereafter, though, rumors began to circulate among his former followers that Saigō had in fact not died and that he would some day return from China or India or even Tsarist Russia and repair the injustice his 1877 revolt had failed to correct. Perhaps, Suematsu took his lead from these tales about his fellow Kyushu native to concoct the Yoshitsune-Chinggis tale.

Regardless, several decades later in 1924 a little known man by the name of Oyabe Zen’ichirō 小谷部全一郎 (1867–1941) revived this story and published a full-length study entitled *Jingisu kan wa Minamoto no Yoshitsune nari * 成吉

思汗ハ源義経也 (Chinggis Khan was Minamoto no Yoshitsune), a work reissued any number of times including, most recently, in 2000. Oyabe’s personal history is no less exotic than Suematsu’s. Born into a samurai family only a few years before class status was itself abolished, Oyabe was adopted into a merchant household and had by all accounts a miserable childhood. Eventually, he ran off to Hokkaidō (not unlike Yoshitsune, in Suematsu’s thesis) and was embraced by the local Ainu populace. Overcome by their kindnesses, Oyabe vowed to return the favor someday. Like Suematsu, he struggled and managed to travel abroad—in Oyabe’s case, to the United States—and there earned 8 Nagayama Yasuo, Hito wa naze rekishi o gizō suru no ka * 人はなぜ歴史を偽造するのか* **

(Why do men fabricate history?) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1998); cited also in Miyawaki-Okada, p. 129.

9 I owe the stimulus for this idea to an e-mail exchange with Henry Smith.

108

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

a doctoral degree from Yale University, became a Christian minister, and returned to Hokkaidō to look after the local folk, build a school, and work for their social and economic betterment. He too wrote a book in English, a memoir entitled A Japanese Robinson Crusoe.10

Oyabe made a point of visiting all the sites of Yoshitsune’s alleged escape in Hokkaidō and then on to mainland Northeast Asia. In 1920 he traveled to areas in Siberia occupied by the Japanese Army during the infamous Siberian Expedition, including Vladivostok, as well as into Manchuria and Mongolia. By 1920, it should be mentioned, all the countries initially involved in the effort to snuff out Bolshevism in its infancy had retreated, except Japan whose troops remained there until 1922. Oyabe came away more convinced than ever that Yoshitsune and Chinggis were one and the same person.11

The claims in his volume are ultimately not significantly different from Suematsu’s. He did have the distinct advantage of having actually lived in Hokkaidō for many years and having visited all the many sites on the continent associated with the Mongol armies. He thus spends much less time with mind-numbing linguistic evidence to support his claims—not none, just less—and more time describing actual places and people. Writing at a time when modern Japan was making its first modern military adventures onto the Asian mainland, ones that would end in complete failure two years after his trip there, one might easily speculate on the pride that Oyabe may have felt associating the great world conqueror with one of Japan’s most revered and formidable military men, even if he had to bring Yoshitsune back from the dead as Arthur Conan Doyle had to do for Sherlock Holmes.

Less than a year following the publication of Oyabe’s book, the journal *Chūō *

shidan * 中央史壇* **put out a special issue entitled Jingisu kan wa Minamoto no *Yoshitsune ni arazu * 成吉思汗は源義経にあらず (Chinggis Khan was not Minamoto no Yoshitsune). It was comprised of eighteen essays by some of Japan’s most famous academics and public intellectuals of the day, including: Kindaichi Kyōsuke 金田一京助 (1882–1971), a linguist with a specialty in the Ainu language; Ōmori Kingorō 大森金五郎 (1867–1937), a scholar of Japanese medical history; Fujisawa Morihiko 藤沢衛彦 (1886–1967), a specialist in ethnography and mythology; Miyake Setsurei 三宅雪嶺 (1860–1945), famed 10 (Boston and Chicago: The Pilgrim Press, 1898).

11 * * Doi Zenjirō 土井全二郎 Yoshitsune densetsu o tsukutta otoko: Yoshitsune Jingisu kan setsu o tonaeta kikotsu no hito, Oyabe Zen’ichirō den 義経伝説をつくった男：義経

ジンギスカン説を唱えた奇骨の人・小谷部全一郎伝 (The man who created

the Yoshitsune myth, a biography of Oyabe Zen’ichirō, the eccentric who advanced the Yoshitsune-Chinggis Khan theory) (Tokyo: Kōjinsha, 2005).

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

109

cultural critic and prolific author; Yanai Wataru 箭内亘 (1875–1926), pioneer Mongolist and Yuan specialist; and Torii Ryūzō 鳥居龍蔵 (1870–1953), Japan’s pioneer anthropologist—all big names in their day. The individual essays bear emphatic titles denying the possibility of Oyabe’s basic contention. In hindsight, the most amazing thing is that they paid his idea any attention at all and must certainly have contributed to the popularity (and sales) of his book.

Not in the least subdued by this avalanche of negative attention, Oyabe penned another book that very year, 1925, defending himself. It bears the same title as his original work with the added subtitle: *Chosha no dōki to sairon * 著者

の動機と再論 (The author’s motivation and reasessment);12 and it backs off from his initial arguments not a whit.

Devoting any time to lengthy disputations with Oyabe’s (or, for that matter, Suematsu’s) arguments misses the point, but as fun as they are to ridicule, one should neither simply dismiss them as ridiculous, as one might, for instance, the views of a Gavin Menzies, author of 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, * * a contemporary example of an insane book that has been taken seriously only in China but has garnered the author sales and the attention of those susceptible to crackpot theories of ocean-crossings.13 Indeed, the more negative attention such works receive, the more interest they might elicit especially among popular, non-specialist readers. Rather, getting at why such views may have been argued as forcefully as they were and when they were, and why they became bestsellers, are ultimately more important tasks for the contemporary historian.

Perhaps we see something of this impetus in Suematsu’s possibly trying to overcome an inferiority complex and show the world how great Japan really was, or (conversely) his playing a inside joke on the Anglophone reading public; he was also the first to translate The Tale of Genji into English, though only in part.14 Oyabe’s efforts were both to bring luster to the Ainu for putatively helping Yoshitsune and to glorify the latter’s early expansions onto the Asian mainland. Chinggis, of course, lived long before Hitler and Stalin, and his horrific acts of mass murder are located in a cloudy realm of the distant past; in late nineteenth or early twentieth century Japan, before the onset of World War II, he was seen in largely heroic terms, the builder of an empire from nothing. In Suematsu’s and Oyabe’s day, Japan was hardly a prosperous country, late to the task of modernization, not terribly respected in the West or Asia, not 12 (Tokyo: Fuzanbō, 1925).

13 (London, New York: Bantam Books, 2002).

Genji monogatari: The Most Celebrated of the Classical Japanese Romances, trans. Suyematz Kenchio (London: Trübner, 1882).

110

Chinggis on the Japanese Mind

terribly well known in any fashion around the world. In an apparent effort to enhance the world’s respect for Japan, Oyabe penned a highly popular volume in 1929 entitled *Nihon oyobi Nihon kokumin no kigen * 日本及日本國民之起源

(The origins of Japan and the Japanese people), which was reissued a few years ago under the more explanatory title of Nihonjin no rūtsu wa Yudayajin da 日本

人のル一ツはユダヤ人だ *. * (The roots of the Japanese are the Jews).15 Such a literature was popular then, as later, but mostly to deny any such connection, although Oyabe was clearly identifying the two peoples. However, associating the land of Japan with that of Chinggis Khan, who was known by everyone everywhere, was clearly an attempt—albeit a major stretch—to bask in the great khan’s majestic light.16

One point elided or explained away by both Suematsu and Oyabe concerns the major way in which the Mongols were, in fact, known in Japan.

Although the Mongols were all but allergic to water and relied entirely upon Chinese and especially Koreans to build a navy once their empire stretched as far as the Pacific coast, they would eventually attempt on two occasions in the late thirteenth century under Khubilai to conquer Japan. We have seen how Suematsu circumvented this problem, and Oyabe seems simply to have ignored it, but it would have taken some doing to overcome such a negative image of the Mongols. Of course, Chinggis was not Khubilai, but they were the greatest Mongol leaders and likely the only two known to Japanese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two decades after Oyabe’s book launched this debate, the most famous modern usage to which the defeat of the Mongols’ attempted crossing would be attributed—“divine winds” or kami-kaze 神風—would emerge, though by this time they were completely divorced from the original thirteenth-century context.

15 (Tokyo: Kōseikaku, 1929), which went through many reprintings; (Tokyo rpt.: Tama shuppan, 1992).

16 Two other more recent books (among many) on the subject that deserve mention are: Seki Yukihiko * * 関幸彦 *** **Minamoto no Yoshitsune, demetsu ni ikiru eiyū * 源義経、伝説に

生きる英雄 (Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the hero who lives in legend) (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1990); Sasaki Shōzō 佐々木勝三**, Ōmachi Kitazō 大町北造, **and Yokota Shōji 横田

正二, Yoshitsune densetsu no nazo: Jingisu kan wa Minamoto no Yoshitsune ka* *** 義経伝

説の謎：成吉思汗は源義経か (The mystery of legends surrounding Yoshitsune: Was Chinggis Khan Minamoto no Yoshitsune?) (Tokyo: Keibunsha, 1986).

■ Source: Fogel, Joshua A. “A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations: The *Senzaimaru * Voyage to Shanghai of 1862,” *Late Imperial China * 29.1 Supplement (2008), 104–24.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations: The Senzaimaru Voyage to Shanghai of 1862

Western scholarship on East Asia has taken note of the Japanese group voyage to the United States in 1860, most prominently in Masao Miyoshi’s study of that mission, to officially ratify the treaty imposed upon their country by Townsend Harris (1804–78) and the government of the United States.1 Considerably less well known are the Japanese missions to Shanghai of 1862 and 1864, both domestically inspired and both frank admissions in their respective forms that there was a brave new world out there confronting Japan, that Commodore Perry (1794–1863), Townsend Harris, and the United States were only the beginning of an imperialist onslaught, and that as a result Japan had to take a more activist role in its own future by going out to examine the outside world. The future belonged to international trade and diplomacy, and, in a metaphor of a few years later, Japan could join the table at dinner or be served up with the main course.2

On the Chinese side of things, before the 1880s we know next to nothing of how the Qing government looked upon Japan, soon to become its most important neighbor in every respect. Modern Sino-Japanese relations do not begin with the many thousands of Chinese students flocking to Japanese institutions of higher learning, as significant as that event will be later in the century. Modern Sino-Japanese relations truly commence with voyage of the Senzaimaru from Nagasaki to Shanghai in 1862. The nature of the relationship the Japanese so tentatively sought at the time reads like a blueprint in microcosm for the negotiations that ensued over the next three decades, before war and aggression replaced peaceful diplomacy as the dominant mode of operations.

1 Miyoshi, * As We Saw Them*.

2 Sugita, “Yū-Shin yokan” (Impressions from a trip to China), 585. Sugita’s (1851–1929) comment was made in 1884.

112

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

I have written on a number of occasions about the 1862 mission of the Senzaimaru (and the 1864 mission of the Kenjunmaru).3 * * Until several years ago, however, scholars of this topic were operating in the absence of documentation on the Chinese side. We had a good number of travel narratives from the Japanese aboard the Senzaimaru and a fair number of studies,4 some of them excellent, but nothing seemed to have remained extant on the Chinese side. That meant nothing from the Shanghai daotai (circuit intendant), Wu Xu (1809–72), with whom the Japanese met twice, and nothing from the many Chinese with whom they interacted in Shanghai; it also meant nothing about how the Chinese reacted to the case made by the Japanese government for trade.

The strangeness is only compounded by the fact that mention of the circumstances surrounding the arrival of the Senzaimaru is made in several prominent Chinese sources. In his Dongfang bingshi jilüe (Summary of military events in the East), Yao Xiguang (b. 1856) noted the visit of a group of Japanese officials to Shanghai, their request of the Dutch vice-consul for assistance in trade, “because Japan had no trading relations with China,” and their meeting with the daotai of Shanghai, Wu Xu.5 Later, the Qing shi gao (Draft history of the Qing dynasty) noted clearly: “In the first year of the Tongzhi reign [1862], the Nagasaki Magistrate sent men to Shanghai to ask if they might establish a consulate [there] to handle the commercial and customs affairs of their country. The Superintendent for Trade Xue Huan would not allow it.”6 If news of their arrival, their meeting with Wu Xu, and their requests for a consulate and the like reached such a highly-placed official as Xue Huan (1815–80), they had 3 Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945, chapter 2; Fogel,

“The Voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai.”

4 Among the better works are two recent book-length studies of the Senzaimaru voyage: Miyanaga, Takasugi Shinsaku no Shanhai repotto (Takasugi Shinsaku’s report on Shanghai); Feng Tianyu, “Qiansuiwan” Shanghai xing (The Senzaimaru’s trip to Shanghai). The best work, to my mind, on the 1862 mission has been done by Haruna Akira. See, among many studies: Haruna Akira, “Sen happyaku rokujū ninen bakufu Senzaimaru no Shanhai haken”

(The shogunate’s sending of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai in 1862); “Nakamuda Kuranosuke no Shanhai taiken” (Nakamuda Kuranosuke’s experiences in Shanghai); and “Mine Kiyoshi no Shanhai keiken” (Mine Kiyoshi’s experiences in Shanghai).

5 Yao Xiguang, Dongfang bingshi jilue (Summary of military events in the East), 15 (2a).

6 Zhao Erxun, ed., Qing shi gao, * * 4618; cited as well in Matsuura, “Shanhai shinpō ni miru bakumatsu kansen Senzaimaru no Shanhai raikō” (The voyage to Shanghai of the official vessel Senzaimaru in the late Edo period as seen in Shanghai xinbao), * * 6. Matsuura (15–16) also gives a number of other nineteenth-century Chinese sources that mention the Senzaimaru events generally.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 113

to have been transmitted by local officials in Shanghai through channels to Beijing. What raw materials did the authors of these and similar works have to work from? We had not so much as a hint.

Then, from the archives of the Zongli Yamen, the first Chinese foreign office, which are now located on the grounds of Academia Sinica in Taibei, a set of documents relating to the voyages of the Senzaimaru as well as the Kenjunmaru were discovered in 2001 by a Japanese scholar. These documents consist of extensive intra-bureaucratic memoranda about how the Chinese authorities at their various levels from the Zongli Yamen in Beijing down to the daotai in Shanghai should respond to the Japanese requests to trade at the port at Shanghai, to rent a house and open a consulate there, to handle their own customs procedures, and the like. And, far from the indifference on the Chinese part with respect to the Japanese that one might have been led to believe the absence of such documents implied, the Chinese were deeply concerned about how to handle these newcomers and what interacting with them portended.7 The discovery of these documents should serve as a sobering warning never to assume that the absence of information at hand is synonymous with its non-existence.

In what follows, I offer a close reading of these new materials regarding the Senzaimaru and attempt to relate what we can learn from this material about Japanese intentions and the Qing officialdom’s response. Why were they embarking on this 1862 mission? How did they expect to finagle the intrica-cies of trading with a country with whom they shared no diplomatic relations?

How are other states and players portrayed in these documents? And, how did the Chinese perceive these uninvited visitors? In other words, into what framework of understanding were these newfound documents to be placed?

It was clear to the shogunal officials in charge of foreign relations in Nagasaki that international trade was the future. Foreign vessels carrying Japanese goods to China and Chinese goods back to Nagasaki and elsewhere in Japan had made their owners wealthy in the years leading up to 1862.8 When it came time for Japan to venture out on its own into the wider world, it made more sense in the view of the Nagasaki Magistrate’s office to send a mission to Shanghai.

There in Shanghai, one could gain a sense in microcosmic form of the entire 7 These documents were announced in a number of scholarly sources and translated into Japanese with a brief introduction by Huang Rongguang, “Bakumatsu Senzaimaru Kenjunmaru no Shanhai haken ra ni kansuru Shinkoku gaikō monjo ni tsuite” (Qing diplomatic documents concerning the dispatch to Shanghai of the Senzaimaru and Kenjunmaru in the late Edo period). The Chinese originals have as yet not been published.

8 Honjo, “Japan’s Overseas Trade in the Closing Days of the Tokugawa Shogunate,” 17.

114

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

wider world without going to North America and Europe; one could meet as many representatives of the Western powers as one wished and see how they behaved in an East Asian venue. Just as Japan would later in the century provide a panoply of sources by and about the West already digested and prepared for Chinese use in Japanese translations, so Shanghai provided a similar commercial service for the Japanese at this juncture a generation earlier.

While sailing a ship to the United States and Western Europe was clearly beyond the capacities of all Japanese in 1862, especially given that the Tokugawa government’s interdiction of foreign travel remained in force, even sailing the relatively short distance to Shanghai was still apparently too daunting a venture. Various plans were raised, such as renting a Dutch ship, but they all proved too expensive to persuade the shogunate. Ultimately, a British commercial vessel, the Armistice, * * was purchased from its owner, Henry Richardson, who had for the previous two and one-half years been transporting goods between Nagasaki and Chinese ports.9 The shogunate promptly renamed it the *Senzaimaru * but realized, as noted, that no one in Japan was prepared to sail such a large ship on the open ocean. They therefore hired Richardson and his British crew back to sail it for them.

Although, as we learn from the Chinese correspondence about the Senzaimaru, Chinese ships had been sailing to Nagasaki to trade in precious metals for some time, the Japanese still had no formal diplomatic ties with the government of the Qing dynasty. Through contacts with the Dutch firm of Theodorus Kroes (1822–89), who was also then the vice-consul of the Netherlands and Belgium in Shanghai, the Japanese vessel was allowed to enter the port of Shanghai, dock by the Dutch consulate on the Huangpu River, and store their goods in Dutch warehouses. We have no hard evidence as to why they picked Kroes’s firm, but it can easily be surmised that the Japanese contacted fellow Dutchmen in Nagasaki—where the Dutch for over two centuries had been the only Europeans allowed to trade and reside—for contacts in Shanghai and were put in touch with a businessman who happened also to be the vice-consul there; Kroes was also the representative of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (Netherlands Trading Company) in Shanghai.

Soon after their arrival on June 2, Kroes escorted the eight Japanese officials from among the fifty-one Japanese aboard the Senzaimaru to meet the Shanghai (or Susong) daotai, * * Wu Xu, the most powerful local official, whose responsibilities covered all commerce in this port as well as customs and who had been on duty in Shanghai since 1859. We now know what transpired at the 9 See the daily Lloyd’s List for those * * years, microfiche held in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 115

meeting, as reflected in Wu’s report to his superior, Superintendent for Trade Xue Huan, from the latter’s own report:

[A.] According to a document, dated Tongzhi 1 [1862]/7/l, from Xue

[Huan], Superintendent for Trade, Wu Xu . . . reported as follows. “On 5/9

[June 5] of this year, the consul from Holland in the West, [Theodorus]

Kroes, escorted eight officials from Japan in the East to my office for an audience: [Their names are listed here]. They had the following to say:

‘The eight of us are all officials from Japan. On orders from our superiors, we have come to Shanghai with thirteen merchants from our country, 4,000–5,000 catties each of sea cucumber, shark fin, *konbu *[kelp], and abalone, as well as lacquer-ware, paper fans, and other items aboard a Dutch trading ship. By means of Dutch merchants we have gone through customs, product inspection, payment of levies, and the like. We should now like to engage in trade and seek your permission to do so in Shanghai.

This being our first such effort, our unfamiliarity leads us to seek your instructions.’

[B.] “To this day, Chinese merchants sail every year from Zhapu [a port in Zhejiang Province] overseas and return from Japan having bought Western copper ( yangtong), * * but merchants from Japan have yet to come to trade in China, and following regulations, I was unable to permit them to import [goods]. However, in consideration of the fact that they have now come a great distance over the sea, I could not bear to turn them down. They have transported their goods on a Dutch vessel, and they have gone through customs with [the help of] the Dutch. I have taken into consideration the court’s pleasure in cherishing men from afar, and planning for their convenience allowed them to promptly sell the items as Dutch goods. I have not, however, allowed them to purchase Chinese commodities, and I instructed them that they must speedily return home aboard the Dutch vessel with the money [gained in transactions for their goods] and not rashly to come here again. They listened and replied that they would all be happy to comply. Their attitude and language at this time were exceptionally submissive.

[C.] “Furthermore, Dutch Consul Kroes said: ‘For over two hundred years, the Dutch have traded with Japan, and the friendship between us has grown profound. I could not prevent the officials here from coming on the merchant vessel of the pertinent country [i.e., Holland] together with the merchants and the produce. We have gone through all of the customs procedures, and once they sell all of their goods, I guarantee that they will return home immediately without buying any Chinese goods.’

116

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

[D.] “On 5/25 [June 21] I myself went to their lodgings to inspect the situation at hand. According to them, ‘Because of the chaos engendered by the Taiping Rebellion, the goods we brought on this voyage have not been easy to dispose of, and we have incurred losses. Because of the great distance covered in coming to this foreign land, we were unfamiliar with the local climate and topography, and three among our merchants have died. As soon as we have sold the remainder of our goods, we plan to return home.’

[E.] “My supposition is that they are about to hurry home. When I investigated further, [I learned that] recently countries of the West have been coming to Japan to engage in commerce, and that Japan brought to Shanghai all the items that it produces and put them up for sale. Of necessity, if they have numerous items, the price will go down. It is true that, with Shanghai besieged by the rebel forces, merchants could not come here and they thus had no market outlets. Thus, despite their trial effort at sailing to Shanghai to trade, the Japanese officials and merchants this time did not realize their wishes. Perhaps this will militate against their coming again. When the officials set a day for their return voyage [to Japan], they passed through customs, carried out the proper exit procedures, and were permitted to go, and in addition to making a further report, I now submit this for your instructions.”

[F.] I [Xue Huan] accordingly carried out an investigation and discovered that Japan is not included among the countries with which we have trading relations ( tongshang), * * having thus far not come to China to engage in trade directly. Furthermore, Holland is a non-treaty country ( wuyueguo), * * and Holland accompanied the Japanese officials and merchants when they engaged in trade. On the basis of such precedents, there is the possibility of abuses of unauthorized contracting ( baolan). * * In the future, I do not know if many nations will emulate this [practice of coming unannounced] and do not know how to stop it. This needs to be prevented before there are abuses [of our kindness]. I pray that this will receive your scrutiny and be implemented.10

I have divided this document into paragraphs, which do not exist in the original, as a means of highlighting the many important points we can draw from it; and, incidentally, this report was partially recapitulated numerous times over 10 Translated from the Japanese translation by Huang Rongguong, “Bakumatsu Senzaimaru Kenjunmaru no Shanhai haken ra ni kansuru Shinkoku gaikō monjo ni tsuite,” 180–1

(hereafter cited as Huang).

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 117

the next few years as the Qing bureaucracy tried to come up with both a way to assess Japan’s true wishes and a legal-diplomatic basis upon which to allow the Japanese to trade. As a whole, this document and the others that follow offer us a completely fresh window onto Japanese and Chinese thinking about one another at the time, as we shall now see.

Paragraph A cites Wu Xu’s report of his initial meeting with the eight Japanese officials and their escort, Vice-Consul Kroes,11 and “quotes” their request of him.

They describe the goods they have brought and hope to sell in Shanghai. There were, incidentally, only three Japanese listed as “merchants.” not thirteen, on board, but this is likely just a typographical error, except that, when they later appeal to the Chinese for leniency because “three among our merchants have died” (paragraph D), there may be some purposive befuddlement—three of the original Japanese crew did die, none of them being merchants. They then proceed to the less than complete truth that they sailed aboard a Dutch vessel. No mention is made of the Japanese ownership of the *Senzaimaru * whose extraordinary arrival in Shanghai was in fact reported in the North China Herald,12 nor * * of the British crew who, to a man, simply disappear from history at this point, never to be heard from again in this connection. The least amount of investigation would have revealed the ship’s provenance—it actually sailed into port flying the three flags of Great Britain, Holland, and Japan—but the Qing authorities clearly had other concerns. Perhaps, they were referring to the small Dutch vessel used to offload the goods brought from Japan for storage in Dutch warehouses. The Japanese admit to following all proper procedures involving customs and levies, with the help of the Dutch, and would now like to be allowed to trade in Shanghai. They make it plain that they have no desire to trade anywhere but Shanghai but, in a tone of humility, profess a degree of ignorance of the proper way to proceed. The ball is thrown into the daotai’s lap.

Wu Xu reveals (paragraph B) that, despite the fact that Chinese traders have long been going to trade at the port of Nagasaki, present treaty regulations make it impossible for him to simply permit the Japanese to do as they wish.

Inasmuch as he was at that point the only living Chinese official to have had contact with the Japanese, the information he acquired from them about their situation seems to have disposed him to favor their requests, for he immediately begins to conjure up schemes to enable this to transpire. With the language of 11 He is consistently given in these documents as Dutch consul, but in fact it would appear that he was actually vice-consul. This is a recurrent error in many documents, irrespective of origin.

North China Herald, June 7, 1862, 1.

118

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

pitying them after a long journey and “cherishing men from afar,”13 Wu appears to have concocted the plan by which their goods would be construed as Dutch (with whom the Qing had trading relations)—repeating the half-truth that the Senzaimaru was Dutch—to be sold in Shanghai, and then they would promise to scurry home to Japan. No one bothers to ask or volunteer information as to why a Dutch vessel would have a Japanese name (presumably painted on its side, though no extant pictures of the vessel have yet emerged). It was thus he, Wu Xu, who held immediate responsibility for allowing them to attempt to dispose of their goods, but they were forbidden from buying Chinese produce and they could not linger in Shanghai or anywhere else in China. Wu adds that the Japanese complied in a sufficiently deferential manner.

Vice-Consul Kroes then (paragraph C) stepped into the fray to back up all the Japanese claims, introduced by the avowal of long Dutch-Japanese contacts.

The import of this statement is that, although the Chinese have not had recent diplomatic ties with Japan, the Dutch certainly have, and they have learned to trust one another. Kroes also vows that he will ensure that the Japanese play by the book (well known to him by virtue of his commercial and political positions) and return home as soon as they sell their wares. We will learn later from secret communications from the Japanese to the Chinese officials that the Dutch were skimming a healthy percentage off all aspects of Japanese trading ventures on this voyage, and the Japanese—apparently unaware that using an agent was a service that did not come free of charge—were chafing under this arrangement; Kroes’s objectives are thus open to question. By the same token, the Japanese may (later) have been exaggerating their complaints to gain Chinese sympathies.

Paragraph D seems to fit with such a constructed discourse. Wu Xu reports on a visit to the Astor House Hotel, the most famous luxury hotel in Shanghai, at which the shogunal officials and other samurai from the Senzaimaru were residing—lower ranking members of the crew stayed on board ship throughout the ten weeks they spent in Shanghai. The claim of three deaths is accurate, as noted above, though one of them was a result of a measles epidemic in Nagasaki prior to their actual departure; the other two were apparent results of cholera contracted in Shanghai, and, as noted above, none of the three was a merchant.14 The Japanese convey the sense, as reported by the daotai, * * that 13 The title of an award-winning book: James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793, * * which won the Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.

14 Many sources confirm this. See, for example, Chen Zuen, Xunfang Dongyangren, jindai Shanghai de Riben juliumin (1868–1945) (Inquiry into the “Japanese,” Japanese residents of modern Shanghai, 1868–1945), 9.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 119

they have had a difficult time in Shanghai, lost money on the efforts at trade because of the Taiping Rebellion, and only want to finish their business and go home. The whining tone might make the cynical reader wonder why they came in the first place—didn’t they know of the Taiping Rebellion, which had broken out twelve years earlier and was well known in educated Japanese circles?15—except that we know why they came. By the same token, we do know with a high degree of certainty that monetary gain in trade was entirely a secondary concern of this 1862 mission; much more important was observation of the rules of the game of international trade as practiced in Shanghai.16

Wu Xu then (paragraph E) gives his summation of the case, and he seems inordinately sympathetic to the Japanese, almost surprisingly so, even adding an argument to what he has already reported the Japanese as actually saying to him personally. He states that further inquiries indicate that everything the Japanese claimed about the commercial failures of their mission is true, and he vouches for their preparations and, indeed, their actual departure—again, following all the proper forms. This report leaves one with the impression that Wu was moved by the apparently bedraggled Japanese endeavor in coming to Shanghai unannounced, though one must admit that much of this was certainly to protect himself. He had already taken a decision to allow them to trade just this one time. In an era before e-mail and other forms of virtually instantaneous communication, Wu Xu was compelled to make decisions on the ground before he could know if they would be positively sanctioned by his superiors; should he make a decision which met with disapproval, he might have jeopardized his career, but such were the fortunes of powerful Qing officials.

Finally, in paragraph F we hear from the author of this memorial, Xue Huan. The few words he adds to the discussion effectively add all the important elements for the continuing diplomatic negotiations over the next few years—ultimately leading in 1871 to the first Sino-Japanese Treaty of Amity, a treaty distinguished at this time for being completely equal. Xue claims to have made his own investigation which indicates that Japan lacks the status necessary for “trading” with China. This requires a bit of elucidation. In 1862

and probably for some time thereafter, the Qing government had no conception of what Westerners called diplomacy or diplomatic relations. Countries with which it had potential contact were grouped into three concentric circles: 15 On Japanese knowledge of the Taipings, see Ichiko, “Bakumatsu Nihonjin no Taihei Tengoku ni kansuru chishiki” (Japanese knowledge of the Taipings in the bakumatsu period).

16 Matsumoto, “Shanhai ni okeru Nihonjin hatten no shoki” (The early years of Japanese development in Shanghai), 37.

120

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

trading countries with treaties ( youyue tongshang), * * non-treaty trading countries ( wuyue tongshang), * * and non-treaty, non-trading countries ( wuyue butongshang), * * a system that predated the Opium War and would remain in effect through much of the nineteenth century.17 Heretofore, according to Xue, Japan was in the last category, but they clearly wanted into the second, where the Netherlands then resided. He feared that they would milk the relationship to China’s detriment, baolan being a morally disreputable practice excoriated by Chinese statecraft officials for centuries.18 He also feared that if China were to open its doors even a crack, there might be a flood of tiny countries like Japan attempting to jam their feet in the door, capture Chinese markets, and never leave.

In a memorandum sent three days later to Xue Huan from the Zongli Yamen, we find his concerns seconded by the authorities. After briefly recapitulating the situation, they make things clearer for the immediate future: “We thus strictly order the Susong daotai [Wu Xu] via the aforementioned minister [Xue Huan]: When merchant vessels from various lands hereafter enter port, deal with the matter appropriately on the basis of a rigorous preliminary investigation. We strictly order you not to follow the case of Japan with other countries.”19

In a joint memorial from Xue and Jiangsu Governor Li Hongzhang (1823–

1901) dated precisely one month later (8/4), we learn more about Wu Xu’s interactions with the Japanese. Within the body of a memorial, we find a piece of a subsequent report by Wu and his subsequent activity supporting his decision:

[G.] When their [i.e., Japanese] officials came to my office for another audience [the second of two audiences they had at the daotai’s office], they told me: “Two months have passed since our arrival in Shanghai, but half of our goods have not sold, and now we are putting things in order and planning to return home. As far as we have been able to investigate, 17 Kawashima, Chūgoku kindai gaikō no keisei (The formation of modern Chinese diplomacy), 215; Kawashima Shin, “Jūkyū seiki chūki Higashi Ajia ni okeru kokusaihō juyō o meguru enshinryoku to kyūshinryoku” (Centrifugal and centripetal forces surrounding the reception of international law in East Asia in the mid-nineteenth century), 188–90.

18 Often translated as “tax farming” or “engrossment,” baolan was a standard object of official ire in Ming and Qing times. See, for example, Kuhn, “Local Self-Government Under the Republic,” 268, 278; Kwang-ching Liu, “The Ch’ing Restoration,” 440, 445; Muramatsu Yūji, Kindai Kōnan no soen (Landlord bursaries of the lower Yangzi delta region in the modern era), 681–747; and Will and Wong (with Lee), Nourish the People, * * 228, 350, 393.

One of the fullest treatments of the subject can be found in Nishimura, “Shinsho no hōran” (Engrossment in the early Qing).

19 Huang, 181.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 121

there are many small countries who engage in trade in Shanghai without a treaty, and you allow them all to trade in the open port in accordance with the regulations pertaining to countries with treaties. You just prohibit them from entering Beijing and from calling at inland ports along the shores of the Yangzi River.

[H.] “Japan is close to China. Every year your official and private merchants dealing in copper come to Japan to import goods. Japan has carried out this business properly until this time, and not once has there been either delay or error. At present, Japan is emulating the small nations without treaties from the West and, without asking boldly to sign a treaty, if we are given permission merely to have our merchant vessels engage in trade solely at Shanghai, to install a consulate, to rent a house, and to see to our own customs procedures and levies for our ships and merchants, this would be an exceptional act of grace.”

[I.] The aforementioned Customs daotai made a list of the treaty nations and the non-treaty nations and submitted it, while this minister ordered an investigation of related materials concerning in what manner in the past non-treaty countries have been permitted to trade at Shanghai.

With these instructions, the aforementioned daotai reported on how small, non-treaty states gained permission to trade.20

Wu’s enthusiasm for trade with Japan does not seem to have diminished in the least. While understanding the possible downside of allowing what the Japanese requested—with a potential influx of ships from small, non-treaty lands—he seems prepared to accept what the Japanese were telling him—

either at face value or as a result of his own office’s investigations, or both.

This snippet from his report cites from their “conversation” at length, stressing two factors (again, artificially divided by paragraphs here). Apparently, in the two months of their residence in Shanghai (paragraph G) and in interactions with other nationals, the Japanese learned that some nations engaged in trade without treaties, for the only thing treaties enabled China’s counterparts to do was to have an embassy in Beijing—a rarity which the Qing government was loathe to allow, except under duress. The Japanese had no such interests, they claimed, adding that they only wished to trade in Shanghai, and promising to stay away from the capital and other ports cities along the Yangzi.

Paragraph H begins by slipping into the centuries-old rhetoric of Sino-Japanese friendship, the sort of thing one still hears at bilateral Sino-Japanese conferences and diplomatic interactions to this day, but it does not stay there 20 Huang, 181.

122

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

long. After mentioning the proximity of the two lands, the Japanese try to lay a “guilt trip” at China’s door: you’ve been coming and trading in Japan for years; we’ve been good and on time till now; we’re just doing what other “small countries” ( xiaoguo) * * from the West without treaties have been doing and we don’t even want a treaty; so, please, can we trade only at Shanghai. Oh, and by the way, can we also open a consulate, rent a house in which to place it, and handle our own customs procedures. I have caricatured this passage, but these requests do seem new to the picture, even if they are perfectly understandable.

The last item requested, the right to handle their own customs procedures, offers a slight hint of a gnawing problem the Japanese felt from the moment they landed in Shanghai: their dependence on the Dutch. Without the Dutch intermediary in all their commercial and “diplomatic” ventures in Shanghai, they were likely to increase the chances for enhanced profits, but they seem oblivious of the fact that, without the Dutch, the entire venture might never have been possible. That is, they needed Kroes to serve as their agent, to famil-iarize them with local Chinese practices and legal procedures, and to gain them access to seats of authority, but it came at a price higher than they apparently had expected. Paragraph I merely demonstrates how assiduous Wu Xu and his staff were in gathering supporting material. It would be as a result of this exercise that they would discover a precedent ( ex post facto) * * for a state such as Japan to engage in trade at Shanghai.

Xue and Li, however, were not through, as they not only continue to cite from a report by Wu Xu but enclose copies of other reports from him in this memorial. First, what they go on to cite from him:

In Xianfeng 3 [1853], the walled city of Shanghai was occupied by bandits, and documents in the daotai’s office were all lost, leaving no materials upon which to investigate. Although it had been stipulated in Article Eight of the supplementary treaty with Great Britain that all foreign merchants would be limited to trading at Canton, a draft of “Regulations on Trade at Five Ports” dated Daoguang 23 [1843] enabled, as a result of negotiations in South China [Jiangnan] the previous year, trade for Western merchants at the four ports of Fuzhou, Xiamen [Amoy], Ningbo, and Shanghai, if imperial permission was given. Great Britain agreed.21

Wu Xu and his staff had been extremely busy in the brief period since the first Japanese requests for a new commercial arrangement with China. This paragraph reflects their continued search for a precedent on the basis of which 21 Huang, 181–82.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 123

trade with Japan might be carried on. Was he doing this as a favor to the Japanese, or to cover himself in the face of potentially adverse opinion on the part of his superiors, or perhaps both?

Upon reviewing Wu Xu’s memorial and offering their own highly suspicious assessment, Xue and Li concluded:

Accordingly, this minister and this governor understand that this memorial [from Wu Xu] conforms to the language of printed books [i.e., it fits with precedent]. Officials from the land of Japan now have put forward requests to follow the cases of non-treaty states, to carry out trade solely at Shanghai, to set up a consulate, to rent a house, and to see to affairs of their own merchants. This minister and this governor are unable to decide how we are to respond. We pray that these [matters] will receive your scrutiny.22

In other words, Circuit Intendant Wu, you handle it, and we shall see what we shall see. The enclosure Wu promised on countries trading in Shanghai (paragraph I) affords some interesting reflection. Trading partners with treaties include: Great Britain, France, United States, Russia, Portugal, Prussia, Belgium (soon to sign a treaty). Traders without treaties include: Denmark, Sweden-Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck, Oldenberg, and Hanover.23 It would appear that, in Wu Xu’s imagination, Japan was a “small non-treaty state” ( wuyue xiaoguo) * * not unlike the handful of German city-states or small European lands listed.

There are still, though, a number of large, unanswered questions arising from these new documents. Why did the shogunal officials in their initial meeting with Wu Xu, shortly after arriving in port, indicate that they only wanted to trade on this occasion, and then two months later, when their stay in Shanghai was nearing its end, why did they take this new route of requesting to follow the model set by the small Western non-treaty states to establish a basis for continued, future trade ties?24 The Japanese clearly understood the direct relationship between the Taiping assaults on Shanghai and the whole region and the depression of commodity prices—they even sighed about it to Wu Xu—and yet they openly sought direct Sino-Japanese trading privileges, arguing that it would be more advantageous to both sides. Perhaps the hyperbole 22 Huang, 182.

23 Huang, 183–84.

24 This point was actually raised to them, according to Wu Xu in a secret memorial; see Huang, 184.

124

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

was flying so fast and furious that it behooves one not to read too much into all this. More likely, I would argue, the Japanese (like Vice-Consul Kroes) were not being entirely forthcoming.

One fascinating piece of the story, which the Japanese mentioned as a justification for their engaging in trade with the Qing empire and which Daotai Wu Xu took up in his own positions, is the concurrent role of Chinese merchants sailing to Nagasaki and buying up Japanese copper. They had no special treaty enabling this activity, but some sort of hazy problem remains unresolved with two such merchants. Wu tells the Japanese, as he reports to his superiors, that these merchants will be dealt with just as soon as the Taipings are quelled.

While generally sympathetic to the Japanese, Wu has at least one more discourse up his sleeve to keep the Japanese at bay, which he subsequently relayed to Xue Huan and Li Hongzhang:

At the end of the Ming dynasty, Japanese pirates formed groups, came to the provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, among others, and caused disturbances along the coast. They were known as *wokou. *

That was a long time ago, and I am not reproaching you for that now, but the people living in their home villages have conveyed [these stories] by word of mouth, and enmity from bygone times may still remain.25

But, the Japanese respond, that was long ago and all the culprits were punished at the time. And, when Wu Xu expresses incredulity, the Japanese officials, having claimed no malice on their part toward China, which they actually insist they revere, actually claim that their views were substantiated “in the history texts of their own country which they unfortunately had not brought with them this time and thus could not point to proofs from those works.”26 We still live with Sino-Japanese controversy over textbooks, but it is nonetheless fascinating to see that, nearly one and one-half centuries ago and despite actual face-to-face contacts for several centuries, on the basis of a shared cultural assumption the Japanese can claim that recording events in history books is closely related to accepted truth about past events.

When writing a few years back about the second Japanese mission to Shanghai, that of the Kenjunmaru, * * which arrived about eighteen months later in early 1864, I was always puzzled by the fact that the new daotai, * * Ying Baoshi (1821–90), in his first meeting with this new set of bakufu officials, asked if they had brought along a copy of a book entitled Kokushi ryaku (A summary 25 Huang, 185.

26 Huang, 185.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 125

of Japanese history), a work (first published in 1826) in five fascicles written in literary Chinese, by Iwagaki Matsunae (1774–1849), covering the period from the Age of the Gods through the year 1588. How he might have known of such a book remains unclear, but Ying noted that this work would be a good way to acquire knowledge of Japanese history. As it turns out, the *Kenjunmaru * visitors had not brought that specific work with them, but they had thought to bring along a copy of a much more celebrated and much longer work, also in literary Chinese, the Nihon gaishi (Unofficial history of Japan) by Rai San’yō

(1780–1832),27 one of the great Kanbun stylists of the entire Edo period. The head of this second delegation noted that Daotai Ying was “very pleased” with the gift. Given all the errors in Chinese transcription committed by the lead Japanese official, it seems extremely unlikely that someone just happened to have brought Rai San’yō’s book along for personal reading. A Chinese reprint edition of San’yō’s epic was published in Shanghai in 1889.28

Only four days after the flurry of bureaucratic correspondence in 1862 just outlined, on 8/8 the Zongli Yamen sent exactly the same brief missive to Xue and Li. It concluded:

We have no way to conjecture if there will be any future negative reper-cussions, if the Zongli Yamen authorizes Japan’s petition to engage in trade at the one port of Shanghai, to set up a one-man consulate, to rent a house, and to look after it. Thus, we instructed the aforementioned superintendent to investigate the present situation, take appropriate action based on those circumstances, and at the same time report to the Zongli Yamen on what actions were taken.29

In the weeks following the departure of the Senzaimaru for home, the Qing bureaucracy continued to spin its wheels in an effort to reach a decision about whether Japan would be allowed to come and trade again at Shanghai. The Dutch vice-consul was to be the conduit for the Zongli Yamen’s ultimate decision. Wu Xu was to carry out the investigation that the Zongli Yamen ordered Xue Huan to undertake. He eventually prepared a report in which he appears 27 Shinmuru, ed., “Genji gannen ni okeru bakuri no Shanhai shisatsu ki” (Account of an investigation of Shanghai by shogunal officials in the first year of the Genji period [1864]), 352–55; Yamaguchi, “Meiji izen no Shina bōeki” (Trade with China before the Meiji period), 24.

28 “Critically read” (pingyue) * * by Qian Yi and published by Dushitang. There is a copy in the Harvard-Yenching Library.

29 Huang, 186.

126

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

to have retained his belief in the sincerity of the Japanese. He notes several times their cordiality and deference to the Qing officials: “They only wish to engage in trade and only at the one port of Shanghai—other than that, they claim to have no wishes. They had no cunning ulterior motives. I believe it appropriate to grant them this request.” But Wu was not done: “Thus, we need to permit them to establish a consulate, rent a house, and see to their own national trading affairs, but this shall not stand as a precedent for the other countries of the East. In addition, we need to inform this consul [Kroes] that they will supervise their own merchants, prohibit them from arbitrarily traveling to any other port to trade, and indicate the restrictions placed on them.

If we do all this, there will be no future deleterious effects.” As per his wish, Xue and Li forwarded Wu’s report to the Zongli Yamen with an odd recommendation: “We find it difficult to believe that there will no deleterious effects whatsoever in future.”30 In the end, the Zongli Yamen urged a generous spirit and pragmatic approach, because (as everyone in the bureaucratic chain of command knew) foreigners were by nature cunning. No sooner would you ban them from returning to engage in trade then they would turn up even more deferentially requesting trade again; and as soon as Japan got its little feet in the door, other small countries would come and request trading privileges on the basis of the example of Japan.

Epilogue

It is surely next to impossible to try to gauge Wu Xu’s emotional reaction when the Japanese showed up unexpectedly in the late spring of 1862. He would have been an extremely busy man at the time. With the Westerners pressing him on any number of issues, with the Taipings at the gates of the city, with all manner of bureaucratic correspondence flowing through his office, the Japanese presented just one more (annoying?) source of difficulty in an already difficult job.

Nonetheless, Daotai Wu was nothing if not a consummate professional, and he saw to it that a precedent would be located by his assistants to justify the position he had chosen to take in granting the Japanese extremely good terms in 1862. Without the discovery of these documents, however, none of this would have been known; we would have remained staring at the same black box that generations of scholars have stared at since the events themselves transpired.

Without these materials, Wu Xu’s role in this decisive event in Sino-Japanese 30 Huang, 187.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 127

relations would remain largely invisible. But, with them in hand, we find that, despite all the other troubles faced by the Shanghai daotai, his professionalism affords us an extraordinary look at the late imperial bureaucracy handling a perplexing case with great grace and acumen. When all we had were the individual accounts of the young Japanese samurai, we could (as many Japanese scholars have) examine them for insights into China and Japan at the time, but we gleaned next to nothing about the bureaucratic relations between the two states, because those samurai were never part of any state-to-state negotiations. With these new documents, the travel accounts of the young samurai are now balanced by the shogunal officials’ efforts to insinuate themselves into the Chinese good graces. The Japanese officials all but beg the Chinese to allow them to continue trading, and the Chinese—with a rather full plate already in mid-1862—condescend to permit this venture but caution against rashly coming again.

There the matter effectively rested until early 1864 when, as the Zongli Yamen predicted, another Japanese vessel, the Kenjunmaru showed up and requested trade.

Glossary

“Bakumatsu Nihonjin no Taihei Tengoku ni kansuru chishiki”

幕末日本人の太平天国に関する知識

“Bakumatsu Senzaimaru Kenjunmaru no Shanhai haken ra ni kansuru Shinkoku gaikō

monjo ni tsuite: Taiwan Chūō kenkyūin Kindaishi kenkyūjo shozō ‘Sōri kakkoku jimu gamon Shintō’ (1862–68 nen)”

幕末千歳丸・健順丸の上海派遣等に関する清国外交文書について：台

湾中央研究院近代史研究所所蔵「総理各国事務衙門清档」一八六二〜

六八年)

baolan

包攬

Bremen

布林宴

Chen Zuen

陳租恩

Chōfu Nihon bunka

調布日本文化

Chūgoku kindai gaikō no keisei

中国近代外交の形成

daotai

道台

Dongfang bingshi jilüe

東方兵事紀略

Dushitang

讀史堂

Ensei sōkō

遠西叢考

128

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

Feng Tianyu

冯天瑜

“Genji gannen ni okeru bakuri no Shanhai shisatsu ki”

元治元年における幕吏の上海視察記

Hamburg

昂不爾厄

Hanover

大漢諾佛

Haruna Akira

春名徹

Hokudai hōgaku ronshū

北大法学論集

Huang Rongguang

黄栄光

Ichiko Chūzō

市古宙三

Iwagaki Matsunae

岩垣松苗

Jindai Zhongguo shiliao jilüe

近代中國史料叢刊

“Jūkyū seiki chūki Higashi Ajia ni okeru kokusaihō juyō o meguru enshinryoku to kyūshinryoku, Shinchō gaikō monjo kara mita ‘Shanhai’ ‘Nagasaki’ ‘Pekin’ ‘Edo’ no shisha kankei”

十九世紀中期東アジアにおける国際法受容をめぐる遠心力と求心力、清

朝外交文書からみた「上海」「長崎」「北京」「江戸」の四者関係

Kaikoku hyakunen kinen bunka jigyōkai

開国百年記念文化事業会

Kaikoku hyakunen kinen Meiji bunkashi ronshū

開国百年記念明治文化史論集

Kawashima Shin

川島真

Kenjunmaru

健順丸

Kindai Kōnan no soen: Chūgoku jinushi seido no kenkyū

近代江南の租棧: 中国地主制度の研究

Kokugakuin daigaku kiyū

國學院大學紀要

Kokushi ryaku

國史略

konbu

昆布

Kroes

哥老司

Kyū bakufu

舊幕府

Li Hongzhang

李鴻章

Lübeck

魯伯

Matsumoto Tadao

松本忠雄

Matsuura Akira

松浦章

“Meiji izen no Shina bōeki”

明治以前の支那貿易

“Mine Kiyoshi no Shanhai keiken: ‘Senchū nichiroku’ to ‘Shinkoku Shanhai kenbunroku’ ”

峯潔の上海経験：「船中日録」

と「清国上海見聞録」

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 129

Miyanaga Takashi

宮永孝

Muramatsu Yūji

村松祐次

“Nakamuda Kuranosuke no Shanhai taiken: Bunkyū ninen Shanhai kō nikki o chūshin ni”

中牟田倉之助の上海体験：「文久二年上海行日記」を中心に

*Nihon gaishi *

日本外史

*Nihon zenkindai no kokka to taigai kankei *

日本前近代の国家と対外関係

Nishimura Genshō

西村元照

Oldenberg

亞爾敦不爾厄

*pingyue *

評閱

*Qing shi gao *

清史稿

*“Qiansuiwan” Shanghai xing: Ribenren 1802 nian de Zhongguo guancha” *

千岁丸”上海行：日本人 1862 年的中国观察

Qian Yi

錢懌

Rai San’yō

頼山陽

Saika Hakuai

雜賀博愛

“Sen happyaku rokujū ninen bakufu Senzaimaru no Shanhai haken” 1862

年幕府千歳丸の上海派遣

*Senzaimaru *

千歳丸

“Shanhai ni okeru Nihonjin hatten no shoki”

上海に於ける日本人發展の初期

“Shanhai shinpō ni miru bakumatsu kansen Senzaimaru no Shanhai raikō”

「上海新報」に見る幕末官船千歳丸の上海来航

Shen Yunlong

沈雲龍

Shinmura Izuru

新村出

“Shinsho no hōran, shichō taisei no kakuritsu, kaikin kara ukeoi chōzeisei e”

清初の包攬：私徴体制の確立，解禁から請負徴税制へ

Sugita Kakuzan ō

杉田鶉山翁

Sugita Teiichi

杉田定一

Takasugi Shinsaku no Shanhai repotto

高杉晋作の上海報告

Tanaka Takeo

田中健夫

*Tōkyō daigaku Shiryō hensanjo kenkyū kiyō *

東京大学史料編纂所研究紀要

tongshang

通商

Tōyōshi kenkyū

東洋史研究

Wakumon

或問

wokou

倭寇

Wu Xu

吳煦

wuyue butongshang

無約不通商

wuyueguo

無約國

wuyue tongshang

無約通商

130

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

wuyue xiaoguo

無約小國

xiaoguo

小國

Xue Huan

薜換

Xunfang Dongyangren, jindai Shanghai de Riben juliumin (1868–1945) 寻访东洋人，近代上海的日本居留民 (1868–1945)

Yamaguchi Kyochoku

山口擧直

yangtong

洋銅

Yao Xiguang

姚錫光

Ying Baoshi

應寶時

youyue tongshang

有約通商

“Yū-Shin yokan”

遊清餘感

Zhao Erxun

趙爾巽

Zongli Yamen

總理衙門

Bibliography

Chen Zuen. Xunfang Dongyangren, jindai Shanghai de Riben juliumin (1868–1945) (Inquiry into the “Japanese,” Japanese residents of modern Shanghai, 1868–1945).

Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2007.

Feng Tianyu. “Qiansuiwan” Shanghai xing: Ribenren 1862 nian de Zhongguo guancha (The *Senzaimaru’s * trip to Shanghai: Japanese views of China in 1862). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2001.

Fogel, Joshua. *The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945. *

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

———. “The Voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai: Early Sino-Japanese Contacts in the Modern Era.” In The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries by Joshua Fogel, 79–94. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.

Sharpe, 1995.

Haruna Akira. “Mine Kiyoshi no Shanhai keiken: ‘Senchū nichiroku’ to ‘Shinkoku Shanhai kenbunroku’ ” (Mine Kiyoshi’s experiences in Shanghai: The “Daily account onboard” and the “Travel account of Shanghai in China”). Chōfu Nihon bunka 8

(1998): 27–100.

———. “Nakamuda Kuranosuke no Shanhai taiken: Bunkyū ninen Shanhai kō nikki o chūshin ni” (Nakamuda Kuranosuke’s experiences in Shanghai: On the “Diary of a trip to Shanghai in 1862”). Kokugakuin daigaku kiyō 35 (March 1997): 57–96.

———. “Sen happyaku rokujū ninen bakufu Senzaimaru no Shanhai haken” (The shogunate’s sending of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai in 1862). In Nihon zenkindai no kokka to taigai kankei (The premodern state and foreign relations in Japan), ed.

Tanaka Takeo, 555–601. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1987.

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations 131

Hevia, James L. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

Honjo, Eijiro. “Japan’s Overseas Trade in the Closing Days of the Tokugawa Shogunate.”

Kyoto University Economic Review XIV.2 (April 1939): 1–23.

Huang Rongguang. “Bakumatsu Senzaimaru Kenjunmaru no Shanhai haken ra ni kansuru Shinkoku gaikō monjo ni tsuite: Taiwan Chūō kenkyūin Kindaishi kenkyūjo shozō ‘Sōri kakkoku jimu gamon Shintō’ (1862–68 nen)” (Qing diplomatic documents concerning the dispatch to Shanghai of the *Senzaimaru * and the Kenjunmaru in the late Edo period: “Qing archival documents of the Zongli Yamen” [1862–68]

held in the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan). Tokyo daigaku Shiryō hensanjo kenkyū kiyō 13 (March 2003): 176–200.

Ichiko Chūzō. “Bakumatsu Nihonjin no Taihei Tengoku ni kansuru chishiki” (Japanese knowledge of the Taipings in the bakumatsu period). In Kaikoku hyakunen kinen Meiji bunkashi ronshū (Essays on Meiji cultural history, commemorating the centenary of the opening of the country), ed. Kaikoku hyakunen kinen bunka jigyōkai, 453–95. Tokyo: Kengensha, 1952.

Kawashima Shin. Chūgoku kindai gaikō no keisei (The formation of modern Chinese diplomacy). Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 2004.

———. “Jūkyū seiki chūki Higashi Ajia ni okeru kokusaihō juyō o meguru enshinryoku to kyūshinryoku, Shinchō gaikō monjo kara mita ‘Shanhai’ ‘Nagasaki’ ‘Pekin’ ‘Edo’

no shisha kankei” (Centrifugal and centripetal forces surrounding the reception of international law in East Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the relations among Shanghai, Nagasaki, Beijing, and Edo as seen in Qing diplomatic documents).

Hokudai hōgaku ronshū 50.1 (1999): 187–91.

Kuhn, Philip A. “Local Self-Government Under the Republic: Problems of Control, Autonomy, and Mobilization.” In Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, ed.

Frederic Wakeman, Jr. and Carolyn Grant, 257–98. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Liu, Kwang-ching. “The Ch’ing Restoration.” In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10: Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 1, * * ed. John K. Fairbank, 409–90. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Matsumoto Tadao. “Shanhai ni okeru Nihonjin hatten no shoki” (The early years of Japanese development in Shanghai). *Tōyō * 42 (October 1939), 37–48.

Matsuura Akira. “Shanhai shinpō ni miru bakumatsu kansen Senzaimaru no Shanhai raikō” (The voyage to Shanghai of the official vessel Senzaimaru in the late Edo period as seen in Shanghai xinbao). Wakumon 4 (June 2002): 3–20.

Miyanaga Takashi. *Takasugi Shinsaku no Shanhai repotto *(Takasugi Shinsaku’s report on Shanghai). Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu ōraisha, 1995.

Miyoshi, Masao. As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States *(1860). * Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

132

A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations

Muramatsu Yūji. Kindai Kōnan no soen: Chūgoku jinushi seido no kenkyū (Landlord bursaries of the lower Yangzi delta region in the modern era: Studies in the Chinese landlord system). Tokyo: Kindai Chūgoku kenkyū iinkai, 1970.

Nishimura Genshō. “Shinsho no hōran, shichō taisei no kakuritsu, kaikin kara ukeoi chōzeisei e” (Engrossment in the early Qing: The formation of a private taxation structure, from lifting the ban to a contract taxation system). *Tōyōshi kenkyū * 33.3

(December 1976): 114–74.

*North China Herald. June 7, 1862. *

Shinmuru Izuru, ed. “Genji gannen ni okeru bakuri no Shanhai shisatsu ki” (Account of an investigation of Shanghai by shogunal officials in the first year of the Genji period [1864]), 335–84. In his Ensei sōkō (Collected studies of the far west). Tokyo: Rakurō shoin, 1935.

Sugita Teiichi. “Yū-Shin yokan” (Impressions from a trip to China). In Sugita Kakuzan ō

(Venerable Sugita Kakuzan), ed. Saika Hakuai, 582–5. Tokyo: Kakuzankai, 1928.

Will, Pierre-Étienne and R. Bin Wong (with James Lee). Nourish the People: The State *Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850. * Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1991.

Yamaguchi Kyochoku. “Meiji izen no Shina bōeki” (Trade with China before the Meiji period). Kyū bakufu 5.3 (April 1901): 20–28.

Yao Xiguang. Dongfang bingshi jilue (Summary of military events in the East). Wuchang: n.p., 1897. Reprint, in Jindai Zhongguo shiliao jilue (Modern Chinese historical materials reprints), ed. Shen Yunlong, Series 5, vol. 44. Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1967.

Zhao Erxun, ed. *Qing shi gao. * Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977. Reprint, 2003.

■ Source: “Lust for Still Life: Chinese Painters in Japan and Japanese Painters in China in the 1860s and 1870s,” in Acquisition: Art and Ownership in Edo-Period Japan, ed. Elizabeth Lillehoj (Floating World Editions, 2007), 149–68.

Lust for Still Life: Chinese Painters in Japan and Japanese Painters in China in the 1860s and 1870s

In the Edo period (1600–1868), Sino-Japanese cultural contacts were mediated through Nagasaki, to which Chinese ships brought quantities of paintings, books, and everyday objects. Nagasaki was the only city in Japan where foreigners lived; it had a Dutch settlement and a Chinese community, which included a number of important Chinese painters. Japanese artists working in the “Southern School” manner (Nanga), an old tradition rooted in China, frequently traveled to Nagasaki to study with Chinese émigré artists and to learn about China. Only in the early Meiji period (1868–1912)—when Japan opened its doors to the outside world—did Japanese artists begin making the trip to China, at long last able to see the true landscapes of Southern School painting.

The Chinese city that the Japanese saw first was Shanghai, a rapidly growing metropolis.

Early Japanese visitors to Shanghai included artists, scholars, and business-people. In the 1840s, the international community of Shanghai had begun the process of sealing itself off from Chinese jurisdictional scrutiny, and as a result, during the Taiping Rebellion, many Chinese artists and literati from the nearby cultural centers took refuge in Shanghai. The mix of painters and calligraphers, who tended to paint for money, brought into being a “Shanghai School,”

which found a new set of patrons in Shanghai capitalists. The Shanghai artists acquired students from as far away as Japan. Like other educated Japanese, these artists wanted to see what many considered to be the homeland of culture itself in China, and were thrilled to be able to commune spiritually with the landscapes of China. The new buyers of art in Shanghai included business-people from Japan, who were the first patrons to enter the Shanghai art scene from abroad. Many Japanese wished to reach Shanghai, either to study painting with an authentic master or to corner a market, in art or other business.

The Chinese port of Shanghai was opened as a result of British gunboats in the Opium War (1839–42), but it would be two decades following the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) before the first Japanese made the trip to Shanghai in 1862. This was only their second official trip abroad, not counting the handful of fascinating cases of earlier shipwreck victims whose unfortunate peregrinations landed

134

Lust for Still Life

them in Shanghai for shorter or longer periods of time.1 So long kept from extensive overseas travel, when Japanese began venturing abroad, Shanghai was much closer than it might have seemed, the first foreign port to which the Japanese sailed in their own vessels. Some Japanese came to Shanghai for relatively brief periods of time, others for one or more years, still others stayed for the rest of their lives. Interestingly, painters were prominent among the first Japanese who would take up residence in Shanghai. There were, of course, businessmen as well, most of them shopkeepers but also a smattering of those who opened branches of the large combines back home (Mitsui Bussan was the first), a small handful of officials working at the consulate which opened in the early 1870s, and a few religious missionaries of the New Pure Land sect of Buddhism.

Eventually, the Japanese community of Shanghai would fill out with roughly equal numbers of men and women; with children and schools; shopkeepers, businessmen, teachers, government employees, and the full range of professionals one would find in an expatriate community. While there had been tiny overseas communities of Japanese in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia in the premodern and early modern eras, Shanghai was to be the first such community in the modern period. After a few words on the first Japanese to set foot in Shanghai in the modern era, we move to a discussion of the Japanese painters who ventured to Shanghai in the 1860s and set them in the longer history of interactions between Chinese and Japanese painters, especially those of the Chinese painters who found refuge somewhat earlier in Nagasaki. Why did painters—of all people—leave Japan in the first place?

Why did they come to Shanghai? What did that port, deemed a virtual hell on earth by just about every Westerner (and many Japanese) who set foot there, have to offer them?2

1 The fullest works in this area are: Haruna Akira, Nippon Otokichi hyōryūki (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1979); Haruna, Sekai o mite shimatta otokotachi: Edo no ikyō taiken (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1988); Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai (Shanghai: Tairiku Shinpōsha, 1943), 43–72. And, of course, there was the much earlier history of raids on Shanghai in the spring and summer of 1553 by men deemed in the sources to be “Japanese pirates” ( wakō). Indeed, the five assaults that year by wakō led to the building of a wall around the city in the autumn, a wall which survived until 1912. As Liu Jianhui has argued, it was the wakō who effectively created the walled (Chinese) city of Shanghai. See Liu, *Mato Shanhai: Nihon chishikijin no “kindai” * taiken (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000), 11.

2 Here is Lord Oliphant describing it in 1859: “the most unhealthy [port] to which our ships are sent, the sickness and mortality being greater here than even on the west coast of Africa.”

Laurence Oliphant, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan, 1857–1859, * * vol. 1

(Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1859), 269.

Lust for Still Life

135

The Earliest Japanese Visitors to Shanghai

The first official Japanese voyages to China in several centuries were the 1862

voyage of the Senzaimaru and the 1864 voyage of the Kenjunmaru, both to Shanghai.3 Those two missions were charged—by two of the highest officials responsible for foreign affairs in the Edo period, the Nagasaki Magistrate and the Hakodate Magistrate, respectively—with observing commercial conditions in Shanghai, as Japan prepared to open itself up to international trade.

The authorities had learned from Chinese, British, Dutch, and American ships calling at those two recently opened Japanese ports that Shanghai was an immense commercial entrepôt and an invaluable window on the West. A journey of several days to Shanghai enabled one to see the entire West in microcosm and obviated the need to go halfway around the world to Europe or cross the Pacific Ocean to the United States.4 Whatever other agendas the Japanese aboard these two vessels may have had—and they were many and varied—the overall intent of these two early trips was commercial.

Much had happened in Shanghai over the twenty years before the latecomer Japanese arrived there. By 1862, the Western powers had been carving out business empires and semi-private enclaves, dubbed “Concessions,”

for two decades along the Huangpu River. But, all that development was not, in the eyes of all the visitors, necessarily a good thing. As Takasugi Shinsaku (1839–67), the young hothead from Chōshū domain, put it in his 1862 travelogue, “Shanghai may in fact belong to China, but one might as well call it British or French terrain. . . . The Chinese have become servants to the foreigners. Sovereignty may belong to China, but in fact it’s no more than a colony of Great Britain and France.”5

The accounts that remain from these early trips to Shanghai are the work of samurai politically active in their local domains and increasingly on the emerging national stage, as well as of merchants getting a first taste of things to come. For better or worse, they all recognized that significant change was 3 I have written extensively about this topic in The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 46–61.

4 Which, in any case, groups of Japanese would do; see W.G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America and Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995); Miyoshi Masao, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979).

5 Takasugi Shinsaku, Yū-Shin goroku, Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū; Yū–Shin goroku, ed. Hori Tetsusaburō, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha, 1974), 159–60, 185. More recently, a better edition of this text with annotations has appeared in Kaikoku, * * ed. Tanaka Akira (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 209–86. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

136

Lust for Still Life

in the offing. Their accounts were not immediately published and circulated back in Japan, some taking many years before they would see print. Thus, their writings did not have an immediate or substantial impact, although many of the men themselves would come to play highly important personal roles in Japanese politics, commerce, and the military over the next few years.

Nagasaki, for two centuries Japan’s only open port, quickly began to recede in importance, both as other ports opened and as Japanese vessels began to venture abroad. The Japanese government assisted private businesses in seeing to it that shipping lanes between the home islands and Shanghai, heretofore monopolized by foreigners, would be shared by Japanese and soon dominated by them. This process transpired over the course of the 1870s and 1880s.6 Even before then, however, Japanese were making their way to Shanghai.

A word on travel, travel restrictions, and the declining capacity of the Japanese government to control travel in the last days of the Tokugawa regime might be helpful at this point. Although a “feudal” regime in many ways, the Tokugawa (or Edo) shogunate was also highly centralized and sought to retain as much control as the technology available to early modern policing institutions would allow. Scholars generally regard this inclination as a reaction to the century of warfare and three decades of unification wars preceding the Tokugawa pacificiation at the turn of the seventeenth century. Japan would henceforth control its own borders, while missionaries and anything associated with Christianity would be interdicted, because missionary activity was blamed in part for those many years of chaos and bloodshed. And contacts with foreigners were also to be tightly restricted. Although domestic travel was itself severely curtailed on the books, there were ways for Japanese to travel, for example, on religious pilgrimages or to see relatives living at a distance.7

Foreign travel after the early decades of the seventeenth century was much more closely observed. Aside from a handful of exceptions, the only Japanese who ventured abroad were the shipwreck victims mentioned above. Similarly, 6 See, for example, Katayama Kunio, “Ryōji hōkoku ni miru Nihon sen no kaigai shinshutsu, Mitsubishi no jidai,” in Nihon ryōji hōkoku no kenkyū, * * ed. Tsunoyama Sakae (Tokyo: Dōbunkan, 1986), 249–52; Yasuba Yasukichi, “Kaijō unsō to kōgyōka, josetsu,” in Kindai keizai no rekishiteki kiban, ed, Hidemura Senzō, Sakumichi Yōtarō, Harada Toshimaru, Yasuoka Shigeaki, Mori Yasuhiro, and Takeoka Keion (Tokyo: Mineruba Shobō, 1977), 266–67; Ge Yuanxu, Hu you zaji (Preface dated 1876), 4/19a, 21b; and Kageyama Taihachi, “Shanhai shōkō

ni tsukite,” in Taishō jūninen kaki kaigai ryokō chōsa hōkoku, ed. Kōbe Kōtō Shōgyō Gakkō

(Kōbe: Meikisha, 1924), 136.

7 On travel within Japan during the Edo period, see Constantine Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modem Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1994).

Lust for Still Life

137

only the Dutch and Chinese were permitted in, and they were only allowed to enter Nagasaki, where even their movements were strictly curtailed—

decidedly no Catholic countries were allowed to sail ships into Japanese ports.

By the 1860s, when the government was becoming increasingly busy snuffing out nascent civil wars and after the United States had forcibly opened several Japanese ports by the end of the previous decade, interest in the Western world had grown dramatically. The only Japanese technically allowed abroad until the regime succumbed in 1867 and 1868 were groups with special authorizations, but as we shall see individuals were able to travel outside the country with a fair degree of impunity.

Sino-Japanese cultural contacts throughout the Tokugawa period continued but took new forms. They were mediated through Nagasaki to which Chinese ships regularly came, frequently bringing quantities of books and other art or everyday objects. The shogun and several important feudal lords often ordered specific items (everything from legal texts to horses and equine physicians) through these merchants-cum-culture brokers, who understood that their ability to continue trading with Japan depended on filling such orders. Sinic culture continued to develop throughout Japan—in literature, scholarship, and the arts—but in the effective absence of Chinese or access to them. This is an immense and fascinating area of research only just coming into its own in the West.

The history of East Asian painting is vast and replete with numerous schools, sects, and subsects. The Japanese artists who ventured to Shanghai and environs from the later 1860s, though, fall into only two discrete schools between which there was little (if any) contact, the Western-style oil painters and the Nanga or “Southern School” painters. The former’s roots were planted in Japan (specifically, Nagasaki) in the eighteenth century by Dutchmen, the only Europeans who had direct contact at that time with Japan; the former were part of an old tradition rooted in China, the latter of more recent vintage.

For all their differences, though, these were the two groups that produced early visitors and migrants to Shanghai.

Western-style Painting

Perhaps contrary to expectation, the Western-style oil painters arrived in Shanghai first. The third officially sanctioned mission to Shanghai—after the Senzaimaru and the Kenjunmaru—was a group of nine Japanese who sailed aboard the British steamship Ganges from Yokohama on 15 February 1867.

On the same day that the Ganges left Yokohama, a French vessel, the Alphée,

138

Lust for Still Life

carrying a large official Japanese delegation, set sail from Yokohama as well.

The latter group was led by Tokugawa Akitake (Minbu, 1853–1910), younger brother of the shogun, set to attend the international exposition in Paris in an official capacity.8 The two ships arrived in Shanghai on the same day at roughly the same time, and as the latter clearly bore men of higher social standing, the men of the Ganges who had planned to take rooms at the famous Astor House Hotel had perforce to spend the night elsewhere.

Among the Japanese aboard the Ganges was one Takahashi Inosuke (1828–

94; later Takahashi Yuichi) who was to become one of the foremost painters of the Meiji period.9 Years before as a youth, Takahashi had come to the attention of his lord, Hotta Masahira (1795–1854) of Sano domain, who strongly encouraged him to pursue his work as an artist and released him from mundane domainal duties to enable him to do so.10 On the day after arriving in Shanghai, Takahashi moved with the entire Japanese group to the large residence of a local businessman and art connoisseur by the name of Wang Renbo (dates unknown), who supported Takahashi’s painting pursuits while the latter resided in Shanghai. He remained in the Chinese port city, taking side trips to Suzhou and elsewhere in the lower Yangzi delta, for roughly ten weeks before returning to Japan. In addition to a diary, he left a number of sketches of the trip to Shanghai, the harbor, and scenes in the city. During this time, Takahashi had extensive contacts with Chinese painters and other literati, attended local Chinese theater, met several Japanese then present in Shanghai (such as the ubiquitous Kishida Ginkō, 1833–1905), and soaked up as much of the local atmosphere as he could.11 However, the impact of this trip on his art, or the movement of art in which he played such an important part, seems to have played little role in his subsequent work. Takahashi’s “Shanghai Diary,” which is preserved in the collection of the Tokyo Art University, includes sketches he made en route to and in the city.

8 For a full treatment of this mission, see Miyanaga Takashi, Purinsu Akitake no Ōshū kikō, Keiō 3 neu Pari banpaku shisetsu (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2000). The prince’s diary has been edited and annotated in Miyaji Masato, ed., *Tokugawa Akitake bakumatsu tai-Ō *

nikki (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1999). There are mentions made of this trip, though not of the stopover in Shanghai, in Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, * * 114–17; and Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, * * 175.

9 For more on Takahashi Yuichi see Chapter 2 in this volume.

10 “Yōga no senkaku Takahashi Yuichi den,” Bijutsu Shinpō 4.9 (July 20, 1905): 68.

11 His diary has been reprinted in Aoki Shigeru, ed., Meiji Yōga shiryō, kirokuhen (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1986), 13–22. Several of his sketches have been reprinted in Tanaka Akira, Nihon no kinsei, vol. 18: Kindai kokka e no shikō (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1994).

Lust for Still Life

139

Another painter who would make his name in oils, Yamamoto Hōsui (1850–

1910), initially wanted to study Nanga painting, and to that end he traveled first to Kyoto and then to Yokohama, where he arrived in 1868. Yokohama was certainly no home for traditional Japanese arts, but it was a place where, given the right circumstances, he might be able to catch a steamer for China. For all his efforts, though, the opportunity to make the voyage to Shanghai never materialized. In the most Westernized of Japanese cities, he came across the Westernoriented oil painting of Goseda Yoshimatsu (1855–1915) and was so taken with it that he remained there and entered Goseda’s school.12

In both Takahashi’s and Yamamoto’s cases, Shanghai was not a destination in and of itself. Takahashi was simply taking advantage of an opportunity for fresh inspiration, while Yamamoto viewed Shanghai and elsewhere in the region first and foremost as the places to go to study traditional Nanga painting. Their cases would probably not be so exceptional had they not occurred so early in the history of modern Sino-Japanese contacts in Shanghai. Altogether different was the case of the Nanga painters who made the trip to Shanghai from the late 1860s specifically because it was a center of

“Chinese-style painting.”

The Southern School

To tell their stories properly, though, requires some background on the artistic connections between Nagasaki and the mainland, going back to an earlier point in the Edo period. Throughout the period, Nagasaki was the only city in Japan that had a considerable Chinese community, including over time a number of important painters who often acquired Japanese disciples during their years of residence in the southwestern Japanese port. Nanga was just one of many schools of painting in Japan—indeed, there were half a dozen prominent ones in Nagasaki itself. Like the style of painting spread by the Ōbaku sect of Zen Buddhism, many of whose abbots came from China in the early Edo period, Nanga was extremely Sinophilic and closely tied to artistic trends on the mainland. Japanese adherents of Nanga painting often drew inspiration 12 Yamamoto Hōsui, “Yōga kenkyū keireki dan (daiichi),” Bijutsu Shinpō 1, no. 1 (30 March 1902): 3; Aoki Shigeru and Furukawa Hideaki, eds., Yamamoto Hōsui no sekaiten zuroku (Nagoya: Asahi Shinbun Nagoya Honsha Bunka Kikakkyoku Nagoya Kikakubu, 1993), 170; Furukawa Hideo, “Tōzai aitsūjiru yō ni shitai nen’o okoshita Yamamoto Hōsui,” in Yamamoto Hōsui no sekaiten zuroku, * * eds. Aoki Shigeru and Furukawa Hideaki (Nagoya: Asahi Shinbun Nagoya Honsha Bunka Kikakkyoku Nagoya Kikakubu, 1993), 12–13.

140

Lust for Still Life

from Chinese paintings and masters, and a steady stream of the latter flowed into Nagasaki.13

The “southern” in this group’s name had nothing to do with Nagasaki’s geography but came from the origins this group traced to the Southern School of Chan Buddhism of the Tang period (618–906), although its principal antecedents were in the high Ming period (1368–1644). Because, like its sister school in China, it laid such heavy emphasis on the high level of education of painters in related bookish disciplines and in its studied knowledge of the history of painting, it often overlapped with “literati painting” ( bunjinga; Ch: wenrenhua). Many painters in this school spent years, for example, painting pictures of Chinese landscapes they could never have seen—and that no fellow Japanese could have seen—based on the paintings of such titans as Dong Qichang (1555–1636) of the Ming, from centuries earlier.

Among the Chinese painters who came to Nagasaki in the eighteenth century, the first important name was Yi Fujiu (dates unknown) from Wuxing County, Jiangsu. He first arrived in 1720, carrying the trading license of his elder brother, Yi Taoji, who had been ordered by the Nagasaki Magistrate—on behalf of the shogun himself—to bring three horses to Japan; it was literally illegal to export horses from China because of potential military needs, and Yi Fujiu perforce had to escort the animals off his ship in the dead of night for fear other Chinese in Nagasaki might observe him. He was equally important as the merchant responsible for bringing a number of valuable Japanese texts back to China, and despite his virtual anonymity in the annals of Chinese painting (to this day, his dates remain a mystery), he was the progenitor of the trend to introduce literati painting of the Nanga School to Japan. Among the Japanese who were much influenced by him was Ike Taiga (1723–76).14

13 There is an immense literature on Nanga painting. I have consulted the following: Yamanouchi Chōzō, Nihon nanga shi (Tokyo: Riru Shobō, 1981); Umesawa Seiichi, Nihon nanga shi (Tokyo: Tōhō Shoten, 1919); Yoshizawa Chū, Nihon nanga ronkō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1977); Yonezawa Yoshiho and Yoshizawa Chū, Nihon no bijutsu 23: Bunjinga (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1966); Wakita Hidetarō, Nihon kaiga kinsei shi (Ōsaka: Shōbunkan, 1943); Takeda Michitarō, Nihon kindai bijutsu shi (Tokyo: Kondō Shuppansha, 1969); Fujioka Sakutarō. Kinsei kaiga shi (Tokyo rpt.: Perikansha, 1983); Kōno Motoaki, “Edo jidai kaiga no shūketsu to tensei,” in Edo jidai no bijutsu: kaiga, chōkoku, kōgei, kenchiku, sho, * * ed.

Tsuji Nobuo et al. (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1984), 121–90.

14 See the entry on him by Yonezawa Yoshiho, “I Fukyū,” in Ajia rekishi jiten, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1959), 199. For details on his life as a merchant and book importer, see Ōba Osamu, Edo jidai no Nit-Chū hiwa (Tokyo: Tōhō Shoten, 1980), 197–98. See also Koga Jūjirō, Nagasaki gashi iden (Tokyo: Taishōdō Shoten, 1983).

Lust for Still Life

141

Another Chinese to distinguish himself as a painter in Nagasaki was Fei Hanyuan (dates unknown), wh arrived in 1734. He was followed later in the century by his relative Fei Qinghu. Both were landscape painters who, while in Nagasaki, acquired disciples anxious to study with real Chinese. In the Tenmei era (1781–89), Zhang Qiugu made his way to Nagasaki where in 1788

he carried on a famous “brush conversation”—the typical manner by which literate Chinese and Japanese “conversed,” using literary Chinese as their written medium—with the official Japanese interpreter. Fei Qinghu attended this session. As a young man, the well-known Japanese painter Tani Bunchō (1703–

1840) traveled from Edo to study with Zhang. Over the course of the century, as many as one hundred Chinese painters would make their influence felt in Nagasaki, and many of them were Chinese Southern School artists. Despite their impact on the history of Japanese art, though, we do not even have dates for most of these Chinese artists.15

Perhaps most important to our story of Chinese influence on Japanese painting was Jiang Jiapu, a man completely unknown in the history of Chinese art but central to the development of the Nanga school in Japan. Jiang hailed from the Hangzhou area of Zhejiang Province and first came to Nagasaki in 1804, as well as many times thereafter. Although he seems to have passed the first stage of the civil service examinations back home, he ultimately failed or ceased trying, and subsequently devoted himself to painting in a highly serious, orthodox style, while earning his living as a merchant.16 He was especially good at landscapes, and during his extended stays in Japan, he directly influenced a number of artists including such major figures as Hidaka Tetsuō (1790–1871), Kinoshita Itsuun (1799–1866), and Miura Gomon (1808–60), known collectively as the “three Nagasaki Nanga masters.”

When he was Jiang’s student, Hidaka Tetsuō was a monk at Shuntokuji in Nagasaki, founded in 1630 and for two centuries the site at which books brought from China were inspected for violations of the strict regulations on interdicted texts. He would serve for many years as the abbot of Shuntokuji 15 The secondary material on this topic in Japanese is extensive, to say the least, though nothing of substance to my knowledge exists in English. For the aforementioned, I have relied on Shimizu Hiroshi, Gajin Nagai Unpei (Nagasaki: Shinano Kyōiku Shuppanbu, 1981), 31–34; Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, 860; Yanagi Ryō, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei: Nagai Unpei no bijutsu (Tokyo: Kotobuki Garō, 1974), 60; and numerous brief entries in the Nihon shi dai jiten (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1992–94).

16 Yamakawa Takeshi cites a letter by the famed cultural connoisseur and shogunal official who was serving in Nagasaki in 1804, Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823), to the effect that Jiang had turned to painting after failing at the examinations. Yamakawa Takeshi, ed., Nagai Unpei (Nagano: Shinano Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1985), 214.

142

Lust for Still Life

and nurture numerous young Japanese interested in Nanga painting who traveled to Nagasaki from all over the home islands. For all his efforts, Tetsuō never seems to have excelled as an artist to the extent that several of his contemporaries and disciples would, but he proved to be an extraordinary teacher and facilitator of human contacts.17

The most active painter in Nagasaki at this time appears to have been Kinoshita Itsuun. A native of the city, he was an energetic organizer and painting teacher who ran shows and took in numerous pupils willing to work assiduously at the Nanga style of art. His heart’s desire was to visit the putative homeland of Nanga in China, but that goal always managed to elude him—it being illegal on pain of death to leave Japan throughout most of his life. From his home, Kinoshita reputedly would travel mentally to the mainland by studying two paintings he had acquired: Zhang Qiugu’s *Emeishan yue *( The Moon at *Emei Mountain *[Sichuan]) and Jiang Jiapu’s *Xihu shui yun *( Clouds over West Lake [Hangzhou]).18

Among Kinoshita’s most famous and devoted disciples was Nagai Unpei (1833–99), who came from the town of Nuttari in Echigo domain (present-day Niigata Prefecture). Born in the midst of the Tenpō famine to a father who worked as a barber but spent much of his time drinking and a mother who raised him and his two brothers in dire poverty, Unpei somehow discovered painting early in life. Despite his father’s wishes for him to follow in the family profession, Unpei despised cutting hair. This attitude led to frequent paternal beatings and ultimately to Unpei’s running away from home as a teenager. His uncle placed him in the home of a local doctor who fostered the lad’s interest in calligraphy and taught him the Confucian classics and other Chinese texts. He also found for Unpei a local Nanga-style painter, Makabe Setchō

(dates unknown), who had studied some years before with Tetsuō in Nagasaki.

Makabe opened up a world of calligraphy, painting, and Chinese learning in 17 Chen Zhenlian, Jindai Zhong-Ri huihua jiaoliu shi bijiao yanjiu (Hefei: Anhui Meishu Chubanshe, 2000), 31–32; Kawakita Michiaki, ed., Kindai Nihon bijutsu jiten (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1989), 294; Suzuki, “Kō Kaho,” in Ajia rekishi jiten, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1959), 200; Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, 37–39; Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, 871–78; and Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei, 60–61.

18 Shimizu, Gajln Nagai Unpei, 40–41, 45–46; Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, 870–71. In 1861, Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924) arrived in Nagasaki with a letter of introduction from Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791–1875) to Kinoshita. He claimed he wanted to study the Nanga style of painting imported from China, but he allegedly brought with him a big-city arrogance toward backwoods Nagasaki. Despite five months under Kinoshita’s artistic tutelage, Tessai really was primarily interested in learning about conditions overseas, and they parted without much mutual affection. See Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, 47–49.

Lust for Still Life

143

Japan to Unpei through connections to the work of the great Edo calligrapher Maki Ryōko (1777–1843), his teacher Kameda Hōsai (or Bōsai, 1752–1826), and others. Through a local priest, Unpei was introduced as well to the work of the artist Kushiro Unsen (1758–1811), who was born in Shimabara, raised in nearby Nagasaki, and studied Chinese learning and language with Chinese residents there.19

At age fifteen, Unpei’s taste for studying Nanga painting directly with masters in Nagasaki was such that he simply decided to set off on the long journey despite the opposition of virtually everyone around him. In 1848, this was a major undertaking for a teenager, especially given the shogunate’s restrictions on domestic travel. Traveling overland, he reached Japan’s sole international port some six months later and went straight away to introduce himself to Tetsuō, who later took him to meet Kinoshita. The latter was immediately taken with Unpei’s seriousness—many people came to study Nanga painting in Nagasaki, but few of them showed such apparent purpose and fewer still were teenagers. Kinoshita effectively took the youngster under his wing, trained him as a painter and calligrapher, and even offered suggestions for Unpei’s ultimate decision to adopt that particular given name. Through Kinoshita, Unpei also met a number of Chinese painters who had taken refuge from the Taiping Rebellion in Nagasaki.20

Our story now must shift to the mainland. The great Taiping Rebellion was raging through the lower Yangzi provinces during the 1850s and early 1860s.

Earlier, in the 1840s, many Chinese scholars, painters, and other literati from the nearby cultural centers of Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuxi, and elsewhere—to say nothing of tens of thousands of common folk—had taken refuge during the rebellion in the Concessions in the hope of avoiding the Taiping devastations they had witnessed and heard of in other places. Accordingly, the population of Shanghai swelled to bloated proportions. The art world was affected in several ways. A large number of elite Chinese artists, in an effort to save themselves and escape the Taipings, made their way to Shanghai, and several of them traveled as far as Nagasaki.

19 Kushiro counted among his friends and traveling companions the likes of Rai San’yō

(1780–1832), Uragami Shunkin (1779–1846), Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783–1856), and Kimura Kenkadō (1736–1802), the cream of late-eighteenth-century mainland-oriented scholars and painters. Shimizu, *Gajin Nagai Unpei, * 13–19; Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei, 60–61; Satō Moyako, Nihon meigaka den, bokko hen (Tokyo: Seiabō, 1967), 122.

20 Furukawa Osamu, “Nagai Unpei no tamashii ni atau,” Tōei 10, no. 5 (1934): 37; Shimizu, *Gajin Nagai Unpei, * 20–25, 27, 29, 38, 52; and Muramatsu Shōfū, Shinshū honchō gajin den, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1972), 25.

144

Lust for Still Life

Two such emigré painters whose names appear repeatedly in the sources, but who have managed to escape virtually every reference work, were Wang Kesan (Daotai; 1822–?) and Xu Yuting (b. 1824). Wang was from Zhejiang Province, and he was hailed in Japan as the greatest Chinese calligrapher to reach Japan since Jiang Jiapu. To this day, his calligraphy appears on the top of a parade float in a local Nagasaki festival in the Kōjiyamachi section of that city. He arrived in Nagasaki in 1862 and had frequent contact there with Unpei, Kinoshita, and others in the Nanga circle of painters, and he offered frequent calligraphic advice to the young artists in the city. About this time, in the spring of 1864, Kinoshita decided that Unpei was ready to go out on his own; he had been living in Nagasaki for sixteen years, but was still apprenticed to Kinoshita and all but unknown. With inspiration from both his teacher and Wang, Unpei had continued to labor, as he saw it, to create an authentic Nanga tradition in Japan that was directly affiliated with the same tradition in China. In the late summer or early fall of 1864, Wang visited Unpei before his return to Shanghai.

They exchanged paintings, and Wang suggested that Unpei consider making the voyage to Shanghai at some point in the near future to further the efflorescence of Nanga exchanges between their two countries.21 As noted above, the Nanga school in Japan had for many years past continued to paint scenery derived from the lower Yangzi region of China, scenery which (of course) did not exist anywhere in Japan and which none of them would have actually seen.

It was as if these mountains and valleys, temples and rural huts were ideal types—in any event, idealized for all East Asian literati painters. The worldview of Nanga was thus decidedly Sinophilic, a worldview of people living in another world altogether.

Xu Yuting, also from Zhejiang, arrived in Nagasaki even earlier, in 1861, and he quickly became active in the local painting community over the next few years. Whereas Wang was a master of calligraphy and plum tree painting, Xu was famed for his ink landscapes. Among the local painting students, Xu took on one Yasoshima Shakyō (1832–1916) and praised his work to the skies.22 By 1867, Xu was also back in China.

In early 1866, Kinoshita decided to make a trip to Edo to visit a brother who lived near the capital. Faithful disciple that he was, Unpei planned to join him, but he became extremely ill and was unable to make the sea voyage from Nagasaki. Kinoshita wrote from Edo to say that, should Unpei recover, he might join him, but Unpei’s illness persisted. Late that summer, the vessel 21 Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, 867; Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, 52–55, 56–57; http://yuki–

nagasaki.hoops.ne.jp/yuki_nagasaki_k04.html; Fujioka, Kinsei kaiga shi, 196.

22 Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, 70–71.

Lust for Still Life

145

carrying Kinoshita and over fifty others left the port of Yokohama en route back to Nagasaki and was never seen again.23 All were lost at sea, and Kinoshita died without ever being able to satisfy his lifelong ambition of seeing the real scenery of China.

In early 1865, Unpei made the acquaintance of another young painter in Nagasaki who would be instrumental in convincing him to try to make the trip to Shanghai. Ishikawa Kansen (b. 1844) came from Etchū domain (contemporary Toyama Prefecture), not far from Unpei’s hometown, and despite his youth had, like Unpei and many others, come to Nagasaki to study Nanga painting at Shuntokuji. He was preparing an album and wanted Unpei to contribute the first piece to it. The second piece, he hoped, would be supplied by either Yasuda Rōzan (Mamoru, 1828/1830–1883) or Chūjō Untei (1834–66); about the former, we shall have much to say below, while the latter was sadly to die with Kinoshita, his teacher, whom he accompanied on the ill-fated trip from Yokohama. Unpei and Kansen became fast friends.24 At Kansen’s suggestion, they and others adorned kites with their artwork for the kite-flying festivities in Nagasaki, and they continued to meet periodically and talk about their work. In the spring of the following year, 1866, they shared concerns about all the tumult then occurring—the assault on Shimonoseki the previous year, the Chōshū wars, the Namamugi Incident in which a British man was murdered in Japan, and other events portending big changes.

Unpei admitted to his friend that he wanted, at long last, to see a Jiang Jiapu landscape with the genuine eyes of the founders of Southern School painting, meaning he wanted to go to China. Much more entrepreneurial than Unpei, Kansen too expressed a similar desire, but it was still technically illegal for individuals to do so. They both knew of Yoshida Shōin’s (1830–59) unsuccessful and ultimately fatal effort to stow away on one of Commodore Perry’s vessels bound for the United States in 1854, a story immortalized in the West in 1878

by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94). Shōin, though, had wanted to visit the distant barbarian West, while they only wanted to travel a few days away to nearby Shanghai to view landscapes from the greatest culture in the world.

23 Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei, 61; Furukawa, “Nagai Unpei no tamashii ni atau,” 38; Muramatsu, Shinshū honchō gajin den, 25–27; Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, * * 64, 71–72; Fujisawa Makoto, “Nagai Unpei,” in Shinshū jinbutsu ki, bijutsuka den, ed. Toida Hiroshi (Nagano: Shinano Mainichi Shinbun, 1950), 167.

24 Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, * * 59–60, 61–63, 65–66; Ozaki Hotsuki, ed., Shinchō Nihon jinmei jiten (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1991), 359, gives the 1828 date for Yasuda’s birth, though the majority of sources give 1830.

146

Lust for Still Life

Unpei ultimately came upon the ideal intermediary who would facilitate their voyage. On several occasions he had met a naturalized American missionary born in the Netherlands, Guido Herman Fridolin Verbeck (1830–98), who had come to Nagasaki in late 1859 on behalf of the Dutch Reformed Church. En route to Japan, the ship carrying him and his wife had called at the port of Shanghai where he left his wife within the Western community before heading off to set up shop in Nagasaki, a site at which Westerners (let alone missionaries) had not lived among the Japanese for over two centuries. It was there several years later that Takasugi Shinsaku, waiting several months for the Senzaimaru to be cleared for departure to Shanghai, met Verbeck. Already fluent in Dutch, English, French, and German, Verbeck was keenly interested in acquiring Japanese as quickly as possible to aid in his work. He also developed a keen interest in Nanga style painting and often visited Kinoshita’s school, met with his students, and asked numerous questions. In April 1864, he moved temporarily with his family to Shanghai; his wife had joined him, apparently, in Nagasaki. In Shanghai they escaped the tense atmosphere surrounding all foreigners in Japan as a result of the many anti-foreign incidents and assassinations associated with late-Tokugawa times. He returned to Nagasaki soon thereafter to continue his teaching and missionary work—he counted as his students several of the luminaries of the coming Meiji era: Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905), Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), and Yokoi Shōnan (1809–69), among others.25

After Kinoshita’s death, Unpei had lost his anchor in life. He finally decided that the best way he could repay his gratitude toward his late teacher was to see the scenery of the lower Yangzi region with his own eyes. He knew as well that Verbeck had made the voyage between Nagasaki and Shanghai several times and would undoubtedly help them. In the spring of 1867, he visited Verbeck and laid out his secret plan. The American agreed to help, though he continued the discussion by seeking Unpei’s views on Christianity. Unpei pleaded ignorance. Verbeck explained that he had recently spoken at length with Kansen about the Christian faith, and indeed after he returned from their trip to China, Kansen actually converted. When he learned that Unpei had already begun planning a trip to the mainland, Kansen begged him to come along, and soon Yasuda Rōzan made his similar desires known. But, despite the loosening of the shogunate’s severe travel restrictions, it was still technically illegal for them travel as individuals and certainly without the consent of their lords. That was where Verbeck could help.

25 Morii Makoto, “Furubekki” (Verbeck), in Nihon shi dai jiten, vol. 5, 1351; Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisel, 61; Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, 68–69.

Lust for Still Life

147

Verbeck was able to secure passage for them on a foreign trading vessel plying the Nagasaki-Shanghai route. When Unpei became ill and unable to travel shortly before their scheduled departure, Rōzan and Kansen were simply too anxious to wait. They donned queue wigs—all Chinese males during the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1912) were required to wear their hair in the queue (pigtail)—and thus disguised themselves for passage as Chinese servants.

Unpei followed them soon thereafter in June 1867, concealing his identity dressed as a Chinese monk, on another trading vessel, the Fei-loong (sometimes rendered Fe-loong in the North-China Herald), arranged by Verbeck.

With the help of a Chinese man he met on board ship and a monk he met in Shanghai soon after arriving, Unpei located his Nagasaki friends, Rōzan and Kansen, at a local inn. The three young men agreed to assume (fairly pretentious) pen names while in Shanghai and environs; the fact that they are never referred to in Chinese sources by these names (and only in Japanese sources to tell this story) leads me to conclude that the names never stuck: Wujiang for Unpei, Wushan for Kansen, and Wushui for Rōzan. The “Wu” element was the name of an ancient state located in the lower Yangzi delta.26

A word about the third member of this party, Yasuda Rōzan, is now in order.

Despite the skimpy and often contradictory details available on him, he is usually accorded the honor of being the most important early Japanese painter to visit the Shanghai area. He was certainly the first Japanese to settle in Shanghai for a considerable length of time. He hailed from a family of samurai doctors from a village near the famous Yōrō Waterfall in Takasu domain, Mino (present-day Gifu Prefecture). In addition to his medical training, Yasuda acquired a consuming interest in calligraphy. He eventually left his hometown and settled in Iida village in nearby Shinano domain (present-day Nagano Prefecture), where he attempted to make a living as a doctor. His next-door neighbor was a salt warehouse owner by the name of Ihara Shigebee, and Yasuda eventually married his neighbor’s daughter Kyū (1847–72), despite the great difference in their social classes. With his medical practice not faring well, he decided to relocate with his wife to Edo, and later they moved on to Nagasaki. There, in the late 1850s or early 1860s, he began studying Nanga painting with Tetsuō

at Shuntokuji.27

26 Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, 74–76; Yamakawa, ed., Nagai Unpei, 214, 224; Fujisawa, “Nagai Unpei,” in Shinshū jinbutsu ki, * bijutsuka den*, 170; Furukawa, “Nagai Unpei no tamashii ni atau,” 38.

27 Iwaya Osamu, Ichiroku ikō, ed. Iwaya Haruo (n.p., 1912), 7b–8a; Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai (Shanghai: Tairiku Shinpōsha, 1943), 252–53; Yonezawa Hideo, “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi (ichi),” Tō-A keizai Kenkyū 3 (July 1938): 57–58; Kawakita, *Kindai Nihon bijutsu *

148

Lust for Still Life

Most sources—all apparently repeating each other—claim that he unilaterally moved to Shanghai in 1864 (a few say 1868), but I have now concluded that 1867 was the date of his departure for the mainland both because of the circumstances described above and because of the contemporaneous diary of Okada Kōsho (1820–1903). Okada was a scholar of Chinese learning who settled in Nagasaki and a medical doctor, as well. In March 1872, he set sail on a two-month trip to Shanghai and Suzhou. “From my youth,” he explains in his account written in literary Chinese, “I have always thought of traveling to China, but the government banned travel, so I could not go [abroad]. I waited for a chance. After the [Meiji] Restoration [of 1868], the ban [on travel] was lifted, and I was able [to do so].”28 Soon after arriving, he visited the recently opened Japanese consulate, introduced himself to Japan’s first consul in China, Shinagawa Tadamichi, and the next day paid a call on Yasuda Rōzan. “I visited him today and met him and his wife together,” Okada reports. “While drinking wine, we happily passed the time as he regaled me with stories from the past. . . . Rōzan has been living in Shanghai for four or five years and speaks Chinese rather well. . . . He pays his expenses with paintings and cailigraphy.

His wife, Hongfeng, is also a painter of orchids and bamboo.”29

In 1870, Yasuda returned briefly to Japan to collect his wife and bring her with him to share his life back in Shanghai. Kyū changed her given name at this time to Ai, and, as indicated by Okada, she became known in her own right as a painter in Shanghai under the name of “Hongfeng nüshi” (Ms. Red Maple Tree). She died there in the summer of 1872 at the tender age of twenty-five and was buried to the west of the Longhua pagoda; her remains were later removed to the Japanese cemetery which had not yet been founded at the time of her *jiten, * 359–60; Okita Hajime, “Shanhai shiwa,” Shanhai Kenkyū 1 (February 1942): 63; Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa (Tokyo: Bōbō Shobō, 1942), 90–91; Okita Hajime, Kojō shi dan: Shanhai ni kansuru shiteki zuihitsu (Shanghai: Tairiku Shinpōsha, 1942), 102–3.

28 Okada Kōsho, Ko Go nikki (Kyoto: Yamaga Fukusaburō, 1891), p 1/1 a. See also Chen Jie,

“Okada Kōsho no Ko Go nikki ni tsuite,” Nihon Joshi Daigaku Kiyō Ningen Shakai Gakubu 11

(March 2001): 231–32.

29 Okada Kōsho, *Ko Go nikki, * 1/4a. He visited Rōzan again four days later (1.7b), and the latter spoke about the scenery around Hangzhou. Huang Shiquan, whom we encountered earlier as a keen observer of the women of Shanghai, noted in the collection of jottings cited above: “Mr. Yasu[da] Rōzan from Japan . . . has long lived in Shanghai and produced many works. He has done ink drawings of plum trees and landscapes.” Songnan mengying *lu *( Account of dream images from Shanghai), reprinted in Shanghai tan yu Shanghairen (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1989), 102.

Lust for Still Life

149

death, and the stone inscription was prepared by none other than the great artist and calligrapher Hu Gongshou (Yuan, 1823–86; see below).30

For all their shared desire to see China in the flesh, our three Japanese Nanga travelers had little to do with one another after they arrived in Shanghai. Their collective first impression of Shanghai was that it was infinitely more prosperous than they had ever imagined, but after that they drifted off in their own directions. Rōzan settled in for the better part of a decade, and the record on Kansen’s whereabouts dries up at this point. Unpei had planned a long stay, but that was not to be. Shortly after Unpei’s arrival, he tracked down his Chinese acquaintance from several years earlier in Nagasaki, Wang Kesan. He and Xu Yuting both lived in or near Shanghai, and they saw to Unpei’s every need. Wang introduced him not only to the city of Shanghai, but more importantly to the new Shanghai school of painting which was emerging in the city, and Unpei was decidedly unimpressed. Unpei’s plans were cut short when he became ill and had to return home.

The Shanghai School and Japan

As the Taiping Rebellion had forced countless artists to take refuge in the relative safety of Shanghai, a new mix of painters and calligraphers in the city brought into being a new “Shanghai School” ( Haipai). A leading figure in this new movement was the aforementioned Hu Gongshou, a Southern School painter with eclectic interests. Yasuda Rōzan began studying with Hu soon after reaching Shanghai, and the two men became good friends. As noted in Okada Kōsho’s diary, Rōzan had “frequent contacts with Hu Gongshou.”31 Hu was born in Jiangsu Province and was renowned in his day as a poet, calligrapher, and artist. He fled to Shanghai in 1861 to avoid the Taipings, and there he eked out a living selling his own artwork, establishing contacts with such painters as Hu Bishan (1817–62), Li Renshu (Shanlan, 1811–82), and Xugu (1823–96).

30 In the Japanese cemetery, Kyū’s gravestone carried the following inscription on its front:

“Grave of Hongfeng nüshi from Japan, inscribed by Hu Gongshou from Huating.” The back reads: “Hongfeng nüshi of Japan was surnamed Ihara, had the given name Ai, and was also known as Teisha. She was the wife of Yasuda Rōzan (Mamoru). She painted orchids and bamboo beautifully. She had a fine hand for calligraphy and was a lovely woman. She came to live with Rōzan in Shanghai in Tongzhi 9 [1870]. She died on the twenty-third day of the seventh lunar month of Tongzhi 11 [1872]. She was twenty-six [ sui]. Rōzan brought the coffin and she was buried on the western side of the Longhua Temple. This was written when the stone was erected” Cited in Yonezawa, Shanhai shiwa, * * 166–67.

31 Okada, Ko Go nikki, 1/4a.

150

Lust for Still Life

Hu later gained great renown, acquiring students from as far away as Japan—

such as Rōzan and others—who wished to study Chinese-style painting from a real Chinese exponent.32

In the world of Chinese painting, the Shanghai School was far from universally respected. Indeed, some used the term Haipai more as an epithet than as an apposite group designation. According to their critics, one of the traits of this school was shoddiness or crudeness. Masaki Naohiko (1862–1940), head of the Tokyo Art School, emphasized this point when he visited Shanghai in 1931

and saw a show at the Shanghai Art School. Four years later, he remarked after seeing a show of Chinese art in Tokyo: ‘They have displayed there the careless paintings of the Shanghai school.”33 Clearly, he considered their work sloppy and crude.

Stressing the positive, James Cahill has argued that the Shanghai School was the “most vibrant movement” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese painting. It drew its roots from the Yangzhou school of the eighteenth century.

At that earlier time and place, a wealthy and highly cultivated mercantile elite sponsored artists, and their elevated tastes influenced what was painted—if only because they were the ones buying the artists’ works; and while money clearly was the common denominator in this equation, there remained a sense of shared elite cultural values. Perhaps most important was the fact that in the eighteenth century most artists were also officials, their “legitimate” livelihood.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the merchant-artist relationship was replicated in Shanghai, only now the entire relationship was solely based on money.

Artists like Hu Gongshou worked for money and painted what their patrons wanted. “The painter,” writes Cahill, “typically, was not trying so much to inculcate a higher taste in his audience as he was responding to the audience’s taste in his paintings. The result is that much of Shanghai School painting moves further than before into the realm of popular art, to the verge of what in earlier centuries would have been thought low-class or vulgar.”34

32 See Tsuruta Takeyoshi, Kindai Chūgoku kaiga (Tokyo: Kadogawa Shoten, 1974), 25; Fujiwara Sosui, “Ko En,” in Shina nanga taisei kaisetsu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1935), 42.

33 Masaki Naohiko, Jūsanshō dō nikki, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1965–66), 1230; see also 825; Tsuruta, *Kindai Chūgoku kaiga, * 11.

34 James Cahill, “The Shanghai School in Later Chinese Painting,” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting, ed. Mayching Ko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 54, 61. For more on the background of the Shanghai School, see Shan Guo-lin, “Painting in China’s New Metropolis: The Shanghai School, 1850–1900,” in A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China, ed. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 20–34.

Lust for Still Life

151

As with so many things associated with Shanghai—such as Shanghai dialect and Shanghai cuisine—the Shanghai style in painting was actually an amalgam of trends brought from elsewhere and crushed in the pestle of a city that was growing rapidly from the mid-nineteenth century on. Although the Taipings never penetrated beyond the outskirts of the city, their actions in the nearby towns and villages forever changed the appearance and population of Shanghai. By the early 1860s, there were surely more non-native painters in Shanghai than native ones, and the new Shanghai capitalists were, like their Yangzhou brethren earlier, becoming patrons of the arts. As Stella Yu Lee has noted, unlike earlier artists, Shanghai artists were not officials and, thus having no “real job” to fall back on, painted for money to survive. “Shanghai patronage,” she adds, “differed from that of Yangzhou in being broadened by the introduction of new buyers. Some of the most famous of them were merchants from southern China and tradesmen from Japan.”35

Not only were the Japanese the first painters to come to China to engage in serious study, but they were also the first patrons to enter the Shanghai art scene from abroad, and this may have owed to the shared traditions in painting and calligraphy going back centuries. In the 1884 work, Shenjiang shengjing tu ( Depictions of Famous Shanghai Sights), there is an extraordinary drawing of two Japanese authenticating and purchasing a Chinese scroll in a Shanghai art shop.36 Writing in 1919, the critic Yang Yi (1864–1929) similarly noted of one calligrapher: “Xu Fangzeng . . . from Pinghu lived in Shanghai in the early years of the Tongzhi period [1862–75]. He excelled in the archaic script and copied Han tomb inscriptions. . . . Japanese profoundly appreciated his calligraphy, buying and returning home with many of his works.”37

35 Stella Yu Lee, “The Art Patronage of Shanghai in the Nineteenth Century,” in Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Paintings, ed. Chu-tsing Li (Laurence, Kansas: University of Kansas; Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; and Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 223, 226.

36 Jing Zhu, Shenjiang shengjing tu (Shanghai: Dianshizhai, 1884, 2 juan), 65b.

37 Yang Yi, Haishang molin (Taibei reprint: Wenshizhe Chubanshe, 1975). Haishang molin, * *

3/13a. Stella Yu Lee (“The Art Patronage of Shanghai in the Nineteenth Century,” 226) cites another source, *Shanghai fengtu zaji *( Collected notes of the ways of Shanghai), which I have not as yet seen, to the following effect: “Most people in the country of Japan were fond of calligraphy, paintings, seals, and stone engravings. In gentry-official families, not only were the collections of those art works rich, but the people were able to distinguish authentic works from fakes, and good works from bad ones. If they discovered something they liked, although it was only a small piece of rock or a few inches of silk, they would spend a thousand gold coins to buy it without a second thought.”

152

Lust for Still Life

Thus, Chinese artists fleeing the Taipings and later just beginning to make a living from their art came to Shanghai because they had learned that it was China’s most important commercial city and that one might survive by painting alone. For the same reason, Japanese wished to reach Shanghai, either to study painting with an authentic master or to corner a market. Nothing like this confluence of events had ever transpired in Chinese art history: migration from other cities with major cultural histories to Shanghai, the emergence of a modern Chinese capitalist class, and the arrival of Japanese in the city.

Hu Gongshou became the teacher of a number of Japanese aspiring to learn at a Chinese knee. In addition to Yasuda Rōzan and his wife, these included Murata Kōkoku (1831–1912) from Hakata in Fukuoka domain on the island of Kyūshū. Kōkoku initially studied painting with his father, Murata Tōho; in 1864, he traveled to Kyoto to study with the Confucian scholar and painter Nukina Kaioku (1778–1863). Eight years later he made his way to Nagasaki to study with Tetsuō; he later met Kinoshita and other literati painters, including Xu Yuting.

Kōkoku made three trips to China around 1876, to view the landscape he had so often seen represented in Chinese paintings and to study with Hu and Zhang Zixiang (Xiong, 1803–86).38

One final name in this vein is Amano Hōko (1828–94) from Ehime domain on the island of Shikoku. He was a Nanga landscape painter who traveled to Kyoto to study with Nakabayashi Chikutō (1776–1853). When Chikutō died, he moved on to Nagasaki and studied under Kinoshita. From there Hōko went on to Shanghai, together with another artist from Ehime, Tsuzuki Kunshō (1835–

83), also a Nanga painter, to study with Hu. After a number of trips to Shanghai, he settled back in Kyoto in the mid-1870s and played a major role in the world of literati painting.39

Perhaps underscoring his contacts with Japanese artists as well as his growing fame and fortune, Wang Tao (1828–97), the famed Chinese writer and reformer, included a poem about Hu Gongshou in his *Yingruan zazhi *( Miscellanies by the Ocean), one line of which reads: “A piece [from Hu’s hand] is worth a city 38 Kawakita, Kindai Nihon bijutsu jiten, * * 346; Kōno, “Edo jidai kaiga no shūketsu to tensei,” 150; Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, 879; Aimi Kōu, “Murata Kōkoku,” in Nihon jinmei dai jiten, ed.

Shimonaka Kunihiko, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1986), 188; Wakita, Nihon kaiga kinsei shi, 243–44; Paul Berry, Unexplored Avenues of Japanese Painting: The Hakutakuan Collection (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 126–27, 177; Watanabe Shōjirō, Meiji gaka ryakuden (Tokyo: Kōmōsha, 1883), 58b–59a; Satō, Nihon meigaka den, bokko hen, 131.

39 Kageura Wakamomo, “Iyo kaiga shi no katakage,” Iyo Shidan 90 (April 1937): 33; Kōno,

“Iyo kaiga gaisetsu,” 26; Matsuyama Shishi Henshū Iinkai, Matsuyama shi shi, 3: kindai (Matsuyama: Matsuyama Shiyakusho, 1995), 680; Berry, Unexplored Avenues of Japanese Painting, 114, 195; www.shogaya.com/html/a-houko_y-bunkou01.htm.

Lust for Still Life

153

in Japan.”40 This phrase suggests—as was often later suggested about Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)—that anything Hu painted was worth its weight in gold, and he knew it. Incidentally, as was noted at the time, he was—together with the famed courtesan Hu Baoyu and the extraordinarily rich compradore Hu Xueyan (1823–85)—one of the “three Hus” of Shanghai.41

A direct connection between Wang Tao and Yasuda Rōzan has yet to be made, but in light of the fact that Rōzan was the longest-term Japanese student of Hu Gongshou, not to mention the fact that his name appears in contemporary Chinese sources, it is highly likely that Wang at least knew of him.

Dr. Okada stressed how helpful Rōzan was to him, as well as to other Japanese who came to Shanghai for longer or shorter periods of time. This group went far beyond artists, however, and included among others Admiral Kabayama Sukenori (1837–1922), famed as the first Japanese governor general of Taiwan—

serving from 1895, having visited the mainland much earlier. When he arrived in Shanghai in the early 1870s as part of Foreign Minister Soejima’s entourage, he met with Rōzan, and the latter—with his extensive knowledge of the local scene—offered the future admiral his store of information.42 By all accounts, Rōzan left Shanghai and returned home in 1873, the year after his wife’s death.

He settled in Tokyo and was extremely successful as an artist and a teacher.

As mentioned earlier, Unpei was less than enthralled by the Shanghai school of painting to which Wang Kesan introduced him in 1867. Unpei was more interested in viewing the scenery of the lower Yangzi delta and meeting “pure” Southern School painters. In Suzhou he renewed his acquaintance with Xu Yuting who, knowing the importance of pedigree, introduced him to local painters as a Japanese calligrapher and student of Kinoshita and Tetsuō, himself a student of Jiang Jiapu. In addition to the standard list of cultural sites, Unpei also wanted to visit the sacred Buddhist Mount Tiantai, but Wang thought it still too dangerous for him to go alone, only a few years after the defeat of the Taipings, with public order in rural China still unstable. He was 40 Cited in Claudia Brown and Ju-hsi Chou, Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire 1796–1911 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, Ariz., 1992), 126. In a recent study, Jonathan Hay also offers some fascinating tidbits on the Shanghai-Japan ties in the world of painting (and book exchange). See Jonathan Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-century Shanghai,” in Art at the Close of China’s Empire, ed. Ju-hsi Chou (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona State University Press, 1998), especially 166–68, 187.

41 Zou Tao, Chunjiang hua shi 1 (Shanghai, 1884), 13, cited in Catherine Vance Yeh, “Modeling the ‘Modern’: Courtesan Fashion, Furniture, and Public Manners in Late Nineteenth Century Shanghai,” unpublished paper.

42 Fujisaki Seinosuke, Taiwan shi to Kabayama taishō (Tokyo: Kokushi Kankōkai, 1926), 270–71.

154

Lust for Still Life

guided by a friend of Wang’s as well as by a monk from the Tiantai complex.

This part of the trip enabled Unpei to commune with the generations—Jiang Jiapu had visited the site three times to paint a famous scroll of it, and thus this trip through space also took on the aura for Unpei of a trip through time into the authentic world of Nanga art. Illness ultimately got the better of Unpei who was forced in the spring of 1868 to * * leave his erstwhile Japanese companions, Rōzan and Kansen, and return to Japan alone.43

Unpei had been gone roughly a year—1867 to 1868, arguably the most important year in modern Japanese history—but to someone who effectively was mentally living in another place and time, one can only surmise how much the events of the Meiji Restoration would have meant for him had he been in Japan. He settled in the renamed capital of Tokyo in 1870. Rōzan moved there a few years later, but there was never much love lost between the two men. Unpei had demonstrated a predilection for the sanctity of painting in the Southern School tradition, while Rōzan seems to have been drawn more to the Shanghai School’s eclecticism and to what some would have called its ties to filthy lucre. Whether they actually had a falling out is unclear, but they had little to do with one another.

One other Japanese figure, a Nanga painter who traveled to Shanghai to nurture his skills, was a man known as Ōkura Uson (Kingo; dates unknown). He came from Echigo like Unpei and from a family of doctors like Rōzan, but what he most shared with these two was an overriding desire to paint. His father forbade him from doing so, but when the father died, Uson made his way to Nagasaki where he began studying with Tetsuō. In the early 1870s he traveled to Shanghai, though as a low-level clerk in the Foreign Office and not as a painter.

In his spare time, he pursued his first love, making wide acquaintances in the world of Chinese painting.44

**Why Shanghai? **

What then was the attraction of Shanghai in particular for the Japanese who ventured there in the 1860s and 1870s? The most immediate and perhaps compelling draw for those Japanese who actively sought to reach Shanghai has as much to do with leaving Japan as it does with reaching that Chinese metropolis. Although they happen to be located in different countries, both of which 43 Shimizu, *Gajin Nagai Unpei, * 77–78, 81–85.

44 Furukawa, “Nagai Unpei no tamashii ni atau,” 41; Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, 318; Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei, * * 61.

Lust for Still Life

155

strictly curtailed travel for several centuries before the 1860s, Nagasaki and Shanghai are closer than Nagasaki was to Edo (renamed Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration of 1868). Before the days of steamships and railroads, navigation might take several days between Nagasaki and Shanghai, but it would have taken much longer to go overland to the Japanese capital.

For educated Japanese to want to see what many considered the homeland of culture itself in China should not seem at all odd.45 It may be difficult to appreciate now, but in the 1860s when the possibility of travel opened up, Japanese educated in traditional continental disciplines, including painting, were a sizable group of those who went to observe the real China. They were not all necessarily pleased with the reality they discovered there—

reality, as we all know, is often vastly overrated—but, like the Nanga painters we have just described, they were virtually always thrilled to be able to commune spiritually with the landscape and often to meet the descendants of the great masters of the past. For the Western-oriented oil painters, Shanghai provided simultaneously new inspiration for artistic subject matter and exposure to the real West, albeit in microcosm.

There was as well a great deal more freedom of movement—again, not simply because it was Shanghai but also because it was not Japan—and this helps us to understand why Japanese from other professions, such as prostitutes who were well represented within the early expatriate community, sought it out. It offered release from the highly restrictive social ties of Japanese society and the equally unrestrictive atmosphere that notoriously characterized Shanghai.

Indeed, Shanghai was justifiably hailed as a wide open city where money bought privilege and where, if one wished, one could easily discard one’s earlier baggage at the port. It was both the real China and a bizarrely transfigured China in which so many Westerners and Chinese from elsewhere were living.

Because of the Westerners—a community almost entirely of merchants and a handful of missionaries—and because of the Chinese who took advantage of their presence there, Shanghai commercialized everything that it touched.

In many cases, that meant that it cheapened everything that passed through it. In a broad sense, one might go so far as to say that the Shanghai School of painting was a depraved incarnation of the earlier Yangzhou School, yet one that was prepared to sell its artistic production to the highest bidder within the metropolis. Nevertheless, the city offered Japanese many opportunities for self-advancement by making commercially available traditional arts for the pleasure of men of means there.

45 This is a theme I develop in Chapters 2 and 3 of The Literature of Travel in the Japanese *Rediscovery of China. *

156

Lust for Still Life

Eventually the Japanese population would grow in the second decade of the twentieth century to outstrip all other foreign communities in Shanghai, and then by the 1930s to outstrip all foreigners combined, reaching 100,000 by the early 1940s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, it was still larger than any Japanese settlement elsewhere in China proper, though on a much more modest scale.46 In other words, Japanese were specially seeking out Shanghai.

To this day, the long cultural ties between China and Japan have enabled literate, well-educated Japanese in many spheres to partake of continental culture and, on occasion, to actively participate in it. Similarly, Japanese remain to this day the world’s most assiduous patrons and collectors of Chinese art work, past and present. Perhaps this penchant for acquiring Chinese works derives less from a craving to possess works for their invaluable monetary worth—

as with the insane international market for van Goghs—and more because, even when those paintings were executed by Chinese hands, in some significant sense the Japanese shared the experience. Nanga, precisely because of its Sinophilia, provided the perfect bridge for this expression of a shared culture.

46 See the extensive statistics in Soejima Enshō, “Senzen ki Chūgoku zairyū Nihonjin jinkō

tōkei (kō),” Wakayama Daigaku Kyōiku Gakubu Kiyō, Jinbun Kagaku 33 (1984): 9–29.

■ Source: “The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory,” in The Nanking Atrocity 1937–38: Complicating the Picture, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berghahn Books, 2007), 267–84.

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

Introduction

Serious scholars will continue to debate many aspects of the Nanking Atrocity perpetrated by the Japanese military from mid-December 1937 to early-February 1938. Why did it take place? How did Japanese military discipline break down? How many Chinese were massacred and raped? These and other questions remain open to scholarly debate. But no serious historian of any nationality doubts or denies that the Atrocity did take place. I stress this point at the outset because of, among other things, the grossly uninformed treatment this issue has received over the past decade in the American news media. The Atrocity has not achieved its full place in the catalog of world atrocities despite the great suffering that took place during those terrible weeks in Nanking, the Chinese capital city. Of course, the same can be said for other great acts of mass murder in the twentieth century, such as massacres of Armenians under the regime of the Young Turks during World War I, or the Porrajmos or Gypsy genocide by the Nazis during World War Two. But this hardly stanches the pain felt by survivors of Nanking and by their descendants. Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic surge of interest in Nanking and other atrocities committed by the Japanese in wartime China. This has taken place both in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and in Chinese diaspora communities, especially in North America. There is even a journal published in Chinese in the United States expressly devoted to the topic, the Jih-pen ch’in-Hua yen-chiu (Studies of Japanese Aggression against China), and there are now many websites focused on Nanking and similar Japanese wartime atrocities.1 Organizations sponsoring the journal and websites have held many conferences and other commemorative events, such as a major symposium at Princeton University in November 1997, and a number of recent books by young Chinese nationalists 1 See, for example, the following websites: www.Nanking1937.org/; www.smn.co.jp/gallery/

Nanking/; www.cnd.org/njmassacre/; www.skycitygallery.com/japan/japan.html; china.muzi

.net/news/topics/massacre.html; www.cernet.edu.cn/history/www.arts.cuhk.hk/Nanking

Atrocity/NM.html.

158

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

have highlighted the Nanking Atrocity. In 2007, the seventieth anniversary of that event, it is important to examine the motives behind these highly politicized activities, which show little or no sign of abating.

Most significantly, in 1997 the late Iris Chang published her bestseller, The *Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. * 2 Not only has it sold several hundred thousand copies and been translated into a host of languages, Chang held numerous extremely successful book signings and appeared at many scholarly conferences before her death. In her book and lectures, she made the startling claim that, not only are the actions of the Japanese military in Nanking comparable to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews of Europe; in fact, when properly calculated, the Nanking death count actually exceeds the

“Shoah,” as that event is known in Hebrew.3 Although explicit references to the Holocaust in the PRC have been rare until very recently, young Chinese dem-onstrators did seize upon the swastika to vent their anger at the United States after the May 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Why are such comparisons being made both in the PRC and abroad? And why now?

Why is it that young generations of Chinese both at home and in the diaspora overseas try to seize center stage from the established historical professions in the PRC, in Taiwan, and in Hong Kong? Why do they fervently seek to present the pain, suffering, and victimhood to the rest of the world on behalf of all Chinese?

The Nanking Atrocity and Postwar China(s)

From December 1937 to February 1938, at the actual time of the event in and around Nanking, few Chinese were in a position to comprehend the enormity of the mass murder going on around them; any who tried to gather data of this sort would have been in immediate mortal danger. Japanese soldiers who might have been able to report the scale of the killings obviously had no motivation to do so. Japanese journalists on the scene were subject to government censorship, or for the most part they suppressed the story voluntarily. The small Western community in Nanking was living in a compound, the Nanking Safety Zone (NSZ) set up in late-November. Although** these men and women **

had some sense of what was going on and have left us with valuable records, 2 The website is: china.muzi.net/news/topics/massacre.shtml.

3 This argument is repeated at: www.skycitygallery.com/japan/japan.html.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 159

they could not see or hear about what went on throughout the entire city and in areas outside of it until much later.4

After the war, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), better known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, convened from 1946 to 1948; and a number of Japanese, Chinese, and foreigners in Nanking at the time were called as witnesses. The IMTFE came up with a figure of at least 200,000

Chinese murdered at Nanking. One Japanese convicted of war crimes at Nanking and sentenced to death was Gen. Matsui Iwane, the commander of Japanese forces, who had not even been in Nanking until 17 December. Matsui was aware of the brutal acts committed in the city and condemned his men for their savage excesses, having earlier demanded that Chinese prisoners of war (POWs) not be executed. But at his trial in Tokyo he denied that anything like a wholesale massacre had taken place. Nevertheless, the IMTFE found him guilty for not having prevented the crimes committed by men under his command, and he was hanged in 1948. By that time, however, the trials had become engulfed in more pressing concerns of the Cold War. There was considerable clamor among left-wing Japanese and among some elements of the general public to bring a much longer list of their own wartime leaders to the dock, but Gen. Douglass MacArthur, the commander of Allied Occupation forces, did not want to alienate conservative Japanese elites by prolonging the trials.

The Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) government under Chiang Kai-shek held much harsher postwar trials. These established the death toll at 300,000 and as a result, a number of implicated Japanese were executed. China at this time, however, was in the throes of a second civil war that the Chinese Communists under Mao Tse-tung would soon win. Shortly after its ouster from the mainland, the KMT dropped all claims to reparations for war damages. Chiang was concerned about diplomatic isolation and alienating the Japanese, and he needed East Asian allies in the Cold War as he established a new regime on Taiwan. When the Communists came to power on the mainland, they too refused war reparations as part of a policy of “self-reliance,” and thus foreswore the PRC’s ability to push that demand in the future. (Chinese individuals, however, can and do continue to sue the Japanese government and businesses for compensation.) Thus, in the immediate postwar period, the world did in effect recognize the Nanking Atrocity, but only a handful of Japanese were executed for their roles in it, and the Japanese government itself never tried any alleged war criminals. More importantly, though, nothing was implemented to keep 4 See Rabe, Good Man of Nanking; Smalley, ed., American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre; Brook, ed., Documents on the Rape of Nanking; and Zhang [Chang], ed., Eyewitnesses to Massacre.

160

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

the Atrocity in the public memory—such as a monument or annual commemoration. That situation obtained until the impressive stone memorial went up in Nanking on 15 August 1985.

The first postwar PRC generation produced little serious scholarship on the Atrocity, in part because they deemed it but one aspect of a horrific wartime experience interpreted in light of the subsequent Communist victory and the Cold War. As Mao Tse-tung putatively declared on the founding of the PRC,

“China has stood up!” The Communists saw themselves, not the KMT, as victors in the war, and they had far bigger socioeconomic problems to contend with than seeking global recognition of Japanese war crimes. Most significantly, the PRC has always hampered serious scholarship on history in order to control the interpretation of it. The PRC government also strategically exploits history against international enemies, and deploys it to inspire shame in potential trading partners.5 For example, it used the Atrocity as an ideological, albeit irrational, anti-US surrogate during the Korean War. In 1952 the PRC regime tried to implicate Americans in the Atrocity by claiming that the International Committee (IC)—an organization of Westerners who actually saved many thousands of Chinese civilians in the Nanking Safety Zone (NSZ)—was a gang of Western imperialists complicit with the Japanese invaders.6 The PRC would again use the Atrocity during the 1960s to criticize the U.S. role in building up bases in Japan. Both of these deployments of the Atrocity helped escalate the Cold War. Yet at the same time, the PRC regime has been careful to control its criticism of the Atrocity owing to the importance of Sino-Japanese trade. Even before diplomatic normalization in 1972, the two countries had been engaged in trade that has grown to a massive volume today. PRC government leaders like to remind their Japanese counterparts of Japan’s heinous wartime acts, usually at face-to-face meetings, and the Japanese government usually acqui-esces in the interests of continuing this mammoth bilateral trade.

In order to maintain this strategic card, the PRC regime has tried to keep the Nanking issue from imploding among its populace, potentially injuring these lucrative Japanese contacts. Still far from a democracy, the Chinese gov-5 This view has been noted by Japanese and Westerners alike. See, for example, Kojima, “Nit-Chū kankei no ‘atarashii hatten dankai’.” I would not go so far as to argue, as Newby does, that the Japanese play along out of a sense of guilt. See Newby, Sino-Japanese Relations: China’s Perspective, p. 13. See also Gries, “Face Nationalism,” chapter 4. Gries argues convincingly that this is not merely a phenomenon of the Communist Party dictating policy to the Chinese people, but that there is much popular support for anti-Japanese policies in China.

6 Yang, “Sino-Japanese Controversy,” p. 16; also, Eykholt, “Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre,” pp. 24–25.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 161

ernment can exercise such prerogatives. It exploits the issue both to keep the Japanese in their place and to show its own people how it has gained the upper hand in Sino-Japanese relations, but it never mobilizes the masses to the point of seriously damaging trade. To be effective, then, the Peking regime has to walk a thin line. It must control public expressions of anti-Japanese sentiment by orchestrating demonstrations against Japan on other selected issues, such as the textbook controversy of the early 1980s, when the Japanese press leaked what proved to be inaccurate stories of the Ministry of Education’s plans to soften the description of Japanese aggression in World War II.

**Why Diaspora Chinese and Why Now? **

Mainland Chinese have until very recently had their hands tied by their government. Overseas Chinese, however, have been much more active, nor just in writing about Nanking and other wartime atrocities, but also in** **pushing for a wholesale condemnation of Japan and its alleged nonpayment of compensation. They believe that the Japanese, and other foreign peoples, have not accorded the 1937–38 Atrocity the importance that it warrants in modern world history, and that the Japanese government has not apologized sufficiently. At a number of international scholarly conferences I have attended, Chinese-American scholars have vociferously attacked Japanese academics and castigated fellow Chinese from the mainland for being “soft” on Japan. Overseas Chinese—and not just scholars—are justifiably angered by this or that rightwing Japanese group or individual who periodically denies the veracity of the Atrocity—although high-level Japanese government officials are forced to resign whenever they do this. But unlike Chinese living in the PRC, who cannot easily demonstrate their displeasure on such occasions, diaspora Chinese are free to express their opinions openly.

Recently, expressions of outrage among overseas Chinese about events in Nanking that occurred seventy years ago have become intricately tied to the complex issue of Chinese identity. Japan has inevitably played a crucial role in this identity formation given the close cultural and historical relationship between the two countries and the key role that Japan has played in China’s own modernization since the late-nineteenth century. Despite the complexity and general amicability of this centuries-long history, the Atrocity has become the defining event in how many Chinese perceive Japan—to the extent of overshadowing over a millenium of previous relations. Even some gifted Chinese historians attribute not just World War II, but pre-twentieth century Japanese behavior, to an aggressive and expansionist Japanese “nature,”

162

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

usually connected with bushidō (the samurai ethos). As a symbol of Japan-as-aggressor, then, the Atrocity has become profoundly entwined with contemporary Chinese identity.

This issue has come to the fore among overseas Chinese only in the recent past. Other immigrant peoples have forged identities within a diaspora separated from their homelands over many centuries. Unlike them, however, the overseas Chinese experience did not really stare until the mid-nineteenth century, and it has become seriously politicized only in the last 50 years or so.

This politicization largely resulted from the post-1949 PRC-Taiwan rift, with growing numbers of ethnic Chinese living in Southeast Asia, Australia, the United States, and Canada. Whereas the overseas Chinese community was once strictly split between supporters of Taiwan and the PRC, it now reverberates with a multiplicity of voices. Moreover, increasing numbers of these ethnic Chinese were not born abroad. Especially since the 1970s, new modes of transportation—including jumbo jets and cheap air fares—have changed the very nature of immigration. People now move about between nations with considerably more ease, but perhaps ironically this has heightened their individual sense of ethnicity.7

New immigrants from Taiwan as well as highly educated PRC Chinese have brought new experiences and aspirations to the fore to create new fault lines within the overseas Chinese community. One of the more vocal groups of overseas Chinese not born abroad has been the scholarly community. Since the late-1980s, far more Chinese students and academics have been studying and teaching in Western institutions of higher learning than ever before. The West has afforded them more freedom, not only for academic pursuits, but for their gradually emerging political goals as well. This development has allowed many Chinese from the mainland to be less directly bound by their homeland than was true earlier. The worldwide web has also facilitated the expression of new voices by simplifying domestic and international communication to an unprecedented extent, and by providing a forum in which all views can be freely averred. The PRC government is desperately trying to control this phenomenon, but it is impossible to do so.8 As various Chinese constituencies within the diaspora seek to assert themselves in the academic community and over the internet, they search for issues on which to ground their identities.

The Nanking Atrocity has become the most prominent of these.

Thus, there are now more voices claiming to articulate Chinese identity than ever before, but paradoxically there is also a weaker basis on which to 7 See Hirano, “Transnational Flows of People and International Exchanges,” pp. 97–98.

8 Buruma, “China in Cyberspace,” pp. 9–12.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 163

build that identity. One by-product of the modern era has been a kind of cultural deracination. Despite its obvious merits, the North American melting pot has had an unfortunate result: few of us are solidly grounded in the cultures, languages, and histories that are reputedly our own. As overseas Chinese—both those born in China and abroad—search for an identity in this the era of identity politics, they often find that they lack the tools needed to acquire one. Cultural deracination for the Chinese in China itself has been exacerbated by the trend toward iconoclasm in modern history with its self-conscious, often violent, rejection of China’s long cultural heritage. This began in the New Culture Movement of the 1910s that blamed traditional culture for all of China’s political, social, and economic ills; and it culminated in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s and early-1970s. As a result, not only American- or Canadian-born ethnic Chinese, but even mainland Chinese who emigrate, are often ignorant of their culture and history.

Entering the hot-house atmosphere of North American identity politics, they lack positive materials with which to forge their identity.9 It is therefore tempting for them—like many other ethnic groups—to latch on to major negative instances in their history in order to forge that identity. For example, most North American Jews no longer know their own languages, religious texts, and cultural traditions in ways that their grandparents or great-grandparents did as a matter of course. So they have fastened on to the state of Israel and on to the sanctity of the Holocaust—the two are deeply interwoven—as basic to their Jewish identity. Many Chinese in the diaspora embrace the Atrocity, “the Tat’u-sha,” in the same way.10

Why choose a negative instance—a horrific catastrophe in which** **so many of one’s putative fellow ethnics died—as basic to one’s identity? This is, I believe, because such an event represents something unassailable and irreproachable; it immediately links all members of an ethnic group in victimhood and bonds them in a way that cannot be questioned. This aspect or identity formation is elemental to the recent trends toward retribalization and toward the new sanctity of “difference,” especially in the United States and Canada. Jews there have “remembered” and used the Holocaust in a similar way. For 2 decades after the end of the war, memory of the Shoah was faint as it went through a lag period, but took off dramatically from the 1960s and 1970s. By the late-1970s, 9 I tried some years ago to describe the disbelief of one great Japanese sinologue, Naitō

Konan (1866–1934), in the 1920s when he witnessed the assault by young Chinese on their own traditions. It make little or no sense to him and left him highly frustrated. See Fogel, Politics and Sinology, pp. 239–51.

10 Buruma has made a similar remark en passant in “Afterlife of Anne Frank,” p. 7.

164

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

Holocaust imagery was everywhere in North American Jewish culture—

periodically punctuated with exclamation marks such as the famous epon-ymous TV melodrama, the Klaus Barbie trial in France, the trial of John Demjanjuk, and most recently the trials of Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier.11

Overseas Chinese have experienced a similar lag, and manifested a similar response, toward the Nanking Atrocity.

The Fourth Generation on the Chinese Mainland

A new generation in the PRC has also begun to decry Japanese wartime behavior. Its members did not actually experience Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, they are too young to have lived through the Communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT in 1949, or to have suffered through the various Communist campaigns of suppression that culminated in the Cultural Revolution. In their mid- to late-thirties now, they grew up within the Communist regime and under its education system, so they acquired an accurate appreciation of their own historical culture with great difficulty, if at all. Unlike their immediate forebears, these young people no longer ascribe China’s many pre-1949 defeats to the weaknesses or failings of pre-Communist regimes, such as the Ch’ing, the warlords, or the KMT. Nor are they content to focus on China’s wartime resistance to Japan as a source of national identity and pride. Instead, they want to focus on China’s victimization at the hands of foreigners.12

In one sense the views of this Fourth Generation ( ti-ssu-tai-jen) match those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime, although these thirty-somethings are not all CCP hacks. They claim that China suffered exploitation in the past because it was weak, so its first national priority is to strengthen itself vis-à-vis Japan and the West. Among many publications, they have authored two best-selling books that exude nationalism and unvarnished antiforeignism— Chung-kuo k’o-shuo pu (China Can Say No) and its sequel, *Chung-11 Novick, “Holocaust Memory in America,” pp. 159–65, citation on p. 163. One line of analysis that Novick docs not pursue is the role of the sharp decline in the popularity of Marxism and other leftist causes, together later with the collapse of the socialist states in Eastern Europe. Many Jews had invested their energies in socialist and other causes of social justice as a kind of secular religion, only to find either their non-Jewish fellows unsympathetic to the cause of Israel or their movement dissolve from within. Witness, for instance, the prominence of Jewish intellectuals among the “new-conservatives,” virtually all of whom had been liberals or leftists prior to their “conversions” in the 1970s and 1980s. * * 12 See Gries, “Face Nationalism.”

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 165

kuo hai-shih neng shuo pu (China Can Still Say No). Because these youths have suffered none of the hardships that their grandparents and parents did—and some have expressed a perverse envy of their elders in this regard—they also have no historical experience from which to form a meaningful identity. So, they vociferously strive to assert China’s deserved but unrecognized international greatness. This entails an embittered assault on anyone who prevented China from assuming its due glory, and Japan is the preeminent culprit in their eyes.

In sum, members of this generation have championed China’s status as a victim in order to compensate for the very insecurity produced by their lack of anything substantive on which to build an identity. As the China scholar Peter Gries argues, its members’ sense of victimization has but two aims: “quantify-ing the pain and presenting the Chinese case to the world.”13 Thus, their writings about the war do not focus on China’s heroic resistance to and ultimate victory over Japan, but rather on the horrific losses incurred—with unusually inflated statistics. Thus they all cite a figure of at least 300,000 Chinese deaths in the Nanking Atrocity, the figure engraved in stone on the memorial in that city. This effort to gain the moral high ground is geared to silence anyone who disagrees, for the number of victims is simply not open to debate, except for upward revision. Anyone who disagrees is attacked or shouted down in public venues. Japanese professor Hata Ikuhiko, who has written extensively about the Atrocity for many years, concludes that 40,000-plus Chinese died in Nanking aside from prisoners of war (POWs). But he was shouted down by the largely Chinese and Chinese-American audience when he tried to present his views at an international conference at Princeton University in 1997. Similarly, the late Iris Chang, who was of the same generation, based her plea for international recognition of the Atrocity on what she presents as irrefutable numbers.

She pointed out in an interview on American television—repeated in a San Francisco Chronicle interview—that the figure of 300,000 victims surpasses the combined death toll in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.14 Her implicit aim here is to establish a hierarchy of victimhood with China on top, especially because most Westerners cringe before the number of civilian lives lost in nuclear attacks on those Japanese cities. But why not compare the death toll at Nanking with those of Stalingrad or Leningrad, where even more civilians were killed? The same moral hierarchy simply does not hold for Chang.

The Fourth Generation rankles at yet another thought. The Japanese—who received their higher culture from China for centuries before victimizing China in the war—today enjoy great economic and political stature in the world, and 13 Ibid, p. 21.

14 “News Hour with Jim Lehrer”, 20 February 1998; Burress, “Wars of Memory.”

166

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

many profit handsomely by investing in China’s burgeoning economy. That has often led these Chinese thirty-somethings to criticize their own government.

In their newfound nationalism, they find it galling that China depends on Japanese investment or aid, and they express their ire by constantly appealing to the memory of Chinese victimization. Their anger is, however, not directly solely at Japan, but at the entire world—and especially at the United States. As was true with Chang, members of China’s younger generation do not work just to vilify Japan; they seek to marshal world opinion against it. That, first and foremost, means targeting the United States—Japan’s number one trading partner and political ally in Asia. Young Chinese are trying to pressure Americans to make the Japan issue a complete mea culpa—a supreme apology for the war outdoing all previous ones, which they regard as insufficiently prostrate—and also to pay compensation for the war. That the American people and government apparently refuse to play this role angers them further.

**Genocide? A Forgotten Holocaust? **

The Fourth Generation in China focuses attention on numbers and victimization, but its members are still too removed from Western discourse to frame their critique in terms of the Holocaust. This is not true of Chang, Wu Tien-wei (who founded the anti-Japanese journal, Jih-pen ch’in-Hua yen-chiu, and is an emeritus professor at Southern Illinois University), and other ethnic Chinese living in the West. The subtitle of Chang’s book is The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, and she insists that what transpired at Nanking was worse than the Holocaust of European Jewry. Wu has put forward the even more hyper-bolic claim that what transpired in Nanking makes “the Auschwitz gas chambers appear humane.”15 It is surely safe to say that these lines are largely for shock value. Chang’s claim remains grossly unproven in her book. Wu’s is not only profoundly insensitive, and even vulgar; it is wholly unnecessary to his point. In any event, these two should not overly detain us.

At the discursive level, the term the Holocaust came to be used for the Judeicide some time in the early 1960s. Among many other things, it was a way of specially honoring those who perished in what many agreed was the worst mass murder in history. But, sadly, those on the left and right alike have frequently abused the term to advance their own agendas.16 By the same token, many ethnic groups have seized on the term since the 1960s to honor their own people who fell victim in large numbers to some great man-made calamity.

15 Wu, Preface, p. iii.

16 See Marrus’s excellent piece, “Is There a New Anti-Semitism,” pp. 172–74 and p. 177.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 167

Each group’s aim has been to bring its suffering to world attention, to garner the universal sympathy that this term elicits, to set its misfortune at a level beyond criticism, and thus to accord itself sacrosanct status. Hence there are Armenian, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy), African-American, Ukrainian, Cambodian, and Native-American holocausts. Finally, we now have a Chinese holocaust.

The Jewish Holocaust shows that such victimhood can serve to shield one’s group against all manner of criticism and strike shame and embarrassment in the hearts of governments. Of all modern genocides, only the Judeicide seems to have acquired this venerated, inviolable status. A few people still deny the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and other aspects of the Holocaust, but they are generally treated as pariahs. In stark contrast, it is possible to deny other genocides and not be so stigmatized. One can, for example, belittle or downplay the Turkish massacres, as the Turkish government itself regularly does, and go on with life more or less uninterrupted. The wartime and continuing suffering of the Roma and Sinti (the Gypsies) are regularly ignored or determinedly relegated to a secondary position. The right-wing critic Dinesh D’Souza recently went out of his way to tease positive side-effects out of the long history of African-American slavery. And, as the historian David Stannard has recently noted, scholars of the left, right, and center have all noted pointedly that eradicating the Native American way of life ultimately benefited surviving New World Indians.17 Appreciation of the Nanking Atrocity lies somewhere amid these other “holocausts.” Some in Japan deny it, including some academics and the occasional politician. But unlike Turkey, the Japanese government has acknowledged the Atrocity, and Japanese scholars are the world’s most active and productive in researching it. Chinese and Chinese-Americans—like Armenians and other ethnic groups elsewhere—would like to see their particular tragedy elevated to sacrosanct status; then, only fringe elements could reject or disparage its veracity.

Nor is the idea of a “forgotten” holocaust original to Chang and others like her. Angus Frazer used it in his 1992 work, The Gypsies, referring of course to the Nazi genocide against them. He had borrowed the term from the French scholar Christian Bernadac, who authored a 1979 book entitled L’Holocaust

17 Concerning the Armenian genocide and its denial, see Dadrian, “Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide,” pp. 101–35; and Smith, Markusen, and Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” pp. 1–22. On the Roma and Sinti, see Hancock, “Responses to the Porrajmos,” pp. 39–64; and Lutz and Lutz,

“Gypsies as Victims of the Holocaust,” pp. 346–59. Concerning the “good” to be derived from black slavery, see D’Souza, End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society. On Native Americans, see Stannard, “Uniqueness as Denial,” pp. 163–208.

168

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

Oublié: Le Massacre des Tsiganes. There is a 1986 book by R.C. Lukas entitled, Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939–1944. In an important 1981 study, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, Leo Kuper called the Turkish mass murders of Armenians the “forgotten genocide of the twentieth century.” R.J. Rummel cataloged the great mass murders of the twentieth century in a 1994 article, “Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers.” Referring to those killed by the Japanese in World War II, he wrote, “This is surely the forgotten democide”—“democide”

being a neologism that he coined to mean the government-sponsored murder of persons of a specific group.18 Finally, there is a 1999 article entitled, “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide.” Thus, using the word “forgotten” as a modifier has a history of its own, and it usually constitutes efforts by the author to shock readers into altering long-held assumptions.

What needs to be asked, however, is this: does it help to assess the Nanking Atrocity by the standards of comparative genocide and Holocaust research?

Can we better understand this event by placing it alongside other mind-boggling massacres? I previously resisted comparisons of this sort. But, on reflection, I have concluded that they need nor establish a hierarchy of pain, nor need they detract from the uniqueness of a particular event. Every act of genocide and mass murder is unique, and none implies exclusivity; thus

“distinctiveness” is a better word in this context. No group has monopolized suffering unto itself, and its rhetoric is offensive only when it flaunts its victimhood to denigrate the sufferings of other groups. Based on the intent of the murderers, the number or percentage of the target population killed, the circumstances of the killings, and other criteria, scholars have made compelling cases to deem mass murders of the Gypsies by the Nazis, of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915, and of the native inhabitants of North and South America by European immigrants, as being just as horrific as the Final Solution against the Jews.

Accepting comparison as a viable means of approaching genocide, let us take a look at criteria that scholars have devised to examine it. Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in 1933, and explained it eleven years later as

“the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc.”19

Fifteen years later, in 1948, the newly formed United Nations passed its famous Convention on Genocide that generally followed Lemkin’s definition. He offers 18 Kuper, Genocide, p. 105; Rummel, “Democide in Totalitarian States,” p. 34.

19 Cited in Kuper, Genocide, p. 22.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 169

a succinct conceptual framework, but no guidelines on the size or scale that a mass murder must reach before it is “genocidal.” In that vein, the social scientist Henry R. Huttenbach wrote: “How do we prevent ourselves from moving glibly from Auschwitz to Hiroshima and back, from the Death Camps to the Gulag, from genuine genocide to non-genocide, from lumping victims of bona fide extermination together with victims of massacres?”20 Not all acts of mass murder are genocidal, and not all genocides may be placed on a plain with the Holocaust. Historian Michael R. Marrus has made perhaps the best argument for distinguishing the Holocaust from other larger-scale mass murders in the simple, terrible fact that the Nazis targeted for murder each and every Jew throughout the world.21 Huttenbach offers his own succinct and useful definition: “[G]enocide is the destruction of a specific group within a national or even international population. The precise character of the group need not be spelled out.” To see if an act deserves to be called genocidal, he suggests one key condition; we must ask, “Is this an act that puts the very existence of a group in jeopardy?”—and not just a case of extreme hardship or large-scale killings.22

There is no single process to genocide. Often it involves sadistic, crude methods of mass execution—despite a ready supply of ammunition—as a means of further terrorizing a subject population. In the 1975–76 Lebanese civil war, for example, sexual mutilation (often committed by well educated, otherwise rational men) was commonly performed by all levels of society, together with vicious acts of rape, desecration, torture, and murder. Whether this rose to a level commensurate with genocide remains to be proven, however. At other times, murders are committed more discretely, out of public view, and often in a way that separates the instigators of mass death from the actually killers. The Holocaust did not immediately become what we now know it as—the rou-tinized mass murder by efficient means through industrialized, regularized, bureaucratically legitimated techniques. Before Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Nazis relied on the pogrom model. And, ultimately about one-third, or fully two million, of the Jews were slain by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units set loose into Eastern Europe early in the war, aided by local collaborators such as the Romanian volunteers.23 It was not until the Nazis established death camps, primarily in Poland in the early 1940s, that the Holocaust took on its most technologically advanced form—insulating the killers from the acts of killing, and making the victims invisible through ever more sophisticated 20 Huttenbach, “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum,” p. 291.

21 Marrus, Holocaust in History, p. 23 and p. 28.

22 Huttenbach, “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum,” p. 259, p. 297 and p. 298.

23 Marrus, Holocaust in History, pp. 39, 79.

170

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

weapons. This process was horrifically illustrated by the progression from the Einsatzgruppen to Zyklon B, the poison gas used to asphyxiate many thousands of victims. Zygmunt Bauman asks how it is that people who were not “moral degenerates” could commit mass murder on the scale of the Holocaust. And, he responds, the Holocaust shows that many never even faced moral choices:

“moral aspects of actions are not immediately obvious or are deliberately prevented from discovery. . . . In other words, the moral character of action is either invisible or purposefully concealed.”24

What form of violence did the Japanese military use at Nanking in 1937–38?

In this instance, the murderers acted as if engaged in a continuous, bestial pogrom. There was some regularity to the killings, but there was no preconceived master plan of mass murder; and the perpetrators were castigated for their brutality and lack of discipline by their own commander, Matsui Iwane, when he arrived on the scene at Nanking. Most of the perpetrators were impoverished men who had led exceedingly hard lives up to conscription and the war. Moreover, their experiences in the military and on campaigns—

particularly the battle of Shanghai before arriving in Nanking—were extremely harsh. They were not even supposed to have attacked Nanking, but were driven on by overzealous superior officers. They were not the refined, well-educated mass murderers who peopled the Gestapo or served as death-camp comman-dants, although some Japanese were not unlike many death- and concentration-camp guards or even some of the Einsatzgruppen. Whereas the Holocaust of European Jewry featured rational plans of murder en masse with bureaucratic regularity, the Nanking Atrocity can be more accurately described as a scene of mass murder run viciously amok.

Was there an ideology comparable to anti-Semitism or anti-Gypsy sentiment behind the Japanese war machine in China? Was there a pervasive ideology that so denigrated China or demonized the Chinese that it could legitimate or pave the way for mass murder—another trait found in genocide?

There was certainly a widespread feeling that the Chinese were a weak and chaotic people incapable of running their own country and in need of urgent help. But there was nothing comparable to an ideology for sustaining mass murder, and there was most assuredly nothing comparable to the Nazi slogan that the Jews and Gypsies were “lives not worth living.” In the Japanese treatment of China under occupation, there was not even anything comparable to the discriminatory Nuremberg Laws or the social isolation in ghettos that subsequently necessitated, in the diseased minds of Nazis, physical segregation of Jews and Gypsies into concentration- and death-camps. The Chinese were pitied or patronizingly looked down on, but they were never demeaned to a point 24 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust pp. 24–26, 74, and 89–90.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 171

justifying wholesale murder. Of course, in all wartime situations the enemy has to be deemed worthy of death—if only to motivate the troops—especially in cases of foreign aggression or total war. However, there was no Japanese plan to annihilate every Chinese man, woman, and child, as there was for the Jews following the Wannsee Conference of early 1942 in Nazi Germany. Nor was there the well-crafted plan of murder earlier in the twentieth century with respect to Armenians in Turkey. Even among the most retrograde, unattractive elements of the extreme Japanese right-wing and militarist cliques, one would be hard-pressed to locate such sentiments, let alone point to these as an overriding ideology in the 1930s and 1940s.

The only framework in Japan approaching an ideology behind the Nanking Atrocity was that of the emperor state which, from the 1930s, effectively deemed anyone who defied the imperial institution as unfit to live. This might be marshaled as a possible rallying call for Japanese troops in the field to attack Chinese who resisted, but it was by no means directed solely at China and the Chinese. Indeed, it applied with equal ferocity to Japanese Communists, which is one reason that so many of them underwent tenkô or a sudden reorientation of their views to abandon leftism and embrace the emperor system, usually while in jail or in anticipation of being arrested. Racism or ethnic hatred, understood in the broadest sense, was an essential component of the Holocaust and many acts of genocide—against New World Indians, Gypsies, Armenians, various peoples in Africa, and Ukrainian peasants. But it does not appear in any major way in Japanese constructions of China and the Chinese.

In fact, one feature of late-nineteenth and twentieth century East Asian history has been a collapsing of the Chinese and Japanese into a “yellow race” to combat the white race. It is true that this notion may have been used to mask Japanese desires to “guide” the Chinese in a particular direction, or to “chastise”

them for failing to go along, but it reflected a certain ideological solidarity vis-à-vis the West.

Moving from the level of an ideology constructed on the putative basis of a shared racial identity to visceral racism, did the latter play a significant part in Japanese formulations or views of the Chinese? Can we detect a visceral Japanese hatred of the Chinese as a people because of who they were? There was certainly much belittling of the Chinese in Japan at the time. But what enraged Japanese soldiers en route to and in Nanking in 1937–38 and what drove them to acts of mass murder had nothing to do with presumed Chinese weaknesses or endemic failings. Quite to the contrary, Japanese soldiers were stunned and out for revenge precisely because of the unexpected strength and perseverance of the Chinese they had confronted in the battle of Shanghai months earlier. This battle was of horrific proportions, second at the time only to the battle of Verdun in terms of overall numbers killed, in which many

172

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

Japanese lost comrades. As one Japanese foot soldier later recalled in an interview with the famed journalist Honda Katsuichi: “[T]he assault on Nanjing cook place as an extension of this fighting [in and around Shanghai]. It just wasn’t the kind of atmosphere in which you’d immediately forgive and release your prisoners, merely because they had surrendered to you. The mood was one of avenging your dead comrades.”25

Fourth Generation Chinese argue char racism—by which they mean the Japanese troops’ dehumanization of the Chinese people—was indeed an essential part of the assault on China. The piece of evidence usually cited is the infamous 100-man killing contest, in which two Japanese soldiers allegedly vied to see who could first slay 100 Chinese en route to Nanking. Many have questioned the veracity of this story, and not only arch right-wingers in Japan. See Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi’s chapter 6 in the present volume. But the Japanese press in November–December 1937 did give the story considerable play, the soldiers did receive death sentences at the postwar Nanking War Crimes Tribunal; so, as a result, anti-Japanese Chinese believe the story today.

But despite the guilty verdict, to accept this story as true and accurate requires a leap of faith that no balanced historian can make.26 If we interpret the story on another level, as symptomatic of the callous way in which Japanese troops acted on the way to Nanking, then we can conclude that dehumanization was elemental to their experience. But this is still not racism. And, when Fourth Generation members go even further, to that claim the slaughter in and around Nanking was not only deliberate but ordered by the emperor, they stray far from the historical record in an effort to find evidence for Japanese victimization of China. What is more, they often push this history of victimization back to the early Meiji era.

For obvious reasons, genocides usually occur where the targeted group is in a minority. This is not to say that the murderers necessarily are the majority, but the murdered are usually a minority, often in times of war or military occupation. Thus the Jews and Gypsies were usually in the minority, even if the Nazis were not the majority in Poland, Lithuania, and elsewhere in eastern and central Europe. Similarly, Armenians living on Turkish terrain were a minority. One exception to this generalization might be native peoples of the New World who were enslaved and murdered by smaller groups of white settlers. In 1937–38, by contrast, the Chinese were the overwhelmingly great majority at Nanking, although they had been abandoned by their army. If we follow Henry R. Huttenbach’s definition of genocide as an act that “puts the very existence of a group in jeopardy,” Japanese actions in China fall far short, if only because the 25 Honda, Nanjing Massacre, p. 240.

26 Also see Wakabayashi, “The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate,” pp. 307–40.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 173

Chinese population was so huge. Frequently the perpetrators of genocide use other ethnic groups to commit murder by proxy. Thus, the Nazis used apparently willing Ukrainians and other collaborators as guards in many of the death camps. In fact, the Nazis’ ability to separate themselves from the killing went so far as to get Jewish complicity through the Sonderkommandos and through various Jewish ghetto councils ( Judenrätter).27 Although there were Chinese collaborators, similar actions did not take place at Nanking; instead, Japanese military personnel did all the killing.

“Modern genocide is genocide with a purpose,” notes Zygmunt Bauman. “The end itself is a grand vision of a better and radically different society.” Because the victim group does not fit into this vision, it must by weeded our. Inasmuch as the modern bureaucracy has no moral component, but is solely directed at increased efficiency, it was the ideal instrument to orchestrate an efficient

“gardening”—as much for Stalin and others as for Hitler.28 Again, this was not true for the Nanking Atrocity. An overarching purpose was missing. There was nothing political, military, ideological, or economic to be gained by committing this mass murder. And, there were no concentration- or death-camps, no elaborate system to distance the killers from the killing, and no bureaucratic organization for it except of the most primitive ad hoc sort. The Rwandan and Cambodian “genocides” of recent years also lacked the bureaucratic efficiency of the Holocaust. There was a vision of a “radically different society” in the case of Cambodia, but the torture and killing lacked the Nazi death machine’s bureaucratic efficiency, even if the numbers of victims was ultimately quite high. Again, this in no way minimizes the suffering of Cambodians in the 1970s or other groups; it just distinguishes the organization of mass murder in different instances.

In sum, this rudimentary typology shows that the Nanking Atrocity was never an end in itself. Rather, it was an instance of impromptu, large-scale, mass murder perpetrated in the context of Japan’s brutal war of aggression against the Chinese and other peoples in East and Southeast Asia. Thus the Atrocity in some respects resembles other events in Africa, Cambodia, and the New World that have acquired the label “genocidal.” However, it fell far short both in numerical count and percentage of population slain, and it lacked the ideological impetus and bureaucratic efficiency that spurred on many of these other genocides. The Atrocity, then, was altogether different from the Shoah, the Porrajmos, or the Armenian experience in Turkey during World War I.

I would ultimately have to agree with Justice Radhabinod Pal, the Indian judge 27 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 22–23, with obvious nods in the direction of Hannah Arendt.

28 Ibid., pp. 91–92, 102–6. Italics in the original.

174

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, who noted: “[T]he case of the present accused before us cannot in any way be likened to the case . . . of Hitler.”29 Chief Justice William Webb effectively concurred: “[T]he crimes of the Germans accused were far more heinous, varied and extensive than those of the Japanese accused.” This diminished assessment in no way slights the suffering of victims at Nanking; nor does it make the Atrocity less heinous. It merely is an attempt to understand these great human tragedies in a comparative perspective.

Chinese victims have a serious case to make, but using the word “Holocaust”

does not help us understand the Nanking Atrocity, nor does it shed light on genocides more generally. It has been more my task to examine the specific contexts in which claims of genocide have been made than to tally numbers or compare victimhood. Why did the issue seem less important to the Chinese in the 1940s and 1950s than it has become since the 1990s? This question involves the complex role of memory in identity formation. To be sure, the Nanking Atrocity deserves our solemn acknowledgment, not only so that the world will not forget, and not only because we need to affirm unequivocally that a great massacre was perpetrated against the Chinese people, which a handful of fringe elements in Japan continues to whitewash. Having said that, past injustices committed against a people do not license them and their descendants to denigrate others. Victimhood does not confer sainthood.

Context, Memory, and Identity

In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate the importance of context in the ways that people perceive a historical event to form national or ethnic identities. Context is intricately tied to memory (constructed or otherwise), and shared memory is essential to identity. In this respect, China and Japan have been crucial to each other for many centuries. China was fundamental to the development of Japanese identity from at least the sixth century onward, and Japan has been crucial to China’s since the end of the nineteenth century. In the First Sino-Japanese War, or Meiji-Ch’ing War, of 1894–95—a war fought when this turnabout began—the Japanese military committed horrific atrocities against Chinese civilians. The Chinese scholar-official Cheng Kuan-ying briefly catalogued these at the time, although he seems to have been recounting events listed in the foreign press rather than personally witnessed: When the Japanese occupied Lüshun, the entire town was massacred.

Pregnant women in Hai-ch’eng were cut open. . . . When Niu-chuang was 29 Cited in Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 459.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 175

occupied, . . . our women were tied up and raped. Even innocent children could not escape. Japanese soldiers stabbed their bayonets into the children’s anuses and then held up the body on their bayonets for fun. . . . When Japanese ships passed Teng-chou, they opened fire on villagers for no reason, and the homes of ordinary people were destroyed. . . .

When they attacked Jung-ch’eng, they also opened fire everywhere, even at the houses of residents. People lost their homes and had to sleep out-doors in the fields. At that time, it was snowing heavily, and many died from cold and hunger. . . . It was so miserable and vicious that even the sky and sun would sigh. Oh, how brutal it was!30

Why have these nineteenth-century atrocities been buried in historical oblivion whereas those of Nanking in 1937–38 continue to be cited routinely? The principal reason lies precisely in the issue of context. World War II is crucially important to those who make the case for a “Nanking Holocaust” because of guilt by association impugned to Japan which, after all, later became allied to Nazi Germany. For the historical record, a formal military alliance—as opposed to the Anti-Comintern Pact—was not formed until September 1940, well after the mass murders at Nanking took place. But this has not stopped the likes of Iris Chang, Wu Tien-wei, and others from claiming that imperial Japan and the Third Reich were full-fledged allies in 1937. Indeed, John Rabe’s inveigh-ing against what he witnessed—which, to her credit, Chang has brought to our attention—is transformed in a newspaper interview to: “So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified.”31 This statement is a bit of a stretch. Chang and Wu link Japan with perhaps the worst murder-ous regime in our time, not just because of the subsequent alliance with Nazi Germany, but also because we have come to regard the European Holocaust as the most horrific act of genocide in recent human history.

The current outrage over events committed in Nanking seventy years ago is not directed at Japan alone, however. Sino-Japanese relations have taken on a new character since World War II. Globalization plus increased Chinese exposure and emigration to the West, especially over the past two or three decades, require that the entire world—which often means the West or, more specifically, the United States—verify China’s victimhood. Chang, for example, was less interested in changing Japanese opinions—about which she knew next to nothing in any case—than in bringing the Atrocity to American attention. This is another reason for her to tally the death toll in Nanking higher than those for 30 Cheng, “Chung-Jih chiao-chan hsi-wen-pao chi Jih-ping t’u-ch’eng ts’an-k’u t’u-shou hsü,”

pp. 486–87.

31 Burress, “Wars of Memory.”

176

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

the two Japanese cities targeted by U.S. atomic bombs. Thus, like the younger generation in China, persons such as Chang are working—and successfully, it should be noted—to marshal the Western media against Japan. This has sadly become central to their identities.

The philosopher Avishai Margalit notes Sigmund Freud’s description of a

“neurotic person’s disproportionate actions.” Freud referred to a Londoner who, looking at a monument to the great fire of 1666, mourned aloud the destruction of three centuries earlier rather than feel joy or relief about the city’s resilience.32 A parallel neurosis of remembering plagues Chinese-American and Chinese groups discussed above. The journalist Ian Buruma recently recounted reading a piece by Iris Chang in which she told of an incident that followed a lecture she had given about the Nanking Atrocity. A Chinese-American woman came forward with tears in her eyes and said to Chang, “You make me proud to be Chinese.” One would think that 5000 years of a resplendent world culture might suffice.

Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).

Bernadac, Christian. L’Holocauste Oublié: Le Massacre des Tsiganes (Paris: France-Empire, 1979).

Brook, Timothy, ed. Documents on the Rape of Nanking. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

Burress, Charles. “Wars of Memory,” in San Francisco Chronicle (26 July 1998).

Buruma, Ian. “The Afterlife of Anne Frank,” in New York Review of Books 46:3

(19 February 1999).

———. “China in Cyberspace,” in New York Review of Books 46:12 (4 November 1999), pp. 9–12.

Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic, 1997).

Chang [Zhang] K’ai-yuan, ed. Eyewitnesses to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).

Cheng, Kuan-ying. “Chung-Jih chiao-chan hsi-wen-pao chi Jih-ping t’u-ch’eng ts’ai-k’ut’u-shuo hsü,” in Hsia, ed., Cheng Kuan-ying chi ( hsia) (Shanghai: Shanghai jen-min ch’u-pan-she, 1988).

Dadrian, Vahakn. “The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” in Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed., Is The 32 Margalit, Ethics of Memory, p. 4.

The Nanking Atrocity And Chinese Historical Memory 177

Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 101–35.

Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999).

D’Souza, Dinesh. The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995).

Drea, Edward. “Dispatches: Military History in the News,” in Quarterly Journal of Military History (Autumn 2000).

Eykholt, Mark. “Agression. Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre,” in Fogel, ed., Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, pp. 11–69.

Fogel, Joshua A., ed., The Nanking Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

———. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

Frazer, Angus. The Gypsies (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1992).

Gries, Peter Hays. “Face Nationalism: Power and Passion in Chinese Anti-Foreignism”

(University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. dissertation 1999).

Hancock, Ian. “Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust,” in Rosenbaum, Alan S. ed., Is The Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 39–64.

Hirano, Ken’ichirô. “Transnational Flows of People and International Exchanges: Phenomena and Activities,” in Yamamoto, Yoshinobu ed., Globalism, Regionalism and Nationalism: Asia in Search of its Roles in the Twenty-first Century (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 93–104.

Honda, Katsuichi. The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998).

Huttenbach, Henry R. “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum: Towards a Methodology of Definition and Categorization,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3:3 (1988), pp. 289–303.

Kojima, Tomoyuki. “Nit-Chû kankei no ‘atarashii hatten** **dankai’: kyôsôteki kyôzon no tame ni,” in Kojima, Tomoyuki ed., Ajia jidai no Nit-Chû kankei: kako to mirai (Tokyo: Simul Press, 1995), pp. 1–34.

Kuper, Leo. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

Lukas, R.C. Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939–1944

(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986).

Lutz, Brenda Davis, and Lutz, James M. “Gypsies as Victims of the Holocaust,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9:3 (Winter 1995), pp. 346–59.

Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987).

178

The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory

———. “Is There a New Anti-Semitism,” in Curtis, Michael., ed., Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary World (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), pp.

Newby, Laura. Sino-Japanese Relations: China’s Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1988).

“News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” (20 February 1998).

Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

———. “Holocaust Memory in America,” in Young, James E., ed., The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: Prestel-Lerlag, 1994), pp. 159–65.

Rabe, John. The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, ed., Erwin Wickert, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1998).

Rummel, R.J. China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 (New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers, 1991).

———. “Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers,” in Charny, Israel ed., The Widening Circle of Genocide (New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers, 1994), pp. 3–39.

Shenfield, Stephen D. “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?” in Levene, Mark and Roberts, Penny, eds., The Massacre in History (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 149–63.

Smalley, Martha Lund, ed. American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre, 1937–1938 (New Haven: Yale Divinity School Library, 1977).

Smith, Bradford. “Japan: Beauty and the Beast,” in Amerasia 6:2 (April 1942), pp. 86–94.

Smith, Roger W., Markusen, Eric, and Lifton, Robert Jay. “Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9:1 (Spring 1995), pp. 1–22.

Stannard, David. “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed., Is The Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 163–208.

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans.

Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

Villa, Brian Loring. “The Diplomatic and Political Context of the POW Camps Tragedy,”

in Bischof and Ambrose, eds., Eisenhauer and the German POWs, pp. 53–61.

Wu, Tien-wei. Preface in Smalley, ed., American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre, 1937–1938, pp. iii–iv.

Yang, Daqing. “A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanking Atrocity as History,” in Sino-Japanese Studies 3:1 (November 1990), pp. 14–35.

Zhang [Chang], Kaiyuan, ed. Eyewitnesses to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).

■ Source: “Prostitutes and Painters: Early Japanese Migrants to Shanghai,” in Migration in History: Human Migration in Comparative Perspective, ed. Marc S. Rodriguez and Anthony T.

Grafton (University of Rochester Press, 2007), 89–117. Republished with permission of University of Rochester Press, permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Prostitutes and Painters Early Japanese Migrants to Shanghai

That the Chinese port of Shanghai was opened by British gunboats in the Opium War (1839–42) is so well known now that it scarcely requires mention.

It has recently been brought once again to the big screen in Xie Jin’s panoramic 1997 movie Yapian zhanzheng (Opium War). That inglorious history aside, it would be two decades following the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) before the first Japanese made the trip to Shanghai in 1862, not counting the handful of fascinating cases of earlier shipwreck victims whose unfortunate peregrinations landed them in Shanghai for shorter or longer periods of time.1

This essay is part of a longer, ongoing project on the history of the first generation of Japanese who migrated to Shanghai, roughly 1862–95. Some of them came for relatively brief periods of time, others for one or more years, still others for the rest of their lives. Prominent among the first Japanese who would cake up residence in Shanghai were, interestingly, prostitutes and painters.

There were also, of course, businessmen, most of them shopkeepers as well as a smattering of those who opened branches of the large combines back home (Mitsui Bussan was the first), a small handful of officials working at the consulate which opened in the early 1870s, and a few religious missionaries of the New Pure Land sect of Buddhism.

Eventually, the Japanese community of Shanghai would fill out with roughly equal numbers of men and women; with children and schools; shopkeepers, businessmen, teachers, government employees, and the full range of 1 The fullest works in this area are: Haruna Akira, Nippon Otokichi hyōryūki (An account of the castaway Otokichi of Japan) (Tokyo, 1979); Haruna Akira, Sekai o mite shimatta otokotachi: Edo no ikyō taiken (The men who saw the entire world: Experiences in a foreign land in the Edo period) (Tokyo, 1988); Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai (Japan and Shanghai) (Shanghai, 1943), pp. 43–72. And the much earlier history of raids on Shanghai in the spring and summer of 1553 by men deemed in the sources to be “Japanese pirates” ( wakō). Indeed, the five assaults that year by wakō led to the building of a wall around the city in the autumn, a wall which survived until 1912. As Liu Jianhui has argued, it was the wakō who effectively created the walled (Chinese) city of Shanghai. See Liu Jianhui, Mato Shanhai: Nihon chishikijin no

“kindai” taiken (Shanghai, the demon capital: The experience of “modernity” for Japanese intellectuals) (Tokyo, 2000), p. 11.

180

Prostitutes and Painters

professions one would find in an expatriate community. While there had been tiny overseas communities of Japanese in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia in the premodern and early modern eras, Shanghai was to be the first such community in the modern period. After a few words on the first Japanese to make their way to Shanghai in the modern era, I will proceed to discuss the prostitutes and then the painters, and then look for commonalities. Why did such apparently disparate groups leave Japan in the first place? Why did they come to Shanghai? What did that port, deemed a virtual hell on earth by just about every Westerner (and many Japanese) who set foot there, have to offer them?2

The Earliest Japanese Visitors to Shanghai

The 1862 voyage of the Senzaimaru and the 1864 voyage of the Kenjunmaru to Shanghai, the first official Japanese voyages to China in several centuries, deserve a few brief comments.3 Those two missions were charged—by two of the highest officials responsible for foreign affairs in the Edo period, the Nagasaki Magistrate and the Hakodate Magistrate—with observing commercial conditions in Shanghai, as Japan prepared to open itself up to international trade. The authorities had learned from Chinese, British, Dutch, and American ships calling at those two, recently opened Japanese ports that Shanghai was an immense commercial entrepôt and a valuable window on the West. One could see the entire West in microcosm by making the journey of several days to Shanghai and without going halfway around the world to Europe or crossing the Pacific Ocean to the United States, both of which groups of Japanese would in any case do.4 Whatever other agendas the Japanese aboard these two vessels may have had—and they were many and varied—the overall intent of these two early trips was commercial.

2 Here is Lord Oliphant describing it in 1859: “the most unhealthy [port] to which our ships are sent, the sickness and mortality being greater here than even on the west coast of Africa.”

Laurence Oliphant, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan. 1857–1859, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1859), p. 269.

3 I have written extensively about this topic in The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China. 1862–1945 (Stanford, Calif., 1996), pp. 46–61.

4 See W.G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America and Europe (New Haven, Conn., 1995); Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (Berkeley, Calif., 1979).

Prostitutes And Painters

181

Much had happened in Shanghai over the twenty years before the latecomer Japanese arrived there. By 1862 the Western powers had been building business empires and semicolonial enclaves, dubbed “Concessions,” for two decades along the Huangpu River. By the time the Japanese arrived on the scene, Shanghai was no longer a frontier outpost. As Takasugi Shinsaku (1839–67), the young hothead from Chōshū domain, put it in his 1862 travelogue, “Shanghai may in fact belong to China, but one might as well call it British or French terrain. . . . The Chinese have become servants to the foreigners. Sovereignty may belong to China but in fact it’s no more than a colony of Great Britain and France.”5

The accounts that remain extant from these early trips to Shanghai are the work of samurai politically active in their local domains and increasingly on die protonational stage, as well as of merchants getting a first caste of things to come. For better or worse, they all recognized that significant change was in the offing. Their accounts were not immediately published and circulated back in Japan, some taking many years before they would see print, and thus their writings did not have an immediate or substantial impact, although many of the men themselves would come to play highly important personal roles in Japanese politics, commerce, and the military over the next few years.

In short order, Nagasaki, for two centuries Japans only open port, began to recede in importance, both as other pores opened and as Japanese vessels began to venture abroad. The Japanese government assisted private businesses in seeing to it that shipping lanes between the home islands and Shanghai, heretofore monopolized by foreigners, would be shared by Japanese and soon dominated by them. This process transpired over the course of the 1870s and 1880s.6 Even before then, however, Japanese were making their way to Shanghai.

5 Takasugi Shinsaku, Yu-Shin goroku (Five records of a trip to China), in Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū (Collected works of Takasugi Shinsaku), ed. Hori Tetsusaburō, vol. 2 (Tokyo, 1974), pp. 159–60, 185. More recently, a better edition of this text with annotations has appeared in Kaikoku (Opening the country), ed. Tanaka Akira (Tokyo, 1991), pp. 209–86.

6 See, for example, Katayama Kunio, “Ryōji hōkoku ni miru Nihon sen no kaigai shinshutsu, Mitsubishi no jidai” (The foreign advance of Japanese shipping as seen in consular reports, the Mitsubishi era), in Nihon ryōji hōkoku no kenkyū (Studies on Japanese consular reports), ed. Tsunoyama Sakae (Tokyo, 1986), pp. 249–52; Yasuba Yasukichi, “Kaijō unsō to kōgyōka, josetsu” (Maritime transport and industrialization, an introduction), in Kindai keizai no rekishiteki kiban (The historical basis for the modern economy), ed. Hidemura Senzō, Sakumichi Yōtarō, Harada Toshimaru, Yasuoka Shigeaki, Mori Yasuhiro, and Takeoka Keion (Tokyo, 1977), pp. 266–67; Ge Yuanxu, Hu you zaji (Notes on Shanghai amusements) (preface dated 1876), 4/19a, 21b; Kageyama Taihachi, “Shanhai shōkō ni tsukite” (On the commercial port of

182

Prostitutes and Painters

A word on travel, travel restrictions, and the declining capacity of the Japanese government to control travel in the last days of the Tokugawa regime might be helpful at this point. Although a “feudal” regime in many ways, the Tokugawa (or Edo) shogunate (1600–1868) was also highly centralized and sought to retain as much control as the technology available to early modern policing institutions would allow. This inclination is generally seen by scholars as a reaction to the century of warfare and three decades of unification wars preceding the Tokugawa settlement at the turn of the seventeenth century. Japan would henceforth control its own borders, while missionaries and anything associated with Christianity (blamed in part for those many years of chaos and bloodshed because of missionary activity) would be strictly interdicted. And contacts with foreigners were also to be tightly restricted.

Although domestic travel was itself severely curtailed on the books, there were ways, for example, for Japanese to travel on religious pilgrimages or to see relatives living at a distance.7 Foreign travel after the early decades of the seventeenth century was much more closely observed. Aside from a handful of extraordinary exceptions, the only Japanese who ventured abroad were the shipwreck victims mentioned above. Similarly, only the Dutch and Chinese were permitted in—decidedly no Catholic countries were allowed to sail ships into Japanese ports—and only to Nagasaki, where even there their movements were strictly curtailed. By the 1860s, when the government was becoming increasingly busy snuffing out nascent civil wars and after the United States had forcibly opened several Japanese ports by the end of the previous decade, interest in the Western world had grown dramatically. The only Japanese technically allowed abroad until the regime succumbed in 1867–68 were groups with special authorizations, but as we shall see individuals were able to travel outside the country with a fair degree of impunity.

SinoJapanese cultural contacts throughout the Tokugawa period continued but took new forms. They were mediated through Nagasaki to which Chinese ships regularly came, frequently bringing quantities of books and other art or everyday objects. The shogun and several important feudal lords often ordered specific items (everything from legal texts to horses and equine physicians) through these merchantscumculture brokers, who understood that their ability to continue trading with Japan depended on filling such orders. Sinic culture continued to develop throughout Japan—in literature, scholarship, Shanghai), in Taishō jūninen kaki kaigai ryokō chōsa hōkoku (Investigative report on an overseas trip in the summer of 1923), ed. Kōbe kōtō shōgyō gakkō (Kōbe, 1924), p. 136.

7 On travel within Japan during the Edo period, see Constantine Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).

Prostitutes And Painters

183

and the arts—but in the effective absence of Chinese or access to them. This is an immense and fascinating area of research only just coming into its own in the West.

The Oldest Profession

The 25 August 1866 edition of the North China Herald observed, in its listing of arriving and departing passengers at Shanghai, that two days earlier the Moldavian had entered port from Nagasaki. On board were “two Japanese ladies.” A similar announcement concerning “3 Japanese ladies” arriving from Nagasaki aboard the Fe-loong appeared on 24 December 1867, and a third reported on “1 Japanese lady” arriving aboard the same ship on 16 May 1868.8

At a time when the entire Japanese population of Shanghai could be counted on the fingers of two hands, these notices stick out glaringly. Who were these apparently unaccompanied “ladies?” What could their business have been in Shanghai in the final years of the Edo period and the first months of Meiji?

Although we do not even know their names, the newspapers use of the term “lady” may indicate a reasonably good social standing. There is a remote chance that they were the Japanese wives of foreigners resident in Shanghai, although this is open to serious doubt, if only because they would surely have been so identified had they been married to Westerners. More likely, “lady” was being used either in ignorance of their actual social station or (in the quaint, midnineteenthcentury English of the North China Herald) euphemistically or sarcastically. The women so named were probably extremely enterprising courtesans from the Maruyama, the redlight district of Nagasaki, who either were seeing the writing on the wall about Nagasaki’s future or were just interested in expanding their commercial horizons. The very fact that the Nagasaki Magistrate allowed them passage, at a time when it would be highly unlikely for him to allow any other kind of woman to travel on her own, supports the argument that they were, in fact, women of the night.

Population figures for the Japanese community in the early Meiji period (from the late 1860s through the early 1880s) indicate roughly two men to every 8 “Passengers,” North China Herald, 25 August 1866, 24 December 1867, 16 May 1868. See also Okita Hajime, “Nōsuchaina Herarudo no bakumatsuji no Nihon kankei kiji” (Articles concerning Japan in the late Edo period in the North China Herald), Ryūkoku daigaku ronshu (Ryūkoku University Essay) 417 (October 1980): 29, 42; Okita Hajime, Kojō shi dan: Shanhai ni kansuru shiteki zuihitsu (Tales from the history of Shanghai: Historical notes about Shanghai) (Shanghai, 1942), p. 100.

184

Prostitutes and Painters

three women; when gender parity was reached in the mid1880s, the local Japanese population numbered close to six hundred.9 Inasmuch as it was still rare for businessmen to leave Japan with their entire families, there were clearly a lot of Japanese women in Shanghai unconnected by marriage or paternity to local Japanese men. Indeed, many texts, especially of the prewar era, simply assume that some twothirds of the resident Japanese women were working as courtesans or prostitutes whose clientele was mostly local Westerners and Japanese10—and, increasingly, wealthy Chinese as well.

In the 1870s and 1880s, the prominence of houses of prostitution run by Japanese caught the attention of local Chinese commentators. One Chinese poem of uncertain origin is cited in a number of sources:11

東洋女子古來稀 Women from Japan have been rare here since antiquity, 別有風情妙入微 For they have a special quality; this is especially wonderful in its detail.

狀束不同時俗流 They make themselves up and dress differently from

contemporary styles,

偏隨紅紫鬬芳菲 Yet they want people to follow their colors in red and purple so as to compete with the myriad flowers.

As this poem implies, something of the attraction of such Japanese women was their difference (that much abused term), and their popularity among Chinese and Westerners owed much to the Japanese songs and dances which none of their clients understood or likely had heard or seen before. Chinese men who 9 Soejima Enshō, “Senzen ki Chūgoku zairyū Nihonjin jinkō tōkei (kō)” (Statistics on the population of Japanese resident abroad in China before the war, draft), Wakayama daigaku kyōiku gakubu kiyō, jinbun kagaku (Essays of Wakayama University Department of Education, Humanistic Sciences) 33 (1984): 9, 24. The Shanghai Municipal Council offered a figure of seven for the entire Japanese population in 1870, but this was clearly not based on reliable information; by the same token, Kishida Ginkō (1833–1905) wrote in 1870

in an article for the Yokohama shinpō moshiogusa that there were one hundred Japanese in Shanghai—equally unreliable. The number was probably somewhere in between, as indicated by Yanagihara Sakimitsu (1850–94)—an estimate of fifty or sixty in his Shi Shin nikki (Diary of a mission to China)—who Traveled to China that same year to negotiate the first SinoJapanese diplomatic treaty which came into effect the following year. See Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 309–10, 324.

10 Ikeda Nobuo, Shanhai hyakuwa (Stories of Shanghai) (Shanghai, 1926), pp. 1–2; Katsuragawa Mitsumasa, “Shanhai no Nihonjin shakai” (Japanese society in Shanghai), in Kokusai toshi Shanhai (Shanghai, international city) (Ōsaka, 1995), p. 37.

11 For example, it is reprinted in Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, p. 312.

Prostitutes And Painters

185

could afford it liked Chinese courtesans who could, in addition to waiting on them, write poetry and sing for them; the refined education of such women seemingly added to the experience. These Japanese women were similarly well trained, and their areas of expertise, although initially strange to Chinese ears and eyes, lent something of the exotic and the alluring about them. This is surely high among the reasons Chinese chose to write about them.

The first Japanese courtesan to settle in Shanghai for whom we have a name is a woman known in the sources solely by her professional nom de guerre of Sansan (rendered by two different, reduplicated sets of characters).12 As was the case with virtually all of the local Japanese, she too hailed from Nagasaki and arrived in the autumn of 1869. She was initially lionized by Huang Shiquan (1853–1924), a leading editor with Shenbao, one of the oldest Chinese newspapers in Shanghai and certainly the most prestigious, in an 1883 work on the sights and sounds of the city, especially its demimonde.13 Over the course of those fourteen years, she had become extremely famous locally and apparently wealthy.

By 1882 the number of Japanese courtesans and more common prostitutes had grown well into the hundreds. While Nagasaki still provided the main supply of young women for the Japanese brothels of Shanghai, they also began coming from nearby Shimabara and Amakusa in southern Japan. Morisaki Kazue suggests a number as high as seven or eight hundred, and while that is almost certainly too high a figure it nonetheless does point us to another source of these young women.14 During the same years that enterprising Japanese women came with prospects or improving themselves or their families economically, many others may have been deceived by unscrupulous Japanese with offers of job opportunities which turned into sexual servitude. The early Meiji years were especially harsh times for Japanese villagers, and there was widespread hunger, starvation, and even child abandonment. In addition to blatant opportunism, there were apparently instances in which families conspired to manipulate their daughters’ fates. Morisaki recounts an incident 12 The two readings are read in Mandarin as “Sansan” and ”Shanshan”; and in Japanese both as “Sansan.” In the Shanghai dialect, which is the only standard of importance here, they were pronounced identically.

13 Huang Shiquan, Songnan mengying lu (Account of dream images from Shanghai), reprinted in Shanghai tan yu Shanghairen (The Shanghai Bund and Shanghai people) (Shanghai, 1989), p. 128. See also Chen Zu’en, “Shanhai ni ita Nihonjin“ (Japanese who were in Shanghai), trans. Oda Kana, Shanghai Walker Online, Part 3: “Tōyō chakan” (The Japanese teahouse) (March 2001): http://www.shwalker.com/database/timei/japanese03

.htm.

14 Morisaki Kazue, Karayukisan (Women taken overseas) (Tokyo, 1978), p. 91.

186

Prostitutes and Painters

reported in the Asahi newspaper for March 1, 1879 of a former samurai family in Kagoshima which ran into economic difficulties and applied to the government to ship its female children off to Shanghai where they would be trained as courtesans; they would return when they were able to support themselves.

All of this assumed a thriving brothel business in the Chinese port. Similarly, once the early Meiji government had banned entrance into courtesanship prior to age fifteen, younger girls headed for the life were often handed over to agents who transported them to the dens of iniquity in Shanghai.15

It would seem that the extant material on Japanese women in the sex trade in Shanghai supports both of the discourses on prostitution in East Asia at this time—the victim discourse and the agency discourse—for the period of the mid to late nineteenth century.16 We find references in the sources to women opening brothels and becoming successful (the agency discourse) and decidedly unhappy sex workers forced into the business (the victim discourse). Although Shanghai was probably the earliest foreign city to which young Japanese women were brought—even earlier than Vladivostok—the numbers of karayukisan (literally, chose who went to China, or [more likely]

were brought there, the term used for young women transported against their will or in ignorance) were far fewer than elsewhere in the region. Singapore, Harbin, Hawaii, and elsewhere posted numbers in the thousands.

A number of volumes from the period include pictures of a Tōyō chakan (Chinese, Dongyang chaguan, meaning “Japanese teahouse”) which shows half of the room with Chinese waiters and customers drinking tea and half with a raised tatami on which a Japanese woman is entertaining a Japanese man. One story with a certain amount of credibility is that such an establishment, opened in the early 1880s by a former cook from the Japanese consulate who, having launched his own restaurant which was not doing terribly well, was encouraged to open a teahouse in its stead and to hire only female waitresses age fifteen or younger. That, he was assured, would bring in Chinese customers as 15 Ibid., pp. 90, 92.

16 Two recent volumes on prostitution in Shanghai which take up these issues are: Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, Calif., 1997); and Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History (1849–1949) (Cambridge, 2001), a translation by Noël Castelino of Belles de Shanghai: Prostitution et sexualité en Chine aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris, 1997).

See the excellent review of these two books by Angela Ki Che Leung, “Prostitution in Modern Shanghai: Two Recent Studies,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 2, no. 1 (2000): 180–87.

Prostitutes And Painters

187

well as Japanese.17 In fact, Tōyō chakan was a generic term for Japaneseowned brothels, many of them located on Sima Road (presentday Fuzhou Road). One source claims there were sixteen of these concerns in 1880s Shanghai, all but two run by Japanese, with a total or sixtynine girls working in them.18 As a group they constituted a distinct Japanese redlight district within the world of Shanghai prostitution, and many of the girls working in them would undoubtedly have been karayukisan.

As they became accustomed to the local scene, the more inventive Japanese women began to pattern their courtesan world more and more to elite Chinese tastes. Like prominent Chinese courtesans of the day, they adopted literary affectations, taking names from Chinese literature. The most famous among them was one “Baoyusheng” (Baoyu being a famous character in the novel Dream of the Red Chamber and sheng a common suffix) who reputedly spoke Shanghai dialect with nary an accent. Others included Sanbaosheng, Xinguangsheng, Lantianxian, Enuosheng, and the like. The brothels themselves also bore purposefully exotic names, such as Kaidonglou (Tower Opening East [meaning Japan]), Meimanshou (Harmonious Longevity), Yuchuanlou (Tower of the Jade Stream), Yanlige (Pavilion of Resplendent Beauties), Buyunge (Pavilion among the Clouds), Dongmeige (Pavilion of Eastern Beauties), and the like.19

The contemporaneous 1884 Chinese text Shenjiang shengjing tu (Depictions of famous Shanghai sights) has a chapter entitled. “Dongyang miaoji shoubo sanxian” (Charming courtesans from Japan strum the samisen) in which the author distinguishes two types of Dongying jinü (Japanese courtesans). First are the “artistic courtesans ( yiji) who “specialize in performing [Japanese]

song and dance”; the second are the “erotic courtesans” ( seji) whose special talents are selfevident.20 Baoyusheng belonged to the former category, and she worked first at the Meimanshou on Qinghe Lane when she arrived in Shanghai at about twenty years of age. By 1884 it was reported that she had moved to the Huajinli (Village of Colored Brocade) on nearby Sima Road.21

17 Ikeda, Shanhai hyakuwa, pp. 11–12; Meishi jushi, Shenjiang shixia shengjing tushuo (Pictures and explanations of present, famous sights of Shanghai) (n.p., 1896), pp. 23–24, where it is referred to as the Tōyō charō (Chinese Dongyang chalou).

18 Chen, “Tōyō chakan”; Katsuragawa, “Shanhai no Nihonjin shakai,” p. 42.

19 Sawamura Yoshio, Shanhai fūdoki (The topography of Shanghai) (Shanghai, 1931) pp. 19–21; Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 314–15.

20 Jing Zhu, Shenjiang shengjing tu (Depictions of famous Shanghai sights) (Shanghai, 1884), 1/16a–16b.

21 Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, p. 314, citing a Chinese text: Chunjiang hua shi (Tales of courtesans of Shanghai), juan 2 (Shanghai, 1884).

188

Prostitutes and Painters

One reason given for the extensive number of Japanese sundry shops in Shanghai in the early years of Japanese migration to the city was to see to the needs of so many women who perforce strove mightily to retain their physical beauty. The decade ending roughly 1887 represents the high tide of both courtesan culture and prostitution for Japanese in Shanghai. In 1882, the story goes, a gambler by the name of Aoki Gonjirō arrived in Shanghai with several dozen hookers in an effort to launch a fullscale redlight district in West Ward Road area, where he rented over ten storefronts. These efforts all came to naught when the Japanese authorities stepped in, began clamping down on prostitution, and saw to it that Aoki was repatriated.22

As early as 1870 when Yanagihara Sakimitsu (1850–94) made his report to the Foreign Ministry about conditions in China, he expressed worry about Japanese being ridiculed abroad for their strange clothing and behavior. Thus, “national dignity” made it incumbent on Japanese overseas that they behave themselves and not embarrass Japan in the modern international community it was belatedly entering. In the spring of 1873 the Foreign Ministry issued a set of guidelines on behavior abroad, Zairyū hōjin kokoroekata kari kisoku (Provisional regulations for Japanese overseas). Among the items listed were: only officials may wear weapons; Japanese men and women should wear hats over their hair; women must not walk in public with their arms and legs exposed; and no screaming fights at home.23 These rules—to which several more were added by the Foreign Ministry late that autumn—have the character of sumptuary laws. However, in 1873 Japanese prostitution was not the main issue—it was simply that all Japanese blend in with the background of multinational cities abroad. At the same time, it should be noted that certain among the Chinese authorities were in the 1870s trying to stop the proliferation of Chinese courtesan houses in both the walled Chinese city and the Concessions of Shanghai, and all these measures would become stricter in the 1880s.24

On 24 September 1883, the Japanese authorities issued a new set of regulations specifically for Shanghai: Shinkoku Shanhai kyoryū Nihonjin torishimari kisoku (Regulations to manage Japanese overseas in Shanghai, China). These new rules included: one had to follow consular guidelines in setting up a restaurant; one should not travel rashly to the Chinese interior without protec22 Katsuragawa, “Shanhai no Nihonjin shakai,” pp. 42– 43; Ikeda, Shanhai hyakuwa, p. 15; Chen, “Tōyō chakan.”

23 The text of the Zairyū hōjin kokoroekata kari kisoku is given in Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 295–97.

24 See Catherine Yeh, “Modeling the Modern”: Courtesan Fashion, Furniture, and Public Manners in Late Nineteenth Century Shanghai” (unpublished paper).

Prostitutes And Painters

189

tion; women should not without good reason cut their hair and dress like men; when going out, men and women should be properly attired; and irrespective of hairstyle, one should always wear a hat out of doors. Penalties for violations of these rules were modest but not insignificant: between one and ten days incarceration and fines from 5 sen to 1 yen, 95 sen.25

As is often the case with law, this latter set of regulations may indicate precisely what was transpiring in Shanghai, and it certainly reveals an increased consciousness on the part of the authorities in Tokyo—undoubtedly transmitted to them by the Shanghai consulate—that local behavior required some

“management.” Aoki Gonjirō had been returned to Japan the previous year and his Shanghai businesses shut down. In 1884, shortly after the regulations were promulgated, four consular policemen were dispatched to Shanghai to bring the rise of Japanese women of “questionable character” under control.26

From a survey of the Japanese cemetery of Shanghai, which has long since ceased to exist, and other death records in the early 1940s, Okita Hajime discovered that a fair number of young women died in Shanghai between April 1883 and February 1891, a high percentage of them prostitutes.27 Research into the role that the authorities played in their deaths or repatriation remains a scholarly desideratum. This process of bringing closer scrutiny and management to Japanese living in Shanghai would continue for the rest of the decade, as the state increasingly sought to keep an eye on the everyday life of its citizens beyond its borders. Many prostitutes left Shanghai for Singapore or Hong Kong or elsewhere in China, and some were sent back to Japan. By 1890

there had been a dramatic reduction in their numbers from only a few years before. Despite their best efforts, the authorities were never able to stamp out the phenomenon altogether. As a kind of postscript to the golden age of Japanese courtesan life in Shanghai, Tōyama Kagenao noted sarcastically in 25 The text of the Shinkoku Shanhai kyoryu Nihonjin torishimari kisoku is given in Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 297–98.

26 The fascinating subject of the Japanese consular police is only now coming to the attention of scholars. Mizuno Naoki of Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in the Humanities is presently running a multiyear research group on the topic. It is also the subject of a dissertation by Erik Esselstrom (University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004).

27 Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 315–16; Ikeda, Shanhai hyakuwa, p. 249. Couling and Lanning note with respect to the decrease in Japanese population between 1885 and 1890 that it “was chiefly due to an exodus of women returning to Japan, for which no reason is assigned.” S. Couling and George Lanning, The History of Shanghai, vol. 2 (Shanghai. 1923), p. 492.

190

Prostitutes and Painters

a volume published in 1907 that the only Japanese who had been successful in business in these early years of migration were these women of the night.28

One of the most important sources on the topic of Shanghai courtesan culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century is extensive writings on the subject by the famous reformer Wang Tao (1828–97), although their veracity remain open to serious doubt. Wang’s one major text which contains material on Japanese courtesans in Shanghai is a large collection of reminiscences that he wrote in his later years, entitled Songyin manlu (Notes on images from Shanghai, 1887). This long work, divided into numerous chapters each devoted to one or more courtesans, includes several chapters on Japanese women who had taken up residence in Shanghai brothels. The problem with using this work as a historical source is that it is a mixture of fiction and fact reminiscent of Pu Songling’s (1640–1715) famous Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange stories from Liao studio) and was in fact recently reprinted in China with the title Hou Liaozhai zhiyi tushuo (Strange stories from Liao studio, sequel, illustrated and explained).

The two chapters directly concerned with our theme are “Dongying cainü”

(Japanese woman of talent) and “Huaxi nüshi xiaozhuan” (Short biography of Miss Huaxi).29 They recount Wang’s or others’ becoming enamored of these women, something of their pasts, and how things ultimately turned out.

Taking them at face value, even critically, can be dangerous, but it might be safe to point to such instances as exemplars of the agency discourse; namely, these were women in control—to Wang’s great consternation in one case—

and suggest closer links structurally to contemporaneous Chinese courtesans.

Lust for Still Life

The history of Japanese and East Asian painting is vast and replete with numerous schools, sects, and subsects. The Japanese who ventured to Shanghai and environs from the later 1860s, though, fall into only two discrete schools between whom there was little (if any) contact, the Westernstyle oil painters and the Nanga (Southern School) painters. The former’s roots were planted in Japan (specifically, Nagasaki) in the eighteenth century by Dutchmen, the only Europeans who had direct contact at that time with Japan; the latter were part of an old tradition rooted in China. For all their differences, though, these were the two groups which produced early visitors and migrants to Shanghai.

28 Tōyama Kagenao, Shanhai (Shanghai) (Tokyo, 1907), p. 219.

29 Wang Tao, Hou Liaozhai zhiyi tushuo, ed. Wang Bin, Chen Fu, Guo Yinghai, and Li Siying, 3 vols. (Harbin, 1988), 3:1316–29, 1439–49.

Prostitutes And Painters

191

Western-style Painting

Perhaps contrary to expectation, the Westernoriented oil painters arrived in Shanghai first. The third officially sanctioned mission to Shanghai—after the Senzaimaru and the Kenjunmaru—was a group of nine Japanese who sailed aboard the Ganges, a British steamship, from Yokohama on 15 February 1867.

The same day that the Ganges left Yokohama, a French vessel, the Alphée, carrying a large official Japanese delegation, set sail from Yokohama as well. The latter group led by Tokugawa Akitake (Minbu, 1853–1910), younger brother of the shogun, was set to attend the international exposition in Paris in an official capacity.30 The two ships arrived in Shanghai on the same day at roughly the same time, and as the latter clearly bore men of higher social standing, the men of the Ganges who had planned to take rooms at the famous Astor House Hotel had perforce to spend the night elsewhere.

Among the Japanese aboard the Ganges was one Takahashi Inosuke (1828–

94; later Takahashi Yuichi) who was to become one of the Meiji period’s foremost painters. Years before as a youth, Takahashi had come to the attention of his lord, Hotta Masahira (1795–1854) of Sano domain, who strongly encouraged him to pursue his work as an artist and released him from mundane domainal duties to enable him to do so.31 On the day after arriving in Shanghai, Takahashi moved with the entire Japanese group to the large residence of a local businessman and art connoisseur by the name of Wang Renbo who supported Takahashi’s painting pursuits while the latter resided in Shanghai. He remained in the Chinese port city, taking side trips to Suzhou and elsewhere in the lower Yangzi delta, for roughly ten weeks before returning to Japan.

In addition to a diary, he left a number of sketches of the trip to Shanghai, the harbor, and scenes in the city. During this time, Takahashi had extensive contacts with Chinese painters and other literati, attended local Chinese theater, met several Japanese then present in Shanghai (such as the ubiquitous Kishida Ginkō, 1833–1905), and soaked up as much of the local atmosphere as 30 For a full treatment of this mission, see Miyanaga Takashi, Purinsu Akitake no Ōshū kikō.

Keiō 3 nen Pari banpaku shisetsu (The European travelogue of Prince Akitake, mission to the Paris Exposition in Keiō 3) (Tokyo, 2000). The prince’s diary has been edited and annotated in Miyaji Masato, ed., Tokugawa Akitake bakumatsu tai-Ō nikki (The late Edo European diary of Tokugawa Akitake) (Tokyo, 1999). There are mentions made of this trip, though not of the stopover in Shanghai, in Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian, pp. 114–17; and Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, p. 175.

31 “Yōga no senkaku Takahashi Yuichi den” (Biography of Takahashi Yuichi, pioneer of Westernstyle art), Bijutsu shinpō (Art news) 4, no. 9 (20 July 1905): 68.

192

Prostitutes and Painters

he could.32 However, the impact of this trip on his art or the movement in art in which he played such an important role remains in serious doubt.

Another painter who would make his name in oils, Yamamoto Hōsui (1850–

1910), initially wanted to study Nanga painting, and to that end he traveled first to Kyoto and then to Yokohama where he arrived in 1868. Yokohama was certainly no home for traditional Japanese arts, but it was a place where, given the right circumstances, he might be able to catch a steamer for China. For all his efforts, though, the opportunity to make the voyage to Shanghai never materialized. In the most Westernized of Japanese cities, he came across the Westernoriented oil painting of Goseda Yoshimatsu (1855–1915) and was so taken with it that he remained there and entered Goseda’s school.33

In both Takahashi’s and Yamamoto’s cases, Shanghai was not an object in and of itself. Takahashi was simply caking advantage of an opportunity for fresh inspiration, while Yamamoto viewed Shanghai and elsewhere in the region first and foremost as the places to go to study traditional Nanga painting. Their cases would probably not be so exceptional had they not occurred so early in the history of modern SinoJapanese contacts in Shanghai. The case of the Nanga painters who made the trip to Shanghai from the late 1860s specifically because it was a center of Nanga painting was altogether different.

The Southern School

To tell their stories properly, though, requires some background on the artistic connections between Nagasaki and the mainland going back earlier in the Edo period. Throughout the period, Nagasaki was the only city in Japan that had a considerable Chinese community, including over time a number of important painters who often acquired Japanese disciples during their years of residence in the southwestern Japanese port. Nanga was just one of many schools of painting in Japan—indeed, there were half a dozen prominent ones 32 His diary has been reprinted in Aoki Shigeru, ed., Meiji Yōga shiryō. kirokuhen (Historical materials on Western painting in the Meiji period, documents section) (Tokyo, 1986), pp. 13–22. Several of his sketches have been reprinted in Tanaka Akira, Nihon no kinsei, vol. 18: Kindai kokka e no shikō (Japan’s early modernity, vol. 18: Toward the formation of a modern state) (Tokyo, 1994).

33 Yamamoto Hōsui, “Yoga kenkyū keireki dan (daiichi)” (Discussion of my career studying Western painting, part 1), Bijutsu shinpō 1, no. 1 (30 March 1902): 3; Aoki Shigeru and Furukawa Hideaki, eds., Yamamoto Hōsui no sekaiten zuroku (The world of Yamamoto Hōsui, a pictorial record) (Nagoya, 1993), p. 170; Furukawa Hideo, “ ‘Tōzai aitsūjiru yō ni shitai nen’ o okoshita Yamamoto Hōsui” (Yamamoto Hōsui who gave rise to the “desire to combine East and West”), in Aoki and Furukawa, Yamamoto Hōsui no sekaiten zuroku, ** **

pp. 12–13.

Prostitutes And Painters

193

in Nagasaki itself. Like the style of painting spread by the Ōbaku sect of Zen Buddhism, all of whose abbots came from China over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, Nanga was extremely Sinophilic and closely tied to artistic trends on the mainland. Japanese adherents of Nanga painting drew their inspiration almost exclusively from Chinese paintings and masters, and a steady scream of the latter flowed into Nagasaki.34

The “southern” in this group’s name had nothing to do with Nagasaki’s geography but came from the origins this group traced to the Southern School of Chan Buddhism in Tang times, although its principal antecedents were in the high Ming. Because, like its sister school in China, it laid such heavy emphasis on the high level of education of painters in related bookish disciplines and in its studied knowledge of the history of painting, it often overlapped with “literati painting” or bunjinga. Many painters in this school spent years, for example, painting pictures of Chinese landscapes they could never have seen—and that no one they ever met could have seen—based on the paintings of such titans as Dong Qichang (1555–1636) of the Ming, centuries earlier.

Among the Chinese painters who came to Nagasaki in the eighteenth century, the first important name was Yi Fujiu (from Wuxing County, Jiangsu). He first arrived in 1720, carrying the trading license of his elder brother, Yi Taoji, who had been ordered by the Nagasaki Magistrate—on behalf of the shogun himself—to bring three horses to Japan; it was literally illegal to export horses from China, because of potential military needs, and Yi Fujiu perforce had to escort the animals off his ship in the dead of night for fear other Chinese in Nagasaki might observe him. He was equally important as the merchant responsible for bringing a number of valuable Japanese texts back to China, and despite his virtual anonymity in the annals of Chinese painting (to this day, his dates remain a mystery), he was the progenitor of the trend to introduce 34 There is an immense literature on Nanga painting. I have consulted the following: Yamanouchi Chōzō, Nihon nanga shi** (History of the southern school of painting in Japan) (Tokyo, 1981); Umesawa Seiichi, Nihon nanga shi (A history of the southern school of painting in Japan) (Tokyo, 1919); Yoshizawa Chū, Nihon nanga ronkō **(Essays on the southern school of painting in Japan) (Tokyo, 1977); Yonezawa Yoshiho and Yoshizawa Chū, Nihon no bijutsu, ** vol. 23: Bunjinga (Japanese art, volume 23: Literati painting) (Tokyo, 1966); Wakita Hidetarō, Nihon kaiga kinsei shi (A history of early modern Japanese painting) (Ōsaka, 1943); Takeda Michitarō, Nihon kindai bijutsu shi (History of modern Japanese art) (Tokyo, 1969); Fujioka Sakutarō, Kinsei kaiga shi (History of early modern painting) (reprint ed., Tokyo, 1983); Kōno Motoaki, “Edo jidai kaiga no shūketsu to tensei” (The conclusion and transformation of painting in the Edo period), in Edo jidai no bijutsu: kaiga, chōkoku, kōgei, kenchiku, sho **(Art in the Edo period: Painting, sculpture, industrial arts, architecture, and calligraphy), ed. Tsuji Nobuo et al. (Tokyo, 1984), pp. 121–90.

194

Prostitutes and Painters

literati painting of the Nanga School to Japan. Among the Japanese who were much influenced by him was Ike no Taiga (1723–76).35

Another Chinese to distinguish himself at a painter in Nagasaki was Fei Hanyuan who arrived in 1734. He was followed later in the century by his relative Fei Qinghu. Both were landscape painters who, while in Nagasaki, acquired disciples anxious to study with real Chinese. In the Tenmei era (1781–89), Zhang Qiugu made his way to Nagasaki where in 1788 he carried on a famous “brush conversation” (the typical manner in which literate Chinese and Japanese

“conversed”—using literary Chinese as their written medium) with the official Japanese interpreter, at which Fei Qinghu was in attendance. As a young man, the wellknown Japanese painter Tani Bunchō (1763–1840) traveled from Edo to study with Zhang. Over the course of the century, as many as one hundred Chinese painters would make their influence felt in Nagasaki, many of them Nanga artists. Despite their impact on the history of Japanese art, though, for virtually none of these Chinese do we even have dates.36 Perhaps most important to our story of Chinese influence on Japanese painting was Jiang Jiapu, a man completely unknown in the history of Chinese art but central to the development of the Nanga School in Japan. Jiang hailed from the Hangzhou area of Zhejiang Province and first came to Nagasaki in 1804 as well as many times thereafter. Although he seems to have passed the first stage of the civil service examinations back home, he ultimately failed or ceased trying, and subsequently devoted himself to painting in a highly serious, strict style, while earning his living as a merchant.37 He was especially good at landscapes, and during his extended stays in Japan, he directly influenced the work of such 35 See the entry on him by Yonezawa Yoshiho in Ajia rekishi jiten** (Encyclopedia of Asian history), vol. 1 (Tokyo, 1959), p. 199. For details on his life as a merchant and book importer, see Ōba Osamu. Edo jidai no Nit-Chū hiwa (Unknown SinoJapanese tales in the Edo period) (Tokyo, 1980), pp. 197–98. See also Koga Jūjirō, Nagasaki gashi iden **(Biographies in the history of Nagasaki painting) (Tokyo, 1983).

36 The secondary material on this topic in Japanese is extensive, to say the least, though nothing of substance to my knowledge exists in English. For the foregoing, I have relied on Shimizu Hiroshi, Gajin Nagai Unpei** **(The painter Nagai Unpei) (Nagasaki, 1981), pp. 31–34; Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, ** p. 860; Yanagi Ryō, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei: Nagai Unpei no bijutsu (Modern painting and the intelligence of the literati painters: The art of Nagai Unpei) (Tokyo, 1974), p. 60; and numerous brief entries in the Nihon shi dai jiten **(Encyclopedia of Japanese history) (Tokyo, 1994).

37 Yamakawa Takeshi cites a letter by the famed cultural connoisseur and shogunal official who was serving in Nagasaki in 1804, Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823), to the effect that Jiang had turned to painting after failing at the examinations. Yamakawa Takeshi, ed., Nagai Unpei** **

(Nagano, 1985), p. 214.

Prostitutes And Painters

195

major figures as Hidaka Tetsuō (1790–1871), Kinoshita Itsuun (1799–1866), and Miura Gomon (1808–60), known collectively as the “three Nagasaki Nanga masters,” among many others.

When he was Jiang’s student, Tetsuō was a monk at the Shuntoku Temple, founded in 1630 and for two centuries the site at which books brought from China were inspected for violations of the strict regulations on interdicted texts. He would serve for many years as its abbot and nurture numerous young Japanese interested in Nanga painting who traveled to Nagasaki from all over the home islands. For all his efforts, Tetsuō never seems to have excelled as an artist to the extent that several of his contemporaries and disciples would, but he proved to be an extraordinary teacher and facilitator of human contacts.38

The most active painter in Nagasaki at this time appears to have been Kinoshita Itsuun. A native of the city, he was an energetic organizer and painting teacher who ran shows and took in numerous pupils willing to work assiduously at the Nanga style of art. His hearts desire was to visit the putative homeland of Nanga in China, but that goal always managed to elude him—it being illegal on pain of death to leave Japan throughout most of his life. In his home Kinoshita reputedly would travel mentally to the mainland by studying two paintings he had acquired: Zhang Qiugu’s Emeishan yue (The moon at Emei Mountain [Sichuan]) and Jiang Jiapu’s Xihu shui yun (Clouds over West Lake [Hangzhou]).39

Among Kinoshita’s most famous and devoted disciples was Nagai Unpei (1833–99) who came from the town of Nuttari in Echigo domain (presentday Niigata Prefecture). Born in the midst of the Tenpō famine to a father who worked as a barber but spent much of his time drinking and a mother who raised him and his two brothers in dire poverty, Unpei somehow discovered painting early in life. Despite his father’s wishes for him to follow in the family 38 Chen Zhenlian, Jindai Zhong-Ri huihua jiaoliu shi bijiao yanjiu (Comparative studies in the history of modern SinoJapanese relations in painting) (Hefei, 2000), pp. 31–32; Kawakita Michiaki, ed., Kindai Nihon bijutsu jiten** **(Dictionary of modern Japanese art) (Tokyo, 1989), p. 294; Suzuki Kei, “Kō Kaho” (Jiang Jiapu), in Ajia rekishi jiten, ** **3:200; Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 37–39; Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, ** **pp. 871–78; and Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei, ** **pp. 60–61.

39 Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, ** **pp. 40–41, 45–46; Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, pp. 870–71. In 1861, Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924) arrived in Nagasaki with a letter of introduction from Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791–1875) to Kinoshita. He claimed he wanted to study the Nanga style of painting imported from China, but he allegedly brought with him a bigcity arrogance coward backwoods Nagasaki. Despite five months under Kinoshita’s artistic tutelage, Tessai really was primarily interested in learning about conditions overseas, and they parted without much mutual affection. See Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, ** **pp. 47–49.

196

Prostitutes and Painters

profession, Unpei despised cutting hair. This attitude led to frequent paternal beatings and ultimately to Unpei’s running away from home as a teenager. His uncle placed him in the home of a local doctor who fostered the lad’s interest in calligraphy and taught him the Confucian classics and other Chinese texts. He also found for Unpei a local Nangastyle painter, Makabe Setchō, who had studied some years before with Tetsuō in Nagasaki. Makabe opened up a world of calligraphy, painting, and Chinese learning in Japan to Unpei through connections to the work of the great Edo calligrapher Maki Ryōko (1777–1843), his teacher Kameda Hōsai (or Bōsai, 1752–1826), and others. Through a local priest, Unpei was introduced as well to the work of the artist Kushiro Unsen (1758–1811), who was born in Shimabara, raised in nearby Nagasaki, and studied Chinese learning and language with Chinese residents there. Kushiro counted among his friends and traveling companions the likes of Rai San’yō

(1780–1832), Uragami Shunkin (1779–1846), Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783–1856), and Kimura Kenkadō (1736–1802), the cream of late eighteenthcentury mainlandoriented scholars and painters.40

At age fifteen, Unpei’s taste for studying Nanga painting directly with masters in Nagasaki was such that he simply decided to set off on the long journey despite the opposition of virtually everyone around him. In 1848, this was a major undertaking for a teenager, especially given the shogunate’s restrictions of domestic travel. Traveling overland, he reached Japan’s sole international port some six months later and went straight away to introduce himself to Tetsuō who later took him to meet Kinoshita. The latter was immediately taken with Unpei’s seriousness—many people came to study Nanga painting in Nagasaki, but few of them showed such apparent purpose and fewer still were teenagers. Kinoshita effectively took the youngster under his wing, trained him as a painter and calligrapher, and even offered suggestions for Unpei’s ultimate decision to adopt that particular given name. Through Kinoshita, Unpei also met a number of Chinese painters who had taken refuge in Nagasaki from the Taiping Rebellion.41

Our story now must shift to the mainland. The great Taiping Rebellion was raging through the lower Yangzi provinces during the 1850s and early 1860s. In 40 Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 13–19; Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei, pp. 60–61; Satō Moyako, Nihon meigaka den, bokko hen (Biographies of eminent Japanese painters, section on the deceased) (Tokyo, 1967), p. 122.

41 Furukawa Osamu, “Nagai Unpei no tamashii ni atau” (To the spirit of Nagai Unpei), Tōei (Shade of the pagoda) 10, no. 5 (1934): 37; Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 20–25, 27, 29, 38, 52; and Muramatsu Shōfū, Shinshū honchō gajin den (Biographies of Japanese artists, revised edition), vol. 4 (Tokyo, 1972), p. 25.

Prostitutes And Painters

197

the 1840s, the international community of Shanghai had begun the process of sealing itself off from Chinese jurisdictional scrutiny, and as a result during the rebellion, many Chinese scholars, painters, and other literati from the nearby cultural centers of Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuxi, and elsewhere—to say nothing of tens of Thousands of common folk—took refuge in the Concessions in the hope of avoiding the Taiping devastations they had witnessed and heard of in other places. Accordingly, the population of Shanghai swelled to bloated proportions. The art world was affected in several ways. One such was that a large number of elite Chinese artists, in an effort to save themselves and escape the Taipings, made their way to Shanghai, and several of them traveled as far as Nagasaki.

Two such emigré painters whose names appear repeatedly in the sources, but who have managed to escape virtually every reference work, were Wang Kesan (Daotai) and Xu Yuting (b. 1824). Wang was from Zhejiang Province, and he was hailed in Japan as the greatest Chinese calligrapher to reach Japan since Jiang Jiapu. To this day, his calligraphy appears in a local Nagasaki festival in the Kōjiyamachi section of that city. He arrived in Nagasaki in 1862 and had frequent contact there with Unpei, Kinoshita, and others in the Nanga circle of painters and offered frequent calligraphic advice to the young artists in the city. About this time, in the spring of 1864, Kinoshita decided that Unpei was ready to go out on his own; he had been living in Nagasaki for sixteen years, but was still apprenticed to Kinoshita and all but unknown. With inspiration from both his teacher and Wang, Unpei had continued to labor, as he saw it, to create an authentic Nanga tradition in Japan that was directly affiliated with the same tradition in China. In the late summer or early fall of 1864, Wang visited Unpei before his return to Shanghai. They exchanged paintings, and Wang suggested that Unpei consider making the voyage to Shanghai at some point in the near future to further the efflorescence of Nanga exchanges between their two countries.42

As noted above, the Nanga School in Japan had for many years past continued to paint scenery always derived from the lower Yangzi region of China, scenery which (of course) did not exist anywhere in Japan and which none of them would ever have actually scene. It was as if these mountains and valleys, temples and rural huts were ideal types—in any event, idealized for all East Asian literati painters. The worldview of Nanga was thus decidedly Sinophilic, a worldview of people living in another world. Xu Yuting, also from Zhejiang, arrived in Nagasaki even earlier, in 1861, and he quickly became active in the 42 Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, p. 867; Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 52–55, 56–57; http://

yukinagasaki.hoops.ne.jp/yuki_nagasaki_ko4.html; Fujioka, Kinsei kaiga shi, p. 196.

198

Prostitutes and Painters

local painting community over the next few years. Whereas Wang was a master of calligraphy and plum tree painting, Xu was famed for his ink landscapes.

Among the local painting students, Xu took on one Yasoshima Shakyō (1832–

1916) and praised his work to the skies.43 By 1867 Xu, too, was back in China.

In early 1800 Kinoshita decided to make a trip to Edo to visit a brother of his who lived near the capital. Faithful disciple that he was, Unpei planned to join him, but he became extremely ill and was unable to make the sea voyage from Nagasaki. Kinoshita wrote from Edo to say that, should Unpei recover, he might join him, but Unpei’s illness persisted. Late that summer, the vessel carrying Kinoshita and over fifty others left the port of Yokohama en route back to Nagasaki and was never seen again.44 All were lost at sea, and Kinoshita had died without ever being able to satisfy his lifelong ambition of seeing the real scenery of China.

In early 1865, Unpei made the acquaintance of another young painter in Nagasaki who would be instrumental in convincing him to try to make the trip to Shanghai. Ishikawa Kansen (b. 1844) came from Etchū domain (contemporary Toyama Prefecture), not far from Unpei’s hometown, and despite his youth had, like Unpei and many others, come to Nagasaki to study Nanga painting at the Shuntoku Temple. He was preparing an album and wanted Unpei to contribute the first piece to it. The second piece, he hoped, would be supplied by either Yasuda Rōzan (Mamoru, 1828/1830–83) or Chūjō Untei (1834–66); about the former, we shall have much to say below, while the latter was sadly to die with Kinoshita, his teacher, whom he accompanied on the illfated trip from Yokohama. Unpei and Kansen became fast friends. At Kansen’s suggestion, they and others adorned kites with their artwork for the kiteflying festivities in Nagasaki, and they continued to meet periodically and talk about their work. In the spring of the following year, 1866, they shared concerns about all the tumult occurring—the assault on Shimonoseki the previous year, the Chōshū wars, the Namamugi Incident in which a British man was murdered in Japan, and other events portending big changes.45

43 Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 70–71.

44 Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei, p. 61; Furukawa Osamu, “Nagai Unpei no tamashii ni atau,” p. 38; Muramatsu, Shinshū honchō gajin den, pp. 25–27; Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 64, 71–72; Fujisawa Makoto, “Nagai Unpei,” in Shinshū jinbutsu ki, bijutsuka den (Notes on Shinshū personages, biographies of artists), ed. Toida Hiroshi (Nagano, 1950), p. 167.

45 Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 59–60, 61–63, 65–66; Ozaki Hotsuki, ed., Shinchō Nihon jinmei jiten (Shinchō’s Japanese biographical dictionary) (Tokyo, 1991), p. 359 gives the 1828 date for Yasuda’s birth, though the majority of sources give 1830.

Prostitutes And Painters

199

he moved temporarily with his family to Shanghai to escape the tense atmosphere surrounding all foreigners in Japan as a result of the many antiforeign incidents and assassinations associated with late Tokugawa times. He returned to Nagasaki soon thereafter to continue his teaching and missionary work—he counted among his students several of the luminaries of the coming Meiji era: Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905), Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), and Yokoi Shōnan (1809–69), among others.46

200

Prostitutes and Painters

and laid out his secret plan. The American agreed to help, though he continued the discussion by seeking Unpei’s views on Christianity. Unpei pleaded ignorance. Verbeck explained that he had recently spoken at length with Kansen about the Christian faith, and indeed after he returned from their trip to China, Kansen actually converted. When he learned that Unpei had already begun planning a trip to the mainland, Kansen begged him to come along, and soon Yasuda Rōzan made his similar desires known. But, despite loosening of the shogunate’s severe travel restrictions, it was still technically illegal for them to travel as individuals and certainly without the consent of their lords. That was where Verbeck could help.

Verbeck was able to secure passage for them on a foreign trading vessel plying the NagasakiShanghai route. When Unpei became too ill to travel shortly before their scheduled departure, Rōzan and Kansen were simply too anxious to wait. They donned queue wigs—all Chinese males during the Manchu Qing dynasty were required to wear their hair in the queue (pigtail)—and thus disguised themselves for passage as Chinese servants. Unpei followed them soon thereafter in June 1867, concealing his identity beneath the garb of a Chinese monk, on another trading vessel, the Fei-loong (sometimes rendered Fe-loong in the North China Herald, the same ship that brought the “Japanese ladies” mentioned above to Shanghai from Nagasaki later that year and next), arranged by Verbeck. With the help of a Chinese he met on board ship and a monk he met in Shanghai soon after arriving, Unpei located his Nagasaki friends, Rōzan and Kansen, at a local inn. The three young men agreed to assume (fairly pretentious) pen names while in Shanghai and environs; the fact that they are never referred to in Chinese sources by these names (and only in Japanese sources to tell this story) leads me to conclude that the names never stuck: Wujiang for Unpei, Wushan for Kansen, and Wushui for Rōzan. The “Wu” element was the name of an ancient state located in the lower Yangzi delta.47

A word about the third member of this party, Yasuda Rōzan, is now in order.

Despite the skimpy and often contradictory details available on him, he is usually accorded the honor of being the most important early Japanese painter to visit the Shanghai area. He was certainly the first Japanese to settle in Shanghai for a considerable length of time. He hailed from a family of samurai doctors from a village near the famous Yōrō Waterfall in Takasu domain, Mino (presentday Gifu Prefecture). In addition to his medical training, Yasuda acquired a consuming interest in calligraphy. He eventually left his hometown and set47 Shimizu Hiroshi, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 74–76; Yamakawa Takeshi, ed., Nagai Unpei, pp. 214, 224, Fujisawa Makoro, “Nagai Unpei, no Shinshū jinbutsu ki, bijutsuka den, p. 170: Furukawa Osamu, “Nagai Unpei no tamashii ni atau,” p. 38.

Prostitutes And Painters

201

tled in Iida village in nearby Shinano domain (presentday Nagano Prefecture) where he attempted to make a living as a doctor. His nextdoor neighbor was a salt warehouse owner by the name of Ihara Shigebee, and Yasuda eventually married his neighbor’s daughter Kyū (1847–72), despite the great difference in their social classes. With his medical practice not faring well, he decided to relocate with his wife to Edo, and later they moved on to Nagasaki. There, in the late 1850s or early 1860s, he began studying Nanga painting with Tetsuō at the Shuntoku Temple.48

Most sources—all apparently repeating each other—claim that he unilaterally moved to Shanghai in 1864 (a few say 1868), but I have now concluded that 1867 was the date of his departure for the mainland both because of the circumstances described above and because of the contemporaneous diary of Okada Kōsho (1820–1903). Okada was a scholar of Chinese learning who settled in Nagasaki and a medical doctor as well. In March 1872, he set sail on a twomonth trip to Shanghai and Suzhou. “From my youth,” he explained in his account written in literary Chinese, “I have always thought of traveling to China, but the government banned travel, so I could not go [abroad]. I waited for a chance. After the [Meiji] Restoration [of 1868], the ban [on travel] was lifted, and I was able to do so.”49 Soon after arriving, he visited the recently opened Japanese consulate, introduced himself to Japans first consul in China, Shinagawa Tadamichi, and the next day paid a call on Yasuda Rōzan. “I visited him today and met him and his wife together,” Okada reports. “While drinking wine, we happily passed the time as he regaled me with stories from the past. . . . Rōzan has been living in Shanghai for four or five years and speaks Chinese rather well. . . . He pays his expenses with paintings and calligraphy.

His wife, Hongfeng, is also a painter of orchids and bamboo.”50

48 Iwaya Osamu, Ichirokū ikō (The literary remains of [Iwaya] Ichiroku), ed. Iwaya Haruo (n.p., 1912), pp. 7b–8a; Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 252–53; Yonezawa Hideo, “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi (ichi)” (A history of the development of Japanese in Shanghai, part 1), Tō-A keizai kenkyū (Studies in East Asian economics) 3 (July 1938): 57–58; Kawakita, Kindai Nihon bijutsu jiten, pp. 359–60; Okita Hajime, “Shanhai shiwa” (Historical tales of Shanghai), Shanhai kenkyū (Shanghai Studies) 1 (February 1942): 63; Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa (Stories from Shanghai History) (Tokyo, 1942), pp. 90–91; Okita, Kojō shi dan, pp. 102–3.

49 Okada Kōsho, Ko Go nikki (Diary of Shanghai and the Jiangnan area) (Kyoto, 1891), 1/1a.

See also Chen Jie, “Okada Kōsho no Ko Go nikki ni tsuite” (On Okada Kōshos Ko Go nikki

[Diary of Shanghai and Suzhou]), Nihon joshi daigaku kiyō ningen shakai gakubu (Essays from Japan Women’s University, Department of Human Society) 11 (March 2001): 231–32.

50 Okada, Ko Go nikki, 1/4a. He visited Rōzan again four days later (1/7b), and the latter spoke about the scenery around Hangzhou. Huang Shiquan, whom we encountered earlier as a

202

Prostitutes and Painters

In 1870 Yasuda returned briefly to Japan to collect his wife and bring her with him to share his life back in Shanghai. Kyū changed her given name at this time to Ai, and, as indicated by Okada, she became known in her own right as a painter in Shanghai under the name of “Hongfeng nüshi” (Ms. Red Maple Tree). She died there in the summer of 1872 at the tender age of twentyfive and was buried to the west of the Longhua pagoda; her remains were later removed to the Japanese cemetery which had not yet been founded at the time of her death, and the stone inscription was prepared by none other than the great artist and calligrapher Hu Gongshou (Yuan, 1823–86; see below).51

Shortly after his arrival he cracked down his Chinese acquaintance from several years earlier in Nagasaki, Wang Kesan. He and Xu Yuting both lived in or near Shanghai, and they saw to Unpei’s every need. Wang introduced him not only to the city of Shanghai, but more importantly to the new Shanghai School of painting which was emerging in the city and—Unpei was decidedly underwhelmed.

The Shanghai School and Japan

“Mr. Yasu[da] Rōzan from Japan . . . has long lived in Shanghai and produced many works.

He has done ink drawings of plum trees and landscapes.” ( Songnan mengying lu, p. 102).

51 In the Japanese cemetery, Kyū’s gravestone carried the following inscription on its front:

“Grave of Hongfeng nüshi from Japan, inscribed by Hu Gongshou from Huating.” The back reads: “Hongfeng nüshi of Japan was surnamed Ihara, had the given name Ai, and was also known as Teisha. She was the wife of Yasuda Rōzan (Mamoru). She painted orchids and bamboo beautifully. She had a fine hand for calligraphy and was a lovely woman. She came to live with Rōzan in Shanghai in Tongzhi 9 [1870]. She died on the twentythird day of the seventh lunar month of Tongzhi 11 [1872]. She was twentysix [ sui]. Rōzan brought the coffin and she was buried on the western side of the Longhua Temple. This was written when the stone was erected.” Cited in Yonezawa, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 166–67.

Prostitutes And Painters

203

painter but with eclectic interests. Yasuda Rōzan began studying with Hu soon after reaching Shanghai, and the two men became good friends. As Dr. Okada noted of Rōzan in his diary: ”He has frequent contacts with Hu Gongshou.”52

Hu was born in Jiangsu Province and was renowned in his day as a poet, calligrapher, and artist. He fled to Shanghai in 1861** **to avoid the Taipings, and there he eked out his living selling his own art work, establishing contacts with such painters as Hu Bishan (1817–62), Li Renshu (Shanlan, 1811–82), and Xugu (1823–

96). Hu later gained great renown in his day, acquiring students from as far away as Japan who wished to study Nanga School painting, such as Rōzan and others, from a real Chinese exponent.53

In the world of Chinese painting, the Shanghai School was far from universally respected. Indeed, some used the term Haipai more as an epithet than as an apposite group designation. According to their critics, one of the traits of this school was shoddiness or crudeness. This point was emphasized by Masaki Naohiko (1862–1940), head of the Tokyo Art School, when he visited Shanghai in 1931 and saw a show at the Shanghai Art School. Four years later, he remarked after seeing a show of Chinese art in Tokyo: “They have displayed there the careless paintings of the Shanghai School.”54

Stressing the positive, James Cahill has argued that the Shanghai School was the ”most vibrant movement“ in nineteenth and twentiethcentury Chinese painting. It drew its roots from the Yangzhou School of the eighteenth century.

In the midnineteenth century, the merchantartist relationship was replicated in Shanghai, only now the entire relationship was solely based on money.

Artists like Hu Gongshou worked for money and painted what their patrons wanted. “The painter,“ writes Cahill, “typically, was not trying so much to inculcate a higher taste in his audience as he was responding to the audience’s taste in his paintings. The result is that much of Shanghai School painting moves 52 Okada, Ko Go nikki, 1/4a.

53 See Tsuruta Takeyoshi, Kindai Chūgoku kaiga (Modern Chinese painting) (Tokyo, 1974), p. 25; Fujiwara Sosui, “Ko En” (Hu Yuan), in Shina nanga taisei kaisetsu (Compendium of the Chinese southern school with explanatory notes), vol. 2 (Tokyo, 1935). p. 42.

54 Masaki Naohiko, Jusanshō dō nikki (Diary from the Hall of Thirteen Pines), 2 vols. (Tokyo, 1965–66), 2:1230; see also p. 825; Tsuruta, Kindai Chūgoku kaiga, p. 11.

204

Prostitutes and Painters

further than before into the realm of popular art, to the verge of what in earlier centuries would have been thought lowclass or vulgar.”55

As with so many things associated with Shanghai—such as Shanghai dialect and Shanghai cuisine—the Shanghai style in painting was actually an amalgam of trends brought from elsewhere and crushed in the pestle of the rapidly growing city from the midnineteenth century on. Although the Taipings never penetrated beyond the outskirts of the city, their actions in the nearby towns and villages forever changed the appearance and population of Shanghai. By the early 1860s, there were surely more nonnative painters in Shanghai than native ones, and the new Shanghai capitalists were, like their Yangzhou brethren earlier, becoming patrons of the arts. As Stella Yu Lee has noted, unlike earlier, Shanghai artists were not officials and, thus having no “real job” to fall back on, painted for money to survive. “Shanghai patronage,” she adds, “differed from that of Yangzhou in being broadened by the introduction of new buyers.

Some of the most famous of them were merchants from southern China and tradesmen from Japan.”56

Because of the shared traditions in painting and calligraphy going back centuries, nor only were the Japanese the first painters to come to China to engage in serious study, but they were also the first patrons to enter the Shanghai art scene from abroad. In an 1884 work cited earlier, Shenjiang shengjing tu, there is an extraordinary drawing of two Japanese authenticating and purchasing a Chinese scroll in a Shanghai art shop.57 Writing in 1919, the critic Yang Yi (1864–1929) similarly noted of one calligrapher: “Xu Fangzeng . . . from Pinghu lived in Shanghai in the early years of the Tongzhi period [1862–75]. He excelled in the archaic script and copied Han tomb inscriptions. . . . Japanese profoundly appreciated his calligraphy, buying and returning home with many of his works.”58

55 James Cahill, “The Shanghai School in Later Chinese Painting, in Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting, ed. Mayching Ko (Oxford, 1988), pp. 54, 61. For more on the background of the Shanghai school, see Shan Guolin, “Painting in Chinas New Metropolis: The Shanghai School, 1850–1900, in A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China, ed. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen (New York, 1998), pp. 20–34.

56 Stella Yu Lee, “The Art Patronage of Shanghai in the Nineteenth Century,” in Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Paintings, ed. Chutsing Li (Laurence, Kansas, 1989), pp. 223, 226.

57 Jing, Shenjiang shengjing tu, p. 65b.

58 Yang Yi, Haishang molin (Shanghai artists) (Taibei, 1975), 3/13a. Stella Yu Lee (“The Art Patronage of Shanghai in the Nineteenth Century,” p. 226) cites another source, Shanghai fengtu zaji (Collected notes of the ways of Shanghai), which I have not as yet seen, to the following effect: “Most people in the country of Japan were fond of calligraphy, paintings,

Prostitutes And Painters

205

Thus, Chinese fleeing the Taipings and later just coming to live off their art came to Shanghai because they had learned that it was China’s most important commercial city and that one might survive by painting alone. For the same reason, Japanese wished to reach Shanghai, either to study painting with an authentic master or to corner a market. Nothing like this confluence of events had ever transpired in Chinese art history: migration from other cities with major cultural histories to Shanghai, the emergence of a modern Chinese capitalist class, and the arrival of Japanese in the city.

Hu Gongshou became the teacher of a number of Japanese aspiring to learn at a Chinese knee. In addition to Yasuda Rōzan and his wife, these included Murata Kōkoku (1831–1912) from Hakata in Fukuoka domain on the island of Kyūshū. He initially studied with his father, Murata Tōho; in 1864 he traveled to Kyoto to study with the Confucian scholar and painter Nukina Kaioku (1778–

1863). Eight years later he made his way to Nagasaki to study with Tetsuō; he later met Kinoshita and other literati painters, including Xu Yuting. He made three trips to China, circa 1876, to see the landscape he had so often seen represented in Chinese paintings and to study with Ha and Zhang Zixiang (Xiong, 1803–86).59

One final name in the vein is Amano Hōko (1828–4) from Ehime domain on the island of Shikoku. He was a landscape painter of the Nanga School who traveled to Kyoto to study with Nakabayashi Chikutō (1776–1853); when Chikutō died, he moved on to Nagasaki and studied under Kinoshita. From there he went on to Shanghai, together with his fellow Ehime local Tsuzuki Kunshō (1835–83), also a Nanga painter, to study with Hu. After a number of trips to Shanghai, he settled back in Kyoto in the mid1870s and played a major role in the world of literati painting.60

seals, and stone engravings. In gentryofficial families, not only were the collections of those art works rich, but the people were able to distinguish authentic works from fakes, and good works from bad ones. If they discovered something they liked, although it was only a small piece of rock or a few inches of silk, they would spend a thousand gold coins to buy it without a second thought.”

59 Kawakita, Kindai Nihon bijutsu jiten, p. 346; Kōno, “Edo jidai kaiga no shūketsu to tensei,”

p. 150; Umesawa, Nihon nanga shi, p. 879; Aimi Kōu, “Mutata Kōkoku,” in Nihon jinmei dai jiten (Great Japanese biographical dictionary), ed. Shimonaka Kunihiko, vol. 6 (Tokyo, 1986), p. 188; Wakita, Nihon kaiga kinsei shi, pp. 243–44; Paul Berry, Unexplored Avenues of Japanese Painting: The Hakutakuan Collection (Seattle, 2001), pp. 126–27, 177; Watanabe Shōjirō, Meiji gaka ryakuden (Brief biographies of Meijiera artists) (Tokyo, 1883), 58b–

59a; Satō, Nihon meigaka den, bokko hen, p. 131.

60 Kageura Wakamomo, “Iyo kaiga shi no katakage” (Brief history of painting in Iyo), Iyo shidan (Historical Essays from Iyo) 90 (April 1937): 33; Kōno Koreyama, “Iyo kaiga gaisetsu”

206

Prostitutes and Painters

Perhaps underscoring his contacts with Japanese artists as well as his growing fame and fortune, Wang Tao included a poem about Hu Gongshou in his Yingruan zazhi (Miscellanies by the ocean), one line of which reads: “A piece

[from Hu’s hand] is worth a dry in Japan.”61 By the same token, this phrase suggests—as was often later suggested about Pablo Picasso—that anything Hu painted was worth its weight in gold, and he knew it. As was noted at the time, he was together with the famed courtesan Hu Baoyu and the extraordinarily rich compradore Hu Xueyan (1823–85) one of the “three Hus” of Shanghai.62

A direct tie between Wang Tao and Yasuda Rōzan has yet to be made, but in light of the fact that Rōzan was the longestterm Japanese student of Hu Gongshou as well as of the appearance of his name in contemporary Chinese sources, it is highly likely that Wang at least knew of him. Dr. Okada stressed how helpful Rōzan was to him as well as to other Japanese who came to Shanghai for longer or shorter periods of time. This group went far beyond artists, however, and included (among others) Admiral Kabayama Sukenori (1837–1922), famed as the first Japanese governor general of Taiwan from 1895

but who visited the mainland much earlier. When he arrived in Shanghai in the early 1870s as part of Foreign Minister Soejima’s encourage, he met with Rōzan, and the latter with his extensive knowledge of the local scene offered the future admiral his store of information.63 By all accounts, Rōzan left Shanghai and returned home in 1873, the year after his wife’s death. He settled in Tokyo and was extremely successful as an artist and a teacher.

As hinted earlier, Unpei was less than enthralled by the Shanghai School of painting to which Wang Kesan introduced him in 1867. Unpei was more interested in viewing the scenery of the lower Yangzi delta and meeting pure Southern School painters. In Suzhou he renewed his acquaintance with Xu (Outlines of painting in Iyo), ibid., p. 26; ** **Matsuyama shishi henshū iinkai, Matsuyama shishi, vol. 3: kindai (History of Matsuyama city, vol. 3: Modern period) (Matsuyama, 1995), p. 680; ** **Berry, Unexplored Avenues of Japanese Painting, pp. 114, 195; www.shogaya.com/

html/ahouko_ybunkouo1.htm.

61 (Taibei, 1969), cited in Claudia Brown and Juhsi Chou, Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire 1796–1911 (Phoenix, Ariz., 1992), p. 126. In a recent study, Jonathan Hay also offers some fascinating tidbits on the ShanghaiJapan ties in the world of painting (and book exchange). See his “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenthcentury Shanghai,” in Art at the Close of China’s Empire, ed. Juhsi Chou (Tempe, Ariz., 1998), esp. pp. 166–68, 187.

62 Zou Tao, Chunjiang hua shi (History of Shanghai painting) (Shanghai, 1884), 1/13, cited in Yeh, “Modeling the ‘Modern.’ ”

63 Fujisaki Seinosuke, Taiwan shi to Kabayama taishō (Taiwan history and Admiral Kabayama) (Tokyo, 1926), pp. 270–71.

Prostitutes And Painters

207

Yuting who, knowing the importance of pedigree, introduced him to local painters as a Japanese calligrapher and student of Kinoshita and Tetsuō who was himself a student of Jiang Jiapu. In addition to the standard list of cultural sites, Unpei also wanted to visit the sacred Buddhist Mount Tiantai, but Wang thought it still too dangerous for him to go alone, only a few years after the defeat of the Taipings, with public order in rural China still unstable. He was guided by a friend of Wang’s as well as by a monk from the Tiantai complex.

This part of the trip enabled Unpei to commune with the generations—Jiang Jiapu had visited this site three times in painting a famous scroll of it, and this trip through space thus took on the aura for Unpei of a trip through time as well into the authentic world of Nanga art. Illness ultimately got the better of Unpei who was forced in the spring of. 1868 to leave his erstwhile Japanese companions, Rōzan and Kansen, and return to Japan alone.64

Unpei had been gone roughly a year, 1867–68, arguably the most important year in modern Japanese history, but to someone who effectively was mentally living in another place and time, one can only surmise how much the events of the Meiji Restoration would have meant for him had he been in Japan. He seeded in Tokyo in 1870. Rōzan settled there a few years later, but there was never much love lost between the two men. Unpei had demonstrated a predilection for the sanctity of painting in the Southern School tradition, while Rōzan seems to have been drawn more the Shanghai Schools eclecticism and its ties to filthy lucre. Whether they actually had a falling out is unclear, but they had little to do with one another.

One other Japanese figure, a Nanga painter who traveled to Shanghai to nurture his skills, was a man known as Ōkura Uson (Kingo). He came from Echigo like Unpei and from a family of doctors like Rōzan, but what he most shared with these two was an overriding desire to paint. His father forbade him from doing so, but when the father died, Uson made his way to Nagasaki where he began studying with Tetsuō. In the early 1870s he traveled to Shanghai, though not as a painter but as a lowlevel clerk in the Foreign Office. In his spare time, he pursued his first love, making wide acquaintances in the world of Chinese painting.65

64 Shimizu, Gajin Nagai Unpei, pp. 77–78, 81–85.

65 Furukawa Osamu, “Nagai Unpei no tamashu ni atau,” p. 41; Okita, Nihon to Shanhai, p. 318; Yanagi, Kindai kaiga to bunjinga no chisei, p. 61.

208

Prostitutes and Painters

**Why Shanghai? **

What then was the attraction of Shanghai in particular for the Japanese who came there in the late 1860s and 1870s? Do the prostitutes and painters discussed above have anything in common behind their desires to reach that city?

The one overarching connection between these two groups and among all those Japanese who actively sought to reach Shanghai has, I suspect, as much to do with reaching that Chinese place as it does with leaving Japan. Although they happen to be located in different countries, both of which strictly curtailed travel for several centuries before the 1860s, Nagasaki and Shanghai are closer than Nagasaki was to Edo (renamed Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration of 1868). Before the days of steamships, navigation might take several days between Nagasaki and Shanghai, but it would have taken much longer to go overland to the Japanese capital.

For educated Japanese to want to see what many considered the homeland of culture itself in China should not seem at all odd.66 It may be difficult to appreciate now, but in the 1860s when the possibility of travel opened up, Japanese educated in traditional continental disciplines were a sizable group of those who went to observe the real China. They were not all necessarily pleased with the reality they discovered there—reality, as we all know, is often overrated—but, like the Nanga painters we have just depicted, they were virtually always thrilled to be able to commune spiritually with the landscape and often the descendants of the great masters of the past.

This explanation, though, helps little in understanding why Japanese prostitutes sought out Shanghai. Certainly there were more clients there and much more money. There was as well a great deal more freedom of movement—

again, not simply because it was Shanghai but also because it was not Japan. It seems as well that the better known of these courtesans could simultaneously savor that distance from the tightknit, restrictive communities of Japan and become the toasts of Shanghai because they were (exotic) Japanese—singing Japanese songs no one else knew or understood, and dancing in Japanese fashion and playing the samisen, both appreciated because they appeared so alien (“Oriental?”), even as they cultivated the Shanghai dialect or Chinese.

Shanghai was justifiably hailed as a wide open city where money bought privilege and where ones earlier baggage could easily be discarded (if one wished) at the port. It was both the real China and a bizarrely transfigured China in which so many Westerners and many Chinese from elsewhere lived.

66 This is a theme I develop in chaps. 2 and 3 of The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China.

Prostitutes And Painters

209

Because of the Westerners, a community almost entirely of merchants and a handful of missionaries who were living in the city, and because of the Chinese who took advantage of their presence there, as Shanghai rapidly grew it commercialized everything it touched. In many cases, that meant that it cheapened everything chat passed through it. In a broad sense, the Shanghai School of painting was a form of “prostitution” in which the former welltrained “courtesans” of Yangzhou sold themselves to the highest bidders once they reached the metropolis of Shanghai. The city offered Japanese women of capacity opportunities for selfadvancement by commercially objectifying traditional arts for the pleasures of men of means there.

Eventually the Japanese population would grow in the second decade of the twentieth century to outstrip all other foreign communities in Shanghai, and then by the 1930s to outstrip all foreigners combined, reaching 100,000 by the early 1940s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, it was on a much more modest scale, though still larger than any Japanese settlement elsewhere in China.67 In other words, Japanese were seeking it out specifically.

67 See the extensive statistics in Soejima, “Senzen ki Chūgoku zairyū Nihonjin jinkō tōkei (kō).”

■ Source: On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō into English,” in Historical Consciousness, Historiography, and Modern Japanese Values, ed. James C. Baxter (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2006), 153–65.

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō into English

Unlike any other people of whom I am aware, the Japanese have developed, especially in the postwar era, a virtually insatiable appetite for historical fiction. They are willing to buy and read, as well as watch televisions productions of, numerous tales from their history, told and retold, repeatedly. Based largely on personal impression over the years, it seems that the Sengoku (Warring States, late-fifteenth to late-sixteenth century) and bakumatsu periods (late Tokugawa years, 1850s and 1860s) are the most fecund time frames for beget-ting historical novels, perhaps because both were so pregnant with the seeds of the dramatic change to come. Whatever the reasons may be, a number of Japanese novelists have become rich men writing long lists of historical titles.

For comparison’s sake, it should be noted that the United States—I am eliding discussion here of other parts of the Anglophone world—has also produced several extremely well-published historical novelists who have prospered greatly. To name just two among many, James Michener (1907–97) and Herman Wouk (b. 1915) have had huge legions of readers. What, then, is the great difference between a Michener or a Wouk and a Shiba Ryōtarō 司馬遼太郎

(1923–96), the topic of this essay? One important difference may be that few serious readers ever confuse Michener with the real thing. They read and continue to read his mammoth novels in part because of the “history” in them, of course, but more for the great romances or compelling stories in which they happen to be wrapped. The same might equally be said of James Clavell’s (b. 1932) historical novel Shogun, a novel set almost entirely not in the era of the Tokugawa shoguns but at the end of the Warring States era, the late Sengoku period; this novel sent the American academy running to attack its historicity or to defend its pedagogical utility.1 Herman Wouk’s two-volume historical novel of World War II, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, is somewhat more pretentious as a work of “history.”2 Fascinating reads that his two hefty volumes are, they may indeed convey a flavor of the times in Europe, the Pacific, and North America, but they contain none of the normal apparatus anyone would expect to find in a work of historical scholarship. In part, this 1 See, for example. Smith 1980, on Clavell 1975.

2 Wouk 1971 and Wouk 1978. His two novels about the founding of the state of Israel and its many crises are historical novels, but with few real personages, and hence they struck me, at least, less as disguised history. Wouk 1993 and Wouk 1994.

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

211

may be true because, like Shiba but unlike Clavell, Wouk inserts numerous historical personages with their real names into his tale (the Roosevelts, Stalin, Hitler, and the like).

By contrast, I think many people do read Shiba Ryōtarō to learn history, or to fill in the blanks where history is mum, and until his death he played the role of authority on history to the hilt. True, he was not a university professor of history, but he attended conferences as an expert on history (and/or literature).

Observing him, I was reminded of the late E.G. Marshall (1910–98), the actor who portrayed the senior defense lawyer on a much-hailed television series of the 1960s, The Defenders, when he was asked to speak to a convention of the American Bar Association. He responded that, appearances notwithstanding, he was not a lawyer. When about twenty years ago, Alan Alda (b. 1936), the star of the then hit series M*A*S*H, a television program about a field hospital unit in Korea during the American war there, did speak to the graduating class of Columbia University’s Medical School, he hastened to remind them that as an actor the only things he had in common with doctors was a compelling need to make people feel better and to be well compensated for it.

In Shiba’s voluminous corpus of mostly multi-volume historical novels, one finds as well a number of non-fiction works about Japanese history and literature. Do we classify such works as history, or perhaps as historical populariza-tions? Is this history à la Stephen Ambrose (1936–2002), Doris Kearns Goodwin (b. 1943), or one of the many other popularizers who, although they may use footnotes sparingly, at least do not plagiarize overly much? It is difficult to say.

Shiba and others like him in Japan, even in their fictional works, frequently do cite directly from old historical and literary texts. They may not give chapter and verse but they do provide author and title. And, as long as Michener’s and Wouk’s historical novels may be, they usually pale in comparison to the length of much of Shiba’s and others’ output of historical fiction in Japan. Like Charles Dickens (1812–70), Shiba was often paid by the word. His novels were frequently serialized in weekly or monthly popular journals over the course of a year or two and then reissued in book form. This may in part help explain the author’s “logorrhea,” but it only begs the question on the consumer side of the equation. Can one imagine an English-language equivalent, for example, of Yamaoka Sōhachi’s 山岡荘八、(1907–78) twenty-six-volume historical novel entitled Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康, which was incidentally translated in full into Chinese?3

3 Reprinted in thirteen volumes (Kōdansha, 1981–84). Translated into Chinese in fifty-two volumes by He Lili 何黎莉 and Ding Xiaoai 丁小艾 (Taibei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1991).

Yamaoka has also written numerous other fictionalized historical biographies.

212

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

Let me say just a few words about my own route to Shiba Ryōtarō’s work. I met and spoke with him only once, at a conference in the late 1980s, but I first came in contact with his work in 1977 when I was a graduate student in Kyoto.

As is well known, Japanese Educational Television (NHK) runs a weekly one-hour historical drama each year (roughly 52 episodes) based on a historical novel, and the novel for 1977 was Shiba’s Kashin (God of Blooming Flowers).4

Like many Japanese that year, I sat spellbound each Sunday evening, staring at my television set, watching the story of Murata Zōroku 村田蔵六 (later to become known as Ōmura Masujirō 大村益次郎, 1825–69), the doctor trained in Dutch medicine and later the military modernizer in Chōshū domain who effectively built a modern army in that one domain in western Japan. Shiba added all sorts of flavor to the story, which even someone like myself who was learning about Zōroku for the first time could nonetheless see.

Zōroku’s domain of Chōshū was, of course, one of the hottest hotbeds of activity on the eve of the Meiji Restoration, and thus a long list of historical players who would become extremely important in the overthrow of the shogunate or the early Meiji government or both walked across the screen each Sunday evening. I was especially taken with another man from Chōshū, new to me at that time twenty-seven years ago, Takasugi Shinsaku 高杉晋作

(1839–67), primarily because Takasugi, incredible hothead that he was, traveled with the first official Japanese delegation to Shanghai in 1862; and all of this was enacted in the television drama. I bought the novel that week and began voraciously to devour it. It was the first real novel I had read in Japanese, but I was younger then and (more) irrational. After making my way through the novel’s 1200-plus pages, though, I found that there was no mention in it whatsoever of this trip to Shanghai. As I later discovered, Shiba had an entire other novel in four volumes—entitled Yo ni sumu hibi 世に棲む日々 (Alive in the world)5—about the life of Takasugi Shinsaku from which those TV scenes were drawn and grafted onto the story of Kashin.

Several months later, I wrote Shiba a letter in which I suggested translating the novel Kashin. He responded through a relative that he basically was not interested, and thankfully the matter ended there. I have been endlessly fascinated by the 1862 Japanese mission to Shanghai ever since, a topic of my present research, and I have Shiba (and NHK) to thank for that.

4 Shiba 1972.

5 Shiba 1973.

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

213

Japanese Historical Fiction Concerning China

In addition to Shiba, I have also been particularly interested in the historical fiction of Chin Shunshin 陳舜臣 (b. 1924), his slightly younger classmate from Ōsaka University of Foreign Languages and long-time friend, especially the depictions of Chinese historical figures in their writings. Chin is incidentally a second-generation Japanese from Kōbe whose parents moved there from Taiwan and whose ancestors came from Quanzhou in Fujian Province.

Although Shiba’s work concentrates on Japanese history, he has set novels on the mainland or placed significant scenes from novels there.6 Chin, by contrast, has a Chinese connection in virtually all of his work. His novels are either set in China over the centuries or involve the Chinese community in Japan.

I have translated two of Chin’s works: a short novel, Pekin yūyūkan 北京

悠々館 (rendered in English as Murder in a Peking Studio), a murder mystery set in Beijing in 1903 on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War; and a much longer one, Taihei tengoku 太平天国 (The Taiping Rebellion), about that long and disastrous event in the middle of the nineteenth century.7 The former is, first and foremost, a mystery story that happens to concern Japanese efforts to blackmail high-level Chinese officials and force the earliest possible commencement of a Russo-Japanese War, because the Japanese know that the Russians are continuing to move troops along the Trans-Siberian Railway to the east in preparation for such a war. The only genuinely famous historical Chinese character, Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1859–1916), who is also the ultimate villain of the piece, makes only brief appearances in the novel. By contrast, Taihei tengoku is full of historical characters, from Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全

(1813–64) and Yang Xiuqing 楊秀清 (d. 1856) to a wide assortment of Manchu and Chinese officials of the Qing government and military. Only the main characters who, as in Herman Wouk’s World War II novels, manage to be at every major or minor historical scene and thus weave the story into a whole, are fictional.8

6 One vast work by him in this vein is Kō U to Ryū Hō 項羽と劉邦 (Xiang Yu and Liu Bang) (Shiba 1984).

7 Originals: Chin 1971c and Chin 1982. Translations: Murder in a Peking Studio (Tempe: Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 1986); The Taiping Rebellion (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).

8 Notably, the Lian family, a wealthy merchant house from Fujian, members from which appear in other Chin novels, particularly his immense Ahen sensō 阿片戦争 (The Opium War) (Chin 1971a), three volumes with many subsequent editions. It has been translated in Chinese by Bian Liqiang 卞立強 (Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 1985). Chin even

214

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

To my Western sensibilities, Wouk’s two war novels are much more successful as fiction than Chin’s Taiping novel, though, Chin’s may be better “history.”

Perhaps this tells us something about their audiences. Perhaps Japanese audiences are more drawn, for whatever reasons, to the kind of tale Chin tells than they would be to Wouk’s. At the same time, we should note that at least the first of these Wouk novels, The Winds of War, was translated into Japanese within three years of its initial appearance; a Chinese translation raised quite a fuss when it appeared on the Mainland several years later.9 Wouk’s novels work better probably because the love story works better than the one in Chin’s work.

I recently completed the translation of another work of Shiba’s entitled Dattan shippūroka 韃靼疾風録 (Chronicle of the Tartar Tempest, which I may subtitle A Novel of Seventeenth-Century East Asia),10 a novel set first in Hirado in southern Japan and then in mainland Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century on the eve of the Manchu conquest of China. The hero of this virtually impossible story, Katsura Shōsuke 桂庄助, comes from a Hirado family. His grandfather who raised him was fluent in the Zhejiang dialect of Chinese because of his contacts with numerous Chinese traders coming to Hirado, and Shōsuke thus grows up bilingual. After an incident involving his grandfather, for which he is not to blame and in which his grandfather dies, Shōsuke is forced to give up certain samurai appurtenances. One day his lord calls him to an audience and informs him that he is to be charged with a long-term mission. To make a long story short, he will have to escort a young and apparently noble young woman—whom no one is initially able to determine the ethnicity of—back to her homeland, the land of Tartary. She is a Jurchen, a Manchu. Through connections in the Chinese underworld with ties in Hirado, they make their way to the mainland via Korea.

And, of course, they fall in love, but they manage not to consummate it for hundreds of pages. Promised to regain his full warrior status if he does a good job, Shōsuke remains a no-nonsense samurai, following his lord’s orders to the hilt, and he thus cannot very well fall in love with a woman he has been charged to bring home. He must return to Japan after his mission is completed—a mission he later learns involves collecting information to corroborate or refute the rumor of a storm brewing in Tartary that will sweep the Ming dynasty out of power and conquer East Asia—and he certainly cannot very well marry her wrote a single-volume popular account of the Opium War (Chin 1971b), which won the 1971 Mainichi Publishers’ Cultural Award.

9 Wouk 1974; Wouk 1979. I have been unable to locate Japanese translations of the sequel, War and Remembrance, though I cannot imagine that it was not translated.

10 Shiba 1990.

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

215

and bring her back home to Hirado with him. Eventually, however, he gives in to his emotions.

Of course, things start to go wrong, and he ends up staying in Shenyang, the Manchu capital, for many years, with periodic trips to Mongolia, Suzhou, and elsewhere. He meets Nurhaci, Abahai, Dorgon (Prince Rui 睿), and numerous fictional Manchus, as well as many Chinese, Koreans, Mongols, and even a half-Cantonese, half-Portuguese man from Macao. As one frequently finds in this genre, there are recurrent digressions into the history of China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Korea, and elsewhere as background for a given scene.

As interesting as these often are, one cannot help but feel that these deviations from the storyline are there, at least in part, to fill that week’s or month’s magazine installment.

Ultimately, Shōsuke decides he must return to Japan, but unfortunately the new Tokugawa government has in his absence decided to impose the sakoku (“locking of the country”) law, which forbids Japanese, on pain of death, from leaving their country. If he returns now, he stands a chance either of being humiliated for doing precisely the opposite of what his lord has ordered him to do—escort the Tartar princess back to her home—or, worse still, being executed. What’s he to do? The impossibility of the story makes the fascinating (though entirely improbable) manner in which Shiba lets it unfold

“seem” possible.

Translation Problems

As good a researcher as Shiba was—in this regard, Clavell, Wouk, and Michener really pale by comparison with him—he was often prone to precisely the kind of generalizations that historians and literary scholars tend to avoid at all cost.

Shiba, though, was attracted to such big, popularizing themes like a moth to a flame. Among his many books are such titles as Ningen ni tsuite 人間について

(About Human Beings) and Nihonjin to Nihon bunka 日本人と日本文化

(Japanese and Japanese Culture), both the transcripts of extended “face-to-face conversations” ( taidan 対談) with interlocutors.11 He also collaborated with Chin Shunshin on a similar work entitled Chūgoku o kangaeru, taidan 中国を考える、対談 (Thinking about China, a Conversation),12 and several others on Korea and Japan. This is a style few academics in the West find either 11 Respectively with Yamamura Yūichi 山村雄一 (Shiba and Yamamura 1983) and with Donald Keene (Shiba and Keene 1972).

12 Shiba and Chin 1978.

216

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

useful or meaningful—Tu Weiming 杜維明 (b. 1940) in our field might be an exception, the late Joseph Campbell (1904–87) in another.

This penchant for the general or more popular explanation forces the con-scientious translator of his fiction into something of a corner. Do we just render his words as they are without explanation? Do we add a translator’s note to the effect that there are many exceptions to the generality just enunciated, or such-and-such a view is not or no longer generally held by specialist scholars?

The first option of just conveying the words as accurately as possible may work for professional translators, but for scholars who pour their lifeblood into the very questions he and others like him toss off over a few beers, this is unac-ceptable. Translator’s notes in a work of fiction, though, only work if they are few and far between. Otherwise the translated text will no longer be a readable novel but will read more like an essay by Paul Pelliot (1878–1945).

How do we deal with views no longer widely held in academia? This is one issue I have had to face in the Shiba translation. The image he conveys of the Tokugawa shogunate “locking itself up” in the early seventeenth century no longer jibes with much recent scholarship, even in Japan. While Shiba was more understanding of the complexity of the whole sakoku issue, his portrayal of this institution was still out of date from a scholarly perspective, even in the mid-1980s when the book first appeared. I have no answer to this question, but simply raise it here for consideration.

What about specific errors of fact, as opposed to differences of interpretation from the scholarly consensus? For instance, there is a passage in Dattan shippūroku which Shiba describes the execution by haritsuke はりつけ, a form of crucifixion and exposure, of the notorious eunuch Wei Zhongxian 魏忠賢 (1568–1627). The problem is that we know that Wei committed suicide by hanging after which his corpse was crucified. Should the translator add a note about the specific cause of Wei’s death or even simply add it to the text?

This may seem like a small point, but it is a slippery slope from this sort of tin-kering to more insidious forms of playing with an original text, such as Arthur Waley’s (1899–1966) adding of florid language—and apparently a character in one chapter—to his translation of the Tale of Genji. 13

There is also a relatively small issue related to this, which causes less despair as a translator but some worry nonetheless. That is the issue of Shiba’s getting dates and other numbers wrong. In the roughly 1100 pages of text, this problem has come up about fifteen times. Usually, it involves a well-known person’s age off by a year or maybe two. Occasionally, the dates of events or other numbers are similarly at odds with every available reference work. I have finessed 13 Waley 1935.

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

217

any problem or infidelity to the text by simply correcting Shiba’s errors and converting all ages to Western reckoning of them, which scholars working on premodern texts do all the time. The errors themselves are less disturbing that what they may portend—namely, sloppiness on the part of the author who wrote so rapidly and voluminously. I stress may because Shiba has many times more dates and figures that do accord with the historical record.

Yet another issue derives from a rather pretentious inclination on Shiba’s part to flaunt his supposed knowledge of the Manchu and Mongol languages, his college major. In countless instances, he has his Manchu characters speak using Manchu words or phrases, or he himself employs Manchu terms while describing Manchu history or culture, of course in katakana renderings. The problem is that many of these are simply incorrect. Some are slightly off and easily corrected. Others are way off, but ultimately recognizable to those knowledgeable of Manchu. Probably a third of them are completely unrecognizable. Were Shiba still alive, I could contact him and ask what he meant, but that avenue was shut off some eight years ago.

Interestingly, this is something Herman Wouk does frequently in his two massive World War II novels with Russian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages. It adds authenticity to a historical novel, having the characters occasionally “speak” in their native tongue, and makes it seem as though the author knows that about which he speaks. It is frankly not a lot different from the footnote to a foreign-language source in a scholarly work. The difference between Herman Wouk and Shiba Ryōtarō in this context, though, is that I have never found Wouk to have made a single language mistake, and I have made a point of looking up every foreign word I did not already know that appears in his many historical novels.

How is a translator to finesse this problem? When I have been able, through consultation with colleagues who specialize in Manchu and Mongol to ascer-tain the correct form of a Manchu or Mongol term, I have rendered them according to the modern romanization schemes. When I cannot figure them out, I simply skip the romanized term. Shiba always gives the alleged meaning of these Manchu or Mongol terms, because of course he does not expect his Japanese readers to know them. I have simply jumped directly into English when the katakana expression makes no sense and elided any linguistic complexity in those difficult cases.

However, one potentially serious problem still remains. That is the names of his Manchu characters which he occasionally feels he must translate to be meaningful, and these of course cannot be elided. Some of the names do not mean what he says they do, and others are completely inauthentic as Manchu names. I shall spare readers here the details, but suffice it to say: what do you

218

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

do when a specific character is called X in Manchu, because he or she is meant or hoped to embody that quality, but X does not, in fact, translate as that quality? Again, I have no solution to this problem but simply want to raise it.

There is one point in the text at which three Mongol generals submit their allegiance with all attendant pomp to the Great Khan of the Jurchen people (the Manchus). Their Mongolian names are given a number of times in katakana. Suspecting that they were based on historical personages but having not a clue as to how their names might be romanized, I contacted several Mongolists in the United States and Japan—Christopher Atwood of Indiana University, Harayama Akira 原山煌 of Momoyama Gakuin University, and Nakami Tatsuo 中見立夫 of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. None of these specialists could figure out the names, which simply did not ring any bells for them, although Mongolian names are not strange to them in the least.

This issue led Professor Nakami in an e-mail message to go on at length about a more telling issue which concerns the fault lines within the entire genre of historical fiction. He was explaining why he so disliked Shiba Ryōtarō’s work, first and foremost because he wrote fiction for a mass audience. Unlike Inoue Yasushi 井上靖 (1907–91) who relied on top-flight scholars to advise him on several of his many historical novels—for example, for Tonkō 敦煌 (Dunhuang), a novel about the period in the Tang when that cave site was sealed with countless manuscripts inside, he consulted with Fujieda Akira 藤枝晃 (1911–98); for Fūtō 風涛 (Wind and waves), a novel about Korea under the Mongol yoke, he consulted with Okada Hidehiro 岡田英弘 (b. 1931); and for Tenpyō no iraka 天平の甍 (The Roof Tile of Tenpyō), a novel about several young Japanese who travel to China in the early eighth century with one of the periodic embassies from Japan to pursue Buddhist studies and from which several members work to convince the great monk Ganjin 鑑真

(C. Jianzhen, 688–763) to come to Japan, he consulted with Andō Kōsei 安藤更生 (1900–70)14—Shiba either did all the work himself or relied on 14 Tonkō (Inoue 1981), with translations into English by Jean Oda Moy, Tun-huang: A Novel (Tokyo, New York: Kodansha International, 1978), into German by Siegfried Schaarschmidt, Die Höhlen von Dun-Huang: Roman (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), intro French by Jean Guiloineau, Les chemins du désert (Paris: Stock, 1982), and at least three times into Chinese by the Pomegranate Red Writing Group 石榴紅文字工作坊, Dunhuang 敦煌 (Taibei: Huatian wenhua gonsi, 1995), by Dong Xuechang 董学昌, Dunhuang 敦煌

(Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1982), and by Liu Musha 劉慕沙, Dunhuang 敦煌

(Taibei: Yuanliu chuban gonsi, 1991); Fūtō (Inoue 1963), with translations into English by James T. Araki, Wind and Waves: A Novel (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989), into French by Corinne Atlan, Vent et vagues: le roman de Kubilai-Khan (Arles: Philippe Picquier, 1993), and into Chinese as Wenhai fengtao 文海风涛, ed. Guangdongsheng

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

219

lesser lights. The distinction, in Nakami’s view and undoubtedly in many educated Japanese readers’ views as well, is between Inoue Yasushi as bungō

文豪 (literary giant) and Shiba Ryōtarō as taishū sakka 大衆作家 (mass market writer).15

On one final concern on which I chink Shiba does relatively well: his novel takes place in the early seventeenth century, a time when the modern entities of “Japan,” “China,” and “Korea” were not at all well formulated in political, nation-state terms among ordinary people. That has not stopped other historical dramatists from assuming that a twentieth-century perspective on the nation-state has always and forever existed throughout East Asia. Shiba’s main character in Dattan shippūroku is decidedly a man of Hirado rather than a generic “Japanese.” This fact is extremely important to the unfolding of the story, for it is because of his origins in Hirado that he has had contacts with Chinese merchants (and, as it develops, figures from the Chinese underworld) his entire life, and knows the spoken Chinese language of the Zhejiang region; and it is because he has traveled nowhere else in the home islands of Japan that he is familiar with little else in Japan from first-hand experience. Shiba makes this very point several times, and it is a salient and salutary one. Similarly, there is a Korean character midway through the first volume who behaves in a manner more Confucian than the contemporaneous Ming Chinese government to which he nonetheless feels an almost subliminal bond of fidelity, even while zuojia xiehui 广东省作家协会(Guangdong Provincial Writers’ Association) (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1993); and Tenpyō no iraka (Inoue 1957) with translations into English by James T. Araki, The roof tile of Tempyō (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975), into French by René Sieffert, La tuile de Tenpyō: roman (Paris: Publications orientalistes de France, 1985), into German by Oscar Benl (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), and in Chinese three times by Lou Shiyi 楼适夷, Tianping zhi meng 天平之甍 (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1963; reprinted Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980), Chen Dewen 陈德文, Tianping zhi meng, lishiju 天平之甍：历史剧 (Roof tile of Tenpyō, a historical drama) (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1978), and by the Pomegranate Red Writing Group, Tianping zhi meng (Taibei: Jiuda wenhua, Wanxiang tushu, 1992). These translations were readily available from NACSIS-Webcat; there are undoubtedly many others as well.

Inoue was a prolific author in his day; among his other historical fiction set in China are Kōzui 洪水 (The Flood) (Shinchōsha, 1962), translated into English by John Bester as Flood, in Modern Japanese Authors, vol. 4 (Hara Publishing Co., 1964), and Kōshi 孔子

(Confucius) (Shinchōsha, 1989), translated into English by Roger K. Thomas, Confucius, a Novel (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1992), into French by Daniel Struve, Confucius, roman (Arles: Stock, 1992), and into Chinese twice by Liu Musha, Kongzi 孔子 (Taibei: Shibao wenhua chuban qiye youxian gongsi, 1990) and Zheng Minqin 郑民钦, Kongzi (Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe, 1990).

15 Personal e-mail communication from Nakami Tatsuo, 24 August 2002.

220

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

he despises individual members of it. I admire also Shiba’s telling of how the Manchu leadership slowly comes to see itself as a distinct “ethnic group”—not his term and perhaps inappropriate—and ultimately to create its own dynastic structure and finally to contemplate attacking and conquering the Ming. The very fact that throughout the novel he refers to the “Ming” or “Great Ming”

rather that to “China” is an indication of his sensitivity to this important issue.

Conclusion: The Bohr Atom

I think we can all accept the fact that there are not neatly separable realms of history, fiction, and myth, each with comfortable barriers and distinct constituencies. Each of these realms influences the others and washes over into the others’ terrain. By the same token, this does not mean that history and literature are really the same, the only significant difference being the truth claims of the writer, a view that has commanded some support of late in the academy. If we can dispense with the idea of history as a science, even a soft science, what are we left with once we accept the fact that literature—even myth—influences our understanding of the past? Do we then throw up our hands and give in, somewhat nihilistically, to the impossibility of ever saying anything of meaning? Clearly not. Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), the father of the Anglophone novel, noted several centuries ago that he wanted to make his epistolary novel Clarissa seem real, not because he wanted people to think that the letters in it were the genuine article but “to avoid hurting that kind of Historical Faith, which Fiction itself is genuinely read with, tho’ we know it to be Fiction.”16 As writers we create “history” as we create “fiction.” History does not simply exist waiting for us to discover it, nor does it fall from the sky—that, I would argue, is the terrain occupied by myth.

For most of us, the history that we write will be read by precious few and is unlikely to influence even a majority of those in the academy. We live in a strange world—looking down our noses at people who pander to the masses and sighing at how ignorant of history every new college class appears to be.

When government bureaucrats bemoan the widespread basic historical ignorance of the young, they usually mean ignorance of a whitewashed, decidedly didactic version of our own history. For most people, though, history only lives in television dramas and, if we are really lucky, historical novels. I must confess that when I think or nineteenth century America, I still conjure up images of the westerns of my youth: Hugh O’Brian (b. 1925) in my mind will always 16 Cited in Bowersock 1994, pp. 50–51.

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

221

be Wyatt Earp (1848–1929), Kevin Costner’s (b. 1955) attempts to the contrary notwithstanding.

Do we, as academics, do much of a service by devoting our time to debunking historical novels and movies? Just in recent years, Oliver Stone’s JFK became a feeding frenzy for American historians, and Steven Spielberg’s Amistad and Schindler’s List were not too far behind. The fear, justifiable as it is, is that most young Americans, and many not so young, get their history from populariza-tions, movies, and fiction. So, just to play devil’s advocate, what is the difference if young people all think there was an elaborate conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy? The answer has to be: It’s just not true. But, so what? Hugh O’Brian was not Wyatt Earp either, a fact I know and think largely irrelevant. Is it a slippery slope from there to fiction or pseudofactual stories about events much more important in our times, such as those concocted by Holocaust deniers anywhere or Nanjing Massacre deniers in Japan?

The French classicist Pierre Vidal-Naquet (b. 1930) has described how he feels he must take precious years away from his own research time to disproving what strikes most of us as the patent nonsense of the Holocaust deniers, principally in Europe, because the frauds they perpetrate demand exposure.17

I would like to call this the Bohr atom phenomenon for the following reasons. We all tend to think of the structure of the atom as a nucleus of protons and neutrons with a bunch of electrons whizzing around at extremely rapid speeds. This model of the atom was devised by the great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr (1885–1962), who even at the time he received the Nobel Prize in 1922 realized that his model was at best insufficient and demonstrably incorrect. And, yet, to this day we and, I dare say, many scientists still tend to think of the atom in the manner that Bohr pictured it. Most of us cannot possibly understand how an atom should properly be pictured—with the mixture of equations, energy, and matter—and it does little damage in our daily lives to think—to the extent that we do at all—of an atom with protons, neutrons, and electrons in their proper places.

Does it matter then, as one of my students at Harvard put it some years ago, whether Mao wore red sneakers or black ones? Or, to bring this discussion back to the topic at hand, do the kinds of literary license taken by historical novelists like Shiba Ryōtarō really do irreparable harm? Are we not then just like that tiny coterie of quantum mechanics specialists who actually understand how an atom should be construed? I have no hard answers, but these are some of thoughts and doubts. And, to bring the story even closer to home, if we have qualms about certain historical fiction for possibly twisting history for 17 See Vidal-Naquet 1992.

222

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

dramatic effect, should we translate it, thereby expanding the potential readership for good or ill? By doing so, are we, to be a bit melodramatic, sleeping with the enemy? I should add that the project of which the volume I am translating is part was initiated between Donald Keene and the Japan Foundation, because both felt that the Japanese novels that have been translated to date do not, on the whole, reflect Japanese readers’ literary tastes. I should add that Keene and Shiba were close friends, but I doubt that had anything to do with it.

In the midst of my work on this translation and on Shiba himself, I found in a long online interview with Donald Keene some interesting comments made in the context of the appearance of another Shiba novel that had then just come out as part of this same series. The author of the essay is explaining the reasons for Shiba’s popularity and why he wrote so much about certain periods in history.

Individual opportunity is maximized not during periods of superficial stability, but rather in turbulent eras like the Sengoku period or the transitional phase between the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji Restoration. In many of Shiba’s works, people who lived in such tumultuous times are depicted in vivid and dynamic detail.

In fact, it is this vividness that explains the popularity of Shiba’s historical fiction. Once touched by Shiba’s pen, people who actually existed centuries ago are brought to brilliant life in the reader’s mind.

“I knew what Yamanouchi Yōdō did, what he was against, and the opinions he voiced,” says Keene, “but no documents tell us what kind of person he was.

When I read Shiba’s story, however, I gained insight into the motivation behind Yōdō’s actions. That’s something you don’t get from history books.”18

What then should we aim for when translating historical fiction? Do we attempt to recreate the world of the novel in language redolent of past times and different places? Shiba, for example, uses contemporary grammatical forms for all conversations involving one or more non-Japanese, but he frequently adds local dialect when there are only Japanese conversing. What he does not use is contemporary slang, for obvious reasons, I would assume. However, that opposite approach can work, if extremely skillfully applied. Pat Hanan’s translations of late Ming and late Qing novels brilliantly convey a time and place different from our own in an English that sounds very down-under to my ears.19 I have opted for a style that eschews contemporary colloquialisms and, of course, 18 See: www.lookjapan.com/LBsc/02FebCF.htm.

19 Li Yu, A Tower for the Summer Heat, trans. Patrick Hanan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-of-the-Century Chinese Romantic Novels, trans.

Patrick Hanan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995).

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

223

anachronisms—namely, anything that sounds as if it was informed by events after the early seventeenth century, especially specific knowledge or expressions or metaphors based on such knowledge formed after the Qing dynasty came into being—but I have also gone for a style that may sound somewhat stilted to many ears.

This essay ultimately raises far more questions than it can possibly answer.

The issues involved in translating fiction, historical or otherwise, are many, and they are likely never to be resolved to anyone’s particular delight. By the same token, however, they deserve our continued attention and investigation.

References

Bowersock, G.W. 1994. Fiction as History: Nero to Julian. University of California Press.

Chin, Shunshin, 1971a. 陳舜臣. Ahen sensō 阿片戦争 (The Opium War). 3 vols.

Kōdansha.

―――. 1971b. Jitsuroku Ahen sensō 実録阿片戦争 (The Opium War, a True Account).

Chūō Kōron Sha.

―――. 1971c. Pekin yūyūkan 北京悠々館. Kōdansha.

―――. 1982. Taihei tengoku 太平天国. Kōdansha.

Clavell, James. 1975. Shogun: A Novel of Japan. New York: Atheneum.

Inoue, Yasushi. 1957. 井上靖. Tenpyō no iraka (The Roof Tiles of Tenpyō). Chūō Kōron Sha.

―――. 1963. Fūtō 風涛 (Wind and Waves). Kōdansha.

―――. 1981. Tonkō 敦煌 (Dunhuang). Iwanami Shoten.

Li Yu. 1992. A Tower for the Summer Heat, trans. Patrick Hanan. Columbia University Press.

―――. 1995. The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-of-the-Century Chinese Romantic Novels, trans. Patrick Hanan. University of Hawai‘i Press.

Shiba Ryōtarō. 1972. 司馬遼太郎 . Kashin 花神. Shinchōsha.

―――. 1973. Yo ni sumu hibi 世に棲む日々. Bungei Shunjū.

―――. 1984. Kō U to Ryū Hō 項羽と劉邦 (Xiang Yu and Liu Bang). Bungei Shunjū.

―――. 1990 Dattan shippūroku 韃靼疾風録 (Chronicle of the Tartar Tempest). Chūō

Kōron Sha.

Shiba Ryōtarō and Chin Shunshin. 1978. Chūgoku o kangaeru, taidan 中国を考

える、対談 (Thinking about China, a Conversation). Bungei Shunjū.

Shiba Ryōtarō and Donald Keene. 1972. Nihonjin to Nihon bunka 日本人と日本文化.

Chūō Kōron Sha.

Shiba Ryōtarō and Yamamura Yūichi. 1983. 山村雄一. Ningen ni tsuite 人間について.

Heibonsha.

224

On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō Into English

Henry Smith, ed. 1980. Learning from Shōgun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy.

Santa Barbara: Program in Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet. 1992. Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Columbia University Press.

Arthur Waley. 1935. The Tale of Genji, A Novel in Six Parta by Lady Murasaki. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Herman Wouk. 1971. The Winds of War. New York: Little, Brown.

―――. 1974. Sensō no arashi 戦争の嵐, trans. Kunitaka Chūji 邦高忠二. Hayakawa Shobō.

―――. 1978. War and Remembrance. New York: Little, Brown.

―――. 1979. Zhanzheng fengyun 战争风云, trans. Shi Xianrong 施咸荣 et al. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe.

―――. 1993. The Hope: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown.

―――. 1994. The Glory: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown.

Yamaoka Sōhachi. 1981–84. 山岡荘八. Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康. Reprinted in thirteen volumes. Kōdansha.

■ Source: “Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source That No One Person Would Dare Face Alone,” China Review International 12.1 (Spring 2005), 15–28.

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source that No One Person Would Dare Face Alone

Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 and Zhao Fengtian 趙豐田, original compilers; translation by Shimada Kenji 島田虔次 et al. Ryō Keichō nenpu chōhen 梁啟超

年譜長編 ([annotated Japanese translation of] Liang Qichao nianpu chang-bian = Chronological biography of Liang Qichao, full edition). Five volumes.

Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004. 426, 57 pp. ¥8600, isbn 4000270613 (vol. 1). 477

pp. ¥8600, isbn 4000270621 (vol. 2). 522 pp. ¥8600, isbn 400027063x (vol. 3).

541 pp. ¥8600, isbn 4000270648 (vol. 4). 478, 89 pp. ¥9000, isbn 4000270656

(vol. 5).

I think it would be safe to say that not only is the academic organization of Japanese and Western sinology (as well as numerous other fields in the humanities and social sciences) different but the two are virtually incommensurate. Whereas in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe, young academic novices are sent out to find their own topics that have “never been done” (or done poorly) and thus stake their claim to a place in the “field”

on the basis of an “original” contribution at such a relatively early age, their counterparts in Japan enter the mainstream usually by joining ongoing mul-tigenerational research or study groups (variously dubbed kenkyūkai 研究会, kenkyūhan 研究班, kyōdō kenkyū 共同研究, and the like)—some of which meet regularly for years—slowly learning their trade through contacts with their peers and elders and subsequently with those younger than they. This latter process, especially in research on premodern Chinese humanities, often involves reading especially difficult texts as a group, possibly annotating and punctuating them for the first time, and then often publishing them also as a group effort in modern Japanese, Chinese with Japanese reading punctuation, or both. This practice has been going on at Kyoto University, for example, for nearly a century. The Japanese system, then, as a rule does not lay primary stress on articulating an independent position at a comparatively early stage in one’s career, but delays that gratification until one reaches what those of us in the West would consider mid-career.

This system might be crushing to a young person who has something distinctive to say and must constantly defer to his academic superiors, men

226

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source

and women who control the sources to fund research groups and access to participation in them. While such an argument may make some logical sense, in nearly thirty years of contact and involvement with a host of such academic I study groups I have rarely seen it happen. Democracy seldom plays a role in academic dealings anywhere in the world, and in this regard Japan is no exception.1

The academic brokers in Japanese sinology are also the first people approached by publishing houses when the latter wish to put out compilations or collections of one sort or another, and the former usually tap the members of their research groups and the coterie of their past students to fulfill such a task. By the same token, these same brokers tend to be the ones with enough cachet in the academic and publishing worlds to approach publishing houses about various multiauthor projects. In fact, it is the usual practice for a research group to come to an end by publishing at least a collection of selected essays from the ongoing work of its constituents. One does frequently see publication of multivolume compilations of resources on Chinese history and culture, such as series of comprehensive histories (with multiple authors), encyclopedias and dictionaries, source collections often with annotations and reprints of original Chinese materials, and a wealth of annotated translations of primary materials—all far too extensive to list here but nonetheless indispensable to all scholars in the field of Chinese studies. Recent years alone have witnessed exceptionally important collections in all of these areas, often (although by no means always) the end result of group research projects. This is anything but the trend in the West, with a number of notable exceptions, such as the Cambridge History of China (which has been appearing for more than a quarter century and still has at least three more volumes set to materialize) and the Science and Civilisation in China series from the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University—both, interestingly, coming out of Great Britain, though with contributors from elsewhere as well.

The philosophy behind all of this group activity in Japan is, of course, that everyone benefits from everyone else’s work on a joint project. This rarely works well in a society that prizes and rewards individualism above all else. If, for example, an individual were to set out to read all the important newspapers and journals of the late Qing and early Republican periods, that would constitute an overwhelming task requiring a half dozen years or more. With a group, though, these serials might be divided up and their contents reported on at regular meetings, a process that would ensure that now ten or fifteen scholars 1 One is reminded of the following riddle: Q: What is the difference between a tenured professor and a terrorist? A: You can negotiate with a terrorist.

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source 227

would share all the information unearthed by their collective work. While others are doing the reporting, one can devote one’s time to other research work, perhaps in other study groups. I heard several years ago of one group at Kyoto University that met for over ten years to read and discuss jointly a vernacular Daoist work from the Six Dynasties period. The end result was a punctuated, annotated edition of this hitherto little-known text now made available to a larger—although admittedly still rather circumscribed—scholarly audience.

The general academic direction I have outlined above fits the mold of the Kyoto area more closely than it does the Tokyo region (or any other, for that matter). There are many such groups on the Kantō Plain, but in the Kansai they in fact form the centerpiece of academic life, from graduate school to retirement. It is thus no surprise to find that the extraordinary work under review here is the product of Kyoto University faculty and students ranging in age (as of 2005) from twenty-seven to early eighties (born in 1917 and now deceased).

Shortly after his retirement from the faculty of Kyoto University, the late Professor Shimada Kenji (d. 2000) privately organized a research group there to translate the long chronological biography of Liang Qichao (1873–1929)—

arguably the most important figure of the late Qing period—which was initially compiled decades ago by Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936) and Zhao Fengtian (1906–1980). There was at this time a research group at the same university that was beginning to examine the impact of Japan and the Japanese on Liang’s thinking and writing. Liang spent over a decade in Japan during his most formative and productive years following the collapse of the Hundred Days Reform Movement of 1898. The latter group was organized by Hazama Naoki 狭間直樹 (b. 1937), then a professor at Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in the Humanities and also a member of Shimada’s team. Hazama’s group would meet every two weeks for the next four years before publishing an indispensable collection of essays: Kyōdō kenkyū, Ryō Keichō: Seiyō kindai shisō

juyō to Meiji Nihon 共同研究，梁啓超：西洋近代思想受容と明治日本

(Group research on Liang Qichao: The reception of modern Western thought and Meiji Japan) (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1999). It was promptly translated into Chinese and published as Liang Qichao, Mingzhi Riben, Xifang: Riben Jingdu Daxue Renwen Kexue Yanjiusuo gongtong yanjiu baogao 梁啟超，明治日

本,西方:日本京都大学人文科学研究所共同研究報吿 (Beijing: Shehui

Kexueyuan Wenxian Chubanshe, 2001) with prefatory essays by Yang Tianshi 楊天石 (b. 1936) of the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Jin Chongji 金冲及 (b. 1930), professor emeritus from Fudan University and president of the Historians’ Association of China; and Zhang Pengyuan 張朋園 (b. 1926), research fellow emeritus from the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica.

228

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source

I was fortunate enough to be present in 1993 at one of the early meetings of Professor Shimada’s parallel translation group. He had amassed a group of eight or nine committed scholars who understood that translating the 1,200-plus pages of the definitive 1983 edition of Liang’s chronological biography was to be a long-term and difficult effort; it ultimately consumed over a decade, and Shimada did not live to see it completed or published. However, no one was likely to pass up the utterly extraordinary opportunity to work so closely with a man so revered in sinological circles both in Japan and abroad.

Shimada certainly had his scholarly opponents, some of them fine scholars in their own right, but few commanded such widespread authority and respect.

At that early meeting, one young scholar (then thirty years old and an assistant to Professor Hazama) presented his draft translation of one of the early sections of the text. Shimada listened patiently, following along with a printed text of the draft distributed in advance to the members of the group. When the young man was done, Shimada politely suggested that it might better be translated in such-and-such a way, and then from his mouth there flowed forth the most extraordinarily elegant and most mellifluous modern literary Japanese that I have ever heard. It was a sight and sound to behold, in large part because it marked a quantum leap in the respective educational backgrounds of the constituent members of the research group. People just don’t learn to compose prose like that any more.

In addition to Shimada and Hazama, the other members of the group included Inami Ryōichi 井波陵一 (b. 1953), Kyoto University; Mori Tokihiko 森時彦 (b. 1947), Kyoto University; Eda Kenji 江田憲治 (b. 1955), then at Kyoto Sangyō University, now at Kyoto University; Ishikawa Yoshihiro 石川

禎浩 (b. 1963), Kyoto University; Okamoto Takashi 岡本隆司 (b. 1965), Kyoto Prefectural University; Takashima Kō 高島航 (b. 1970), Kyoto University; Murakami Ei 村上衛 (b. 1973), Kyoto University; and Hayakawa Atsushi 早川

敦 (b. 1978), graduate student, Kyoto University. Murakami, Takashima, and Hayakawa were not members of the original team. As a first draft of the translation was nearing completion in the year following Shimada’s death, Yang Tianshi and Sang Bing 桑兵 (b. 1956), a brilliant young professor of modern Chinese history from Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, were invited at different times to Kyoto to help decipher the countless and often highly obscure literary references, pen names or literary sobriquets of men mentioned in the text, and other difficult textual points. Jin Chongji helped in a similar manner while serving as a visiting professor at Kyoto University. This aspect of the translation is practically worth the price of admission, so to speak; there are numerous instances in which individuals’ names are given by a highly obscure

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source 229

secondary or tertiary pseudonym, and the translators have tracked most of these down, pen names not found in any ordinary biographical dictionary.

The completed Japanese edition of Liang Qichao’s chronological biography contains a translation of the entire Chinese original, incorporating the notes and all the front and back matter included by the Chinese compilers; numerous additional notes of many and sundry sorts added by the translators; bibliographies of works in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages; a comprehensive index to all five volumes of the translation; indexes for Chinese, Japanese, and Western personal names; a twenty-five-page “explanatory postface” ( kaisetsu 解説) by Hazama; and a shorter “afterward” ( atogaki あとがき ) by Inami.

In the end, the 1,200-plus pages of the original Chinese text turn into over 2,500 pages of Japanese. The entire project is daunting in the extreme—not the least because of its astronomical price, nearly $450 at today’s rate of exchange.

In addition to a discussion of how the translation was executed, a review of a translated text should say something about the worthiness of the work itself as well as the quality of the translation. As noted above, in the estimation of virtually every scholar working on the late Qing period, Liang Qichao looms extremely large in Chinese political and intellectual history. He virtually invented the Chinese political press single-handedly and helped create its quasi-modern language. He knew or came into contact with almost every reformer, revolutionary, and their opponents as well as innumerable scholars in both China and Japan. His writings set the tone and level of numerous political and scholarly debates at the turn of the last century. Nevertheless, little from his collected writings, Yinbingshi heji 飲冰室合集 (Collected works from the ice-drinker’s studio), has yet to be translated into English. Only two book-length works have appeared: his history of Qing thought, Qingdai xueshu gailun 清代學術概論 (Outlines of scholarship in the Qing period), which could use updating, although it remains an excellent point of departure, and his history of early Chinese philosophy, Xian Qin zhengzhi sixiang shi 先秦政治思想史

(History of pre-Qin political thought), which could use serious updating.2

2 See Immanuel C.C. Hsü, trans., Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). Compare this translation with the complete edition prepared by Ono Kazuko 小野和子, Shindai gakujutsu gairon: Chūgoku no runessansu 清代

学術概論：中国のルネッサンス (Outlines of scholarship in the Qing period: China’s Renaissance) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1974). And, L.T. Chen, trans., History of Chinese Political Thought during the Early Tsin Period (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930). There is, as well, one book-length work in French translation, albeit even earlier: Jean Escarra and Robert

230

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source

Will a Japanese translation of Liang’s chronological biography improve the situation? There are numerous Chinese works in Japanese translation that have existed for decades and that have been assiduously ignored by Western scholars. Indeed, some texts have been translated so often that it has become difficult in Japan to teach classical Chinese using them; students run to use the easily available translations rather than struggle with the originals. For the modern era, however, how will a translation of this particular work into Japanese help us? I would argue that if we are serious as scholars about what we do and if we approach the world of scholarly endeavor as an international and collaborative project, then it must be viewed even from our limited, myopic line or vision as a great and unexpected blessing. How so?

Everyone who works primarily in the late Qing period, especially those in intellectual and cultural history, has had to make use of Liang’s nianpu.

There is simply no avoiding it. Liang knew so many people and had contact through the mail with so many more that he virtually lived the period itself.

Easier access to Liang’s chronological biography pushes the scholarly bar one level up. Before assessing samples of the translation itself, two other points about the work recommend it to all scholars of the period. Insofar as they were able, the translators have checked the numerous quotations in the entries against the originals. Thus, for example, the editors frequently support a statement about Liang’s life with a paragraph or two from one of a number of contemporaneous documents. In a number of instances, Ding and Feng inserted incorrect characters into the texts. These have been meticulously sorted out—

to the extent possible. In addition, the translators have included notes clarify-ing that the language used in the extensive citations from documents of the period reflects the usage of the time.3

Are the difficulties with the original Chinese text reduced or eliminated with the appearance of this translation? Let’s take three concrete examples (drawn from three different sorts of material) from three different decades in Liang’s life and parse them. The text of Liang’s nianpu is organized in a fairly uncomplicated manner.

The editors give a simple sentence or two of explanation and then offer as evidence usually a selection from one of his letters or newspaper articles, sometimes a government document such as an imperial edict, or someone else’s letter to him or a piece of writing about him or his activities.

Germain, trans., La conception de la loi et les théories des légistes à la veille des Ts’in (Beijing: China Booksellers, 1926).

3 Bracketed information provided in footnotes in original.

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source 231

Let us look first at an early entry, one from late 1898, shortly after Liang reached Japan in the wake of the failed Reform Movement (p. 169 in the original—all Chinese citations have been returned to fantizi 繁體字).

先生初到東京時，住牛込區馬場下町.楊維新與丁文江書，記當時和

日人往來情形説：

初到東京時，似系住牛込區馬場下町（原住待查),當時大隈左

右如犬養毅,高田早苗, 栢原文太郎(原注此君與任公先生交厚,

當時約為兄弟) 時有來往, 并力為講解日本文法, (原注和文漢讀

法為任公先生著) 彼時事，弟非目見不能詳言.(“楊維新與丁在

君書”)

In this instance neither the introductory passage by the compilers nor the letter provided as evidence is itself terribly difficult. The Japanese translation (vol. 1, pp. 288–289) reads as follows:

先生は東京に着いた当初、牛込区馬場下町に住んでいた。楊

維新は丁文江に宛てた書簡の中で、当時の日本人との交際の

様子を記して次のように言う。

「

〔任公先生は〕東京に着いた当初、牛込区馬場下町(要調

査—原注)に住んでいたようです。当時、大隈〔重信〕の側

近であった犬養毅, 高田早苗，柏原文太郎（この人は任公先

生と親密であり、このころ兄弟の契りを結んでいました—原

注）は、しばしば往来していただけでなく、彼に日本語の文

法を精力的に教えていました（『和文漢読法』は任公先生の

著作です—原注）。その当時のことは、私が自分の目で直接

見たわけではないので、詳しくは申し上げられません。」（楊

維新「丁在君あての書簡」

And my own English translation follows:

When Liang first arrived in Tokyo, he was living in Baba Shitamachi, Ushigome Ward. In a letter to Ding Wenjiang, Yang Weixin noted his various associations with Japanese at the time and went on to write: When [Liang Rengong] first arrived in Tokyo, he seems to have taken up residence in Baba Shitamachi, Ushigome Ward (which was under surveillance—note in original). Not only did Inukai Tsuyoshi, Takada Sanae, and Kashiwabara Buntaro (Liang was particularly close to this man,

232

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source

having concluded a fictive kinship bond with him—note in original), all intimate associates of Ōkuma Shigenobu, frequently visit him there at the time, but they were energetically teaching him Japanese grammar.

(The Hewen Handu fa [Reading Japanese the Chinese way] was a work by Liang—note in original). I did not directly witness this myself at the time, and thus I cannot speak about it in great detail. (Yang Weixin, “Letter to Ding Zaijun”)

As noted above, the original Chinese is not particularly challenging in this instance. Then, what added value does the annotated Japanese translation offer us now? First of all, there were two errors in the Chinese original that the Japanese rendition simply fixed without so much as a mention: the character zhu 住 in the first “note in original” should be zhu 注, as it is given for the second and third such “notes”; and the first character of Kashiwabara Buntarō’s name is given incorrectly as 栢 instead of 柏. Neither of these errors earth-shatteringly changes the meaning beyond all repair. But, errors are errors.

Second, the Japanese translation has a number of additional annotations.

One such note (no. 274, p. 410) traces all of the residences Liang took up in his first months in Japan, using Japanese government archives, and is able to confirm one address—given slightly earlier in a Minbao essay cited in the nianpu (see p. 278)—but the address given here that was, according to the original note, “under surveillance” could not be confirmed. In any event, “Baba Shitamachi” is now located in Shinjuku Ward.

Third, two of the added Japanese notes (nos. 273 and 275, p. 410) fill in details on the names given in this letter. We learn that Yang Weixin (Dingfu 鼎甫) was also from Guangdong; he studied at the Datong School in Yokohama and later (June 1909) graduated from the Teacher Training Course at Waseda University.

In another we learn that Kashiwabara Buntarō (1869–1936) of Chiba Prefecture graduated from the Tōkyō Senmon School (forerunner of Waseda University), received the Ōkuma Prize for his excellent schoolwork, and then took up a post on the board of trustees there when it became Waseda. In 1898 with the founding of the Tō-A Dōbunkai 東亞同文學 (East Asian Common Culture Association), he became one of its supervisors and played host to Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) and Liang when they took refuge in Japan several weeks before the information in this entry took effect.

Finally, we are directed to a footnote concerning the Hewen Handu fa (no. 3, p. 413), which provides considerable information on this fascinating and little-known text (more like a crib sheet of sorts) for Chinese wishing to acquire a reading knowledge of Japanese in a hurry. It was composed by Liang and

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source 233

Luo Xiaogao 羅孝高 (Luo Jin 羅晉), another Cantonese and disciple of Kang Youwei, studying at Waseda from before the 1898 Reform Movement.

Does the addition of this information make the Japanese translation worth our attention? I think there can be little doubt of this. Does it merit the purchase of the Ryō Keichō nenpu chōhen at its hefty price? Perhaps not for individuals whose native language is not Japanese, but for libraries it is certainly a must-buy. Interestingly, I suspect that probably every Japanese who works on this period in Chinese history will buy it despite the price, a fact known intimately by the marketing and editorial staff at Iwanami Shoten, a publishing house not in the business of academic charity.

For the sake of clarity and potential interest, let us now open the original Chinese text (1983 edition) randomly—and in the middle of page 696, we find the following entry within the year 1914:

九月間,先生曾致湯覺頓一書,可見他當日求去不得的困難情形:

前示敬悉,尊恙乃爾綿惙,真所不解,比復何如耶？請假事果

如公所料,不見派代理,且僅許半月,究當改以何法求自脱,公

宜為我熟思之。萬不獲免,擬請改為學術的,更其名曰研究會,

公謂如何？亦望與季常一商之。

On the surface, the opening sentence is, as usual, fairly straightforward, and few scholars will even need to avail themselves of a dictionary: “In the ninth lunar month of the year [ca. October 1914], Liang sent a letter to Tang Juedun from which we can discern that at that time he [Tang] was in a difficult situation having sought to take a leave of absence but having not been permitted to do so.”

The only real problem this sentence might pose is the identity of Tang Juedun, who, it turns out, is Tang Rui 湯叡 (1878–1916), as a handy footnote added by the Japanese translators makes clear. He was a figure in reformist politics and also a disciple of Kang Youwei—and, like both Kang and Liang, a native of Guangdong Province; he later fled with them to Japan after the failure of the Hundred Days Reform, returning only after the 1911 Revolution.

He served in early Republican governments in various economic posts, before falling afoul of Yuan Shikai and being assassinated by a local militarist. The Japanese translation renders this first sentence in the same crisp, clear-cut style (vol. 3, p. 397):

九月、先生は湯覺頓[湯叡]に書簡を送った。当時、彼が辞職

を願っても許されない困難な状況にいたことが分かる。

234

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source

No problems so far. The difficulties arise with the citation from Liang’s letter itself, which is written in an altogether different style, accessible without a dictionary only to old pros, and with a dictionary to a handful more who have reasonably good sinological training. To be sure, scholars have been using Liang’s nianpu for many years. However, passages such as this one, which can be replicated for its difficulty hundreds of times in this text, are precisely the sort of stumbling blocks for Western historians and social scientists who work on the late Qing and twentieth-century China, those of us whose sinological skills are not as well-honed as they might be.

Before slugging it out with an effort at rendering this part of the nianpu entry into English, let us look at how the Japanese translators deal with it: 前のお手紙、敬んで拝読いたしました。あなたの御病気がそ

こまで危ないものだったとは、まったく知りませんでした。

近ごろはいかがでしょうか。休暇願の件ですが、あなたのお

考えのようにすると、代理が任命されません。半月ほど休暇

をもらえるのが関の山です。結局どんな方法に改めて逃げ出

す道を求めたらいいのか、私のためによくよくお考えになっ

て下さい。どうしても辞めさせてもらえなかったら、学術的

なものに改め、名称を研究会に変更することを願い出るつも

りです。あなたはいかが思われますか。季常ともー度御相談

いただきたいと存じます。

Not only does the Japanese capture the meaning of the original, along with nuances and confusions, I would argue, but also, like all good translations, it helps us to read the original itself. It hones closely to the Chinese text without falling into the trap of being too literal a translation. As an experiment, let us translate the Japanese and then go back to the Chinese, the way we might if we came to a difficult passage in the original and took refuge in a translation into our own mother tongue:

I respectfully read your recent letter. I had no idea that your illness had progressed to such a state. How have you been lately? As concerns your request for a leave of absence, if we do as you suggest, a replacement will not be appointed.

The best one can hope for is about half a month’s leave. Please give some careful thought to my situation and what route we should take to avoid this impasse.

If in the end I am not allowed to step down, I plan to change [our organization] into [an] academic one and to apply to change its name to the

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source 235

“Research Group.” Do you have any thoughts about this? I want you to discuss this with Jichang, too.

Not at all clear on who “Jichang” might be, I consulted one of several name indexes at the back of volume 5 of the Japanese translation, and there I discovered that “Jichang” was a sobriquet for Jian Nianyi 蹇念益 (1878–1930), who hailed from Guizhou, studied at Waseda University from 1902, returned to China after the advent of the Republic, and became involved in politics and later scholarship in the early Republican period.

Looking back now at the original Chinese text, it slowly but surely appears to be less and less thorny. First-glance difficulties in the original begin to clear up, and truly tough passages begin to jump off the page. The serious student of this text can then go back and look at these places more closely in the original, and possibly learn some Chinese usages in this way (indeed, s/he may find, on occasion, that the translation is in error). In addition, those places where the text appears to be a bit obscure in the original remain so in the Japanese translation: “I plan to change [our organization] into [an] academic one and to apply to change its name to the ‘Research Group.’ ”

Finally, let us now move to the final entry in the nianpu, an obituary for Liang from a possibly surprising source. First, the Chinese original (pp. 1210–

1212), with apologies for its length:

又國外反映，據美國《史學界消息》（個人簡訊)載：

梁啟超於一月十九日在北京逝世，終年五十六歲.他早年和已

故的康有為一起, 推行了一些改革, 導致滿清政權於一九一一年

崩潰.一八九八年，當他二十五歲時，曾上書提倡對科舉制度進

行改革，從而為在一九〇五年徹底除這一制度鋪平道路. 在一

八九八年的政變中，他險些喪失生命，以後幾年, 他過着流亡生

活. 在此期間, 他撰寫宣傳政治改革的文章, 登在他擔任編輯的

刊物上. 民國建立後, 他全心致力於歷史科學的教學, 講授，寫

作. 他的政治活動僅限於發起組織進步黨以及後來的研究系—

兩個較孫中山領導的國民黨穩健一些的黨派.

梁先生深受他的老師康有為的兩本進步著作的影響，即

《新學偽經考》和《孔子改制考》—這兩種著作被看作是今

天整個中國史學評論的推動力. 他是‘今文’的堅定維護者.

這一派認為不少古代的存疑著作是在公元頭十年中，出於政

治原因，而被劉歆所纂改. 康，梁對十七至十八世紀的所謂

‘漢學派’的史學評論的深刻研究，以及他們學到的西方方法，

很自然地使他們成為當今史學研究復興的奠基者.

236

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source

梁啟超最新的《合集》（《飲冰室文集》）於一九二七年出

版，共八十卷.另外一些學術著作以單行本出版，對其中三種，

他很自豪, 即《中國歷史研究法》[於1922年出版]《清代學術

概論》和《先秦政治思想史》[於1923年出版], 均出版於一九一

一—一九一二年間. 最後一種已譯成法文.

他的最新著作之一，《要籍解題及其讀法》是當今古籍評論

的最好總結.

在他逝世前，他正在編寫一部巨著《中國文化史》，只有部

份付印.

在一本小自傳《三十自述》裡，梁先生説：“我十八歲初到

上海，第一次拿到一本地圖冊之前，我不知道世界上有五大

洲.（…下第歸，到上海，從坊間購得《瀛環志略》，讀之，

始知有五大洲各國.—此為梁啟超原文，譯者.)”然而就是這個

年輕人，以非凡的精神活力和自成一格的文風，贏得全中國知

識界的領袖頭銜，並保留它一直到去世. 表現在他的文風和他

的思想裡的這種能夠跟上時代變遷的才華，可以説是由於他嚴

格執行他自己常常對人引用的格言：“切勿猶疑以今日之我宣

判昨日之我.”

(梁思莊譯自《美國歷史評論》第34卷670–671頁，1929年4月）

Now, let us take a look at the Japanese translation (vol. 5, pp. 350–351): また、海外の反響については、アメリカの『史学界消息』（個人

簡訊） [Historical News, Personal ] によれば、次のように言う。

「梁啓超が一月十九日に北京で亡くなった。享年五十六

歳。彼は若い頃、すでに故人になった康有為とともにいささ

かの改革を推し進め、満清政府が一九一一年に崩壊するのを

導いた。一八九八年、彼が二十五歳の時、上奏文を捧げて

科挙制度に対して改革を進めるよう提唱したが、それによっ

て、一九〇五年にこの制度を徹底的に廃止除去するための道

を開いた。一八九八年の政変において、彼はあやうく命を落

とす羽目に陥り、以後数年、亡命生活を余儀なくされた。こ

の期間中、彼は政治改革を宣伝する文章を書いて、彼が編集

を担当する刊行物に登載した。中華民国建設後、彼は歴史科

学の指導や、講義、執筆に全力を注いだ。彼の政治活動は、

進歩党及び後の研究系-孫中山[孫文]の国民党よりやや穏健な

二つの党派-を組織したことに限られる。

梁先生は彼の先生である康有為の二冊の進歩的著作の影響

を深く受

けた。すなわち『新學偽經考』と『孔子改制考』

であり、この二つの著作は、今日の中国史学評論全体の推進

力だと見なされている。彼は「今文」の断固たる擁護者だっ

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source 237

た。この一派は、少なからぬ古代の疑わしい著作は、紀元後

十年の間に、政治的原因によって、劉歆の手で改竄された、

と考えた。康、梁は十七世紀から十八世紀にかけての、いわ

ゆる「漢学派」の史学評論について深く研究したし、彼らが

学んだ西洋の方法が、ごく自然に彼らを当代の史学研究復興

の創始者たらしめた。

梁啓超の最も新しい『合集』（『飲冰室文集』）は一九二

七年 [ sic] に出版され、全部で八十卷である。それ以外の学

術的著作はその一部が単行本として出版されており、そのう

ちの三種について、彼は大変な自信を持っていた。すなわち

『中国歴史研究法』[一九二二年出版-脚注]、『清代学術概

論』及び『先秦政治思想史』[一九二三年出版-脚注]であり、

いずれも一九一一年から一二年にかけて出版された。最後の

一種はすでにフランス語訳されている。彼の最新の著作の一

つである『要籍解題及其読法』は、当今の古籍評論の非常に

優れた総括である。

彼は亡くなる直前に、大著『中国文化史』を編纂していた

が、その一部が印刷に付されたに止まる。

小さな自伝である「三十自述」の中で、梁先生は次のよう

に述べている。「私は十八歳ではじめて上海を訪れて、最初

に一冊の地図を手にするまで、世界に五大陸があるなどとは

思つてもみなかつた(。。。試験に失敗した帰りに上海へ立ち

寄った際、町で『瀛環志略』を買って読み、はじめて五大洲

の各国が存在することを知った-これが梁啓超の原文である。

訳者[梁思荘])という。しかしながらこの若者こそ、非凡な精

神的活力と独自の風格を築いた文章によって、全中国知識界

の指導者の地位を勝ち取り、しかも亡くなるまでずっと保持

したのである。彼の文章の風格及び思想の中に表現された、

時代の変化にぴったりついて行ける才能は、彼が厳格に自己

自身に適用し、つねづね人に対して引用した格言によって言

い表すことができる—今日の我によって咋日の我に判決を言

い渡すことに決してためらうな[『清代学術概論』二六。「

今日の我を以て昔日の我を難ずるを惜しまず」]。」（梁思荘

が、『美国歴史評論 ( American Historical Review)』三四、六七〇

～六七一頁、一九二九四月、より訳す）

As it turns out, this entry was originally published in Englisn in the “Personal”

column under “Historical News” in the April 1929 issue of the American Historical Review. I give that note as it appeared in the original AHR with a small number of bracketed comments for clarification:

238

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source

Concerning [his] foreign influence once again, the following was said in the “Personal” [section] of the American “Historical News”: Liang Ch’i-ch’ao [Liang Qichao] died January 19 in Peking, at the age of 56. Early in life he was associated with the late K’ang Yu-wei [Kang Youwei] in initiating the reforms that ended in the collapse of [the]

Manchu régime in 1911. In 1898, at the age of 25, he wrote a memorial advocating revolutionary reforms in the [civil service] examination system, thus paving the way for its final abolition in 1905. In the coup d’état of 1898, he lived in exile for some years, writing on political reform through the medium of periodicals which he edited. After the establishment of the Republic [of China in 1911], he devoted himself more exclusively to teaching, lecturing, and writing on historical subjects; his activities in the political field being confined to the founding of the Chin Pu Tang

[Jinbudang, or Progressive Party], and more recently the Yen Chiu Hsi

[Yanjiuxi, or Research Clique]—two parties which advocated more moderate views than those held by Sun Yat-sen and the Kuo Min Tang

[Guomindang, or Nationalist Party].

Mr. Liang was greatly influenced by two revolutionary works of his teacher, K’ang Yu-wei, “The Forged Classics of the Wang Mang Period”

( Hsin Hsüeh Wei Ching K’ao) [Xinxue weijing Kao; lit., Studies of the forged classics in the Xin dynasty]), and “Confucius’s Programme of Reform”

( K’ung-tzu Kai Chih K’ao) [Kongzi gaizhi kao; lit., Studies of Confucius as an institutional reformer])—two works which may be said to have set in motion the whole Chinese historical criticism of our day. He was a stalwart defender of Chin Wen [Jinwen], or [the] ‘modern text’ school which holds that not a few doubtful texts of antiquity were forged by Liu Xin, for political reasons, in the first decade of the Christian era. The intensive study which both K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao had made of the so-called ‘Han school’ of historical criticism (of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), together with what they had learned of the Western approach, made them the natural founders of a revival of the present-day intellectual renaissance, especially on its historical side.

The latest edition of Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s “Collected Writings” ( Yin Ping Shih Wen Chi [Yinbingshi wenji, Collected writings from the ice-drinker’s studio]) appeared in 1927 in eighty volumes. Some scholarly contributions were published separately; the three in which he took the greatest pride being: “Methods of Investigating Chinese History” ( Chung Kuo Li Shih Yen Chiu Fa [Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa; published in 1922—

note in Chinese text]); “Critical Scholarship during the Ch’ing Dynasty”

( Chi’ing Tai Hsüeh She Kai Lun [Qingdai xueshu gailun, also known as

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source 239

Intellectual Trends of the Qing Period]), and “Chinese Political Thought Prior to the Ch’in Dynasty” ( Hsien Ch’in Cheng Chih Ssu Hsiang Shih [Xian Qin zhengzhi sixiang shi; published in 1923—note in Chinese text]), all published in 1911 and 1912; the last is translated into French. One of his most recent works, “Methods of Studying the Important Classical Books”

( Yao Chi Chieh T’i Chi Ch’ii Tu Fa [Yaoji jieti ji qi dufa]) affords the best summary of the present-day criticism of the great ancient books that has yet appeared. At the time of his death he was engaged on a vast “Cultural History of China” ( Chung Kuo Wen Hua Shih [ Zhongguo wenhua shi]) of which only parts have appeared in print.

In a little autobiographical sketch entitled, “On Reaching the Age of Thirty” [“Sanshi zishu”], Mr. Liang remarked, “Prior to my visit to Shanghai at the age of eighteen, when a world atlas for the first time fell into my hands, I did not know of the existence of the five continents.

(When I visited Shanghai on the way home after having failed in the civil service examination, I purchased in the market and read the Yinghuan zhilüe 瀛環志略 [A brief survey of the maritime circuit], and for the first time I came to understand that there were various countries in the five continents)”—so reads Liang Qichao’s original text (note of Chinese translator). And yet this young man, by extraordinary mental resiliency and an inimitable literary style, captured the intellectual leadership of all China, and retained it till he died. This ability to change with the times, manifested in his literary style as well as in ms ideas, may be attributed, perhaps, to the strict self-application of a motto which he often quoted to others: “Do not hesitate to let your self of to-day pronounce judgment on your self of yesterday.” (Translated [into Chinese for the nianpu] by Liang Sizhuang 梁思莊 [Liang’s daughter] from the American Historical Review 34 [April 1929], pp. 670–671.)

What, then, do we gain by having this new Japanese translation when the original is itself mostly from an English source? First, again, there is the question of errors in the Chinese text. The translation by Liang’s second daughter and fifth child, Liang Sizhuang (1908–1986), of the somewhat stilted English in the AHR piece takes a certain amount of license with the original. At one point the English reads: “In the coup d’état of 1898, he lived in exile for some years, writing on political reform through the medium of periodicals which he edited.”

This phrasing sounds sufficiently innocuous to offend no one, but apparently Ms. Liang wanted a touch more excitement in her father’s early years.

The Chinese text (在一八九八年的政變中,他險些喪失生命,以後幾年,

他過着流亡生活. 在此期間, 他撰寫宣傳政治改革的文章, 登在他擔任

240

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source

編輯刊物上) would more appropriately be rendered: “In the 1898 coup d’état, he found himself in dire straits nearly losing his life, and for several years thereafter he lived in wandering exile. During this period he wrote essays promoting the theme of political reform and contributed to periodicals which he himself edited.” In this instance the Japanese offers a faithful translation of the Chinese—and not the English original.

Second, the Japanese text provides a citation from Liang’s Qingdai xueshu gailun (chapter 26), for the quotation from Liang for the final sentence of this entry in his nianpu. It is the famous chapter in the book (p. 103 in Immanuel C.Y. Hsü’s English translation) in which Liang speaks of himself in the third person and compares himself to his mentor, Kang Youwei.

Third, and most important, are the additional data offered by the Japanese translators in the form of notes. For example, the beginning of the third paragraph about the “latest edition” of Liang’s collected writings (as of 1929, the year of his death) notes that such a work appeared in eighty fascicles in 1927. In fact, we learn (vol. 5, p. 436 n. 44) that this is a reference to the Yichou chongbian Yinbingshi wenji 乙丑重編飲冰室文集 (Collected essays from the ice-drinker’s studio, revised edition of 1925), which was published, as the title indicates, in the “yichou” year, 1925, by Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局.

The Japanese edition also mentions details of the 1926 French translation of Liang’s Xian Qin zhengzhi sixiang shi of 1923. It notes that this French text is listed in the Catalogue des principaux ouvrages sortis des presses Lazaristes à Pékin de 1864 à 1930, compiled by Joseph van den Brandt (Beijing: Henri Vetch, 1933). It should be noted that there is as well a copy in the library of the University of California, Berkeley, from whose online catalog some of this information is derived.

Finally, the translators note that the material in the final paragraph of the nianpu entry from Liang’s autobiographical essay, “Sanshi zishu,” can be found in full, back in a much earlier entry, the first one for 1890 (vol. 1, p. 56; p. 22

of the original). Perhaps the final sentence of that entry—also from “Sanshi zishu”—would help clarify the moment in Liang’s life when he first came to Shanghai: “My eyes caught sight of works translated and published by the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai. Although very interested in them, I didn’t have the luxury to buy any.”

I have tried in this review to indicate the ways in which this monumental new source may help those of us for whom Japanese is not our native language.

That is, you don’t have to be a native Japanophone to find and appreciate the utility of this extraordinary translation. In fact, you probably do not even have to possess particularly stellar Japanese—although it would not hurt to try—to be able selectively to make use of this work.

Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source 241

At the same time, unfortunately, it will probably be many moons before such an important text sees the light of day in English (or any other Western language), the result of a rather narrow-minded scholarly and publishing world that accepts translations of literature, although often grudgingly, but oddly discourages translations of scholarly texts, save those written by great names.

In this instance, filthy lucre remains the driving force. Of course, money lies at the foundation of Japanese publishing, too; the difference is that a large and powerful academic press like Iwanami can easily expect to make back its investment through library and individual sales. Even as book prices rise to stratospheric heights, individual scholars in Japan continue to buy them, despite individual protests; were that not the case, either Iwanami and other such presses would certainly fold, or they would more likely stop publishing books like this one.

Until Western academic publishers start publishing such translations and translations are given their due in academia, I am afraid we will all be better off learning Japanese.

■ Source: “Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan,” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, China Research Monograph 57 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2004), pp. 1–12.

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

During the summer of 1993, I attended some of the initial monthly meetings of Professor Hazama Naoki’s research seminar at Kyoto University. Breaking with custom, he had selected a Sino-Japanese theme, rather than a strictly Chinese historical one, for the subsequent three-year period: the role of Japan as an intermediary in Liang Qichao’s (1873–1929) understanding of modern Western civilization. While this was not an altogether new theme—everyone knew that Liang had spent more than a decade in Japan, beginning with his exile there in 1898, had written voluminously while there, and had certainly been influenced by the experience—the precise nature and actual mode of that influence had not been clearly delineated nor by any means fully understood.

We knew that Liang read many Japanese books that “influenced” him; we knew that he popularized countless two-character Chinese expressions thought to have been coined in Japanese in his serial publications; and we had an idea that he learned much of what he did about the West through Japanese translations of Western works. However, direct connections remained murky at best. Three biographical studies of Liang had already appeared in English and a fourth was soon to come out, but even in Philip Huang’s excellent work—

the most sophisticated in treating the Japanese connection—this linkage was still vague.1

I was therefore fascinated to hear these early seminar presentations in Kyoto that summer and the next. During the academic year 1996–97, as visiting professor at Kyoto University’s Research Institute for the Humanities, I was privileged to participate for a full year, the final extended year, in the seminar.

The experience was both mind opening and exhilarating. Liang Qichao will never appear the same.

1 Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); Chang Hao, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Philip C., Huang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972); Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

243

It struck me that, because of an abiding interest in Liang Qichao and the entire generation of the 1898 Reform Movement in the West,2 the timing was right to organize an international conference to address the very topic Professor Hazama had taken up but with the addition of Western and Chinese scholars. With funding from the Japan Foundation and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, we were able to invite to Santa Barbara, California, eight Japanese scholars (five from the original research group in the Kyoto area and three from the Tokyo area), two scholars from Taiwan, one scholar from the People’s Republic of China, one from Australia, one from France, and one from the United States. In addition, we were fortunate enough to have six bilingual or effectively bilingual commentators. The result was a highly successful international symposium.

The one serious problem confronting an editor of essays from a genuinely international conference is the challenge of having the non-English-language papers translated into readable, scholarly English with all the scholarly apparatus required on this side of the Pacific. That, we believe, has been achieved, though it has taken two solid years of working and reworking the East Asian-language contributions. In the interim, the final papers from Professor Hazama’s seminar have appeared: Kyōdō kenkyū: Ryō Keichō, Seiyō kindai shisō

juyō to Meiji Nihon (Collaborative research on Liang Qichao: Meiji Japan and the reception of modern Western thought).3 Translations of the Japanese text have already been published in Chinese as well.4 The present collection of essays makes an excellent companion volume to Hazama’s, be it in the Japanese original or in Chinese translation.

A number of interconnected themes link the essays in this volume to one another and to the overarching theme of Liang and Meiji Japan. In light of the voraciousness with which Liang consumed the writings to which he was exposed in Japan, it is important to note that he came at a specific time and with a specific agenda of his own that strongly conditioned the nature of his experience there. Liang had left China, as we know, under extraordinary circumstances. There was a price on his head, the same price for which a number 2 Most recently, see Peter Zarrow and Rebecca E. Karl, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002). Earlier works in English include Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker, eds., Reform in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1976).

3 Ed. Hazama Naoki (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1999).

4 Liang Qichao, Mingzhi Riben, Xifang (Liang Qichao, Meiji Japan, the West Report of the joint research of the Institute in the Humanities, Kyoto University, Japan) (Beijing; Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2001).

244

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

or his colleagues paid with their lives back in China. With the reform movement to which he had assiduously devoted himself in shambles, he reached Japan with a burning sense of crisis for his homeland. China under the Empress Dowager (1835–1908) was on the verge of collapse, he believed, and unless various political, social, and cultural reforms were enacted, he feared for demise of Chinese civilization as he knew it. Unlike Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), who went to Japan somewhat later and developed a keen interest in and sensitivity to Japanese culture itself, which he then devoted himself to introducing back into China, Liang approached Japan in a much more utilitarian manner and always ultimately focused on China.

China, he felt, desperately needed the foundations of a strong nation-state, the structure and infrastructure necessary to bring the entire citizenry together as one. This was the lesson, he believed, that the modern world had laid at China’s doorstep over and over again throughout the nineteenth century, and it was a lesson the Japanese had apparently learned well. Thus, it was to the end of providing China with all the accoutrements of the modern nation-state—from the personal and cultural to the social to the national-political—

that Liang became virtually obsessed. He became a man with a mission, and this is critical to our understanding of the circumstances surrounding Liang’s interface with “Japan” or with the “West” via Japan.

Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century provided Liang with an intellectual reservoir of great works from the West edited and translated for his selection. It was his avenue into modern Western knowledge, prepackaged and ready to use. Unable to read any Western languages, Liang acquired Western knowledge through the medium of Japanese translations. He was able to use the intellectual world around him in Japan as a quick way to learn about the latest theories in numerous fields from the West. Had Liang traveled to any one of the Western countries that produced the works upon which he drew so profusely and devoted his time to acquiring that one European language, he would never have gained the extraordinary breadth of knowledge for which he is so famous. Thus, as shown in the essays by Marianne Bastid-Bruguière, Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Mori Tokihiko, Huang K’o-wu, Don Price, Saitō Mareshi, Sakamoto Hiroko, Hazama Naoki, and others, Liang was tapping into “Western learning”

without the intermediacy of the West itself. It was all knowledge refracted via Japan, and hence doubly refracted by the time Liang wrote about it in Chinese.

To varying degrees many of the authors of the essays in this volume clearly see Liang’s borrowing from his sources—usually unattributed—as problematic. Bastid-Bruguière comes the closest to actually labeling Liang a plagiarist.

None of the authors, though, allows the issue to stop there, for all are aware of the rather different practices regarding attribution in China a century ago—and

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

245

among journalists. After identifying the intellectual route leading back from Liang’s work to a Japanese intermediary and then usually to a Western source, as demonstrated perhaps most clearly in the essay by Ishikawa Yoshihiro, their aim is to stress the use to which Liang put the many new ideas he was introducing to his Chinese readers. Liang was thus not looking to engage the truly sophisticated scholarship on China and East Asia that was available in academic publications in Japan at the time. As Sang Bing and Ishikawa, among others, demonstrate, he was looking to popularize sweeping grand theories, unifying principles that would tie the Chinese experience to the rest of the world, principles that would bring China into the general discourse and not leave it to the realm of exceptions—and Japanese commentators and translators made such theories more easily available to him.

In tracing the complex process of Liang’s appropriation of Japanese sources, these essays also demonstrate that Japan was more than just an empty vehicle.

The cultural universe that China and Japan shared was central to his formulation of certain new ideas, some of which were actually Eastern rather than Western in origin. Liang often (re)discovered elements or strains from his own tradition only after going to Japan, as Hazama Naoki and Mori Noriko discuss in their essays.5 In these instances, those Chinese traditions had not been forgotten in China, but they had not yet been linked to the project of strengthening the nation-state in the critical way he observed that they had in Japan.

He thus fastened onto them. Only another East Asian country such as Japan could have served Liang’s needs here, for these were subject areas—Buddhism and the teachings of Wang Yangming (1472–1529)—that would have had little meaning outside the region.

We have seen that Liang’s primary goal was a strong nation-state for China, but that seemed to require a well-managed economy. Mori Tokihiko closely tracks Liang’s coming to terms with the Western notion of “political economy.”

Mori demonstrates that Liang tried hard to avoid adopting the current Japanese term keizai (C. jingji) because he was afraid that the traditional Chinese background to that term—from jingshi jimin or “to manage the realm and save the people”—would seriously confuse his readers. His opponents in the Chinese press in Japan, the revolutionaries, lacked the requisite background in their own tradition to find this a problem, however, and moved quickly to adopt 5 This is, interestingly, also true of Liang’s renewed understanding of the history of Chinese

“philosophy,” a subject dramatically changed under Japanese influence. See Sueoka Hiroshi,

“Ryō Keichō to Nihon no Chūgoku tetsugaku kenkyū,” in Kyōdō kenkyū, pp. 168–93; Chinese translation: “Liang Qichao yu Riben de Zhongguo zhexue yanjiu,” in Liang Qichao, Mingzhi Riben, Xifang, pp. 156–83.

246

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

jingji. Mori shows how Liang struggled for years to come up with an appropriate term, until he reluctantly adopted jingji as well.

A far grander political issue for which the Japanese case offered Liang considerable grist for his mill was that of the imperial institution. As Peter Zarrow demonstrates, the centrality of the emperor to Liang’s conception of things can hardly be overstated. The Meiji emperor provided inspiration as a symbol of national unity, apparently signifying reform leadership and historical progress, while presiding over a strong constitutional state—precisely the arrangement Liang and his mentor, Kang Youwei (1858–1927), as well as other constitutional reformers sought. How well they actually understood what was transpiring in Japan—either before or after they took refuge there—is a much more difficult issue to assess. What they understood that political situation to be, how and what they sought to appropriate from the political set-up of the Meiji regime, are the central issues here. The imperial institution in Japan was, thus, not a blueprint for Liang but more a model from which to borrow creatively.

Tying the imperial institution to state control were links reinforced for Liang by his exposure in Japan to the writings of the political scientist and educator Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916). Katō also introduced Liang to the Social Darwinist concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest—and, in Katō’s formulation, rights. As Don Price shows in his essay, Liang again selectively adopted from Katō’s formulation of might-makes-right thinking to creatively build a statist doctrine for China. Katō’s views were attractive not simply because they made sense intellectually, but also because they seemed to have been applied in Meiji-era Japan with extraordinary results. Evolutionary theory came to play a formidable role in Liang’s consciousness, as it did for many of Liang’s contemporaries around the world.

One line of inquiry that is explicit or implicit in all of the essays in this volume is the relationship between Liang Qichao and his Japanese sources. In her contribution on Liang and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (1808–81), Marianne Bastid-Bruguière portrays Liang’s appropriation of the fortuitous translation into literary Chinese by a Japanese of a work by Bluntschli. The latter’s stress on a powerful state served Liang’s own needs for a critique of unwieldy democracy. Bastid-Bruguière also shows clearly that Liang’s borrowings were not haphazard but methodical, revealing how Liang worked in Japan—systematically absorbing and adapting everything of utility around him, forming it into the dozens of essays he wrote.

In this field of political thought, the Japanese helped Liang not only by providing a Chinese-language translation ready-made for adoption but, more generally, by creating a modern political vocabulary that this translation of Bluntschli helped generate. Bastid-Bruguière gives us an excellent case study,

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

247

as we follow the textual history of Bluntschli’s posthumous publication in Japanese and Chinese and come to understand how the universe of European political science of the day became available to Liang Qichao in translation (or in his native tongue) in Japan and how and why Bluntschli was so useful for his own overriding project of strengthening the Chinese nation-state.

Huang K’o-wu’s detailed treatment of Liang’s introduction of the ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to his Chinese readers parallels Bastid-Bruguière’s.

It is important to note from the outset that Liang never read Kant—neither in the original nor in translation; what he read was a Japanese translation by Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901), the great Meiji-era intellectual, translator, and political figure, of a French history of Western philosophy that contained a section on Kant. Ultimately, whether Liang understood Kant’s philosophic ideas is largely irrelevant. Liang used, as he always did, what he interpreted from Kant to his own philosophic and political ends—just as had been the case in his readings of Bluntschli and as would be the case with many others.

Huang traces the inordinately complex process by which Liang himself read, “translated,” interpreted, and criticized what he took to be the work of Kant. He shows how Liang related certain of Kant’s ideas to Buddhist and Neo-Confucian texts, how he used Kant’s views to praise Wang Yangming’s ideas and criticize those of his great predecessor, Zhu Xi (1130–1200), as well as to demonstrate the superiority, in certain philosophic realms, of Buddhism.

Huang also suggests a kind of “inlay pattern” to Liang’s thinking’ with different spheres of knowledge filtrating into different strata in his mind—a process that often left Kant far behind.

The same process can be found in Liang’s appropriation of the social sciences, especially the modern discipline of geography—an immediate Japanese source that was itself an already digested doctrine of Western origin.

Ishikawa Yoshihiro demonstrates how Liang fastened onto certain all-embracing Western theories of geographical determinism through the intermediacy of the popularizing works by Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927) and Ukita Kazutami (1859–1946). Liang then proceeded to propound their ideas in his own name.

These theoretical constructs, which posited a genetic link between the environment—the land, the topography, and the climate—and historical-political eventualities, although largely passé today, were widely popular a century ago in both East Asia and the West.

Ishikawa’s essay highlights the important point about all of Liang’s scholarly work that he evinced virtually no interest in the sophisticated, scholarly studies being produced at that time in Japan, such as the work of Kuwabara Jitsuzō (1870–1931), the famed China and Inner Asia historian at Kyoto Imperial University. By the same token, the Japanese academic community, with which

248

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

Liang intersected only tangentially, seems never to have taken him too seriously. As Sang Bing shows in his essay, they saw him as a gadfly, a journalist working on one project today and another tomorrow, but never with the earnestness they deemed requisite for a true scholar. In his last years, after he had returned to China from his long stay in Japan, Liang worked hard to build a field of “national learning” (guoxue) in China, and in this he was much influenced by his time in Japan. Despite this influence, though, Liang’s guoxue and academic Sinology in Japan ultimately had little in common. The former was part of his nation-building efforts, whereas the latter was a much more systematic, academic discipline. As Sang points out, Liang’s death in 1929 passed with scarcely any notice within Japanese academic or even journalistic circles.

Nonetheless, Liang found elements from his own tradition being touted in the realm of the self and the family in unexpected and innovative ways in Japan that he himself soon adopted. He argued in his lengthy essay Xinmin shuo (Discourse on the new citizen) that China needed to develop a modern citizenry with a strong sense of civic morality or virtue (gongde) to complement the more internal, personal, or private morality ( side). As Hazama Naoki shows, the personal was genetically linked to the larger political realm, for both gongde and side were essential to China’s emergence as a modern nation-state, as had been the case earlier for Meiji Japan and the modern West. After returning from an eye-opening visit to the United States in the early years of the twentieth century,6 Liang had become increasingly fearful of revolution and the social anomie to which it could lead. He found support for his views on civic virtue versus personal virtue in the writings of the great Ming-era philosopher and statesman Wang Yangming.

Liang’s interest in the contemporary relevance of Wang’s ideas was also a product of Liang’s time in Japan. Precisely at the moment Liang was living in Japan, Wang Yangming was undergoing a revival of sorts in certain Japanese circles. Yōmeigaku (the school or teachings of Wang Yangming) was being used at this time in Japan to emphasize the importance of the individual as the 6 Catalogued its his Xin dalu youji (A record of travel on the new continent), concerning which see the essay by Hazama herein (chap. 8). This trip began on February 20, 1903, and ended with his return to Yokohama on December 11 of the same year. See Hazama Naoki, “Ryō

Keichō: Nihon kankei nippyō (1898–1903)” (Liang Qichao, a daily account concerning Japan, 1898–1903), in Chūgoku kindai ni okeru Nihon o baikai to suru Seiyō kindai bunmei no juyō ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū. Heisei 6–7 nendo kagaku kenkyūhi hojōkin ippam kenkyū C kenkyū

seika hōkokusho (Basic research, on the reception of modern Western civilization in modern China via the intermediacy of Japan. Report on the attainments of C research in the general research funded for scientific research for 1994–95) (March 1997), pp. 27–28.

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

249

cornerstone of a strong state. For contemporary Japan, then, Wang Yangming was being employed to buttress the unique Japanese spirit or Yamato damashii. This caught Liang’s attention, for the Chinese needed something comparable, he argued—what he would call a “Chinese Bushidō” or martial spirit. At the same time, the nationalist philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō (1856–

1944) was employing Wang Yangming’s writings to forge a new Meiji-period national morality, another project that Liang saw as linked to gongde. Japan provided the model, although in this case based on a Chinese tradition.

Liang also discovered the relevance of Buddhism to modern nationalism while in Japan. Liang had shown considerable interest in Buddhism even before he departed for Japan—despite the fact that he was a student of Kang Youwei, China’s most famous Confucian scholar of the late Qing. In fact, there was widespread interest in Buddhism among many late-Qing scholars.

However, once he found himself in Japan, as Mori Noriko shows in her essay, Liang found a remixed Buddhism, one that had been outfitted for the task of modern state building. There Buddhism had been combined with evolutionary theory, especially the views of Benjamin Kidd (1858–1916). When Liang introduced Kidd’s ideas to his readership, he stressed the latter’s focus on personal self-sacrifice for the general good and the future of the nation-state, much the way Kidd had been read and mixed with select Buddhist ideas in Japan. Liang particularly felt the influence of the great Meiji-period Buddhist scholar Inoue Enryō (1858–1919). In Inoue, he found modern evolutionary theory, the modern state, and Buddhist religion combined. That Inoue was already fighting a losing battle and was trying to refit Buddhism for survival in Japan was largely lost on Liang.

Another personal issue for Liang in which Japan provided a complex vehicle for new political ideas was the relationship between Chinese national identity and language. All the emerging nation-states of Europe and Japan had gone through a process of forging a “national language,” a sine qua non of modernity. As Saitō Mareshi makes clear, there were at least three layers at work in Liang’s understanding of “Chinese” as a language: his native spoken Cantonese, guanhua (official Mandarin, at which Liang never acquired great proficiency), and the literary Chinese language (wenyan). Liang himself derived language identity and ethnic identity in being both Cantonese and Han. The linguistic structure of Chinese as a language, though, would become clear to Liang only after he perused Japanese grammars of his day.

For Liang, the Japanese language was little different from Cantonese. Both were rooted, he believed, in an ancient literary language, wenyan, which had served both countries (and Korea and Vietnam, it should be added) for many centuries. The Hewen Han dufa (Reading Japanese the Chinese way), a

250

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

contemporary work offering easy access to Japanese for readers of Chinese, was an all-important text for Liang.7 It not only enabled him to gain quick entry into contemporary Japanese writings and translations; it also substantiated the notion that Japanese could be read as if it were a topolect of Chinese.

Another aspect of Liang’s understanding of national identity formulated in Japan, in addition to the linguistic, was the place of gender. This forms the core of Sakamoto Hiroko’s contribution to this collection. She shows how Liang, although deeply concerned with the issue of national identity even before leaving China in 1898, found his conception of the nation and of gender transformed by his stay in Japan. In this instance, Liang was influenced by Takayama Chogyū (1871–1930), the literary critic and scholar of aesthetics and moral philosophy, whose work reinforced Liang’s own view of the centrality of race in history and in the ultimate struggle for survival of nations in the world. Just as race was central to national survival, women were central to the strengthening of the race. Women, in Liang’s view, were elemental to the struggle for national survival because they mothered the future generation of Chinese. Bound feet were thus a disgrace because they hindered the free physical movement of these mothers. His commitment to ending footbinding and to female education was thus less inspired by a belief in the need for women’s freedom of movement and edification in and of themselves than it was for the future of the race-nation.

How are we ultimately to characterize Liang? That he was a public intellectual, at least among Chinese, goes without saying, and he was profoundly politically committed, even if those commitments underwent some considerable change with time. Indeed, Liang may have been a harbinger of a new intellectual class in China, one with roots in the Confucian elite speaking on behalf of the “people” only now speaking on behalf of the “Chinese people” (in a geographic, not ethnic, sense).8 This group of new-style intellectuals would rise to greater prominence in the next generation, generating the New Culture Movement and continuing to publish in the sort of political journals that Liang effectively invented for China. One might argue that the extraordinary changes the journalistic Chinese language was undergoing between the late nineteenth century and the New Culture Movement of the 1910s, from literary to vernacular Chinese, was catalyzed by the hybrid journalistic language Liang similarly 7 Hewen Han dufa (no publication information; copy held in the Kyoto University Library).

8 For a study that looks at the emergence of political journalism in China in this vein, see Joan Judge, Print and Politics: “Shibao” and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

251

helped to invent, a language irreversibly transformed by his infusion of countless neologisms either coined by Japanese or in use in Japan at the time.9

Japan and the Japanese became over the process of his many years there more than just mediators of things Western; they were providing serious models for the modern nation-state in the countless areas outlined above.

And these Liang assiduously examined. As Saitō Mareshi suggested during the discussions at our conference and as several essays in the volume suggest, Liang’s role model in this regard consciously or unconsciously, may have been Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957), the Japanese journalist who came of age in the Meiji period and published voluminously over a long career, even if little of his work has much scholarly depth. Both men were concerned with any and every area of their nation’s culture and wrote numerous essays in numerous fields.

But each was centrally concerned with seeing to it that his homeland emerged stronger and with deserved glory in an increasingly contentions international arena.

Is Liang Qichao reduced in any significant way as a result of these eleven scrutinizing examinations of the role of Japan and the Japanese in his thought and practice? If one is concerned with Liang as a great scholar, then indeed his ranking in modern history will be sharply demoted. If one is more concerned with Liang as a Chinese nationalist, then perhaps one may view his wholesale appropriation of things Japanese as problematical. However, if one is content to leave Liang as a public intellectual (as opposed to an academic or scholar) and a man or his own time in history, then what these eleven essays do is demonstrate how he functioned as a publicist. We now know the sources of numerous lines of thought upon which he drew—virtually always without attribution. For those reluctant to concede a significant Japanese influence on Liang, there is no longer any room for debate. Even many of Liang’s ideas about Chinese history and thought drew on scholars and schools of thought in Japan.

We seriously hope, though, that Liang’s role has not been reduced, but rather historicized or, at least, relativized. His prolific production as a writer should not—as it should not for Tokutomi Sohō—be confused with academic brilliance, great linguistic breadth, or even originality. It simply reveals a man of exceptional energy with interests that were as wide as they were thin, active at a time when China’s sense of national crisis and national identity were most acute and the introduction of foreign learning at its inception. No one could be 9 See the important work of Federico Masini, The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898 (Berkeley: Project on Linguistic Analysis, University of California, 1993).

252

Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan

an original thinker in as many fields as Liang “contributed” to. But that is also beside the point. Liang was a public intellectual whose self-appointed role was introducing multitudes of Western and Japanese ideas to his readership—all with the aim of building a strong Chinese nation-state and culture. He only fails when he is judged (ahistorically) by later academic standards.

■ Source: “Response to Herbert P. Bix, ‘Remembering the Nanking Massacre’,” Japan Focus, at http://japanfocus.org/-Joshua_A_-Fogel/1637 (May 2004).

Response to Herbert P. Bix, “Remembering the Nanking Massacre”

I have just read Herbert Bix’s long and thoughtful Japan Focus review essay of a new contribution to the recent spate of books and articles concerned with the Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Nanjing Atrocity or Incident). I found much food for thought there and much that I would like to have seen fleshed out more fully. There were as well a number of points that I found more questionable or even irresponsible. For these reasons, I have chosen to air several points of agreement and disagreement in the interest of widening an important debate. Let me note from the outset, however, that this is not meant as another review of the book discussed by Bix, but of the issues he raised in his review.

The book that Bix reviews, Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing (ed. Fei Fei Li, Robert Sabella, and David Liu; M.E. Sharpe, 2002), is the result of a conference held in 1997 on the sixtieth anniversary of the events analyzed; it was convened at Princeton University and received some press coverage at the time, including indications that a number of speakers were shouted down or had their talks disrupted by activist students and others who (obviously) sharply disagreed with their points of view. It is a credit to the editors that they managed to put together the volume and include such differing points of view.

Most of my own views on the Nanjing Massacre can be found in my introduction and in the essays (by Mark Eykholt, Takashi Yoshida, and Daqing Yang) in the volume I edited for the University of California Press, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, and in a number of reviews of others’

work (such as the books by Iris Chang and Yamamoto Masahiro). I gave a faculty lecture just a year ago at the Institute for Advanced Study on the phenomenon of Chinese historical memory of the massacre, the essence of which will be found in a chapter of a book presently being edited by Bob T. Wakabayashi of York University. Thus, I will not rehearse my own views here, except insofar as they pertain to specific points being made.

In his second paragraph, Bix makes the sort of statement I find so troubling in much work done by Chinese ethnonationalists (of which, of course, Bix is not a member). Describing the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Chinese capital, Bix states: “An unprecedented rampage of arson, pillage, murder, and

254

“Remembering the Nanking Massacre”

rape ensued.” There is no doubt that great amounts of all four “ensued,” but was it “unprecedented”; and does this mean unprecedented in 1937–38 or unprecedented ever? He must mean the former, for (unless you swallow Iris Chang’s version of the events hook, line, and sinker) there’s no denying that the mass slaughter that followed Nanjing throughout central and eastern Europe overwhelms that of Nanjing’s winter of 1937–38. But, let’s look more closely at the former. In terms of sheer numbers, many more Armenians died on Turkish terrain during that genocide from 1915, more Africans in the Atlantic slave trade, and far more kulaks in the Soviet collectivization; and certainly later, more Cambodians at the hands of their own people, and more Hutus and Tutsis just a decade ago than the entire death toll in Nanjing—and more peoples could be added to this appalling list. Thus, whatever show of solidarity with our friends and colleagues such a statement as Bix’s may be intended to convey, it is largely at the expense of accuracy, and, in fact, only opens progressive people everywhere to assault by rightwing revisionists who trawl about waiting for errors of this sort as a means of dismissing entire arguments altogether. In a piece such as this one by Bix that offers such intriguing ideas about comparative genocide, this was not a happy place to begin.

Two sentences later, Bix enters the minefield of the numbers game.

Concerning the death toll, he writes: “Chinese sources range as high as 340,000; the best Japanese estimates put the figure as ‘no fewer than 200,000.’ ” This sort of statement invites the conclusion that death toll estimates are based on and slanted by the nationalistic concerns (or nationality) of the estimator. However, only someone seriously deluded, irrespective of ethnicity, or whose point of view has irreparably been skewed by nationalistic concerns now argues a figure near 340,000. And, who are the authors of “the best Japanese estimates”?

Bix does not tell us. Kasahara Tokushi who is cited below for his fine work on the subject and who is, indeed (in my estimation), one of the finest scholars, Japanese or otherwise, working on the war years and the Nanjing Massacre in particular, estimates roughly 100,000 for the immediate Nanjing area and rising to as high as twice that figure for the much wider region. I would wholehearted endorse Bix’s next sentence, though, for “[f]uture collaborative research could well alter the latter [200,000] figure.” I’m not sure if Bix means by this that 200,000 may later be shown to be too low an estimate, but in any event “collaborative research” on this topic would be a salutary development, to say the least. A recent conference on the military history of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–45, in which Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars came together for four intense days of scholarly exchange, demonstrated that this sort of collaborative work is now certainly possible without dissolving into vitriolic attack, defensiveness, and polemics. The numbers remain in doubt among serious

“Remembering the Nanking Massacre”

255

Japanese researchers, both academic and journalistic. Even as sympathetic a figure as Honda Katsuichi told Frank Gibney that he (now) estimates a death toll of one hundred and several tens of thousands (see Gibney’s introduction to Honda Katsuichi, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame, M.E. Sharpe, 1998, p. vii).

Bix moves immediately to note that the Nanjing Massacre did not enter public consciousness in Japan until the Tokyo Trials and “even then the story was not followed up and the issues soon disappeared from public consciousness.” It is, of course, difficult to say anything firm about what does or does not enter “public consciousness,” but the Nanjing Massacre was not absent from Japanese publications from 1948 through the entire Cold War, as Bix argues.

As Daqing Yang is now discovering, the author Hotta Yoshie (1918–98) wrote a series of pieces of historical fiction in the 1950s about the atrocities in Nanjing and leftwing journalists began researching the events in the late 1960s, in certain instances inspired by the contemporaneous American war in Vietnam.

Some of the work of the most famous of these, Honda Katsuichi, has even appeared now in English. In any event, the statement, “[t]hrough four long decades of cold war, issues of war responsibility were covered up,” is at best inaccurate, at worst an insult to all those hardworking Japanese scholars who are principally responsible for having the seamier side of events of the Sino-Japanese War brought to life at all: comfort women, poison gas, human experimentation, drug dealing, and the Nanjing Massacre, among others.

Bix handles the discussion of the essays by Ian Burma and Richard Falk generously. He notes Buruma’s disinclination to hold the Nanjing Massacre up for comparison with the Nazi Holocaust and Buruma’s suggestion that the scholarly desideratum of learning the truth of the events that transpired in Nanjing strongly militates against forging a Chinese identity around such a symbol of victimization. Buruma made similar arguments in the New York Review of Books shortly after the conference in Princeton, and they still ring true. Bix’s criticism of Falk’s ignorance of the Tokyo Trials and other items of native knowledge were highly measured; Falk should consider himself lucky. However, the discussion of the Tokyo Trials’ Justice Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967) quickly becomes skewed along polemical lines. Pal may not have been a “neutral analyst,” as Falk depicts him, but to dismiss his views as Bix does because of his political support for Chandra Bose and company is not arguing a point but assessing guilt by association. Pal’s juridical decision at the Tokyo Trials, which runs to hundreds of pages, is utterly fascinating reading. Tanaka Masaaki, to be sure, has turned Pal into a hero for his own nefarious endeavor to whitewash Japanese behavior on the Mainland during the war, because Pal had serious reservations about the decisions reached at the Tokyo Trials, but Pal deserves better than

256

“Remembering the Nanking Massacre”

odious creatures such as Tanaka. Timothy Brook, no rightwing sympathizer, has written sensitively and sensibly on Pal in a recent issue of the Journal of Asian Studies and in the introduction to his edited Documents on the Rape of Nanking (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

Dismissing Pal in this way would be comparable to dismissing Anwar Sadat’s (1918–81) ability to make an important decision because he supported the Germans during World War II. Of course, support for the Axis powers is reprehensible by any standard, but there are different circumstances and different levels of complicity. Neither Justice Pal nor President Sadat served as a guard at a death camp, nor did either send anyone there. They, like nationalist leaders and their followers throughout Southeast Asia, made common cause with admittedly loathsome regimes in the cause of anti-colonialism. If we abhor the manner in which rightwing critics use guilt by association to dispense with an uncomfortable argument thrown their way, then consistency demands that we insist on at least the same standards for liberals, leftists, progressives, and the great mass of the unaffiliated.

When Bix moves next to a look at an essay by Sun Zhaiwei, he makes some highly salient points. Sun is China’s best known scholar of the Nanjing Massacre, and this is his maiden work to appear in English. The point Sun stresses, as Bix enumerates it, is that the root cause of the Massacre was “Japanese militarism and ideological indoctrination” combined with mass murder aimed at eviscerating Chinese resistance. Few would disagree that militarism and indoctrination contributed to Japanese behavior in Nanjing, though it is unclear just what is specifically or operationally meant by these terms; however, use of mass murder to further strike fear into an invaded populace may imply that the deaths in Nanjing were planned in advance by the Japanese leadership, and few (aside from the usual suspects) believe this line of argumentation any longer. If we tweak the argument a bit, though, few would disagree with the notion that on the field of battle Japanese troops and their immediate superiors—though apparently not their commanders-in-chief—were aiming to punish the Chinese for their ferocious resistance at Shanghai in which many Japanese soldiers lost friends in a battle they believed they would win quickly and easily. As a Japanese foot soldier later recalled in an interview with Honda Katsuichi: “[T]he assault on Nanjing took place as an extension of this fighting

[i.e., in and around Shanghai]. It just wasn’t the kind of atmosphere in which you’d immediately forgive and release your prisoners, merely because they had surrendered to you. The mood was one of avenging your dead comrades” (The Nanjing Massacre, p. 240). I agree wholeheartedly with Bix that the Princeton conference volume would have been a marvellous opportunity to use the data drawn by Sun here from Nanjing to explore similar instances of mass murder

“Remembering the Nanking Massacre”

257

occurring during total war. To date, the Chinese have been extremely reluctant to make this move, and the few that do generally jump to facile comparisons with the Nazi Holocaust, as Buruma laments.

We confront a similar problem across the Strait of Taiwan with the next essay by Lee En-han. Lee has been working for some time to demonize Japan in the prewar and war years, and I would be extremely wary of being led into the trap set here. Bix states: Lee “rightfully laments the efforts of those he calls the ‘total deniers’ such as Tanaka Masaaki and the ‘partial deniers,’ of whom historian Hata Ikuhiko is the most notorious, to ‘use every possible tactic to resist the figures.’”

To speak of Tanaka and Hata in the same breath in this regard borders on the seriously irresponsible—unless one’s aim, as it appears is Lee’s, is to discredit by associated guilt everyone with which one disagrees. Tanaka is a fairly despicable character who has fabricated documents and built a career around spreading lies to vindicate a lost cause. Hata, no matter how much one may disagree with him, is an eminent scholar who has for over forty years been writing numerous excellent studies of Japan at war. He was certainly writing about the Nanjing Massacre before Iris Chang or Lee En-han were, and his book on the subject, first published in 1986 and translated into Chinese, is still an authority in the field. The problem is that he comes up with a death toll much lower than Chang, Lee, Sun, and many leftwing Japanese historians—on the order of 40,000. The harsh political attacks on him may also be responsible, in part, for forcing him into the arms of figures on the right in Japan with considerably less scholarly interest in the debates over wartime atrocities. Hata refuses to rescind what these others consider a low figure, and he refuses to back down under pressure, shouting, and cat-calls. In fact, he gives just as good (or bad) as he gets, often making unwarranted (or, at least, unwanted) counterclaims, such as his irrational comment at a trilateral (US-Japan-China) meeting of scholars at International House in Tokyo several years ago that the Chinese claims or 300,000 murdered at Nanjing must be including those killed in the Cultural Revolution. Most Japanese who, at least, admit that widespread killing went on in Nanjing that winter bow their heads and take their bashing, but Hata dishes it back out. Neither side is particularly attractive, but at least Hata is a serious scholar. To claim that his research is motivated by Japanese nationalist concerns thus strikes me as fairly silly.

Hata is largely responsible for discrediting virtually every one of the photographs that adorn the pages of Iris Chang’s book and probably are as responsible as her prose for winning admirers among English-language readers. His piece of several years ago in Sekai subjected each and every one of them to withering criticism. Several Japanese historians, such as Kasahara Tokushi,

258

“Remembering the Nanking Massacre”

subsequently apologized for having accepted the validity of one or more of them. One important point that thus emerges is that, like it or not, progressive historians also allow their politics to take command and override their good sense. It is to Kasahara’s credit that he has recognized this. That Bix finds Kasahara’s fine piece in this volume “one of the best in the book” is not at all surprising. He has been working for years on the war years; he knows Chinese well and uses numerous Chinese sources; and he has published a large volume of works on the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese campaigns during the war.

Bix dispenses with Higashinakano Shūdō (the given name is often rendered as Osamichi) in a brief sentence, although the editors go to pains to note that he is a member of the revisionist camp. Although not a “total denier” (he’s close, having admitted in one piece to a total of forty-seven civilian deaths in Nanjing), he has devoted much energy to discrediting the evidence concerning the mass killings at Nanjing as mere rumor or anti-Japanese plot. On a simplistic political spectrum, he is well to the right of Hata Ikuhiko, but he cannot be ignored or written off simply because of his politics. He is the rarest of figures in the revisionist camp—an actual historian who knows how we work and what counts as evidence. Thus, if one is interested in getting to the bottom of what actually transpired in that terrible winter in Nanjing, then one can safely ignore the likes of Tanaka Masaaki—I would argue—but not either Higashinakano or Hata.

Skipping over Bix’s brief treatment of the essays by Haruko Cook and Takashi Yoshida, with which I basically agree, he comes next to Vera Schwarcz’s comparative exploration of Chinese and Jewish historical memory in the wake of a horrific tragedy. But, in this instance, Schwarcz actually warns us again oversimplifying comparisons, of everyone declaring their own ethnic

“holocaust” in a frenzy of victimization, all connected in intriguing ways with nation-building. Bix appears to quite like this piece and encourages readers to see how Schwarcz’s quasi-psychoanalytic approach to telling of past suffering is somehow connected to the beginnings of healing. While I always benefit from reading Vera Schwarcz’s work, I have never understood how verbaliz-ing is linked to healing. I think it is based on a somewhat religious belief system that necessitates a leap of faith in the psychoanalytic relationship. If you accept that relationship as instructive and the extroversion of personal pain as curative, then it will be for you. Although he is not mentioned in this context, Dominic LaCapra has also in a recent book offered a psychoanalytic model for confronting the Holocaust (see his Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Cornell University Press, 1994).

“Remembering the Nanking Massacre”

259

It all sounds rather nifty, especially in Schwarcz’s brilliant hands, but she still panders to the notion that Nanjing is somehow, some way a “holocaust” that can sit in a comparison with the Shoah. This is precisely where the social scientists among us need to enter and the humanists among us need to exit center stage. A social historian by the name of Henry Huttenbach has been working for several decades to draw up a typology for genocide. He warns us, though: “How do we prevent ourselves from moving glibly from Auschwitz to Hiroshima and back, from the Death Camps to the Gulag, from genuine genocide to non-genocide, from lumping victims of bona fide extermination together with victims of massacres?” (“Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum: Towards a Methodology of Definition and Categorization,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3.3 [1988]: 291.) In other words, we need comparisons to make sense of those things which strike us as absolutely evil, but even more important is the need for a sound analytical framework from which to make such comparisons.

In my view, psychoanalysis is not it.

Bix ultimately offers mixed praise for Nanking 1937 as a whole. It presents a wide panorama of viewpoints on the Nanjing Massacre, “war responsibility,”

and comparative suffering, but fails to plumb their depths with insights from more recent events of “human depravity” and mass murder. This would not be to demote or departicularize the events in Nanjing, but just to make them more comprehensible. Such an approach is, of course, precisely why Iris Chang and others of her persuasion would like us to see the massacres committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing during the winter of 1937–38 as a “forgotten holocaust.” The trope of the “forgotten holocaust” was already well used by the time she seized upon it, having been employed for the Gypsy (Roma and Sinti peoples) genocide at the hands of the Nazis, the Poles under Nazi occupation, Armenians by the Turks, and others, and reasons for its exhumation for contemporary utilization are too obvious to need explanation.

Bix suggests placing the events of the Nanjing Massacre in light of the mass rapes of German women by the invading Russian army at the very end of WWII and the immediate postwar years, the French torture of Algerian civilians, and the United States’ army’s killings at No Gun Ri in the Korean War. As horrific as each of these complex of events was, they are also qualitatively different, and none approaches the numbers even remotely posted by the Japanese military in Nanjing. But, Bix is not through, for next we are told—the imperative is actually used—to compare Japan’s aggression against China with “the American colonial war of aggression in Iraq” and several other incidents of US mistreatment or murder of prisoners. And, if that’s not enough, we are again instructed in the imperative not to “forget the lessons of the atrocities in Nanking when reading of the atrocious policies that Israeli governments (past but especially

260

“Remembering the Nanking Massacre”

present) pursue against the Palestinians for the sake of Israeli ‘settlements’

and ‘outposts’ built illegally on stolen land.” It is one thing to tell readers to think critically about the contemporary crimes and misdemeanors of their own government, but when the whole world is opened up, why is it always Israel that is singled out for such wholesale condemnation? Certainly the ethnic cleansings of the former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, Chechnya, and elsewhere have given us numerous instances of mass murder (often accompanied by mass rape) that far outstrip anything the Israelis (past, present, or combined) have done. Furthermore, why do “progressives” so often fail to mention Cambodia and various other Stalinist and Maoist regimes and groups, such as the Shining Path, who have committed mass murders in our time of almost (with apologies to Vera Schwarcz) unspeakable proportions. Genocide—real mass murder that reaches genocidal proportions—knows no left-right distinction, and putting little Israel into that group is, frankly, preposterous.

■ Source: “Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography: A Reconsideration in the Early Twenty-First Century,” Qinghua xuebao 清華學報 33.2 (December 2003), 439–53.

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography: A Reconsideration in the Early Twenty-First Century

In English the term “Japanese Sinology” might be translated into Chinese as either 日本漢學 or 日本的中國硏究, and it covers as much or even more

than the Chinese expressions. It can mean Japanese studies of Chinese history and culture, or Japanese exegeses of the Chinese classics throughout the ages, or in fact any instance in which one examines Japanese approaches to or responses to Chinese civilization from antiquity through the present. My own work has tended to fall within the first category: Japanese studies of Chinese history, and it is to this general subject that I shall address my remarks today.

Some years ago, I spent a great deal of time studying the writings of the celebrated Japanese historian, Naitō Konan 內藤湖南, Torajirō 虎次郞 (1866–

1934), and the school of Sinology he helped to build at Kyoto University early in the last century. What I soon learned—this is an obvious point—is that I could not simply read his many writings on Chinese history and culture and then write an analysis of them. Rather, I had to immerse myself in the period in which he wrote, roughly the 1880s through the years just prior to his death in the early 1930s—namely, mid-Meiji 明治 through early Shōwa 昭和 Japan.

I also came to understand that I would have to read his writings on Japanese history, because the historical and cultural relationship between China and Japan were central to his entire project as a scholar.

The result was a book that I have never been entirely satisfied with: Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934) which was translated into Japanese as: 《內藤湖南、ポリティックスとシノロジー》. Unsatisfied

for two reasons. First, there were several areas of Chinese culture to which he had devoted considerable attention and which I was unable to find a way of addressing in the book. These would include Chinese art history and Chinese historiography; in both of these scholarly areas, he wrote eminent books and articles.

* 本文初稿曾在2003年11月7、8日由台灣大學日文系主辦的「第二屆日本漢學國際

學術硏討會」上宣讀，謹向主辦單位及學報兩位評審者致謝。

262

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

Second, in the 1970s and early 1980s, I was still writing in a defensive mode.

With the exception of a handful of his most famous disciples—such as Miyazaki Ichisada 宮崎市定 (1901–1995) and Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郞

(1904–1980)—who continued to laud their professor, the influence of the war years was still strong when I was doing my work, and this meant that Naitō was still associated with all things Japanese in China and that meant aggression against China. If I wanted to say anything even remotely positive about his theories, I had to first try to overcome the negative image that had developed around much of the scholarship associated with him in postwar Japan.

The first postwar articles written about Naitō were highly condemnatory and found the roots of imperialism in every one of his famous theories. Thus, to give just one example, while Naitō may have argued that China entered modernity over a millenium ago at the start of the Song dynasty, that only meant in his harshest critics’ eyes that he thought China had stagnated in modernity for those many centuries. I knew this was all wildly exaggerated, but I had to argue from a defensive posture, all the time knowing equally well that there were, of course, political aspects about his life and career that were tainted with Japanese imperialism.

This situation has all now happily changed. I would like in my talk today to first address reasons why the mood has changed, look at some of the newer work on Naitō that has appeared in recent years, and then take a fresh close look at one of the two areas I was unable to address in my book twenty-five years ago, his work in the field of Chinese historiography.

What Has Changed

I think the most important thing that has changed since I first began reading and writing about Naitō Konan has been unrelated to changes within Japan.

Interestingly, since the death of Mao Zedong and the commencement of the Four Modernizations, Mainland Chinese authors have rediscovered Naitō

on their own, as have scholars in Taiwan over the past decade or more. I say

“rediscovered” because Naitō had many Chinese colleagues and associates before his death, especially during his years at Kyoto University. A number of his essays were translated into Chinese, and his views were recognized-not necessarily always agreed with, but recognized-as sufficiently significant as to warrant their attention. In the prewar world of Sinological studies by serious scholars as opposed to, shall we say, more popular or journalistic writers such

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

263

as Liang Qichao1—Chinese and Japanese had reached a level of interaction are only now, once again, approaching. I would even argue that one of the reasons many of Naitō’s books were never translated in Chinese was that most serious Chinese scholars could read them in the original.

In the immediate postwar years, when memories of World War II were still extremely fresh, many leftwing Japanese academics returned to teaching positions at Japan’s many universities. Under the American Occupation of Japan through 1952 and well after it, scholars who had supported the Japanese government or espoused rightist, imperialist ideas were removed from their posts.

Thus, the entire first generation of Japanese scholars—and not only in Asian studies—were far to the left of center. In addition, a significant number had survived during the war years not by having gone into exile, as did so many leftwing and Jewish German academics, but by hiding their views from the spot-light or actually working for an agency of the Japanese government or military in China, such as one of the research organs of the South Manchurian Railway Company. In either case, they were deeply burdened with a sense of guilt for what they saw as acts of complicity with the Japanese war machine. Two of the more prominent ways these men and women worked to exorcise their demons was by virulently attacking all prewar Japanese scholarship on China for being completely compromised by the imperialist Japanese government and army, and by profoundly associating themselves with the Chinese revolution on the mainland which was nearing success soon after the war’s end. A significant number later left the Japan Communist Party when it broke with the Chinese Communist Party—out of sympathy for the latter.

One example of this postwar condemnatory approach to the work of Naitō Konan was an essay by Nohara Shirō 野原四郞 published in 1946:

〈內藤湖南支那論批判〉

.2 Nohara took aim at Naitō’s most famous work,

《支那論》, which was first published in 1914 shortly after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Despite the apparent chaos of the early Republican era, and in the face of Japanese critics claiming that disorder was both the natural culmination of modern China and a perfect excuse for international dismember-ment of China, Naitō argued vehemently that republicanism (共和主義) was the historically-determined future for China—and, he strongly implied, 1 See 桑兵, “Japan and Liang Qichao’s Research in the Field of National Learning,” trans.

Minghui Hu and Joshua A. Fogel, Sino-Japanese Studies 12.1 (November 1999), pp. 5–24.

2 野原四郞，“內藤湖南支那論批判”、《中國評論》1卷4號 (1946)、頁35–42。

264

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

China was the future for the East Asian region as a whole.3 That would seem like a highly positive assessment which should have earned Naitō great praise in the postwar years. However, Nohara 野原 and others like him decided that virtually every point in《支那論》was worthy of nothing short of abject condemnation. Where Naitō saw a grassroots basis for republicanism in China at the village level run by elders (父老) without the intercession of the central government, a process which had matured over the centuries since the Song dynasty and the end of aristocracy, Nohara 野原 found nothing but “local bullies and evil gentry” (土豪劣紳).Where Naitō argued that Chinese had transcended the age of the nation-state and no longer conceptualized the nation as such, Nohara 野原 argued that he was merely concocting an excuse for others, namely Japan, to step in and rule—thus, Nohara 野原 claimed, by identifying the elders (父老) as the kernel of Chinese society, Naitō was effectively providing Japanese imperialists with the key to conquering China. To be sure, Naitō

did argue in favor of China relinquishing control of its national government to a consortium of international powers, so that the Chinese people would not be burdened with the cost of a national defense and would not have to worry about corruption at the level of the central government. Nohara 野原 claimed that this was actually core of Naitō’s argument.

Nohara’s 野原’s claims were, needless to say, very much caught up in the era in which they were written, the immediate postwar period. It should no longer take us much time to see that they were exaggerated, often wildly off the mark, and more concerned with a larger, self-cleansing process as Japanese scholars of Chinese history and culture faced the extremely difficult task of coming to terms with their own prewar heritage. Being a major figure of that prewar heritage, perhaps it is only natural that Naitō would come under attack. It is also important that Naitō was decidedly not a leftist or Marxist in any sense. Indeed, he described the principal reason for the failure of the Taiping Rebellion to be its “communism” (共產主義), namely its communitarian structure which directly conflicted with the structure of rural Chinese village life controlled by elders (父老). Hence, the Taiping leaders failed to understand the basic structure of Chinese society and were thus doomed to end in defeat. Naitō wrote admiringly of local Chinese society and his antipathy for what he called “communism” (共產主義) was just below the surface. This cannot have sat well with postwar Marxists critics of his work.

I have singled out one essay by Nohara Shirō 野原四郞, but there were many other similar works which found Japanese imperialism peeking out from every thesis pounded out by Naitō. The other glaring fault these critics found 3 內藤湖南，“支那論”，《內藤湖南全集》（東京：筑摩書房、1972年）第5卷

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

265

in his work was the putative claim that Chinese history had stagnated. As I have noted, if modernity began in the tenth or eleventh centuries, and China was still modern in the nineteenth century, then it must have stagnated. I have been unable to find any treatment of this subject in Naitō’s written work, but it nonetheless became a hallmark of the postwar critique of him—even reflected faintly in Western scholarship.4 While still in his mid-twenties, Saeki Yūichi 佐伯有一 (b. 1932) found time, in the midst of a 1957 article on Japanese scholarship concerned with Ming-Qing economic history, to lambast Naitō

for eviscerating China’s historical dynamism by propounding stagnancy at the hallmark of the past millenium.5 Again, this was wildly exaggerated.

In the immediate postwar decades in Japan, the statement that someone had ever claimed stagnancy or backwardness in China was an incendiary one.

This was not only a time when the Chinese revolution was very fresh, but it was also a time when Japanese scholars were doing everything in their power to give China back a history—a normal history—that they perceived had been taken away by the theories of prewar Japanese scholars. In Marxist terms—

terms which dominated the postwar debate—that meant that China had to be fitted back onto the unilinear track toward a glorious socialist future, just like other “normal” countries. We see concerns even in the highly refined scholarship of such an exalted figure as Niida Noboru 仁井田陞 (1904–1966) who, writing in the 1950s, sought to locate and analyze in great depth a distinctive feudal period for China; in so doing, Chinese history would acquire periodization, and the engines of history would once again be chugging down their one-way tracks.6

Thus, despite his extraordinary contributions to the topic of periodizing Chinese history, his absence of comment on the topic of stagnation, and indeed his criticism of the Japanese military adventures in Manchuria in the 4 This view was even reflected in English-language writing about Japanese views of China where Naitō’s name would appear as someone who, to cite one example, “popularized ‘unchanging China’ . . . [and] wrote persuasively of China’s backwardness, stagnation, and corruption, and tended to create an image of a land in which any change, including a reversal to earlier, more traditional conditions would be preferable.” See Marius Jansen, “Changing Japanese Attitude Toward Modernization,” in Changing Japanese Attitude Toward Modernization, ed. Marius Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 838–84.

5 佐伯有一：〈日本の明淸時代硏究における商品生產評價をめぐって：その學說

的展望〉、《中國史の時代區分》、鈴木俊·西嶋定生編（東京：東京大學出版

會、年）、頁257–258。

6 仁井田陞,〈中國社會の封建とフューダリズム〉《東洋文化》第5號（1951年2

月）,此文收入仁并田陞《中國法制史硏究、3：奴隷農奴法·家族村落法》（東

京：東京大學出版會、1962年）、頁97–100。

266

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

early 1930s,7 Naitō and his work became the objects of severe vituperation in the first postwar decades. In the process, the baby was almost thrown out with the bath- water; that is, the “bad” parts of Naitō’s writings seemed so offensive that all of his writings became, in some quarters at least, all but taboo for a period of time. Kyoto scholars continued to admire his work; some of the older generation who had studied with him at the end of his career and the beginning of their own remembered his work fondly, but with a handful of exceptions, there were no strong rebuttals to the condemnatory mood for some time.8

The situation began to change in the early 1980s primarily, I believe, because Mainland Chinese scholars found so much of value in Naitō’s extremely rich body of writings. In a P.R.C. publication for internal consumption (內部), the journal《中國史硏究動態》, Professor Xia Yingyuan 夏應元, now retired

but who was then at the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中國社會科學院·歷史硏究所), published an essay entitled:

〈內藤湖南的中國史硏究〉

.9 It was a short piece but, unlike so many essays

in Japan, it curiously did not dwell on the imperialist implications of Naitō’s writings; rather, it introduced his main theories, such as his famous periodization scheme, and expressed great admiration for their author. Many years before in 1934, the year of Naitō’s death, a then young Zhou Yiliang 周一良

(1913–2001) published a longer and more erudite essay about Naitō’s scholarly work, based on his own college graduation thesis, in the journal《史學

年報》.10 When he returned to China after World War II from Harvard University, where he tutored many Americans in Japanese,11 Zhou taught Japanese history to several generations of Chinese students at Beijing University.

Xia’s article basically picked up this thread after nearly half a century.

7 For example:〈滿洲國建設について〉《大阪朝日新聞》1932年3月1、5、7、8日、

in《內藤湖南全集》（東京：筑摩書房、1972年）第5卷、頁170–180;〈滿洲國今

後の方針について〉《大アジア》（1933年6月）、in《內藤湖南全集》（東京：

筑摩書房、1972年）第5卷、頁181–184。

8 One such exception was a useful, albeit innocuous, biography of Naitō: 三田村奏助、《内

藤湖南》（東京：中央公論、1972 年）。There was also an idiosyncratic biographical study of Naitō by a non-academic: 靑江舜二郞、《龍の星座：內藤湖南のアジ

ア的生涯》（東京：朝日新聞社、1966年）。

9 夏應元：〈內藤湖南的中國史硏究〉《中國史硏究動態》2卷（1981年), 頁1–16。

10 周ー良：〈日本內藤湖南先生在中國史學上之貢獻〉《史學年報》2卷1號(1934

年9月），頁155–172。

11 周ー良，《畢竟是書生》（北京：十月文藝出版社，1998年）、頁28–41; 日譯：

藤家禮之助監譯、《つまリは書生、周ー良自傳》（東京：東海大學出版

會、1995年）、頁49–71。

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

267

As with Xia’s essay, notably absent from Zhou’s work—and virtually ubiquitous in all Japanese writing on the subject of Naitō’s work—was mention of imperialism, stagnation, and the like; and Zhou was writing only a few years after the Manchurian Incident. Indeed, when I met both men over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, they affirmed the view for me that, in their separate estimations, Naitō was simply a great scholar. I shall return to this theme momentarily.

Another important change leading to the resuscitation of Naitō and his ideas about Chinese history does have to do with changes within Japan. It concerns the generational change within Japanese academia since the conclusion of World War II and the paradigm shift in approaches to Chinese historical and cultural research. As the immediate postwar generation has passed on either through retirement or death, a younger generation has not been as infatu-ated with Marxism—or at least with the overdetermined manner in which Marxism was frequently used to emplot Chinese history, finding feudalism here and capitalism (or its “sprouts” 萌芽) there.

I would point to the early 1980s as the moment when this change was first being identified—again, this was when I was putting the finishing touches on my book about Naitō Konan 內藤湖南. In a collection of essays edited by Professor 谷川道雄 (b. 1925) entitled《中國士大夫階級と地域社會との

關係についての總合的硏究》, Professor 谷川 and his colleagues made

clear what Tanigawa 谷川 had been more subtly working on in his own period of expertise, Chinese history from Wei-Jin 魏晉 through fang.12 Namely, they were all arguing from their various places in Chinese history that there was something more basic to the fabric of Chinese history that social classes as understood by Marxism, and they called this phenomenon the local social community: sometimes “local society” (地域社會) and more frequently “local community” (共同體). This term is an expression with a long and complex history within Japanese scholarship; even its association with Japanese studies of Chinese history is complex. Professor Tanigawa 谷川 had been for many years dissatisfied by the rigid mold into which Japanese Marxist Sinologists had forced China’s historical experience. He proposed several decades earlier that Sinologists move beyond class to assess local Chinese society, and he was roundly attacked by the dominant Marxist establishment for his 12 谷川道雄編、《中國士大夫階級と地域社會との關係についての總合的硏究》

（京都：昭和57年度科學硏究費補助金總合硏究(A)硏究成果報吿書(硏究課題

番號00531039)硏究代表者：谷川道雄、1983年）。See my extensive review of this collective work: “A New Direction in Japanese Sinology,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44.1 (June 1984), pp. 225–47.

268

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

efforts.13 However, he never gave up, and his views have now produced many disciples and adherents over the years. His late colleague at Kyoto University, Kawakatsu Yoshio 川勝義雄 (1922–1984), was a longtime partner in moving the discussion beyond simplistic class analysis.

Fascinating for me is that Tanigawa’s 谷川 concept of “local community” as a term for the structure of local Chinese society very closely resembles a concept used by Naitō:〈鄕團〉. When I suggested this relationship to Professor Tanigawa 谷川 in the mid-1980s, he was very happy that the connection had been recognized. He has since spent a great deal of time studying Naitō’s works and even organizing a citizen’s group of men from various occupations within the Kyoto area to read works by Naitō together. He also organized a 內藤湖南

硏究會 of scholars from around Japan, and they recently published under his editorship:《內藤湖南の世界：アジア再生の思想》.14 A look through

the essays in this book, which includes one Chinese author, reveals that these scholars are no longer obsessed with pigeon-holing Naitō or assessing him solely on the basis of “imperialism.” Naitō has now become a figure in intellectual history with some fascinating ideas about Chinese history—some of those ideas may still work and some may not.

In other words, he is no longer being used as a “whipping boy” or a sacrificial animal onto whom all the sins of the prewar era may be put and exorcised.

Perhaps, then, the time is right to take a fresh look at his extraordinary history of Chinese historical thought.

A Fresh Look at Naitō’s Work in the Field of Chinese Historiography Several years ago, the long series of books put out by the publisher Heibonsha (平凡社) in conjunction with the Tōyō bunko (東洋文庫) reissued Naitō’s 13 He first raised his own doubts about labeling the Tang period as “ancient”（古代）at the annual meeting of the 歷史學硏究會 in 1955. In several essays of the 1960s, he suggested that scholarly advances were been severely held back because of the stranglehold of the periodization schemes being imposed on Chinese history by orthodox Marxist theory.

See 川勝義雄、〈一東洋史硏究者における現實と問〉、〈新しい歷史學のため

に》68號（1961年）：川勝義雄、〈魏晉南北朝〉、《史學雜誌》71號（1962年5

月）、頁164–171.

14 內藤湖南硏究會編、《內藤湖南の世界：アジア再生の思想》（名古屋：河

合文化敎育硏究所、（2001年）. Although the book lists the 硏究會 itself as editor, clearly this was Professor Tanigawa’s work; he initially organized the group, wrote the volume’s introduction, its preface, and its final substantive essay.

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

269

extraordinary work,《支那史學史》.15 This work was the result of lectures delivered at Kyoto Imperial University in the 1910s, and the reader quickly realizes something which is as true now as it was over eighty years ago when Naitō

first delivered these lectures: not only was there no easy way for him to have organized the raw material for his talks, but even more astonishing is the fact that there were no libraries with easy access to all the major works of Chinese historiography. Naitō had to all the work as he went along. This very fat book was thus not only the first of its kind in any language; it has even today not been superceded, and that is surely why Heibonsha thought it could republish the book and earn money. I would like now to briefly examine the basic arguments of this book. Not many books can still be read with profit nearly a century after they were first published. An investigation of this one may help explain why it is still such an extraordinarily valuable work.

The single most important debate which Naitō saw informing the entire history of Chinese historical writing—and one which tells us a great deal about his own sense of what was important in historical research—was between a comprehensive approach to history (tongshi 通史) and a single-period approach (duandaishi 斷代史). Although he found some merit in the latter and admired several historians who advocated it, he was an unabashed partisan of the former and of the great Chinese historians who had adopted it in their work.

Thus, after 100 pages 01: his《支那史學史》analyzing every known pre-Han text and fragment then in existence for its historical content and every known commentary on them, it is with the Shiji 史記 of Sima Qian 司馬遷

(135?–93 bce) that Naitō identified the true emergence of conscious history writing in China. After the disorder of the Warring States era, there was a general tendency in the Han toward the unification of thought, and Naitō saw the 史記 as the result of efforts to unify the historical records that had accumulated to that point in time. Unlike his father, Sima Tan 司馬談 (d. 110 bce), from whom he inherited the work of compiling the 史記, 司馬遷 fell heavily under the influence of Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179?–104? bce) and the Gongyang tradition 公羊傳. Naitō interestingly argued that, while the 史記 is not what we might accept as history today, it is factually what we demand of history writing. It was decidedly not like its contemporaries-works which compiled events to serve a sovereign’s needs; the 史記 was thus not born simply out of the “demands of the times” but out of 司馬遷’s own great genius.16

15 內藤湖南，《支那史學史》（東京：平凡社、1992, 2卷。

16 內藤湖南，《支那史學史》，《內藤湖南全集》（東京：筑摩書房、1976年）第

11卷、頁106–108。

270

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

Such an evaluation might seem rather quaint and certainly old-fashioned in our overly critical age, but let us momentarily give Naitō the benefit of the doubt and look at just what he identified as 司馬遷’s “genius.” First and foremost, it was the use of a comprehensive approach to history which implied an understanding that history did not simply begin in a given year when one sovereign ascended the throne or a new dynasty commenced and end when that ruler or regime left power. As 司馬遷 seemed to clearly understand, history was a process involving change over a long, long time span: the entirety of the known past. 司馬遷 saw himself, perhaps exaggeratedly, as the heir to a daotong 道統 that went from the Duke of Zhou 周公 through Confucius to himself.17 Like his father, though, 司馬遷 believed that the historian’s task was a hereditary commitment to speak the truth—irrespective of the consequences—and thus to explain how history had culminated in the present, the Han dynasty.

Naitō felt that the 史記 had not been appreciated in its day, largely because it was followed by the Han shu 漢書 of Ban Gu 班固 (32–92), a single-era history that set the mold for much of the history writing that followed. Only at a much later date were the contributions of the 史記 recognized. Naitō

reserved special praise for Shao Jinhan’s 邵晉涵 (1743–1796) penetrating analysis of the text.18 It was Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠 (1738–1801), though, who first understood the great importance of 司馬遷 work as a whole, and it was Naitō Konan who brought Zhang and his writings out of oblivion in the early twentieth century.19

One thing Naitō criticized 司馬遷 for was the latter’s apparent effort to explain historical events in a rational manner but then to use rational explanation to elucidate legendary events, such as the fatherless births of the founders of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Perhaps, this reveals the influence of the

“scientific approach” to historiography not ordinarily associated with Naitō

17 See Steven Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

18 《內藤湖南全集》，第11卷、頁110–112。

19 《內藤湖南全集》，第11卷、頁 113, 115–116, 124–129, 131–133. On Naitō’s contribution to

“rediscovering” Zhang Xuecheng and his influence on Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) and others, see: 內藤湖南，〈章實齋先生年譜〉，《支那學》1卷3–4號（1920年10月），

《內藤湖南全集》，第7卷、頁67–79;〈胡適之の新著章實齋年譜を讀む〉，

《支那學》2 卷 9 號（1922年5月），《內藤湖南全集》，第7卷、頁 80–90: Joshua A.

Fogel, “On the ‘Rediscovery’ of the Chinese Past: Ts’ui Shu and Related Cases,” in Perspectives on a Changing China: Essays in Honor of Professor C. Martin Wilbur on the Occasion of His Retirement, ed. Joshua A. Fogel, and William T. Rowe, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1979), pp. 230–33.

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

271

and the Kyoto School of Sinology. Still, Naitō argued that 司馬遷 was China’s first comprehensive historian and he was not fully appreciated until much later in history.

A number of scholars did appreciate the 史記 and sought to continue it beyond the reign of Han Wudi 漢武帝 (r. 140–86 bce), the point at which Sima Qian had stopped. The Later Han 後漢 historian Ban Biao 班彪 (3–54) was not impressed by these sequels and decided instead to write a history of the Former Han dynasty. In form he followed the 史記 but there was the all-important difference that his work no longer encompassed the full run of history, but was to be the history of a single era which, upon his death, his son Ban Gu completed. Although later praised by such critics as Liu Zhiji 劉知幾

(661–721) of the Tang for setting the mold that subsequent dynastic histories would follow, others such as Zheng Qiao 鄭樵 (1104–1162) of the Song levelled a stinging attack on it for precisely the same reason. Zheng argued that Ban Gu, despite his claim of admiration for the 史記 clearly could simply not have understood its central message that only a complete history from antiquity through the present could ever capture the complexity of causation in the historical process.20

This was effectively Naitō’s position as well and thus explains his extraordinary praise for Zheng’s work. Thus, he clearly identified Sima Qian’s greatness in his adoption of a tong 通 approach to history from gu 古 to 近 . In the subsequent few centuries many different kinds of works would appear written in various styles, and the rivalry continued for some time between 通史 and 斷代史. In fact, the number of historical works grew so large that by Tang times China’s first historical critic, 劉知幾, emerged to write his famous Shi tong

《史通》. Despite his title, though, Liu favored the 漢書 or 斷代史 approach to history writing, and, as Naitō put it, failed to appreciate the subtleties of the 史記.21

Skipping ahead to an important turning point in Chinese history, we find that one of the longest chapters in Naitō’s 《支那史學史》 concerns the Song dynasty, second only to his chapter covering the Qing. He argued that the change in historical compilation techniques can be seen in the differences between the Jiu Tang shu 《舊唐書》 and the Xin Tang shu 《新唐書》. The former was written between the Later Tang 後唐 and Later Jin 後晉 states of the Five Dynasties 五代 era and included copious amounts of material 20 內藤湖南，《支那史學史》《內藤湖南全集》第11卷、頁136–138。

21 同前註，頁 141–142, 144–145, 164–165, 168–172; for a more recent analysis of 劉知幾’s historical thinking, see 稻葉ー郞 (1999),〈劉知幾の史通〉《中國の歷史思想》

（東京：創文社、1999)、頁 197–277。

272

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

verbatim from Tang sources. By contrast, the latter was the work of two men, Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072) and Song Qi 宋祁 (998–1061), who rewrote the history of the Tang era in the ancient style, quoting few documents from the time at all and all but completely ignoring the Jiu Tang shu. Many including such scholarly luminaries as Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–1682) and Shao Jinhan though, found little of value in the Xin Tang shu, but others, such as Ji Yun 紀昀

(1724–1805), came to its defense. Naitō himself found things of use in the later text, though he faulted it for not being as punctilious in assessing historical fact as it might have been, such as in the use of fiction as a historical source.22

What did Naitō think of the Zizhi tongjian《資治通鑑》of Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1089), another text with the character tong in its title? He argued that Sima Guang’s penchant for drawing lessons from the events of history was tied up with the transition underway in China over the previous century from 貴族政治 to 獨裁君主政治, but he did not go into detail on this potentially fascinating topic. Despite marked differences in organization, the《資治

通鑑》revived in a major way the tongshi style, searching for cause and effect over the long run of history.23

If 劉知幾 began the Tang-Song transition in Chinese historiography, then 鄭樵 completed it, according to Naitä The main thrust of Zheng’s Tong zhi《通志》was, simply put, that history had to be written in a comprehensive manner or it failed to capture wnat was the essence of historical inquiry: change over time. Thus, as we have seen, Zheng praised the《史記》no end and lambasted the《漢書》 with equal force. Among pre-Qing historians and historical critics, Naitō considered 鄭樵 a man of extraordinary brilliance and ranked on a par with 司馬遷.24

Surely the most extraordinary sub-section of Naitō’s chapter on history writing in the Ming was his six pages on Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602). Although not the first mention of Li in a modern source—Naitō himself had mentioned Li’s work as early as 190125—Naitō was one of the figures centrally responsible for reviving interest in and study of Li’s work in both China and Japan, and this was the first serious examination of Li’s historical writing in any language in several centuries. Although Li was vilified in the early Qing, Naitō was sufficiently impressed to allocate to Li more space than to any other Ming figure 22 《內藤湖南全集》，第11卷、頁194–201。

23 同前註，頁204–219。

24 同前註，頁 228–229, 231–232。

25 內藤湖南，〈讀書記三則〉，《日本人》（1901年8月5日），《內藤湖南全集》第

12卷、頁23–30。

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

273

in historical writing.26 Naitō recognized Li as an extremist both in personal inclination and scholarship, but saw his work within the general framework of his times. As is well known, Li adopted an essentially biographical approach to history writing, although he rejected the older good-bad (or right-wrong) dichotomy as a universal way of assessing historical personages. His contribution was to suggest that the very concepts of “good” and “bad” by which we judge figures from the past are conditioned by changes in times. Thus, we cannot properly apply the same yardstick to all people at all times.

Reading and writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Qing period did not have for Naitō the sense of being distant that it now holds for us.

Naitō had covered its political events as a journalist for the first twenty years of his adult life, before he began his teaching career at Kyoto Imperial University in the last years of the Qing; in fact, he lived over half his life during the final Qing decades. For Naitō, it was during the Qing period when Chinese—and, for that matter, all humanity—reached the apex of historiographical expertise in methods, the use of sources, and philosophy of history. No Japanese, no Westerner, and certainly no one else could come close. Naitō’s great respect for historiography of the Qing era can be traced to what he perceived as its central focus on accuracy. It also involved a perceived rejection of ideology riding roughshod over scholarship. All of this may sound distinctly naive in our own sharply critical age, but it would be ahistorical of us to dismiss it as such without investigating it first.

While Naitō did indeed lavish praise upon all the famed scholars of Qing kaozhengxue 考證學 from Gu Yanwu and Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 (1610–1695) at the very start of the dynasty through figures as diverse as Sun Yirang 孫詒讓 (1848–1908) and Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858–1927) at the end, he was especially taken with the historiographical writings of the eighteenth-century scholar Zhang Xuecheng—and Zhang was actually quite critical of the kaozheng movement. Thus, Naitō’s views are not easily characterized as simple positivism.

While he had not gone out of his way to applaud the earlier dynastic histories—largely, it appears, because he did not have faith in these government-sponsored, mass projects to be able to retain any scholarly 26 內藤湖南全集》，第 11 卷、頁 265–278。See also Joshua A. Fogel, “On the

‘Rediscovery’ of the Chinese Past,” pp. 233–234; and 島田虔次，〈私の內藤湖南〉，

《內藤湖南全集月報》（1970 年6月），頁6–8, 此文收入島田虔次，《中國の傳統

思想》（東京：みすず書房、2001年）、頁322–328. There is a fine chapter on Li Zhi in Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Importance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

274

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

independence—Naitō did have reason to acclaim the Ming shi《明史》of the early Qing, He seemed especially pleased by the efforts of Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊 (1629–1709) to abandon the semi-fictional yeshi as sources in favor of a methodology geared toward use of the shilu 實錄 as the basis for writing the history of the Ming. Otherwise, Naitō spent a great deal more time and space on the topic of the early Qing, discussing the historical writings of the three great scholars of the founding generation, none of whom served the new Manchu state: Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, and Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (1619–1692).

Despite great differences among them, he found admirable qualities in all of their historical writings.27

Much of the rest of his chapter on the Qing consists of explications of the main historical writings of an extremely long list of figures from the time—

some very famous, others all but unknown. His definition of “history” in this context was exceedingly broad, covering many subfields of science and classical studies. And, the general treatment is chronological, from early Qing to late.

Among those singled out for particular praise, in addition to those mentioned above, are: 胡承諾 (1607–1681), 閻若璩 (1636–1704), 全祖望 (1705–1755), 王鳴盛 (1722–1798), 戴震 (1723–1777), 趙翼 (1727–1814), 錢大昕 (1728–1804), 崔述 (1740–1816), and 洪亮吉 (1746–1809).28 The list is so long and so rich, it simply overwhelms the modern reader. Naitō’s book was first put together from student notes, and at the very end of the text, we find a few brief lines—

in Chinese—of what was apparently covered in the very last lecture. The final line about a contemporary of Naitō’s reads: “Liang Qichao: Doesn’t even know what wants and proceeds to act recklessly” 「梁啓超不知其意而妄作者」.29

As taken as he was with so many Chinese historians, the work of Zhang Xuecheng held a particularly strong attraction for Naitō. Despite his own predilection for hard-nosed, kaozheng-style historical scholarship, Naitō nonetheless found Zhang’s theoretical approach to Historical methodology profoundly inspiring. In a lecture given shortly after his retirement in 1928, Naitō revealed that he had first read Zhang’s two major works,《文史通義》and《校讎

通義》, in 1902 after purchasing them in Hangzhou. In the mid-1910s, Naitō

obtained an uncut edition of Zhang’s complete works (《章氏遺書》) and read them from start to finish. On this basis he wrote up a brief chronological biography (nianpu 年譜 ) which inspired Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) to do the same and thus Zhang’s work became known to a new generation of Chinese 27 《內藤湖南全集》，第 11 卷、頁294–296, 301, 298–310。

28 同前註，頁 310–314, 321, 325–326, 334–344, 349–350, 364, 388–396。

29 同前註，頁 447。Naitō only met Liang once, in 1899 in Japan, and was not impressed by him.

Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography

275

scholars.30 While Zhang’s scholarly aim may have seemed in the final analysis to be philosophical, Naitō believed that it was fundamentally historiographic.

Zhang was not out to record facts but to discover basic principles of the historical process. As Zhang had put it, all learning was historiography.31 I dare say this view would strike many as perfectly appropriate even today.

In short, Naitō most appreciated Chinese historical works of a comprehensive nature, beginning with the 史記, works that looked at changes over the full run of history and not just a single dynastic era. He also appreciated scholarship and methodologies that were geared toward gaining a more accurate picture of the past; thus, Li Zhi of the Ming who contested received wisdom on evaluating historical personalities and especially the great Qing scholars working in history and related disciplines found great favor with him. While he highly valued hard work as a means toward an end, it was never an end in and of itself. Thus, he probably reserved the greatest praise for the master innova-tors (the paradigm-shifters) in historical studies, the men who came up with the ideas that changed the way we understand the past—first and foremost, Zhang Xuecheng.

Naitō was a Titan who lived in an era of Titans. His heroes, from Sima Qina to Zhang Xuecheng, were in turn Titans to him. In our era of debunking mas-querading as scholarship, I believe that there is much more that can be gained by learning from the great scholars of the past. 臺北 and 京都 may be, the last two places on earth where Chinese history is still done in this way. I thank you very much for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you today.

30 See 註 18.

31 內藤湖南，〈章學誠の史學〉(1928年10月6日在大阪懷德堂的講義)《內藤湖南

全集》，第11卷、頁 471–472, 474–476, 482–483。

■ Source: “Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s,” in Historiography and Japanese Consciousness of Values and Norms (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan, 2002), 79–99.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

It [Shanghai] seems to be the most thriving place in the world.

—Matsudaya Hankichi 松田屋伴吉**, **18621

From the middle of the seventeenth century for over 200 years, it was illegal on pain of death for Japanese to travel outside the islands that comprised their archipelago. Indeed, travel even within the islands was tightly regulated.2

Study of things Western developed here and there over the course of these two centuries via works in Dutch—largely, medical texts—that came into Japan through the port of Nagasaki. Study of things Chinese had a long history in Japan before the start of the Edo period (1600–1868) and as with Dutch Learning (Rangaku), although on a much larger scale, developed and expanded throughout the country, spawning a wide assortment of regional schools and textual affiliations. When the shogunal government lifted the ban on travel in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was no mad rush to visit Holland; some scholars—such as Nishi Amane 西周 (1829–97) and Tsuda Mamichi 津田真道 (1829–1903)—did study there, though in small numbers. By contrast, the much closer China became the objective of a wide variety of travelers.3

Why did Japanese want to go to China and, in particular, Shanghai? In trying to answer this broad question, it is extremely important to bear in mind that, from the perspective of the 1860s, it was not at all apparent that Japan’s industrialization and “modernization” would take off with dramatically greater speed and success later in the century than China’s. Indeed, until visiting China for the first time, it was not at all clear to many Japanese that these were even desirable routes for their country—or, at the time, it would be better to say their many domains either separately or collectively—to follow.

This essay examines three principal motivations spurring travel to China: commercial, military, and cultural. After a brief overview, it will examine 1 As cited in Kawashima Genjirō 川島源次郎, Nankoku shiwa 南國史話 (Historical Tales from Southern Lands) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1926), p. 148.

2 See Constantine Vaporis’s fine book, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1994).

3 Joshua A. Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 277

travelers and their writings in each of these categories for the decade of the 1860s, compare their impressions of Shanghai, and try to assess the place of

“the West” in their thinking. It will conclude with a look at one of the most intriguing travelers, Kishida Ginkō 岸田吟香 (1833–1905), who came to Shanghai twice in the 1860s and many more times thereafter—and for all three reasons, often confused or overlapping in his own mind.

The Special Meaning of Travel to China

As I have argued in the past,4 travel to China for Japanese before the twentieth century—and, in certain quarters, probably through the Taishō period—was qualitatively different from traveling elsewhere, as it was qualitatively different from Westerners traveling in China. No educated Japanese alive in 1862, save a few shipwreck victims who acquired an education outside Japan, had ever been to China at that time, and yet visiting that large land was not like visiting a completely foreign place. It was both known and unknown—physically unknown, personally unseen, contemporarily unexperienced, but culturally it was deeply familiar terrain, or at least most Japanese so imagined. This was not simply because both countries had long used Chinese characters, as was so often claimed by Japanese and Chinese alike. It was because the basic cognitive knowledge of how the world was ordered and how one was to accommodate oneself to it derived from the same set of texts, read and reread, commented on and memorized in both countries for centuries. When Kumashiro Enchō

神代延長, an official dispatched at the end of the 1860s to Shanghai to encourage Japanese commercial ventures there, said the following as reported by his Chinese friend, Chen Qiyuan 陳其元, it was not just empty sloganeering:

“My country reads Chinese books, writes Chinese characters, and practices Chinese rituals. We were originally one family.”5 By comparison, the knowledge of Dutch that a handful of Rangaku scholars acquired seems rice paper thin.

This familiarity meant that the cultural referents implicit in actual Sino-Japanese discourse were assumed and natural. The most obvious manifestation of this was that Chinese and Japanese in these years were immediately able to communicate, despite the lack of a common spoken tongue, through the medium of literary Chinese. There are countless poignant cases to 4 Fogel, The Literature of Travel, pp. 43–46, and elsewhere along similar lines.

5 Chen Qiyuan, Yongxian zhai biji 庸閒齋筆記 (Notes from the Retreat of Simple Leisure), juan 3, as cited in Yonezawa Hideo 米澤秀夫, Shanhai shiwa 上海史話 (Stories from Shanghai History) (Tokyo: Bōbō shobō, 1942), pp. 168–69.

278

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

substantiate this point, as the essay by Richard Lynn on Huang Zunxian 黄遵憲

(1848–1905) and his Japanese acquaintances in this volume amply demonstrates, and it provided the fundament for Sino-Japanese interactions in these early years. Elite Chinese who were resident in Japan, by way of comparison, did not begin to learn to speak Japanese well until the Meiji period was in its final years—in part because of cultural snobbery, but mostly because there was no need to do so. This covers the generations from Huang Zunxian through (and including) Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929).6

Travel for Commercial Ends

Numerous Japanese who traveled specifically to Shanghai or whose ships called there en route elsewhere were taken with the extraordinary prosperity of commercial life in that burgeoning city (see the opening epigrath above). They did not all like the large number of ships flying flags from around the globe, though most were thrilled by the experience of seeing them. For example, when the Le Monge arrived in Shanghai on February 15, 1864 en route to England and France where the leader of the thirty-four Japanese on board, Ikeda Chikugo no kami Chōhatsu 池田筑後守長發, was to carry out some negotiations, they found the proverbial “forest of masts” anchored there. Everyone in the group who left an account described a feeling of exhilaration.7 When the previous year, five Japanese passed through Shanghai en route to Europe, virtually to a man their jōi 攘夷 (expel the barbarians) views changed overnight to 6 On Liang’s knowledge of Japanese, see Saitō Mareshi, “Liang Qichao’s Consciousness of Language,” paper presented at a conference on Liang Qichao and Japan, Santa Barbara, California, September 1998; and Saitō Mareshi 齋藤希史, “Kindai bungaku kannen keiseiki ni okeru Ryō Keichō” 近代文学観念形成期における梁啓超 (Liang Qichao in the formative period of the concept of modern literature), in Kyōdō kenkyū, Ryō Keichō: Seiyō kindai shisō juyō to Meiji Nihon 共同研究、梁啓超：西洋近代思想受容と明治日本 (Joint Research on Liang Qichao: The Reception of Modern Western Thought and Meiji Japan), ed.

Hazama Naoki 狭間直樹 (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1999), pp. 296–33.

7 Numata Jirō 沼田次郎, “Bakumatsu no kengai shisetsu ni tsuite: Man’en gannen no ken-Bei shisetsu yori Keiō gannen no ken-Futsu shisetsu made” 幕末の遣外使節について：万

延元年の遣米使節より慶応元年の遣仏使節まで (On diplomatic missions abroad in

the late-Edo period, from the mission to the United States in 1860 to the mission to France in 1864), in Seiyō kenbun shū 西洋見聞集 (Collection of Travelogues to the West), Nihon shisō

taikei series, vol. 66, ed. Numata Jirō and Matsuzawa Hiroaki 松沢弘陽 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1974), pp. 612–13; Okita Hajime 沖田ー, Nihon to Shanhai 日本と上海 (Japan and Shanghai) (Shanghai: Tairiku shinpōsha, 1943), pp. 233–36, 242.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 279

kaikoku 開國 (open the country). This was especially true for two of them, Itō

Hirobumi 伊藤博文 (1841–1909) and Inoue Kaoru 井上蓉馨 (1835–1915). Itō

began to have serious doubts immediately that his hardened jōi ideas, formed in the hot house of Chōshū 長州 domain over the previous few years, would stand either his domain or Japan in good stead. It certainly seemed from the example of Shanghai that kaikoku was the policy to make Japan flourish, too.

As Inoue’s biographer put it:

When he reached Shanghai, and saw from the deck of his ship the hundred or so warships, steamships, and sailing vessels in anchorage, and the busy scene of ships entering and leaving the harbor, he was completely taken aback. For the first time the Marquis [Inoue] . . . saw the full meaning of Sakuma Zōzan’s 佐久間象山 teachings [on the necessity of opening Japan up] and the inadequacy of simple exclusionist thought.8

In my earlier work, I have described in detail the first and second bakufu-sponsored group trips to Shanghai.9 Those vessels, the Senzaimaru 千歳丸

in 1862 and the Kenjunmaru 健順丸 in 1864, were charged by the Nagasaki Magistrate and the Hakodate Magistrate, respectively, with observing commercial conditions in Shanghai as Japan prepared to open itself up to international trade and take full part in it. While every one of the many Japanese aboard these two ships had his own personal aims in traveling to China, the stated objective of the bakufu in authorizing these trips was commercial.10 That, in 8 Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 231–33; Etō Shinkichi 衛藤瀋吉, “Nihonjin no Chūgokukan: Takasugi Shinsaku ra no baai” 日本人の中国観：高杉晋作らのばあい

(Japanese views of China: The case of Takasugi Shinsaku and others), in Niida Noboru hakase tsuitō ronbunshū, daisankan: Nihon hō to Ajia 仁井田陞博士追悼論文集、第

三卷: 日本法とアジア (Essays in Memory of Professor Niida Noboru, vol. 3: Japanese Law and Asia), ed. Fukushima Masao 福島正夫 (Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 1970), p. 57; citation from Marius Jansen, “Japan and the Chinese Revolution of 1911,” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 11, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, ed. John K. Fairbank and Kwang-ching Liu (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 342, n. 5, with several emended spellings.

9 Fogel, The Literaure of Travel, pp. 46–61. In that book I followed a source that errone-ously transcribed the second character of the name Kenjunmaru. I have since discovered a number of new sources that confirm this reading.

10 These materials have most recently been studied by Liu Jianhui 劉建輝, Mato Shanhai: Nihon chishikijīn no “kindai” taiken 魔都上海：日本知識人の「近代」体験 (Shanghai, Demon Capital: The “Modern” Experience of Japanese Intellectuals) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000).

280

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

part, explains why they voyaged to Shanghai and not elsewhere along the coast of the mainland. The two magistracies, particularly the one in Nagasaki, had learned from contacts with Chinese, British, Dutch, and American vessels that Shanghai was an immense commercial entrepôt and a window on the West.

Thus, one could see the West by making the three- or four-day trip to Shanghai and without going halfway around the world to Europe or crossing the Pacific Ocean to the United States. By 1862 the Western powers had been building business empires and semi-colonial enclaves—better known as concessions—for twenty years within the city of Shanghai and along the Huangpu River. By the time the Japanese arrived on the scene, Shanghai was no longer a frontier outpost. As Takasugi Shinsaku 高杉晋作 (1839–67), the young hothead from Chōshū domain, put it in his 1862 travelogue, “Shanghai may in fact belong to China, but one might as well call it British or French terrain. . . .

The Chinese have become servants to the foreigners. Sovereignty may belong to China but in fact it’s no more than a colony of Great Britain and France.”11

What sort of commerce did the Japanese have in mind? What did they have to sell that the Chinese might want or need? There is an amusing story that predates the first actual voyage of Japanese to Shanghai but illustrates a point to be made. On the very day that Hakodate, a port on the southern side of Hokkaidō, Japan’s northernmost island, was opened to trade with the outside world—the second day of the sixth lunar month of Ansei 6 or 1859—an American vessel, the Moray, and a British vessel, the Eliza Mary, arrived in port in the wee hours of the morning. The latter had on board a British merchant by the name of Aston and his Cantonese steward Chen Yusong 陳玉松. The two men proceeded to the shop of a local marine produce wholesaler, Yanagida Tōkichi 柳田藤吉, and Chen there asked brusquely, probably in writing: “Got any haidai?” Mr. Yanagida did not know what haidai 海帶 was, and the matter was only cleared up when a local scholar could be found who confirmed that haidai was what the Chinese called konbu 昆布, a widely consumed variety of seaweed or kelp. Yes, he had plenty and offered Chen and Aston fourteen or fifteen stalks which they brought back with them to Shanghai. The Sino-Japanese market for konbu would never be the same. Massive quantities of Hokkaidō

konbu (as well as sea cucumbers and various creatures of the sea) were purchased by Chinese or other merchants for sale in China, causing the price to fall dramatically on Chinese markets. In short order, haidai was no longer just 11 Takasugi Shinsaku 高杉晋作, Yū-Shin goroku 遊清五録 (Five Records of a Trip to China), in Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū 高杉晋作全集 (Collected Works of Takasugi Shinsaku), ed.

Hori Tetsusaburō 堀哲三郎 (Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu ōraisha, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 159–60, 185.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 281

a luxury commodity for the elite but was being eaten by all social classes in Shanghai, even coolies.12

The bakufu did not allow individuals to travel abroad for business or study until 1866, although any number of Japanese had done just that over the previous three years. The pioneer Japanese enterprise in Shanghai dates to 1868, the first year of the Meiji era. It was known as the Tashiroya 田代屋, founded by Tomonari Genpei 友成源平, an adopted son of a well known Nagasaki ceram-ics dealer named Tashiro 田代, a surname Genpei took for himself as well.

The Tashiroya sold Arita ware from Bizen 備前 domain and lacquerware to Chinese from a rented shop at the corner of Suzhou Street and Yuanmingyuan Street in the Hongkou area of the city. Hongkou was not then the thriving center that it would later become, one of the reasons the Japanese, late-corners to Shanghai, would settle there, as did sojourners from Guangdong.

The Tashiroya also sold sundries for Japanese women in Shanghai, although the only Japanese women in Shanghai in 1868 were several prostitutes.

Over the next year or so, the Tashiroya also opened a Japanese-style inn or ryokan primarily for Japanese visitors to the city.13

Although the 1870s would witness the coming of many Japanese commercial concerns and branches of several major conglomerates, before 1870 the Tashiroya was the only Japanese business in Shanghai. In 1869 the young Meiji government sent a Japanese official to Shanghai to check on local conditions for prospective Japanese entrepreneurs who wanted to trade with the Chinese.

This official, Shinagawa Tadamichi 品川忠道, was authorized the following year by the Gaimushō 外務省 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) to establish the 12 Yonezawa Hideo 米澤秀夫 “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi (ichi)” 上海邦人發展史(一) (A history of the development of Japanese in Shanghai, part 1), Tō-A keizai kenkyū

東亞經濟研究 3 (July 1938), pp. 55–56; Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 86–88.

The term “konbu” interestingly appears in the Hewen Han dufa (How to Read Japanese the Chinese way), that all-important and little known text that aided Liang Qichao and others of his generation in rapidly acquiring some reading fluency in Japanese: “kunbu (J. konbu ‘kelp’): a belt-shaped vegetable from the sea.” It was probably published in the 1890s, certainly before 1899, which means that even at this point, some thirty years after the first konbu arrived in China, the term had not entered everyday Chinese parlance.

See Hewen Han dufa (no publication information, copy held in the Kyoto University Library), p. 62.

13 Yonezawa, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 91–92; Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 260–62; Okita Hajime 沖田一, Kojō shidan: Shanhai ni kansuru shiteki zuihitsu 滬上史談: 上海に關

する史的隨筆 (Tales from the History of Shanghai: Historical Notes about Shanghai) (Shanghai: Tairiku shinpōsha, 1942), p. 79; Okita Hajime 沖田ー, “Shanhai shiwa” 上海史

話 (Historical tales of Shanghai), Shanhai kenkyū 上海研究 1 (February 1942), p. 61.

282

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

Kaitensha 開店社 or Office for Opening Shops. It was located next door to the Tashiroya, and several years later—after the official commencement of diplomatic relations between the two countries—it became the Japanese Mission, and Shinagawa became Japan’s acting consul.14

Finally, in this vein, mention should be made of a French vessel carrying a large group of Japanese under the tutelage of Tokugawa Akitake 徳川昭

武 (Minbu 民部) to the second international exposition in Paris. It departed Nagasaki in February 1867 and called first at the port of Shanghai. On board was a Shibusawa Eiichi 渋沢栄一 (1841–1931) who was then in his mid-twenties. In his account of the overall trip to Europe, Kōsei nikki 航西日記

(Diary of a Voyage to the West), Shibusawa mentioned the many things he observed in Shanghai—much of it related to business, as one would expect: the construction of bridges, the building of roads, and the laying of rail and telegraph lines. Indeed, the first telegraph lines in China were laid that very year.15 He also seems to have been genuinely saddened by the state to which China had descended:

The Europeans treat the natives like horses or oxen, striking them at will with sticks. Wherever we went, our passage was blocked by noisy crowds who swarmed about like ants. Now and again an English or French soldier would come along and chase them away, but back they would come like the surging tide. . . . China is a venerable country of renown. In size, population, richness of soil and products, it has no equal in Europe or Asia. Yet the country has been left behind by the advanced nations, for like a towering tree [vulnerable to the high winds], it considers itself superior to all other countries and is complacent and arrogant. . . . Clinging to outgrown policies, China becomes weaker by the day. This is truly regrettable.16

Who can say what impact this visit to Shanghai may have had in the career of Japan’s most famous self-made businessman of the Meiji and Taishō eras.

It is probably not an exaggeration to say that in the bakumatsu era Shanghai rapidly replaced Nagasaki as the place from winch Japan learned of conditions in the world at large. One group of Japanese who played an especially important role in this process were those who had been victims of shipwrecks, whose ships had drifted away from Japanese waters and, often after years of 14 Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 262–67.

15 Ibid., pp. 189–90; Okita Hajime, Kojō shidan, pp. 30–31.

16 See The Autobiography of Shibusawa Eiichii: From Peasant to Entrepreneur, transl. Teruko Craig (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1994), p. 154.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 283

working their way around the world, ended up in Shanghai. For reasons of time and space, they cannot figure in this essay with one exception, that of the extraordinary case of a man known only as Otokichi 音吉 (b. 1819). He, like other Japanese castaways, had sought to return to his homeland but was turned away because the infringment of the ban on overseas travel might entangle other Japanese in a situation for which only bad weather had been initially to blame. His story has been told in detail elsewhere.17

Travel for Military Ends

The period under study falls well before military conflict between China and Japan had become a serious issue. The context of travel by Japanese to Shanghai with military aims in mind refers to conflicts, or potential conflicts, back home in Japan either between domains or between certain domains and the shogunate. Shanghai provided a wealth of opportunities to purchase military hardware from European manufacturers. The city was relatively accessible, especially compared with traveling all the way to the West, and the prices were reasonable. It should be emphasized again that the individual Japanese purchasing or attempting to purchase weaponry or ships in Shanghai during the 1860s were not doing so on behalf of “Japan,” a political concept still in the making at that time. They were charged in their missions by their respective feudal domains, and all worked to hide their objectives for fear that the bakufu would find them out.

The first record we have of a Japanese attempting to buy a vessel in Shanghai appears in 1862 when Takasugi Shinsaku learns to his amazement and jeal-ousy that a deck hand aboard the Senzaimaru, who is actually Godai Tomoatsu 五代友厚 (1835–85) in disguise, has plans to look into such a purchase on behalf of Satsuma 薩摩 domain when they arrive in the Chinese port. These ships cost tens of thousands of dollars, and one can only wonder where a deck hand would have secreted such a quantity of money en route. The most Takasugi could muster was to buy a small hand gun. When the Japanese aboard the Kenjunmaru arrived in 1864, they were informed, perhaps by way of warning, of a group of three Japanese—Kobayashi Rokurō 小林六郎, Nagao 17 Haruna Akira 春名徹, Nippon Otokichi hyōryūki 日本音吉漂流記 (An Account of the Castaway Otokichi of Japan) (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1979) is the fullest account of his life and a wonderful read. See also the painstaking research of Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 43–70. Most recently, Liu Jianhui has added an interesting interpretation to the literature in his Mato Shanhai, pp. 128–37.

284

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

Jisaku 長尾治策, and Ueno Kagenori 上野景範—who had recently come to Shanghai to buy weapons and had been sent home empty-handed because such business was deemed illegal.18

Several years later at the time of the second Chōshū war in 1866, Itō Hirobumi was sent by his lord to Shanghai to buy not one but two ships for the domain.

He succcessfully purchased one American and one British vessel which were renamed the Daini Heiinmaru 第二丙寅丸 and the Manjumaru 満珠丸 for the domainal navy. Later that year Gotō Shōjirō 後藤象二郎 (1838–97) of Tosa domain traveled to Shanghai and bought a gunboat for his lord. A considerably less well known fact was that at roughly the same time Saga 佐賀 domain sent its ship, the Kōshimaru 甲子丸, to Shanghai for repairs; as it entered the port of Shanghai, it was flying the Japanese flag. Saga had bought this vessel from the British in October 1864 for the large sum of $120,000. Similarly, Takezoe Shin’ichirō 竹添進一郞 (1842–1917), the great sinologue, diplomat, and author of a penetrating travelogue of China in 1870, made his first trip to Shanghai m 1866 aboard Kumamoto domain’s vessel, the Banrimaru 萬里丸, to seek repairs—to avoid undue suspicions, he claimed he was shipwrecked.19

Soga Yūjun 曾我祐準 from Yanagawa 柳川 domain was on a mission of observation in Shanghai (and later to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Calcutta) in 1866, and he bumped into Itō on the streets of Shanghai. Soga had been moved, as were many Japanese of his generation, by a sense of urgency to research foreign affairs. To that end, he had traveled to Nagasaki in the early 1860s where he studied British troop training before returning home. He traveled back to Nagasaki in June 1865 with the hope of boarding a foreign vessel to take him overseas, at a time when it was still technically illegal to do so. He met with a number of foreign merchants and eventually was able to ship out on a British commercial vessel owned by Glover and Company as some sort of aide, and off he went to Shanghai. His diary recounts the meeting with Itō and Itō’s mission there, as well as encounters with other Japanese.20

As the above paragraphs indicate, commercial and military objectives often overlapped. Ships might be used for offensive warfare, but they might also be put to pacific use moving people or goods from place to place. A number of Westerners had become wealthy plying the Nagasaki-Shanghai and Hakodate-Shanghai routes bringing Chinese and Western goods to Japan to trade. When the Japanese finally decided to buy their own vessel to sail to Shanghai in 18 Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, p. 155.

19 Okita Hajime, Kojō shidan, pp. 31–33; Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, p. 156; Yonezawa Hideo, “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi (ichi),” Tō-A keizai kenkyū 3 (July 1938), p. 58.

20 As cited in Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 249–50.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 285

1862, they had no choice but to retain the British captain and crew because no Japanese were seaworthy at that point in time. Within a few short years, that situation would quickly change.

The third Japanese-owned vessel to make the trip to Shanghai—after the Senzaimaru and the Kenjunmaru—was a steamship known as the Cosmopolite which left Nagasaki on October 13,1867, arriving a few days later in Shanghai. It was manned entirely by Japanese, 108 of them—a captain, 24 officers, 60 crew-men, and 23 stokers. Originally a British ship, the Cosmopolite had been sold in 1864 to Higo 肥後 domain. While the Cosmopolite was a 600-ton cargo vessel, the fourth ocean-going ship bought by Japan which came to trade in Shanghai was the 400-ton Dolphin. Purchased by Hizen 肥前 domain in April 1866 from the British for $23,000, it made a number of trips to Shanghai in the waning years of the Edo period.21

Travel for Cultural Ends

In this context, I use “culture” and “cultural” in a broad and simple sense. It is meant to convey the intentions of those Japanese travelers who came to Shanghai to meet Chinese artists, calligraphers, and scholars, to exchange brush conversations about various artistic and philosophical matters, and to visit sites of historical significance to all educated East Asians.

The first Japanese to make the trip to Shanghai and who actually took up residence there upon his arrival in 1864 was Yasuda Rōzan 安田老山 (Mamoru 養). He was born in 1833 in Takasu 高須 domain in Mino 美濃 into a family of samurai doctors. In addition to his medical training, Yasuda acquired an early and persistent interest in calligraphy. He eventually left his hometown and settled in Iida 飯田 village in nearby Shinano 信濃 domain where he put up a shingle. His next-door neighbor was a salt warehouse owner by the name of Ihara Shigebee 伊原重兵衛, and Yasuda married his daughter Kyū (usually written きふ)—an interesting match inasmuch as they were from opposite ends of the social ladder or Edo Japan. As his practice was not proving productive, Yasuda and his wife moved to Edo and later to Nagasaki, and there he worked for a prominent Zen monk by the name of Tetsuō 鐵翁, head priest of the Shuntoku 春德 Temple, founded in 1630 and for many generations the site at which books brought from China were inspected by the temple head for 21 M. Paske-Smith, Western Barbarians in Japan and Formosa in Tokugawa Days, 1603–1868

(Kobe, 1930; New York reprint: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1968), p. 223; Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 228–30.

286

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

violations of the strict bakufu regulations on interdicted texts. He also studied calligraphy with Tetsuō until he departed for Shanghai in 1864. There he worked for and studied painting and calligraphy with one of best known and appreciated artists of the day, Hu Gongshou 胡公壽 (Yuan 遠 1823–86).22

At least two other students of Tetsuō’s made the trip to Shanghai as well, Nagai Unpyō 長井雲坪 (from Echigo 越後 domain, posthumously to become well known) and Ishikawa Kansen 石川澗川 (from Etchū 越中). All three Japanese became friends of the landscape painter Xu Yuting 徐雨亭, who had earlier visited Nagasaki, Wang Daozhi 王道之, and Lu Wangxiang 陸王祥.

In Shanghai, Yasuda became known as Wushui 吳水 (waterway of China), Nagai as Wujiang 吳江 (river of China), and Ishikawa as Wushan 吳山 (mountain of China). When he returned to Japan years later, Yasuda propagated the style of painting he had learned from Hu Gongshou. This style was especially championed in Tokyo by Okuhara Seiko 奥原晴湖 and in Kyoto by Nakanishi Kōseki 中西耕石. Underscoring his contacts with Japanese artists as well as his fame, Wang Tao 王韜 (1828–97) included a poem about Hu Gongshou in his Yingruan zazhi 瀛壖雜誌 (Miscellanies by the Ocean), one line of which reads: “A piece [from his hand] is worth a city in Japan.”23

When he traveled through Shanghai in 1872, Okada Kōsho 岡田篁所 noted in his diary, Kogo nikki 滬呉日記 (Diary of Shanghai and Jiangsu), that he had met with Yasuda and that the latter was still studying with Hu Gongshou. In his jottings about the sights and sounds of Shanghai in the 1880s, the author Huang Shiquan 黄式權 (1853–1924) mentions that “Mr. Yasu[da] Rōzan from Japan . . . has long lived in Shanghai and produced many works. He has done ink drawings of plum trees and landscapes.”

22 Hu Gongshou hailed from Jiangsu province and was renowned in his day as a poet, 96 calligrapher, and artist. He came to Shanghai in 1861, where he earned his living by selling his own art work, to avoid the Taipings and there established contacts with such painters as Hu Bishan 胡鼻山, Li Renshu 李壬叔, and Xugu 虚谷 (1823–96). Shanghai was then becoming a refuge point for many from the long civil war, and among them a number of the painters, such as Hu, forged a new “Shanghai style.” Hu gained great fame in his day, acquiring even Japanese students of the Nanga School of painting, among his disciples. See Tsuruta Takeyoshi 鶴田武良, Kindai Chūgoku kaiga 近代中国絵画

(Modern Chinese Painting) (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1974), p. 25.

23 (Taibei reprint: Guangwen, 1969), cited in Claudia Brown and Ju-hsi Chou, Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire 1796–1911 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1992), p. 126. In a recent study, Jonathan Hay also offers some fascinating tidbits of the Shanghai-Japan ties in the world of painting (and book exchange). See his “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth-century Shanghai,” in Art at the Close of China’s Empire, ed.

Ju-hsi Chou (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 166–68, 187.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 287

In 1870 Yasuda returned to Japan to gather up his wife and bring her with him to share his life in Shanghai. Kyū changed her given name at this time to Ai, and she became known in her own right as a painter in Shanghai as Hongfeng Nüshi 紅楓女史 (Ms. Red Maple Tree). She died there in the summer of 1872

at the tender age of 26 sui (J. sai) and was buried to the west of the Longhua 龍華** **pagoda; her remains were later removed to the Japanese cemetery which had not yet been founded at the time of her death. The stone inscription was prepared by none other than Hu Gongshou.24

Although, unlike Yasuda, he never settled in Shanghai, Nagura Inata 名倉予

何人 (some read it Anata; also known as Nagura Jūjirō 名倉重次郎 or Atsushi 敦) from Hamamatsu 浜松 domain first visited Shanghai earlier, altogether three times in the 1860s. Over the course of these trips, he established lasting friendships with well known Chinese scholars and painters. He first came to Shanghai in 1862, one of the 51 Japanese aboard the Senzaimaru.25 His second 24 Okita Hajime, “Shanhai shiwa,” Shanhai kenkyū 1 (February 1942), pp. 63–64; Okita Hajime. Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 252–53; Huang Shiquan, Songnan mengying lu 淞南夢影

録 (Account of Dream Images from Shanghai), reprinted in Shanghai tan yu Shanghairen 上海灘與上海人 (The Shanghai Bund and Shanghai People) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989), p. 102; Okita Hajime, Kojō shidan, pp. 76, 102–03; Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 90–91, 159; Yonezawa Hideo, “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi (ichi),”

Tō-A keizai kenkyū 3 (My 1938), p. 58. In the Japanese cemetery Kyū’s gravestone carried the following inscriptions on front: “Grave of Hongfeng Nüshi from Japan, inscribed by Hu Gongshou from Huating.” The back reads: “Hongfeng Nüshi of Japan was surnamed Ihara 伊原, had the given name Ai 愛, and was also known as Teisha 停車. She was the wife of Yasuda Rōzan (Mamoru). She painted orchids and bamboo beautifully. She had a fine hand for calligraphy and was a lovely woman. She met Rōzan in Tongzhi 9 [1870] and came to live with him in Shanghai. She died on the 23rd day of the seventh lunar month of Tongzhi 11 [1872]. She was 26 [ sui]. Rōzan brought the coffin and she was buried on the western side of the Longhua Temple. This was written when the stone went up.” Cited in Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 166–67. They had actually met and married prior to 1870, as noted earlier. Information on the Shuntoku temple from Ōba Osamu 大庭脩, Edo jidai no Nit-Chū hiwa 江戸時代の日中秘話 (Sino-Japanese Relations in the Edo Period) (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 1980), pp. 46–47.

25 He wrote two accounts from this voyage. Nagura Inata, “Shina kenbun roku” 支那見聞

録 (Travel observations of China), reprinted in Tanaka Masatoshi 田中正俊, “Nagura Inata ‘(Bunkyū ninen) Shina kenbun roku’ ni tsuite” 名倉予何人「(文久ニ年)支那見聞

錄」について (On Nagura Inata’s [1862] travel observations of China), in Yamamoto hakase kanreki kinen Tōyō shi ronsō 山本博士還暦記念東洋史論叢 (Essays in Asian History, Commemorating the Sixtieth Birthday of Professor Yamamoto [Tatsurō]), ed. Yamamoto hakase kanreki kinen Tōyō shi ronsō hensan iinkai (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha, 1972), pp. 291–304; and Nagura, “Kaigai nichiroku” 海外日錄 (Daily account overseas), in Tazaki Tetsurō 田崎哲郎, “Shiryō shōkai: Nagura Inata ʽKaigai nichiroku,’ Bunkyū ninen

288

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

trip was a brief stopover en route to Europe in 1864, while the third voyage was aboard the Ganges in 1867. The Ganges carried a total of nine Japanese to Shanghai, all of them concerned first and foremost with the pursuit of knowledge. In addition to Nagura, they were: Ōbayashi Toraji 大林虎次, Yagi Saiji 八木財次, Abe Yasutarō 安倍保太郎 (later, Abe Yasuta 安倍保太), Itō

Jinshirō 伊東甚四郎, Kushibe Gozaemon 串戸五左衛門, Watanabe Shōnen

渡邊莊年, Kaburagi Tatemoto 鏑木立本, and Takahashi Inosuke 高橋佁之

助 (later, Takahashi Yuichi 高橋由一).

The same day, February 15, that the Ganges left Yokohama, a French vessel, the Alphée, carrying a large Japanese delegation set sail from Yokohama as well. The group led by Tokugawa Akitake, younger brother of the shōgun, was set to attend the international exposition in Paris in an official capacity.26

The two ships arrived in Shanghai at roughly the same time, and as the latter clearly bore men of higher social standing, the men of the Ganges who had planned to take rooms in the Astor House Hotel had perforce to spend the night elsewhere. Takahashi moved the next day to the large residence of a local businessman and art connoisseur by the name of Wang Renbo 王人伯

who supported Takahashi’s painting pursuits for the several months the latter spent in Shanghai. In addition to a diary, Takahashi left a number of sketches of people and places in Shanghai at the time; he was later to become a renowned artist.

While on his 1862 trip, Nagura had made close contacts with the writer Chen Ruqin 陳汝欽 (Miansheng 勉生). On his third trip in 1867 he made friends with a broad range of wenren 文人: Wang Xuanfu 王亘甫 (whom he had met in 1864), Wang Weixiao 王維孝, Hou Tingzun 侯廷樽, Ping Zhai 平齋, Zhe Sheng 喆生, Zhang Xiuzhi 張秀芝, and Xu Xiqi 許錫祺 (1820–76), in addition to Wang Renbo whom he had met earlier. Of these men, Xu wrote the most about meeting with the Japanese who had come to Shanghai on the Ganges, including poems to Yagi and Kushibe. Xu’s student, the local poet Yao Chengyan 姚承燕 (Qisun 芑孫), later composed a poem in Nagura’s honor Senzaimaru kankei shiryō” 資料紹介：名倉予何人「海外日錄」文久二年千才丸

関係資料 (Introduction of sources: Nagura Inata’s “Daily account overseas,” a document concerning the Senzaimaru of 1862), Aichi daigaku kokusai mondai kenkyūjo kiyō 愛知大

学国際問題研究所紀要 (December 1986), pp. 91–118.

26 There are mentions made of this trip, though not of the stopover in Shanghai, in W.G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America and Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 114–17; and Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States ( 1860) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 175.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 289

which appears in the Siming suoji 四溟瑣紀 (Fragmentary Writings of the Realm), a collection of writings by Shanghai-based authors. Another Chinese who frequented the Wang Renbo estate, Wang Zhentai 王禎泰, took the entire Ganges group to performances of local theater on several occasions.

Mention should be made in passing of Nagura’s 1864 trip to Europe that stopped in Shanghai on both legs of the journey, led by Ikeda Chikugo no kami and cited above. Nagura used the few days in Shanghai in February en route to make the acquaintances of several Chinese wenren, among them Wang Renbo, Hou Kang’an, 侯康安 and Sun Yanfeng 孫硯峰; on the return trip in August he met with Liu Wenhui 劉文匯, Wang Weiqi 王維圻, Wang Renbo again, and Wang Xuanfu.27

Nagura left Shanghai following his third trip in May of 1967. His stated aim in making this last trip was the pursuit of knowledge, but there were obvious ancillary reasons as well. His trips afforded him the opportunity to get to know China and Chinese men of letters, to exchange thoughts and poems via literary Chinese, and to introduce his Chinese hosts to Japan. These trips also gave him a chance to see the outside world through the microcosm of Shanghai.

There were several other Japanese who had taken up residence in Shanghai in the waning years of the Tokugawa regime, though their motivations for doing so remain more obscure. Yabe (or Yae) Kisaburō 八戸喜三郎 (Hiromitsu 弘光, Junshuku 順叔) had already been to London and San Francisco and was allegedly fluent in English—perhaps indicating that he was earlier a shipwreck victim—when he found himself in Hong Kong at the time that the Japanese aboard the Ganges arrived in Shanghai; he apparently first arrived in Shanghai in 1866. He then made his way to Shanghai to join this group on a tour led by a Chinese official as far as Suzhou, Zhenjiang, and Nanjing. The Chinese knew Yabe as Hongguang 宏光, a variant of his studio name Hiromitsu, and the very fact that he had several names and elite Chinese contacts would lead one to believe that he, too, was a man of letters. Indeed, in his Wengyou yutan 甕牖餘談 (Chats from the mouth of a jar), Wang Tao highly praised “Riben Hongguang” 日本宏光 who, he claimed, had traveled widely, knew many Chinese wenren, and had a fine calligraphic hand. When Wang traveled to Japan in 1879, he asked many people about Yabe, but no one knew anything about him. By contrast, Tani Kanjō 谷干城 (1837–1911), the high-ranking Tosa official, met Yabe in Shanghai in 1867 and reported in his travelogue that the 27 Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 157, 158; Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 185–90, 207–14, 233–36, 242, 248–49; Okita Hajime, Kojō shidan, p. 103.

290

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

man was exceedingly full of flattery and conceit.28 One final Japanese scholar resident in Shanghai in these years about whom even less is known was Sone Tsunenosuke 曾根常之助 (Shōun 嘯雲). He hailed from Uwajima 宇和島,

is mentioned in several contemporary accounts, and was living in the city by 1866.29

Although it is clearly difficult to distinguish the various Japanese travelers to Shanghai in these years in the somewhat artificial manner that I have chosen, nonetheless several things do suggest themselves. Unlike those who went for commercial or military reasons, the cultural travelers all but completely ignored the West that was so important to the others. No Westerners had anything of substance to contribute culturally to the interactions they sought in Shanghai, and aside for a utilitarian knowledge of English acquired during peregrinations prior to his settling in Shanghai, even Yabe Kisaburō seems to have had no contacts with things Western. The West was simply not on their spiritual radar screens. By contrast, it would not be too great an exaggeration to say that men such as Itō Hirobumi and others traveled to Shanghai with little or no interest in the native population whatsoever. In the life and experiences of Kishida Ginkō in the 1860s, however, we find all three objectives combined—

usually not discretely separated one from the next, but all present nonetheless.

Kishida Ginko and His Wide Range of Activities in Shanghai Even before he made his first trip to Shanghai, Kishida Ginkō had already lived several lives. He was highly educated in Chinese learning, came from a samurai family, had worked as a farmer and as a merchant, and knew more than a smattering of English. In his early thirties, he found himself suffering from a serious eye affliction which made it impossible for him to read. The year was 1864

and no cure seemed available. Then, his friend and well known legal scholar Mitsukuri Rinshō 箕作麟祥 (1846–97) encouraged him to visit the clinic of the missionary Dr. James C. Hepburn (1815–1911) in Yokohama. Hepburn’s treatment cured him and a lasting friendship ensued.

A graduate of Princeton College and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Hepburn thought there were simply too many doctors and too much competition among them in the United States. It was best, he believed, to move 28 Okita Hajime, Kojō shidan, pp. 30–31; Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 159–60, 164; the citation from Wang Tao, Wengyou yutan, juan 2, can be found in Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 195–96, 198.

29 Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 159–60; Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, p. 203.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 291

to a country with few doctors where his services would genuinely be needed.

Many such lands existed at the time, as they still do, and thus Hepburn decided to select a country that not only lacked doctors but also was, in his estimation, ignorant of the Christian God. He spent five years in the Shanghai and Xiamen areas of China, returned to the United States for a number of years, and then settled in the Yokohama area of Japan, after the opening of that port city, for most of the rest of the nineteenth century.

When Kishida met Hepburn in the mid-1860s, the doctor was beginning to prepare the first Japanese-English dictionary. Hepburn found in Kishida a man whose training in Kangaku as well as his varied past made available to him for his dictionary an extraordinary array of vocabulary registers of the Japanese language. In June of 1865 Kishida moved in with the Hepburns to work full-time on the dictionary project. When a draft was completed in the late summer of 1866, Hepburn realized that he would be unable to print his dictionary satisfactorily in Japan. At this time Japan had no moveable type, only woodblock printing. They thus set sail for Shanghai aboard the Cadiz on October 27, 1866. Printing of the dictionary took place at the American Presbyterian Mission Press (Hua-Mei shuguan 華美書館) then run by William Gamble. As a missionary enterprise in China, they had access to Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet in moveable type, but what about kana? As it turns out, they in fact had bad the capacity to print kana since 1861, perhaps aided in this way by Kyūkichi 九吉, brother of Otokichi and another Japanese shipwreck victim resident in Shanghai, who had been involved in the world of Shanghai printing.30

Shortly after their arrival in Shanghai, Hepburn and his wife became ill and returned to Japan, leaving the difficult job of overseeing and proofreading the printing of the dictionary to his Japanese assistant. Kishida worked long hours for minimal wages for the next seven or eight months, seeing this task to frui-tion, and in May of 1867 the printing of the Wa-Ei gorin shūsei 和英語林集成

(Japanese-English dictionary) finally came to an end. The story of Hepburn’s 30 Sugiura Tadashi 杉浦正, Kishida Ginkō, shiryō kara mita sono isshō 岸田吟香、資料か

ら見たその一生 (Kishida Ginkō: A Life Seen through Documents) (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1996), pp. 148–9, 151–52, 155, 156–57; Okita Hajime, Kojō shidan, pp. 24–25; Yonezawa Hideo, Shanhai shiwa, pp. 97–98; Yonezawa Hideo, “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi (ichi),” Tō-A keizai kenkyū 3 (July 1938), p. 61; Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 71–72; The Mission Press in China, being a Jubilee Retrospect of the American Presbyterian Mission Press (Shanghai, 1895). Shanhai jinbutsu shi 上海人物志 (Accounts of Shanghai People), ed.

Nihon Shanhai shi kenkyūkai 日本上海史研究会 (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 1997), p. 82, gives

“September 10, 1866” as the dated of their departure from Yokohama, but I think this is an error for the tenth day of the ninth month according to the lunar calendar.

292

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

dictionary is legendary, for it canonized the Hepburn romanization system which we still use in modified form today. Kishida is usually portrayed as an underfed and unhappy coolie, but a look at his diary, the Ūsun nikki 吳淞日記

(Wusong Diary), reveals much, much more going on.

In fact, Kishida investigated and established such extensive contacts in the world of Chinese scholarship and art that one might be led to assume that this was, in fact, the far more compelling reason for him to make the trip to China.

He maintained the friendships made on this trip for the next thirty years over the course of at least a dozen more trips. He was also actively studying commercial conditions in Shanghai for a highly successful venture he would start in a few years’ time. These concerns seem far more important to him from the perspective of his diary.

Before leaving for Shanghai, Kishida had made the acquaintance of Ishii Tankō 石井潭香 (d. 1870) when both were studying in Edo. Ishii had earlier studied calligraphy with a Chinese master in Nagasaki. Kishida took several examples of Tankō’s calligraphy with him to Shanghai to show to Chinese interlocutors. Here is an entry from his diary for the nineteenth day of the first lunar month (late February) of Keiō 3 (1867):

Ding Jiesheng 丁介生 and Sun Renpu 孫仁圃 came to visit. Renpu is a man of extraordinary etiquette. We exchanged some brush talk that day as well. Tankō had done four pieces of calligraphy [which Kishida had brought to China]. Upon seeing Tankō’s characters, their faces took on a strange hue, and both Jiesheng and Renpu looked closely at the seals, twisted the paper in their fingers, and asked the nationality of the man who had drawn these characters. I replied [in kanbun]: “This is a mere scrap composed by my friend Han Huiyan 韓徽言 [or Kan Kigen in Japanese, Tankō’s pen name] for your visual amusement.” At that, Jiesheng said in English: “Japan man.” When I said, “Yes,” he said: “China man.”

I replied: “No, Japan man.” Renpu wrote: “I believe Mr. Han is a friend of yours from Japan. . . .” This was very high praise, indeed. Jiesheng seemed incapable of believing that these were all from the hand of a Japanese.

Furthermore, [Tankō’s] work was praised by all Chinese.31

Many other Chinese continued to doubt that such marvelous work could have been the product of a Japanese hand.

In addition to the many Chinese with whom he made contact in Shanghai, Kishida also met up with several of the Japanese who had arrived in 1867

31 Cited in Sugiura Tadashi, Kishida Ginkō, pp. 143–45.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 293

aboard the Ganges, in particular the painter Takahashi Yuichi and Kaburagi Tatemoto, both from Saga domain, and Yagi Saiji. When they made their trip to Nanjing, he planned to joined them, but was unable to do so.32 But, it was the Chinese painters and calligraphers with whom Kishida spent much time and who were much taken with him. In a letter to his friend Kawakami Tōgai 川上冬崖, dated the fifteenth day of the first lunar month of 1867, he described the artistic scene in Shanghai, and one can clearly see his commercial inclinations rising to the surface as well.

There appear to be some great painters in Shanghai, but I’ve been so busy from day to day [with the dictionary project] that I haven’t had a moment to meet or speak with them yet. In calligraphy, Song Xiaocheng 宋小城

and Sun Renpu are very good; in painting, Hu Gongshou, Yu Qianyun 余

倩雲, Ling Ziyu 淩子與, and Chen Shimei 陳嗜梅 are said to be well

known at present. I’d like to have one piece by each of them by the time I return home. As always, though, money is a serious problem. A painter by the name of Ling Susheng 淩蘇生 who paints only marsh geese is a very easy-going man. I’ve shown him the work of many Japanese painters, but he had reserved his praise solely for your work. He said: “Tōgai’s flowers and grass are executed most subtly.” I’ve kept the wastepaper from our brush talks, so I’ll bring it home with me to show you. That’ll prove that this is neither a lie nor flattery on my part. For calligraphy I would most extol Tan Weng 潭翁 [Master Tan?]. As soon as you get this letter, please send me one or two scrolls, so I can show your paintings to Hu Gongshou and Yu Qianyun. I’ll also ask them to do some painting and get them to put your name on it which I can bring back home with me. Is it okay if I do this on your behalf?33

Without knowing more about this specific case, though, Kishida’s objectives are not at all transparent.

Prior to his departure for Shanghai, Kishida had met in Edo the extraordinary figure of Hamada Hikozō 濱田彥藏 (1837–97), better known as Joseph Heco, a shipwreck victim of 1850 whose peregrinations had taken him for the better part of a decade to California where he acquired American citizenship. Back in Japan in the early 1860s, he explained to Kishida, who was studying English with him, just what a newspaper was. Kishida had never heard of such a thing, but, extraordinarily enterprising man that he was, he was willing to go in on 32 Sugiura Tadashi, Kishida Ginkō, p. 160; Okita Hajime, Kojō shidan, p. 29.

33 Cited in Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, pp. 206–07.

294

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

such a venture with Heco—who knew English well but still had the untamed Japanese of a young fisherman—and another friend, Honma Senzō 本間潛藏.

The result was Japan’s first newspaper, Kaigai shinbun 海外新聞 (Overseas news), whose inaugural issue appeared in the spring of 1864. On June 1, 1868

Heco and Kishida inaugurated another newspaper, Yokohama shinpō moshiogusa 橫濱新報もしほ草 (Yokohama press miscellany), and later still Kishida was a staff writer for the Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun 東京日日新聞 (Tokyo daily news), covering among other things the Japanese assault on Taiwan in 1874.34

Kishida made his second trip to Shanghai in February of 1868 allegedly to purchase a steamship. The details on this roughly two-month voyage and its background remain murky at best; we still do not know who was funding such an expensive venture or why. The Yokohama shinpō moshiogusa for Keiō

4 (1868) /5/13 carried a note from Kishida which read as follows: “In a letter received from Shanghai, China on the tenth, we are informed that there are now 100 Japanese in Shanghai [an exaggeration]. They say someone was there buying a steamship which is coining to Japan.” This cannot have been a reference to his own efforts, for he was unable to locate an appropriate vessel in Shanghai and thus no deal ever materialized.35

Nonetheless, he used the opportunity of being in Shanghai to set up agencies to market the product that would make him rich in years to come. The product was a miraculous eye wash called Seikisui 精錡水 with which Dr. Hepburn had cured him several years earlier. He had only just begun producing Seikisui in August 1867, and only six months later, in February 1868, he was ready to begin selling it in China. Two shops in Shanghai, the Ruixinghao 瑞興號 and the Wanxianghao 萬祥號, agreed to be agencies to sell Dr. Hepburn’s treatment, and each bore the placard: “On sale here, the eye medicine Jingqishui

[Seikisui], expertly produced by Mr. Kishida Ginkō of Japan.”36 In the newly renamed capital of Tokyo, he soon opened an apothecary shop on the Ginza to market Seikisui, and advertisements for this product appeared in such newspapers as the Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun in the early Meiji years.37

34 Sugiura Tadashi, Kishida Ginkō, p. 165; James L. Huffman, Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), pp. 30–31, 37–38, 95.

35 Sugiura Tadashi, Kishida Ginkō, p. 260; Yonezawa Hideo, “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi (ichi),”

Tō-A keizai kenkyū 3 (July 1938), p. 62; Moshiogusa article cited in Okita Hajime, Nihon to Shanhai, p. 257.

36 In Chinese: “Dongyang Antian Yinxiang xiansheng jianzhi yanyao Jingqishui jimai” 東洋

岸田吟香先生鑒製眼藥精錡水寄賣. See Sugiura Tadashi, Kishida Ginkō, pp. 260–62.

37 See the advertisement reproduced in Yamamoto Taketoshi 山本武利, Kōkoku no shakai shi 広告の社会史 (A Social History of Advertising) (Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku, 1984), p. 11.

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s 295

Kishida was clearly a bakumatsu-Meiji jack-of-all-trades. While engaged in all of his many and sundry ventures, he still managed to keep his cultural associations alive in Shanghai. In a Chinese painting reproduced in an 1897

collection, he is centrally located and clearly the senior member of the group.

Among Chinese scholars he had earned the extraordinary honorific appellation, “Dongyang zhi xianke” 東洋之仙客 (the immortal of Japan). In fact, Kishida may have temporarily acquired wealth but he never saved his money or enjoyed its fruits, at least in the conventional way. Rather, he devoted himself to a variety of projects in China, such as spreading information throughout China on the evils of opium and by establishing rehabilitation clinics for drug users.

Sino-Japanese friendship was apparently more important to him that personal wealth. Indeed, his business practices were ironically dubbed “Kishida no kata bōeki” 岸田の片貿易 (Kishida’s one-way trade) by his contemporaries.38 His influence in the creation of a number of important Japanese institutions in China aimed at Sino-Japanese amity falls outside the scope of this essay.

Conclusions

At this time, I can do little more than indicate some of the central themes that I see at work among the objectives of Japanese travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s.

The 1860s was a critical decade in both countries. The Qing dynasty was, with British help, finally able to quell the greatest rebellion in its history—Kishida claimed in fact to have seen Taiping remnants in the streets of Shanghai in 1866, though that seems doubtful. In its aftermath, the government launched a massive restoration campaign to bring the country back onto its feet, and this program involved hiring Western experts in manufacturing and military science. Japan was undergoing the waning years of its last shogunate, and many of the youngbloods that became important players in the new Meiji regime from 1868 had visited Shanghai or passed through it en route elsewhere, an experience that frequently played a significant role in their understanding of Japan’s new place in the world.

As noted above, Shanghai was in this decade—and for many decades thereafter—to replace Nagasaki as Japan’s window onto the world. Whereas in the past one would go to Nagasaki to meet a Chinese or Dutch person, now one could go to Shanghai to meet many Chinese and all manner of Europeans.

38 Dianshi zhai huabao 點石齋畫報 (1897), erji 二集 (Guangdong reprint: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1983) with special thanks to Meng Yue 孟悅 for not only bringing this to my attention but copying and sending it to me; Shanhai jinbutsu shi, pp. 84–85.

296

Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s

Shanghai, though, could teach a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory lessons. Yes, it demonstrated that opening ports would lead to prosperity, but, as Takasugi Shinsaku noted during Japan’s first mission to Shanghai, that prosperity did not necessarily fall to the ones who opened their own ports.

Japan would have to retain firm control over the opening of its own ports.

There were crowds of people, forests of ship masts, and hustle-bustle beyond the very imaginations of Japanese visitors—things one can still experience in Shanghai—but that clearly did not portend a uniformly positive future for the Chinese.

For the cultural travelers, though, Shanghai provided something it is all too easy now for us on the other side of “modernity” to ignore. From the mid-1860s, the very fact that Japanese could actually visit China meant that these men who were trained, as generations of their antecedents had been before them, in the same texts and traditions as their Chinese hosts, would be able to meet real, living, breathing Chinese men of letters. Not only had no one among them ever had that privilege; no one they had ever known could have enjoyed such an honor. On the whole the Chinese who came to Nagasaki were merchants and seaman who were for the most part illiterate. Before the Meiji government launched its breakneck Westernization plans, before China was a place to be “gotten out of” ( datsu-A 脱亞), and before the Chinese themselves began the wholesale ravagings of their own ancient culture throughout the twentieth century, this reuniting of cultural cousins was a momentous event. And kanbun 漢文** **provided the key link enabling discourse at many different registers to be carried on. That would all sadly be lost over the following decades, particularly as the gruesome twentieth century commenced.

■ Source: “An Important Japanese Source for Chinese Business History,” Chinese Business History 12.2 (Fall 2002), 3, 8.

An Important Japanese Source for Chinese Business History

In the course of recent research on the early history of the Japanese community of Shanghai, I came across a source of prospective interest to anyone concerned with Chinese business history in the nineteenth century. It was a monthly publication entitled Shanhai shōgyō zappō (Shanghai commercial reports), published in Shanghai by the “Shanhai shōdōkai” (Shanghai commercial association) between July 1882 and October 1883. Initially it appeared monthly, with the last few issues coming less frequently. Little is known about the publishing group or about the editor, Oka Masayasu, who was also the sec-retary of the “Shanhai shōdōkai.” Offices were first listed at Number 7 Jiangxi Road in the British Concession but soon moved to the grounds of the Mitsui Bussan Company at Number 11 Sichuan Road. This was, significantly, the first serial published by the Japanese community of Shanghai.

The paper was published in a current early- to mid-Meiji style of unpunctuated Japanese, relatively easy to read. The Japanese community at the time numbered only a few hundred, most of them businessmen (aside from the still prominent group of Japanese prostitutes in the burgeoning international port, who presumably had nothing to do with this serial). As the first article in its first issue makes clear, it was aimed at describing business conditions in China (not just Shanghai) for the Japanese there—and for those back on the home islands who did business with the continent. Agencies sold it in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagasaki, and Hakodate as well as in Shanghai.

When the idea for the organization which published Shanhai shōgyō zappō

was suggested to Shanghai Consul-General Shinagawa Tadamichi in December 1879, he heartily supported it. This offers another interesting glimpse of the symbiotic relationship between the consulate and nascent business concerns at the time, a topic that has been developed by a number of Japanese scholars who have worked on the subject. The paper’s statement of purpose included describing commercial conditions, goods and quantities available, prices, etc., all over China.

One fascinating article in the second issue entitled “Shina tsūshō ron”

(“On trade with China”) by Enami Tetsuo offers an evaluation which gives us a good sense of where on the political spectrum this journal saw itself. Enami

298

An Important Japanese Source for Chinese Business History

notes that in the old “barbaric age,” if a person or state wanted something in another’s possession, they simply stole it and killed as necessary. But, in the present “civilized age,” bun (Chinese, wen) had transcended bu (Chinese, wu), and the expansion of trade represented one such civilized mode of behavior.

In the past the road to wealth and power was warfare, but now, trade and commerce had become the equitable modes of operation. Enami points to the 1871 Sino-Japanese treaty and the flourishing trade it has, in his opinion, reaped. He does note in passing that many Chinese remain arrogant in their relations with others, but the implication is that the practice will pass with time. This attitude seems fully in keeping with the “Civilization and Enlightenment” mode of early Meiji Japan, here applied to foreign trade and international relations.

Articles in Shanhai shōgyō zappō include translations from the English-language press of Shanghai, such as Shanghai Mercury, and translations of all the major treaties recently concluded between the powers and China. None of this is terribly interesting in and of itself. What is interesting and of considerable use to scholars are the numerous tables and charts of imports and exports of countless products, the listings of ships (sail and steam) by country calling at the port of Shanghai, the great detail on such items as coal, tea, and other products (and their sub-varieties) which we now know were elemental to the international trade of nineteenth-century Shanghai. Also, the Shanghai market prices on a long list of goods are given in tabular form, as are shipping and storage costs.

Shanhai shōgyō zappō disappeared without a trace in the fall of 1883 and is rarely mentioned today even in histories of the Shanghai press. Its last issue carried a story on the Chinese huiguan (Landsmannschaft) system which its author saw as a force for commercial cohesion among Chinese of the same province; he notes as well that Shanghai had a full panoply of huiguan and offers a description-translation of the rules and regulations of the Guangdong huiguan of Shanghai. The careful reader may detect a note of envy that Japanese merchants lacked such solidity away from home.

Several pages later the journal disappeared forever. It can now be found at Hitotsubashi University Library and the Meiji shinbun zasshi bunko at Tokyo University.

■ Source: “Chinese Understanding of the Japanese Language from Ming to Qing,” in Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors: Chinese Views of Japan in the Ming-Qing Period (EastBridge, 2002), 63–87.

Chinese Understanding of the Japanese Language from Ming to Qing

Generally speaking, there have been four periods in which heightened Chinese interest in Japan has led to the development of scholarship concerning Japan: the late Ming (principally the Jiajing and Wanli eras); roughly the decade between the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05); the 1930s and early 1940s, from the Manchurian Incident until the

end of World War Two; and the present, post-Mao era.1 Concerning the first period it has been argued that, while the Ming years witnessed the compilation of hallmark Chinese texts on Japan, in the Qing period, by contrast, there was a decline in Chinese learning about Japan. This essay will examine this phenomenon by focusing on the specific issue of changing Chinese perceptions of the Japanese language from the Ming to the Qing.

Although mention of and efforts to represent the Japanese language in Chinese texts long predate the Ming, it was only at that time that Chinese scholars for the first time wrestled with characteristics of Japanese that sharply distinguished it from Chinese. Ming-period texts confronted and analyzed the kana syllabaries, explained Japanese grammar by parsing sentences, and offered lengthy word lists of Japanese terms.

Language is, of course, not a transparent vessel, but reflects the social and political contexts of its speakers and writers. Prior to the twentieth century, educated Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others from East Asian states no 1 This is a generally accepted and unobjectionable view. See Wu Anlong and Xiong Dayun, Chūgokujin no Nihon kenkyū shi, pp. 14–16; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Chūgoku kobunken ni mieru Nihongo: Kakurin gyokuro to Shoshi kairyō ni tsuite,” Komazawa daigaku kenkyū kiyō 15

(March 1957), pp. 155–56. The late-Ming period is, however, distinguished in several important ways: it is the first such era of intense Chinese attention focused on Japan; it is longer than the other periods; and the nature of contact between China and Japan associated with the past century (late-nineteenth to late-twentieth) which has been made increasingly convenient by modern transportation and communications was completely absent at that time.

In one significant way, the four are strikingly similar: all are related to the rise of perceived or real Japanese might (military and economic). Wang Yizhong cites eighty-one Chinese works from the Ming period about Japan, and there were many others as well. See his “Mingdai haifang tuji lu,” Qinghua zhoukan 37.9–10 (May 1932), pp. 141–62.

300

chinese understanding of the japanese language

longer in existence (such as the state of Bohai) who looked to China for moral, political, and cultural guidance all sought to master the literary Chinese language. Knowledge of Chinese for non-Chinese East Asians was itself an index to erudition, and inasmuch as knowledge and morality were so closely interwoven in cultures which shared China’s Confucian heritage, to one degree or another, it was as well an important component of self-cultivation and elite social cohesion. By contrast, few Chinese ever bothered to learn a foreign language before the late nineteenth century. The obvious exceptions to this general rule concern the conquest dynasties of late imperial history, namely, the acquisition of Mongolian by Chinese during the Yuan dynasty and the Manchu language during the Qing; these instances again point to the political importance of language. It would be difficult to find many Chinese who learned either language out of intellectual curiosity before the conquest of the Central Plain.

Borrowing a concept from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,2 we have a situation here in which there was enormous cultural capital for non-Chinese East Asians to acquire greater talent at the Chinese literary language, but there was almost no cultural capital in Chinese society associated with the acquisition of a foreign language. Within the distinctive linguistic habitus of early modern China, knowledge of Japanese was neither desired nor seen as necessary. Chinese literati appreciated and, indeed, understood Japanese culture exclusively through the erudition its own elites reached in literary Chinese composition and through contributions to the evolving Confucian tradition (such as commentaries on Confucian texts, also written in literary Chinese).

Only rarely did they seem to have any interest in the intrinsic value of the Japanese language or culture.

The issue of language in this Chinese context was not simply a linguistic or political one, but was also ultimately closely tied to culture. The relative lack of concern on the part of the Chinese elite prior to the twentieth century bespeaks a sense of cultural seclusion or, at least, cultural self-sufficiency. For the most part, foreigners who wanted to interact with the Chinese empire had to do so within the parameters of the Chinese cultural universe by learning Chinese. In Ming times, the government created a corps of translators for diplomatic relations and local officials commissioned studies of Japan to combat the threat of Japanese piracy along the coast. In these contexts, the study of foreign languages was largely driven by political, not cultural, motivations.

2 E.g., Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 81–89. I have gained some insight from this work by Bourdieu, but the fit with the East Asian cultural setting still remains uneasy, requiring theory—as yet unwritten—of its own.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 301

The Qing era provides an even more interesting vantage point from which to address the issue of Chinese approaches to foreign languages. Precisely at this time Chinese scholars were developing the most sophisticated techniques in historical linguistics, phonetics, and related fields ever devised in Chinese history—namely, the kaozheng or textual critical movement. How is it that their intense interest in the history of the Chinese language seems not to have extended to any other languages? Was their interest in the history of the Chinese language a genuine interest in language itself or in language as one essential element of Chinese culture? What can the case of Chinese approaches to the Japanese language in this period teach us about the premises of this philosophical and cultural movement?

Background: Pre-Ming Traces of Japanese in Chinese Texts Scholars are generally agreed that the first mention of a Japanese word in a Chinese document appears in the first serious Chinese work that discusses Japan and the Japanese, namely the entry on the “people of Wa” (Woren) in the Wei zhi (Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei) by Chen Shou (233–97). This famous and much analyzed text contains Chinese-character renderings for a number of Japanese proper nouns—place names, bureaucratic titles, and personal names, such as the renowned Empress Pimiko (or Himiko), and numerous country names in ancient Japan.3 These are, however, treated more as novelties than as linguistic evidence of any sort. Inasmuch as this text was transcribed at a time when Japan still had no written language, the representation of these Japanese names in Chinese characters marked the first instance in which Japanese words were transcribed into any written form.

Subsequent entries on Japan in the Chinese dynastic histories contain similar Chinese-character readings for Japanese proper nouns. These would include the famous listing of the “five kings” and their embassies to various Chinese courts, seeking investiture within the Chinese ritual system, which appears in the entry on Japan in the Song shu (History of the Liu-Song dynasty). It also 3 See the magnificently annotated edition of Wang Xiangrong and Xia Yingyuan, Zhong-Ri guanxi shiliao huibian, pp. 8–13, 18–21; the translations by Ishihara Michihiro, Yakuchū

Chūgoku seishi Nihon den, pp. 14, 14, 18, 22; and Ryusaku Tsunoda and L. Carrington Goodrich, Japan in the Chinese Dynastic Histories, pp. 14, 16, 20. See also Hamada Atsushi, “Gishi Wajinden nado no shokan no kokugo goi ni kansuru nisan no mondai,” Jinbun kenkyū 3.8

(August 1952), pp. 29–45.

302

chinese understanding of the japanese language

includes the names of the king of Wa and various Japanese toponyms given in the entry of Japan in the Sui shu (History of the Sui dynasty).4

Aside from official histories, various early private collections occasionally make mention of Japan and cite Japanese terms in Chinese-character approximations. One such example would be the Shishi liutie (The six models of Buddhism) of the monk Yichu, also known as Mingjiao Dashi, of the Five Dynasties era. In his section on “States, settlements, prefectures, and towns,”

Yichu includes a section on Japan with the following note on Mount Fuji: “Over 1,000 li to the northeast is a mountain by the name of Fuji. . . . A single flower soaring on high, its summit is covered in mist.”5 Entries of a similar sort are scattered throughout the Chinese literary record, including dozens, perhaps several hundred, references in Tang-era poetry.

Before the Song era, however, no effort has as yet been discovered on the part of the Chinese to say anything about the Japanese language per se. Luo Dajing (Jinglun, jinshi of 1226), a scholar and poet from Luling in the Southern Song era, reports in his Helin yulu (The pearly dew of Helin) of a meeting in his youth in Zhonglu, Zhejiang, with a Japanese priest by the name of Ankaku (1160–1242). As we learn from other sources, Ankaku, a Rinzai Zen monk, came from the Kōshōji in Chikuzen and was originally known by the name Shikijō

Ryōyū. A brilliant young man, allegedly having read and become conversant in the Buddhist canon by age twenty, he traveled to China just after the year 1200

and remained there for over ten years, during which time he devoted himself to memorizing the Buddhist canon, before returning to Japan in 1214.6

4 Wang and Xia, annot., Zhong-Ri guanxi, pp. 31–32, 44–45; Ishihara, Yakuchū Chūgoku, pp. 25–26, 49, 50; Tsunoda and Goodrich, Japan in the Chinese Dynastic Histories, pp. 29–30, 40. See also Watanabe Mitsuo, “Zuisho Wakokuden no Nihongo hitei,” Komazawa kokubun 5

(October 1966), pp. 1–8.

5 Yichu, Shishi liu tie, p. 433. It is believed that Yichu acquired this information from a Japanese monk, Kanpo (Kōjun Daishi), who traveled to China in 958. See Wang Xiangrong, “Guanyu Riben kao,” in his Zhong-Ri guanxi shi wenxian lunkao, p. 242. This is, interestingly, not the first mention of a Japanese mountain in a Chinese text. For that one needs return several hundred years to the entry on Japan in the Sui shu wherein one finds mention of Mount Aso. Ishihara Michihiro, “Chūgoku ni okeru Nihon kan no tanshoteki keitai,” Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyō ( jinbun kagaku) 1 (March 1951), p. 203; Ishihara Michihiro, “Nichi-Min tsūkō bōeki o meguru Nihon kan,” Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyō ( jinbun kagaku) 5 (March 1955), p. 20.

6 Luo Dajing, Helin yulu, 16/5b–6a; Ishihara Michihiro, “Chūgoku ni okeru rinkōteki Nihon kan no tenkai,” Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyō ( jinbun kagaku) 2 (February 1952), pp. 53–54; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Chūgoku kobunken,” p. 157, citing such sources as the Nihon Bukkyō jinmei jisho (Biographical dictionary of Japanese Buddhism) and the Honchō kōsŏ

den (Biographies of eminent monks of our era); Zhang Yaqiu, “Cong Helin yulu zhong de

chinese understanding of the japanese language 303

After a brief note about this Japanese monk, Luo records twenty Chinese terms and their Japanese translations, given in Chinese-character transcription, that Ankaku taught him. The first three are political terms for which Ankaku gave the Japanese equivalents, not transcriptions; the fourth is a mixture of direct translation and Chinese characters used to represent Japanese morphemes. The remaining sixteen are single-character terms given in Chinese followed by Japanese pronunciations approximated by Chinese characters, a process known as kan’yaku (C. hanyi) or on’yaku (C. yinyi) by Japanese linguists. Thus, for example, following the Chinese term yu (rain), we find (in contemporary standard Mandarin) “xiami” which approximates the Japanese term for rain, or ame. Similarly, the Chinese term tou (head) is followed by

“jiashiluo,” which approaches the Japanese term kashira. 7 In all of these cases, it is exceedingly important to remember that not only do these readings reflect local dialectal Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, but that both spoken languages have changed over the past eight hundred years as well. Nonetheless, even the untrained linguist can recognize these equivalencies. Luo Dajing’s list remains the only one of its kind prior to the Ming era that has thus far been uncovered.

In the Ming, not only would the lists of individual terms grow into the thousands, but Chinese readers would be introduced to the Japanese writing systems for the first time. Although we have no such extant lists or introductions dating to the Yuan period, one explanation for the great explosion of information about Japan and the Japanese language in the early Ming may lie in the manifold opening outward occasioned by the Mongol conquest and the resultant cosmopolitanism. The Mongols themselves only acquired a written language, based on the Uighur script, several decades before conquering China in 1279, and with an empire that stretched well into Arabic and Persian terrain, the Mongols did not overly privilege the Chinese language. Thus, educated Chinese during the Yuan era would surely have been exposed to writing systems other than Chinese.

yize shiliao kan Songdai Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu,” in Zhong-Ri wenhua luncong, pp. 205–06.

Ankaku’s dates follow Zhang Yaqiu, “Cong Helin yulu,” p. 208; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Chūgoku kobunken,” gives slightly different ones. Wang Yong (“Chūgoku ni okeru Nihon kenkyū no zenshi,” in Zhong-Ri wenhua luncong) refers to pieces of this sort about Japan in the Tang, Five Dynasties, and Song era as the “prehistory of Chinese Japanology.”

7 Luo Dajing, Helin yulu, 16/5b–6a. A more specialized study of just one of these terms can be found in Asayama Shin’ya, “Kakuringyokuro no ʿōbōʾ nado ni tsuite,” Kokugo kokubun 7.12

(December 1937), pp. 116–20. See also Arisaka Hideyo, “Jōdai ni okeru sagyō no tōon,” Kokugo to kokubungaku 13 (January 1936), p. 96 .

304

chinese understanding of the japanese language

**The **

Kana** Syllabaries in Ming China**

In fact, when the hiragana syllabary alphabet was first introduced into China at the very beginning of the Ming dynasty, the author of the text noted that its symbols were “like Mongolian.” This text was the Shushi huiyao (Essentials in the history of calligraphy) by Tao Zongyi (completed according to the author’s preface in Hongwu 9 or 1376). Tao hailed from Huangyan, Zhejiang Province, and he lived from the last decades of the Yuan era into the early Ming. He was a gifted scholar who passed the jinshi examination at a young age, but he never served in office and actually turned down several offers of appointment.

The Shushi huiyao is a work in nine juan. It presents a history of Chinese calligraphic styles from antiquity into the Yuan.

One section in juan eight of this work concerns calligraphic styles of “foreign lands” (waiyu), induding Sanskrit, Uighur, Arabic, and Japanese. After a brief description of Japanese calligraphy, Tao lays out in clearly readable fashion the hiragana syllabaries in the i-ro-ha order (the Japanese alphabetical order comparable to a-b-c in many Western languages). Beneath each hiragana symbol are Chinese characters approximating the Japanese pronunciation of that symbol; for the sa, ta, and ha rows of the Japanese syllabary alphabet, there are two pronunciations given for each.8 These are all followed by a list of ten terms and their Japanese pronunciations (in kana). Tao claims that he acquired all 8 Tao, Shushi huiyao; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Chūgoku kobunken,” pp. 159–62; Watanabe Mitsuo,

“Minjin ni yoru Nihon gobun rikai no keika,” Tsurumi joshi tanki daigaku kiyō 2 (March 1962), p. 100; Hamada Atsushi, “Kokugo o kisai seru Mindai Shina bunken,” Kokugo kokubun 10.7

(July 1940), pp. 10–11; Ogawa Tamaki, “Shoshi kaiyō ni mitaru ‘iroha’ no Kanji taion ni tsuite,”

Kokugo kokubun 16.5 (September 1947), pp. 311–20; Arisaka Hideyo, “Shoshi kaiyō no ‘iroha’ no onchŭ ni tsuite,” Gengo kenkyū 16 (August 1950), 1–13. Hamada Atsushi has shown that these clearly represent voiced/unvoiced pairs in the Wenzhou dialect. Tao would have spoken a variant of the Wu dialect, and Wenzhou dialect falls within the larger Wu dialect group. See Hamada Atsushi, “Kokugo o kisai seru,” p. 11. Tao’s work has also been used by Japanese linguists to help reconstruct the pronunciation of certain kana of medieval Japanese; see, for example, Hashimoto Shinkichi, “Hagyō shiin no hensen ni tsuite,” in Kokugo on’in no kenkyū, pp. 33–35. There were similar works prepared by Koreans during the Yi dynasty in which the Japanese syllabaries were matched with approximate han’gŭl symbols for pronunciation.

The earliest example of a Korean text of this sort is the Yongbi ǒch’ǒng ka (Songs of flying dragons) by Kwŏn Che, Chŏng In-ji, and others; dated 1445, one year before the famous proclamation announcing han’gǔl, this text is apparently the earliest printed text to make use of the Korean alphabet. The most famous early text of this sort, published only a few decades after the invention of han’gŭl, is the Irop’a (I-ro-ha) of 1492. See Ōtomo Shin’ichi, Muromachi jidai no kokugo onset no kenkyū: Chūgoku shiryō ni yoru, pp. 40–41; Kamei Takashi, Ōfuchi Tokihiko, and Yamada Toshio, Nihongo no rekishi, 4: utsuriyuku kodaigo, p. 406.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 305

of this information about the Japanese language from a Buddhist monk by the name of Kokkin Taiyō who had visited China, but nothing of this man has as yet been brought to light. For many reasons, Buddhist monks continued to play a central role in the cultural transmission between China and Japan.

Even a cursory look at Tao’s explanations of the forty-six syllabaries of Japanese reveals a highly serious effort to represent that sound system through the use of Chinese characters. As a native of southeastern Zhejiang, between Ningbo and Wenzhou, Tao’s native tongue would have belonged to the Wu dialect group. He composed the text while living in Songjiang which also falls in the Wu dialect region. Thus, even though he would probably have been a speaker as well of standard capital Mandarin, his readings of the Chinese-character renderings for the Japanese syllabaries clearly reflect Wu readings.9

Inasmuch as we know nothing about his Japanese informant, we cannot at this point speculate what Japanese accent he brought to the pronunciation of kana.

About one hundred and eighty years would pass before Chinese readers would be introduced to the katakana syllabary. It was at this time that Chinese interest in the Japanese language became tied to the perceived Japanese threat along the coast. In 1556 Zheng Shungong—originally from Xin’an, Guangdong—was ordered by Yang Yi, the governor of Zhejiang, to proceed to Japan to request of the Japanese authorities the suppression and prohibition of the wokou (J. wakō, “Japanese pirate”). Zheng was apprehended in Bungo Domain on the island of Kyūshū by Ōtomo Yoshishige (Sōrin, 1530–87) and held there, though not incarcerated, for as long as six or seven months; his entire Japanese stay may have lasted a year or more. During this time he had ample opportunity to observe Japan in some depth before returning to China in 1557 in the company of a Japanese monk by the name of Tokuyō

Seiju, again of the Rinzai Zen sect from the great Daitokuji temple complex.10

Upon his return he wrote up his observations into an encyclopedic work bearing the title Riben yijian (A mirror on Japan) in sixteen juan.

The Riben yijian contains the first Chinese printing of the katakana syllabaries, presented in much the same way as Tao Zongyi had introduced hiragana. Despite a few errors, perhaps in transcription, Zheng not only offered a clear reading for each katakana symbol; the Chinese characters he used for pronunciation actually suggest the origins of the kana symbol in question.

9 Ōtomo Shin’chi, Muromachi jidai no kokugo, pp. 64–66.

10 Ōtomo Shin’ichi gives slightly different dates. He also notes that Seiju ultimately spent time at the Zhiping Temple in Maozhou, Sichuan, and altogether over four years in China.

See Ōtomo Shin’ichi, Muromachi jidai no kokugo, pp. 415–17.

306

chinese understanding of the japanese language

He called them “Huawen Wozi” (lit., Chinese writing, Japanese characters).

He then laid out the hiragana syllabaries, which he dubbed “Wozi Wo” (by which he probably meant “Wozi Woyin” or Japanese characters and their pronunciations) and occasionally “Wozi caoshu” (cursive Japanese characters).11

The Riben yijian also contains the longest list of Japanese words with Chinese-character renderings—some 3,399 in all—in any text prior to the compilation of modern dictionaries.

Japanese Glossaries and Grammatical Explanations in Ming Texts One of the other major innovations of the Ming period in evolving Chinese understandings of the Japanese language was this compilation of a number of extensive word lists, far surpassing in length anything that preceded the Ming.

In addition, a number of innovative means of explaining Japanese grammatical usage also appear in these texts. Aside from the works prepared for the government’s diplomatic usage, these works interestingly were all compiled in the Jiajing and Wanli reigns of the Ming in the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. And, they were all inspired by the military question of dealing with “Japanese” pirates, many or most of whom were Chinese working out of bases in Japan.

In order to facilitate contacts with neighboring states that brought tribute to the Chinese court, early in the dynasty Ming court officials of the Huitong guan (Interpreters Institute)—the office dating to the Yuan that dealt with foreign emissaries, provided them with housing, clothes, and conveyance, and watched over them closely while in China—prepared word lists for the various languages spoken by these foreign embassies. These were collectively known as Huayi yiyu (Sino-foreign vocabularies). The earliest one, compiled on the orders of Ming Taizu, was a Sino-Mongolian word list by Qoninci (fl. ca. 1376–

ca. 1394), a Mongol known as well by the Chinese name of Huo Yuanjie, and 11 Zheng Shungong, Riben yijian, juan 4–5. See also Sanshū Nihon yakugo, pp. 230–32; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Minjin ni yoru,” pp. 101, 106; Tomioka Kenzō, “Nihon ikkan kaidai,”

Geibun 5.9 (September 1914), pp. 257–58; Akiyama Kenzō, Nis-Shi kōshō shi kenkyū,

pp. 604, 605, 607; Ishihara Michihiro, “Mindai Nihon kan no ichi sokumen,” Ibaraki daigaku bungakubu kiyō (bungakka ronshū) 1 (January, 1968), pp. 9, 14, 15; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Minmatsu no Nihon shōkaisho: Nihon ikkan ni tsuite,” Komazawa saigaku kenkyū

kiyō 13 (March 1955), pp. 144–69; Ōtomo Shin’ichi, Muromachi jidai no kokugo, p. 471. See also Wang Xiangrong, “Cong Jinglüe fuguo yaobian kan renchen kang-Wo zhanshi,” in Zhong-Ri guanxi shi wenxian lunkao, concerning a related text.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 307

Mašâîh Muhammad (Mashayihei Mahama), and it dates to 1382. In 1407 the Siyi guan (Translators Institute) was established to translate documents from foreign states and to train future translation officials; they, too, prepared word lists to aid in their work.

Dating from as early as the late fifteenth century, there are now six of these glossaries extant that were prepared for dealing specifically with Japanese emissaries, usually referred to as Riben jiyu (Japanese vocabularies). Each runs to roughly 520–560 terms in all. One such list containing 521 terms breaks down as follows: astronomy (42), geography (43), times and seasons (37), flora (52), animals (45), palaces and mansions (14), implements (68), people (47), personal affairs (51), the body (20), clothing (20), foodstuffs (30), precious items (19), literature and history (10), voice and countenance (9), numbers (24), directions (11), and common usage terms (20). While these categories resemble those of subsequent texts, their content tends to stress official discourse and interactions.12

12 Sanshū Nihon yakugo, pp. 215, 217–29; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Minjin ni yoru,” pp. 104–05; Hamada Atsushi, “Nihon kigo kaidoku shian,” Jinbun kenkyŭ 2.1 (January 1951); Asai Keirin, “Kōhon Nihon yakugo,” in Andō kyōju kanreki shukuga kinen ronbunshū; Ishihara Michihiro, “Mindai ni okeru Shinajin no Nihon kenkyū,” in Tō-A shi zakkō, pp. 211–14; Ōtomo Shin’chi, “Nihonkan yakugo no seiritsu, kokugo on’in shiryō to shite no kachi,”

Kokugogaku 43 (March 1961), pp. 31–42; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Ka-i yakugo oyobi Nihonkan yakugo ni tsuite,” Komazawa daigaku kenkyū kiyō 18 (March 1960), pp. 120–35; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Ka-i yakugo oyobi Nihonkan yakugo ni tsuite (shōzen),” Komazawa daigaku kenkyū kiyō 19 (March 1961), pp. 15–31; and the extremely technical and detailed essay by Nakano Miyoko, “Nihon kigo ni yoru 16 seiki Teikai onkei no suitei, oyobi Muromachi makki kokugo on ni kansuru jakkan no mondai,” Tōhōgaku 28 (July 1964). One entire Japanese vocabulary has been analyzed word for word in Ōtomo Shin’ichi and Kimura Akira, Nihonkan yakugo. On the Siyi guan in English, see Norman Wild, “Materials for the Study of the Ssû I Kuan (Bureau of Translation),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies XI (1943–46), pp. 617–40; on the Riben jiyu in English, see the older article by Joseph Edkins, “A Chinese and Japanese Vocabulary of the Fifteenth Century,”

Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan X (1882), pp. 1–14; and the rejoinder by Ernest Satow, “Notes on Dr. Edkins’ Paper ‘A Chinese-Japanese Vocabulary of the Fifteenth Century,’” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan X (1882), pp. 15–38. A similar phenomenon of the establishment of a training institute for interpreters and translators can be seen in Korea. In 1276 the T’ongmun’gwan was opened to train experts in spoken and written Chinese only; when the Yi dynasty was founded, it was replaced by the Sayǒgwǒn, and in roughly 1414 a Waehakch’ŏng (Japanese studies office) was set up to train Japanese-language interpreters and translators. See Ōtomo Shin’ichi, Muromachi jidai no kokugo, pp. 39–40, citing the Sejong sillok (The veritable records of King Sejong). Among the texts they used for Japanese training was the Irop’a mentioned above.

308

chinese understanding of the japanese language

These works were not known or available outside the confines of the government offices using them and hence had limited influence. The first text written outside the halls of the Ming central government that carried a word list of this sort was a work inspired by the threat of piracy, the Riben kao lüe (Brief study of Japan), sometimes also known as the Riben guo kao lüe (Brief study of the country of Japan), by Xue Jun. Generally considered the first specialized Chinese text about Japan, the Riben kao lüe in one juan dates to 1523 (Jiajing 2); it is also the first Chinese book to have the expression “Riben” (Japan) in its title. All subsequent Chinese writings on the subject from the late Ming were influenced by it. Xue was a student in the country school in Dinghai—he later served as an assistant instructor (xundao) in Changzhou and an instructor ( jiaoyu) in Fuliang—when Dinghai District Magistrate Zheng Yuqing ordered him to compose a work that clarified the known information about Japan and to offer suggestions to the military on how best to cope with the pirates who were attacking the coast. As he notes early in the text, there had been destructive fighting earlier in 1523 in Ningbo between men under the command of the Ōuchi envoy Sōsetsu Gendō and the Hosokawa envoy Song Suqing, but it had not spread to Dinghai. Unlike several of the authors of later texts in this tradition, Xue was never able to visit Japan, and thus his work was prepared without any direct knowledge of the subject under study.13

In the one full study we have of the Riben kao lüe, Wang Xiangrong argues that it would not have been an especially noteworthy work had it not been China’s first specialized study of Japan. The real distinctiveness of Xue’s work lies in an extremely important innovation, a section entitled “Jiyu lüe” (Brief vocabulary)14 which lists a total of 357 Japanese words (or 359, depending on edition) with kan’yaku style readings provided, a list repeated verbatim (including errors) in many texts that followed in the Ming. Unlike the official vocabu-13 Wang Xiangrong, “Zhongguo diyibu yanjiu Riben de zhuanzhu: Riben kao lüe,” in Zhong-Ri huanxi shi wenxian lunkao, pp. 222–23, 224, 230; Kyōto daigaku bungaku kokugogaku kokubungaku kenkyūshitsu, ed., Nihon kigo no kenkyū, p. 1; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Minjin ni yoru,” p. 104; Akiyama Kenzō, “Mindai ni okeru Shinajin no Nihongo kenkyū,” Kokugo to kokubungaku 10.1 (January 1933), p. 9; Miao Fenglin, “Mingren zhu yu Riben youguan shiji tiyao sizhong,” Jiangsu shengli guoxue tushuguan 2 (1929), pp. 1–4; Fukushima Kunimichi,

“Nihon kigo gokai,” Kokugogaku 36 (March 1959), pp. 69–78. There is a biography of Xue Jun in the Ming shi, juan 207. Xue later acquired the prestige title of Wenlinlang or gentleman-litterateur.

14 Xue Jun, Ribun kao lüe, pp. 16b–23a. The expression jiyu requires explanation. It derives from the Liji, one of the ancient ritual classics, in which the vocabulary of the “barbarians” in the four directions are distinguished; those from the east are designated ji. See Watanabe Mitsuo, “Minjin ni yoru,” p. 104.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 309

laries prepared from the early Ming for diplomatic correspondence, Xue’s list is broader, more detailed, and better organized. He himself claimed that the ultimate aim of this section was, as was the case for the entire text, defense against wokou incursions: “Speech is the voice of the heart, and if you understand their speech, you will be able to see through to the sincerity or falsehood of their hearts. Thus, I have compiled common expressions, categorized and translated them. This may help in defending ourselves from distant enemies.”

Nonetheless, the terms he offers are decidedly not military language but ordinary everyday terms, even some commercial expressions. Having not learned Japanese himself, he probably acquired these terms from Chinese merchants who plied the Kyūshū-Ningbo trade route, but he does not reveal his sources.

The Chinese pronunciations given in characters for the Japanese terms reflect the sixteenth-century eastern Zhejiang dialect.15

The categories and numbers of terms within each run as follows: astronomy (11), times and seasons (17), geography (9), directions (6), precious items (8), people (64), human affairs (92), the body (14), implements (45), clothing (10), foodstuffs (20), flora, (9), animals (11), numbers (16), and common usage terms (27). There are occasional differences in pronunciations given in different editions. Yet, a comparison of all the major late-Ming texts about Japan that include such glossaries indicates that the Riben kao lüe set pronunciation standards for the subsequent texts. On the whole, Xue’s work gravely misun-derstood Japan—he basically saw all Japanese as wokou and took much of his information from the Wei zhi entry on Wa, by then over one thousand years old—but his “Jiyu lüe” set an important model for well over a century.16

The next major text on Japan was the much longer and fuller Riben yijian,

described above. Although compiled only four decades after the Riben kao lüe, its word list included almost ten times as many Japanese terms and their Chinese-character transcriptions. These break down in the following manner: astronomy (61), geography (246), times and seasons (120), people (164), palaces and mansions (86), instruments (296), animals (255), flora (244), the body (160), clothing (75), precious items (34), foodstuffs (95), literature and history (57), voice and countenance (122), stems and branches (35), divination terms 15 Wang Xiangrong “Zhongguo diyibu yanjiu Riben de zhuanzhu,” pp. 232–33. The earliest edition of the Riben kao lüe now extant dates to 1530, with a preface by Wang Wenguang.

On the various editions of the text and their differences (often minute), see Kyōto daigaku bungakubu, ed., Nihon kigo no kenkyū, pp. 2–17.

16 Wang Xiangrong “Zhongguo diyibu yanjiu Riben de zhuanzhu,” pp. 233–36; Hamada Atsushi, “Kokugo o kisai seru,” pp. 14–16.

310

chinese understanding of the japanese language

(8), numbers (30), and common usage terms (1311).17 In addition, other sections of the text contain Japanese toponyms and the like with Chinese renderings. Unlike other Ming texts on Japan, the Riben yijian represented each kana syllable with a single Chinese character, uniformly employed, not a multitude of different ones. It is also unlike the other Ming-era word lists which generally reflect Kyūshū dialect pronunciations of Japanese terms, and it contains numerous terms which appear in no other Chinese texts of this period.18

By far the most analyzed Chinese text concerning Japan of this period has been the Chouhai tubian (Illustrated essay on maritime defense) by Zheng Ruozeng in thirteen juan. The text exists in four or five editions dating from 1562 to 1624. Hu Zongxian (1511–65), the governor of Zhejiang, has often been named as the author of this text largely because of the efforts of his descendants, but it is now clear that it was the work of Zheng Ruozeng.19 Zheng was born in Kunshan, near Suzhou, and the whole region from Suzhou to Shanghai had been hit hard by wokou activity over the first decades of the sixteenth century. Hu Zongxian had built his career on crushing the wokou, especially the notorious pirates Wang Zhi (d. 1559) and Xu Hai. When he learned of Zheng’s interests in pursuing the pirates, perhaps through a work in one juan Zheng had completed in the summer of 1561 entitled Riben tu zuan (Collection of Japanese maps), Hu invited him to join his staff.

Zheng never actually traveled to Japan but compiled his writings by interviewing numerous people along the south China coast affected by corsair raids, captured wokou, and Chinese merchants who had visited Nagasaki to engage in trade; two men of commerce who provided him with much material were Jiang Zhou and Chen Keyuan. Hu’s connections also enabled Zheng to examine government documents. The Chouhai tubian will ultimately, though, 17 Zheng Shungong, Riben yijian, Qionghe huahai, juan 5.

18 There is a biography of Zheng Shungong in the Ming shi, juan 322, which mentions his trip to Japan. Hamada Atsushi, “Kokugo o kisai seru,” pp. 19–22.

19 Even the Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao states clearly: “The Chouhai tubian in thirteen juan by Hu Zongxian of the Ming.” This information was repeated in a number of other Qing sources as well. The first modern author to recognize that Zheng in fact authored the Chouhai tubian was Gotō Shukudō, “Wakō shiryō: Chūkai zuhen ni tsuite (1),” Tōyō

bunka 42 (November 1927), pp. 58–71; Gotō Shukudō, “Wakō shiryō: Chūkai zuhen ni tsuite (2),” Tōyō bunka 43 (December 1927), pp. 72–80; and Gotō Shukudō, “Wakō shiryō: Chūkai zuhen (3),” Tōyō bunka 44 (January 1928), pp. 106–16. See also Wang Xiangrong,

“Guanyu Chouhai tubian,” in Zhong-Ri guanxi shi wenxian lunkao, pp. 166–75; Wang Yong, Zhongguo dili tuji congkao, p. 93; Ōtomo Shin’ichi, “Nihon zusan, Chūgai zuhen no shohon to sono seiritsu jijō,” Nihon rekishi 132 (June 1959), pp. 91–100; Miao Fenglin, “Chouhai tubian (Ming Tianqi kanben),” Shixue zazhi 1.4 (September 1929), pp. 6–9.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 311

be remembered much more as a treatise on the wokou than as a study of Japan. The advice it offered helped Hu to win subsequent battles against the marauders.20 The linguistic information in the text does not mark a major advance over previous works in this lineage. However, in a subsection entitled “Jiyu daoming” (Vocabulary of names of islands), Zheng included 81 items (11 of which have no transcription beside them), and many of these were new to Chinese texts. They are followed by a list of 358 words in 15 categories, effectively the same as that given in the Riben kao lüe.

One final text worth noting from the late Ming dates to the middle years of the Wanli reign at the very end of the sixteenth century. This is entitled the Riben kao (Study of Japan) in five juan by two military men, Li Yangong (then working at the military headquarters of the Capital Training Divisions) and Hao Jie (then right censor-in-chief), and it turns out to be the same as another text, entitled Riben fengtu ji (Account of the customs of Japan), appended to the Quan-Zhe bingzhi kao (Study of the military institutions of Zhejiang) by another military man, Hou Jigao (a regional commander to whom it is frequently incorrectly attributed). Published between the seventh month of 1592

and the tenth month of 1593, precisely at the time of Hideyoshi’s first invasion of the Asian mainland, Li presented their work in the eleventh month of 1593 to Song Yingchang (1530–1606), the military commissioner in charge of combating the Japanese invading army. Li had been sent to Japan by Song to attempt to forestall further incursions. His firsthand experiences there and en route along the Korean peninsula, the interviews he carried out, and his acquisition of some knowledge of the Japanese language enabled him to provide more up-to-date information about Japan.21

20 Wang Xiangrong, “Guanyu Chouhai tubian,” pp. 159, 161–65, 177–81, 182–84; Tanaka Takeo,

“Chūgai zuhen no seiritsu,” in Chūsei kaigai kōshō shi no kenkyū, pp. 215–17, 219–21, 223–25; Kyōto daigaku bungakubu, ed., Nihon kigo no kenkyū, pp. 28–34, 40–42, 46; Liang Rongruo,

“Chouhai tubian de banben,” in Tan shi ji, pp. 128–31; Liang Rongruo, “Ping Pulinsidun daxue Zhongwen shanben shuzhi,” in Tan shi ji, p. 122; Stanley Y.C. Huang, “Cheng Jo-tseng,” in Dictionary of Ming Biography, pp. 205–07; Akiyama Kenzō, “Mindai Shinajin no Nihon chiri kenkyū,” Rekishi chiri 6.1 (1933), pp. 44–45, 47, 58 (though Akiyama still believed Hu to be the author of the Chouhai tubian); Kaneko Kazumasa, “Chūgai chūhen no shōkai,” Biburia 12 (October 1958), pp. 54–58.

21 Watanabe Mitsuo, “Minjin ni yoru,” p. 107; Wang Xiangrong, “Guanyu Riben kao,” pp. 245–

46, 248, 252–54; Ishihara Michihiro, “Mindai ni okeru,” p. 213. Li’s biography can be found in the Ming shi, juan 126, while Hao’s can be found in juan 221. The confusions surrounding the two incarnations of this text are dealt with cursorily by Hamada Atsushi, “Kokugo o kisai,” pp. 22–25, and much more satisfactorily by Ōtomo Shin’ichi, Muromachi jidai no kokugo, pp. 489–96 and Wang Xiangrong, “Guanyu Riben kao,” pp. 254–58.

312

chinese understanding of the japanese language

While the initial impetus to the compilation of this work was gaining more accurate data about the Japanese invaders, fully one-half of the Riben kao was devoted to language. The first juan contains, amid other information, the names of the Japanese islands with Chinese-character pronunciations (all apparently taken from the Chouhai tubian); juan 2 offers 70 terms concerned with Japanese customs and practices, almost all of which appear again later in the text’s word list. In juan 3, the hiragana syllabaries are introduced in a cursive form, arranged in i-ro-ha order and accompanied by Chinese characters for pronunciation (some nonstandard, probably reflecting the eastern Zhejiang area accent of the time); there is as well a extra kana represented by what appears to be the Chinese character jing (capital city). It also contains some 39 Japanese waka (31-syllable poems) with a complex system of explanation described below.

Juan 4 is devoted entirely to the Japanese language, a word list of between 1,140 and 1,186 terms (depending on edition). Although the actual number of terms pales in comparison to that of the Riben yijian, the categories under which these terms were arranged reached 56, far greater than any other text. These 56 categories include altogether new ones such as medical implements (6), agricultural tools (6), cities (14), crafts (19), and calculation methods (29), among others.22

Appearing in juan 4 is one of the most remarkable features of this work, a long Chinese-style poem of four-line stanzas, each with seven characters, entitled “Qieyin zhengshe ge” (Poem on correct pronunciation). It describes in poetic form the different ways in which Chinese characters are used and pronounced in Japanese. It also contains a passage on the use of grammatical partides in Japanese, something entirely foreign to Chinese grammar and not taken up again in a Chinese text for nearly three hundred years.

The 39 waka in the Riben kao come from various Japanese poetry collections. To each poem the two authors added the following explanatory tools: (a) a four-character title; (b) a Chinese-character reading corresponding to the kana value next to each character in the text; (c) huyin or Japanese pronunciation (using Chinese characters) for each character in the poem that stands in its own right; (d) dufa or yomikudashi rendering in an all Chinese-character pronunciation for each poem (basically combining b and c); (e) shiyin or 22 See Li Yangong and Hao Jie, Riben kao, passim; Watanabe Mitsuo, transl. and annot., Shinshū yakuchū Nihon kō, passim. See also Watanabe Mitsuo, “Minjin ni yoru,” pp. 107–08; Wang Xiangrong, “Guanyu Riben kao,” p. 260.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 313

explanation of the meaning or function of every character; and (f) qieyi or a Chinese poetic rendition of the poem’s overall meaning. The following is one such example of a waka taken by the authors from the Japanese collection known as the Shūi shū:

a. 摘花遇雨 “Zhaihua yuyu”

b. 櫻革里埃米外勿里氣奴和乃失古活奴而禿木花那革計爾羊多賴奴

櫻かりあめはふりきぬおなしくはぬるとも花のかけにやとらん

c. 櫻

花

索古賴

法乃

[ sakura] [ hana]

d. 索古賴革里埃米外勿里氣奴和乃失古活奴而禿木法乃那革計爾

羊多賴奴

e. 櫻

革里埃迷外

勿里氣奴和乃失古活

奴而禿木

正音音折雨

助語驟暴

盡濕會左右濕淋灕

花

革計尔

羊多賴奴

正音躲

助語睡不得

摘櫻逢暴雨，衣衫左右濕，花不堪遮躲，淋灕睡不得

The amount of work that went into such an effort must have been immense, there being not a single relevant Chinese reference work of any kind then in existence. In addition, juan 5 contains twelve kouta (ballads, ditties) under a section entitled “Shan’ge” (Mountain songs), most of which date to the Muromachi period (1338–1573). In a manner similar to the presentation of the waka, the authors provide the following explicatory data for each song (save the first): (a) a four-character title; (b) a Chinese-character reading to explain the Japanese pronunciation; (c) shiyin; and (d) qieyi. For example: a. 夫歸妻接 “Fugui qijie”

b. 一多濕那禿那耶和一多濕那禿那耶他賣里油米各打推（搖）

いしとの殿やおいとしの殿や賜れ弓肩よ

屋繪箔一單彈可尼

靱戴かうに

c. 一多濕小肝•禿那丈夫•和一多濕大心肝•他賣里遞來•油米弓•各

打肩•屋繪箔箭袋•一單彈可頂在頭上•那搖尼皆助語

d. 心肝丈夫 • 大心肝丈夫 • 遞弓來 • 放在我肩上 • 箭袋頂在我頭上

The characters used to approximate Japanese pronunciation here reflect the Zhejiang regional accent of the era. It should probably be noted as well that the

314

chinese understanding of the japanese language

waka and kouta themselves—all originally written primarily in kana— are now frequently difficult to read, and the Chinese-character explanations of these works provided by Li and Hao offer a helpful explanatory tool.23

There are many other Chinese texts of the late-Ming period concerned with Japan; many of these contain a handful of Japanese names or words with Chinese-character pronunciations.24 The ones discussed here, though, are the most important in chronicling the increased sophistication of Chinese perceptions of Japan, Japanese culture, and the Japanese language. This development did not, however, prove fecund in the centuries that followed, for scholars of the Qing period did not build on this emerging tradition of Chinese scholarship on Japan.

Japan in the Qing Period: The Case of Weng Guangping

The early years of the Qing dynasty coincide with the years when the recently founded Edo regime began to enact restrictive ordinances on travel by foreigners to Japan; they were to reside solely in Nagasaki, and their contacts with Japanese were curtailed as well. There were still, though, a number of Chinese travelers to the port of Nagasaki in the early- and mid-Qing period who wrote of their experiences. Few of these have anything to say concerning the Japanese language, though there are exceptions. One such exception from the Qianlong period (1736–96) is the Xiuhai bian (Essay from the sea of my sleeve) by Wang Peng, the subject of Ōba Osamu’s essay in this volume.25 Wang was a merchant who first went to Nagasaki in 1764 and then traveled between the two countries frequently thereafter. His account contains a small handful of Japanese terms with kan’yaku readings—for example, jishiliu (J. kiseru) for the long, narrow Japanese pipe.26

23 Li Yangong and Hao Jie, Riben kao, pp. 112, 237–38; Watanabe Mitsuo, “Minjin ni yoru,”

pp. 110–12; Watanabe Mitsuo, transl. and annot., Shinshū yakuchū, pp. 205, 174–75, 332–33, respectively. See also Ōtomo Shin’chi, Muromachi jidai no kokugo, pp. 503, 505, 513, 546.

24 One text that should be mentioned is Chen Kan, Shi Liuqiu lu. In addition to describing his mission as an emissary sent to the Ryūkyū kingdom in 1534, Chen Kan (1489–1538) lists 407 Ryūkyūan words and how to pronounce them, and he appends the 46 hiragana syllabaries. They are written with pristine clarity (see Chen Kan, Shi Liuqiu lu, pp. 47b–48a).

25 For a discussion of the meaning of Wang Peng’s title, see the essay in this volume by Ōba Osamu, esp. footnote 22.

26 Sanshū Nihon yakugo, p. 233. The text of the Xiuhai bian can be found in Wang Xiqi, Xiaofang huzhai yudi congchao, vol. 10, and is discussed in detail in the essay by Ōba Osamu in this volume. Kiseru is a loan word of ultimate Khmer origin.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 315

Before the changes brought about in Japan in the Meiji era and the beginning of a new Chinese tradition of writing on Japan from the 1870s and 1880s,27

there was really only one comprehensive new study of Japan by a Chinese of the Qing period. This work was the Wuqi jing bu (Commentary on the Azuma kagami) by Weng Guangping (Haichen, 1760–1843), a work that waited nearly two centuries before finally being published in 1997.28 The Azuma kagami (Mirror [or, Comprehensive history] of the East) is a medieval Japanese chronicle in 52 fascicles, written in literary Chinese by an official (whose name is now unknown) of the Kamakura shogunate (1165–1333), that describes in great detail the shōgun’s daily activities from 1180 through 1266. At the beginning of the Edo period, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616) so prized this work for its studied attention to the lessons to be derived from historical experience that he ordered it reprinted.29 The work then made its way to China amid the Sino-Japanese book trade at the end of the Ming dynasty; there is an edition dated 1626, with Japanese reading punctuation provided by the great Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), held in the Beijing Municipal Library.

One of the earliest Chinese commentators on the Azuma kagami was the early-Qing scholar Zhu Yizun (1629–1709). As he later recounted the story: “In the jiachen [third] year of the Kangxi reign [1664], I was able to see this work at the Jigu tang (Hall for the Examination of Antiquity) of Mr. Gao of Guodong.

Forty-three years later I obtained it for my own bookshelf.” He also introduced the contents of the Japanese work, using it to criticize his countrymen’s ignorance of Japan. He also praised the Riben kao for laying out the customs and practices of the Japanese, but held it wanting, for in it the “hereditary chronicles of [Japan’s] rulers ( guowang) remain unclear.”30 Weng would heartily fill this lacuna.

27 See D.R. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire’s End.

28 Through the diligent work of two scholars from Hangzhou University, Wang Yong and Wang Baoping, Hōyū shoten (Kyoto) published the work in the late 1997. It still has not been published in China.

29 A preface dated 1605 to a Keichō (1596–1615) edition of the Azuma kagami notes: “Our great shōgun Ieyasu frequently read from this work to learn about the experiences of the past in bringing orderly rule to the world, seeing its benefits, and reflecting on the bad. . . .

He ordered it to be printed so that it would be passed down for years and subsequent generations would be able to read it and distinguish clearly. Thus, not only would it be a clear mirror for the East, but indeed it was surely written as a warning for all.”

30 Zhu Yizun, “Wuqi jing ba,” in Pushu ting ji, 44/12b–13a. See Feng Zuozhe and Wang Xiaoqiu,

“Cong Wuqi jing bu tandao Qingdai Zhong-Ri maoyi,” Wen shi 15 (1982), p. 104; Fujitsuka Chikashi, Nis-Sen-Shin no bunka kōryū, p. 115; Satō Saburō, “Chūgokujin to Azuma kagami,”

Nihon rekishi 188 (January 1964), pp. 45–47. Two recent essays by Feng Zuozhe describe a

316

chinese understanding of the japanese language

While investigating the private, illegal minting of coinage along the coast in the Qianlong period, one official found coins engraved with the characters

“Kuanyong tongbao.” Upon investigation, he soon realized that China had never had a Kuanyong period, and thus he did not know where these coins had come from. As the search continued, no one else seemed to be able to solve this conundrum until a Suzhou scholar by the name of Wang Huiyin recognized the reign period not as Kuanyong but as the Japanese Kan’ei era (1624–44); he had read Zhu Yizun’s piece on the Azuma kagami in which the Kan’ei reign was mentioned. Jiangsu Governor Chen Hongmou (1696–1771) then reported to the throne that the problem had been resolved. He also learned of the existence of this Japanese text, but all his efforts to obtain a copy proved fruitless.31

Weng Guangping was a young man when this incident occurred. He was born in the village of Pingwang, Wujiang County, Jiangsu. Pingwang lies on the west bank of the Grand Canal at the crossroad of Zhejiang-Jiangsu traffic. By his own admission, Weng was a scholarly man who “by nature enjoys strange books.” He was also a noted painter and calligrapher with a number of other important works to his name. Unfortunately, he was born into a family always on the edge of poverty and was thus unable to support his scholarly inclinations as fully as he wished. After several failures, he managed to obtain the xiucai degree at the age of forty-six and the juren degree at sixty-one, and he was able to establish a reputation for himself as an erudite man. In his preface to Weng’s Tingying ju wenchao (Prose writings from the dwellings of listening orioles), the great scholar of the Tongcheng school Yao Nai (1731–1815) wrote:

“He is widely conversant with the numerous writings of classicists and historians, works of geography and phonology, and the Shanhai jing (Classic of the mountains and the seas), as well as with foreign lands and alien terrains.”32

Other contemporaries also praised his omnivorous reading.

How then did Weng Guangping happen on the Azuma kagami? At some point he read Zhu Yizun’s essay as well as a note by Zhu’s friend Cai Cheng in the latter’s Jichuang conghua (Collection from the chicken coop) which told fascinating case in which the famed Cao Yin (Lianting, 1658–1712) happened upon a copy of the Azuma kagami and put it to interesting use. See Feng Zuozhe, “Cao Yin yu Riben, cong xin faxian de Cao zang Wuqi jing tanqi,” in Zhong-Ri guanxi shi guoji xueshu taolunhui lunwen, pp. 209–18; and Feng Zuozhe, “Sō In to Nihon, shin hakken no Sō In kyūzō

Azuma kagami ni tsuite,” Tōyō bunko shohō 21 (1989), pp. 57–58.

31 Shi Yunyu (1756–1837), “Ba,” in Weng Guangping, Wuqi jingbu, 17a.

32 Cited in Wang Baoping, “Wuqi jing bu zhuzhe Weng Guangping kao,” Zhong-Ri wenhua luncong, pp. 156–57. Weng actually visited Yao twice (in 1810 and 1813) in Nanjing.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 317

of both men’s affection for the Japanese text.33 This intrigued Weng. He finally came upon a copy of the text—made from Zhu’s own—in the private collection of a Mr. Wang of the Zhenqi Pavilion in Wulin. After reading it, he asked Wang if he might take it home to make his own copy, but Wang was reluctant to lend out this rare work; Weng thus returned several more times to read Wang’s copy further. Time passed and eventually he found another copy in the possession of the eldest son of the well-known scholar and Hanlin compiler Pan Jiatang (Lei, 1646–1708). This copy had been made from one formerly in the Shuizaixuan collection of You Tong (Xitang, 1618–1704). As Pan had noted of the text:

It covers only eighty-seven years. Every day contains a record of the weather conditions, much like the yinqing bu (records of darkness and clarity) kept by governmental offices in China. The language [of the Azuma kagami) is rough and does not convey its meaning as well as it might. One cannot read it just once. However, few overseas [i.e., Japanese]

writings have flowed into [China]. Through one month’s work, I copied it all out.34

Why did this particular text have such an impact on Weng (and others)?

Although it is still difficult to say with certainty, several factors suggest themselves. First, it was written, by all accounts, in a fine literary Chinese, something that not only Tokugawa Ieyasu and Hayashi Razan had recognized, but something which Zhu Yizun and other Chinese scholars also noted, although Pan Jiatang seems to have mildly dissented. Second, Ieyasu’s authority enabled it to be reprinted and make the reverse trip westward from Japan to China.

Among the several dozen Japanese texts that became known in China, no other one so stimulated Chinese interest in Japan itself. In fact, it is one of only two Japanese texts in the entire seventeen hundred-year history of Sino-Japanese cultural contacts that so widely circulated in China and inspired the composition of Chinese commentaries.

The more Weng investigated the text and compared it with other Japanese historical works known in China, such as the Nihon nengō sen (Japanese era names, with annotations) which had been brought to China by merchants, the more interesting he found it. This research also led him to discover errors in the Azuma kagami and inspired him to make a thoroughgoing study of Japanese history and culture, not just the 87 years covered in the Azuma kagami. He was 33 This note is reprinted in Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 30/14a.

34 Pan Qibing [Pan Jiatang), “Fu Wuqi jing ba,” in Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 19/5a.

318

chinese understanding of the japanese language

well aware of the fact that Chinese had not produced many studies of foreign lands; most of what did exist was contained in the treatises accompanying the standard dynastic histories. In his opinion, “Japan was the largest country of those in the Eastern Sea. . . . I wanted to pattern my work on the annals of historians and compose a comprehensive mirror for Japan” all its own.35 Hence, despite his title, Weng’s work went far beyond the Azuma kagami.

Altogether Weng used a total of over one hundred and ninety sources, some forty of which were works by Japanese written in literary Chinese; perhaps living in Pingwang enabled him to have access to many books brought by sea from Japan to China. He devoted seven years of his time, from 1807 to 1814, to this task, polishing the writing through five drafts, before completing this major text. Until just a few years ago, it had circulated exclusively in various manuscript editions of 28 juan and 30 juan in length.36 “It is like a gazetteer (zhi) in form,” he explained, “and is also called the Riben guo zhi (Gazetteer of Japan).”37 Seventy years later, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905) would also write a major work with this alternate title, though I have yet to discover any evidence of Weng’s influence on Huang.

The first ten juan, or fully one-third of the Wuqi jing bu, are shixibiao or historical annals. Perhaps responding to Zhu Yizun’s complaint that Chinese writings about Japan failed to elucidate the names of its rulers through the ages, Weng recounts in annalistic form (arranged by both Chinese and Japanese reign years) what he considered the most important events for every single year of Japanese history by sifting the through dozens of texts at his disposal.

These follow a complex effort on his part to sort out various theories about the historicity of the so-called “age of the gods” (kamiyo). In the somewhat fuller 30- juan edition of the text, there are then two juan on geography, one of maps, two on customs, one on food and produce, one on commercial treaties, one on government posts, seven on bibliography, one on the Japanese writing system, two comprising a Japanese word list, one on the military, and one on subject states.

What follows will focus on an analysis of the three juan concerned with the Japanese language. In addition to these three juan, it should be noted, kana 35 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 1/1a, 1b.

36 Watanabe Mitsuo, “Azuma kagami ho to Nihongo shiryō,” in Iwai hakushi koki kinen tenseki ronshū, pp. 831–32; Fujitsuka, Nis-Sen-Shin no bunka kōryū, pp. 123–25, 130, 133; Feng Zuozhe and Wang Xiaoqiu, “Cong Wuqi jing bu tandao,” pp. 104–07; Ishihara Michihiro,

“Sakoku jidai ni okeru Shinjin no Nihon kenkyū (jō): Ō Kōhei no Nihon koku shi ni tsuite,”

Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyō ( jinbun kagaku) 16 (November 1965), p. 2.

37 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 1/8a.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 319

syllabaries appear elsewhere throughout the Wuqi jing bu for no clear reason; there are over a dozen instances in the ten juan of the historical annals in which Weng employed kana for a purpose that is now difficult, if not impossible, to surmise, especially since it is clear that he did not fully understand them.38

Juan 26 is extremely short, devoted to guoshu or “national writing” or the kana syllabary alphabets. Weng gives two charts here. The first is characterized as the “48 foreign symbols of Japanese” which appears to be a chart of the hiragana syllabaries in i-ro-ha order with the addition of the Chinese character shang (above) and, as in the case of the Riben kao, the Chinese character jing.

Most of the syllabaries are given in two forms, though it is unclear what difference there is between them, and each is followed by a Chinese-character transcription. Most of these are extremely difficult to decipher. The second chart lays out a total of sixty-one symbols of what appears to be the katakana syllabary in no particular order, again with Chinese characters for pronunciation. These are also not clearly written, and without the Chinese characters attached to each, it would be impossible to decipher many of them.39 These flaws may not be entirely Weng’s fault but of manuscript copiers who would have been even less familiar with Japanese than Weng.

Juan 27–28, entitled guoyu jie or “explanation of the national language”

(implying Japanese), comprise the now familiar word list of Japanese terms with Chinese characters appended for readings. It should be noted that over two hundred years had passed since the last major list of this sort had been published, in the late Ming. Weng provides 1,223 terms under 14 categories: astronomy, time words, and seasons (98); geography (17); the body (93); people (93); animals, insects, and fish (61); flora (60); foodstuffs (57); clothing (56); residences (19); instruments used aboard ships (154); numbers (22); personal affairs (154); colloquial expressions (69); and commonly used terms (105).

These are followed by 81 terms for the islands and domains ( kuni) of Japan, as are 26 ward names and 58 street names of Nagasaki.40 The pronunciations seem to reflect the southwestern Kyūshū dialect.

It remains unclear who first put this list together or when it was compiled.

Many of the terms in Weng’s list concern the Nagasaki-China trade, especially the items brought from Japan for trade. Watanabe Mitsuo has surmised 38 See, for example, Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 2/11a, 3/8b, 10b, 11a, 4/4b, 5/9b, 12b, 6/1a, 8/6b, 10/3a, 3b, 10b, 12a, 13b, 14a.

39 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 26/1a–3b.

40 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 27–28. These two juan have been examined in detail in Ōtomo Shin’ichi and Kimura Akira, Azuma kagami ho shosai Kaigai kidan kokugokai, honbun to sakuin.

320

chinese understanding of the japanese language

that because the Jūzenji, a temple located at the Tōjin yashiki or Chinese Compound in Nagasaki, is part of Weng’s list, it must have been compiled after 1689 when that temple was built.41 The inclusion of many street and ward names from Nagasaki suggests that the original compiler may have come from that city or lived there for some period of time. It seems fair as well to agree with Fukushima Kunimichi and Watanabe that while Weng did not collect this list by himself he took it from a text, mentioned any number of times in the Wuqi jing bu, entitled Haiwai qitan (Intriguing tales from overseas), though this text has not as yet been tracked down.42 There was a text with this title that circulated in Japan (Kaigai kidan), a Japanese retranslation of a Chinese translation of the Chūshingura tale. This was not, however, the work cited by Weng Guangping. To his great credit, Weng recognized the superiority of the list of terms in this work to those included in the many late-Ming works (discussed above).

Many of the categories and terms listed in these two juan of Weng’s book can be found in other works from the late Ming, though a significant number were new in this genre of vocabulary. For example, while the inclusion of colloquial expressions was not entirely new, such a significant number (69) was unprecedented. Each Chinese expression is followed in slightly smaller Chinese-character transcription, set below and just to the right of the expression in question, of the intended Japanese term.

For example:43

一

回

不

己

再

色

去

要

過

的

去

非

摸

意

遜

麥

多

羅

懶

談

搭

六

戈

[hitoiro] [modoru] [iran] [sunda] [mata iku]

41 Watanabe Mitsuo, “Azuma kagami ho no Nihongo shiryō,” p. 836. See also Sanshū Nihon yakugo, pp. 238–39.

42 20–21; Sanshū Nihon yakugo, p. 238. I was recently told by a Japanese scholar that the Haiwai qitan was a chronicle of the experiences of a shipwrecked sailor. See also Wu Anlong and Xiong Dayun ( Chūgokujin no Nihon kenkyū shi, p. 104) who state that this was an appellation attached by Chinese to the Azuma kagami which they found such an

“intriguing tale,” but they offer no evidence to support this hypothesis.

43 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 28/9a–10a; Ōtomo Shin’ichi and Kimura Akira, Azuma kagami ho shosai, pp. 41–43.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 321

Several of the expressions under this heading still elude analysis.

A second significant addition in Weng’s list of terms is the large number (154) of those concerned with shipping, unprecedented in both size and variety. If not Weng, then whoever collected this vocabulary must have had contact, direct or indirect, with Chinese merchants who plied the trade route to Nagasaki. Many of these terms concern bookkeeping, measuring goods, and items transported.44 A third important innovation in Weng’s list is the extensive number of place-names, especially from the Nagasaki area. While there are readings given for all the Nagasaki toponyms, several of the “domain and island names” are given without readings. At least one of these places names is fictitious; Onnajima (lit., Isle of Women), a site in a play by the great writer Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725), and several others may be miswritten.

On the whole, though, the readings are extremely accurate, indicating the participation of someone who not only knew the Japanese language but knew the city of Nagasaki as well. For example:45

山

肥

土

出

三

城

後

佐

雲

島

羊

非

拖

因

密

馬

谷

撒

字

什

失

木

麽

羅

[ Yamashiro] [ Higo] [ Tosa] [ Izumo] [ Mishima]

Weng explicitly notes that his list of Nagasaki ward and street names came from a text entitled Dongyang keyou lüe (Traveler to Japan in Brief), but no one has yet been able to track down this work.

As noted, Japanese kana appear elsewhere in the text for no apparent reason, for example, on the first of five maps of Nagasaki and amid the descriptions of Japanese geography.46 At other points in the text, Japanese words for everyday items are given in Chinese-character renderings. For example, under Japanese “customs” Weng notes: “They use wood for their pillows and call them magula [J. makura]. . . . Tobacco they call danbag u [J. tabako], and a pipe is a jishiliu [J. kiseru]. . . . Courtesans [in Nagasaki] wear a belt . . . known as a yaobei 44 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 28/2b–5b; Ōtomo Shin’ichi and Kimura Akira, Azuma kagami ho shosai, pp. 28–34.

45 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 28/12b–13b; Ōtomo Shin’ichi and Kimura Akira, Azuma kagami ho shosai, pp. 48–50.

46 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 11/4a, 12/2b–5a, 7b.

322

chinese understanding of the japanese language

[J. obi].”47 Interestingly, makura and kiseru do not appear in Weng’s vocabulary list, and tabako and obi do appear but with different Chinese-character transcriptions: tabako as taiboge and obi as w upi. This divergence can best be explained as different people or writings having been relied on for these two portions of the text.

From the larger historical perspective, Weng’s accomplishment is extraordinary. He put together a word list that, while far from the longest prepared by a Chinese, was innovative and rich in specific ways heretofore unknown in China. What is even more extraordinary, however, is that he did all this without knowledge of the Japanese language itself. The first response a contemporary scholar is likely to have after examining Weng’s treatment of the Japanese language is surprise that Weng apparently never bothered to learn the language.

In fact, it is highly unlikely that he ever met a Japanese, and he probably met few Chinese who had been to Japan. Learning the language and meeting the people of Japan were by no means easy feats in early nineteenth-century China, but at least some greater familiarity with the language would seem to be the barest necessity. It is now, of course, incomprehensible that a scholar would devote such attention to the study of Japan without learning Japanese.

From Ming to Qing in Chinese Knowledge of Japan

In order to probe this question of why Weng undertook this seven-year study of all things Japanese without learning the language and what this may tell us about the shift in Chinese views of Japan from the Ming to the Qing period, let us draw some data from a parallel cultural development: the shift in Chinese pictorial representations of Japanese from Ming encyclopedias to those of the Qing, a phenomenon studied by Professor Tanaka Takeo. Tanaka has demonstrated that in Ming encyclopedias Japanese are pictured as either domedheaded, long-sleeved, sagacious monks or topknotted, sword-bearing, barefooted, half-naked warriors, a point reiterated in the essay by Wang Yong in this volume. The image of warriors in particular reflected the over-weening Chinese perception of Japanese in this era. In Qing times, however, the Japanese in such drawings became fully clothed and more in line with the image of sagacity.48 The question then is: What exactly does this change 47 Weng Guangping, Wuqi jing bu, 14/13a, 15/2b.

48 Tanaka Takeo, “Wakō zu tsuikō: Shindai Chūgokujin no Nihonjin zō,” Tōyō daigaku bungakubu kiyō shigakkahen 46 . 18 (1992), p. 2. This essay is a follow-up to Tanaka Takeo, “Wakō

zu zakkō: Mindai Chūgokujin no Nihonjin zō,” Tōyō daigaku bungakubu kiyō shigakkahen

chinese understanding of the japanese language 323

reflect? Does it indicate an increased, more nuanced Chinese understanding of the Japanese?

The key reasons for this changing image of the Japanese were that the wokou menace was long over, there was extensive Sino-Japanese trade, and relations between the two countries were calmer than in the past. The decline of the threat of piracy meant that the imagery of the bloodthirsty marauders had given way to the more pacific metonymy of the wise, monk-like Japanese men-dicant; pirates from Japan had not completely passed from Chinese memory, as images of them remained in the popular imagination and popular culture. The renewed trade between China and Japan brought with it new, more civilized Chinese images of the Japanese, perhaps transmitted by Chinese observers at the Chinese Compound in Nagasaki. What is most important for our purposes, however, is not this shift in iconographic representations per se but what it reflected about changing Chinese views of and interest in Japan. Tanaka reads this change in representations not as an instance of maturing Chinese views of Japan but as the reassertion of China’s earlier lack of interest in foreign countries and cultures. The more complex images from the Ming period could be attributed to the immediate threat posed at the time which thrust the Japanese into Chinese cultural consciousness. Tanaka argues that Chinese knowledge of Japan then decreased in quality once again from Ming to Qing as this threat disappeared. Thus, the clothing or civilizing of images of Japanese represents not an important change based on more or better information about Japan but a reflection of less Chinese concern with Japan.49

Weng Guangping was completing his work some time after visual images of the Japanese had changed. Can we speak of his representations of Japan and the Japanese language in the same way as Tanaka discusses visual representations of the Japanese as ultimately reflecting a less complex understanding?

Clearly, his willingness to write extensively about Japan and its language without bothering to study that language bespeaks a certain arrogance somewhat difficult to appreciate two centuries later. Weng did nonetheless devote seven years of his impoverished life to this project—he did not take it lightly. The question remains, however, as to just what the ultimate aim of this project was.

While Weng spent a number of years studying Japan, in the final analysis he 41.13 (1987), pp. 1–26, which describes the Ming period. For an easily accessible example of these “clothed Japanese,” see the cover of Wu Anlong and Xiong Dayun, Chŭgokujin no Nihon kenkyū shi, which also incidentally includes in the background an old Chinese map of Japan with an island named “Onnajima.”

49 Tanaka Takeo, “Wakō zu tsuikō: Shindai Chūgokujin no Nihonjin zō,” pp. 2–3, 6, 7, 8, 12–13; Wang Xiangrong, “Guanyu Riben kao,” p. 247.

324

chinese understanding of the japanese language

was not a Japanologist in any sense of the word familiar to us. He did write a few other short pieces about Japan, but nothing even remotely on a par with the Wuqi jing bu. 50 His seven-year project was essentially a challenging exercise in textual research—a phenomenal one, to be sure—but not the magnum opus of someone devoted to or even primarily interested in Japan studies. To be able to look back over nearly two thousand years of Chinese writings on Japan as well as Japanese writings in literary Chinese and attempt to chronicle the history, culture, and political and military institutions—as well as the language—of that land through an immensely complicated process of textual comparisons was a challenge that someone of Weng’s self-professed “nature”

could apparently not resist.

Had the Qing cultural environment supported an intellectual career in Japan studies, perhaps Weng might have made greater efforts to learn the Japanese language. However, inasmuch as the lack of cultural or symbolic capital associated with such an endeavor militated against such a career choice, it is understandable that he only planned this one project and learning Japanese may never have seriously crossed his mind. The very facts that Weng even viewed himself as a bit of an oddball (someone instinctively attracted to the “strange”) and that he was never able to get his work on Japan published in full may indicate the extent to which his whole endeavor, however extraordinary in retrospect, was out of touch with his own cultural and political milieu. Despite his lack of knowledge of Japanese, he saw the need for sections in his text on language, probably because such sections had become elemental to this Chinese tradition of writing about Japan since the late Ming.

We return to a question raised at the outset. How it is that in the midst of a scholarly movement aimed at the most intense linguistic and phonological research in Chinese history Weng did not use the new tools developed by his fellow kaozheng researchers to analyze the Japanese language? As suggested above, the answer undoubtedly lies in the fact that the textual critical movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not interested in language itself but in Chinese as the language of culture. For that reason, none of the many thousands of works produced by these truly great scholars addressed issues concerning any other languages and militated against Weng’s doing so himself.

50 Weng apparently wrote accounts of the Japanese tea ceremony and of Japanese art. See Wang Baoping, “Wuqi jing bu zhuzhe Weng Guangping kao,” in Zhong-Ri wenhua luncong, p. 154; Wang Baoping, “Azuma kagami ho ni tsuite,” in Azuma kagami ho: Chūgokujin ni yoru saisho no Nihon tsūshi, p. 4.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 325

Generally speaking, in late imperial Chinese history, two distinct aims have alternately motivated Chinese scholarly interest in the outside world. On the one hand, there is the utilitarian need to know one’s enemy so that one will survive. This is summed up well in the ancient classic on warfare by Sunzi: “If you know yourself and you know the others, you will always be victorious.” By the same token, there is the more broad-minded, universalist approach that the proper scholar should “investigate all things under heaven.” As the Chinese saying goes, “any single item left unknown marks the shame of the man of the world.”

Unlike his predecessors from the Ming, Weng was not driven to address the issue of Japan out of a concern for national defense. Knowledge of Japan had long passed from a national defense concern to an arcane intellectual pursuit. As a result of the “reverse” book traffic from Japan to China in this period, a manuscript of the Azuma kagami fortuitously landed in the hands of an unusual scholar devoted not to utilitarian matters but to the “investigation of all things under heaven.”

Weng and his work were largely forgotten soon after his death, save in the local area where he was born and raised. What influence, if any, he had on late-Qing thinking about Japan remains an important scholarly desideratum.

Did Huang Zunxian and others who traveled and lived in Japan from the 1870s and 1880s—as Weng Guangping had not—read the Wuqi jing bu? It was really only with China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 that the Chinese turned once again to building their knowledge of Japan. It had been three hundred years since a threat from Japan stimulated such Chinese interest, and Japan’s military success in the international arena at the turn of the last century led thousands of Chinese students to pursue their own studies in Japan, to learn firsthand how to make Chinese rich and strong. Once again there was cultural capital to be gained through acquisition of knowledge of Japan and the Japanese language.

Bibliography

Akiyama Kenzô 秋山謙藏. “Mindai ni okeru Shinajin no Nihongo kenkyû” 明代に於

ける支那人の日本語研究 (Chinese studies of the Japanese language in the Ming era). Kokugo to kokubungaku 國語と國文學 10.1 (January 1933): 1–38.

———. “Mindai Shinajin no Nihon chiri kenkyû” 明代支那人の日本地理硏究

(Studies of Japanese geography by Chinese in the Ming era). Rekishi chiri 歷史地理

6.1 (1933): 31–61.

326

chinese understanding of the japanese language

———. Nis-Shi kôshô shi kenkyû 日支交涉史硏究 (Studies in the history of Sino-Japanese interactions). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1941.

———. Shinajin no mita Nihon 支那人の觀た日本 (Japan as seen by Chinese).

Volume 9 in series, Tôyô shichô 東洋思潮 (Intellectual trends in East Asia). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1934.

Arisaka Hideyo 有坂秀世. “Jôdai ni okeru sagyô no tôon” 上代に於けるサ行の頭

音 (Initials in the sa line in antiquity). Kokugo to kokubungaku 國語と國文學

13 (January 1936): 90–103.

———. “Shoshi kaiyô no ‘iroha’ no onchû ni tsuite” 書史会要の「いろは」の音註

について (On the phonetic transcription of the Japanese syllabary alphabet in the Shushi huiyao). Gengo kenkyû 言語研究 16 (August 1950): 1–13.

Asai Keirin 淺井惠倫. “Kôhon Nihon yakugo” 校本日本譯語 (Japanese terms in translation, finished text). In Andô kyôju kanreki shukuga kinen ronbunshû 安藤教

授還曆祝賀記念論文集 (Essays in honor of the sixtieth birthday of Professor Andô), pp. 1–56. Tokyo: San’yôdô, 1950.

Asayama Shin’ya 朝山信彌. “Kakurin gyokuro no ‘ôbô’ nado ni tsuite” 鶴林玉露の黃

榜などについて (On the expression “huang-pang” from the Helin yulu and other matters). Kokugo kokubun 國語國文 7.12 (December 1937): 116–120.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Transl. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Chen Jialin 陳家麟. Dongcha wenjian lu 東槎聞見錄 (Account of a trip to Japan). In Xiaofanghu zhai yudi congchao 小方壺齋輿地叢鈔 (Collection of documents on world Geography), ed. Wang Xiqi 王錫祺, vol. 10. Shanghai Zhuoyitang, 1897.

Chen Kan 陳侃 1534 (1831 reprint). Shi Liuqiu lu 使琉球錄 (Account of a mission to the Ryûkyû Islands). Vol. 16 in reprint series Baibu congshu jicheng 百部叢書集成

(Compendium of 100 collections), ed. Yan Yiping 嚴一萍. Taibei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1965.

Edkins, Joseph. “A Chinese and Japanese Vocabulary of the Fifteenth Century, with Notes, Chiefly on Pronunciation.” Transactions of the Asiantic Society of Japan X

(1882): 1–14.

Feng Zuozhe 馮佐哲. “Cao Yin yu Riben, cong xin faxian de Cao zang Wuqi jing tanqi”

曹寅与日本——从新发现的曹藏《吾妻镜》谈起 (Cao Yin and Japan, the

newly discovered Azuma kagami in Cao’s collection). In Zhong-Ri guanxi shi guoji xueshu taolunhui lunwen 中日关系史国际学术讨论会论文 (Essays from an international scholarly symposium on the history of Sino-Japanese relations), pp. 209–18. Beijing: Zhongguo Zhong-Ri guanxi shi yanjiuhui, 1988.

———. “Sô In to Nihon, shin hakken no Sô In kyûzô Azuma kagami ni tsuite” 曹寅と日

本ーー新発見の曹寅旧蔵『吾妻鏡』について (Cao Yin and Japan, on the

chinese understanding of the japanese language 327

Azuma kagami recently discovered in the former collection or Cao Yin). Tôyô bunko shohô 東洋文庫書報 21 (1989): 57–58.

Feng Zuozhe 冯佐哲 and Wang Xiaoqiu 王晓秋. “Cong Wuqi jing bu tandao Qingdai Zhong-Ri maoyi” 从《吾妻镜补》谈到清代中日贸易 (A discussion of Sino-Japanese trade as seen in the Wuqi jing bu). Wen shi 文史 15 (1982): 103–23.

———. “Wuqi jing yu Wuqi jing bu: Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu de lishi jianzheng”

《吾妻镜》与《吾妻镜补》：中日文化交流的历史见证 ( Azuma kagami

and Wuqi jing bu: Historical evidence of Sino-Japanese cultural interaction).

Wenxian 文献 1 (1980); reprinted in Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu shi lunwenji 中日文化

交流史论文集 (Essays on the history of Sino-Japanese cultural interaction), ed.

Beijing shi Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu shi yanjiuhui 北京市中日文化交流史研究

会 (Beijing City Research Group on the History of Sino-Japanese Cultural Interaction), pp. 208–17. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1982.

Fujitsuka Chikashi 藤塚鄰. “Butsu Sorai no Rongo chô to Shinchô no keishi” 物徂徠

の論語徵と淸朝經師 (Ogyû Sorai’s Proofs of the Analects and Qing dynasty classical teachers). Shinagaku kenkyû 支那學硏究 4 (1935): 1–61.

———. “Nihon koku Kô Kan Rongo giso no Shinchô keigaku ni oyoboseru eikyô” 日本

刻皇侃論語義疏の清朝經學に及ぼせる影響 (The influences exerted on Qing

classical studies by the Japanese edition of the exegetic commentary to the Confucian Analects of Huang Kan). Kangakkai zasshi 漢學會雜誌 8:3 (1940): 291–328.

———. Nis-Sen-Shin no bunka kôryû 日鮮清の文化交流 (Cultural interactions among Japan, Korea, and China). Tokyo: Chûbunkan shoten, 1947.

———. Shinchô bunka tôden no kenkyû 清朝文化東傳の硏究 (Research on the eastern transmission of Qing dynasty culture). Tokyo: Kokusho kankôkai, 1975).

Fukushima Kunimichi 福島邦道. “Nihon kigo gokai”『日本寄語』語解 (Explanation of the vocabulary in the Riben jiyu). Kokugogaku 36 (March 1959): 69–78.

Gotô Shukudô 後藤肅堂. “Wakô shiryô: Chûkai zuhen ni tsuite (1)” 倭寇史料：籌海

圖編に就て (Historical materials on the Wakô: On the Chouhai tubian). Tôyô bunka 東洋文化 42 (November 1927): 58–71.

———. “Wakô shiryô: Chûkai zuhen ni tsuite (2)” 倭寇史料: 籌海圖編に就て (Historical materials on the Wakô: On the Chouhai tubian). Tôyô bunka 東洋文化 43

(December 1927): 72–80.

———. “Wakô shiryô: Chûkai zuhen (3)” 倭寇史料：籌海圖編 (Historical materials on the Wakô: Chouhai tubian). Tôyô bunka 東洋文化 44 (January 1928): 106–16.

Hamada Atsushi 濱田敦. “Gishi Wajinden nado ni shokan no kokugo goi ni kansuru nisan no mondai” 魏志倭人傳などに所見の國語語彙に關する二三の問題

(Several issues concerning Japanese terms in the “Treatise on Japan” in the Wei zhi).

Jinbun kenkyû 人文研究 3.8 (August 1952): 29–45.

328

chinese understanding of the japanese language

———. “Kokugo o kisai seru Mindai Shina bunken” 國語を記載せる明代支那文獻

(Chinese documents of the Ming dynasty which record Japanese terms). Kokugo kokubun 國語國文 10.7 (July 1940): 7–45.

———. “Nihon kigo kaidoku shian” 日本寄語解讀試安 (A plan for explaining the Japanese translation terms). Jinbun kenkyû 人文研究 2.1 (January 1951): 19–59.

Hashimoto Shinkichi 橋本進吉. “Hagyô shiin no hensen ni tsuite” 波行子音の變遷

について (On changes in the consonants in the ha line). In Kokugo on’in no kenkyû 國語音韻の研究 (Studies in Japanese phonetics), pp. 29–45. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1950.

Honchô kôsô den 本朝高僧傳 (Biographies of eminent monks of our dynasty). In Dai Nihon Bukkyô zensho 大日本佛教全書 (Complete writings on Buddhism of the great Japan). Tokyo: Bussho kankôkai, 1911–19.

Howland, D.R. 1996. Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire’s End. Durham: Duke University Press.

Huang Qingcheng 黃慶澄. Dongyou riji 東游日記 (Diary of a trip to Japan). In Xiaofanghu zhai yudi congchao 小方壺齋輿地篇鈔 (Collection of documents on world geography), ed. Wang Xiqi 王錫祺, vol. 10. Shanghai: Zhuoyitang, 1897.

———. Dongyou riji 東游日記 (Diary of a trip to Japan). Shanghai: Zhuyitang, 1877?; n.p.: Yonggu zhai, 1894.

Huang, Stanley Y.C., “Cheng Jo-tseng” 鄭若曾. In Dictionary of Ming Biography, ed.

L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, pp. 204–208. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1976.

Ishihara Michihiro 石原道広. “Chûgoku ni okeru Nihon kan no tanshoteki keitai: Zuidai izen no Nihon kan” 中國における日本觀の端緒的形態: 隋代以前の日

本觀 (The emergence of views of Japan in China: Views of Japan prior to the Sui period). Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyô ( jinbun kagaku) 茨城大学文理学紀要

(人文科学) 1 (March 1951): 187–206.

———. “Chûgoku ni okeru rinkôteki Nihon kan no tenkai: Tô, Godai, Sô jidai no Nihon kan” 中國における瞵好的日本觀の展開: 唐。五代。宋時代の日本觀 (The

development of a friendly view of Japan in China: Views of Japan in the Tang, Five Dynasties, and Song periods). Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyô ( jinbun kagaku) 茨

城大学文理学部紀要 (人文科学) 2 (February 1952): 30–59.

———. “Mindai Nihon kan no ichi sokumen” 明代日本観のー側面 (One perspective on Japan in the Ming Era). Ibaraki daigaku bungakubu kiyô (bungakka ronshû) 茨城大学文学部紀要(文学科論集)1 (January 1968): 1–39.

———. “Mindai ni okeru Shinajin no Nihon kenkyû” 明代における支那人の日本

硏究 (Chinese studies of Japan in the Ming era). Rekishigaku kenkyû 歴史學硏究

13.4 (April 1943); reprinted in Tô-A shi zakkō 東亞史襍攷 (Essays on East Asian history), pp. 211–14. Tokyo: Seikatsusha, 1944.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 329

———. “Nichi-Min kôshô no kaishi to fuseikoku Nihon no seiritsu: Mindai no Nihon kan (ichi)” 日明交涉の開始と不征國日本の成立: 明代の日本觀(一) (The

beginning of Japanese-Ming relations and the formation of an undefeatable Japan: Views of Japan in the Ming period, part 1). Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyô ( jinbun kagaku) 茨城大学文理学部紀要 (人文科学) 4 (March 1954), 20–35.

———. “Nichi-Min tsûkô bôeki o meguru Nihon kan: Mindai no Nihon kan (ni)” 日明

通交貿易をめぐる日本觀: 明代の日本觀(二) (Views of Japan surrounding

Japanese-Ming communications and trade: Views of Japan in the Ming period, part 2). Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyô ( jinbun kagaku) 茨城大学文理学部

紀要 (人文科学) 5 (March 1955): 14–28.

———. “Nihon tô shichishu: Chûgoku ni okeru Nihon kan no ichimen” 日本刀七種: 中国における日本観の一面 (Seven Japanese swords: One aspect of a view of Japan in China). Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyô ( jinbun kagaku) 茨城大学文理

学部紀要 (人文科学) 11 (December 1960): 17–26.

———. “Sakoku jidai ni okeru Shinjin no Nihon kenkyû (jô): Ô Kôhei no Nihon koku shi ni tsuite” 鎖国時代における清人の日本研究 (上): 翁広平の日本国志

について (A study of Japan by a Chinese of the Qing period during the exclusion era (1): On Weng Guangping’s Riben guo zhi). Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyô ( jinbun kagaku) 茨城大学文理学部紀要 (人文科学) 16 (November 1965): 1–22.

———. “Sakoku jidai ni okeru Shinjin no Nihon kenkyû (ge): Ô Kôhei no Nihon koku shi ni tsuite” 鎖国時代における清人の日本研究(下): 翁広平の日本国志

について (A study of Japan by a Chinese of the Qing period during the exclusion era (2): On Weng Guangping’s Riben guo zhi). Ibaraki daigaku bunrigakubu kiyô ( jinbun kagaku) 茨城大学文理学部紀要 (人文科学) 17 (December 1966): 1–20.

———. Yakuchû Chûgoku seishi Nihon den 訳註中国正史日本伝 (Treatises on Japan from the Chinese dynastic histories, translated and annotated). Tokyo: Kokusho kankôkai, 1975.

Kamei Takashi 亀井孝, Ôfuji Tokihiko 大藤時彦, and Yamada Toshio 山田俊雄.

Nihongo no rekishi, 4: utsuriyuku kodaigo 日本語の歴史: 4 移りゆく古代語

(The history of Japanese, Volume 4: The changing ancient language). Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1976.

Kaneko Kazumasa 金子和正. “Chûgai chûhen no shôkai” 籌海重編の紹介

(Introduction to the Chouhai chongbian). Biburia ビブリア 12 (October 1958): 54–58.

Kimura Akira 木村晟. “Yûreki Nihon zukei no Nihongoi ni tsuite” 游歴日本図経の日

本語彙 (On the Japanese vocabulary in the Youli Riben tujing). Komazawa daigaku bungakubu kenkyû kiyô 駒沢大学文学部研究紀要 31 (March 1973): 83–210.

Kyôto daigaku bungakubu kokugogaku kokubungaku kenkyûshitsu 京都大学文学部

国語学国文学研究室 (Departments of Japanese Language and Japanese

330

chinese understanding of the japanese language

Literature, Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University), ed. Nihon kigo no kenkyû 日本寄語

の研究 (Studies of Japanese vocabularies). Kyoto: Kyôto daigaku kokubungakkai, 1965.

Liang Rongruo 梁容若. “Chouhai tubian de banben”「籌海圖編」的板本 (The woodblock edition of the Chouhai tubian). In Tan shu ji 談書集 (Essays discussing books), pp. 128–32. Taibei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1978.

———. “Ping Pulinsidun daxue Zhongwen shanben shuzhi” 評譜林斯敦大學中文

善本書志 (Critical record of the rare Chinese books held at Princeton University).

In Tan shu ji 談書集 (Essays discussing books), pp. 101–27. Taibei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1978.

———, transl. “Shanjing Ding yu Qijing Mengzi kaowen” 山井鼎与七经孟子考文

(Yamanoi Kanae and the Textual Study of the Seven Classics and Mencius). In Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu shilun 中日文化交流史論 (Essays on the history of Sino-Japanese cultural interchange), pp. 292–300. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1985.

Li Xiaopu 李筱圃. Riben youji 日本遊記 (Travelogue of Japan). Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1985.

Li Yangong 李言恭 and Hao Jie 郝傑. Riben kao 日本考 (Study of Japan), Ed. Wang Xiangrong 汪向榮 and Yan Dazhong 嚴大中 Beijing reprint: Zhonghua shuju, 1983.

Luo Dajing 羅大經. Helin yulu 鶴林玉露 (The glittering dew drops of Helin).

Shanghai reprint: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 1990.

Miao Fenglin 繆鳳林. “Chouhai tubian (Ming Tianqi kanben)” 籌海圖編 (明天啓刊

本) (The Chouhai tubian, Edition of the Tianqi period of the Ming). Shixue zazhi 史

學雜志 1.4 (September 1929): 6–9.

———. “Mingren zhu yu Riben youguan shiji tiyao sizhong” 明人著與日本有關史

籍提要四種 (Four historical texts concerning Japan written by Chinese of the Ming). Jiangsu shengli guoxue tushuguan 江蘇省立國學圖書館 2 (1929): 1–18.

Ming shi 明史 (History of the Ming dynasty). In Ershiwu shi 二十五史 (The twenty-five histories). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe and Shanghai shudian, 1986.

Nakada Takayoshi 中田敬義. “Meiji shoki no Shinago” 明治初期之支那語 (Chinese language in the early Meiji period). Chûgoku bungaku 中國文學 83 (1942): 11–20.

Nakano Miyoko 中野美代子. “Nihon kigo ni yoru 16 seiki Teikai onkei no suitei, oyobi Muromachi makki kokugo on ni kansuru jakkan no mondai” 日本寄語による 16

世紀定海音系の推定、および室町末期國語音に關する若干の問題

(Estimating the Dinghai dialect of the sixteenth century on the basis of Japanese translation terms, and various issues concerning the pronunciation of late Muromachi Japanese). Tôhôgaku 東方學 28 (July 1964): 120–100 [pagination given in reverse order].

Naruse Jinzô 成瀬仁蔵. Joshi kyôiku 女子教育 (On women’s education). In Naruse Jinzô chosakushû 成瀬仁蔵著作集 (The writings of Naruse Jinzô), 2:33–155. Tokyo: Nihon joshi daigaku, 1974.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 331

———. Nüzi jiaoyu lun 女子教育論 (On women’s education). Trans. Yang Tingdong 楊廷棟 and Zhou Zupei 周祖培. Shanghai: Zuoxin yishuju, 1901.

Ogawa Tamaki 小川環樹. “Shoshi kaiyô ni mitaru ‘iroha’ no Kanji taion ni tsuite” 書

史會要に見たるいろはの漢字對音について (On the corresponding Kanji

phonemes for “i-ro-ha” as seen in the Shushi huiyao). Kokugo kokubun 國文國語

16.5 (September 1947): 311–20.

Ôtomo Shin’ichi 大友信一 . Muromachi jidai no kokugo onsei no kenkyû: Chûgoku shiryô ni yoru 室町時代の国語音声に研究: 中国資料による ( Studies in Japanese phonetics of the Muromachi period, based on Chinese materials). Tokyo: Shibundô, 1963.

———. “Nihonkan yakugo no seiritsu, kokugo on’in shiryô to shite no kachi”「日本館

訳語」の成立、国語音韻資料としての価値 (The formation of the Ribenguan

yiyu, its value as material on Japanese phonetics). Kokugogaku 国語学 43 (March 1961): 31–42.

———. “Nihon zusan, Chûgai zuhen no shohon to sono seiritsu jijô” 『日本図纂』

『籌海図編』の諸本とその成立事情 (The Riben tuzuan, the Chouhai tubian, and the circumstances surrounding their formation). Nihon rekishi 日本歴史 132

(June 1959): 91–100.

———. “Yûreki Nihon zukei no ‘hôgen’ shosai no goi”「游歴日本図経」の「方

言」所載の語彙 (The vocabulary included under “Fangyan” in the Youli Riben tujing). Kokugogaku 国語学 108 (March 1977): 97–107.

Ôtomo Shin’ichi and Kimura Akira 木村晟. Azuma kagami ho shosai Kaigai kidan kokugokai, honbun to sakuin 吾妻鏡補所載海外奇談国語解本文と索引 (The explanation of Japanese in the “Kaigai kidan” in the Azuma kagami ho, text and index). Tokyo: Kyûko shoin, 1972.

———. Nihon ikkan, honbun to sakuhin 日本一鑑本文と索弓 | ( A mirror of Japan, text and index). Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1964.

———. Nihon ikkan, honbun to sakuhin [meii] 日本一鑑本文と索引 (A mirror of Japan, text and index [word list]). Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1972.

———. Nihonkan yakugo, honbun to sakuin 日本館譯語本文と索引 (The Ribenguan yiyu, text and index). Tokyo: Rakubunsha, 1968.

Pan Qibing 潘其炳. “Fu Wuqi jing ba” 附吳妻鏡跋 (Appended postface to the Azuma kagami), in Weng Guangping 翁廣平. Wuqi jing bu 吾妻鏡補 (Commentary on the Azuma kagami). N.p., 1814, juan 19.

Sanshû Nihon yakugo 三秀日本訳語 (Compiled Japanese vocabularies). Kyoto: Kyôto daigaku kokubungakkai, 1968.

Satô Saburô 佐藤三郎. “Chûgokujin to Azuma kagami” 中国人と吾妻鏡 (Chinese and the Azuma kagami). Nihon rekishi 日本歴史 188 (January 1964): 45–47.

———. Kindai Nit-Chû kôshô shi kenkyû 近代日中交涉史研究 (Studies in the history of modern Sino-Japanese relations). Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kôbunkan, 1984.

332

chinese understanding of the japanese language

Satow, Ernest 1882. “Notes on Dr. Edkins’ Paper ‘A Chinese-Japanese Vocabulary of the Fifteenth Century.’” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan X: 15–38.

Shi Yunyu 石韞玉. “Ba” 跋 (Postface) to the Azuma kagami, in Weng Guangping 翁廣

平. Wuqi jing bu 吾妻鏡補 (Commentary on the Azuma kagami), juan 1.

Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 四庫全書總目提要 (Annotated general catalogue for the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933.

Tanaka Takeo 田中健夫. “Chûgai zuhen no seiritsu” 籌海図編の成立 (The formation of the Chouhai tubian). In Chûsei kaigao kôshô shi no kenkyû 中世海外交涉史

の研究 (Studies in the history of overseas relations in the medieval era), pp. 215–

Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1981.

———. Wakô to kangô bôeki 倭寇と勘合貿易 (Japanese pirates and the tally trade).

Tokyo: Shibundô, 1966.

———. “Wakô zu tsuikô: Shindai Chûgokujin no Nihonjin zô” 倭寇図追考: 清代中

国人の日本人像 (A follow-up study of the drawings of “Japanese pirates”: Chinese images of Japanese in the Qing penod). Tôyô daigaku bungakubu kiyô shigakkahen 東洋大学文学部紀要史学科編 46.18 (1992): 1–21.

———. “Wakô zu zakkô: Mindai Chûgokujin no Nihonjin zô” 倭寇図雑考: 明代中

国人の日本人像 (Various analyses of the drawings of “Japanese pirates”: Chinese images of Japanese in the Ming period). Tôyô daigaku bungakubu kiyô shigakkahen 東洋大学文学部紀要史学科編 41.13 (1987): 1–26.

Tao Zongyi 陶宗儀. Shushi huiyao 書史會要 (Essentials in the history of calligraphy). N.p.: 1376.

Tomioka Kenzô 富岡謙藏. “Nihon ikkan kaidai” 日本一鑑解題 (An introduction to the Riben yijian). Geibun 藝文 5.9 (September 1914): 256–59.

Tsunoda, Ryusaku, and Goodrich, L. Carrington. Japan in the Chinese Dynastic Histories.

Pasadena: P.D. and Ione Perkins, 1951.

Wang Baoping 王宝平. “Azuma kagami ho ni tsuite” 吾妻鏡補について (On the Wuqi jing bu). In Azuma kagami ho. Chûgokujin ni yoru saisho no Nihon tsûshi 吾妻

鏡補: 中国人による最初の日本通史 ( Wuqi jing bu: The first comprehensive history of Japan by a Chinese), ed. Wang Baoping, pp. 3–18. Kyoto: Hôyû shoten, 1997.

———. “Wuqi jing bu zhuzhe Weng Guangping kao” 吾妻镜补著者翁广平考 (A study of Weng Guangping, the author of the Wuqi jing bu). In Zhong-Ri wenhua luncong 中日文化论丛 (Essays in Sino-Japanese culture), ed. Hangzhou daxue Riben wenhua yanjiusuo 杭州大学日本文化研究所 (Research Institute on

Japanese Culture, Hangzhou University) and Kanagawa daigaku jinbungaku kenkyûjo 神奈川大学人文学研究所 (Humanities Research Institute, Kanagawa University), pp. 150–60. Hangzhou: Hangzhou daxue chubanshe, 1996.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 333

———. “Fu Unryô no Nihon kenkyû no shûhen” 傅雲龍の日本硏究の周邊 (On the margins of Fu Yunlong’s studies of Japan). In Sekkô to Nihon 浙江と日本 (Zhejiang and Japan), pp. 227–46. Suita: Kansai daigaku shuppanbu, 1997.

———. “Qingdai yanjiu Riben zhi lizuo—lun Ce’ao zazhi” 清代研究日本之力

作—论《策鰲杂摭》(A masterpiece of research on Japan in the Qing period: The Ceao zazhi). Ribenxue yanjiu 日本学研究 5 (December 1996): 135–41.

Wang Xiangrong 汪向榮. “Cong Jinglüe fuguo yaobian kan renchen kang-Wo zhanshi”

从《经略复国要编》看壬辰抗倭战事 (The anti-Japanese war of 1592 as seen

from the Jinglüe fuguo yaobian). In Zhong-Ri guanxi shi wenxian lunkao 中日關係

史文獻論考 (Essays on materials in the history of Sino-Japanese relations), pp. 264–88. Beijing: Yuelu shushe, 1985.

———. “Guanyu Chouhai tubian” 關於籌海圖編 (On the Chouhai tubian). In his Zhong-Ri guanxi shi wenxian lunkao 中日關係史文獻論考 (Essays on materials in the history of Sino-Japanese relations), 159–217. Beijing: Yuelu shushe, 1985.

———. “Guanyu Riben kao” 關於日本考 (On the Riben kao). In his Zhong-Ri guanxi shi wenxian lunkao 中日關係史文獻論考 (Essays on materials in the history of Sino-Japanese relations), pp. 239–63. Beijing: Yuelu shushe, 1985.

———. “Periodizing the History of Sino-Japanese Relations.” Transl. Joshua A. Fogel.

Sino-Japanese Relations 2.1 (December 1989): 28–41.

———. “Zhongguo diyibu yanjiu Riben de zhuanzhu: Riben kao lüe” 中国第一部研

究日本的专著: 《日本考略》(China’s first specialized study of Japan: Riben kao lüe). In his Zhong-Ri guanxi shi wenxian lunkao 中日關係史文獻論考 (Essays on materials in the history of Sino-Japanese relations), pp. 218–38. Beijing: Yuelu shushe, 1985.

Wang Xiangrong and Xia Yingyuan 夏应元, annot. Zhong-Ri guanxi shiliao huibian 中

日关系史料汇编 (Collection of historical materials on Sino-Japanese relations).

Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984.

Wang Xiaoqiu 王曉秋. “Huang Zunxian Riben guo zhi chutan” 黄遵宪日本国志初

探 (A preliminary study of Huang Zunxian’s Riben guo zhi). Jindai shi yanjiu 近代史

研究 3 (1980): 177–206.

———. Jindai Zhong-Ri qishi lu 近代中日启示录 (Records of Sino-Japanese revela-tions in the modern era). Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1987.

———. Jindai Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu shi 近代日中交涉史話 (A history of modern Sino-Japanese cultural interchange). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1992.

———, ed. Zaoqi Riben youji wuzhong 早期日本游記五種 (Five early travelogues of Japan). Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1983.

Wang Xiqi 王錫祺. Xiaofang huzhai yudi congchao 小方壺齋輿地叢鈔 (Collections of documents on world geography). Shanghai: Zhuyitang, 1897.

334

chinese understanding of the japanese language

Wang Yizhong 王以中 1932. “Mingdai haifang tuji lu” 明代海防圖籍錄 (Maps and texts on coastal defense from the Ming dynasty). Qinghua zhoukan 清華週刊 37.9–

10 (May): 141–62.

Wang Yong 王勇. “Chûgoku ni okeru Nihon kenkyû no zenshi” 中国に於ける日本研

究の前史 (The prehistory of Chinese study of Japan). In Zhong-Ri wenhua luncong 中日文化论丛 (Essays in Sino-Japanese culture), ed. Hangzhou daxue Riben wenhua yanjiusuo 杭州大学日本文化研究所 (Research Institute on Japanese Culture, Hangzhou University) and Kanagawa daigaku jinbungaku kenkyûjo 神奈

川大学人文学研究所 (Humanities Research Institute, Kanagawa University), pp. 132–46. Hangzhou: Hangzhou daxue chubanshe, 1991.

———. “Issho to Kakokuhon” 佚書と華刻本 (Lost books and Chinese printings). In Tenseki 典籍 (Classical Texts), ed. Ôba Osamu 大庭脩 and Wang Yong, vol. 9 of Nit-Chû bunka kôryû shi sôsho 日中文化交流史叢書 (Collection of essays on the history of Sino-Japanese cultural interactions), pp. 348–86. Tokyo: Taishûkan shoten, 1996.

———. Tô kara mita ken-Tô shi, konketsujitachi no dai Tô teikoku 唐から見た遭唐

使、混血児たちの大唐帝国 (The Japanese embassies to the Tang as seen by the Tang: The great Tang empire of halfbreeds). Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1998.

———. Zhong-Ri guanxi shi kao 中日关系史考 (Studies in the history of Sino-Japanese relations). Beijing Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 1995.

Wang Yong 王庸. Zhongguo dili tuji congkao 中國地理圖籍叢書 (Studies of Chinese geographical texts). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1947; 1956 reprint.

Watanabe Mitsuo 渡部三男. “Azuma kagami ho no Nihongo shiryô” 吾妻鏡補

の日本語資料 (Material on the Japanese language in the Wuqi jing bu). In Iwai hakushi koki kinen tenseki ronshû 岩井博士古希記念典籍論集 (Essays on texts to commemorate the seventieth birthday of Professor Iwai), pp. 831–36. Tokyo: Iwai hakase koki kinen jigyôkai, 1963.

———. “Azuma kagami ho shoin no Nihongoi, kôhon ‘Kaigai kidan kokugokai’” 吾妻

鏡補所引の日本語彙、校本海外奇談国語解 (Japanese vocabulary terms

cited in the Azuma kagami ho: The “Explanation of Japanese of the Kaigai kidan” in the Text). Komazawa daigaku bungakubu kenkyû kiyô 駒沢大学文学部研究紀要

20 (March 1962): 19–45.

———. “Chûgoku kobunken ni mieru Nihongo: Kakurin gyokuro to Shoshi kaiyô ni tsuite” 中國古文獻に見える日本語: 鶴林玉露と書史會要について (Japan

as seen in old Chinese documents: The Helin yulu and the Shushi huiyao). Komazawa daigaku kenkyû kiyô 駒澤大学研究紀要 15 (March 1957): 155–63.

———. “Ka-i yakugo oyobi Nihonkan yakugo ni tsuite” 華異譯語および日本館譯

語について (Sino-foreign vocabularies and translations or Japanese). Komazawa daigaku kenkyû kiyô 駒澤大學研究紀要 18 (March 1960): 120–35.

chinese understanding of the japanese language 335

———. “Ka-i yakugo oyobi Nihonkan yakugo ni tsuite (shôzen)” 華異譯語および日

本館譯語について承前 (Sino-Foreign vocabularies and translations of Japanese, continued from earlier). Komazawa daigaku kenkyû kiyô 駒澤大學研究紀要 19

(March 1961): 15–31.

———. “Minjin ni yoru Nihon gobun rikai no keika” 明人による日本語文理解の

経過 (The course over which Chinese of the Ming era came to understanding the Japanese language). Tsurumi joshi tanki daigaku kiyô 鶴見女子短期大学紀要 2

(March 1962): 98–114.

———. “Minmatsu no Nihon shôkaisho: Nihon ikkan ni tsuite” 明末の日本紹介書:

┌日本一鑑┘ について (An introductory text on Japan from the late Ming: The Riben yijian). Komazawa daigaku kenkyû kiyô 駒澤大學硏究紀要 13 (March 1955): 144–69.

———. “Zuisho Wakokuden no Nihongo hitei” 隋害倭国伝の日本語比定

(Identifying Japanese in the “Treatise on Japan” from the Sui shu). Komazawa kokubun 駒沢国文 5 (October 1966): 1–8.

———. translator and annotator. Shinshû yakuchû Nihon kô 新修譯註日本考 ( Riben kao [Study of Japan], revised translation and annotations). Tokyo: Shintensha, 1985.

Weng Guangping 翁廣平. Wuqi jing bu 吾妻鏡補 (Commentary on the Azuma kagami). N.p., 1814. 30 juan ms.

———. Wuqi jing bu 吾妻鏡補 (Commentary on the Azuma kagami). Ed. Wang Baoping 王宝平. Kyoto reprint: Hôyû shoten, 1997.

Wild, Norman. “Materials for the Study of the Ssû I Kuan 四夷(譯) 館 (Bureau of Translation.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies XI (1943–46): 617–40.

Wu Anlong 武安隆 and Xiong Dayun 熊達雲. Chûgokujin no Nihon kenkyû shi 中国人

の日本研究史 (A history of Chinese Japanology). Tokyo: Rokkô shuppan, 1989.

Xue Jun 薛俊. Riben kao lüe 日本考略 (Brief study of Japan). Deyueyi zang, 1831. 1 juan.

Yichu 義楚. Shishi liu tie 釋氏六帖 (The six models of Buddhism). Vol. 5 of series Xiandai Foxue daxi 現代佛學大系 (Modern compendium on Buddhism). Taibei: Mile chubanshe, 1982.

Zhang Yaqiu 张雅秋. “Cong Helin yulu zhong de yize shiliao kan Songdai Zhong-Ri wenhua jiaoliu” 从《鹤林玉露》中的一则史料看宋代中日文化交流 (Song-era Sino-Japanese cultural relations as seen from the historical materials in the Helin yulu). In Zhong-Ri wenhua luncong 中日文化论丛 (Essays in Sino-Japanese culture), ed. Hangzhou daxue Riben wenhua yanjiusuo 杭州大学日本文化研究

所 (Research Institute on Japanese Culture, Hangzhou University) and Kanagawa daigaku jinbungaku kenkyūjo 神奈川大学人文学研究所 (Humanities Research Institute, Kanagawa University), pp. 205–12. Hanzhou: Hangzhou daxue chubanshe, 1996.

336

chinese understanding of the japanese language

Zheng Shungong 鄭舜功. Riben yijian 日本一鑑 (A mirror of Japan). 16 juan: dao xinbian 島新編, 4 juan; Qionghe huahai 窮河話海, 9 juan; Fuhai tujing 桴海圖經, 3 juan. N.p., 1565–66; Beiping photolithographic reprint of the Wendiange 文殿閣

text, 1939.

Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊. “Wuqi jing ba” 梧妻鏡跋 (Postface to the Azuma kagami). In Pushu ting ji 曝書亭集 (Collection from the Air-Out-the-Books Pavilion), juan 44.

N.p., 1664.

■ Source: Fogel, Joshua A. “‘Shanghai-Japan’: The Japanese Residents’ Association of Shanghai,”

Journal of Asian Studies 59.4 (Cambridge University Press, November 2000), 927–50.

“Shanghai-Japan”: The Japanese Residents’ Association of Shanghai

At noon on December 3, 1937, a Japanese military parade—perhaps in ironic imitation of other processions by foreigners in Shanghai—began marching down Nanjing Road through the foreign concessions in Shanghai and along the Bund. In the lead was a military police (kenpeitai) car escorted by mounted troops bearing sabres at the hilt. They were followed by a large infantry detach-ment, machine-gunners, and finally by artillerymen. Japanese aircraft flew by overhead, and Japanese civilians lined the route along the way and shouted out choruses of banzai. When they arrived at Jessfield Park, they were met by a contingent of Italian ladies—allies in the anti-Comintern pact—waving Japanese flags. The event lasted until 3 p.m. and involved all 6000 Japanese troops stationed in the city. The next day a smaller contingent of troops marched in orderly fashion from Garden Bridge south to the Bund and through the concessions ( Tokyo asahi shinbun, December 4, 1937, and December 5, 1937; cited in Muramatsu 1991, 308–9). Lest there be any doubt about it, this was clearly intended as a victory march, an effort to demonstrate the new reality of Japan’s preeminence in Shanghai. However much this display may have been directed at the Chinese, with whom Japan had now been at war for five months, the Western residents of the concessions—with whom the resident Japanese had been at loggerheads for many years—were the primary targets. No such event ever took place in any of the other centers of Japanese residence in China, only in Shanghai, where all the Western powers were present in full force.

The complex background to the staging of such an event reflects both Japan’s long efforts to gain respectability among the foreign powers in Shanghai and the sense of frustration among local Japanese with the rising tide of anti-Japanese activities among the surrounding Chinese population. There were nearly 25,000 Japanese in the city by this time,1 and their numbers would

* The author would like to thank in particular Mark Peattie and Joan Judge for a thorough reading of an earlier draft of this essay and Christian Henriot for providing several important sources previously unavailable.

1 The overall population of Shanghai at this time was about 3.6 million, making the roughly 25,000 Japanese only 0.7 percent of the total.

338

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

skyrocket over the next few years, but most lived with a deep and increasing apprehension as they found themselves on the front lines of an unfolding tragedy of enormous proportions. The central organization that gave cohesion to the Japanese community of Shanghai, that administered its communal institutions, and that represented it through the consulate to the homeland was the Japanese Residents’ Association (JRA) of Shanghai (Shanhai kyoryū mindan).

Its history is the subject of this essay.2

Yet, the community that the JRA represented was by no means monolithic.

It was subtly stratified into at least two tiers. These different groups within the community had different objectives, concerns, and experiences. As a result they tended to react differently to the events of the years under study. A study of the Shanghai JRA, representing the largest Japanese community within China proper, reveals how these Japanese of different backgrounds responded to events at the time of Japanese aggression against China. One minute they were civilians within the protected concessionary enclave, and the next they were on the front lines of a ferocious war. Were they in fact trapped there by political and military considerations beyond their control, or did they play some role in fashioning the nature of the Japanese response to an increasingly hostile environment? How did their experiences differ from those of other JRA communities in China? And, how did the unfolding perception of a Chinese menace influence the social rifts within the Shanghai community?

While recent years have witnessed a growing body of writings in English on Shanghai (for example, Henriot 1993; Wakeman 1995) and especially on its Western communities (for example, Bickers and Henriot 2000; Wilkinson 2000; Kreissler 2000), little has as yet been published on the Japanese community (Henriot 2000 is a recent exception). Other Japanese expatriate communities in China have also received scant attention (except for Fogel 2000). Before multiethnic Shanghai can be fully appreciated, the largest foreign presence in Shanghai needs greater coverage. This article is part of that project.

Origins and Early Work of the Shanghai JRA

Unlike the other foreign powers, Japan had a long premodern history of ties to Shanghai, going back at least to the fifteenth century and probably earlier.

However, when the first Japanese vessel of the modern era, the Senzaimaru, docked at the port of Shanghai in 1862 (nineteen years after that port had officially opened), it found Great Britain, the United States, Holland, and 2 The only essay in English to date that even touches on the Shanghai JRA is Peattie 1989.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 339

France already well established in the city.3 Only seven Japanese had settled in Shanghai when diplomatic ties were established in 1871, but after the creation of a Japanese consulate the next year, major Japanese companies began setting up branches there.

During the early Meiji years (1868–1912), the population grew slowly, with women constituting roughly two-thirds of the local Japanese; the men were engaged in a variety of business concerns, while the women worked largely in the flesh trade, many having been kidnapped from their homes to fill the brothels in Shanghai and throughout East and Southeast Asia. By 1890 the resident Japanese population reached 639, with men for the first time outnumbering women (337 to 302). Although the population approached 1000 on the eve of the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, during that conflict the great majority of Japanese withdrew; most returned following Japan’s stunning victory. The Treaty of Shimonoseki provided that Japan could build factories on Chinese soil, and as a result Japanese became more deeply involved in the Chinese economy. In late 1904 the resident Japanese population surpassed 3000 and continued to rise much more rapidly from 1905 (Zhu 1995, 401, 406; Takatsuna 1995, 119–21; Katō 1974, 316–17; Yonezawa 1938 and 1939; Soejima 1984, 9, 24; Cao and Ma 1990, 51).4 Throughout the Meiji era the great majority of Japanese in Shanghai came from the southern island of Kyūshū and western Honshū, areas which provided a great number of Japanese emigrants to other sites, including Korea.

The Treaty of Shimonoseki enabled the Japanese to establish a concession area, but they never sought to do so in Shanghai as they did in other Chinese cities, such as Tianjin and Hankou. No one has as yet satisfactorily explained why they opted against a concession, but possible fears of alienating the large foreign presence in the city with this newly emergent (and non-European) group may have militated against such a move. The great majority of Japanese, some 75 percent, remained in Shanghai’s International Settlement, that area to the north of the Chinese city occupied initially by the British after victory in the Opium War. Even before the first Sino-Japanese War, Japanese were settling in the Hongkou quarter of the settlement, soon to become known informally as the “Japanese Concession” or “Japantown.” Interestingly, though, the decision not to construct a concession of its own by no means meant that the Japanese 3 On premodern contacts between Shanghai and Japan, see Qiao 1990, 35–39, 65. On the voyage of the Senzaimaru, see Fogel 1994, 79–94; Haruna 1987, 555–601; Wang 1989, 140–56; Satō

1984, 67–96; Qiao 1989, 43–52.

4 On the kidnapping of Japanese girls to serve in brothels overseas—the “Karayukisan”—see Morisaki 1976, 156–57; Hane 1982, 217–21; Kim 1981, 182–267.

340

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

community would be more closely integrated into the life of the Chinese city.

To the contrary, it was probably more isolated in Shanghai than in other population centers on the mainland.

Responding to the rapid growth of a Japanese presence on the Asian mainland and to the need to unify and protect their nationals abroad, the Japanese government, through the Gaimushō (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), enacted a “Residents’ Association Law” (Kyoryū mindan hō) on March 7, 1905. The Gaimushō followed with a supplementary directive on August 1 of that year. On December 17, 1905, a Japanese Association (Nihonjin kyōkai) was founded at a joint meeting held in the Japanese Consulate of the Shanghai Japanese Club (Nihonjin kurabu) and the Japanese Business Club (Nihon jitsugyō kurabu).5

Several days later Consul-General Nagataki appointed a thirty-member board, which on December 23 named Itō Yonejirō its first chairman. The most important task for the Japanese Association was to take over the management of the Kaidō Elementary School from the Shanghai branch of the Higashi Honganji (founded in 1874, an outpost of the “eastern headquarters” of the Pure Land Buddhist sect), which had seen to its operation since it was initially set up in 1890. The Japanese Cemetery, located on land purchased by the consulate in 1873 and long run by the Higashi Honganji, was also placed into the hands of the Japanese Association. These and a number of other communal tasks occupied the Japanese Association for the two years of its existence (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 107–12, 933–34; Hayashi 1929, 91; Nakauchi 1941, 25).

These early years correspond precisely to the immediate post-Russo-Japanese War period of rapid Japanese growth in Shanghai. The Japanese Association was not up to the task, and its role was taken over by the JRA, founded on September 1, 1907, with Itō Yonejirō assuming the chairmanship of the JRA board. Its offices were at first placed in the Japanese Club. The JRA was initially concerned with how to levy taxes from local Japanese in order to support its work, eventually devising a sliding scale based on income. On January 7, 1908, a Residents’ Council (Kyoryū minkai) was formed in compli-ance with a consular order, and this body regulated taxes on the local community. The Residents’ Council varied in size for a number of years before the Gaimushō fixed it at 60 in 1925 (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 172–76, 178; Yonezawa 1941, 194–96; Takatsuna 1993, 42).

In its early years, the JRA concerned itself with a number of projects. The Japanese Volunteers (Giyūtai) had belonged to the Shanghai Volunteer Brigade since 1900, but with the creation of the JRA, management of the Volunteers 5 The Japanese Club of Shanghai was the quintessential association for the elite of the community, and its relations with the JRA were always intimate. See Kaiin meibo 1944.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 341

fell to it beginning in 1907. Operation of the first elementary school by the Japanese Association was turned over to the JRA, and it was renamed the Japanese Higher Elementary School (Nihon jinjō kōtō shōgakkō) in 1908 when it had 125 students enrolled; in 1910 a nursery school was added, and both were soon swamped with pupils. To solve this oversubscription, the JRA opened an Eastern District Japanese Elementary School (Tōbu Nihon jinjō shōgakkō) in November 1923, but it too was soon overwhelmed with students and had to be expanded. A third “Western District” (Seibu) elementary school was opened in April 1927, and a fourth “Central District” (Chūbu) opened two years later.

In 1920 a Japanese Girls’ Higher School (Nihon kōtō jogakkō) was opened, and it moved to its own quarters in 1923. In 1926 a Japanese Business School (Nihon jitsugyō gakkō) also opened its doors, and five years later a Japanese Commercial School (Nihon shōgyō gakkō) followed suit, moving to its own building the next year. The number of schools continued to proliferate as the Japanese population grew over time. In theory, all of these schools were open to all Japanese, there being no distinction by class, and there were no special or elite private Japanese schools in Shanghai.

In addition to all these educational tasks that consumed 80 percent of its budget, the JRA also continued to manage the Japanese cemetery and crematorium as well as the Shanghai Youth Association (Kojō seinenkai, founded in 1902). The JRA assumed responsibility for local hygiene and disease prevention as well, establishing a hospital administrative council in 1931 and a full-fledged clinic in 1934 (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 178–83, 568, 944–81, 1295–1310).6

Even had there had not been conflicts with the surrounding Chinese community, the JRA clearly had its hands full to overflowing.

One remarkable quality of the entire Japanese enterprise in Shanghai was how extrinsic for the great majority of Japanese it was to the city itself and how much Japanese life there was designed to resemble home, though it should be noted that it was a rare foreigner of any nationality who fashioned a Chinese life-style on the mainland. From the second decade of the twentieth century, Japanese began informally referring to their adopted city with the extraordinary transnational toponym “Nagasaki ken, Shanhai shi” (the city of Shanghai in the prefecture of Nagasaki). This offhand remark indicated both the large number of Japanese residents from Kyūshū (where Nagasaki was to be found) and the extent to which most Japanese lived in a Japanese style. For example, fish and vegetables arrived from the port of Nagasaki on a daily basis and were 6 On educational facilities operated by the JRA in Shanghai, see Shanhai kyoryū mindan ritsu gakkō ichiran 1933; and Wu Jianxi 1994. For an overview of all educational institutions in Shanghai, see the Kō-A in report, Shanhai ni okeru kyōiku jōkyō 1941.

342

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

sold in the local Shanghai markets. “It was as if a corner of the Nagasaki market had moved,” noted one Shanghai Japanese from Nagasaki; “Japanese residents in Shanghai lived there oblivious to the fact that they were in a foreign country” (cited in Takatsuna 1995, 125).

The JRA weathered the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the rising poverty and famine in central China which caused refugees to flock to Shanghai (and enhanced the danger of the spread of disease), and the chaos of the early years of the Republic of China. The most distressing and irritating development to them in those years, however, was the rise of the anti-Japanese movement among Chinese. The local Chinese reaction to the Twenty-one Demands in 1915 was a boycott of Japanese goods and, even more debilitating, the refusal of Chinese merchants to sell to local Japanese. Although they had had no say in the formulation of the policy that had led to the delivery of those demands, local Japanese soon found themselves on the front lines facing Chinese ire.

Smaller Japanese businesses suffered as a result, and many Japanese were forced to return home. With several notable exceptions, their answer was to organize themselves locally to withstand assault and, if necessary, respond in kind. Writing an account of his impressions a few years later in the early 1920s, the novelist and travel writer Muramatsu Shōfū (1889–1961) noted in stark tones:

The Japanese have no intention whatsoever of throwing away fifty years of work that have gone into the building of “Shanghai-Japan.” The Yangzi trade runs annually to five or six hundred million yen and often more than seven. As Manchuria is Japan’s lifeline, the Yangzi trade is Japan’s line of nourishment, and it will under no circumstances dispense with this. There is no reason to relinquish such great interests even if it means fighting. We must come to the aid of the 30,000 [Japanese] residents of Shanghai. We cannot let them die before our very eyes. This is our responsibility both as a state and as a government.7

As Muramatsu’s language suggests, the Japanese living in Shanghai were part of a community closely linked to the homeland. Yes, they were living in Shanghai and, as much as possible, still in Japan, but, with few exceptions, they were doing everything possible not to be living in China. In this sense, they had adopted all the worst foreign biases against the Chinese. But the links to Shanghai were not ephemeral or illusory, and not just because of the economic 7 Mato (Demon Capital), published in 1923, as cited in Takatsuna 1995, 131. On Muramatsu’s writings about China, see Otani 1989, 93–108; Fogel 1996, 251, 270, 271. For more on Muramatsu’s complex relationship with China, see Wada 1999, 45–55.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 343

ties Muramatsu cites. Japan’s penetration into the foreign-dominated Shanghai market had been hard fought and would not be easily relinquished. Already in the early 1920s, Shanghai had been transformed into an essential organ of the Japanese political-economic animal, as Manchuria had been earlier.

Muramatsu’s account thus resounds with several layers of ominous ringing.

**Responses to Chinese Nationalism and Rifts within the **

Japanese Community

One of the great shocks of the early twentieth century to Japanese from many different walks of life was that Chinese nationalism should develop precisely as an anti-Japanese movement. Many were unprepared for any sort of cohesive Chinese nationalism to emerge, because they had been led to believe by scholars and journalists alike that the Chinese had no concept of nation. Some, such as the eminent Sinologist Naitō Konan, argued that China had long passed the historical era in which the nation was a meaningful unit. However, since the rest of the world was still stuck in that earlier period, China might need some assistance or guidance to become an active player in the family of nations.

Others were not as generous to the Chinese or as knowledgeable of Chinese history and simply believed that the Chinese were not ready to assume the responsibilities of a modern nation-state. This view was not merely the product of corrupt, imperialist Japanese minds, for Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) himself had suggested that the Chinese people were like a sheet of loose sand, not yet cohering into the presumed natural unity that the nation-state would provide. Other Japanese were prepared to recognize Chinese nationalism for what it was, but assumed that East Asians shared a common enemy in the Western imperialist powers and thus shared a common destiny; Chinese could develop nationalism, in this formulation, but it was unthinkable that they would ever identify Japan as the enemy.

In response to fears during the anti-Japanese boycotts of 1915, six neighborhood associations ( chōnaikai) were organized for local self-defense and mutual aid (Hashimoto 1940, 61–62, lists the original six). They worked closely with the JRA and the consulate. Two years later, six more neighborhood associations were formed, and together the twelve were dubbed the League of Japanese Neighborhood Associations of Shanghai (Shanhai Nihonjin chōnai rengōkai); the first head of the League was Hayashi Yūkichi, who would lead it on and off for the next three decades. When boycotts and other anti-Japanese actions erupted, these neighborhood associations were called into action to provide Japanese with current information, deliver the mail, distribute food, protect

344

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

fellow nationals (especially schoolchildren), and later organize vigilance committees ( jikeidan). By the mid-1920s, the number of neighborhood associations had risen to forty, and to insure effective coordination of the various groups, Consul-General Yada Shichitarō had the League of Japanese Neighborhood Associations transformed into the more cohesive Japanese Street Federation of Shanghai (Shanhai Nihonjin kakuro rengōkai). Each neighborhood association bore its fair share of the expenses for running the Street Federation. By the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, this umbrella organization oversaw the activities of 56 neighborhood associations; by June 1942, there were 179 of them (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 1047, 1056, 1063, 1070–78; Hashimoto 1940, 5, 56, 58–59; Takatsuna 1995, 127–28).

Although they had to be affiliated with the JRA, the neighborhood associations were not organized by JRA leaders. This disjuncture reveals the most telling social cleavage within the Japanese community of Shanghai throughout its history, a cleavage exacerbated by external assault. From its inception the JRA was run by elite members of local Japanese society. Its board was comprised of this elite and was closely tied to the consulate, to the major corporations and banks in the former British Concession, and to the heads of textile companies that dominated the Japanese economy in Shanghai (see Duus 1989 for a fine overview of Japanese textile investments and factories in China). They were dubbed the kaishaha or “company clique” because of these ties, and most lived in mansions in the British and French Concession areas. They accounted for no more than 5 percent of the Japanese in Shanghai, but they held a disproportionate share of the community’s clout in local affairs and in relations with the home government. In most cases, they did not intend to live in Shanghai for the rest of their lives but were usually there for several years before being transferred to some equally prestigious position in Paris or London or New York. Thus, their social contacts were, more often than not, with their social equals among the Western elite.

By contrast, the great majority of Japanese belonged to what was locally called the dochakuha or “native clique,” comprised of middle-class and poorer people. While the JRA board was dominated by the kaishaha, they knew there would be serious friction within the community if dochakuha interests were ignored, and frequently a dochakuha man was appointed head of the board to placate those interests. At the time of the Shanghai Incident in January 1932

(see below), for example, Kawabata Teiji, a doctor living in the Hongkou district, served in this position; he had been a resident of Shanghai since 1912 and was felled by a Chinese terrorist bomb in April 1932 at a ceremony honoring Emperor Hirohito’s birthday. By no means were all dochakuha professionals.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 345

Most were Japanese expatriates who worked as salaried employees of the textile firms, banks, and other Japanese concerns or operated their own small-and middle-sized firms or shops in various trades and lived in Hongkou and Zhabei, adjacent sites in the north on the edge of the “international city” of Shanghai. At the bottom end, it also included Japanese who were unemployed.

It was, thus, an economically weak group, dependent on local political and economic vagaries, living side-by-side with Chinese in the same trades. It was they who were most affected by anti-Japanese actions and were thus most ter-rified of them. As Sino-Japanese tensions mounted through the 1920s, it was they—not the wealthy business people living in geographical security—that confronted Chinese outrage daily and felt ever more alienated and isolated.

Their early response was to organize the neighborhood associations for self-defense (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 1101–02; Takatsuna 1993, 32, 42–43, 90; Takatsuna 1995, 123–24; Horimoto 1989, 46–47; see also comments by Professor Usui Katsumi in Dokyumento Shōwa 1986, 188–89.

While it is highly doubtful that these two groups would have interacted socially back in Japan, the nature of the social rift in Shanghai reflects the experience of living overseas and fitting into a socioeconomic mold cast before their arrival. Thus, there were no rural Japanese farmers or a significant Japanese working class in Shanghai, as, of course, there were in Japan. Interestingly, the Japanese community in prewar Singapore had a similar social cleavage: a business elite known as gudan zoku (godown group) and ordinary folk known as shitamachi zoku (downtown group) (Yano 1975, 124–25).8 Among the various sites of foreign residence in China, though, no other city produced such a tense cleavage, undoubtedly because of the concentration in Shanghai of Japanese and Japanese interests.

At the time of the Northern Expedition in 1927, there were renewed fears of rising anti-Japanese activities in Shanghai and of the forces of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) “becoming red” ( sekishokka), in spite of their ferocious massacre of Communists in the spring of that year. In December a group of local JRA members with military experience organized a Shanghai branch of the Imperial Military Reservists’ Association ( Teikoku zaigō gunjinkai) to protect local Japanese interests. Coming from the same social stratum and neighborhoods as other dochakuha members, the Reservists soon linked up with the neighborhood associations and vigilance committees. This link tied the dochakuha directly to the Japanese military (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 1081–82; Takatsuna 1993, 49; Takatsuna 1995, 129; Peattie 1989, 207).

8 Thanks to Mark Peattie for bringing this source to my attention.

346

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

The apprehensions of these Japanese were not based on paranoia. They were the closest, most visible representatives of a policy of Japanese expansion into China that

was widely hated by Chinese. However, the spark for the explosion of the 1932 incident in Shanghai was lit hundreds of miles away in the northeast with the Manchurian Incident of September 18, 1931. After that incident, Japanese in Shanghai and elsewhere in urban China felt even more threatened by the forces of anti-Japanism, and this in turn pushed them further in the direction of seeing all Chinese as potential enemies. Such a volatile mix might have been ignited by any one of a number of events, but it would not have the luxury of dissipating with time. The ferocity of the Japanese assault on Shanghai in early 1932 directly reflects the fears and alienation of the dochakuha who were primarily responsible for the horrors visited on the Chinese city at that time.

The Shanghai Incident and the JRA

As they later narrated the history of events culminating in the Shanghai Incident, the JRA saw a long string of anti-Japanese actions beginning in 1908

and culminating in the Manchurian Incident. While we might now be reluctant to follow this distinctively nationalistic logic and interpret the Manchurian Incident as anti-Japanese, one would be hard-pressed to disagree that it was the start of an altogether new era in Sino-Japanese relations. News of the clashes in Manchuria soon spread south to Shanghai, and many Japanese in less well-protected cities of China withdrew to the relative security of Shanghai. The anti-Japanese boycott in place because of the P’yǒngyang Incident (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 206–7, 545–47)9 of July 1931 only intensified and sparked countless local incidents. Various anti-Japanese organizations formed in the city to protest the Guandong Army’s actions, and local Japanese felt an unprecedented level of anxiety.

9 On July 1, 1931, Chinese and Korean farmers near the city of Changchun in Manchuria clashed, and Japanese troops stepped in to break it up. News that Chinese had attacked Korean farmers reached Korea and spawned anti-Chinese riots, especially in the cities of Inchon and P’yǒngyang. In the latter 27 people were killed, and another “incident” acquired a toponym.

The boycott in Shanghai was the result of anger that the Japanese overlords in Korea had not prevented the violence against Chinese.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 347

There were armed Chinese attacks on the Japanese areas of Shanghai, and Chinese activists carried out sanctions against Chinese merchants who continued to do business with Japanese. These and other anti-Japanese actions hit the small- and middle-level Japanese businessmen—namely, the dochakuha— the hardest, forcing factory and shop closings. For example, whereas 29 percent of all imports on the Shanghai market in 1930 came from Japan, by December 1931 that figure had dropped to 3 percent (Xu Jie 1996, 288). The Japanese Commercial League of Shanghai (Shanhai Nihon shōkō rengōkai), representing 960 small- and middle-sized Japanese businessmen, was hastily formed and appealed to the consulate for help from the Japanese government, which sent three Japanese destroyers to the port of Shanghai from Japan. Ultimately, these businessmen organized mutual aid through the Street Federation with the help of the JRA.

In the first weeks following the Manchurian Incident, the Shanghai Street Federation, led by the aforementioned Hayashi Yūkichi, organized a residents’

assembly ( kyoryūmin taikai), which would eventually meet on four occasions over the next few months preceding the Shanghai Incident. Gathering for the first time on October 11, 1931, some 6000 participants speaking loudly for the dochakuha convened at a Japanese elementary school and adopted a harsh line; they called on the Japanese government and military to provide aid against Chinese efforts to destroy them. At their second meeting on October 27, 3500

participants from fifteen Chinese cities descended on Shanghai to repeat their hard line. The third meeting on December 6 again brought together about 3500

participants from 42 Japanese resident groups throughout China. Their line was even harder this time, as this dochakuha-led group protested against the kaishaha-dominated consulate.

The kaishaha’s more moderate tone seems to have won the day temporarily, but the dochakuha only became angrier afterward when the Japanese government took no determined action against the Chinese. Later, in December, dochakuha groups became emboldened and began calling for Japan to “punish China.” At the fourth meeting of the residents’ assembly on January 20, 1932, some 2000 participants reached a bellicose crescendo, demonstrating in front of the Japanese consulate and clashing with the Shanghai Municipal Police.

At these and smaller meetings of neighborhood associations, these Japanese decided on a policy of striking at the anti-Japanese movement before being attacked further themselves (Takatsuna 1993, 64–75).10

10 Both the Street Federation (Hashimoto 1940) and the Shanghai JRA (Shanhai kyoryū

mindan 1942) have left histories written in the early 1940s; the former is considerably sharper in its attacks on the Chinese and in its self-defense than the latter.

348

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

The elite level of Japanese society in Shanghai took another approach. At the time of the Manchurian Incident, Consul-General Murai called a meeting of all the major Japanese leaders in the city, including Yasui Gengo, chairman of the JRA, Ikeda Shigeo of the Residents’ Council, and Hayashi Yūkichi of the Street Federation, to plan for the protection of local Japanese should the anti-Japanese movement in the north spread to Shanghai. At that time they constituted themselves as an Emergency Board (Jikyoku iinkai) headed by Murai and to be funded by the JRA. They continued to meet either every day or every few days for the next eight months. The Emergency Board coordinated a number of activities, such as housing, food distribution, and communications, and pressed the home government to dispatch troops to support them. Ultimately, they took complete credit for “saving 30,000 [sic] Japanese from massacre”

through “a unity of officials and people, cooperation of military and civilian.”

The harsh response of the dochakuha to rising Chinese nationalism directed against Japan as compared to the kaishaha’s more measured reactions is not overly surprising. The latter was always more personally protected against violence and in any case had to answer directly to the Japanese government for any actions pursued in the name of the community. The fear and loathing of the former group, though, were certainly exacerbated by the lack of heed paid it by the kaishaha leadership. This in turn only heightened class tensions within the Japanese community of Shanghai. When dochakuha groups did become violent later that month, however, they vented all of their anger against the Chinese. The JRA leadership could claim no responsibility for the vigilante actions taken against the Chinese.

The JRA’s role in this cooperation involved liaison with government and police agencies, making the Japanese position known to the press, providing a temporary postal service, turning some of the dormitories at JRA-run schools over to military use, mobilizing teachers at those same schools to work in field hospitals, collecting funds to support the various agencies during the crisis, purchasing food and fuel and acquiring vehicles from Nagasaki and Dairen (C. Dalian, in China’s northeast), providing housing and provisions for refugees, distributing free food, and interpreting for military personnel (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 552–57, citation p. 556).11

The Shanghai Incident, beginning in late January 1932, has received some scholarly attention, although most of it has focused on the event as a precursor 11 This mammoth chronicle of the JRA’s work by the JRA significantly mentions almost nothing of the dochakuha activities described above, nor of the atrocities to be described below.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 349

to the greater disaster to follow. It left 6080 Chinese dead, 2000 wounded, and 10,400 missing; 814,084 persons suffered direct losses, and 80 percent of urban workers lost their jobs; 50 percent of all factories in Zhabei were destroyed largely from aerial bombardment, and 1.2 million Chinese were made refugees.

Much of the killing and destruction was the direct result of vigilante actions taken by the vigilance committees of the neighborhood associations. These associations worked in conjunction with the Shanghai branch of the Reservists and represented dochakuha animosities and fears. The general pretext used for murdering civilians was that nonmilitary Chinese personnel were all potential soldiers, whether or not in uniform. The Chinese and Western press labeled these mobile killers “Japanese rōnin,” and indeed they apparently included organized criminals and gangsters, as well as ordinary thugs and far-right-wing extremists. The Japanese authorities later tried to suppress stories of these massacres, but they actually had to contend with printed and spirited defenses of these actions from the time of their commission. Muramatsu Shōfū, whose earlier defense of Japanese actions to defend their hard-fought position in Shanghai was cited above, witnessed the Shanghai Incident and wrote for the popular monthly Chūō kōron in the following way:

As far as we Japanese are concerned, the greatest achievement of the vigilance committees was their having been able to wipe out the plainclothes soldiers. The one real weakness of our Naval Landing Party [the Japanese military body that led the assault on the city] was an overall lack of familiarity with the local terrain. China’s most potent tactic was to take advantage of this lacuna, loose thousands of plainclothes troops upon us, increase the dangers facing the Japanese, and thus attempt to unleash disorder in our rear. To resist this move, we have had no choice but to organize the vigilance committees. However, as we know from the time of the Great Kantō Earthquake [in September 1923 in Japan], vigilance committees may run rampant for a time and go to extremely violent ends. How much easier, then, is it for us to see that under circumstances of taking action against a clear enemy, unlike the natural disaster of an earthquake, the vigilance committees would reach a state of heightened and ruinous agitation. Only the Japanese vigilance committees displayed such heroism as when they sprang to action barehanded against the pistol-bearing plainclothes troops. Thus, the plainclothes soldiers’ tactic of the Chinese was completely defeated. We did not anticipate that the Chinese might use such fighting strength against the ordinary people of their opponents [i.e., the Japanese]. Frequently plainclothes troops were

350

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

misidentified, and good people suffered. (Muramatsu 1932, 347. Also cited in Takatsuna 1993, 86)

Here and in other contemporary sources, the author admitted to massacres and to the disposal of bodies by carrying them onto Japanese vessels and throwing them into the waters of the Yangzi. Indeed, this was probably the fate of a good many of the 10,400 missing Chinese during the Shanghai Incident, raising the death toll much higher. Most of this gruesome business was the work of the Japanese navy working with the vigilance committees and all in five weeks’ time.

The term used by Muramatsu and many other Japanese of the day to describe the multitude of prospective Chinese troops was “plainclothes soldiers” ( ben’itai). The very existence of such a term is evidence of the volatile nature of the Japanese response to the Shanghai Incident. In the minds of many increasingly nervous Japanese, virtually any suspicious-looking Chinese might be construed as a “plainclothes troop.” In fact, any Chinese at all might be labeled as such and summarily shot by a trigger-happy, frightened Japanese populace constantly checking its rear.12 And, the more Japanese goon squads acted on such fears, the more Chinese in fact must have effectively become figurative soldiers without uniforms in a total war against Japan. Certainly, the justification for violence against the Chinese provoked more violence on the part of Chinese out of self-protection. Indeed, under circumstances such as the Shanghai Incident, not to reach such a conclusion on the part of many Chinese meant almost certain death.

World War Two in Shanghai

Both sides claimed victory in the Shanghai Incident when Japanese troops withdrew, though it was at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Chinese. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937—a clash between Chinese and Japanese troops outside Beijing—which the JRA of Shanghai also blamed on the Chinese, quickly set off a fresh set of incidents through north China and into Shanghai. Again, local Chinese merchants refused to sell to or buy from Japanese, and it soon became difficult for local Japanese to get basic foodstuffs.

As fears of a massacre or siege set in, the JRA through the consulate called for 12 See the interesting essay on the origins of the term “plainclothes soldier” and its distinctiveness to the Shanghai Incident and further Japanese encroachments into China in Kuroha 1979.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 351

naval reinforcements in early August. When Shanghai Mayor Yu Hongjun protested on August 13 to Japanese Consul-General Okamoto against violations by the Naval Landing Party, the latter ominously replied that it was not the Japanese but Chinese “plainclothes troops” who were at fault for violating the peace (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 669–71).

Soon after war broke out, many of the employees of the larger Japanese concerns sent their families home; others at sites further up the Yangzi shuttled their families through Shanghai back to Japan. The Emergency Board continued to do its work and helped facilitate repatriation as well as welcoming the Japanese that started flocking to Shanghai after the arrival of Japanese troops.

As more cities fell to Japanese forces through 1938, Japan’s military position continued to grow. News of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and declarations of war against the United States and Great Britain reached Shanghai in the wee hours of December 8, 1941; the one American river gunboat docked in Shanghai surrendered, and the one British river gunboat there refused to do so and was sunk. Later that morning the Japanese consul-general visited the Shanghai Municipal Council and announced his country’s intentions to occupy the foreign concessions and keep order there; the Naval Landing Party entered at the Bund and the imperial Japanese army entered at other strategic points. As the JRA narrative of the events put it: “Shanghai, stronghold of the West for 100 years, was taken by the Japanese army, and a new dawn for East Asia was proclaimed” (Muramatsu 1991, 313–15; Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 676–79, 681–85, citation on p. 685).13

Once war commenced, the task of protecting Japanese nationals in Shanghai fell to the JRA. This difficult work increasingly required centralizing the JRA’s many subordinate and tangentially connected bodies in Shanghai. It also necessitated a growing budget, from between US $700,000 and $800,000 before the war to $6.2 million by 1942. This money was forthcoming principally in the form of loans from the big Japanese banks, not in grants from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and this change only furthered the image of the JRA as a kaishaha body, not representative of the entire community. As the war developed, however, distinctions of this sort between different Japanese classes melted away before the surrounding Chinese enemy.

Just as the warring Chinese factions in the civil war preceding the Japanese invasion came to terms in the face of the foreign threat, so too did the socially divergent strata of Japanese within Shanghai come together before the Chinese assault on them. The anti-Japanese movement did not make subtle 13 Muramatsu 1991, 316–43, has a fascinating discussion with illustrations of the elaborate Japanese plans to remake the concession areas.

352

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

distinctions between Japanese classes, and thus with the war the formerly differentiated community of Japanese quickly became unified. The kaishaha had to be prodded into action by the dochakuha, but when the former came around it lost no time in assuming the mantle and forging a coherent set of unified institutions in Shanghai.

In his annual report to the thirty-first general meeting of the Shanghai Residents’ Council on March 24, 1938, JRA Chairman Amano Masusaburō

seemed less concerned with the physical war than with what he termed the

“economic war.” He expressed concern for protecting resident Japanese, but the bulk of his speech involved a wide range of programs aimed at “revival.”

These included building plans for the city now under Japanese occupation, paying off the remainder of the interest-free loan to the consortium of banks, cleaning up scrap iron in the area for the military, and the like. One particularly pressing issue was the maintenance of local health standards. Cholera had claimed numerous victims in the concessions and Chinese areas of the city, and Japanese groups (military and civilian alike) were working with the JRA to prevent its spread; as of March 1938, there had not been a single Japanese case of cholera. Other illnesses, such as typhus and smallpox, were also rampant, and a Temporary Disease Prevention Committee (Rinji bōeki iinkai) was established with JRA involvement. Education also remained important to the JRA’s mandate, as the number of schoolchildren was actually starting to rise due to immigration both from other sites of Japanese residence on the mainland and from the homeland as well. Amano also announced the establishment of a

“Revival Fund” to offset the costs incurred during the troubles of 1937–38, once they had subsided (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 688–707).

When Amano returned the next year (March 23, 1939) to report to the Residents’ Council, there was a palpable, even eerie sense of peace prevail-ing within the operations of the JRA. He announced the creation in January of a Society Section (Shakaika) within the JRA, which became involved in numerous community affairs: advice, military send-offs and welcomings, military mails delivered care of the JRA, employment and housing assistance for residents and new arrivals, manning military lounges at which the men could always find a hot cup of tea, a bath, or a haircut, and welfare relief for a variety of hardships related to the war. With the continued influx of Japanese into Shanghai, there was insufficient commercial and residential space, and the schools and clinic needed to be expanded. Two new schools were opened that year, and for the first time the same compulsory education required of boys was extended to girls. There were now more Japanese schoolchildren, over 4900, than ever before, and aside from classroom space the one real problem

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 353

in the realm of education was enticing teachers to come to Shanghai (Shanhai Koryū mindan 1942, 709–28).

Fukuda Chiyosaku succeeded Amano as head of the JRA in December 1939, and again in the annual report to the Residents’ Council (March 25, 1940), the war intruded in only a tangential way. The student population increased at an even higher rate in 1939 than it had before, compelling the JRA to rent additional space. In addition, they expected three new schools to open later that year. As late as 1940 the JRA was still getting some financial support from the Shanghai Municipal Council as well as a larger sum from the home government for local education. In his list of tasks for the JRA in 1940—new school construction, revision of the rules for local tax assessment, the bond for the second JRA loan, new premises for the offices of the JRA, launching an office of industrial encouragement, and expansion of the cemetery and crematorium—

Fukuda made no mention of the war (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 731–37).14

Exactly one year later, Fukuda announced to the general meeting of the Shanghai Residents’ Council that they now represented 80,000 Japanese in Shanghai, the population having more than tripled over the previous four years. He noted the February 1–3, 1940, meeting in Qingdao of the Congress of Japanese Residents of China (Zai-Shi kyoryū mindan rengō kaigi), the second of its kind, to which three Shanghai Japanese had been sent; the third meeting was held May 11–13, 1940, in Tianjin, attended by 55 representatives from eight JRAs and 23 Residents’ Councils; the fourth was scheduled for Shanghai but had to be moved to Tokyo “because of circumstances.” This Congress, it was claimed, represented 500,000 Japanese residing in China. Fukuda reiterated that support and management of schools remained the JRA’s most important work, though he invoked the Rescript on Education, “Kokutai no hongi” (Basic Principles of the National Polity), and the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, all for the first time. Perhaps this was indicative of a more nativist and isolated Japanese position. As of late 1940 there were 9894 pupils, fully twice as many as only two years earlier, and three new schools had opened to meet this need; yet another elementary school was scheduled to open in May 1941.

Health maintenance and disease prevention had become even more important JRA functions that year, probably because of the rising Japanese presence and increased student population. The JRA now boasted a full-fledged Hygiene Section (Hokenka). More interesting was the dissemination of health-related 14 Hashimoto 1940, 99, 100–01, describes the process by which the Street Federation sought and received funding for schools from the Shanghai Municipal Council in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

354

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

knowledge. Earlier that March the JRA had sponsored a venereal disease prevention week with an evening of films and lectures; these were supplemented by radio broadcasts and the dissemination of pamphlets. Health inspections of restaurants, “rooms for rent” ( kashiseki, probably a euphemism for brothels), dance halls, and other public spaces were launched. And, a variey of vaccines and innoculations were provided to Japanese, Chinese, and other foreigners free of charge—altogether 190,000 people took advantage of these offers.

Also, the JRA clinic had added several new departments—dermatology, urol-ogy, and ear-nose-throat—to its existing array: internal medicine, surgery, and pediatrics. An obstetrics and gynecology department was due to be added in May 1941. For the first time since these speeches were published, the head of the JRA (dominated by the kaishaha) mentioned in a praiseworthy vein the work of the vigilance committees and the Street Federation (both decidedly dochakuha bodies) with which the JRA was involved. His citation of the latter groups’ work marks a striking example of the greater cohesion being forged within the Japanese community through a process of elite cooptation of non-elite institutions. In his summation of JRA work that year, Fukuda again made no mention of the war (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 738–52).

After Japanese aircraft bombed Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, the entire universe of Japanese life in Shanghai—and everywhere else—changed, and when Fukuda appeared several months later (March 25, 1942) before the general meeting of the Residents’ Council, his report reflected that change. All the squabbling between the Shanghai Municipal Council and the JRA, the culmination of years of efforts on the part of the Japanese to gain a greater say within the foreign communities of Shanghai, came to an abrupt halt when the Japanese army marched in and occupied the concessions. Several months earlier Imperial Prince Kan’in paid a visit to Shanghai and met with the JRA chairman. The Japanese population in Shanghai continued to soar, approaching 100,000 and necessitating the building of three new schools. However, the big story in JRA documents for early 1942 was the war that had now extended into the Pacific theater and how Shanghai was going to play its part (Shanhai kyoryū mindan 1942, 753–59).15

As of 1941–42, with the kaishaha-dochakuha rift about to be mended and the Japanese in control of the concessions, the JRA structure reached its most sophisticated, comprised of four bureaus ( bu) and ten sections (ka). The Documents Section (Bunshoka) served directly under the chairman of the JRA with secretarial, personnel, and documents offices. The General Affairs Section (Shomuka) had duties including maintenance of the Japanese temples and 15 Zou Yiren 1980, 146–47, gives a 1942 Japanese population in Shanghai of 94,768, a figure that includes Koreans.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 355

shrines, ceremonies, elections to the Residents Council, and liaison with other groups.16 The Financial Affairs Bureau (Zaimubu) was responsible for the JRA’s budget; below it were three sections. The Tax Section (Shuzeika) oversaw four offices for property taxes, business taxes, consumption taxes, and assessments.

The first year that the JRA assessed taxes, 1908, a total revenue of ¥19,435.90

came pouring into its coffers; by 1941 it was collecting over ¥5.25 million. The Accounting Section (Kaikeika) dealt with the JRA’s bank accounts, cash dis-bursements, and fixed-term accounts. It also oversaw four offices. The Supplies Section (Chōdoka) saw to the delivery of equipment, goods, and foodstuffs, the storage of goods, the use and maintenance of utilities, and fire insurance.

The Education Bureau (Kyōikubu) housed an immensely complicated structure. As of April 1942 it oversaw the operation of seventeen schools (including a nursery school) and the largest budget by far of any division within the JRA.

The Society Section had seven clearly identifiable tasks before it: protection and relief for the poor and homeless; comfort and advice for wounded Japanese troops soon to be repatriated; an employment agency to help find work for the thousands of new immigrants from Japan or elsewhere on the mainland; creation and operation of an office for postal life insurance; a housing office to help those arriving from Japan and for those whose homes or offices or factories had been damaged in the fighting; management of two Shanghai parks; and the identification of Koreans in Shanghai, who had had their own residents’ association since 1933, so as to better integrate them into the work of the JRA. The Hygiene Section oversaw four offices, administered vaccines for a variety of diseases, and dealt with the remains of deceased Japanese. The Building Repairs Section (Eizenka) was only founded in May 1942 to deal with the large influx of new students, which required the building of new schools and continued maintenance of the many others. The JRA Clinic continued to grow and add new wings, new departments, and new doctors. The Revival Fund Bureau (Fukken shikinbu) was concerned with collecting money to help local Japanese businessmen rebuild their shops, store, offices, and factories after years of sustaining anti-Japanese attacks (Shanhai kyoryō mindan 1942, 897–98, 900–06, 908–11, 931–34, 936–39, 981, 983, 984–90, 992, 995, 997–1003, 1008, 1011, 1015, 1022, 1024–31, 1035–36).

Finally, the Bureau of Civil Affairs (Shiminbu) represented the culmination of the new JRA structure. On June 1, 1941, the Japanese Street Federation of Shanghai was ordered dissolved and formally integrated into the JRA. Ten days 16 The Street Federation seems to have played a particularly important role in the maintenance of the Shanghai Shinto Shrine; its area was proudly expanded in 1940 to commemorate the year 2600, allegedly dating back to the year in which the legendary Emperor Jinmu ascended the throne. See Hashimoto 1940, 89, 150.

356

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

later all of the neighborhood associations and vigilance committees were similarly placed under the administrative structure of the JRA, each with offices within the Bureau of Civil Affairs. These offices embraced the work of thousands of Japanese at the street level. This was all part of a larger plan to forge the greatest possible cohesion within a community both growing and under siege. In response to the crisis of world war, on January 1, 1942, Japanese Consul-General Horiuchi Tateki formally launched the work of the Total Strength Patriotic Association of Shanghai (Shanhai sōryoku hōkoku kai) with board members from a host of local institutions and with the JRA—together with the Japanese Chamber of Commerce, youth groups, the Asian Development Board (Kō-A in), the consulate, and other bodies—forming its core (Shanhai kyoryū

mindan 1942, 1047–48, 1280–84, 1285).

Interestingly, in the process of attempting to forge this unity through a stark program of centralization, the JRA, the consulate, and other elite bodies managed to completely co-opt the groups formerly run by dochakuha leaders in a much more independent manner. In a sense, the stark necessities of the war made it impossible for the rivalries internal to the Japanese community to continue. The elite kaishaha backed by such bodies as the Gaimushō simply took over direction of the self-defense structure created and operated up to that time for several decades by dochakuha people. In a more fundamental sense, though, this development represented the final playing out of the class struggle within the Japanese community of Shanghai, and, as is usually the case, the elite won. Only the elite were in a position to call in the needed protection, should Japan’s enemies launch a full-scale assault on Shanghai. Their victory would be short-lived, however.

**Other **

**JRAs in China: The Distinctiveness of the Japanese **

Experience in Shanghai

Japan had concession areas in a number of other Chinese cities, and JRAs were founded in many. What, if anything, made the Shanghai JRA’s experience unique? How did the Japanese experience in Shanghai, where they did not establish their own concession, differ from cities in which they did? Though little research has been done on the resident Japanese population in these other sites, some suggestive comparisons can be offered. The Sino-Japanese Protocol of October 1896 permitted the Japanese to set up concessions in Shanghai, Tianjin, Xiamen, and Hankou; the “Residents’ Association Law”

of March 1905 led to the establishment in 1907 of JRAs in Shanghai, Hankou, Tianjin, Niuzhuang, Andong, and elsewhere.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 357

One interesting issue is the level of integration with the local Chinese community. A Japanese consulate first appeared in Tianjin in 1875, when the resident population was miniscule. When space was allocated for the Japanese concession there in August 1898, there were still only 52 Japanese in the city; by the time that space was expanded less than five years later in April 1903, there were 1311. The area of the concessions had no previous history of residence; it was effectively built from the ground up, and Chinese were never forced to leave that area. Many Chinese actually served on the Japanese Residents’ Council of Tianjin. In 1914—when there were 1687 Japanese in the city—there were more Chinese on the Residents’ Council than Japanese. Little is known about these Chinese at this point, save that they were primarily wealthy businessmen and their families. The system of selection to the Council was changed in late 1917, when it was deemed that a majority of the 32 Council members had to be Japanese and the operative language of meetings was made Japanese, but Chinese—wealthy Chinese, to be sure—continued to have some say in local affairs. Hankou’s system closely resembled that of Tianjin, though its Residents’ Council had only twenty members (Katsuragawa 1994, 353, 358–59; Ueda 1941, 316–17, 320, 323, 726; Kimura 1993, 30–31, 36, 39; Soejima 1984, 19; see also Peattie 1989, 176–81, for general information on Japanese settlement in Hankou and Tianjin).

Nothing remotely comparable can be cited from the experience of the Shanghai JRA—Chinese were never involved, and Chinese feelings were near the bottom of the list of its concerns. Several reasons for this difference may be suggested. As latecomers to the Sino-foreign world of Shanghai, the Japanese were always playing a game of catch-up, adapting their life in the city both to a world created by other foreigners vis-à-vis the Chinese and to life back home—and the other foreigners were similarly busy replicating in Shanghai the life of their respective metropoles. With the rare exception of a Silas Hardoon or an Uchiyama Kanzō, few residents of the Shanghai concessions had anything to do with Chinese outside of business arrangements and looked down on them all. Also, by the time the Japanese became seriously involved in Shanghai life, there was no surfeit of land to share with the surrounding and growing Chinese population. The Japanese concession in Tianjin was built on virgin terrain, a situation impossible to replicate in Shanghai.

Another issue dividing the urban experiences in Shanghai and Tianjin was the fluidity and size of the local Japanese population. The Japanese population of Tianjin grew steadily to roughly 4000 by the end of World War One and to 6289 by 1932. In 1936, on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, it ballooned to 11,590. Thus, aside from the sharp increases in the first years of the century and in 1935, Tianjin’s Japanese community exhibited a more stable

358

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

demographic growth than Shanghai; it was apparently a less fluid population. Hankou was home to only 37 Japanese in 1898 when Shanghai Consul-General Odagiri Masunosuke and Secretary Funatsu Tatsuichirō were sent to the city to negotiate the opening of a concession with Hu-Guang Governor-General Zhang Zhidong. Although that number had increased to 1229 in 1910, it dropped sharply the next year to nearly half that number as a result of the 1911 Revolution; by 1912 it had recuperated to 1337. Prior to the outbreak of the war, the Japanese population continued to rise slowly, though it never exceeded 3000 and in fact fell off in the late 1920s and early 1930s. By 1939 it soared to nearly 6000 (Ueda 1941, 343, 729; Katsuragawa 1994, 359–61; Soejima 1984, 25).17 Thus, Hankou too was a city with a fairly stable resident Japanese presence before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Shanghai’s Japanese population, by contrast, did not experience such stability. It shot up precipitously from the late 1930s, much like the Japanese populations of Harbin, Shenyang, and Changchun, which increased dramatically over the course of the 1930s.

The latter cities—all in Manchuria—undoubtedly grew as a result of an influx of carpetbaggers, following the Japanese military seizure of the Northeast. The case of Shanghai remains unstudied in necessary detail, but it would appear that there was both an inflow of new residents from the homeland as well as immigrants fleeing smaller Japanese communities elsewhere on the mainland for the relative security of Shanghai.

Yet another issue would be the centrality of business concerns to the local Japanese in different urban Chinese settings. As in Shanghai, the foundation of the Japanese community in Tianjin, Qingdao, and Hankou was business. After the suppression of the Boxers, large numbers of Japanese small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs flocked to Tianjin in particular. Inasmuch as the concession was to be built from scratch, Japanese in the construction trades also flooded into the city to avail themselves of the new opportunities. Several years later during the Russo-Japanese War, Tianjin businessmen produced goods for both armies, and this in turn spurred a boom in the local economy. Between 1905 and the 1911 Revolution, the Tianjin-Japanese trade increased 20 percent 17 By way of comparison, the cities of largest Japanese concentration in Manchuria, such as Changchun, Fengtian (present-day Shenyang), and Harbin, also experienced sharp increases in the mid-1930s. Changchun’s resident Japanese population rose from 17,382 in 1930 to 83,911 in 1937; Fengtian’s numbers rose from 46,000 in 1930 to 142,020 seven years later; and Harbin’s Japanese population rose from 4306 to 43,010 over the same period, nearly a tenfold increase. See Soejima 1984, 10, 14, 15. Discovering what percentage of these were carpetbaggers remains a scholarly desideratum.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 359

to 30 percent annually, with half of all Japanese-made imports still in Chinese hands (Katsuragawa 1994, 361–63).

One stark difference between the Japanese communities in Shanghai and Tianjin is illustrated by the following case. In 1908 a group of Reservists in Tianjin sought permission from the JRA to organize a band of Japanese Volunteers. The JRA denied their request for four reasons: it was “improper”

to discuss questions of self-defense vis-à-vis the Chinese in the Residents’

Council while Chinese were part of that group; such “a military action” in the face of a nonpressing situation was “disagreeable with respect to China’s feelings”; reliance on the Japanese troops stationed in Tianjin was sufficient for the defense of the Japanese residents; and there was no JRA budget for it. The first two reasons are especially interesting, since there seems to have been something of a Sino-Japanese partnership based on trust—at least as perceived by the Japanese at the time—which a band of Volunteers would have harmed, a situation virtually unthinkable in Shanghai.

A Volunteers group was formed briefly in 1913, in the disorder immediately following the Republican Revolution of late 1911, and again in 1925, when the civil war and warlord clashes inundated the Tianjin area. In the latter instance, the JRA felt that the Tianjin army was inadequate to the task of keeping local order and protecting local Japanese, now a much larger group. The Volunteers were charged with assisting the Tianjin army and serving as interpreters, but never with assuming a position as the main Japanese military force in the city.

They were to protect the local Japanese against the violence and depreda-tions of warlord armies and also against the rising anti-Japanese movement.

Vigilance committees had been formed “for self-defense and self-protection”

in Shanghai in the wake of the anti-Japanese response to the Twenty-one Demands in 1915; Tianjin’s Volunteers served a similar function. A May 1927

meeting of the Tianjin Residents’ Council formally established the Volunteers because, as they put it, “the situation in Tianjin has become extremely critical”

(Katsuragawa 1994, 385–6).

Thus, although the JRA experience in Tianjin and Shanghai got off to sharply different starts, they ultimately evolved in similar directions.18 There was, 18 One fascinating comparison is with the various Japanese residents’ associations of Manchuria that were ordered disbanded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the mid-1930s, because the government did not want the other nationalities in the new nation of Manzhouguo (Manchukuo) to feel unfairly discriminated against. In Manzhouguo all ethnic groups were supposed to live in gozoku kyōwa (harmony of the five ethnic groups).

The plan was to incorporate all the residents’ associations into the Kyōwakai or Concordia Society. In the case of Harbin, the local Japanese military actually feared that the

360

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

though, no event in Tianjin comparable to the Shanghai Incident, in which local groups were complicit in widespread massacres. Again, perhaps because Japan was a latecomer to the imperialist life in Shanghai and was always struggling with the other powers for respectability, tensions with the Chinese there were higher than elsewhere in China. By the 1920s, Shanghai had become the effective capital of China. It was not only the jewel in the imperialist crown, but it was also the place where anti-imperialist Chinese frequently centered their activities. It was thus the exception to all the rules of Sino-foreign interactions.

By the same token, neither Tianjin nor any other Chinese city could ever rival Shanghai as a commercial and business center; even by the late 1930s, the Japanese population of Tianjin was still only a fraction of that in Shanghai.

Interestingly, while Shanghai had no formal Japanese concession, that by no means meant that the Japanese community was better integrated into local life; if anything, it was more isolated in Shanghai than elsewhere. Why the Japanese never established a concession remains a mystery, unless it can be attributed simply to fears of alienating the other foreign establishments in Shanghai. However, its absence had the interesting effect not of driving the Japanese into the arms, figuratively speaking, of the Chinese, but of the people the Japanese truly sought to emulate: the other foreign powers.

Nonetheless, as Chinese nationalism appeared on the horizon and found its primary focus in all manner of Japanese activity on the mainland, resident Japanese felt they had no choice but to seek self-defense through vigilante groups. What Tianjin Japanese had earlier taken to be a relationship with the Chinese of trust and equity was, of course, nothing of the kind; it was a trade system based on unequal treaties, extraterritoriality, and institutional-ized discrimination against the Chinese. As Chinese nationalism and the anti-Japanese movement grew, Japan’s response was to see China as the enemy.

The use of boycotts—the breaking of economic ties or refusal to acknowledge them—was a great shock to Japanese in Tianjin. In the end the Tianjin concession armed itself and sought financial and military help from Tokyo—just like their fellow nationals in Shanghai.

One important factor that unified the various Japanese communities in China and set them off, especially in Shanghai, from the other major foreign settlers was the simple fact that the Japanese comprised the only significant Asian continued existence of the JRA would lead to “ethnic animosities” ( minzokuteki tairitsu) . This met with resistance on the part of local Japanese, but the Ministry prevailed.

See Gaimushō Archives, file K3.2.2.1–32, reports of June 16, 1935; December 14, 1937; October 25, 1937; January 21, 1938; May 24, 1938; June 18, 1938; and August 17, 1938.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 361

community. They** **were thus at once neither Chinese nor European in lifestyle or habit. The Westerners only came to respect the Japanese when political circumstances made it impossible to do otherwise, which served to make life in Shanghai, and presumably elsewhere in China proper, seem even more alien.

Japanese did, as we have seen, attempt to recreate home abroad, but that ultimately only intensified the sense of separation. None of the Japanese, not even the wealthiest in the kaishaha, lived in the grand style of the richer Europeans, only two Japanese reportedly ever joined the International Club of Shanghai, and few Japanese—mostly left-wing intellectuals and writers—seem to have participated in the active cafe society of the International Settlement.

“Shanghai-Japan” thus did not mean a close bond between the Japanese people and the Chinese residents of its largest city. In fact, it meant virtually the opposite: a tie linking Japan with the center of East Asian imperialism and the other powers. It was a sign of Japanese separateness from the Chinese. The Japanese decision not to construct their own concession after 1895 also speaks to the fact that the Japanese had made a firm choice to affiliate with the extant foreign communities and their concessions in the city. “Shanghai-Japan” was not a socially unified force from the start, but developed a fractured social structure of two factions at odds with one another. However, as relations with the Chinese deteriorated, the Japanese groups quickly healed their differences in an effort to forge the greatest possible unity in the face of Chinese anti-Japanese actions. Thus, as the Japanese community of Shanghai outstripped all the other foreign populations combined several times over, its isolation only continued to grow. And, as the Japanese community of Shanghai outnumbered all such communities in China proper, it never attained anything remotely similar to the amicable ties that characterized the Japanese experience in Tianjin and elsewhere other than Shanghai.

One interesting difference between Japanese on mainland Asia and those at home was that, during the war years, the Japanese in Shanghai, Tianjin, and elsewhere in China relied on the Japanese military to protect them and, until the last week of the war, they were protected. Thus, their relationship with the Japanese military was based on real-life experiences. They had called for their government to send troops to protect them, and they had received military protection. By contrast, the same cannot be said of Japanese on the home islands, who had the same expectations for their defense and got fire-bombing and nuclear weapons in return.

362

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

Glossary

Amano Masusaburō 甘濃益三郎

ben’itai

便衣隊

部

Bunshoka

文書課

Chōdoka

調度課

chōnaikai

町內會

Chūbu

中部

Chūō kōron

中央公論

dochakuha

土着派

Eizenka

營繕課

Fukken shikinbu

復興資金部

Funatsu Tatsuichirō 船津辰一郎

Gaimushō

外務省

Giyūtai

義勇隊

gozoku kyōwa

五族協和

gudan zoku

グダン族

Hayashi Yūkichi

林雄吉

Higashi Honganji

東本願寺

Hirohito

裕仁

Hokenka

保健課

Horiuchi Tateki

堀內干城

Ikeda Shigeo

池田重雄

Itō Yonejirō

伊東米治郎

Jiang Jieshi

蔣介石

jikeidan

自警團

Jikyoku iinkai

時局委員會

課

Kaidō

開導

Kaikeika

會計課

kaishaha

會社派

kashiseki

貸席

Kawabata Teiji

河端貞次

kenpeitai

憲兵隊

Kō-A in

興亞院

Kojō seinenkai

滬上青年會

Kokutai no hongi

國體の本義

Kyōikubu

教育部

Kyoryū mindan hō

居留民團法

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 363

Kyoryū minkai

居留民會

kyoryūmin taikai

居留民大會

Kyōwakai

協和會

minzokuteki tairitsu

民族的對立

Murai

村井

Muramatsu Shōfū

村松梢風

Nagasaki ken, Shanhai shi

長崎縣上海市

Nagataki

永瀧

Nihon jinjō kōtō shōgakkō

日本尋常高等小學校

Nihon jitsugyō gakkō

日本實業學校

Nihon jitsugyō kurabu

日本實業倶樂部

Nihon kōtō jogakkō

日本高等女學校

Nihonjin kurabu

日本人倶樂部

Nihonjin kyōkai

日本人協會

Nihon shōgyō gakkō

日本商業學校

Odagiri Masunosuke

小田切萬壽之助

Okamoto

岡本

Rinji bōeki iinkai

臨時防疫委員會

Seibu

西部

Sekishokka

赤色化

Shakaika

社會課

Shanhai kyoryū mindan

上海居留民團

Shanhai Nihonjin kakuro rengōkai 上海日本人各路聯合會

Shanhai Nihonjin chōnai rengōkai 上海日本人町內聯合會

Shanhai Nihon shōkō rengōkai

上海日本商工聯合會

Shanhai sōryoku hōkoku kai

上海總力報國會

Shiminbu

市民部

shitamachi zoku

下町族

Shomuka

庶務課

Shuzeika

主稅課

Sun Zhongshan

孫中山

Teikoku zaigō gunjinkai

帝國在鄉軍人會

Tōbu Nihon jinjō shōgakkō

東部日本尋常小學校

Usui Katsumi

臼井勝美

Yada Shichitarō

矢田七太郎

Yasui Gengo

安井源吾

Yu Hongjun

俞鴻鈞

Zaimubu

財務部

Zai-Shi kyoryū mindan rengō kaigi 在支居留民團聯合會議

Zhang Zhidong

張之洞

364

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

List of References

Bickers, Robert, and Christian Henriot, eds. 2000. New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cao Linhua 曹霖华 and Ma Changlin 马长林. 1990. “Shanghai Riben juliu mintuan gaishu” 上海日本居留民团概述 (Overview of the Japanese Residents’ Association of Shanghai). Dang’an yu lishi 档案与历史 3: 51–55.

Dokyumento Shōwa 2: Shanhai kyōdō sokai ドキュメント昭和 2: 上海共同租界

(Documentary of the Shōwa period, part 2, the International Settlement of Shanghai). 1980. Tokyo: NHK.

Duus, Peter. 1989. “Zaikabō: Japanese Cotton Mills in China, 1895–1937.” In The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, edited by Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark Peattie. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fogel, Joshua A. 1994. “The Voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai: Early Sino-Japanese Contacts in the Modern Era.” In The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

———. 1996. The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945.

Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 2000. “The Japanese and the Jews: A Comparative Analysis of Their Communities in Harbin, 1898–1930.” In New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953, edited by R. Bickers and C. Henriot. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gaimushō Archives, file K3.2.2.1–32.

Haruna Akira 春名徹. 1987. “1862 nen bakufu Senzaimaru no Shanhai haken” 1862 年

幕府千歳丸の上海派遣 (The shogunate’s sending of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai in 1862). In Nihon zenkindai no kokka to taigai kankei 日本前近代の国家と対外

関係 (The premodern state and foreign relations in Japan), edited by Tanaka Takeo 田中健夫. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan.

Hashimoto Gorōji 橋本五郎次, ed. 1940. Shanhai Nihonjin kakuro rengōkai no enkaku to jiseki 上海日本人各路聯合會の沿革と史蹟 (History and landmarks of the Japanese Street Federation of Shanghai). Shanghai: Shanhai Nihonjin kakuro rengōkai.

Hayashi Genzaburō 林源三郎. 1929. “Shanhai kyoryū mindan” 上海居留民圑 (The Japanese Residents’ Association of Shanghai). Shina kenkyū 支那研究 19.

Henriot, Christian. 1993. Shanghai 1927–1937: Municipal Power, Locality, and Modernization. Transl. Noël Castelino. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 2000. “‘Little Japan’ in Shanghai: An Insulated Community, 1875–1945.” In New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953, edited by R. Bickers and C. Henriot. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 365

Horimoto Naohiko 堀本尙彥. 1989. “Shanhai no kō-Nichi undō to Nihonjin kyoryūmin, kyū ichi hachi jihen zengo o chūshin ni” 上海の抗日運動と日本人居留民、九

一八事変前後を中心に (The anti-Japanese movement in Shanghai and the resident Japanese, around the time of the [Manchurian] Incident of September 18).

Shindai shigaku 信代史学 14: 22–52.

Kaiin meibo 會員名簿 (Registry of the names of members of the association [Japan Club]). 1944. Shanghai: Shannai Nihon kurabu.

Katō Yūzō 加藤祐三. 1974. “Shanhai ryakushi” 上海略史 (A brief history of Shanghai).

In Matsumoto Shigeharu 松本重治. Shanhai jidai, jaanarisuto no kaisō 上海時

代、ジャーナリストの回想 (Shanghai years, memoirs of a journalist). Vol. 1: 310–25. Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha.

Katsuragawa Mitsumasa 桂川光正. 1994. “Sokai zaijū Nihonjin no Chūgoku ninshiki, Tenshin o ichirei to shite” 租界在住日本人の中国認識、天津を一例として

(The perception of China by Japanese residents in the concessions, the case of Tianjin). In Kindai Nihon no Ajia ninshiki 近代日本のアジア認識 (Modern Japanese perceptions of Asia), edited by Furuya Tetsuo 古谷哲夫. Kyoto: Kyōto daigaku jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo.

Kim Il-myŏn 金ー勉. 1981. Nihon josei aishi 日本女性哀史 (The sad history of Japanese women). Tokyo: San’ichi shobō.

Kimura Kenji 木村健二. 1993. “Zaigai kyoryūmin no shakai katsudō” 在外居留民の

社会活動 (The social activities of Japanese residents abroad). In Iwanami kōza: Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi, vol. 5: Bōchō suru teikoku no jinryū 岩波講座: 近代日

本と植民地、膨張する帝国の人流 (Iwanami series: Modern Japanese colo-

nies, Vol. 5: The flow of people under an expanding empire). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.

Kōno Yasunori 幸野保典 and Kimura Kenji 木村健二. 1987. “1920 nendai Tenshin Nihonjin shōgyō kaigisho no bunseki” 1920 年代天津日本人商業会議所の分析

(An analysis of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce in Tianjin in the 1920s). Chiba shigaku 千葉史学 11: 39–57.

Kreissler, Françoise. 2000. “In Search of Identity: The German Community of Shanghai.”

In New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953, edited by R. Bickers and C. Henriot. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Kuroha Kiyotaka 黒羽清隆. 1979. “‘Ben’itai’ kō, Nihongawa shiryō ni yoru Shanhai jihen no ichimen” 便衣隊考、日本側史料による上海事変の一面 (A study of

“Plainclothes Soldiers”: One aspect of the Shanghai Incident based on Japanese sources). In Jūgonen sensō shi josetsu 十五年戦争史序説 (Introduction to the history of the Fifteen-Year War). Tokyo: Sanshōdō.

Mikiso Hane. 1982. Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan.

New York: Pantheon Books.

366

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

Morisaki Kazue 森崎和江. 1976. Karayukisan からゆきさん (Karayukisan). Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha.

Muramatsu Shin 村松伸. 1991. Shanhai toshi to kenchiku, 1842–1949 上海都市と

建築、一八四二 –一九四九 (Shanghai, city and architecture, 1842–1949).

Tokyo: PARCO.

Muramatsu Shōfū 村松消風. 1932. “Shanhai jihen o mite kuru” 上海事変を觀てくる

(Witness to the Shanghai Incident). Chūō kōron 中央公論 (April).

Nakauchi Jirō 中内二郎. 1941. Kyoryū mindan no kenkyū 居留民團の研究 (A study of the Japanese Residents’ Association). Tokyo: Santsū shobō.

Nihon Shanhai shi kenkyūkai 日本上海史研究会 (Japan Association for the Study of Shanghai History), ed. 1997. Shanhai jinbutsu shi 上海人物誌 (Chronicle of Shanghai personages). Tokyo: Tōhō shoten.

Okita Hajime 沖田一. 1943. Nihon to Shanhai 日本と上海 (Japan and Shanghai).

Shanghai: Tairiku shinpōsha.

Otani Ichirō 小谷一郎. 1989. “Muramatsu Shōfū to Chūgoku: Den Kan to Muramatsu, Muramatsu no Chūgoku ni taisuru shisei nado o chūshin ni” 村松消風と中国：

田漢と村松、村松の中国に対する姿勢などを中心に (Muramatsu Shōfū

and China: On Tian Han and Muramatsu, Muramatsu’s pose toward China).

Hitotsubashi ronsō 一橋論叢 101.3 (March), 93–108.

Peattie, Mark. 1989. “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China, 1895–1937.” In The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, edited by Peter Duus, Ramon H.

Myers, and Mark Peattie. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Qiao Shuming 谯枢铭. 1989. “Jinru Shanghai zujie de Ribenren” 进入上海租界的

日本人 (Japanese who entered the Shanghai concessions). Shanghai yanjiu luncong 上海研究论丛 3: 43–52.

———. 1990. “Gudai Shanghai yu Riben jiaowang” 古代上海与日本交往

(Interactions between Shanghai and Japan in the pre-modern era). Shilin 史林 2.18: 35–39, 65.

Satō Saburō 佐藤三郎. 1984. “Bunkyū ninen ni okeru bakufu bōekisen Senzaimaru no Shanhai haken ni tsuite” 文久二年における幕府貿易船千歳丸の上海派遣

について (On the sending to Shanghai of the shogunal trading vessel Senzaimaru).

In Kindai Nit-Chū kōshō shi no kenkyū 近代日中交渉史の研究 (Studies on modern Sino-Japanese interactions). Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan.

Shanhai kyoryū mindan 上海居留民團, ed. 1942. Shanhai kyoryū mindan sanjūgo shūnen kinenshi 上海居留民團三十五年週年記念誌 (Commemorative chronicle on the 35th anniversary of the Japanese Residents’ Association of Shanghai).

Shanghai: Shanghai JRA.

Shanhai kyoryū mindan ritsu gakkō ichiran 上海居留民團立學校一覽 (Listing of the schools operated by the Residents’ Association of Shanghai). 1933. Shanghai: JRA.

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai 367

Shanhai ni okeru kyōiku jōkyō 上海ニ於ケル教育狀況 (The state of education in Shanghai). 1941. N.p.: Kō-A in Kachū renrakubu.

Soejima Enshō 副島圓照. 1984. “Senzenki Chūgoku zairyū Nihonjin jinkō tōkei (kō)”

戦前期中国在留日本人人口統計(稿) (Statistics on the populations of

Japanese resident in China during the prewar period, draft). Wakayama daigaku kyōiku gakubu kiyō, jinbun kagaku 和歌山大学教育学部紀要、人文科学 33: 1–35.

Takatsuna Hirofumi 高綱博文. 1993. “Shanhai jihen to Nihon kyoryū mindan, Nihonjin kyoryūmin ni yoru Chūgokujin minshū gyakusatsu no haikei” 上海事変と日本居

留民団、日本人居留民による中国人民衆虐殺の背景 (The Shanghai Inci-

dent and the Japanese Residents’ Association: The background to massacres of Chinese by resident Japanese). In Nit-Chū sensō: Nihon, Chūgoku, Amerika 日中

戦争:日本、中国、アメリ力 (The Sino-Japanese War: Japan, China, the United States), edited by Chūō daigaku jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo 中央大学人文科学研究

所. Tokyo: Chūō University Press.

———. 1995. “Seiyōjin no Shanhai, Nihonjin no Shanhai” 西洋人の上海、日本人の

上海 (Westerners’ Shanghai, Japanese Shanghai). In Shanhai shi, kyodai toshi no keisei to hitobito no itonami 上海史、巨大都市の形成と人々の営み (The history of Shanghai: The formation of an immense city and its people’s occupations), edited by Takahashi Kōsuke and Furumaya Tadao. Tokyo: Tōhō shoten.

Ueda Toshio 植田捷雄. 1941. Shina ni okeru sokai no kenkyū 支那に於ける租界の研

究 (A study of the concessions in China). Tokyo: Gannandō shoten.

Wada Hirofumi 和田博文. 1999. “Muramatsu Shōfō, ‘tasha’ to deau tame no tabi” 村松

消風、「他者」と出会うための旅 (Muramatsu Shōfū, a trip to meet the

‘other’). In Gengo toshi: Shanhai 1840–1945 言語都市: 上海 1840–1945 (City of languages: Shanghai, 1840–1945), edited by Wada Hirofumi, Ōhashi Takehiko 大橋毅

彦, Shindō Masahiro 真銅正宏, Takematsu Yoshiaki 竹松良明, and Wada Keiko 和田桂子.Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten.

Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. 1995. Policing Shanghai, 1927–1927. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

Wang Xiaoqiu 王晓秋. 1989. “Mumo Ribenren zenyang kan Zhongguo: 1862 nian

‘Qiansuiwan’ Shanghai zhi xing yanjiu” 幕末日本人怎样看中国: 1862 年千岁丸

上海之行研究 (Japanese views of China in the bakumatsu period: A study of the voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai in 1862). Ribenxue 日本学 1: 140–56.

Wilkinson, Mark F. 2000. “The Shanghai American Community, 1937–1949.” In New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953, edited by R. Bickers and C. Henriot. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Wu Jianxi 吴健熙. 1994. “Riben juliu mintuan he Shanghai Riqiao zidi xuexiao” 日本

居留民团和上海日侨子弟学校 (The JRA and schools for Japanese children in Shanghai). Shilin 史林 4: 51–59.

368

the japanese residents’ association of shanghai

Xu Jie 许杰. 1996. “Hongkou Ribenren juzhuqu shulun” 虹口日本人居住区述论

(On the Japanese residential area of Hongkou). Shanghai yanjiu luncong 上海研究

论丛 10: 278–98.

Yano Tōru 矢野暢. 1975. Nanshin no keifu 南進の系譜 (Lineages of the southern advance). 洋貨幫 kyo: Chūō kōron sha.

Yonezawa Hideo 米澤秀夫. 1938. “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi” 上海邦人發展史

(A history of Japanese development in Shanghai). Tō-A keizai kenkyū 東亞經濟

研究, part 1, 22.3 (July), 394–408.

———. 1939. “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi” 上海邦人發展史 (A history of Japanese development in Shanghai). Tō-A keizai kenkyū 東亞經濟研究 part 2, 23.1 (January–

February), 112–26.

———. 1941. Shanhai shiwa 上海史話 (Stories from Shanghai history). Tokyo: Unebi shobō.

Zai chū-Shi hōjin jittai chōsa hōkokusho: Shanhai no bu 在中支邦人實態調査報告書: 上海之部 (Report on an investigation of Japanese living in central China: Shanghai section). 1944. Compiled by the Japanese Consulate-General of Shanghai. Shanghai: Shanhai keizai kenkyūkai.

Zhu Yong 朱榕. 1995. “Shanhai kyoryū Nihonjin shakai to Yokohama Kakyō shakai no hikaku kenkyū” 上海居留日本人社会と横浜華僑社会の比較研究 (A comparative study of the resident Japanese society in Shanghai and the overseas Chinese society in Yokohama). In Yokohama to Shanhai, kindai toshi keisei shi hikaku kenkyū 横浜と上海、近代都市形成史比較研究 (Yokohama and Shanghai: A comparative study of the history of the formation or modern cities). Yokohama: Yokohama kaikō shiryō fukyū kyōkai.

Zou Yiren 邹依任. 1980. Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian de yanjiu 旧上海人口变迁

的研究 (Study of the demographic changes in old Shanghai). Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe.

■ Source: “Masuda Wataru and the Study of Modern China,” in Japan and China: Mutual Representations in the Modern Era, by Masuda Wataru (Curzon Press/Taylor & Francis, 2000), vii–ix.

Introduction: Masuda Wataru and the Study of Modern China

Masuda Wataru, the author of the text that follows was born in a small fishing village in Shimane prefecture in 1903, the only son of a medical doctor.1

Excelling at school, he entered Tokyo Imperial University’s Department of Chinese Literature in 1926. It was not a particularly happy time to study there in the immediate aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake, and Masuda frequently made use of the Ueno Library at the time. The Faculty of Letters had been completely destroyed, and lectures were often held in makeshift bar-racks or in the operating rooms of the Medical School. He especially recalled enjoying the lectures of Shionoya On on the history of Chinese fiction and Taki Seiichi on East Asian art. He also studied with the great poet Satō Haruo and helped with his translations of Chinese fiction.

Upon graduation in 1929, he continued his translation work with Satō. Then, in March of 1931, he decided to go to Shanghai where good fortune enabled him to work and study under the great Chinese writer Lu Xun. Lu lectured Masuda on his own writings, allegedly every day, for three hours from March through December. Masuda later composed a biography of Lu Xun which was published serially in the journal Kaizō. He also came to know the Chinese writers Yu Dafu and Zheng Zhenduo at this time, and later Guo Moruo.

Returning to Japan in December of 1931, he communicated with Lu Xun until just before the latter’s death in 1936. Masuda spent a great deal of time in the 1930s translating Lu’s work, including an edition of his history of Chinese fiction under the title Shina shōsetsu shi (History of Chinese Fiction)2 and, 1 Helpful in the preparation of this brief introduction to the life and work of Masuda Wataru were the following two articles: Matsueda Shigeo, ‘Masuda Wataru san no omoide arekore’

(Various memories of Mr. Masuda Wataru), Bungaku 45 (May 1977), 548–52; and Katayama Tomoyuki, ‘Hensha atogaki’ (Editor’s postface), in Seigaku tōzen to Chūgoku jijō, ‘zassho’ sakki (The Eastern Movement of Western Learning and Conditions in China: Notes on ‘Various Books’) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979), pp. 351–61.

2 (Tokyo: Sairensha, 1935). Published after the war as Chūgoku shōsetsu shi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1962).

370

Introduction: Masuda Wataru and the Study of Modern China

with Satō Haruo, of Ro Jin senshū (Selected Works of Lu Xun).3 In October 1934, together with Takeuchi Yoshimi, Takeda Taijun, and Matsueda Shigeo, he helped organize the Chūgoku bungaku kenkyūkai (Research Group on Chinese Literature). For the next ten years, he wrote regularly for its organ, Chūgoku bungaku geppō (Chinese Literature Monthly).

In June of 1936 he traveled again to Shanghai to visit Lu Xun on his death-bed. It was this time that he also secured the rights to publish a translation of Mao Dun’s Zi ye (Midnight), though he never completed this translation.

After returning to Japan in July, he was asked later in the year by the Kaizōsha publishing house to oversee the planned publication of Dai Ro Jin zenshū (The Complete Works of Lu Xun). He agreed, but left Kaizōsha in March of 1939.

Although Masuda did not see military action on the mainland during the Sino-Japanese War, he was active nonetheless. In May 1939, he worked for the Kō-A in or Asian Development Board on a project, which took him to Shanghai and Nanjing, investigating contemporary Chinese culture. From April 1940 to March 1942, he taught Chinese literature at Hōsei University. In November 1942

he went to work for the Dai Tō-A shō (Greater East Asian Ministry) on a project similar to that at the Kō-A in earlier.

After the conclusion of the war, he lectured for a time at Tokyo University in September 1946, taught at Keiō University from April 1947 to March 1949, and worked on and off for the Foreign Ministry. For nearly four years from July 1949 through February 1953, he taught at Shimane University in his home prefecture. The next month he began his longest teaching position at Ōsaka Municipal University which he left fourteen years later in March 1967. Toward the end of this stint, in November 1966, he visited China with a Japanese academic delegation and witnessed the Cultural Revolution in full form.

He began his last teaching position at Kansai University in April 1967 and retired in March 1974. In January of the following year, the Shanghai wenwu chubanshe published Lu Xun zhi Zengtian She shuxin xuan (Selection of Letters from Lu Xun to Masuda Wataru). When his old friend and colleague, Takeuchi Yoshimi, died in early 1977, Masuda was asked to give the funeral eulogy. While delivering his speech, Masuda collapsed and died of a heart attack on the cemetery ground.

Although his greatest contribution to scholarship was in the field of modern Chinese fiction, especially through translation—Masuda also translated 3 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1935). A fuller edition was published after the war in thirteen volumes: (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1956, reprinted 1964).

Introduction: Masuda Wataru and the Study of Modern China 371

Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio)4—still, he will be best remembered for his relationship with and translations of Lu Xun. He later wrote a memoir of his ties to Lu, Ro Jin no inshō (Impressions of Lu Xun).5

…

The volume translated here— Seigaku tōzen to Chūgoku jijō, ‘zassho’ sakki (The Eastern Movement of Western Learning and Conditions in China: Notes on

‘Various Books’) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979)—marked a departure of sorts for Masuda. After many years of collecting books and manuscripts in both China and Japan, he prepared a series of 28 essays serialized in the journal Shohyō (issues 19–46 inclusive, May 1972–May 1977). It was the last work he would write, and he may have intended to write more. These represent the first 28 chapters of the volume translated here. The essay on Yamamoto Baigai appeared in Kansai daigaku nenshi kiyō (no. 2, December 1976); it was appended to the 28 essays when they were published in 1979.

The sheer love of books, bibliophilia in the best sense of the term, glistens through the pages of this book. Only someone with a lifetime’s experience collecting and reading such works would have been prepared to devoted the exhaustive energies needed to write such a work. Anyone who continues to doubt the interrelatedness of Chinese and Japanese culture at the textual level is advised to read this fascinating book.

…

In the process of translating this book, I had occasion to call on friends and colleagues to help in their respective areas of expertise, and I would like to thank them here. My UCSB colleagues, Haruko Iwasaki, Kate Saltzman-Li, and especially Luke Roberts, were exceptionally helpful. Luke pondered many a sōrōbun passage with me until its meaning became clear. My good friend Zhou 4 Initially published in Chūgoku koten bungaku zenshū (Complete Works of Classical Chinese Literature) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1959), volume 22; published separately by Heibonsha in 1963; and reprinted in Chūgoku koten bungaku taikei (Series on Classical Chinese Literature) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1979), volumes 40–41 .

5 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1948, reprinted 1956); Chinese translation, Lu Xun de yinxiang, by Zhong Jingwen (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1980). Other works by Masuda concerning Lu Xun include: Ro Jin no kotoba (Lu Xun’s Words) (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1955); and Ro Jin annai (A Guide to Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1956). He also wrote Chūgoku bungaku shi kenkyū, bungaku kakumei to zen’ya no hitobito (Studies in the History of Chinese Literature: The Literary Revolution and People on Its Eve) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1967).

372

Introduction: Masuda Wataru and the Study of Modern China

Qiqian, of the Institute of Japanese Studies, Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences and one of the Chinese translators of this book, pointed out a number of errors or misprints in the original text. Professor Ōba Osamu of Kansai University enabled me to use the Masuda Collection at his university and provided me with a copy of its invaluable catalogue. As the reader will see, I have significantly added to the footnotes publication information absent in the original work; the aim is to make the book more user-friendly in the West.

■ Source: “The Japanese and the Jews: A Comparative Analysis of Their Communities in Harbin, 1898–1930,” in New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953, ed. Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (Manchester University Press, 2000), 88–108.

The Japanese and the Jews: A Comparative Analysis of Their Communities in Harbin, 1898–1930

One effective way to reach an understanding of the experiences of a given foreign community or colonial (or semi-colonial) situation in a given city is to compare it with another foreign community or colonial situation in the same city. This enables us to contrast degrees of assimilation, integration, interaction with the surrounding indigenous community and other foreign communities, and the like. Indeed, this volume, as a whole, will move us a large step forward in that direction. This chapter examines the experiences of the Jewish and the Japanese communities of Harbin in the three decades before the Manchurian Incident.

Harbin enjoys a unique place in East Asian history. Unlike the great majority of other cities in contemporary China, Harbin does not have a history stretching back hundreds, even thousands, of years.1 It was constructed at the very end of the nineteenth century by Russian engineers and city planners, and it became something of a melting pot, a city of pioneers. It was a place where even the Chinese were newcomers. As a result of this newness, although there were not extraordinary levels of intermarriage and intercultural exchange, there was more in Harbin than in the other metropolises housing foreign communities in China.

For those leaving the Russian empire, Harbin offered Jews an opportunity unavailable elsewhere in the lands of the Tsars: a haven relatively free from the virulent strain of antisemitism so prominent in eastern Europe at the time.

The elite of the late imperial regime supported this tolerant attitude toward the Jews in the hope that they would spur economic development and help extend Russian authority into Manchuria.2 Thus Jews were used in Harbin 1 Chinese scholars have in the past few decades devised some highly dubious theories for the origins of Harbin which place it in the late eleventh century. This theory empowers the Chinese to claim a long history in Harbin prior to the first Russian settlement of the turn of the century. See Søren Clausen and Stig Thøgerson (trans. and eds). The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin (Armonk NY, M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 3–4, 12–16.

2 David Wolff, ‘To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914,’

unpublished MS, introduction.

374

The Japanese and the Jews

by the authorities as an economic vanguard in Asia, at the same time that many Jews utilised this opportunity to escape the clutches of Tsarism and antisemitism. For Japanese, Harbin offered a second chanc—and before 1931 it was not supported by Japanese military might. It was an opportunity to mix and do business in what was arguably the most international city in the world at the time—albeit a backwater from a world perspective—and it was a chance to escape back-breaking poverty for many at home.

Origins of Harbin and its Japanese and Jewish Communities The Japanese community in Harbin was the earliest settlement of Japanese in Manchuria. Earlier some Japanese had emigrated to Vladivostok in the Russian Maritime Province, which originally fell within Qing terrain and had been ceded to Russia in 1860 by the Manchu government. At the time Vladivostok was barely a sleepy fishing village; by 1877 there were approximately eighty Japanese living there, most working in the flesh trade servicing the large number of sailors whose ships called at port. Within a few years their numbers reached 140–50—all from Nagasaki—and they had branched out into restaurants and several laundries as well. By 1890 there were nearly 400 Japanese in the city with a gender ratio of three women to two men; frontier cities usually have far more men than women and a thriving brothel world, but Vladivostok’s experience was somewhat different. The Russians began construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891, and Vladivostok, being the eastern terminus, was overflowing with new businesses involved in the construction of the docks.

There were some 500–600 Japanese recruited to the city from northern Kyûshû to work as labourers. By century’s end, the number of Japanese topped 1,000, and communal institutions were beginning to emerge. However, the bulk of the population remained involved in prostitution.3

In the fall of 1896 the Ussuri line of the Trans-Siberian Railway—linking Vladivostok with Khabarovsk—neared completion, and China signed a secret treaty with Russia allowing the latter to construct rail lines throughout Manchuria. They were to become the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), and a CER construction authority in Vladivostok was created in the spring of 1897.

For the transportation of material, a base of operations was still needed near a river; a site was selected near the Sungari river (in Chinese Songhuajiang) 3 Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari (Harbin Story) (Tokyo, Hara shobô, 1985), 14–15, 18–24, 27–8. She cites a source that claims there were over 200 young women working as prostitutes in Vladivostok already in the mid-1880s.

The Japanese and the Jews

375

that was sparsely populated. The materials were transported from Europe to Vladivostok by sea, loaded on to rail lines there and brought to Khabarovsk, and finally placed on riverine vessels and taken on the Sungari to this new site.

The first group of men, led by A.I. Iugovich, chief construction engineer of the CER, with an armed Cossack guard, set out to establish this site in March 1898.

It may be difficult to imagine now, with Harbin a teeming city of several million inhabitants, but what they found when they arrived the next month was a small settlement of local villagers in roughly twenty huts where lowgrade alcohol was being distilled and opium grown along the banks of the river. The Russians bought it all, and soon the massive railway construction enterprise was under way; some 200,000 Chinese would eventually migrate north to find employment with it.

The Russian developers first set out to build a train station and narrow-gauge track from the Sungari wharf to the centre of the former settlement. This transport route was later to become the major thoroughfare of Harbin, known as Kitaiskaia Ulitsa (Chinese Street) in Russian and Zhongyang dajie (Central Boulevard) in Chinese. Within two decades, this avenue became the heart of non-Chinese Harbin, lined with an assortment of shops selling the latest fashions and foods from every comer of the European world.4

Russian city planners called this new site simply ‘Posyolok Sungari’ (the Sungari Settlement), but in a 1904 Japanese work introducing Manchuria it is already referred to as ‘Harbin’.5 The name must have come into popular currency within this period of six years. From that point forward, the Russian always called it ‘Kharbin’, and the Chinese used the three characters ‘Ha-er-bin’.

4 R.K.I. Quested, ‘ Matey’ Imperialists? The Tsarist Russians in Manchuria, 1895–1917 [Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong Press, 1982), 32, 100–1, 129–31; Koshizawa Akira, Harupin no toshi keikaku (The City Planning of Harbin) (Tokyo, Sôwasha, 1989), 13–24; Matani Haruji,

Harubin no machi (The City of Harbin) (Tokyo, published by the author, 1981), 1. There are numerous theories about the origins of the toponym ‘Harbin’ and none of them is especially persuasive. Five of them are summarised in Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari, 52–4; a Japanese guidebook of 1924 mentions three but fails to support one over the others: Harubin

no gainen (The Concept of Harbin) (Harbin, Harubin Nihon shôgyô kaigijo, 1924), 1. The most recent theory, not cited in Sugiyama, comes from Guan Chenghe in his Haerbin kao (Study of Harbin). There he argues for a Jurchen origin for ‘Harbin’ meaning ‘honoured’; he also maintains that the city dates from 1097, thus supporting the aforementioned Chinese claim on the city and casting his linguistic theory in an equally dubious light. See Li Shuxia, Haerbin lishi biannian, 1896–1926 (Historical Chronicle of Harbin, 1896–1926) (Harbin, Difang shi yanjiusuo, 1980), 3.

5 Wolff (‘To the Harbin Station’, chapter 1) has found a Russian map dated 1898 in which

‘Kharbin’ is pencilled in at this site.

376

The Japanese and the Jews

In Japanese writings of the pre-war era it was more often ‘Harupin’. Even today both ‘Harupin’ and ‘Harubin’ are used as readings for this toponym.

The famed author Yokomitsu Riichi wrote an essay in 1932 entitled ‘Rekishi (Harupin no ki)’ (History: a Note on Harbin),6 It recounts the story of Miyamoto Chiyo, a remarkable young woman who was one of the first Japanese to settle in Harbin. Born in 1879, she moved with her brother from her native Kumamoto to Vladivostok in 1888; there she earned her living as an assistant to the only Russian doctor in town. When, as part of the Russian development of Harbin, the doctor moved there in 1898, she accompanied him. Within a few years her close ties with the Russian community were sufficient grounds for all Japanese immigration matters to be put in her charge. The Boxer rising brought Sino-Russian border tensions to a high point, and in July of 1900

the Russian army routed or murdered the entire Chinese population of the city of Blagoveshchensk, altogether some 3,000–4,000 persons. Many Japanese fled Harbin for the relative security of Khabarovsk or elsewhere, as did many Chinese. Yokomitsu noted that only twenty-two of Harbin’s Japanese residents remained during this massive withdrawal from the city; by the following year, however, the Japanese population returned to over 300.

The paperwork for such a group was now too demanding for Miyamoto to handle by herself, and at this juncture a Japanese residents’ association, the Sôkakai or Sungari Association, was founded. The name indicates that by that early date, 1901, the name ‘Harbin’ had as yet probably not become firmly established, at least among the Japanese population. By late 1902 the population of Harbin had reached about 30,000, of whom some 514 were Japanese, according to a report of the Sôkakai; Manchuria as a whole was now home to about 7,000

Japanese. In 1903–04, on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, Harbin experienced a second mass withdrawal, though the city was otherwise unaffected by the fighting.7 The Japanese population of Harbin finally surpassed its pre-war figure only in December 1907, when the number reached 627, at a time when the numbers of Japanese in the cities of China proper were much higher.8

6 Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Rekishi (Harupin no ki)’ [History: A Note on Harbin), Kaizô (Construction), 14 [October 1932), 2–17.

7 Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari, 30–2, 49–50, 56–60. On the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on Harbin see Yanagida Momotarô, Harubin no zanshô (Harbin’s Afterglow) (Tokyo, Hara shobô, 1986), 97–130. In September 1900, Chiyo’s sister Fuino gave birth to a daughter, the first Japanese born in Harbin; the first Jew was born in 1904.

8 For example, there were already nearly 6,000 Japanese in Shanghai at this point in time. In addition to Chapter Nine in this volume see Zhu Yong, ‘Shanhai kyoryû Nihonjin shakai to Yokohama Kakyô shakai no hikaku kenkyû’ (The Resident Japanese Population of Shanghai and the Chinese Resident Population of Yokohama: a Comparative Study), in Yokohama to

The Japanese and the Jews

377

The gender imbalance continued to dog Japanese in Harbin for some time into the twentieth century. Even with a gender-skewed population and the bulk of it feeding the brothel business, Japanese in the city began quickly to branch out into other trades and to form a plethora of communal institutions.

Comparably precise data for the Jewish community of Harbin have as yet not been uncovered. The records of the Jewish community—minutes of communal meetings, taxation figures, and the like—have yet to be found. We do know, however, that there were Jews among the first settlers in Harbin, if not in the initial Tsarist construction team. Unlike the Japanese who were leaving unemployment or poverty in their homeland the Jews, many from Siberia and others from the Pale of Settlement in the Russian empire, were escaping waves of ferocious antisemitism and organised terror. However, the very first Jews to make Harbin their home were a breed apart. This intrepid group included a handful of former Nikolaevskie soldati, men who had been effectively kidnapped in their early to mid-teen years into twenty-five-year terms of military service for the Tsar’s armed forces. If they survived this service, they were granted a privilege denied other Jews in Russia: to settle outside the Pale.

A number of such men, hardy creatures that they were, chose to make the new city of Harbin their home.9

Other early settlers were equally intrepid souls. To help develop this new region of the empire, the Tsarist government allowed a handful of Jewish businessmen the opportunity to invest in various industries in the Harbin area and Manchuria more generally. The activities included furs and lumber, and some of the businessmen became fabulously wealthy. The principal early figure in the Manchurian export trade was Roman Moiseevich Kabalkin, who had made his fortune in the grain trade and served for fourteen years as a consultant on the Riazan-Ural’sk railway. He was permitted to develop freight traffic from Siberia to Manchuria, to which end he established R.M. Kabalkin and Son around 1910. In the face of antisemitic pressures, he found support in the Shanhai, kindai toshi keisei shi hikaku kenkyû (Yokohama and Shanghai: a Comparative Study of Modern Urban Formation) (Yokohama, Yokohama kaikô shiryô fukyû kyôkai, 1995), 401; Takatsuna Hakubun, ‘Seiyôjin no Shanhai, Nihonjin no Shanhai’ (Westerners’ Shanghai, Japanese Shanghai), in Takahashi Kôsuke and Furumaya Tadao, eds, Shanhai shi, kyodai toshi no keisei to hitobito no itonami (History of Shanghai: the Formation of a Great City and the Occupations of its People) (Tokyo, Tôhô shoten, 1995), 120–1.

9 See the interviews with Boris Katz, whose father was a Nikolaevsky soldat, and Benjamin Alcone ( né Alconovitch), whose grandfather was one, in Bay Area Jews from Harbin, Manchuria, transcripts and tapes from unpublished interviews held in the Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley CA, in Russian and English. These interviews are on cassette tapes.

378

The Japanese and the Jews

CER authorities. Another major Jewish player in the Harbin economy was Lev Shmulevich Skidel’skii, who was to become Harbin’s only Jewish millionaire.10

Others were less wealthy men and women who simply gambled that they would do better on the more level playing field of Manchuria than in the pogrom-ridden cities and towns of the Pale. For example, the father of Eve Naftaly [née Greenwald) was a lumber and grain merchant who first visited Harbin in 1904 and brought his family there the next year. From the great Kishinyov pogrom in 1903 through the more widespread antisemitic acts associated with the Russian revolution of 1905, Jews began looking for opportunities outside the restrictions and abuses of the Pale. In Harbin, by contrast, a Jew could own land and there were no quotas on Jews in the schools: ‘It was like Russia without the antisemitism of Russia.’ Emile Katz’s father brought his family to Harbin in 1906 for the same reason, as did the father of Abe Traig ( né Treguboff) in 1907. As Mrs Traig put it in an interview in 1975, ‘You see, the Jews in Siberia [by which she meant also Manchuria and the Maritime Province], once they got there, had much more rights than in Russia itself, because Siberia was a country that had to be developed.’ Pearl Levin’s father, responding to the horrors of 1905–06, moved his family to Harbin because he feared that his children would become revolutionaries as a result.11 The Jewish community grew steadily in the early years of the twentieth century. By 1909 its population of approximately 5,000 amounted to 11.5 per cent of the overall total in Harbin, second only in Siberia to Irkutsk (6,100) where the numbers amounted to only 5.6 per cent of the overall population.12

What did they think of this strange young city on the other side of the world?

Most were amazed by two facts. First, it was a perfect replica of a Russian city, although far removed from the centres of Russian culture and civilisa-tion. Second, it was, as Eve Naftaly elegantly put it, ‘a horrible place . . . You know, like in the westerns—a little town, a frontier town. There were no pave-ments. There were wooden sidewalks.’ But, interestingly, she hastened to add,

‘Harbin was a Russian town . . . on the Chinese soil.’ ‘It was a Russian city,’ noted Pearl Levin bluntly; ‘Harbin was absolutely Russian,’ stated Sara Ossin most 10 Shmuel Rabinovits, ‘Hayishuv hayihudi be-Sin, sigsugo vekhurbano’ (The Jewish Community in China: its Growth and its Demise), Gesher, 2:11 (July 1957), 108–21; David Wolff, ‘To the Harbin Station’, chapter 3.

11 Bay Area Jews from Harbin, Manchuria, interview with Eve Naftaly, 1, 2–4, 19; with Emile Katz, 7–8; with Abe Traig, 1, 3; with Mrs Traig, 5; with Pearl Levin on cassette. The same was true for the family of Leon Lerman, who came to Vladivostok in 1905, later moving to Harbin in 1913 or 1914.

12 David Wolff, ‘To the Harbin Station’, chapter 2.

The Japanese and the Jews

379

succinctly.13 The city was a ramshackle frontier, much less sophisticated than anything with which they were familiar in the Pale, yet completely Russian, they all noted without any irony. What made Harbin and a few other cities like it preferable to anything in western Russia or Poland or Ukraine at the time, it must be emphasised, was the almost complete absence of antisemitism, fuelled in Russia proper by the government itself, or restrictions, a topic to which we shall return. No memoirist remembers any serious incidents before the late 1920s, though there were certainly many minor incidents following the retreat of the White armies toward the end of the 1910s. This quality of life more than compensated for Harbin’s lack of other amenities. As more Jews fleeing persecution in the 1910s made their way to Harbin, the early settlers took them in and together founded a full panoply of communal institutions.

Work in Harbin: Occupations, Businesses, Shops

Unlike the Japanese community of Shanghai, which lived much like other foreign ethnic enclaves within its own small universe, in its early years Harbin remained under Russian control. Despite the concessions acquired by Japan after victory in 1905, Harbin was to all intents and purposes a CER fief unto itself, ruled by the general manager of the CER, Dmitri L. Khorvat. However, as prospects for a secure future looked better from 1907 and the immense untapped wealth of the region became known, a new infusion of Japanese capital from that time helped to revive Harbin’s wayward economy; both Mitsubishi and Mitsui opened branches there that year. From this time, as well, there was a sustained return and growth in the number of Japanese in the city, following the withdrawal at the time of the Russo-Japanese War.

As early as 1905 there were five competing companies plying the sea lanes between Japanese ports and Vladivostok. Even before the war the Japanese had founded larger enterprises in Harbin, such as Tokunaga Shôkai, Suzuki Nichi-Man Shôkai and Moritomi Shôkai—these were not on a par with the great zaibatsu, but neither were they corner bodegos. A local survey of Japanese businesses in Vladivostok late in 1907, for example, revealed thirty-nine general stores, seventy-five laundries, thirty-six barbers, twenty-seven cobblers, thirty-six carpenters and sixty-two families in the kashiseki or ‘rooms for rent’

business, a euphemism for houses of prostitution. World War I brought prosperity to Harbin; trade exports rose dramatically and, by way of example, the 13 Bay Area Jews from Harbin, Manchuria, interview with Eve Naftaly, 11, 17–18; interviews with Pearl Levin and Sara Ossin on cassette.

380

The Japanese and the Jews

number of oil refineries increased from seven to twenty. During the war years Japanese contacts throughout Siberia rose to make Japan second only to the United States for the volume of trade with the region.14 Interestingly, even as the Japanese population grew and became more sophisticated and diverse through the 1910s, and even as fresh business opportunities enriched the local community, the number of Japanese linked with prostitution remained extremely high.15

The phenomenon of large-scale Japanese prostitution in Harbin was by no means unique in East Asia. Large numbers of young Japanese women, known colloquially as karayukisan (lit. those who go to China), were forced or deceived with offers of jobs to aid their impoverished families into travelling to many of the cities of mainland East and South East Asia, as well as Hawaii and even the west coast of the United States. If they survived the trip, they were faced with a future of indentured servitude as prostitutes, often for the rest of their lives.

Morisaki Kazue has estimated that some 30,000 prostitutes were transported to Manchuria by unscrupulous Japanese.16 One may see here the origins of what would later, also euphemistically, be called ianfu or comfort women, the young Asian women dragooned into sexual service for the expanding Japanese military, though others date this development to much later.

The Bolshevik revolution brought about a major shift in power relations within the city. There were struggles within the CER between Khorvat and the railway workers, exacerbated by demands from the local Chinese authorities 14 Higashi Kochiku, ‘Urajio yori Harubin e’ (From Vladivostok to Harbin), Taiyô, 24:9 (July 1918), 184–6; Manshû nippô, 18 December 1907, 1; Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari, 64–8, 75–8, 90–2.

15 Harubin tsûshin, 1 February 1923, 3. This report contains a survey of the local population, broken down by neighbourhoods and suburbs of Harbin, and a detailed occupational breakdown. By this time, the gender ratio of men to women had levelled to five-to-four.

See Song Shisheng, ‘The Brothels of Harbin in the Old Society’, in Søren Clausen and Stig Thøgersen, The Making of a Chinese City, 104–7. There is a fascinating listing of the businesses owned and operated by Russians in Harbin in Urajio nippô, 10 August 1922, 3. With the exception of the brothel business, Russians were engaged in many of the same businesses in that city as the Japanese, albeit in larger numbers.

16 Morisaki Kazue, Karayukisan (Karayukisan) (Tokyo, Asahi shinbunsha, 1976), 156–7; Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York, Pantheon Books, 1982), 217–21; Kim Il-myon, Nihon josei aishi (The Sad History of Japanese Women) (Tokyo, San’chi shobô, 1981), 182–267. See also D.C.D. Sissons, ‘ Karayuki-san: Japanese prostitutes in Australia, 1887–1916’, Historical Studies, 17:68 (April 1977), 323–41; 17:69 (October 1977), 474–88; Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990), 142–3.

The Japanese and the Jews

381

for full sovereignty over both the railroad and the region. Russian culture continued to dominate non-Chinese (and even some Chinese) life in Harbin, but from this time forward Russian control of the city began a decline from which it was never to recover. The Russian presence in Harbin in fact only increased over time, with waves of White Russians and others escaping the Bolsheviks after 1917, but without Tsarist support many Russians were reduced to poverty, beggary and criminal behaviour. Harbin may have been the only city in East Asia in which Caucasian beggars outnumbered Asian beggars. Barely two decades old, Harbin remained a city of pioneers—Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Koreans and others—a city undergoing repeated political and social turmoil.

After the conclusion of the Great War, the joint powers invaded Siberia in an attempt to crush the young Soviet regime, but by the end of 1918 all the powers save Japan had withdrawn. Fearing the immediate consequences of Russian retaliation, Japanese forces remained in the region for over four years, despite worries voiced by the Japanese communities in Siberia and Manchuria of exacerbated tension with Russia and China. By this point there were thousands of Japanese expatriates (and far more Koreans, whose country had been annexed by Japan in 1910) living throughout the cities of North East Asia and along the Trans-Siberian Railway. When the decision was reached for the Japanese expeditionary force to withdraw in 1922, many local Japanese residents vociferously protested in the local press against such a move, fearing Russian reprisals because of the long intimacy of the Japanese military with the Whites and the Japanese support for such petty White Russian dictators as Grigorii Semenov.17

During the years of the Russian civil war the Russian émigré population of Harbin tripled to 124,000 by 1921, while the Japanese population rose by 75 per cent over the same period to 3,545 (excluding Koreans). The Chinese, far and away the largest portion of the local population, rose in number from 170,000

in 1917 to over 315,000 by early 1922. Thus, by 1922 the city had a total population 17 See the appeal to the Japanese government (dated 1 May 1918), signed by the heads of the Japanese Residents’ Associations of Vladivostok, Harbin, Iman, Nikolsk and Spassk-Dal’nyi, it cautions the authorities on the use of military force in the region. Reprinted in Shinobu Seizaburô, Taishô seiji shi (A Political History of the Taishô Period) (Tokyo, Kawade shobô, 1951), II, 483–4; Harubin shôhin chinretsukan shûhô, 2:17 (23 July 1924); Manshû tokuhon (Manchurian Reader) (Tokyo, Tô–A keizai chôsakyoku, 1935), 356–8; Kazama Seitarô, ‘Kokkyô no machi Harubin tayori’ (News from Harbin, City at the Frontier), Bungei shunjû, 16:9 (June 1938), 254–5; Harubin tsûshin, 6 March 1923, 3. In the 15 March 1923 issue of this last newspaper there is a report from the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Harbin in the form of a letter (written in sôrôbun) to the Diet: ‘Taishô jûich-inen Nihongun Shiberia teppei ni yoru hisongaisha ni tsugu’ (Report on those Injured by the Withdrawal from Siberia by the Japanese Army in 1922), 2.

382

The Japanese and the Jews

of half a million, and nominal political control over the city was now in Chinese hands, but each of the constituent ethnic groups effectively managed their own affairs. To do so, each created its own array of communal institutions.

The Jewish community grew in response to waves of antisemitism in eastern and central Europe. While the great majority of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian Jews migrated to North America, a sizeable minority found their way along the Trans-Siberian Railway to cities in the east. Once the basis of a community had been laid, it began to grow. The population of Jewish Harbin reached its peak in the early 1920s at no more than 15,000—small by international standards but important in other ways.

Continuing the direction set by the first generation of settlers, the majority of Jews in Harbin were in business. While the greatest wealth was probably to be made in lumber and furs, others dealt in grain, soap, textiles and similar products of daily use. Many were small businessmen who ran their own shops, such as Benjamin Alcone’s father, who ran a jewellery store, and Pearl Levin’s father, who, together with his brother, operated a music store.18 Some Japanese visitors to the city claim that the brothels they visited were run by Jews and/or employed young Jewish women for their clientele, but they generally substantiate such claims by inane statements about someone ‘looking Jewish’ or having ‘a long nose’.19 There indeed may have been Jews in that trade, too, but the question requires further study. Harbin never became a noted centre of Jewish or secular learning; it spawned no great yeshivas or colleges for Europeans.

Indeed, most young Jewish men and women went to Europe or the United States for a university education.20

Although no one has substantiated the role of Jews in Harbin prostitution, it seems clear that Jews were involved in the local entertainment industry to a considerable extent. Harbin was famous throughout East Asia as one of the liveliest and most freewheeling places on the world map, something that went well with its earlier frontier self-image. It was referred to generally as the ‘Paris of the Orient’ (as well as the ‘City of Eros’) by many travellers and settlers there, an appellation applied by others to Shanghai as well. It was renowned for its 18 Bay Area Jews from Harbin, Manchuria, interviews with Benjamin Alcone and Pearl Levin on cassette tapes; see also interviews with Eve Naftaly, 1, with Abe Traig, 4, with Emíle Katz, 9, and with Leon Lerman, on cassette. Interview with Evsey Domar, 5 October 1987.

19 See, for example, a chapter entitled ‘Hana’ (Noses) in Yamamoto Sanehiko, Shina (China) (Tokyo, Kaizôsha, 1936), 163–78.

20 Evsey Domar left Harbin in 1934, spent two years in Dairen, and then proceeded to UCLA to study economics. Interview with Evsey Domar.

The Japanese and the Jews

383

‘dance halls,’ strip tease shows and bar-girls, and it was these institutions that were allegedly operated by Jewish residents.21

One of the enduring themes about Jewish life in Harbin was, with the exception of several notorious cases, the relative absence of organised antisemitism.

Of course, the Whites brought their antisemitism with them to the city and taught it to the Japanese during the Siberian Expedition, to which time the first Japanese translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion can be dated,22

but there were no Black Hundreds in Harbin, the setting being far removed from the traditional forces that stirred up antisemitic activities elsewhere. It was thus an extraordinary novelty: a Russian city without significant antisemitism, at least before the late 1920s. In the short history of the interface between Ashkenazi Jewry and China, Harbin was the only community which saw itself, more or less, as a terminus in the Exile (excluding, of course, the final ingathering of all exiles).

Communal and Cultural Institutions

By the 1910s, both the Japanese and the Jewish communities of Harbin had produced a wide array of local institutions supporting their respective constituencies. These institutions were, of course, by no means unique to Harbin; wherever either group settled away from home, they created comparable communal services. Neither the Japanese nor the Jews were content to rely on the local Chinese authorities to provide any but the most minimal political or policing service to the city; both assumed responsibility for the rest. This meant establishing social, educational, economic and religious institutions to provide for their people in Harbin. Harbin did have the additional circumstance of being such a young city that, unlike most other cities in continental 21 Yamamoto Sanehiko, ‘Harupin’ (Harbin), Kaizô, 14 [October 1932), 337–40; Kiyozawa Retsu, ‘Sekai no jiyû shi, yoru no Harupin’ (Free City of the World: Harbin by Night), Taiyô, 32:7 (June 1926), 58–62; Higashi Fumio, Chôsen Manshû Shina, 39–48; Yamaura Kan’ichi,

‘Kokusai ero toshi Harupin: Manshû ero no fukeizai’ (International City of Eros, Harbin: The Wastefulness of Manchirian Eros), Keizai ôrai (Economic changes), 6 (October 1931), 175, 177.

22 Kobayashi Masayuki, Yudayajin: sono rekishizô o motomete (The Jews: in Search of their Historical Image) (Tokyo, Seikô shobô, 1977), 238–41, 250–9, Miyazawa Masanori, Zôho Yudayajin ronkô: Nihon ni okeru rongi no tsuiseki (Studies of the Jews, Expanded: In Pursuit of Japanese Debates) (Tokyo, Shinsensha, 1982), 36–8, 41–59, 71, 81; Sugita Rokuichi, Isuraeru shi zakkô (Studies in the History of Israel) (Tokyo, Kyôbunkan, 1964), 370.

384

The Japanese and the Jews

Asia, it probably would have been in no position to offer such services even if its foreign constituents sought them.

As elsewhere outside Japan, it was the formal Japanese Residents’

Association that took the lead in creating communal institutions. Although Harbin followed Vladivostok’s lead in most civil matters, Japanese in Harbin formed a local residents’ association, the Sôkakai, in 1901; Vladivostok did likewise in March 1902, where there were 2,875 Japanese residents (and a total of 4,334 throughout the Russian Far East). The mass withdrawal of Japanese from the region over the following few years left few behind to run communal affairs.

As Harbin’s Japanese population returned to its pre-war level by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the first elementary school for Japanese pupils was opened—with a total of four students—in 1909 in a room of the local Nishi Honganji, a branch establishment of the Pure Land Buddhist sect.

It acquired its own building only in June 1923, an impressive edifice built by the Sôkakai and the South Manchurian Railway Company (SMR) which from 1920

assumed half of all educational expenses for the local population.23

Despite these separate communal institutions, the Harbin community achieved a much higher degree of integration into the general Harbin population than did Japanese communities elsewhere in China. Whereas, for example, in Shanghai most Japanese lived in blissful ignorance of the surrounding Chinese population, in Harbin most Japanese learned Russian—they agreed with the assessment that it was, after all, a Russian city culturally—and many even made a stab at Chinese. Since those Japanese who settled in Harbin planned to remain there well into the future, it was only natural that they should attempt to learn the language of the predominant groups in the city, much as Japanese sought to learn English in the United States or Portuguese in Brazil. In September 1920 a Russo-Japanese School opened, the forerunner of the Harbin Academy which became famous as a training institute in the Russian language. The first principal, Inoda Kôhai, was a former student of Futabatei Shimei from the Tokyo Foreign Language School. A Sino-Japanese Evening School for language training opened in early April 1923 with similar aims of fostering Sino-Japanese understanding and friendship.

In addition, many Japanese who worked outside the home adopted Western styles of dress from the end of the Meiji period. In fact, Japanese in Vladivostok 23 Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari, 66–7, 78, 116–17; Gotô Shinkichi, ‘Harubin Nihon shôgakkô’/ [The Japanese Elementary School of Harbin), in Gotô Shinkichi, ed., Harubin no omoide (Memories of Harbin) (Kyoto, Kyôto Harubin kai, 1973), 68–82; Sugiyama Kimiko, ‘Harubin no ki: watakushi ga doko de mita koto, kangaeta koto’ (Notes on Harbin: Where I saw Things and thought Things), Manshû to Nihonjin, 7 (November 1979), 8.

The Japanese and the Jews

385

early on became tailors producing Westernstyle men’s and women’s clothing initially for the local Russian population. Fresh Japanese produce (mandarin oranges, apples, and other fruit and vegetables) was imported from numerous Japanese ports throughout the north-east as far as the Blagoveshchensk region with Chinese merchants serving as intermediaries. Japanese-language newspapers in Harbin abounded. In addition to journalists from all the major Japanese dailies and weeklies, Harbin produced a wide variety of its own, such as Harubin nichinichi shinbun, Taihoku shinbun, Harubin tsûshin, Ro-A jihô, Hoku-Man denpô and Teikoku tsûshin. 24

In the aftermath of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution, Harbin became congested with countless new immigrants. The year 1919 was particularly difficult, with the Japanese military confiscating freight cars for their own use. That same year, though, the Japanese community founded the Harbin Commercial Exhibition Hall (Harabin shôhin chinretsukan) dedicated to stimulating Russo-Japanese trade and incidentally to calming Russo-Japanese tensions. It was headed by Mori Gyoin, who was to become a central figure in the local Japanese community for the next two decades. The Exhibition Hall began that year to publish a monthly magazine, each issue well over 100 pages, featuring all manner of local news, commercial statistics and a variety of human interest stories mostly from Harbin but with occasional reports from Vladivostok and elsewhere in the region. By October 1921 the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Harbin had 113 members.25

These efforts at smoothing over the ethnic frictions in the city may be unique in the Japanese experience on the mainland, despite the fact that visitors to the city noted that Chinese, Japanese and Russians each had their own interests to protect and their own self-defence mechanisms. When the Japanese army withdrew in 1922, many Japanese residents of Vladivostok decided it was no longer safe to live there, and they resettled in Harbin, presumably because it seemed far more secure to them; others moved to the Korean city of Ch’ongjin to the south, but Harbiners did not move in any significant numbers. The decade 24 Yanagida Momotarô, Harubin no zanshô, 234.

25 Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari, 93–5, 97, 106, 111, 113–14; Harubin tsûshin, 17 March 1923, 3, 18 March 1923, 2; Yamamoto Sanehiko, ‘Harupin’, 357. A June 1922 document marked

‘secret’ in the Gaimushô (Japanese Foreign Ministry) Archives (JFMA) complained that Japanese in Manchuria had changed their clothing in accordance with the conditions of life and work in the region, which the author regarded as potentially deleterious to long-term planning, and the Japanese ‘treat locals like slaves’. See Miyahara Tamihei,

‘Man-Mô bunka senden kôenkai ni kansuru ken’ (On the Symposium for Manchurian and Mongolian Culture), No. 4 in the series ‘Hôjin no zai-Man seikatsu’ (Life in Manchuria for the Japanese), JFMA, 2631 (June 1922).

386

The Japanese and the Jews

from the evacuation in 1922 through the Manchurian Incident marked Harbin’s Republican Chinese phase. The central government in Beijing and later in Nanjing was never strong enough to exercise control over Harbin, though, and the city thus fell under the sway of the massive Manchurian satrapy of warlord Zhang Zuolin, who turned affairs over to his underling, Zhang Huanxiang. The latter Zhang began a course of action aimed at Sinifying Harbin which met with considerable friction from the leaders of the other ethnic communities.26

History has sadly provided far more opportunities for Jews to find themselves forced to leave the country of their birth and migrate to a new setting in which they would carve out communal institutions. Jewish Harbin was a Russian Jewish enclave outside central Russian control. Russian Jews just longed to be left alone; in Harbin they were beyond the reach of the Russian government, and they prospered. Russian Gentiles had come to expect support from the regime; in Harbin they got none and did poorly.

The first generation of Jewish settlers were generally bilingual in Russian and Yiddish, though, as was the case elsewhere, Yiddish soon gave way to Russian monolingualism in civil affairs, though it is not entirely clear when the transition occurred. Most of those interviewed have denied any knowledge of Yiddish—for an assortment of complex reasons usually associated with a sense that Russian was a cosmopolitan, ‘European’ language while Yiddish was backward and old-fashioned. However, when Israel Cohen travelled through Harbin in 1920 or 1921, carrying the message of the Balfour Declaration around the world, he was asked by the beadle of the Great Synagogue to speak after the morning prayers one Shabbat: ‘Reb Yisroel, vet ir efsher a bisl zogn?’ (Israel, perhaps you could say a few words?) The ever-present Chinese military guards, fearful of the spread of Bolshevism, forbade the use of Yiddish, insisting on Russian, which they more or less understood and which Cohen did not know.27

This story also indicates, as many interviewees have noted, that the Chinese, 26 Higashi Kochiku, ‘Urajio yori Harubin e’,189, Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari, 114–15. Higashi Fumio ( Chôsen Manshû Shina, 46) reported that relations between young Japanese and young Russians were excellent, with some intermarriage, but this strikes me as somewhat exaggerated or propagandistic. His book was published in 1940. More typical was Yamamoto Sanehiko’s comment (‘Harupin’, 346): ‘Who must bear responsibility for the crime of turning Harbin into a street of flirtatiousness?’ The White Russians, of course. ‘All their great pride in the glories of the Tsarist era they now discard in the gutters of Harbin. They keep hordes of degenerate women, and they have transformed it

[Harbin] into a prominent boil on the face of the earth.’ Stunning comment, considering that it was the Japanese who pioneered prostitution in Harbin.

27 Israel Cohen, The Journey of a Jewish Traveller (London, Bodley Head, 1925), 171. Cohen offered to speak in Hebrew, but none of the Harbiners (Chinese or Jewish) could under-

The Japanese and the Jews

387

too, learned Russian far more often than Russian-speakers learned any Chinese.

In addition, we have a survey dated 1913 on native language which gives 62 per cent Russian and 32 per cent Yiddish for Jewish Harbin; the 1897 Russian cen-sus produced a figure of 97 per cent Yiddish for Jews throughout Russia.28

A Jewish Nationality Committee was established in Harbin on 16 February 1903, and it elected a ‘Spiritual Directorate’. They immediately set to work trying to establish a synagogue; at first, a place was rented while funds were sought among European brethren. In August 1904, W. Levin, Harbin’s first rabbi, arrived; earlier that year, in January, a five-kopek communal tax per chicken for kosher slaughtering was levied by the Jewish leaders of the city. While Rabbi Levin departed in 1906, a new synagogue (known as the Main Synagogue) and Jewish primary school were completed in 1907. They soon created a khevra kadisha or burial society (like the hundreds of similar associations that exist to this day in Jewish communities through the world), a cemetery, a mikvah (ritual bathhouse), an old age home, a Jewish Women’s Charity Committee in 1907, a library in 1912 and a Talmud-Torah in 1914. Many of the communal institutions established or expanded by Jews were in response to the wave of émigrés that came to the city later during the years of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution. These included a free kitchen, a Jewish hospital, a low-interest credit union, secular and religious schools, and a second synagogue.

There were as well Russian secular schools that were not specifically Jewish and which Jewish students attended, such as the Harbin Commercial School.29

The foremost figure of Jewish Harbin, like Mori Gyoin for Japanese Harbin, was Abraham Kaufman. Born in Perm, Russia, Kaufman earned his medical degree in Switzerland before coming to Harbin in 1908. There he opened his practice and thereafter was involved in every aspect of communal life until the Soviet army invaded and occupied the city in 1945. Kaufman was promptly deported to the Gulag for the next eleven years. It was he who organised the Jewish hospital and numerous other communal organisations in the city.

Not a single memoir about pre-war Harbin is complete without a paean to Dr Kaufman, the community shtatlan or intercessor. ‘When [a] new group started,’ remembered Eve Naftaly, ‘he was the president.’ He was famed as well stand the language; he settled on English, which was then translated into Russian.

(Yiddish romanisation corrected to conform with the standard transcription system.) 28 See David Wolff, ‘To the Harbin Station’, chapter 3.

29 Evsey Domar, interview; Tsvia Shickman-Bowman, ‘The History of Harbin Jewish Community, 1898–1931,’ MS; Herman Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East: A Century of Jewish Life in China and Japan (New York, Twayne Publishers, 1962), 21–33; David Wolff, ‘To the Harbin Station’, chapter 3.

388

The Japanese and the Jews

as an orator; his moving speech on Kol Nidre night in 1912 about the trial of Mendel Beilis played an important role in his rise to prominence within the community.30

Unlike the other ethnic communities of Harbin, Jews did not share a single nationality, and citizenship became a serious issue for many who hoped to leave Harbin some day. Most had been Russian or Polish, but after the Russian Revolution, Soviet citizenship became a touchy issue. Some chose Soviet citizenship as a convenience, not necessarily as a sign of friendship for the new regime. Others retained the citizenship of Poland or Latvia or a host of other eastern European countries. Others opted for citizenship in the short-lived Far Eastern Republic (1919–24), and then found themselves without a country when that state collapsed. Many were simply stateless.

One thing that united the great majority of Jewish Harbiners was Zionism, the new movement that allowed them to take great pride in themselves as Jews, which they had not been allowed to do in Russia proper. Abraham Kaufman had been active in the young movement for a Jewish homeland from the beginning and even attended the 1897 Zionist Congress in Basel. In the long history of the Jewish Exile, Harbin was home to the only sustained Zionist press in the Russian language. The quintessential Zionist cultural and social organisation, Hashomer Hatsair (mostly left-wing), had a branch in Harbin. From within it was also formed Betar, the decidedly right-wing Zionist cultural and sports group.31 In contemporary Jewish life, it would be unthinkable for these two groups to be so close; in Harbin early in this century, these political distinctions were less well understood and less important than the fact that both were Zionist. The Jewish Bund, a non-communist left-wing labour organisation later decimated by Stalin, also had representatives in Harbin, though its numbers tended to be small.

The quasi-military Betar helped the Jews of Harbin to learn the art (and hence the psychology) of self-defence in the face of antisemitic attack. Most Jews fleeing eastern Europe did not have this experience of relative freedom until they came to North America or Israel. Most of them discovered their capacity for self-defensive organisation only at this point, when the organised 30 Eve Naftaly, interview, 68, 84; Pearl Levin, interview on cassette; Evsey Domar, interview; Herman Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East, 24, 26–7; David Wolff, To the Harbin Station’, chapter 3.

31 William Zimmerman remembered his mother collecting money for Palestine in the 1910s: interview, 26; Leon Lerman also remembered the importance of Zionist activities in Harbin: interview on cassette; Sara Ossin also recalled how important Betar was in Harbin: interview on cassette.

The Japanese and the Jews

389

antisemitic groups in Harbin could not call on the support of the Russian government. Thus, the Jews of Harbin effectively acquired this experience earlier in China. Whatever other failings it may have had, Betar did instil pride and the courage to fight back, enabling this group of Jews (unlike many others of their background and generation) to overcome the psychologically (and probably physically) scarring experience of antisemitism.

Thus a full Jewish cultural life was to be found in Harbin, as well as non-Jewish Russian cultural events in which Jews participated: clubs, artistic societies, dance companies, oratory groups, orchestras, and a wild night life of cabarets and revues. Harbin became a regular stop for touring companies, including the Bolshoi Ballet. All the principal Jewish holidays were celebrated in Harbin. Matzah was available every year at Passover, and kosher meat was available all year round. William Zimmerman remembers that, when his family lived in Vladivostok, they travelled regularly to Harbin to purchase kosher meat ‘because Harbin is a good Jewish city’. Benjamin Alcone remembers that the Chinese even prepared gefilte fish for the Jewish families in whose homes they worked.32

The Jewish press of Harbin covered the full gamut from far right to far left. The great majority of its output was published in Russian. Evsey Domar remembered there being six daily newspapers in Russian in the 1920s. Some of these newspapers and newsletters (twenty, in all, for the years 1920–40), such as Yevreyskaya zhizn’ (Jewish Life), lasted several decades; others, such as Diaspora i Palestina (Diaspora and Palestine), existed for only a few issues.

The one Yiddish-language newspaper, Der vayter mizrekh (The Far East), represented the voice of social democracy and was sympathetic to what is now the oldest Yiddish newspaper in the world, the Forverts (Forward) of New York City. Der vayter-mizrekh appeared thrice-weekly for about fourteen months, 1921–22, and is a fascinating newspaper.33 For a community not noted for the high level of education it offered, Harbin Jewry produced an impressive array of newspapers, periodicals and other publications, and supported a wide range of cultural events.

32 Herman Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East, 24–9; William Zimmerman, interview, 15; Eve Naftaly, interview, 25, 33–5; Benjamin Alcone, interview on cassette.

33 Evsey Domar, interview; Rudolph Lowenthal, The Religious Periodical Press in China (Beijing, Synodal Commission in China, 1940). Der vayter-mizrekh ran a large congratulatory notice for the Forverts on the latter’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1922.

390

The Japanese and the Jews

Conclusion: Ethnic Integration and Assimilation in Harbin On the whole Japanese memoirists who grew up in Harbin have gone to great lengths to describe how extraordinarily international, cosmopolitan and multicultural Harbin was. They frequently depict family interactions with Chinese and Koreans and even Russians. Sugiyama Kimiko, who has left an extremely valuable memoir of her nearly twenty years in the city, describes the disorientation in 1945 when her family was warned that it was time to go ‘home’.

She beautifully describes the eerie feeling of having to withdraw to a ‘mother’

country of which she knew next to nothing. Harbin was her home; it was where her parents had met and married and given birth to her.34 In retrospect, though, especially after the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s, this portrayal is hard to accept in full. Perhaps, given the virtual absence of ‘international’,

‘cosmopolitan’ experience in Japanese history, cultural life in Harbin seemed to be the epitome of ethnic interaction to many Japanese.

Japanese did, though, before the 1930s bend to the Russian ways of the city.

Many learned Russian, some—such as the famed diplomat, Sugihara Chiune—

exceedingly well. There is no reason to believe that they all harboured evil intentions toward the Chinese or welcomed the arrival of the Guandong army en masse in the 1930s, despite the orchestrated parade in 1932 along the streets of Harbin. Nonetheless, Japanese born or raised in Harbin and elsewhere in Manchuria—Abe Kôbô, Ozawa Seiji, Etô Shinkichi and Sugihara to name but four—have made an unusually international contribution to wartime and post-war Japanese society and culture, a contribution still not well understood or studied.

Jewish Harbin was much less well integrated into local society. Reading the issues of Der vayter mizrekh from 1920–21, one senses the almost complete absence of China. There were countless stories about the numerous Jewish war orphans in eastern Europe that needed homes and news from other East Asian cities about the Jewish communities there. This characteristic resonates with other expatriate presses, such as Shanghai’s British North China Daily News, 34 Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari, 3–6, 9, 12–13, 15–16, 18–19; see also Kaetsu Mikio, Nanasen mei no Harupin dasshutsu (Seven Thousand who Escaped from Harbin) (Tokyo, published by the author, 1971). More recently similar works of Japanese caught at the end of the war or later seeking their ‘roots’ in Harbin have been published; see, for example, Watanabe Ichie, Harubin kaikikô (Return Voyage to Harbin) (Tokyo, Asahi shinbunsha, 1996); Kôno Fumie, Harubin no sora: Nit-Chû no sokoku o motsu shô Nihonjin no kunan (The Harbin Sky: Sufferings of a Little Japanese who had both China and Japan as Homelands) (Tokyo, On Times, 1996).

The Japanese and the Jews

391

which frequently tended to be consumed with stories from ‘home’. For local news, it would have been assumed, there were other sources, but in the continual shaping of communal identity the news from the home front played a critical role that could never be ignored.

Russian and eastern European Jews, even more than their co-religionists in western Europe, had lived apart from Gentiles—in part because they were compelled to and in part because they chose to do so. Life in Harbin, largely free of virulent antisemitism until the late 1920s, was more conducive to integration. However, integration never seems to have included the Chinese population that outnumbered all others. As Eve Naftaly put it bluntly, ‘every nationality . . . to the great shame of them, treated the Chinese like dirt’.35 This statement has been repeated in less blunt but equally sharp ways by many others. Few learned more than a handful of Chinese words; few even recognised the everpresence of the Chinese around them, except in business transactions or as their servants. Evsey Domar, a retired professor of economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an eminent figure in his field, made a fascinating observation during an interview when he admitted that he had never noticed in his twenty years in Harbin and Dairen how attractive young Chinese women were; only on a trip back to China many years later did that awareness dawn on him.36

As noted above, Harbin offered pre-World War II Jewish émigrés something denied most other Jews not living in North America or Palestine: a safe haven.

Beyond the reach of government-sponsored antisemitic attacks, they learned to defend themselves in Harbin. Shanghai would later provide a similar escape for Jews, but it was never as secure, nor was Shanghai ever seen as more than an avenue of escape to somewhere else. In fact, the experience of Jews in Harbin encapsulated in roughly a generation much of the history of the Diaspora.

Through the rapidly evolving circumstances of the time, the rise, brief efflorescence and decline of Jewish Harbin was telescoped into a few decades. Thus we find many of the institutions and organisations in Harbin that we find in almost all well articulated Diaspora communities, with the caveat that events unfolded so quickly that the same people often found themselves simultaneously members of two or more organisations, which their counterparts elsewhere would never have dreamed of.

35 Eve Naftaly, interview, 20.

36 Evsey Domar, interview. Professor Domar died on 1 April 1997: see Boris Bresler and Gregory Grossman, ‘Evsey Domar: In Memoriam’, Bulleten’ Igud Yotsei Sin [English Supplement), 350 (June–July 1997), 30–1.

392

The Japanese and the Jews

Harbin underwent a complete transformation beginning in the late 1920s and culminating in the Manchurian Incident and the Japanese military seizure of the city in 1931. From that time forward, the Japanese population skyrocketed, increasing by a factor of ten over the first half of the 1930s from a figure of 3,600 in early 1932. From the late 1920s the city experienced a spate of kidnappings—usually supported by extremist elements in the Guandong army working together with extreme right-wing, antisemitic, and fascist elements from the Russian community—of wealthy Chinese and of Jews for huge ransoms. The 1932 case of Semyon Kaspé, the talented young musician, is only the most notorious and grisly of many similar incidents.37 Following the Kaspé funeral, at which Abraham Kaufman gave the eulogy and denounced the perpetrators of the gruesome crime in no uncertain terms, ‘Dr Kaufman . . . a most cultured scholar, beloved by Gentiles and Hebrews alike,’ reported Amleto Vespa, then allegedly being compelled to work for the Japanese secret police, ‘was attacked daily for two months in two Japanese-owned papers.

He was attacked on the street by Russians in Japanese employ. My new Chief assigned two Russian thugs to go at night and smash all the windows of the two synagogues.’38

The new mood in the city forced the great majority of Jews to flee for cities in China proper to the south, principally to Shanghai, and Tianjin to a lesser extent. When the young American reporter Edgar Snow visited Harbin in 1934, he had the following to say about the changes in the city’s atmosphere: Harbin, once delightful, today notorious as a place of living death, the worst-governed city in Manchukuo.

Probably in no other city of the world is life so precarious. Harbin residents, including the 100,000 White and Red Russians, who here bend to the law of the yellow man, risk their lives if they go unarmed anywhere, even in daylight.

Holdups, robberies, murders, kidnappings are common occurrences . . .

Some of the worst criminals are White Russians. Destitute, broken in spirit, unwilling to return to Russia under the Bolsheviks, unable to earn a living in China under the Japanese, they turn to crime, nourished on a diet of drugs, 37 John Stephan, The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Force in Exile, 1925–1945 (New York, Harper Row, 1978); Amleto Vespa, Secret Agent of Japan (Garden City NY, Garden City Publishing, 1941), 78–80, 89, 196, 198–203, 205–18, 238–9, 253, 272.

38 Vespa, Secret Agent, 241. Amleto Vespa was an Italian sympathiser of Mussolini, married to a Chinese woman, and working for Zhang Zuolin; he was compelled by threats to his family to work for the Japanese. See also Bay Area Jews from Harbin, Manchuria, interviews with Eve Naftaly (76, 78–9), Emile Katz (9, 14), and Sara Ossin (unpaginated).

Mrs Ossin: ‘The Japanese were indescribably cruel.’

The Japanese and the Jews

393

which are sold openly in shops infesting the city . . . In Harbin alone there are more than 2000 licensed shops for the sale of opium, heroin and morphine.39

In the new Harbin, the highly feared Tokumu kikan (Special Services Agency) of the Guandong army used the ethnic enclaves of the city to control it. Thus, according to sources that still need to be corroborated, they hired, for example, impoverished Cossacks to watch over the local Russian community. With the fox now guarding the chicken coop, this policy was virtually guaranteed to make everyone unhappy, except a handful of venal malcontents. As Edgar Snow noted, the Japanese police then sold off contracts to operate brothels and drug houses to local thugs and other unsavoury elements in the various sectors of the city, siphoning off a percentage of the take for themselves. That Japanese military take-over of prostitution in the city probably worked fist-in-glove with the rise of sexual slavery now being documented after a long hiatus. Many Japanese visitors to Harbin in the 1930s were horrified by what they found and lamented the fact that there were whole illicit industries thriving in Harbin which would have been completely illegal in Japan.40

39 Edgar Snow, ‘Japan Builds a New Colony’, Saturday Evening Post, 206 (24 February 1934), 81, 84, emphasis added.

40 Sugiyama Kimiko, Harubin monogatari, 136–7; Vespa, Secret Agent, 33–5, 51, 86. Vespa claims that by 1936 there were 172 brothels, 56 opium dens, and 194 licensed narcotics shops in Harbin alone, and that in Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces there were 550 licensed houses of prostitution with 70,000 girls servicing customers (Vespa, Secret Agent, 102). The Harbin figures, although high, are considerably lower than those proffered by Snow.

■ Source: “The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking,” Japan Echo 27.1 (February 2000), 55–57; reprinted in An Overview of the Nanjing Debate (Japan Echo, Inc., 2008), 100–7.

The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking

In 1997 when Iris Chang, an independent journalist, published her book on the Nanjing Massacre of 1937–38, many people felt that an important story from World War II in East Asia would now be told for the first time in English.

That is, until they actually read the book.

The book, entitled The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books), appeared with gushing proclamations on the back cover from an assortment of China scholars and journalists (Frederic Wakeman, Beatrice Bartlett, and Ross Terrill among them) lauding the merits of the book and carried a preface by a Harvard University professor of modern Chinese history (William Kirby). The early reviews in such esteemed places as the New York Times continued to gush praise. Yet, anyone who has ever studied modern Sino-Japanese relations should be able to clearly discern that the book is grievously flawed in many ways. And, sadly, it plays right into the hands of the right-wing extremists in Japan who still deny or strongly downplay the massacre itself.

In her opening chapters Chang attempts to depict the entire history of Japan up to the point of the massacre, and she ultimately reduces it all to bushidō leading to mass murder in the twentieth century. The fact, for instance, that only a tiny fraction of the population was of the samurai class does not enter into her calculations. There are numerous other errors of fact and interpretation in this introduction. The most irritating quirk of this section of the book, though, is Chang’s relentless psychologizing of “the Japanese,” despite her statement that she would offer no “commentary on the Japanese character or on the genetic makeup of a people who would commit such acts” (p. 13). Nevertheless, she relentlessly does comment on the “Japanese psyche,” without questioning if such a thing actually ever existed.

The main body of Chang’s book is divided into three parts: the Japanese assault on the city, the mass murders and rapes; the efforts of the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone to protect Chinese residents; and what she dubs a “second rape” by which postwar Japanese allegedly have been attempting to ignore or cover up the massacres of 1937–38. Her description of the Japanese attack on Nanjing, although occasionally blemished by wild or inaccurate claims, is generally good. Professor Hata Ikuhiko has already pointed out a number of inaccuracies in his essay in Japan Echo (“Nanking

The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking 395

Atrocities: Fact and Fable,” vol. 25, no. 4 [August 1998]). There is no point in repeating his critique, except to say that, while I am not sure if I agree completely with his understanding of the Nanjing Massacre, virtually all his points are well taken.

Chang believes wholeheartedly that the Japanese military developed a master plan for the murder of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in and around Nanjing when it realized that it could not feed them all during a long military confrontation. A statement like that would, it seems to me, require a great deal of proof. To indict any group of mass butchery of this sort demands the highest standards of historical analysis and scrutiny. Chang’s evidence is paltry, based on a discredited source: David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy: How Emperor Hirohito Led Japan into War Against the West (New York: Morrow, 1971). There is evidence of organized executions of POW s, though not on the scale claimed by Chang. The same is true for her argument about victims of gang rape in the city. I will not get into the question of numbers murdered and raped, but Chang spends much time establishing an extraordinarily high figure, again with little evidence. Furthermore, Hata Ikuhiko and other Japanese scholars have recently discovered that many of the photographs that appear in her book are either fabrications or misconstructions.

The Chinese in this book are all depicted as victims, people without agency; the Japanese are depicted solely as aggressors. As she adds a work to the growing body of victim studies, Chang never asks some of the most serious questions of all: How could so many hundreds of thousands of people have been slaughtered by so many fewer Japanese troops? This is by no means to blame the victims for what happened to them, but just to try to understand what transpired in Nanjing. While Chang offers third-rate pop psychology to analyze

“the Japanese,” she is curiously silent on “the Chinese.”

Comparative Victimology

To me, the most offensive argument in the book is her claim that the Nanjing Massacre was a “forgotten holocaust,” even worse than Hitler’s war against the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. She employs a peculiar mathematics to come to this conclusion, but this is not scholarship. It is not informed by any of the massive scholarship in European languages on the Holocaust or comparative genocide; it is pure emotionalism on the part of Ms. Chang. For example, how can we compare the situation in which Jews were murdered en masse in countries in which they were a tiny minority to China, where the Chinese were always in the vast majority vis-à-vis the Japanese aggressors?

396

The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking

I see this book and similarly articulated points of view as indications of a new voice of diaspora Chinese attempting to stake a place for themselves in the cultural melting pot of, especially, the United States. Unfortunately, identity politics in America has of late taken the comparative victimology approach—

namely, if you and your group have a great massacre in your past, then you have a right to speak, and no one can deny you this right. This, I would suggest, is the reason Chang’s book was met with such acclaim by people who should have known better—they were simply afraid to say otherwise. After I published a short, negative review of The Rape of Nanking in the Journal of Asian Studies (vol. 57, no. 3 (August 1998]), I received numerous letters and e-mail messages from scholars and graduate students praising my review and the courage it took to write it, none of whom had had the nerve to say so in public.

By her own admission, Chang relied on numerous others to do her foreign-language research. As it turns out, this includes Chinese materials. No serious historian would ever operate in such a manner. Chang, though, is not a historian, but a journalist. Does this get her off the hook? Some would argue that people writing for a popular market—as opposed to professional historians—

do not have the same responsibility with respect to sources and footnotes and foreign-language documents. I find this argument specious. We can all disagree on what constitutes truth and agree that there may be no hard and fast

“objective truth.” Perhaps because she is just a journalist, Chang should not be faulted for her ignorance of so much of the writing about the very topic of her book. Still, making obvious claims contrary to what is observable and verifiable is not just wrong but perversely so.

One of the major claims that Chang makes that is patently false is that postwar Japanese continue to hide from their past and continue to lie about it. She even goes so far as to claim that research in Japan on the Nanjing Massacre can be “career-threatening, and even life-threatening” (p. 12). Such a statement reveals an astounding level of ignorance, especially inasmuch as she interviewed Ienaga Saburō for her book. Still, she claims that “the Japanese as a nation are still trying to bury the victims of Nanking—not under the soil, as in 1937, but into historical oblivion” (p. 220). Such a crude and dissembling statement does an enormous disservice to the Japanese scholars who, for the past three decades, have been the leading scholars in the world in researching every aspect of the Japanese war in China. It is certainly no crime not to know the Japanese language, but to make such blanket statements despite this ignorance is slanderous. To be sure, there are people in Japan who continue to belittle or downplay the Nanjing Massacre and other aspects of Japanese aggression in China, just as there are crackpots—some evil and others just fools—in the West who deny the existence of the ovens at Auschwitz. There are laws against

The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking 397

such writings in Germany, but elsewhere in the West we tolerate the fringe elements, because living in a democracy demands that we do. The same is true of Japan. Would that China had such problems!

A Sad Day in American Scholarship

How has Chang’s book been received by the print media in the United States?

As I noted earlier, the New York Times carried a laudatory review by Orville Schell, dean of the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. That a journalist was asked to review a work of history is an inexplicable, though common, practice of the American press; perhaps because Chang is herself a self-proclaimed journalist, the New York Times opted for another journalist to write the review. In any event, it was a case of the blind leading the blind. Schell’s review appeared on December 14, 1997, and basically did not review the book. He merely repeated the arguments of the book, implicitly and explicitly agreeing with them all. It was a sad day in American scholarship.

Other reviewers effectively followed suit. There was a critical review in the Wall Street Journal, although the criticism mainly surrounded Chang’s equating the Nanjing Massacre with the Holocaust.

News of the troubles surrounding publication of the Japanese translation of Chang’s book filtered into the American press as well, but with numerous errors of fact. An article in the New York Times on May 20, 1999, “History’s Shadow Foils Nanking Chronicle” by Doreen Carvajal, repeated Chang’s unsubstantiated claims that the publishing house Kashiwa Shobō was bending to pressure from “right-wing Japanese organizations.” Carvajal quoted Chang as saying:

“I think it is safe to assume that they [the people at Kashiwa Shobō] were cracking under pressure from ultranationalist groups. . . . Denial is an integral part of atrocity, and it’s a natural part after a society has committed genocide.

First you kill, and then the memory of killing is killed.” In the first part of her statement, Chang at least admits that she was “assuming” this conclusion—

which allows her to offer no proof. The second part of this statement continues the line of her book—now claiming “genocide” despite the fact that what transpired in Nanjing falls far short of the standard definitions of genocide, including that of the United Nations.

Carvajal went on to state that “Japan has historically been reluctant to take responsibility for wartime atrocities.” It is true, I would argue, that some Japanese have attempted to avoid responsibility on behalf of their country, but that falls far short of evidence to indict an entire country, as the quotation would seem to imply. The article concludes with a quote from Chang: “I want

398

The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking

the Japanese people to know the truth of the Rape of Nanking. I want them to know a side of history that isn’t properly taught in school. Like it or not, this is a part of their history.” This citation reveals another aspect of Chang’s ignorance of Japan: her belief that Japanese textbooks ignore Japanese aggression in World War II and the Rape of Nanjing in particular. Americans have been led to believe, since the textbook incident of the early 1980s, that all Japanese textbooks have been edited to skip over the war years and whitewash Japan’s role in the war. Of course, this is ludicrous and Chang should be ashamed of herself for perpetrating such a myth.

I and a number of other scholars wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in which we protested such a misconstrued presentation of the facts, but they chose not to publish it. Several weeks after the New York Times article appeared, a much more balanced piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times (Sonni Efron, “War Again Is Raging over Japan’s Role in ‘Nanking,’” June 6, 1999).

Here the entire story of Chang’s squabble with Kashiwa Shobō is laid out with much greater attention to the facts. To check the claim by Chang and others that Japanese have written little about Japanese atrocities committed during the war, the reporter went to the National Diet Library in Tokyo and discovered 42 books about the Nanjing Massacre alone. The reporter also pointed out that right-wing critics in Japan have been using the numerous errors in Chang’s book to discredit all discussion of the Nanjing Massacre. This development could be disastrous to the many serious scholars in Japan who have labored long and hard to bring this massacre to the forefront of Japanese national consciousness. Indeed, one right-wing website apparently is filled with attacks on Chang’s book and is quoted as saying: “Even after this, can you still say there was a Nanjing massacre?”

The Iris Chang affair will pass, and scholars in China, Japan, Taiwan, the United States, and elsewhere will continue to study the Nanjing Massacre and related events during World War II. Unfortunately, our impact on the general public will never approach Chang’s. While no serious scholar of modern Chinese or Japanese history accepts its findings, her book has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies. When Oliver Stone’s movie JFK appeared several years ago, it was met with a barrage of criticism for his bizarre conspiracy theories. As a historian my biggest worry was that younger students, who had not lived through the events depicted in the film, would not bother to read about the assassination of John F. Kennedy but would simply go see the movie, be entertained, and accept Stone’s weird rendition of the story. Let us hope that this will not happen with Iris Chang’s book.

A Japanese translation of this article was published in Sekai, November 1999.

■ Source: “The Nanjing Massacre in History,” in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (University of California Press, 2000), 1–9.

**The Nanjing Massacre in History **

More than sixty years have passea since the series of historical events now called the Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Nanjing Atrocity and the Rape of Nanjing). Although historians have analyzed from every conceivable angle other aspects of World War II ranging from the Manchurian Incident of September 18, 1931—now considered the beginning of the war in the Asian theater—to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, this literature pales in comparison with that focused recently on what happened in Nanjing in 1937–38. There are journals and now a liost of Worldwide Web sites devoted solely to the Nanjing Massacre and associated Japanese atrocities committed in East Asia during World War II, and Iris Chang’s recently published book. The Rape of Nanking, has enjoyed astounding sales. At no time dining the six decades since the event have tempers been more inflamed or research on this subject more intense than now. The Massacre and related events must be lifted beyond the popular level, however, to be studied with greater nuance and in consultation with a wider range of sources.

How could such a horrific event lie quietly for so long and only in the past few years explode with such force? How did the Nanjing Massacre become a metonym for Japanese behavior in China over the entire half century before the end of the war? Indeed, how has the Nanjing Massacre become so profoundly entwined with—even emblematic of—contemporary Chinese identity, as Ian Buruma has suggested it has?1

Until recently the atrocities that took place in Nanjing in 1937–38 have not been accorded the importance or status they warrant in modem history, except by scholars. Certainly, this has increasingly become the perception of many Chinese, especially in the diaspora. This lack of attention to the Massacre has been partly attributable to the pride and determined self-reliance of the government in Beijing. The post-World War II world witnessed an extraordinary efflorescence of nationalism throughout East and Southeast Asia, and a concomitant unwillingness to play the victim any longer. After the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance the Chinese Communist regime assiduously rejected foreign aid or assistance of any kind, even in the face of a starving population and natural disasters (such as the Tangshan earthquake) of historically 1 Buruma, “The Afterlife of Anne Frank,” p. 7.

400

The Nanjing Massacre in History

unprecedented proportions. Postwar East Asia’s newly developed self-esteem has militated against countries, blaming others for their own failings. Thus, although the Chinese regime made the Japanese jump through any number of political hoops to reestablish diplomatic and trade relations, it did not demand reparations for the devastation that the Japanese had wrought during the war.

The denial by certain Japanese of the Nanjing Massacre over roughly the past two decades has contributed to a recrudescence of Chinese anger primarily at Japan but also at the Chinese regimes for not encouraging research on the subject earlier and exposing it to the world. The Japanese deniers of the atrocities are themselves part of a recent Japanese revival of nationalism that has cleaved to right-wing politics and rejected any foreign role in the articulation of Japanese identity. What actually happened in Nanjing is almost irrelevant in and of itself to these people—all that matters is that Japan’s image not be stained, and therefore the atrocities must be denied.

With the rift between Taiwan and the People’s Republic after 1949 and with increasing numbers of Chinese living in other Asian countries, the United States, and Canada, the complex issue of Chinese identity has been thrown into question. Unlike other peoples who have been exiled from their homelands and have had to forge an identity within a diaspora, the Chinese have had relatively little experience in this realm until recently. In roughly the past decade the Chinese diaspora has begun to speak in an altogether new voice. Where once it was split between those supporting Taiwan and those supporting the People’s Republic, it now embraces a multiplicity of voices—embracing, for example, Tu Wei-ming’s idea of cultural China, meaning all of those Chinese (living anywhere) who contribute to the growth of Chinese culture. The Communists and the Guomindang no longer control the discourse. As the diaspora searches for a distinct voice with which to articulate its distinct identity, it is finding that many issues have been swept under the carpet by both regimes. The Nanjing Massacre has become the most prominent of these.

The role that the Chinese diaspora has played in attempting to return the Nanjing Massacre to center stage may be attributable to yet another factor.

One by-product of the modem era has been a kind of cultural deracination.

Despite its obvious merits, the melting pot has led to the unfortunate result that few of us living in diaspora are well grounded in the sources, languages, and histories of the cultures putatively our own. Many are returning to a search for an identity without the tools necessary to acquire it, often latching onto negative events In their history as elemental to their identity. Many Jews, no longer knowledgeable of their own traditions, languages, and texts as were their grandparents or great-grandparents, who learned them as a matter of course, cling to the state of Israel and the sanctity of the Holocaust as basic to their identity. Similarly, many Chinese in the diaspora with considerably

The Nanjing Massacre in History

401

less knowledge of their own traditions and history than their forebears have seized on the Nanjing Massacre as their own. Why choose a negative instance?

Sadly, there are enough great massacres and atrocities to go around, and such an event committed against a people simply because of who they are endows them with an identity perceived as unassailable and irreproachable; it immediately links all members of an ethnic group in victimhood and ties them to their culture, albeit in a superficial way.

These and other factors have conspired to turn attention, especially among diaspora Chinese, back to the events of the war, and the atrocities committed by the Japanese in that war have often been wrenched out of context and elevated to untold heights. Of course, the Chinese are not the only people who have done this. Many Jews have done the same with the Nazi Judaicide of the war, as have Armenians with the Turkish massacres of 1915 and African Americans with the long history of slavery and discrimination in the New World. Although magnanimous citizens everywhere have been sympathetic to the pain and suffering of all peoples, only the attempted genocide of the Jews has thus far achieved virtually sacrosanct status. One can deny or downplay the Turkish massacres, as the Turkish government regularly does, and go on with ones life. No one denies slavery, but one can deny that the experience was thoroughly nightmarish from beginning to end, as Dinesh D’Souza has recently attempted to do, without derailing ones career.2 By contrast, deniers of Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps are immediately and justifiably relegated to pariah status, consigned at best to fringe groups, by all thinking human beings.

Of all these massive, man-made atrocities, only in the case of the Nanjing Massacre has a whole school—actually, several—developed that completely denies or significantly downplays it. How can this be? How can established Japanese intellectuals in many fields—though, importantly, few if any in Chinese or Japanese history—buy into the idea that the Nanjing Massacre is a phantom, an illusion, even a ruse concocted by the Chinese and their allies to ruin Japan’s reputation? How can such people still defend Japanese mass murders of fifty and sixty years ago as the acts of “Asia’s liberator”?

Frankly, it boggles the mind. More important, it also demonstrates that each of these mass atrocities of modem times is historically and morally distinctive. Lumping them together may serve some emotional end but it ultimately confuses rather than illuminates history, for this is one case in which comparative history may not serve us well. Asserting uniqueness does not mean that we cannot suggest a typology of such mass atrocities; it just means that we should not collapse them. Underscoring specific contexts in which such 2 D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society.

402

The Nanjing Massacre in History

massacres occur contributes much more to the furtherance of our knowledge of the events themselves than does a cataloguing of superficial similarities or a use of borrowed and sensational appellations.

The three chapters that comprise this volume, each based on years of individual research, serve this end of contextualizing the Nanjing Massacre. The authors and editor presented a panel at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in March 1997 and then decided to compile the present volume. Each chapter considers a different aspect of the history and historiography of the Nanjing Massacre in China and Japan. Although the following three chapters examine some contemporaneous reports documenting the atrocities themselves, the bulk of the material they analyze dates from the end of World War II and the war crimes trials that ensued. They examine, in the kind of detail we have hitherto not seen in English, the voluminous Chinese and Japanese literature on this momentous event of 1937–38. Each attempts to answer the kinds of questions raised here.

It is a telling state of affairs historiographically that I must say in this introduction that none of us doubts that a great massacre occurred in and around Nanjing from December 1937 through February 1938. These essays are by no means devoted to disproving the claims of the deniers, however. We take for granted that those claims have been made for an assortment of unsavory political reasons or misguided emotional or nationalistic ones. To grant the existence of such an atrocity, though, only begs the question. Far more important to our purpose here is a consideration of how the Nanjing Massacre has been used both by those who aver and by those who deny it—that is, how it has been appropriated as an ideological tool or for nationalist mobilization.

In particular, the chapters by Mark Eykholt and Takashi Yoshida confront the Nanjing Massacre in contemporary historiography in order to see the uses to which it has been put.

We have also refrained from engaging in what I call the “numbers game”—

the practice of estimating and seriously debating the numbers of those killed and those raped in the Nanjing Massacre, in which certain Chinese push the figures higher and higher while certain Japanese do everything within their power to push the figures lower and lower. There are two different logics behind this game. The first is to render the Nanjing Massacre as gruesome an event as ever witnessed in world history and thus gamer international attention and sympathy. In her recent book, for example. Iris Chang explicitly claims that the Nanjing Massacre was even more deadly than the European Holocaust.3

3 Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.

The Nanjing Massacre in History

403

The second logic is to normalize the events and portray them as understandable actions given the bloody circumstances of the war then underway, as some Japanese critics have attempted to do, purposefully taming the horrors surrounding the mass murders and offering them no special place in history.

While those Chinese following the first logic now argue that more than 300,000

were killed and 80,000 raped, Japanese following the second argue that fewer than 100 were killed and very few raped. The contributors to this volume are all of a mind that a great massacre occurred, and whether 200,000 people were killed or 240,000 does not alter the dimensions of the horror.

No amount of discussion between the contending parties is likely to bridge this gap. Indeed, on a number of occasions in Japan advocates of these two views have confronted one another, made their respective cases, and uniformly failed to convince their opponents of a single item. In part, this inability to reach consensus results from the different concerns motivating these groups.

Scholars of modern Chinese and Japanese history irrespective of their political views—virtually all admit that a massacre occurred in the Nanjing area, though they may differ on numbers. Others involved in the debate—be they scholars from other fields or other professionals—seem all but oblivious to what constitutes historical fact. This is not a methodological or philosophical difference but an ideological one. Deniers of the Nanjing Massacre have acquired the strength of numbers to ignore the facts, the photos, and the personal memoirs. Their concern is with Japanese national pride and self-confidence, not with redressing a historical wrong.

In the final chapter in this volume Daqing Yang offers a more contemplative look at our subject in an effort to identify how we all might come to, if not agreement on what occurred in Nanjing sixty years ago, then at least some sort of consensus on the parameters of the event. I am less sanguine than he, but his reflections (those, incidentally, of a Chinese from Nanjing) make for deeply compelling reading. He confronts the difficult issues that only such a controversial and contested event can raise: history and memory, atrocity and amnesia, and the capacities of human beings to transcend nationality in the writing of history.

The aims of this book are several. We hope to place Chinese and Japanese historiography on the events that transpired in Nanjing into their contemporary settings in China (and Taiwan) and Japan, and to offer a more nuanced view of contemporary agendas. We examine what makes the Nanjing Massacre unique in modem Sino-Japanese (and world) history and why it has spawned such debate and emotions. Offering the English-reading public access to the voluminous material that has been published in East Asian languages over the

404

The Nanjing Massacre in History

past sixty years on this event, this book will serve to elucidate the complexity of details in the events surrounding the Nanjing Massacre as they are becoming better known in the English-speaking world.

The most important contribution this volume will make, however, will be to lay before its readers the highly complex debates in China and Japan since the war, and to attempt to explain why various schools of thought have come to the fore and why the debate has recently become so ferocious. This requires unpacking “Japan” (and “China”), identifying interest groups, ideological points of view, schools of thought, scholarly rifts, personal antagonisms, and political intrusions into scholarship, and dropping facile characterizations based solely on nationality. Far too often, for example, Japanese reluctance fully to admit; the role of the Japanese military in the horrific events on the Mainland during the war has led uninformed critics to blame “the Japanese” for historical amnesia, yet much or the most advanced scholarship in the world on virtually every aspect of the war, atrocities included, comes from Japanese scholars.

Although there axe many different Japanese constituencies, there remain certain compelling reasons to examine these issues from a national perspective as well. It was the Japanese army that invaded China and perpetrated the Nanjing Massacre, and it was Chinese soldiers and civilians, abandoned by their own army and government, who fell victim to the Japanese military. As a result, to this day Chinese write from the point of view of victims and their descendants; the events are being reclaimed by those distant from them often for reasons of changing identity. Japanese tend either to deny the events in an attempt to preserve a positive legacy for contemporary Japanese, or they write out of a deeply felt sense that Japanese wartime actions, although impossible to exonerate, may somehow be atoned for by detailed scholarship exposing all manner of atrocities including vivisection, use of poison gas, and chemical warfare. At the international level, the issues here have become the stuff of political and diplomatic controversy over the past two decades, exacerbating Sino-Japanese tensions.

The Chinese and Japanese sides of these issues form the basis, respectively, for the analyses of Mark Eykholt’s and Takashi Yoshida’s chapters in this volume. As they demonstrate, the political and intellectual environments in China and Japan are altogether different, to say nothing of the increasingly vocal role played by members of the Chinese diaspora.

In attempting to set these issues in a larger historiographical and philosophical context, Daqing Yang raises a number of questions about how a scholar (or a general reader) is to come to terms with an event so horrifying that it defies ratiocination. How do we make sense of an event rooted, at least at some level, in insanity? A number of the questions raised in this book are also the concern of

The Nanjing Massacre in History

405

Holocaust scholars. Although their writings may offer historiographical guidance or correctives, the Nanjing Massacre is best studied on its own ground in China and Japan in the context of World War II in East Asia. When the atrocities associated with the toponym of Nanjing are situated within the context of the war and the debates about them situated in the historiography of the postwar period, then we will have gone a long way toward placing this massacre in history and historiography.

Bibliography

Buruma, Ian. “The Afterlife of Anne Frank,” in New York Review of Books 46:3

(19 February 1999).

Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic, 1997).

D’Souza, Dinesh. The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995).

■ Source: “Integrating into Chinese Society: A Comparison of the Japanese Communities of Shanghai and Harbin,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930, ed. Sharon A. Minichiello (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 45–69.

Integrating into Chinese Society: A Comparison of the Japanese Communities of Shanghai and Harbin

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese began settling in what were to become famous as the two most “international” cities in East Asia, Shanghai and Harbin. The Japanese communities that formed in these multicultural metropolises varied widely as they faced different issues and developed within different contexts. Writing in 1933 and 1934, the renowned journalist Edgar Snow cut through the “internationalist” hyperbole and inadvertently shed light on the question of ethnic integration within Shanghai and Harbin.

Harbin, once delightful, today notorious as a place of living death, the worst-governed city in Manchukuo.

Some of the worst criminals are White Russians. Destitute, broken in spirit, unwilling to return to Russia under the Bolsheviks, unable to earn a living in China under the Japanese, they turn to crime, nourished on a diet of drugs, which are sold openly in shops infesting the city. . . . In Harbin alone there are more than 2000 licensed shops for the sale of opium, heroin and morphine. (Snow 1934, 81, 84. Emphasis added.)

Within Greater Shanghai dwell nearly 3,000,000 people. The vast majority is of course Chinese. The last censors notes list 50 different foreign nationalities with a total of 48,000. . . . To find men of all creeds and colors is not so phenomenal perhaps; New York, Paris, Berlin and Vienna can point to a medley of races. But in Shanghai there is for the most part no mixture; that is the phenomenon. Here, generation after generation, the British have stayed British, the Americans have remained “100 percenters.”

In Paris the foreigner enjoys learning French; in Berlin he must acquire German; in New York the American dialect is considered essential. But in Shanghai he does not learn Chinese, although it is the language of the city’s 3,000,000, and beyond them, of the hundreds of millions from whom he

Integrating into Chinese Society

407

hopes, with a little surprise, to extract a few coppers. It is believed that the study of Chinese weakens the fiber of the mind, and the few foreigners who do master the language are pointed out as eccentrics; significant smiles are exchanged behind their backs. . . .

[I]n Shanghai [the foreigner] . . . is immune from all but his own consular jurisdiction. . . . Many believe that it is advisable to have as little contact with the Chinese as possible. (Snow 1933, 173–174; Takatsuna 1995, 98–99)

Both cities were hailed throughout the early decades of the twentieth century—and they have been so remembered in the memoir literature since—

as the ”Paris of the East,” because of their ”international” (read European) flavor. As one Japanese journalist wrote in 1940: “Harbin! . . . International capital of northern Manchuria amid the swirling eddies of extravagant and romantic adventure, where past and future play a zigzagged symphony. . . . What a wonderful place” (Tachibana 1940, 264, 266). Where else in East Asia could one on a daily basis brush shoulders with so many foreigners, dine in foreign restaurants, and shop in foreign stores? In fact, Shanghai and Harbin were probably far more cosmopolitan than Paris at the time.

The central question I address here is how tie Japanese fit into Shanghai and Harbin, if indeed they tried. What roles did they play in these international communities? How well integrated were they into their economic, social, political, and cultural life? In the period preceding the concerted military invasion of the 1930s, what role did these cities play for the Japanese? Edgar Snow’s words offer a hint. Shanghai was a mosaic world of different ethnicities living side by side but having as little to do with one another as possible, while Harbin was a melting pot, more a city of pioneers whose residents, even the Chinese, were newcomers and mixed far more in good times and bad than in Shanghai.

I begin with a look at the origins of the two Japanese communities, then looks at the sorts of occupations Japanese residents of Shanghai and Harbin undertook before examining the communal organization they established in China.

I focus on the politics of the Japanese communities and their interactions with the surrounding Chinese and conclude by looking at their relations with the Japanese homeland.

Origins of the Two Japanese Communities

The Japanese were the last of the foreign powers to become a major presence in China. By the time the first Japanese vessel of the modem era, the Senzaimaru, docked at the port of Shanghai in 1862 (nineteen years after it

408

Integrating into Chinese Society

officially opened), Britain, the United States, Holland, and France were already established there (See Fogel 1994b, 79–94; Haruna 1987, 555–601; Wang 1989, 140–156; Satō 1984, 67–96; Qiao 1989, 43–52). Only seven Japanese had already settled in Shanghai when diplomatic ties were concluded in 1871, but after the creation of a Japanese consulate the next year, major Japanese companies began setting up branches there. Through the early Meiji era, the population grew slowly and became roughly two-thirds women, with the men in a variety of business concerns and the women largely in the prostitution trade. By 1890 the resident Japanese population had reached 644, and men now first outnumbered women (339 to 305). The population approached 1,000 on the eve of the first Sino-Japanese War. During the war the overwhelming majority of Japanese withdrew, but most returned following Japan’s victory. The Treaty of Shimonoseki concluding that conflict provided that Japan could build factories on Chinese soil, and as a result Japanese became more deeply involved in the Chinese economy. In late 1904 the resident Japanese population surpassed 3,300 and continued to rise much more rapidly from 1905 (Zhu 1995, 401, 406; Takatsuna 1995, 119–121; Katō 1974, 316–317; Yonezawa 1938–1939). Throughout the Meiji years the great majority of Japanese in Shanghai came from Kyushu and western Honshu.

Immigration to Harbin followed a somewhat different course. Although Harbin was home to the earliest Japanese settlement in Manchuria, before it even existed Vladivostok served as a source of goods from abroad; it was also Russia’s mirror on the Pacific. Vladivostok fell within the Maritime Province, originally part of Qing territory, but it was ceded to Russia in 1860. It was then little more than a fishing village, and the whole region, as one source puts it, had more animals than people.1 By 1877 there were some 80 Japanese living in Vladivostok, most involved in the brothel business serving the many visiting sailors; several years later the 140–150 Japanese, all from Nagasaki, had several restaurants and several laundries there. By 1890 there were 392 Japanese in Vladivostok with a 3:2 female-to-male ratio, unlike most frontier settlements, which tend to be predominantly male, but intriguingly like the contemporaneous experience in Shanghai. On March 31, 1891, the Trans-Siberian Railway began construction, and Vladivostok was teeming with the businesses involved and the new construction on the docks. Among the laborers mobilized for the effort, some 500–600 Japanese were recruited from northern Kyushu villages. As the century came to a close, the Japanese population reached 1,000; communal institutions were beginning to emerge, but a preponderant involvement in prostitution remained (one source indicates that there were 1 Sugiyama 1985, 11, citing an 1892 work by Kawakami Toshihiko, future consul of Harbin, Urajiosutoku.

Integrating into Chinese Society

409

more than 200 young women working as prostitutes in Vladivostok in the mid 1880s) (Sugiyama 1985, 14–15, 18–24, 27**–**28).

As the Ussuri Line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, linking Vladivostok with Khabarovsk, neared completion in the fall of 1896, Russia and China signed a secret treaty allowing Russia to spread rail lines across Manchuria. This became the Chinese Eastern Railway (cer), and in the spring of 1897 a construction authority for the cer was established in Vladivostok. A base of operations close to a river was still needed for the transportation of materials, and to that end a sparsely populated site near the Sungari River was selected. The necessary materials were brought by sea from Europe to Vladivostok, then by rail to Khabarovsk, and finally down tie Sungari by ship to this site. The first construction team of twenty men with a Cossack guard of fifty left Vladivostok in March 1898, arriving a month later at a site to be known as Staryi Kharbin (Old Harbin). They found there a small settlement of roughly twenty huts where the natives were producing low-grade alcohol and growing opium on the moist banks of the Sungari. They purchased it all and began the massive railway construction efforts that would eventually employ as many as two hundred thousand Chinese who migrated north for the work. The first project entailed building a station and narrow-gauge track from the wharf to the center of the former local settlement, and this transport route later became the main thoroughfare of Harbin, known as Kitaiskaia Ulitsa (Chinese Street) in Russian and Zhongyang dajie (Central Boulevard) in Chinese. In less than two decades, this avenue would become the heart of non-Chinese Harbin, lined with a wide assortment of shops selling the latest fashions and foods from around the world. Russian city planners dubbed the new site Posyolok Sungari (Sungari Settlement), but in a Japanese work introducing Manchuria published in 1904, it is referred to as Harbin, and thus the name must have come into popular usage within that six-year period. Always Kharbin in Russian and Ha-er-bin (Harbin) in Chinese, it was more often than not Harupin in Japanese writings of the late Meiji and Taishō years.2

2 The Chinese recently have come up with some far-fetched theories claiming that Harbin goes back to the late eleventh century, thereby predating the Russian settlement by many centuries. They have as yet presented little substantive evidence. See Clausen and Thøgersen 1995, 3–4, 12–16. On the early Harbin and the cer, see Quested 1982, 32, 100–101, 129–131; Koshizawa 1989, 13–24; Matani 1981, 1. There have been any number of theories about the meaning and origin of the name Harbin, none of them particularly persuasive. Five of these are summarized in Sugiyama 1985, 52–54. A Japanese guidebook of 1924 discusses three theories but declines to take a stand; see Harubin no gainen 1924, 1. The most recent theory, not cited in Sugiyama, is that of Guan Chenghe, in his Haerbin kao; he argues that it is from a Jurchen word meaning “honored” and that the city dates from 1097 (see Li 1980, 3).

410

Integrating into Chinese Society

In a 1932 essay the famous writer Yokomitsu Riichi recounted the story of the first Japanese, a young woman named Miyamoto Chiyo, who settled in Harbin (Yokomitsu 1932, 2–17). She had moved from her native Kumamoto to Vladivostok in 1888 at the age of eighteen with her younger brother, making her living there as an assistant to the only Russian doctor in the city. When the doctor moved to Harbin in 1898, she accompanied him.

Because of her close association with the Russians, by century’s end she was placed in charge of all Japanese immigration matters. At the time of the Boxer Rebellion, Sino-Russian border tensions mounted; in July of 1900 the Russian Army routed or killed the entire Chinese population of Blagoveshchensk, some three thousand to four thousand persons. Many Japanese residents fled Harbin for Khabarovsk and elsewhere, as did many Chinese. Yokomitsu reported that only twenty-two of Harbin’s Japanese residents remained during the mass withdrawal, but that by 1901 the Japanese population had rebounded to more than three hundred again. At that point Miyamoto could no longer handle all the paperwork by herself, and a Japanese residents association, the Sōkakai (Sungari Association), was formed, another indication that by 1901, at least, the toponym Harbin had not yet been firmly established. By late 1902 there were 514 Japanese out of a total population of roughly thirty thousand in Harbin, according to a Sōkakai survey; there were roughly seven thousand Japanese throughout Manchuria at this time. There was another mass withdrawal from Harbin and elsewhere in Manchuria to Japan in 1903–1904 on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, though Harbin remained untouched by the fighting (Sugiyama 1985, 30–32, 49–50, 56–60).3

Thus, the Japanese population of Harbin, which only surpassed its prewar figure in late 1907 when it reached 627, was vastly inferior to the Shanghai figure, which was nearing six thousand at the same time. Japanese residents in Shanghai had already attained a more gender-balanced population and a more professionally balanced one as well by the turn of the century, but these processes would take much longer in Harbin. Despite these differences and the fact that the surrounding populations were ethnically dissimilar, the two communities began to produce interestingly similar patterns of settlement and communal institutions that offer us a handle for comparing their integration into the two larger communities.

3 On Harbin and the Russo-Japanese War, see Yanagida 1986, 97–130. Chiyo’s sister Fuino gave birth to a daughter in September 1900, the first Japanese born in Harbin.

Integrating into Chinese Society

411

Occupational Integration: Stores, Shops, Businesses, and Other Lines of Work

The most remarkable quality of the entire Japanese enterprise in Shanghai was how extrinsic it was to the city itself and how much life was fashioned to resemble home. From the second decade of the twentieth century, Japanese began informally referring to their adopted city as “Nagasaki ken, Shanhai shi.”

This offhand remark indicates the extent to which most Japanese lived in a Japanese style, as fish and vegetables arrived from Nagasaki on a daily basis and were sold in the local markets. “It was as if a comer of the Nagasaki market had moved,” noted one Shanghai Japanese from Nagasaki; and, as if to second the point made by Edgar Snow: “Japanese residents in Shanghai lived there oblivious to the fact that they were in a foreign countiy” (Takatsuna 1995, 125).

While the Japanese community of Shanghai was a distinct ethnic enclave, it nonetheless came to represent an economic entity worth dying to protect.

“Nagasaki-Shanghai” finds a fascinating parallel in the following statement of the famous travel writer and novelist, Muramatsu Shōfū:

The Japanese have no intention whatsoever of throwing away fifty years of work that have gone into the building of‚ “Shanghiai-Japan.” The Yangzi trade runs annually to five or six hundred million yen and often more than seven. As Manchuria is Japan’s lifeline, Yangzi trade is Japans line of nourishment, and it will under no circumstances throw this away. There is no reason to relinquish such great interests even if it means fighting.

We must come to the aid of the 30,000, [Japanese] residents of Shanghai.

We cannot let them die before our very eyes. This is our responsibility both as a state and as a government.4

Although the Treaty of Shimonoseki enabled them to establish a concession area, the Japanese never staked that claim in Shanghai, as they did in Tianjin and Hangkou. The great majority remained in the International Settlement; of the 26,208 Japanese living in Shanghai in 1935, 19,651 (75 percent) resided in the International Settlement. Even before the first Sino-Japanese War, Japanese were settling in the Hongkou (Hongkew) quarter of the settlement, soon to become known informally as the “Japanese Concession” or “Japantown”5

4 Mato (Demon Capital), published in 1923, as cited in Takatsuna 1995, 131. On Muramatsu’s writings about China, see Otani 1989, 93–108; Fogel 1996, chap. 9.

5 These figures come from Katō 1974, 316; slightly lower figures for 1935 can be found in Takatsuna 1995, 121; slightly different figures as well can be found in Peattie 1989, 170. The

412

Integrating into Chinese Society

The first Japanese to move to Shanghai were principally government officials and independent businessmen who ran their own shops usually in the service sector. There were as well a few who worked as servants in the homes of Westerners. Through the end of the nineteenth century, women outnumbered men by a large margin and most worked as prostitutes for foreigners or as entertainers employed by Japanese businessmen to establish foreign contacts. In 1885, there were more than twenty Japanese-owned brothels and “teahouses”

in Shanghai. The larger Japanese concerns began to set up branches in the Meiji era—Mitsubishi in 1875, Mitsui Bussan in 1877, Yokohama Specie Bank in 1893—but they did not begin to exert a strong influence until after the Sino-Japanese War and especially after World War I (Zhu 1995, 406, 410; Takatsuna 1995, 120; Peattie 1989, 183).

Whereas the major Japanese banks set up branches along the Bund, mid-level stores and trading firms were located in the French concession. Smaller shops were closer to the area in which most Japanese lived in Hongkou, primarily along North Sichuan Road, Wenjianshi Road, and Wusong Road. A December 1927 survey noted that Japanese were 47 percent of the entire foreign population of Shanghai. Those who worked for the larger concerns and the major banks were dubbed the kaisha-ha, or company clique, whereas those who operated smaller businesses and stores in Hongkou or Zhabei were known as the dochaku-ha, or “native” clique. This distinction undoubtedly reflects the fact that the former group were rotated in and out of Shanghai on two-or three-year terms, while the latter more often than not had settled in Shanghai.

Through the Taishō years, there were ten Japanese-run ryokan, some twenty Japanese geshuku, and twenty-four Japanese restaurants and brothels, many of these owned by migrants from Kyushu.

One-fourth of all Japanese in Shanghai were directly tied to the cotton textile industry, and many more did business with it. These companies grew in tandem with the development of Japanese capitalism. Through the Taishō

years, Japan gradually replaced Germany and France in economic influence in Shanghai and by the end of the 1920s reached a par with the United States and Great Britain, reflected in the fact that it had the largest number of foreign banks in Shanghai. From 1912, with the establishment of the Republic, Japanese banks began making loans to China and gained a toehold in the Chinese financial world through investments in Chinese railways and the like. Indeed, as the Japanese presence in the Chinese economy grew stronger—according to a 1915

survey, for example, there were seventy-five Japanese companies in Shanghai overall population of Shanghai at this time was roughly 3.6 million, making the Japanese 0.7 percent of the total.

Integrating into Chinese Society

413

worth more than 50,000 yen in capital—the Japanese there began to see it as an intrinsic and essential part of their world (Zhu 1995, 412–414; Duus 1989, 65–100; Katō 1974, 318–319; Takatsuna 1995, 121–125; see also Nakamura 1973, 91–96).

The large Japanese economic stake in the Shanghai market certainly helps to explain the willingness of local Japanese, as the citation from Muramatsu Shōfū indicates, to square off and confront the Chinese nose-to-nose. Excluding Manchuria, Shanghai accounted for one-half of Japans trade with China; there were immense investments to protect in the textile industry and with the larger trading companies. These factors, of course, also played an important role in producing anti-imperialist Chinese nationalism, and they served as well to strengthen Japanese resolve to defend their assets (Banno 1989, 314–329; Jordan 1991).

Unlike Shanghai, where each ethnic group lived in a small universe unto itself and enjoyed extraterritoriality, Harbin remained in Russian hands, for all intents and purposes ruled as a fiefdom of the cer by its head, Dmitri Khorvat; and this in spite of the concessions won by Japan after victory in the war. Unlike Shanghai where a Japanese consulate was opened as early as 1872, Miyamoto Chiyo’s work was not turned over to consular officials in Harbin until 1907. The new infusion of capital from Japan from 1907 helped revive Harbin’s sluggish economy. That year marked the beginning of a sustained return of Japanese to the city following the withdrawal at the time of the Russo-Japanese War.

Mitsubishi and Mitsui both opened branches in 1907 as well.

As early as 1905 there were five competing companies plying the sea lanes between Japanese ports and Vladivostok. In December of 1907 the Japanese population in Harbin reached 627, superseding its prewar figure. Even before the war, larger enterprises had been founded by Japanese in Harbin, such as Tokunaga Shōkai, Suzuki Nichi-Man Shokai, and Moritomo Shōkai. A local survey of Japanese businesses in Vladivostok, for example, showed that there were thirty general stores, seventy-five laundries, thirty-six barbers, twenty-seven cobblers, thirty-six carpenters, and sixty-two families engaged in the kashiseki, or “rooms for rent” business, clearly a euphemism for houses of prostitution.

World War I brought prosperity to Harbin, as trade exports rose dramatically and, for example, the number of oil refineries rose from seven to twenty. During the war years Japanese contacts throughout Siberia rose to make it second only to the United States for the volume of its trade with Japan.6 Yet, even as the 6 Higashi Kochiku 1918, 184–186; Manshū nippō, December 18, 1907, 1, article on the civil administration of Harbin and the cer authorities mentions the corning to Harbin of Mitsui; Sugiyama 1985, 64–68, 75–78, 90–92.

414

Integrating into Chinese Society

Japanese population of Harbin continued to grow and mature as a group during the Taishō years, and as fresh business opportunities emerged, the number of Japanese involved in one end or another of prostitution remained extraordinarily high.7

The Bolshevik Revolution caused a major shift in power relations within the city. Struggles within the cer between Khorvat and the railway workers were exacerbated when local Chinese authorities began to demand the recovery of foil sovereignty over the region and the railroad. From this point forward, while Russian culture continued to exercise a profound impact on the non-Chinese quarters of the city, Russian control in Harbin began a slide from which it was never to recover. Even as the Russian presence in Harbin continued to grow, in fact explode with the Influx of White Russian refugees after 1917, they no longer enjoyed tsarist support and many were reduced to poverty or worse. Harbin was still a city of pioneers—Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and others—a new city undergoing far more change and flax than Shanghai in these years.

Following the war, the joint powers invaded Siberia in an effort to defeat the Bolsheviks, but by the end of 1918 all of the other powers had withdrawn.

Japanese forces stayed for more than four years, despite worries on the part of the local communities in Siberia and the Chinese northeast of exacerbated tensions with, the Russians and Chinese. There were by now thousands of Japanese expatriates (and far more Koreans now under Japanese hegemony) scattered through the towns and cities of Northeast Asia and along the Trans-Siberian Railway. When the decision was reached for the Japanese troops to pull out, many protested vociferously through the local Japanese press against such a move for fear of Soviet reprisals, in part at least because the Japanese army and navy had been so closely associated with propping up petty White Russian dictators such as Grigorii Semyonov.8

Nonetheless, as the Russian emigré population tripled during the Russian civil war years to 124,000 by 1921, the Japanese population also rose 75 percent 7 Harubin tsūshin, February 1, 1923, 3. This report contains a survey of the local population, breakdowns by the suburbs of Harbin, and a detailed occupational breakdown. By this time, the men outnumbered the women roughly five-to-four (Song 1995, 104–107). There is a fascinating breakdown of the businesses owned and operated by Russians in Harbin in Urajio nippō, August 10, 1922, 3. With the exception of the brothel business, Russians (in larger numbers, to be sure) were engaged in many of the same sorts of affairs in the city.

8 See the appeal (May 1, 1918) to the Japanese government signed by the heads of the Japanese Residents Associations of Vladivostok, Harbin, Iman, Nikolsk, and Spassk-Dal’nyi, cautioning the authorities on the use of military force in the region (reprinted in Shinobu 1951, 483–

484; Harubin shōhin chinretsukan shūhō 2.17, July 23, 1924; Manshū tokuhon, 1935, 356–358; Hirayama 1932, 236–238; Kazama 1938, 254–255; Harubin tsūshin, March 6, 1923, 3).

Integrating into Chinese Society

415

over the same period to 3,545, and by far the largest segment of the local population, the Chinese, rose from 170,000 in 1917 to more than 315,000 by early 1922.

Despite nominal control of the city now in Chinese hands, each of the local ethnic groups basically managed its own affairs. Each created its own array of institutions to protect its constituent population. Unlike Shanghai, though, there was greater interaction among the various communities.

Communal Organizations and the Japanese Residents Association Like many ethnic groups who have settled away from the familiar surroundings of home, the Japanese throughout continental Asia established a panoply of communal institutions to organize the local community; mobilize it when need be, and see to the everyday social, educational, economic, and religious needs of its people. In this regard the Harbin and Shanghai experiences were similar. Already in the 1870s, the Japanese consulate in Shanghai took the lead in establishing communal institutions, building a Japanese cemetery in 1873 that was placed in the hands of the local Higashi honganji (founded 1874) in 1877. Control over the cemetery land was later passed to the Japanese Residents Association (jra), which was founded in 1907 in Shanghai. The Higashi honganji also led the way with the establishment of medical facilities and clinics; by late 1907 there were seven Japanese hospitals in Shanghai and a Japanese Medical Association of Shanghai (Shanhai Nihon Ikai) was founded in May 1902. In 1869, even before diplomatic relations were normalized, the Japanese government lent a hand in the creation of schools in Shanghai. As more schools emerged over the course of the 1870s, they exerted a major influence on the permanence of the local Japanese community. The first school for young women was built in 1876, at a time when there were only forty-five Japanese in the city. That year also witnessed the establishment of a Japanese foundling home in Shanghai (Zhu 1995, 421–422, 426–427; Katō 1974, 319–320).

The jra of Shanghai (Shanhai Nihon Kyoryū Mindan) fell directly under the management of the consulate and hence the Gaimushō and exercised considerable local authority within the Japanese community, in large measure because the Japanese enjoyed extraterritoriality in China. It was joined by the Japanese Street Federation of Shanghai (Shanhai Nihonjin Kakuro Rengōkai) and the neighborhood associations (chōnaikai)t which served at various levels to both protect and mobilize the entire Japanese community. By supporting local institutions and by speaking on behalf of local Japanese interests, the jra served to strengthen the internal cohesion of the local community. Soon after its founding, the elite stratum among the Japanese gained control over

416

Integrating into Chinese Society

the jra. Among their formal duties were maintaining the Japanese volunteer brigade with its responsibility for guarding the International Settlement, maintaining jra-run schools, running the local cemetery, and seeing to the preservation of hygiene and the prevention of disease. Schools were its particular preserve, with more than 80 percent of the jra budget devoted to education.

In 1908 there were 225 Japanese children in these schools; by 1931 there were 3,345. Over the course of the Taishō years, this number surpassed 2,000, as the percentage of students in the total Japanese population also rose. This change reflected the greater number of entire family units living in Shanghai; earlier, Japanese men had frequently moved to Shanghai alone (Takatsuna 1995, 125–

127; Zhu 1995, 428). Also, the Tō-A Dōbun Shoin (East Asian Common Culture Institute), a Japanese postsecondary institution of higher learning, graduated more than 3,600 students between 1900 and 1945 (see below).

The street and neighborhood associations became essential to the fabric of the local community. When the Twenty-one Demands were delivered to the Yuan Shikai government in 1915, anti-Japanese boycotts broke out across urban China. A large number of Japanese left for home, and this confrontation provided the opportunity for the formation of six neighborhood associations in Shanghai. Together they worked with the jra and the consulate to protect local Japanese as well as to streamline the operations of local communal institutions. In 1917 six more neighborhood associations were set up. At the time of the May Thirtieth Incident (1925), they were mobilized to act as effective policing agencies. By the end of the period of Japanese residency in Shanghai, there were altogether forty such associations. The overarching organization that managed the many neighborhood groups was the Street Federation. Unlike the jra, which was controlled by the kaisha-ha, the neighborhood and street associations were controlled by the dochaku-ha, reflecting the sentiments of the bulk of the local Japanese population.

These organizations reflect a sense of isolation, unease, perhaps even alienation among the Japanese, all of which influenced their degree of integration into the community of Shanghai. As a group they tended to reproduce as many of the institutions of home as they possibly could. In the face of Chinese nationalism directed against Japan, as was to occur so frequently during the period under study, they remained on the whole staunchly nationalistic themselves. At the time of the Northern Expedition in 1927, fear that the forces of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) would do harm to Japanese interests inspired the formation of a Shanghai branch of the Reserve Officers Association from among the jra members with military experience. Indeed, these organizations sadly provided the organizational structure for the massacres of Chinese who were rounded up on the pretext of being “plainclothes guerrillas” at the time of

Integrating into Chinese Society

417

the first Shanghai Incident in January 1932. As tensions grew through the late 1920s and 1930s and Shanghai continued to be a major anti-Japanese center, despite both Japanese and Guomindang massacres, the jra simply grew more intransigent. It led the call to punish China and feverishly demanded that the Japanese army defend local interests (Takatsuna 1995, 127–131).9

The Harbin community, albeit smaller in numbers, produced an impressive array of communal institutions as well. Although Harbin generally followed Valdivostok’s lead in most civil matters, Harbin had formed a residents association, the Sōkakai, as early as 1901; Vladivostok followed suit in March 1902 at a time when there were 2,875 Japanese in the city (and a total of 4,334

throughout Siberia and the Russian Far East). The mass evacuation of Japanese from the northeast over the next two years left few behind to run communal affairs. As Harbin’s Japanese population began to return to prewar levels at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the first Japanese elementary school was opened, with all of four children, in 1909 in a room at the local Nishi honganji; it did not have its own building until June 1923, when an impressive structure built by the Residents Association and the South Manchurian Railway Company (smr), which from 1920 assumed one-half of all educational costs for local Japanese, was completed. The first elementary school was called Momoyama; a second one was called Hanazono (Sugiyama 1985, 65–67, 78, 116–117; Gotō 1973, 68–82; Sugiyama 1979, 8).

Despite these separate communal institutions, the Harbin community achieved a much higher degree of integration than that of Shanghai. In Shanghai most Japanese lived in blissful ignorance of the surrounding Chinese populace, whereas in Harbin most Japanese learned Russian and many even took a stab at Chinese. Inasmuch as those who settled in Harbin planned to remain there for the duration, it was only natural that they master the language of the predominant groups in the city, much as Japanese learned English in the United States or Portuguese in Brazil. In September 1920 a Russo-Japanese School opened, the forerunner of the Harbin Academy, which became famous as a training institute in the Russian language. The first principal, Inoda Kōhai, 9 Though little studied, the Shanghai “Incident” beginning in late January of 1932 left 6,080

Chinese dead, 2,000 wounded, and 10,400 missing; 814,084 suffered direct losses, and 80 percent of urban workers lost their jobs; 50 percent of all factories in Zhabei were destroyed, largely from aerial bombardment, and 1.2 million Chinese were made refugees. This was mostly the work of the Japanese military, but the neighborhood associations played roles in the killing and destruction, and all in five weeks’ time. Small consolation that the Chinese won this battle, though that victory proved a great inspiration in the next and far greater Pyrrhic victory of the Chinese against Japan.

418

Integrating into Chinese Society

was a former student of Futabatei Shimei from the Tokyo Foreign Language School. A Sino-Japanese Evening School for language training opened in early April 1923 with similar aims of fostering Sino-Japanese understanding and friendship. In addition, many Japanese who worked outside the home adopted Western styles of dress from the end of the Meiji period. In fact, Japanese in Vladivostok early on became tailors, producing Western-style men’s and women’s clothing initially for the local Russian population. Fresh Japanese produce was imported from numerous Japanese ports throughout the northeast as far as the Blagoveshchensk region with Chinese merchants serving as intermediaries.

In the aftermath of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, Harbin became congested with countless new immigrants. The year 1919 was particularly difficult, with the Japanese military confiscating freight cars for their own use. That same year, though, the Japanese community founded the Harbin Commercial Exhibition Hall (Harubin Shōhin Chinretsukan) dedicated to stimulating Russo-Japanese trade and incidentally to calming Russo-Japanese tensions. The head was Mori Gyoin, who was to become a central figure in the local Japanese community for the next two decades. The Exhibition Hall began that year to publish a monthly magazine, each issue well over one hundred pages, featuring all manner of local news, commercial statistics, and a variety of human-interest stories, mostly from Harbin but with occasional reports from Vladivostok and elsewhere in the region. By October of 1921 the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Harbin had 113 members (Sugiyama 1985, 93–95, 97, 106, 111, 113–114; Harubin tsūshin, March 17, 1923, 3; March 18, 1923, 2; Yamamoto 1932, 357).10

Despite these efforts at smoothing over the ethnic frictions in the city, visitors noted that Chinese, Japanese, and Russians each had their own interests to protect and their own self-defense mechanisms. When the Japanese army withdrew in 1922, many Japanese residents of Vladivostok decided it was no longer safe to live there, and they resettled in Harbin; others moved to the Korean city of Ch’ongjin to the south, but Harbiners did not move in any significant numbers. The decade from the evacuation in 1922 through the Manchurian Incident marked Harbin’s Republican Chinese phase. The central government in Beijing and later in Nanjing was never strong enough to exercise control over Harbin, and thus the city fell under the sway of the massive Manchurian 10 A June 1922 document marked “secret” in the Gaimushō Archives complained that Japanese in Manchuria had changed their clothing in accordance with the conditions of life and work in the region, which the author regarded as potentially deleterious to long-term planning, and the Japanese “treat locals like slaves.” See Miyahara 1922.

Integrating into Chinese Society

419

satrapy of warlord Zhang Zuolin, who turned affairs over to his underling, Zhang Huanxiang. The latter Zhang began a course of action to sinify Harbin that met with considerable friction with the leaders of the other ethnic communities (Higashi 1918, 189; Sugiyama 1985, 114–115).11

In both Shanghai and Harbin, Japanese newspapers abounded, reinforcing the sense of separate communities. In addition to journalists from all the major Japanese dailies and weeklies, Shanghai produced several of its own, such as Shanhai nippō (founded 1903), Shanhai mcfuntchi shinbun (founded 1914), Shanhai mainichi shinbun (founded 1918), and Jiangnan zhengbao (founded 1918), a Japanese-owned newspaper published in Chinese. Although serving a smaller community, Harbin produced even more, such as Harubin nichinichi shinbun, Taihoku shinbun, Harubin tsūshin, Ro-A jihō, Hoku-Man denpō, and Teikoku tsūshin (Ozaki 1990, 10; Yanagida 1986, 234).

Politics Within the Japanese Communities

The one area of life in Shanghai that witnessed considerable Sino-Japanese integration was left-wing politics, and this in spite of the variety of local Japanese police forces in Shanghai, including an office of the Special Higher Police (Tokkō). As we have seen, the great majority of Japanese in Shanghai were at least as supportive of their government and military as their friends and relatives back home. What was the purpose, then, of so many policing agencies? In part, the police were there to protect against intrusions from the Chinese; but there were good reasons, as mainstream politics veered sharply to the right at home, to keep a close watch on the activities of some Japanese in Shanghai as well. I shall introduce three interrelated topics, in each of which a high degree of cooperation between Chinese and Japanese was achieved: Uchiyama Kanzō, the Tō-A Dōbun Shoin, and the Sorge-Ozaki spy ring.

11 Higashi Fumlo (1940, 46) reported that relations between young Japanese and young Russians were excellent, with some intermarriage, but this strikes me as somewhat exaggerated or propagandistic. His book was published in 1940. More typical was Yamamoto Sanehiko’s comment (1932, 346): “Who must bear responsibility for the crime of turning Harbin into a street of flirtatiousness?” The White Russians, of course. “All their great pride for the glories of the tsarist era they now discard in the gutters of Harbin. They keep groups of degenerate women, and they have transformed it [Harbin] into a prominent boil on the face of the earth.” Stunning comment, considering that it was the Japanese who pioneered the flesh trade in Harbin.

420

Integrating into Chinese Society

Uchiyama Kanzō first arrived in Shanghai in 1913 and four years later opened the Uchiyama Shoten on North Sichuan Road. He eventually built the largest collection of Japanese books in China proper, catering to local Japanese as well as to Chinese who had studied in Japan. As his business grew, he converted the second story of the shop into a tatami room for meetings between Chinese and Japanese writers. In a short time, Uchiyama became a broker and his bookstore a salon for Sino-Japanese literary contacts. It was through him, for example, that Tanizakai Jun’ichirō met with such eminent Chinese writers as Tian Han, Guo Moruo, and Ouyang Yuqian in 1926. The strongest and most famous bond Uchiyama forged with a Chinese writer was with Lu Xun, who moved to Shanghai from Guangdong in October 1927. In March of 1930 Lu Xun, fearing arrest, hid in the Uchiyama Shoten for more than a month (Ozawa 1972, 83; Uchiyama 1961, 122; Ozaki 1990, 26–33; Fogel 1989, 575–602; Uchiyama 1979, 39; NHK 1986).

Uchiyama went out of his way to remain as apolitical as possible, although as Sino-Japanese tensions mounted, being apolitical meant being unwilling to accept the pronouncements of his own government and the local Residents Association toward China. It meant as well that he had to avoid the endemic struggles within the Chinese literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Without a doubt, the overwhelming political bent of his Chinese clientele was leftist, and many were or would soon become Communists. Under extremely politicized circumstances, being apolitical bordered on the impossible, but that was, nonetheless, Uchiyama’s stance. Also, because he was in China and not in Japan, he was able to sell Japanese works, such as translations of the writings of Marx and Lenin, that by the 1930s would have been increasingly difficult, if not outright impossible, to put on sale back home. Uchiyama remained in China through the end of World War II and until his death in 1959; he was posthumously lionized in the People’s Republic as a lao pengyou (lit., old friend).

Another Japanese institution that bred radical activities and fostered close Sino-Japanese integration in Shanghai was the Tō-A Dōbun Shoin. A product of the imagination of the adventurer and reformer, Arao Kiyoshi, and the hard work of his disciple, Nezu Hajime, together with Konoe Atsumaro, it was founded in 1900 in Shanghai, ideally for both Japanese and Chinese students.

The curriculum emphasized contemporary subject matter: business, political science, agriculture, and much Chinese-language training (Reynolds 1987, 1989). A number of students developed overwhelmingly strong sympathies for the Chinese labor movement over the course of the 1920s; some witnessed the May Thirtieth Incident, Chinese workers’ strikes, or even activities of the young Chinese Communist Party (ccp). Several of the Japanese students abandoned their education altogether to participate in the Chinese revolutionary

Integrating into Chinese Society

421

movement, while others were expelled for becoming too involved; in either case their language training served them well and set them off from most of their local countrymen, who had shown little or no interest in learning Chinese.

Despite die fact that the Japanese policing agencies kept a close watch on their movements, many Japanese students (together with their Chinese classmates) became deeply Involved in leftist and anti-imperialist actions. These activities intensified into the early 1930s, when, as Chalmers Johnson has noted, “what amounted to a Japanese cell of the Chinese Communist Youth League had been established” at the Tō-A Dōbun Shoin (Johnson 1990, 55).

In 1930 a number of Tä-A Dōbun Shorn students joined with a small group of Japanese and Chinese journalists and writers in Shanghai to form 31e China Problems Study Group. The group’s recognized leader was a Chinese Communist activist and graduate of Kyoto University, Wang Xuewen. Wang had studied economics under Kawakami Hajime and lived in Japan for a total of fourteen years. Because of his experience and language talents, the ccp had assigned Wang the task of rallying “antiwar, anti-imperialist” Japanese in Shanghai to the Communist cause (Nishizato 1977, 12, 25, 48–49, 74, 89; Kawai 1979, 207–211, 259, 262, 320, 339, 341–343, 368–369; Peng 1988, 28–29).12 Though Wang’s connections to the ccp were unknown to his Japanese acquaintances, none would likely have been surprised or upset by the news. The group discussed such issues as the developing Communist movement, the nature of Chinese society, and other au courant themes of the day among leftists. In mid-October one ccp member named Yang Liuqing suggested that the group move beyond discussion and participate in direct action. Wang agreed. Then, on the suggestion of Kawai Teikichi, who would become more prominent in the 1930s, they renamed themselves the Nis-Shi Tōsō Dōmei, or Sino-Japanese Struggle Alliance (Kawai 1979, 371–374, 377; Johnson 1990, 57; Kawai 1973, 12–13; Ozaki 1990, 126–129; Kawai 1975, 2).13

The first and most startling act of the Sino-Japanese Struggle Alliance was an antiwar action aimed at the Japanese Naval Landing Party in Shanghai. The large cement structure housing the latter was a daily, visible reminder that Japanese nationals and their property fell under Japanese military protection.

12 Wang left Shanghai abruptly in 1937 and fled to Yan’an, where he and Japanese Communist Nosaka Sanzō organized and lectured at the Japanese Peasants’ and Workers’ School for captured soldiers of the Japanese army. See Nakamura Shintarō 1975, 231–240.

13 As Nishizato (1977, 90) explains, they opted for the “Shi” of Shina in their title, rather than Chūgoku, despite claims that the former denigrated the Chinese, because the latter would be unfamiliar to most Japanese, and the Chinese in the group agreed On “Shina”

and “Chūgoku,” see Fogel 1994a, 66–76.

422

Integrating into Chinese Society

In commemoration of the thirteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the young men of the Alliance printed posters and leaflets in both Chinese and Japanese opposing all hostilities between the two nations. On the evening of November 7, 1930, they used coal tar to scrawl in immense characters on the side of the Naval Landing Party building:

Down with Japanese Imperialism!

Join hands with the Chinese Soviets!

Turn your guns around and bring down the capitalist-landlord state!

Long live the Chinese Communist Party!

Long live the soldiers, workers, and peasants!

Needless to say, the press widely reported the event. A group of students within the Tō-A Dōbun Shoin joined the Alliance and went on strike in sympathy.

Several students and Alliance members were arrested in what was exaggeratedly reported in the press as the “Japan Communist Party Incident.” By early 1931, most of the students had been released from jail and expelled; Nishizato Tatsuo, a recent graduate of Tō-A Dōbun Shoin, was arrested as a ringleader in Tokyo by the Tokkō later in 1931 and was not released until December 1932

(Kawai 1973, 11; Johnson 1990, 57–58; Ozaki 1990, 130–135; Nishizato 1977, 100, 110–114).14

Another ccp order to Yang in October 1931 directed him to find Japanese in Shanghai to cooperate with the intelligence-gathering work of Richard Sorge, an operative for Red Army intelligence. Yang turned to Ozaki Hotsumi, a well-respected journalist, and to Kawai Teikichi, whom lie knew through the Alliance. Ozaki and Kawai met for the first time at Yang’s home. Inasmuch as the Sorge-Ozaki spy ring has been discussed at great length by many fine scholars, we shall elide discussion of it here (Johnson 1990; Deakin and Storry 1966; Prange 1984; Mader 1984).15

The politics of Harbin were altogether different from those of Shang hai.

Before the Japanese military seizure in the early 1930s, the city was administered on a daily basis by representatives of the different constituent communities, including the majority Chinese population. Left-wing activists certainly resided in or passed through Harbin, but it never became home to any sustained 14 Unlike other sources, which generally follow Kawai, Nishizato (1977, 92) claimed that the line “Long Live the Chinese Communist Party!” was not one of the slogans plastered on the wall, because it would have been contrary to the nature of their movement.

15 I have discussed Kawai Teikichi’s scholarship on China as a genre of non-academic sinology in Fogel 1993, 259–265.

Integrating into Chinese Society

423

political movement of the left. In fact, as Edgar Snow hinted, the drug trade was to become a kind of Russo-Japanese joint venture.

Indeed, it was on the extreme right wing of the political spectrum in Harbin that Japanese and Russians found some common ground. From the late 1920s, the city experienced a rash of kidnappings, usually backed by the more fanatic elements in the Guandong Army working together with Russians fascist elements, of wealthy Chinese and of Russian Jews for huge ransoms; the Semion Kaspé kidnapping case is only the most notorious and grisly of many (Stephan 1978; Vespa 1941, 78–80, 89, 196, 198–203, 205–218, 238–239, 253, 272).

Harbin also provided the setting for major political events that, unlike those in Shanghai, had little connection to China or Chinese politics. For Japanese residents of the city, the most dramatic event of the entire first half of the twentieth century was the assassination of Itō Hirobumi in October 1909 in front of the railway station. The assassin, a disgruntled Korean nationalist named An Chung-gun, was unhappy at Prince Itō’s prominent role in the coming annexation of Korea. A memorial statue to Itō was soon erected before the train station, and this event became a defining moment for the local Japanese community, even those born well after die event. About the same time, the Japanese consul general in Harbin, Kawakami Toshihiko, was also shot by a Korean, but he survived the attack (Manshū nichinichi shimbun, December 26, 1909, 1; Yanagida 1986, 209–217).

There were certainly Japanese spies in and around Harbin, but, unlike Shanghai, most of them were working for the Japanese government. Harbin was home to a branch of the smr devoted to Russia-watching. Russian-language experts were stationed there to observe local Soviet politics and, more importantly, Soviet troop movements across the border. The Tokumu Kikan was an imposing presence that occupied two-thirds of an entire city block. Two blocks away it had another, smaller office, across the street one way from the headquarters of the Kenpeitai, or Military Police, which occupied half a city block, and the other way from the Harbin Shinto Shrine. After the murder of Zhang Zuolin in June of 1928 by officers in the Guandong Army, the political climate in Harbin took a decidedly chilly turn. From a general ambiance of “confused freedom,” as one memoirist put it, there was a precipitous slide into a more militarized atmosphere, especially following the Manchurian Incident and seizure of power by the Japanese authorities (Matani 1981, appended maps).

The Guandong Army marched into Harbin in February 1932, several months after the Manchurian Incident. In a well orchestrated welcome, Japanese lined the streets of the city to greet them. There were still only about thirty-six hundred Japanese living in Harbin, though as many as two hundred thousand were scattered through the many cities and towns of Manchuria. Less than one

424

Integrating into Chinese Society

month later, on March 1, the puppet state of Manzhouguo (Manchukuo) came into existence, and the Japanese era in Harbin, the third regime in as many decades in this city of ceaseless transitions, officially took control. Six years later there were thirty-seven thousand Japanese residents, and their numbers continued to grow until the early 1940s. Under Japanese control, the Tokumu Kikan allegedly set up bureaus for the various ethnicities of the city and, for example, hired impoverished Cossack malcontents to keep a watch on the local Russian community. With the fox watching the chicken coop, this policy was guaranteed to make virtually everyone unhappy. As Edgar Snow noted at the time, the Japanese police then sold off contracts to run houses of prostitution and drug dens to local toughs and other unsavory elements in various sectors of the city, drawing off a percentage of the take for themselves. Many Japanese visitors to Harbin in the 1930s lamented the fact that there were whole illicit industries thriving in Harbin that would have been completely illegal in Japan (Sugiyama 1985, 136–137; Vespa 1941, 33–35, 51, 86).16

Conclusions: Relations with the Homeland

While Shanghai was a mosaic society, as intimated by Edgar Snow, in which the Japanese residents had little meaningful contact with the surrounding peoples, Harbin was more a multicultural melting pot in the sense of different ethnic groups coming together and giving up something of themselves as they attempted to create something new, though the incidence of marriage across racial lines remained low. No one ever dreamed or certainly ever espoused such a fate for the ethnic communities of Shanghai, least of all the Japanese there. Since there was no population “native” to Harbin, everyone was a pioneer and shared common difficulties in a way unimaginable in Shanghai.

Bom in Harbin in 1928, Sugiyama Kimiko remembers being thoroughly confused in mid-August 1945 when she was warned by her uncle, an employee at the Japanese consulate, that she should leave Harbin for “home” immediately. Harbin was home. Her parents had met and married there in 1925 and had run an agricultural implements store there. They were all part of the pre-Manzhouguo generation who, she claims, lived amid other Asians who were 16 Vespa claims that in 1936 there were 172 brothels, 56 opium dens, and 194 licensed narcotics shops in Harbin alone, and that in Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces there were 550

licensed brothels with 70,000 Japanese girls servicing customers (1941, 102). The Harbin figures, although high, are considerably lower than Edgar Snows, as noted at the beginning of this essay.

Integrating into Chinese Society

425

their friends and neighbors. During the tension of the Manchurian Incident, a Chinese man helped her father; both men were so far from their native places that neither had a clear idea what a country or an ethnicity really was. One of her close friends was a Korean who, her mother told her, was a cousin of An Chung-gŭn. She, of course, knew she was Japanese, but the primary “ethnic” affiliation she felt was as a Harbiner; and for that reason she felt neither overly upset at Japan’s loss in the war nor particularly threatened afterward.

When they left Harbin, their Chinese friends threw them a party, in spite of her father’s worry that showing such attention to a Japanese family might be dangerous. Returning to Japan was a truly perplexing experience, because it was alien terrain. Yes, Japan had lost the war, Manzhouguo had dissolved, and Japanese had to withdraw to their “mother” country, but what, she still wondered, did any of that have to do with her (Sugiyama 1979, 3–6, 9, 12–13, 15–16, 18–19; see also Kaetsu 1971).

There are many similar stories for Harbin and elsewhere in Manchuria.

I have seen nothing comparable for Shanghai or anywhere else in China proper. Perhaps many emigrants to the Northeast Asian continent had truly internalized the propaganda of the day. More likely, they looked at the opportunities a new life in Manchuria afforded them much in the same way Japanese immigrants to the United States felt in the same years, though the presence of Japanese governmental and military agencies was far greater in Manchuria, to be sure, and Japanese did not enjoy extraterritoriality in the United States. The Shanghai community, though larger than the Harbin one, was never as stable nor as permanently fixed in its new home. Aside from rare exceptions such as Uchiyama Kanzō and the radical students and activists described above, Japanese residents of Shanghai had little contact with the local Chinese population. Japanese in Shanghai thus only rarely achieved, or even desired, any level of Integration with the surrounding populace. Unlike in Harbin, it was not a desideratum. In addition, there was considerable interaction among the various Japanese communities of Manchuria—baseball games, newspaper coverage, and other informal, social contacts—though little of a similar nature with or within the communities of China proper. There were far more Japanese communities and residents associations in Manchuria than in China proper and far more Japanese consulates in Manchuria than there are now.

In one of the interesting ironies of Japanese foreign policy during the Manzhouguo era, the government moved to disband the Japanese residents associations in Manchuria in the mid-1930s, because they did not want the other nationalities in the new nation—who were all supposed to live in gozoku kyōwa (harmony of the five ethnic groups)—to think the Japanese were enjoying special privileges. A report from the Gaimushō of October 1937 lists eight

426

Integrating into Chinese Society

residents associations that were dissolved in late September and early October; Harbin’s was to be discontinued in November. Also, the Japanese in Manchuria would, perforce, abandon all claims to extraterritoriality, for they were no longer fiving on Chinese or contested terrain but in Manzhouguo. All the residents associations were to be incorporated into the Kyōwakai, or Concordia Society, in many ways the ultimate tool of multicultural integration. In fact, it was the local Japanese military that feared the continued existence of the Harbin jra would lead to “ethnic animosities” (minzokuteki tairitsu). After a diplomatic fury between Harbin and the Gaimushō from October 1937 through early 1938, the latter agreed to avoid the displeasure of the Manzhouguo government and disband all special organizations that seemed to offer Japanese any kind of distinctive favors. The Gaimushō specifically wanted to avoid the impression of “racial bias” and act in the spirit gozoku kyōwa (Gaimushō Archives, file K3.2.2.1–32, reports of June 16, 1935, December 14, 1937, October 25, 1937, January 21, 1938, May 24, 1938, June 18, 1938, and August 17, 1938). By comparison, it is hard to imagine the Japanese community of Shanghai remaining in existence without the jra.

How did Japanese at home see the communities of Japanese on the mainland? Both Harbin and Shanghai were dubbed by journalists and travelers as the “Paris of the East,” and both cities were visualized as dens of iniquity. But, these competing images were as alluring to some as they were reprehensible to others. No one thought of the Japanese in Shanghai as pioneers, though that image frequently was used to describe Japanese who had settled in the Northeast. One report from Dalian (Dairen) that appeared in Chūō kōron in 1920 belied an image of Japanese that could apply to Harbin as well.

Children raised here don’t know of the mild Japanese weather nor of its graceful scenic beauty. . . . They see decadent Chinese lives. . . . They will probably grow up with irregularities and with unimaginably strange psyches. Soon after birth, they see two races and learn two languages and see clearly the unnaturalness wherein one of the races overcomes the other. We know the children here are not the Japanese who pull rickshas or work as coolies. . . . Children molded by such a life as this—Japanese without a home place. . . . Elementary school students draw Mount Fuji, which they have never seen, from their imagination and paint it red. How will they ever see it right with the bald mountains of Manchuria [about them]? (Kimura 1920, 73–74)17

17 Perhaps even more disturbing is Kimura’s depiction of the Chinese: “To sport with them or tyrannize them would be ’unfair,’ indeed doubly or triply abominable. One just has to

Integrating into Chinese Society

427

References

Bay Area Jews from Harbin, Manchuria. Unpublished interviews. Transcripts held in the Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California. In Russian and English.

Banno, Junji. 1989. “Japanese Industrialists and Merchants and the Anti-Japanese Boycotts in China, 1919–1928.” In The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937,

edited by Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, 314–329. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Clausen, Søren, and Stig Thøgersen, ed. and trans. 1995. The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Deakin, F.W., and G.R. Storry. 1966. The Case of Bichard Sorge. London: Chatto & Windus.

Duus, Peter. 1989. “Zaikabō: Japanese Cotton Mills in China, 1895–1937.” In The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, edited by Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, 65–100. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fogel, Joshua A. 1989. “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49.2:575–602.

———. 1993. “Senzen Nihon no irnnkan Chūgokugaku.” In Ajia kara kanagaeru edited by Mizoguchi Yūzō, Hamashita Takeshi, Hiraishi Naoaki, and Miyajima Hiroshi, Vol. 1, Kōsaku suru Ajia, 253–272. Tokyo University Press.

———. 1994a. “The Sino-Japanese Controversy over Shina as a Toponym for China.” In The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 66–76. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe.

———. 1994b. “The Voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai: Early Sino-Japanese Contacts in the Modern Era.” In The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 79–94. Armonk, New York: M.E.

Sharpe.

———. 1996. The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945.

Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Goto, Shunkichi. 1973. “Harubin Nihon shōgakkō.” In Harubin no omoide, edited by Gotō Shunkichi, 68–86. Kyoto: Kyoto Harubin Kai.

Harubin no Gainen. 1924. Harbin: Harubin Nihon Shōgyō Kaigijo.

Harubin Shōhin Chinretsukan Shūhō.

Harubin Tsūshin.

subjugate them. Tyranny will not do. Even if they plead to excess, there is no other way.

They have no feelings and are spoiled. Chinese youths are raised laboring for ten years until they reach marriageable age; then they steal from the cash box—for ’independence.’

This is because their minds are empty. They are born that way. I learned that there were such people”(88).

428

Integrating into Chinese Society

Haruna, Akira. 1987. “1862 nen bakufu Senzaimaru no Shanhai haken.” In Nihon zenkindai no kokka to taigai kankei, edited by Tanaka Takeo, 555–601. Yoshikawa Kōbunkan.

Higashi, Fumio. 1940. Chōsen Manshū Shina tairiku shisatsu ryokō annai. Seikōkan.

Higashi, Kochiku. 1918. “Urajio yori Harubin e.” Taiyō 24.9:183–190.

Hirayama, Yoshie. 1932. “Harupin kanraku shō.” Keizai ōrai 7 (March):234–239.

Johnson, Chalmers. 1990. An Instance of Treason: Osaki and the Sorge Spy Ring. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Jordan, Donald A. 1991. Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs: The Failure of China’s

“Revolutionary Diplomacy, ” 1931–1932. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kaetsu, Mikio. 1971. Nanasen mei no Harupin dasshutsu. Self-published.

Katō, Yōzō. 1974. “Shanhai ryakushi.” In Shanhai jidai jaarnarisuto no kaisō by Matsumoto Shigeharu, 1:310–325. Chūō Kōronsha.

Kawai, Teikichi. 1973. Aru kakumeika no kaisō. Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha.

———. 1975. Zoruge jiken gokuchū ki. Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha.

———. 1979. Harukanaru seinen no hibi ni, watakushi no hansei ki. Tanizawa Shobō.

Kazama, Seitarō. 1938. “Kokkyōno machi Harubin tayori.” Bungei shunjū 16.9:252–255.

Kimura, Sōhachi. 1920. “Dairen ni te.” Chūō kōron 35 (December):72–90.

Koshizawa, Akira. 1989. Harupin no toshi keikaku, 1898– 1945. Sōwasha.

Li, Shuxia. 1980. Haerbin lishi biannian (1896–1926). Harbin: Difang Shi Yanjiusuo.

Mader, Julius. 1984. Dr. Sorge-Report: Ein Dokumentarbericht über Kunderschafter des Friedens mit ausgewählten Artiklen von Richard Sorge. Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik.

Manshū Nippō.

Manshū nichinichi shinbun.

Manshū Tokuhon. 1935. Tō-A-keizei Chōsakyoku.

Matani, Haruji. 1981. Harubin no machi. Self-published.

Miyahara, Tamihei. 1922. “Man-Mō bunka senden kōenkai ni kansuru ken.” Number four series, “Hōjin no zai-Man seikatsu.” Gaimushō Archives, no. 2631. June 13.

Nakamura, Fukuzō. 1973. “Taishō jidai no Harupin.” In Harubin no omoide, edited by Gotō Shunkichi, 91–96. Kyoto: Kyoto Harubin Kai.

Nakamura, Shintarō. 1975. Son Bun kara Ozaki Hotsumi e. Nit-Chū Shuppan.

NHK. 1986. “Dokyumento Showa.” Pt. 2: “Shanhai kyōdō sokai.”

Nishizato, Tatsuo. 1977. Kakumei no Shanhai de, aru Nihonjin Chūgoku kyōsantōin no kiroku. Nit-Chū Shuppan.

Otani, Ichirō. 1989. “Muramatsu Shōfū to Chūgoku: Den Kan to Muramatsu, Muramatsu no Chūgoku ni taisuru shisei nado o chūshin ni.” Hitotsubashi ronsō 101.3:93–108.

Ozaki, Hotsuki. 1990. Shanhai 1930 nen. Iwanami Shoten.

Ozawa, Masamoto. 1972. Uchiyama Kanzō den: Nit Chū yūkō ni tsukushita idai na shomin. Banchō Shobō.

Integrating into Chinese Society

429

Peattie, Mark R. 1989. “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China, 1895–1937” In The Japanese Informed Empire in China, 1895–1937, edited by Peter Duus, Ramon H.

Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, 116–209. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Peng, Hao. 1988. “Chuajahe Zhenji de zuji: Sanshi niandai Ribenren zai Shanghai de fanzhan huodong.” Zhongguo Zhong-Ri guanxi shi yanjiuhui huikan 14:26–31.

Prange, Gordon. 1984. Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Qiao, Shuming. 1989. “Jinru Shanghai zujie de Ribenren.” Shanghai yanjiu luncong 3:43–52.

Quested, R.K.I. 1982. “Matey” Imperalists?: The Tsarist Russians in Manchuria, 1895–1917.

Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong.

Reynolds, Douglas R. 1987. “China Area Studies in Prewar China: Japan’s Tōa Dōbun Shoin in Shanghai, 1900–1945.” Journal of Asian Studies 4 5.5:945–970.

———. 1989. “Training Young China Hands: Tōa Dōbun Shoin and Its Precursors, 1886–1945.” In The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, edited by Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, 210–271. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Satō, Saburō. 1984. “Bunkyū ninen no okeru bakufu b ō ekisen Senzaimaru no Shanhai haken ni tsuite.” In Kindai Nit-Chū kōshō shi no kenkyū, 67–96. Yoshikawa Kōbunkan.

Shinobu, Seizaburō. 1951. Taishō seiji shi, vol. 2. Kawade Shobō.

Snow, Edgar. 1933. Far Eastern Front. New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas.

———. 1934. “Japan Builds a New Colony.” Saturday Evening Post 206 (February 24):12–

13, 80–81, 84–87.

Song, Shisheng. 1995. “The Brothels of Harbin in the Old Society.” In The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin, edited and translated by Søren Clausen and Stig Thøgersen, 103–108. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Stephan, John. 1978. The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925–1945. New York: Harper & Row.

Sugiyama, Kimiko. 1979. “Harubin no ki: watakushi ga doko de mita koto, kangaeta koto.” Manshū to Nihonjin 7 (November):3–20.

———. 1985. Harubin monogatari. Hara Shobō.

Tachibana, Sotoo. 1940. “Harubin no yūutsu.” Bungei shunjū 18.8:264–288.

Takatsuna, Hakubun. 1995. “Seiyōjin no Shanhai, Nihonjin no Shanhai.” In Shanhai ski, kyodai toshi no ketsei to hitotbito no itonami, edited by Takahashi Kōsuke and Furumaya Tadao, 97–132. Tohō Shoten.

Uchiyama, Kanzō. 1961. Kakōroku. Iwanami Shoten.

———. 1979. “Ro Jin sensei tsuioku.” In Ro Jin no omoide. Shakai Shisōsha.

Urajio Nippō.

Vespa, Amleto. 1941. Secret Agent of Japan. Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company.

430

Integrating into Chinese Society

Wang, Xiaoqiu. 1989. “Mumo Ribenren zenyang kan Zhongguo: 1862 nian ’Qiansuiwan’

Shanghai zhi xing yanjiu,” Ribenxue 1:140–56.

Yamamoto, Sanehiko. 1932. “Harubin.” Kaizō 14 (October):336–371.

Yanagida, Momotarō. 1986. Harubin no zanshō. Hara Shobō.

Yokomitsu Riichi. 1932. “Rekishi (Harupin ki).” Kaizō 14 (October):2–17.

Yonezawa, Hideo. 1938–1939. “Shanhai hōjin hatten shi.” Tō-A keizai kenkyū, pt. 1, 22.3

(July 1938):394–408; pt. 2, 23.1 (January–February 1939):112–126.

Zhu, Yong. 1995. “Shanhai kyoryū Nihonjin shakai to Yokohama Kakyō shakai no hikaku kenkyū.” In Yokohama to Shanhai, kindai toshi keisei shi hikaku kenkyū. Yokohama: Yokohama Kaikō Shiryō Fukyū Kyōkai, 399–330.

■ Source: “The Other Japanese Community: Leftwing Japanese Activities in Wartime Shanghai,”

in Wartime Shanghai, ed. Yeh Wen-hsin (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 1998), 42–61.

The Other Japanese Community: Leftwing Japanese Activities in Wartime Shanghai

To speak of the Japanese community of wartime Shanghai as a monolith would be to misrepresent its internal complexity. To the extent that we know of the Japanese in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, we understand them to be a group closely self-protective and dependent on the home government and military for its security. The great majority of the Japanese in Shanghai in those tense years were most concerned with ensuring their government’s active involvement in protecting their community and its interests against the Chinese.

There were, however, less well known voices among the Japanese who called for peace and urged their compatriots and government to take Chinese interests into account. Their stories come together about 1930 and overlap in the decade of the 1930s. Their range of successes and failures is broad. Their legacy, while debatable, has still played an important role in the revitalization of Sino-Japanese amity since 1972. After setting in context the modem Japanese experience in Shanghai, this chapter will examine a number of often linked events and Japanese personages whose commitment was to make things turn out much differently from the way they did.

Background: The Japanese Community of Shanghai

In Shanghai, as elsewhere in mainland China, the Japanese were the last of the foreign powers to become deeply involved in China with local affairs. By the 1930s, however, they had become by far the largest presence. From a population of less than fifty in 1873, just two years after the first Sino-Japanese Treaty of Commerce, the number of Japanese in Shanghai rose steadily. In 1935 there were 26,208 Japanese in Shanghai of a total of 76,931 throughout China proper.1

This proportion made the Japanese community of Shanghai the largest 1 Ten years earlier, the Japanese had numbered 47,246 in China proper, marking a mild but consistent increase. The Japanese population in Manchuria, by contrast, increased twenty-fold between 1908 (58,433) and 1935 (1,156,646), much more rapidly than in the cities of China proper.

432

The Other Japanese Community

concentration of any city in China proper. From before the first Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese in Shanghai had been moving into the Hongkew (Hongkou) quarter of the city. Though they had won the right to establish their own exclusive concession area as a result of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Japanese never did claim such a right in Shanghai, as they did in Tianjin and Hankou.

Instead the great majority remained in the International Settlement. Of the 26,208 in 1935, 19,651 resided there; only 1,450 were in the French Concession and some 5,107 in the Chinese quarters of the city.

Many of those in the International Settlement lived in the area of North Sichuan Road, near the center of the concession. Along North Sichuan Road alone were several Japanese schools. Japanese-operated shops were principally on Wusong Road and Wenjianshi Road. This region was informally known as the “Japanese Concession” or “Japantown,” though there was no such formal designation. It was not located at the heart of Shanghai’s major thoroughfares.2

The Japanese established a consulate in Shanghai in 1872, and it was elevated to consulate-general status in 1891. With the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Japan acquired most-favored-nation status, and soon thereafter its consul in Shanghai sat on the governing consular board within the settlement. In 1871 international telegraphy was made possible between Shanghai and Nagasaki, and that same year Reuters set up shop in Shanghai. Four years later, the Mitsubishi Company opened regular sea lanes between Yokohama and Shanghai, and a branch of Mitsui Bussan was established in 1877. The Yokohama Specie Bank established a Shanghai branch in 1893, and five years later the Ôsaka Shipping Company opened a Yangzi Line. It was not until 1907 that the Shanghai branch of the Japanese Residents’ Association (JRA) was established, by which time these and many other banks and commercial establishments had branches in the city. Established first as a Japanese businessmen’s association in 1911, the 2 Katô Yûzô, “Shanhai ryakushi” [A brief history of Shanghai], appended to Matsumoto Shigeharu, Shanhai jidai: jaanarisuto no kaisô [The Shanghai years: memoirs of a journalist]

(Tokyo: Chûô kôronsha, 1974), I, pp. 316–17. Mark Peattie offers slightly different figures for 1935 Shanghai; see Peattie, “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China, 1895–1937,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, ed. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R.

Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 170. For information on Japanese travelers to Shanghai at the end of the Edo period, see Joshua A. Fogel, “The Voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai: Early Sino-Japanese Contacts in the Modem Era,” in The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1994); and Joshua A. Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945 (Stanford University Press, 1996), chapter two. For more information of the earlier history of the Japanese at Shanghai, see Yonezawa Hideo, “Shanhai hôjin hatten shi” [A history of the growth of the Japanese in Shanghai], Tô-A keizai kenkyû, part 1, 22, 3 (July 1938), pp. 394–408; part 2, 23, 1

(January–February 1939), pp. 112–26.

The Other Japanese Community

433

Japanese Chamber of Commerce came into existence in 1919 when there was a critical mass of Japanese commercial concerns.3

Of the fifteen Japanese schools in Shanghai in 1939, nine were run by the Shanghai JRA, which also operated a clinic, a cemetery, and a crematorium.

The Higashi Honganji had set up a branch temple in Shanghai as early as 1874, and by the 1930s was managing several schools there. Other Japanese religious groups—Tenrikyô, Japanese Christians, and Shintô—had temples, shrines, and schools in Shanghai, too.

Shanghai was as well a center of Chinese and international journalism. In addition to a corps of correspondents from the major Japanese dailies and weeklies, a number of Japanese newspapers were based in Shanghai, such as the Shanhai nippô (founded in 1903), the Shanhai nichinichi shinbun (founded in 1914), and the Shanhai mainichi shinbun (founded in 1918). Also the Jiangnan zhengbao (founded in 1918), a Japanese-owned and operated newspaper published in Chinese, was run out of Shanghai.4

There were also Japanese clubs, bathhouses, restaurants and bars, beauty salons, and inns in Shanghai. Hongkew was filled with Japanese goods and stores, and in many of the local Chinese shops Japanese was frequently spoken. Indeed, one could live an almost entirely insulated Japanese existence in Shanghai. In this regard, the Japanese were much like their counterparts from Europe. As early as 1920, though, the Japanese outnumbered all other foreign nationalities in Shanghai. By 1930 there were three times as many Japanese as British subjects in the city.

In tandem with the growth and development of the Japanese community and business interests in Shanghai (and elsewhere on the mainland), there was an increasing Japanese police presence there. The largest force was the consular police, a group particularly feared by Japanese leftists active in China.

There was as well the “higher police”; these were the “thought police” charged with rooting out subversion. The judicial police handled crimes committed within the Japanese community. Finally, the peace preservation police dealt with a variety of local health and welfare issues.5

3 Katô Yûzô, “Shanhai ryakushi,” in Matsumoto Shigeharu, Shanhai jidai, pp. 318–19; and Mark R. Peattie, “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China,” p. 183. Roughly one-fourth of all Japanese in Shanghai were directly tied to the cotton industry, and many more did business with it. See Peattie, p. 204; and Peter Duus. “Zaikatô: Japanese Cotton Mills in China, 1895–1937,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, pp. 65–100.

4 Katô Yûzô, “Shanhai ryakushi.” in Matsumoto Shigeharu, Shanhai jidai, pp. 319–20; Peattie,

“Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China,” p. 196; and Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen

[Shanghai 1930] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), p. 10.

5 Peattie, “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China,” pp. 184, 192, 201–3.

434

The Other Japanese Community

The wide array of Japanese investments in Shanghai, more than elsewhere in China, represented interests worth protecting at great cost. As anti-Japanese boycotts and other outward demonstrations of Chinese ire at Japanese activities in China developed from the 1910s forward, the JRA in Shanghai and the Japanese community as a whole assumed an ever more bellicose stand. There were as well a number of Japanese military and paramilitary outfits at work in Shanghai: a Shanghai chapter of the Imperial Military Reserve Association, patriotic youth groups, and civilian (vigilante) groups. They all became extremely harsh in their denunciations of Chinese strikes and boycotts aimed at Japanese interests.6

Amid these loud calls for Japan to get tough and protect the Japanese and their concerns in Shanghai, there were other voices as well. After describing the background of the Japanese presence in the city, this chapter will look at several of the more remarkable instances of Japanese activists who risked considerable personal safety, to say nothing of their lives, in the interest of what they assumed would foil Japanese imperialism on the mainland. What drove Japanese at this time to strike out and devote themselves to Sino-Japanese amity in the face of heightening Sino-Japanese tensions? What was it about Shanghai that may have fostered this particular stance? In what ways did their experiences before coming to Shanghai, their reasons for making the trip, and the distinctive nature of their contacts in the city foster the political positions they adopted?

Uchiyamo Kanzô and His Shanghai Bookstore

In 1913 a recent Japanese convert to Christianity, Uchiyama Kanzô (1885–1959), followed his pastor’s suggestion and set off for Shanghai to make his mark in life.

Four years later he opened his own bookstore, the Uchiyama Shoten, in an alley off North Sichuan Road in Hongkew. He would continue to operate it for the next thirty years. Uchiyama stocked primarily Japanese volumes, mostly religious works at first, though later catering to the many and varied interests of his customers, both Japanese and the many Chinese who had studied in Japan. As his store expanded, its second storey, which he had converted into a tatami room, became the meeting site for discussions among Chinese and Japanese writers.

6 Banno Junji, “Japanese Industrialists and Merchants and the Anti-Japanese Boycotts in China, 1919–1928,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, pp. 314–29; Donald A. Jordan, Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs: The Failure of China’s “Revolutionary Diplomacy,”

1931–32 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); and Peattie, “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China,” pp. 206–7.

The Other Japanese Community

435

As the years passed, Uchiyama thus became a mediator of sorts between Chinese and visiting Japanese authors, and his bookstore became a “salon” for brokering Sino-Japanese literary contacts. He dubbed these intellectual interactions mandankai or “conversation groups.” It was through his auspices, for example, that the great writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirô (1886–1965) was able to meet and interact with the likes of Tian Han (1898–1966), Guo Moruo (1892–1978), and Ouyang Yuqian (1887–1962). Later, Tanizaki introduced Uchiyama to the poet and novelist Satô Haruo (1892–1964), and through Uchiyama, Satô met many famous Chinese writers.7

Of all his Chinese contacts and associates, Uchiyama forged a special bond with China’s most famous writer of the prewar era, Lu Xun (1881–1936). Lu Xun moved to Shanghai from Guangdong with his wife in early October of 1927, and two days later he visited the nearby Uchiyama Shoten for the first time.8 Several days after that, as Uchiyama later recounted the story, Lu Xun returned, bought a large stock of books, and asked the proprietor “in impeccable Japanese” if they might be delivered to his home. Ready to oblige, Uchiyama asked for his customer’s name and address.

“My name is Zhou Shuren,” he said.

7 Ozawa Masamoto, Uchiyama Kanzô den: Nit-Chû yûkô ni tsukushita idai na shomin [Biography of Uchiyama Kanzô: a great commoner in the establishment of Sino-Japanese friendship]

(Tokyo: Banchô shobô, 1972), p. 83; Uchiyama Kanzô, Kakôroku [Diary] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1961), p. 122; Ozaki Hotsuki, pp. 26–33; and Paul Scott, “Uchiyama Kanzô: A Case Study in Sino-Japanese Interaction,” Sino-Japanese Studies 2.1 (1990), pp. 49–52. Satô Haruo later translated Lu Xun’s famous tale, “The True Story of A Q,” into Japanese; see Ge Baoquan,

“A Q zhengzhuan” zai guowai [“The True Story of A Q” overseas] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1981), pp. 57–64. I have described Tanizaki’s 1926 visit to Shanghai in detail in my “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, 2 (1989), pp. 575–

602; and in The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, pp. 250–75.

8 I have referred here to Xu Guangping (1898–1968) as Lu Xun’s wife, though they may not actually have been married at this point. They had met and fallen in love the previous year, when Lu was married to another woman. He was intent that she fully understand his work, and to that end he assumed a paternal role in her life. In a letter dated December 2, 1926, he had written to her: “I think you do not have as much knowledge of life as I have . . . I feel that it would help you considerably to study something new . . . You have another weak point as well in that you cannot read works in foreign languages. It would be very valuable for you to learn Japanese. I will see that you study [Japanese] hard next year.” (See Lu Xun, Lu Xun chuanji

[Collected works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin daxue chubanshe, 1987), XI, p. 478. My thanks to my student, Tanaka Rei, for locating this passage and bringing it to my attention.) Despite lessons he planned for her from a textbook he put together himself, Xu showed little aptitude for Japanese.

436

The Other Japanese Community

“Uh, you are Lu Xun? I certainly know your name well, and I knew as well that you had arrived from Guangdong, but I did not recognize your face. My apologies.” It was from that time that my association with Lu Xun commenced.9

In late March of 1930, Lu Xun was compelled to leave his residence for fear of arrest, and for one month until the end of April he hid out in the Uchiyama Shoten. In early May he found a safer apartment.

As business prospered, Uchiyama moved his bookstore to North Sichuan Road in 1929. Its growth was fueled at least in part by the contemporaneous publication by the big publishing houses in Japan of huge muIti-volume series of works, with each volume costing one yen. These series are the ancestors of today’s ubiquitous zenshû (collected works) and sôsho (collections), although prices have increased a bit. Uchiyama marketed these editions of works in China, and because they made immense bodies of literature available at such reasonable prices he was able to forge close ties with many Chinese intellectuals. In addition to having the largest stock of Japanese books throughout China, he also sold 830 titles of Japanese books in Chinese translations.10

As many have since recalled, Uchiyama did his best to remain as apolitical as possible. Under the circumstances—with tensions between the Chinese and Japanese governments high, several recent localized Japanese military interventions in China, and the full-fledged invasion of the 1930s—being apolitical at this time meant being unwilling to accept the pronouncements of one’s own government toward China. It also meant that Uchiyama steered clear of becoming entangled in the internecine political skirmishes on the Chinese left.

Of course, the overwhelming inclination of his Chinese clientele was strongly left-wing, and many of them were or would soon become Communists, but he stayed out of that fray. It was exceedingly difficult during the 1930s and 1940s to hold to an avowed position of apoliticality when the entire surrounding world was becoming so politicized. This was, none the less, Uchiyama’s stance.

Furthermore, because he was in China and not in Japan, Uchiyama was able to sell Japanese books in translation, such as the writings of Marx and Lenin, that by the 1930s would have been increasingly difficult, if not outright impos-9 Uchiyama Kanzô, “Ro Jin sensei tsuioku” [Remembrances of Mr Lu Xun], in Uchiyama Kanzô, Ro Jin no omoide [Memories of Lu Xun] (Tokyo: Shakai shisôsha, 1979), p. 39.

This article originally appeared in the journal Kanzô in 1936. The story has been retold many times, and were it not for Uchiyama’s own memoir, we might have reason to doubt its veracity. See also NHK’s “Dokyumento Shôwa,” part 2, “Shanhai kyôdo sokai” [The International Settlement of Shanghai], an hour-long television documentary broadcast on Japanese educational television (NHK) in 1986.

10 Ozald Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen, pp. 41–2; and Scott, “Uchiyama Kanzô,” pp. 52–4.

The Other Japanese Community

437

sible, to put on sale back home. He also remained in Shanghai after the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 and has since been officially lionized as a lao pengyou. Needless to say, there was an unambiguous political stance in his remaining on the mainland and his longstanding sympathy for the left. For Uchiyama, that stance was less political than it was cultural and personal.

Many other Chinese writers in addition to Lu Xun spent time at the Uchiyama Shoten. There were other Japanese in Shanghai who also frequented the bookstore, both to buy books and to make contacts with radical Chinese.

Shanghai was rapidly becoming a breeding ground for subversive types from both countries. Their joint meetings transpired at a small handful of sites, and the second floor of Uchiyama’s shop was one of them.

Another was the second floor of the Gongfei Coffee Shop at the end of North Sichuan Road. The “salon” that formed here was a place where leftwing Chinese and Japanese writers and cultural types frequently congregated. Ozaki Hotsumi (1901–44), the reporter and spy extraordinaire in the ring surrounding Richard Sorge (1895–1944), was a regular from the late 1920s on, as was Xia Yan (Shen Duanxian, b. 1900) upon his return to China in May 1927 after seven years in Japan.

Xia supported himself principally by translating current Japanese literature—largely of the proletarian literary movement—into Chinese: Hirabayashi Taiko’s story “Seryôshitsu ni te” (At the Free Clinic), Kaneko Yôbun’s play Jigoku (Hell), Fujimori Seikichi’s short story “Gisei” (The Sacrifice), Nakano Shigeharu’s “Harusaki no kaze” (The Wind of Early Spring), Kobayashi Takiji’s story “Kanikôsen” (Crab-canning Ship), and many others. He obtained most of these works from the Uchiyama Shoten, and it was actually Uchiyama himself who introduced Xia to Lu Xun in 1928. Around this time he joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which, of course, Lu Xun never did, and their friendship was, needless to say, short- lived. In October of 1929 Lu Xun, Xia Yan, and others took part in the planning of what would eventually materialize as the League of Leftwing Writers. At a meeting at the Gongfei Coffee Shop on February 16, 1930, a planning committee to found the League came into existence. Xia Yan brought a copy of the League’s founding manifesto to Nishizato Tatsuo (see below), and Nishizato translated it into Japanese and had it published in the cultural column of Shanhai nippô. This event brought Nishizato to the attention of the Japanese consular police.11

11 Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen pp. 64–9; and Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Literary Trends: The Road to Revolution. 1927–1949,” in The Cambridge History of China XIII, Republican China, 1912–

1949, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 429, 443. Lu Xun studies in Japan are an industry in themselves. For highly abbreviated English-language introductions

438

The Other Japanese Community

The Role of the Tô-A Dôbun Shoin

Another breeding ground for Japanese radicalism in Shanghai and a site of Sino-Japanese cultural and political interactions from the 1920s through the 1930s was the Tô-A dôbun shoin (East Asian Common Culture Academy), surely the most famous of all the Japanese schools in the city. A product of the imagination of mainland adventurer and reformer Arao Kiyoshi (1858–96) and the hard work of his disciple, Nezu Hajime (1860–1927), and Konoe Atsumaro (1863–1904), the school was founded in 1900. It was to be, for both Chinese and Japanese, dedicated to the long-term reform of China along Japanese lines and thus to long-term Sino-Japanese friendship. The curriculum at Tô-A dôbun shoin stressed contemporary subjects—business, political science, agriculture—and with a heavy dose of Chinese-language training. Before it dissolved in 1945, with Japan’s defeat in the war, it graduated some 3,652 students.12

If it was hard enough to control Japanese students living in Tokyo who were separated from their families elsewhere in Japan, it was that much harder to do so in Shanghai. A number of Japanese students became deeply sympathetic to the Chinese labor movement in Shanghai, where they may have witnessed the May 30 Incident, Chinese workers’ demonstrations, or organized activities of the young Chinese Communist Party. Some became so enamored of Chinese leftist politics that they abandoned their education and threw themselves into the movement, and their language training and familiarity with the local terrain served them well.

There were periodic incidents among the students, including strikes and walkouts spearheaded by the Chinese students. Despite the close scrutiny of the various Japanese police agencies, Chinese and Japanese students from the late 1920s became active in decidedly leftwing and anti-imperialist actions.

to Lu Xun’s time in Japan and to Japanese studies of Lu Xun, see, respectively, William A.

Lyell, Jr, Lu Hsiin’s Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 52–102; Maruyama Noboru, “Lu Xun in Japan,” in Lu Xun and His Legacy, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 216–41; and Nishizato Tatsuo, Kakumei no Shanhai de, aru Nihonjin Chûgoku kyôsantôin no kiroku [In revolutionary Shanghai: the chronicles of a Japanese member of the Chinese Communist Party] (Tokyo: Nit-Chû shuppan, 1977), p. 85. For data on Xia Yan, see Zhou Bin, Xia Yan zhuanliie [Short biography of Xia Yan] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1994), especially pp. 39–64.

12 On the Tô-A dôbun shoin, see three pieces by Douglas R. Reynolds: “Training Young China Hands: Tô-A Dôbun Shoin and its Precursors, 1886–1945,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1945 pp. 210–71; “China Area Studies in Prewar China: Japan’s Tô-A Dôbun Shoin in Shanghai, 1900–1945,” Journal of Asian Studies 45, 5 (1987), pp. 945–70; “Recent Sourcebooks on Tô-A Dôbunkai and Tô-A Dôbun Shoin: A Review Article,” Sino-Japanese Studies 1, 2 (1989), pp. 18–27.

The Other Japanese Community

439

There were socialist study groups set up by the students with which the school authorities did not interfere. These activities intensified into the early 1930s, when, as Chalmers Johnson has pointed out, “what amounted to a Japanese cell of the Chinese Communist Youth League had been established” at the Tô-A dôbun shoin.13

Among the subsequently more notorious students of these years were such well known Communists as Ozaki Shôtarô (b. 1906, class of 1930), Anzai Kuraji (b. 1905, class of 1931. postwar member of the central committee of the Japan Communist Party (JCP)), Nishizato Tatsuo (class of 1930), and Nakanishi Tsutomu (1910–73, class of 1933 though he never graduated, postwar JCP member of the Diet). They and others worked with Chinese and with other Japanese in and around Shanghai in the 1930s.14

From Journalists to Spies, from Study Groups to Practical Action One of the less well known Japanese activists in Shanghai at this time was Kawai Teikichi (1901–81). As a student at Meiji University, Kawai had come into contact with radical leftwing groups envigorated by the recent Bolshevik revolution. Through an acquaintance in China in the mid-1920s, he also began to hear about the revolutionary events on the mainland, and he resolved to go to China as soon as he could. To save sufficient funds for the trip, he worked for several weeks for the Seiyûkai, a rightwing political party. This insouciance, this lapse in his ability to distinguish clearly between the far left and the far right—what I dub his “political dyslexia”—plagued Kawai for his entire career and made him a favorite target for the more politically astute. Lacking the full genius of political hindsight, people like Kawai in the 1920s and even early 1930s viewed what we now see clearly as radical rightwing activity as simply radical, opposed to an oppressive government, and anti-capitalist. Kawai, for example, continued through his entire life to argue that Kita Ikki (1883–1937), an avowed fascist executed for his behind-the-scenes role in the February 26

Incident, was in fact a progressive revolutionary. Of course, many did see these left-right differences clearly at the time, but for others it was apparently still inchoate.

13 Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring, expanded edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 55.

14 Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen, pp. 114, 116–17; and Nishizato Tatsuo, Kakumei no Shanhai de, pp. 12, 26, 48–9, 74. Although Nishizato was willing to accept the fact that his alma mater played a role in Japanese imperialism, he clearly stated that none of the students were “running dogs”.

440

The Other Japanese Community

After a short first trip to China in 1928, Kawai returned in 1930, first to Beijing and in June to Shanghai. The friend who brought him there was Komatsu Shigeo. Komatsu had worked for the Japanese Home Office in Beijing as a translator, before leaving to work under Tachibana Shiraki (1881–1945), the journalist and expatriate scholar of Chinese affairs, in Shanghai. By 1930, he was in the employ of the South Manchurian Railway Company (SMR). Kawai took to Shanghai instantly. He felt he had finally arrived at the heart of the Chinese revolution, and he loved it.

Upon their arrival in Shanghai, Komatsu telephoned the Chinese translator.

Wen Shengguang, and the private China scholar, Tanaka Tadao (1894–1964).

Tanaka had earlier served as a translator of Japanese documents for Deng Yanda (1895–1931), and through him had made many acquaintances in the Chinese Communist movement—among them Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969), Xiang Zhongfa (1880–1931), and Li Lisan (1899–1967); he also knew Negishi Tadashi through contacts at the Tô-A dôbun shoin. He had worked as well for the Tokyo branch of the Research Department of the SMR, but by 1930 he was engaged in his own research on Chinese currency systems. He had come to Shanghai after Jiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) had brought down the Wuhan regime, and he was living with Wen Shengguang and Wen’s Japanese wife, writing for the weekly Shanhai shûhô. Komatsu and Kawai joined Tanaka and Wen for dinner soon thereafter to discuss China-related issues.15

Their meetings soon became more regular, and they were joined in August by Soejima Tatsuoki and Tejima Hirotoshi, friends of Kawai’s from Beijing whom he had summoned to Shanghai. In addition, several students from the Tô-A dôbun shoin participated in these meetings: Anzai Kuraji, Shirai Yukiyoshi (class of 1932), Mizuno Shigeru (class of 1933), and Nishizato Tatsuo. Funakoshi Hisao (1902–45), a journalist for the Shanhai mainichi shinbun, also attended.

They saw themselves as a study group—the Chinese Problems Study Group—and their recognized theoretical leader was Wen’s friend, Wang Xuewen (1895–1985). Wang was a graduate of Kyoto University where he had studied economics under Kawakami Hajime (1879–1946), the leading Marxist economist in Japan. He was virtually bilingual in Japanese by virtue of having spent some fourteen years there. He had joined the Chinese Communist Youth League in Japan, before returning to Shanghai in 1927 and joining the CCP itself. Perhaps most important, he had been assigned the job by the party of rallying “antiwar, anti-imperialist” Japanese in Shanghai to active participation in the Communist cause. None of the Japanese with whom he had contact 15 Kawai Teikichi, Harukanaru seinen no hibi ni: watakushi no hansei ki [Days of my distant youth: a record of half my life] (Tokyo: Tanizawa shobô, 1979), pp. 48–9, 84, 176, 184, 191, 193, 207–11, 259, 262, 320, 339, 341–3; and Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen pp. 119–25.

The Other Japanese Community

441

knew that Wang held positions of importance within the Chinese Communist Party at this time, though few of them would probably have been bothered by knowledge of that fact. Wang remained active in Shanghai until 1937, when he repaired to Yan’an, where he and Japanese Communist Nosaka Sanzô (1892–

1993) organized and taught at the Japanese Peasants and Workers’ School for captured troops of the Japanese army.16

With Wang as their guide, the group discussed such topics as the developing Chinese Communist movement and the nature of Chinese society, both hot issues in leftist intellectual circles at the time in China. Through another connection, Nakanishi Tsutomu also heard Wang’s analysis of the recent third party plenum of the sixth congress of the CCP (September 1930), the critique of the Li Lisan line, and was deeply impressed. The serial that Tanaka was working for, Shanhai shûhô, had been owned by a conservative reformist of the Kang Youwei school but by 1930 he had died. Kawai and Komatsu had soon thereafter joined the staff, and Shanhai shûhô had become pro-Communist.

In mid-October, a CCP member by the name of Yang Liuqing—originally from Taiwan, he had participated in the Hailufeng Soviet of 1927 and was active in the Japanese study group—suggested that the members go beyond studying Chinese society and get involved in action. Wang agreed. At Kawai’s suggestion they named themselves the Nis-Shi tôsô dômei, or Sino-Japanese Struggle Alliance. Tanaka and Wen disagreed with this direction, fearing severe police reprisals, and did not join the Alliance, and Kawai criticized them for being too bookish. Many years later Kawai confessed that the Alliance had been established on a directive from the CCP to Yang, who was then operating under the pseudonym of Jiang.17

16 Peng Hao, “Chuanhe Zhanji de zuji” [The career of Kawai Teikichi], Z hongguo Zhong-Ri guanxi shi yanjiuhui huikan 14 (1988), pp. 28–9; Kawai Teikichi, Harukanaru seinen no hibi ni, pp. 368–9; Nakamura Shintarô, “Nosaka Sanzô to En’an dôkatsu no Nihonjin” [Nosaka Sanzô and the Japanese in the caves of Yan’an], in Son Bun kara Ozaki Hotsumi e [From Sun Yat-sen to Ozaki Hotsumi] (Tokyo, Nit-Chû shuppan, 1975), pp. 231–40; Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen, pp. 124–6; and Nishizato Tatsuo, Kakumei no Shanhai de, p. 89. There is an entry on Wang Xuewen in a recent Chinese historical dictionary which elides all mention of Wang’s contacts among the Japanese in Shanghai: Zhongguo minguo shi cidian

[Historical dictionary of the Republic of China], ed. Chen Xulu and Li Huaxing (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1991), p. 41.

17 Kawai Teikichi, Harukanaru seinen no hibi ni, pp. 371–4, 377; Kawai Teikichi, Aru kakumeika no kaisô [Memoirs of a revolutionary] (Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu ôraisha, 1973), pp. 12–13; Kawai Teikichi, Zoruge jiken gokuchû ki [Prison notes from the Sorge case] (Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu ôraisha, 1975), p. 2; Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen, pp. 126–9; and Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason, p. 57. Nishizato Tatsuo explains in his memoirs, Kakumei no Shanhai de (p. 90), that the group opted for the “Shi” of Shina in their title, rather

442

The Other Japanese Community

The first and most flamboyant act fomented by the Sino-Japanese Struggle Alliance was an antiwar propaganda stunt at the Japanese Naval Landing Party in Shanghai. The latter was a stark, visible symbol of Japanese military protection of Japanese nationals and their property in Shanghai. To commemorate the thirteenth anniversary of the Russian revolution, the young men printed up posters and bilingual leaflets in opposition to any hostilities between China and Japan. Their activities had already brought them under the scrutiny of Japanese consular police and the Kenpeitai (military police). On the evening of November 7, 1930, they used coal tar to write in immense characters on the wall of the Naval Landing Party building:

Down with Japanese imperialism!

Link hands with the Chinese Soviets!

Turn your guns around and bring down the capitalist-landlord state!

Long live the Chinese Communist Party!

Long live the soldiers, workers, and peasants!

The event was, needless to say, widely reported in the press.

In sympathy with these antiwar sentiments, a group of students in the Tô-A dôbun shoin joined the Alliance. Just before this event, a Chinese Communist Youth Group had formed within the student body, and a student strike was under way there. One Iwabashi Takeji, an activist in the Alliance, was responsible for handing out anti-war leaflets to Japanese officer candidates in port at Shanghai. On December 27, a number of students were arrested, and members of the Alliance turned to Wang for guidance, but before he could get back to them from party channels, most had fled the city for Beijing. These repressions of Alliance activities were exaggeratedly reported in the press as the “Japan Communist Party Incident.” By early 1931, the arrested Tô-A dôbun students had been released and a number of them were expelled from school. Nishizato was arrested as a leader of this incident by the Higher Police in Tokyo in August 1931; he was imprisoned in Nagasaki and released in only December 1932. For a time such radical activities among the Japanese of Shanghai quieted down.18

than Chûgoku, despite claims that the former denigrated the Chinese, because the latter would not have been familiar to most Japanese, On “Shina” and “Chûgoku,” see Joshua A.

Fogel. “The Sino-Japanese Controversy over Shina as a Toponym for China,” in Fogel, The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations, pp. 66–76.

18 Kawai Teikichi, Aru kakumeika no kaisô, p. 11; Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen, pp. 130–

35; NHK “Dokyumento Shôwa,” part 2; and Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason, pp. 57–9. Nishizato Tatsuo ( Kakumei no Shanhai de, p. 92) contradicts Kawai’s account of this event (and implicitly those of Ozaki and Johnson, which were based on Kawai’s mem-

The Other Japanese Community

443

Shanghai and the Japanese in the Sorge Spy Ring

Another CCP directive passed to Yang in October of 1931 called on him to find Japanese to cooperate with the intelligence-gathering activities of Richard Sorge. Yang turned to Ozaki Hotsumi and Kawai Teikichi, and it was at Yang’s home in Shanghai that these two Japanese first met in October 1931.19 Ozaki told Kawai to meet him the very next day, and the two men repaired to a restaurant, accompanied by “a foreign woman,” where they met a foreign man.

The woman was Agnes Smedley (1892–1950), the man Richard Sorge. Kawai knew neither of them, but assumed they were Comintern agents. Sorge asked him if he could go to North China and Manchuria to collect data on Japanese army activities, and Kawai assented. Sorge had been charged by Red Army Intelligence with finding out if the Japanese planned to invade south into China proper or north into Siberia. Ozaki would provide Kawai with contacts.

ory of the incident) in one pertinent detail. He claims that the line “Long live the Chinese Communist Party” was not one of the slogans plastered on the wail; it would have been, he claims, contrary to the nature of their movement. As a lifelong Communist, Nishizato found he had many similar bones to pick with Kawai; when describing events of those times in China, he frequently found himself agreeing with fellow comrade Nakanishi Tsutomu in opposition to Kawai. On Nishizato’s arrest, see Kakumei no Shanhai de,

pp . 100, 110–14.

19 Because much has been written about Ozaki’s role in the Sorge spy ring, what follows will focus more directly on the role played by Kawai. For scholarship on Ozaki, see Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason; F.W. Deakin and G.R. Storry, The Case of Richard Sorge (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966); Gordon Prange, Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984); and Julius Mader, Dr.-Sorge-Report: Ein Dokumentarbericht ūber Kunderschafter des Friedens mit ausgewählten Artikeln von Richard Sorge (Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1984).

Kawai held the unique distinction of all those intimately involved in the spy ring of both surviving prison and World War II and being willing to speak and write about it after the war. In addition to three volumes of memoirs, cited inter alia he wrote fourteen popular volumes of Chinese and Japanese history. I have discussed his work as a non-academic scholar in “Senzen Nihon no minkan Chûgokugaku” [Non-academic genres of Sinology in prewar Japan], in Kôsaku suru Ajia [Asia entangled], ed. Mizoguchi Yûzô, Hamashita Takeshi, Hiraishi Naoaki, and Miyajima Hiroshi (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1993), in the series Ajia kara kangaeru (Reconsiderations from Asia), 1י pp. 259–65. Kobayashi Fumio has almost fawningly written about Kawai’s scholarship in several essays, such as

“Kawai Teikichi no Chûgoku kan” [Kawai Teikichi’s view of China], in his Chûgoku gendai shi no danshô [Fragments from the contemporary history of China] (Tokyo: Tanizawa shobô, 1986) pp. 108–32.

444

The Other Japanese Community

When Kawai, who was just thirty years of age, asked if this was a Comintern assignment, Ozaki laughed it off and asked Kawai to trust him.20

As he recounted in a volume of memoirs, Kawai assumed he was working on behalf of peace, anti-imperialism, socialism, and hence ultimately in the best interests of Japan. He traveled to Beijing first, where he was inundated by anti-Japanese slogans and banners everywhere. He describes the process by which he turned his entire being into a set of eyes and ears, amassing information on behalf of the international proletariat, and intent on discovering what Japan was up to in the region. As was his wont, he garnered much of his data from Japanese bar girls in establishments frequented by Japanese employees of the SMR, the Gaimushô, the local Japanese press, and later members of the Japanese armed forces. He soon made his way to Fengtian, where the information about the Manchurian Incident was coming fast and furious. He wrote up his impressions, which were dispatched through secret couriers back to Ozaki in Shanghai. Finally, a Chinese contact delivered to Kawai a letter in Ozaki’s hand instructing him to return to Shanghai.

In early December, after two months on the job, Kawai arrived back in Shanghai. He had much to tell Ozaki, who promptly asked him to write it up immediately and append his own thoughts. He could clearly see that the mood in Shanghai had swung in a sharply anti-Japanese direction in those two months. The next day he and Ozaki went to Smedley’s apartment in the French Concession, and Sorge soon arrived. Ozaki had already translated Kawai’s report for him into English. Sorge shook his hand and began pelting him with specific questions about Japanese troop strengths and their aims. Kawai told him that the Guandong army wanted to sever Manchuria from the control of the Nanjing regime and establish a state under Japanese control. The fact that there were only 30,000 Japanese troops in the region, he surmised, probably meant that they would not invade Siberia any time too soon—not exactly a clairvoyant conclusion. The army had enlisted the support of two ultrarightist groups to these ends. After responding to Sorge’s questions, Kawai was asked to go back to Manchuria, again traveling under cover of being a reporter for Shanhai shûhô.21

On January 18,1932, a small group of Japanese monks walking the streets of Shanghai and intoning the Nichiren chant, for which they were greatly despised among the local populace, were set upon by angry Chinese. One was badly beaten, another killed. The incident outraged the Japanese community of Shanghai. Reprisals were meted out by some Japanese vigilantes, and the troubles escalated. The JRA requested military assistance and demon-20 Kawai Teikichi, Aru kakumeika no kaisô, pp. 48–51.

21 Kawai Teikichi, Aru kakumeika no kaisô, pp. 53, 55, 61, 64, 71–5.

The Other Japanese Community

445

strated in front of the Japanese consulate, demanding arms to defend themselves. Seventy pistols were distributed to them, which were quickly turned to offensive ends as they attacked Chinese merchants and rioted. By January 21, reports that a Japanese warship was on its way reached Shanghai; it arrived two days later. The Chinese responded by arming the local populace, and fighting erupted on January 29. That such a minor fracas could lead to what would be called the Shanghai Incident in which some 25,000 Chinese were killed or wounded is evidence of the heightened Sino-Japanese tensions in the city.

Kawai arrived back in Shanghai in the early morning hours of January 30.

He somehow made his way amid the fighting to his newspaper office. Was he saddened by the fact that, for all his efforts to the contrary, China and Japan were at war? Was he distraught that the imperialist military forces of his native land had attacked and brutalized the Chinese? No, he was ecstatic, because the reverberations of bombs and gunfire were, in his estimation, the death throes of capitalism, for “the laws of history were straightforward.” He made contact with Ozaki, and they later visited Sorge. After making his report, Kawai was again asked to return to Manchuria to continue his work.22

Sorge, though, needed another contact person in Shanghai, because Ozaki was planning to leave the Asahi shinbun. Ozaki recommended Yamagami Masayoshi (1896–1938), branch head of Rengô tsûshin, the Japanese news service, in Shanghai. Yamagami had initially come to Shanghai in 1925 as a reporter for the Shanhai nippô. His travels through China’s major southern cities brought him into contact with such luminaries of the Creation Society as Yu Dafa (1896–1945), Cheng Fangwu (1897–1984), Wang Duqing (1898–1940), and Mu Mutian (1900–71) in Guangdong as well as with Lu Xun. In December of 1927 he filed a detailed report on the Canton commune. Two years later he wrote a play, Shina o shinkan saseta mikkakan (Three days that shook China), as a historical testament. After the collapse of the Canton commune, he returned to Shanghai and from there to Japan. In October 1929 he was back in Shanghai, where he bumped into Lu Xun on the street, an event recorded in Lu’s diary.

Yamagami was living on North Sichuan Road with a Japanese woman, the first Japanese beautician in Shanghai, who operated her own salon in the area.

In late 1928, shortly after he arrived in Shanghai, Ozaki went to visit the office of the Creation Society on North Sichuan Road. He met many leftwing writers there and even wrote under a pen name for their serial, Dazhong wenyi (Literature and art for the masses). One such writer, Tao Jingsun (1897–1952), who succeeded Yu Dafu as editor of Dazhong wenyi, recalled in his memoirs that Ozaki later introduced him there to Yamagami. Yamagami and Ozaki, both 22 Kawai Teikichi, Aru kakumeika no kaisô, pp. 82–6; and Jordan, Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs, pp. 223–33 passim.

446

The Other Japanese Community

members of the Japanese fourth estate in Shanghai, had been friends for some period of time. Both men contributed, under pseudonyms, essays to Tao’s journal, which translated a large number of pieces from the proletarian literature movement in Japan. Tao had studied medicine and lived in Japan for twenty-two years, where he had met Guo Moruo and founded the literary magazine GREEN in Kyûshû.23

Ultimately, Yamagami was too busy to devote the necessary time to helping Sorge, but he suggested that another journalist with good leftist credentials, Funakoshi Hisao, fill the needed slot. Funakoshi had already been involved** **

in the Sino-Japanese Struggle Alliance and later in communicating Kawai Teikichi’s reports to Ozaki, and hence to Sorge. He** **worked with Sorge and Kawai until Sorge left China in 1933 and subsequently for Sorge’s replacement in Shanghai.

Nishizato Tatsuo and the Chinese Communist Party

Another manner in which one leftist Japanese with years of experience living in Shanghai accommodated himself to the changed circumstances and the heightened political atmosphere of the 1930s is typified by Nishizato Tatsuo. Released in late 1932 after sixteen months in prison, Nishizato found he had missed both the Manchurian Incident and the establishment of the

“puppet” state of Manzhouguo (Manchukuo). In 1934 he was able to get back to Shanghai, where he found the main difference from several years before to be the shift toward a harsher Chinese attitude toward Japanese. With the help of friends he was able to secure a position with Rengô tsûshin in Shanghai, an indication that for every overt Japanese activist in China there were probably any number of sympathetic ones.

Nishizato also began to try to establish contact with the Chinese Communist Party. One day he met his former friend Wang Xuewen in Jessfield Park, and with Wang’s help Nishizato began the process of entering the CCP. “My new 23 Ozaki Hotsuki, Shanhai 1930 nen, pp. 90–6, 142–3, 188–90; Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason, pp. 51–2, 81, 266; and Zhonghua minguo shi cidian, p. 421. In early 1931. Yamagami, having earlier secured Lu Xun’s permission, began to translate “The True Story of A Q”

into Japanese. Just at that time the Longhua Incident erupted, in which five young leftist authors were arrested and murdered by the Guomindang. The translation was dedicated to these five “martyrs,” and some of their writings were also translated and included in the final product, which appeared later that year. Shina shôsetsu shû A Q seiden [A collection of Chinese fiction: The True Story of A Q]. Yamagami used the pen name of Lin Shouren; Lu Xun proofed the translation for accuracy; and Ozaki, writing under the pseudonym of Shirakawa Jirô, contributed an introduction.

The Other Japanese Community

447

life began,” as he recalled many years later. As he would describe it, he was so opposed to the Japanese war of invasion against China and he so wanted to express his solidarity with the Chinese people that the best course he could pursue was to join the CCP He wanted to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with the Chinese people against “world fascism.”

He was assigned by the CCP the task of carrying on anti-war work among Japanese troops. Every week he met with a representative of the CCP in the French Concession in Shanghai. This contact was his lifeline to the Communist movement elsewhere in China; it was from this line of information that he learned, for instance, of the Fifth Encirclement Campaign being waged by Jiang Kai-shek’s forces against the Communists in Jiangxi. He eventually took a position with the Yomiuri newspaper to support himself while continuing his political activities.24

Later Developments in 1930s Shanghai

Japanese operatives and sub-operatives in the Sorge-Ozaki ring continued their work in China after the early 1930s, but mostly in cities other than Shanghai.

Funakoshi moved on to Tianjin and Hankou, making occasional trips to the northeast, while Kawai, too, traveled mainly in Manchuria. That was where the action about which Sorge sought information was to be found. Sorge and Ozaki themselves remained in Tokyo. Other Japanese sympathetic to Chinese yearnings, though, remained in Shanghai.

As the political scene in Japan lurched sharply to the right, leftwing activists usually were compelled either to undergo a “reorientation” (tenkô) of their views and a concomitant embracing of the Japanese imperial institution, or effectively to go underground. As hundreds of their former fellows were willing, for an assortment of reasons, to compromise their socialist views and avoid prison terms, or worse, others among these leftists fled the home islands for China. It was, ironically, there that they frequently found work—which was by the mid-to late 1930s impossible for them to come by in Japan—with the largest Japanese colonial enterprise in history, the Research Department of the South Manchurian Railway Company. Their recruitment was made possible by the fact that the leaders of the immense research division, men such as Itô Takeo (1895–1985), shared their views on many issues, if not their overall 24 Nishizato Tatsuo, Kakumei no Shanhai de, pp. 115, 122–3, 125–8, 131–2, 167.

448

The Other Japanese Community

world view, ltô himself employed several dozen such men—including such Communists as Ozaki Hotsumi and Ishidô Kiyotomo (b. 1904).25

Most of these Japanese leftists moved to Manchuria. Some, though, were hired to work in Shanghai, where Itô was head of the Research Department’s branch office. Just at this moment in the late 1930s, as Japan was preparing for total war, the SMR was impelled to expand its research activities broadly. It needed capable men who knew how to conduct research, and Itô and others in the SMR knew where to get them. The irony of their position, leftists working for such a colonial enterprise in the middle of Japan’s most egregious imperialist adventure, was not lost on these men.

This is how Itô described the situation in Shanghai:

There were as well a fair number of leftists at the Shanghai office [of the SMR] where I was working. All sorts of people had come with introductions from acquaintances of mine from the Shinjinkai [New Man Society, a liberal-radical student organization of the late 1910s and early 1920s]

days. Altogether our office had over three hundred employees and a budget of over three million yen.

As the Research Department expanded, several large-scale research projects were carried out, and the Research Division of the Shanghai office bore its share of the responsibility. Shanghai played the most important role in three research projects: Shina kôsenryoku chôsa [Investigation of the resis-25 Itô Takeo, Life along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Itô Takeo, trans. Joshua A.

Fogel (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1988), pp. xv–xvi, 173. See also Ishidô Kiyotomo’s fascinating memoirs, Waga itan no Shôwa shi [My heretical history in the Shôwa period]

(Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1987), and Zoku waga itan no Shôwa shi [My heretical history in the Shôwa period, continued] (Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1990). There are any number of works on the SMR and its Research Department. Among the better ones on the SMR are: Andô Hikotarô, Mantetsu: Nihon teikokushugi to Chûgoku [The SMR: Japanese imperialism and China] (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobô, 1965); and Harada Katsumasa, Mantetsu [The SMR]

(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984). The better works on the SMR’s research activities would include: Hara Kakuten, Gendai Ajia kenkyû seiritsu shiron: Mantetsu chôsabu, Tô-A kenkyûjo, IPR no kenkyû [Historical analysis of the founding of modern Asian studies: studies of the Research Department of the SMR, the East Asian Research Institute, and the Institute of Pacific Relations] (Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1984); Hara Kakuten, Mantetsu chôsabu to Ajia [The Research Department of the SMR and Asia] (Tokyo: Sekai shoin, 1986); Yamada Gôichi, Mantestu chôsabu, eikô to zasetsu no yonjûnen [The Research Department of the SMR: forty years of glory and frustration] (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1977); and Kusayanagi Daizô, Jitsuroku: Mantetsu chôsabu [The true story of the Research Department of the SMR] (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1979).

The Other Japanese Community

449

tance capacity of the Chinese], Nichi-Man-Shi infure chôsa [Investigation of Japanese-Manchudan-Chinese inflation], and Sekai jôsei bunseki [An analysis of international conditions]. The first of these occupied the Shanghai office for three calendar years, 1939–41. Most prominently active in the project was Nakanishi Tsutomu.26

Exceedingly few, probably not even Itô himself, knew that Nakanishi was a Japan Communist Party operative, a mole of sorts in the SMR. Itô certainly knew that Nakanishi held personal and scholarly views considerably to the left of center, and even had he known of Nakanishi’s party affiliation it is entirely likely that he would have acted no differently.

Nakanishi had learned Chinese exceedingly well—so well, indeed, that he could pass as Chinese when circumstances demanded—while a student at the Tô-A dôbun shoin a decade earlier. In China he became deeply enamored of the Chinese revolution and was eventually expelled from school. He returned to China in 1934 and entered the SMR. Through the mid-1930s he wrote in SMR

journals on the Chinese labor movement and general economic conditions in China and Manchuria. He served as one of the thirty-one researchers employed by Itô at the SMR’s Tianjin office in 1935 to carry out the now legendary village investigations in the Jidong region. His many articles on Chinese agriculture repeatedly lacerated the “ruthless feudal exploitation” exercised by Chinese landlords over the peasant population.27

Undoubtedly because of his expertise in village investigation, his knowledge of Chinese, his wide travels in China, and his methodological acuity, Nakanishi, still a low-level functionary in the overall SMR machine, was given the lion’s share of responsibility in the project designed to uncover the resistance capacity of the Chinese people. I have discussed this material elsewhere28 and will not reproduce it here, except to note that the thrust of Nakanishi and his fellow workers’ immense study was to encourage the Guandong Army, sponsor of the study, to seek an immediate political solution and get out of China quickly.

A ground war on the Asian mainland, he warned, would be unwinnable.

26 Itô Takeo, Life along the South Manchurian Railway, pp. 175–6. On the Shinjinkai, see Henry Dewitt Smith, Japan’s First Student Radicals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).

27 Nakanishi Tsutomu, Chûgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de [In the tempest of the Chinese revolution] (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1974), pp. 35–7, 47–8, 77–8, 81–3, 96–101, 112–15, 142–5, 166, 177; Yamada Gôichi, Mantetsu chôsabu, pp. 139, 150–2; and Joshua A. Fogel. “Introduction: Itô Takeo and the Research Work of the South Manchurian Railway Company,” in Itô Takeo, Life along the South Manchurian Railway, pp. xiv, xv, xvii–xviii.

28 See Fogel, “Introduction: Itô Takeo and the Research Work of the South Manchurian Railway Company,” pp. xviii–xxii.

450

The Other Japanese Community

Conclusions

Many of the Japanese who traveled to Shanghai for their tertiary education were looking for an altogether new experience, a way to make a contribution to Japan’s future in the new, increasingly international world. What better place than the most cosmopolitan city in East Asia? From the late Meiji period through the early years of the Shôwa period, this outward-looking attitude was far more pronounced that it had been before. Similarly, journalists posted voluntarily or otherwise to China in these years sought out or found a world in Shanghai full of extraordinary excitement and experience unlike anything they could bring to it. A confluence of forces—including a proclivity to sympathize with the nascent Chinese student and labor movements, the new global perspective afforded by living in Shanghai, the intimate personal and cultural links forged with Chinese intellectuals and writers with a similar view of the contemporary world, and the proselytizing activities of Chinese Communist activists, among others—pushed many of them in a decidedly leftwing direction.

Through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, political and military tensions escalated between China and Japan, as well as within Japanese society. These tensions affected the nature of the activities of the small groups of Japanese leftist sympathizers in Shanghai. Initially literary contacts became increasingly political and resulted in activism—indeed, this was a route that many Chinese writers themselves had traveled. For some Japanese activists, this path led as far as to international espionage. The heightened tensions within Japan forced many Japanese to relatively brief careers as researchers in China.

Ultimately both of these groups—namely, the Japanese active in antimilitarist, anti-imperialist, and strongly leftwing politics in China and those who went to work for the largest colonial Japanese enterprise that has ever existed—were decimated by the Japanese military and government. Where the majority population of Japanese in Shanghai had once felt isolated and threatened, now with the Japanese military build-up on the mainland it was decidedly those opposed to Japanese pursuance of war against China who feared for their lives. For the Japanese leftist activists in Shanghai, the mushrooming of intelligence agencies represented an ominous threat and finally the end to their continued work. In a volume of his memoirs written after the war, Kawai Teikichi described the scene in this way:

Shanghai was the international capital of espionage. Lines of intelligence linked some people there with Washington, others with London or Berlin, Moscow or Tokyo. Just among Japanese intelligence organs [in Shanghai],

The Other Japanese Community

451

there were those of the army, the navy, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the Foreign Office, the Justice Ministry, the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office, and the Korea Governor-General’s Office. Each of these had independent agencies and competed with each other. Of course, the object of intelligence gathering was politics, military affairs, and thought. Furthermore, the Shanghai Municipal Council stood at the forefront in the inspection of all of Shanghai.29

Only the journalist-spy Ozaki was actually executed, but others died in prison or shortly after being released in late 1945 from malnutrition. From the early 1940s Japanese leftists and others even remotely sympathetic to them began to be arrested by the various Japanese police agencies in China and at home.

Ozaki, Sorge, and their operatives were taken in 1941 and 1942. Nakanishi was seized in 1942, largely, it appears, because his report on the resistance capacity of Chinese had made the Japanese authorities suspicious of his true sympathies; Nishizato was taken in the same sweep of arrests. A large number of SMR

researchers, including Itô, were hauled off to jail in 1942 and 1943. Many died of malnutrition or exposure in the wintry Manchurian climate.

None the less, a significant minority of these scholars and activists went on to brilliant postwar careers in government, leftwing politics, and academic life.

They wore their wartime prison sentences on their lapels as a badge of honor.

Uchiyama Kanzô, the remarkable man who has never been studied in English, was one of a tiny few able to bridge the Sino-Japanese gap at this savage historical juncture. His determinedly apolitical stance, but clear sympathy in the eyes of Chinese, enabled him to remain with his store through the harshest years of Sino-Japanese hostilities, the end of World War II in 1945 and the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, until his death in 1959.

Of course, these leftwing activists were far from a majority of the Japanese resident in Shanghai or elsewhere in China in these years. Indeed, Japanese journalists were among the most severe denigrators of contemporary Chinese society and politics of all Japanese visitors there in the entire prewar period.

None the less, the handful of remarkable individuals discussed above did make a distinctive contribution to modem Chinese political history and Sino-Japanese relations, in spite of the fact that at a higher level Sino-Japanese relations were rapidly disintegrating. Given the way the war ultimately turned out, they probably are justified in the enormous postwar pride they have felt for their prewar and wartime activities. No history of the period is complete without their stories.

29 Kawai Teikichi, Aru kakumeika no kaisô, p. 114.

452

The Other Japanese Community

Bibliography

Andô, H., Mantetsu: Nihon teikokushugi to Chûgoku [The SMR: Japanese imperialism and China], Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobô, 1965.

Banno, J., “Japanese Industrialists and Merchants and the anti-Japanese Boycotts in China, 1919–1928,” in P. Duus, R.H. Myers, and M. Peattie, eds, The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Deakin, F.W., and G.R. Storry, The Case of Richard Sorge, London: Chatto and Windus, 1966.

Duus, P., “Zaikabô: Japanese Cotton Mills in China, 1895–1937,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, in P. Duus, R.H. Myers, and M. Peattie, eds, The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Fogel, J.A., “Introduction: Itô Takeo and the Research Work of the South Manchurian Railway Company,” in T. Itô, Life along the South Manchurian Railway, pp. xiv, xv, xvii–xviii.

———, “Senzen Nihon no minkan Chûgokugaku” [Non-academic genres of Sinology in prewar Japan], in Kôsaku suru Ajia [Asia entangled], ed. Y. Mizoguchi, T. Hamashita, N. Hiraishi, and H. Miyajima, in the series, Ajia kara kangaeru

[Reconsiderations from Asia], I, Tokyo: Tokyo University, 1993.

———, “The Sino-Japanese Controversy over Shina as a Toponym for China,” in J.A.

Fogel, The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1994.

———, “The Voyage of the Senzaimaru to Shanghai: Early Sino-Japanese Contacts in the Modern Era,” in J.A. Fogel, The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations,

Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1994.

———, “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, 2 (1989), pp. 575–602.

———, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Ge, B., “A Q zhengzhuan” zai guowai [“The True Story of A Q” Overseas], Beijing Renmin chubanshe, 1981.

Hara, K., Gendai Ajia kenkyû seiritsu shiron: Mantetsu chôsabu, Tô-A kenkyûjo, IPR no kenkyû [Historical analysis of the founding of modern Asian studies: Studies of the Research Department of the SMR, the East Asian Research Institute, and the Institute of Pacific Relations], Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1984.

———, Mantetsu chôsabu to Ajia [The Research Department of the SMR and Asia], Tokyo: Sekai shoin, 1986.

Harada, K., Mantetsu [The SMR], Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984.

Ishidô, K., Waga itan no Shôwa shi [My heretical history in the Shôwa period], Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1987, and Zoku waga itan no Shôwa shi [My heretical history in the Shôwa period, continued], Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1990.

The Other Japanese Community

453

Itô, T., Life along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Itô Takeo, trans. J.A.

Fogel, Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1988.

Johnson, C., An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring, expanded edition, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Jordan, D.A., Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs: The Failure of China’s

“Revolutionary Diplomacy,” 1931–32, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.

Katô, Y., “Shanhai ryakushi” [A brief history of Shanghai], appended to S. Matsumoto Shanhai jidai: jaanarisuto no kaisô [The Shanghai Years: Memoirs of a Journalist I, Tokyo: Chûô kôronsha, 1974.

Kawai, T., Aru kakumeika no kaisô [Memoirs of a revolutionary], Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu ôraisha, 1973.

———, Harukanaru seinen no hibi ni, watakushi no hansei ki [Days of my distant youth a record of half my life], Tokyo: Tanizawa shobô, 1979.

———, Zoruge jiken gokuchû ki [Prison notes from the Sorge case], Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu ôraisha, 1975.

Kobayashi, F., “Kawai Teikichi no Chûgoku kan” [Kawai Teikichi’s view of China], in Chûgoku gendai shi no danshô [Fragments from the contemporary history of China], Tokyo: Tanizawa shobô, 1986.

Kusayanagi, D., Jitsuroku: Mantetsu chôsabu [The true story of the Research Department of the SMR], Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1979.

Lee, L.O., “Literary Trends: The Road to Revolution, 1927–1949,” in The Cambridge History of China, XIII, Republican China, 1912–1949, Part 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Lu, X., Lu Xun quanji [Collected works of Lu Xun] XI, Beijing: Renmin daxue chubanshe, 1987.

Lyell, W.A., Jr, Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Mader, J., Dr.-Sorge-Report. Ein Dokumentarbericht über Kunderschafter des Friedens mit ausgewählten Artikeln von Richard Sorge, Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1984.

Maruyama, N., “Lu Xun in Japan,” in L.O. Lee, ed., Lu Xun and his Legacy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Nakamura, S., “Nosaka Sanzô to En’an dôkutsu no Nihonjin” [Nosaka Sanzô and the Japanese in the caves of Yan’an], in Son Bun kara Ozaki Hotsumi e [From Sun Yatsen to Ozaki Hotsumi], Tokyo, Nit-Chû shuppan, 1975.

Nakanishi, T., Chûgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de [In the tempest of the Chinese revolution], Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1974.

NHK, “Dokyumento Shôwa,” part 2, “Shanhai kyôdô sokai” [The international settlement of Shanghai], an hour-long television documentary shown on Japanese educational television (NHK) in 1986.

454

The Other Japanese Community

Nishizato, T., Kakumei no Shanhai de: aru Nihonjin Chûgoku kyôsantôin no kiroku [In revolutionary Shanghai: the chronicles of a Japanese member of the Chinese Communist Party], Tokyo: Nit-Chû shuppan, 1977.

Ozaki, H., Shanhai 1930 nen [Shanghai 1930], Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990.

Ozawa, M., Uchiyama Kanzô den: Nit-Chû yûkô ni tsukushita idai na shomin [Biography of Uchiyama Kanzô: a great commoner in the establishment of Sino-Japanese friendship], Tokyo: Banchô shobô, 1972.

Peattie, M., “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China, 1895–1937,” in Peter Duus Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds, The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Peng, H., “Chuanhe Zhanji de zuji” [The career of Kawai Teikichi], Zhongguo Zhong-Ri guanxi shi yanjiuhui huikan [Journal of the Chinese Research Committee on the History of Sino-Japanese Relations] 14 (1988).

Prange, G., Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.

Reynolds, D.R., “China Area Studies in Prewar China: Japan’s Tôa Dôbun Shoin in Shanghai, 1900–1945,” Journal of Asian Studies 45, 5 (1986), pp. 945–70.

———, “Recent Sourcebooks on Tô-A Dôbunkai and Tô-A Dôbun Shoin: A Review Article,” Sino-Japanese Studies 1, 2 (1989), pp. 18–27.

———, “Training Young China Hands: Tôa Dôbun Shoin and its Precursors, 1886–1945,”

in Peter Duus, Ramon Myers, and Mark Peattie, eds, The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Scott, P., “Uchiyama Kanzô: A Case Study in Sino-Japanese Interaction,” Sino-Japanese Studies 2, 1 (1990), pp. 49–52.

Smith, H.D. Japan’s First Student Radicals, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Uchiyama, K., Kakôroku [Diary], Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1961.

———, “Ro Jin sensei tsuioku” [Remembrances of Lu Xun], in Uchiyama Kanzô, Ro Jin no omoide [Memories of Lu Xun], Tokyo: Shakai shisôsha, 1979.

Yamada, G., Mantetsu chôsabu, eikô to zasetsu no yonjûnen [The Research Department of the SMR: forty years of glory and frustration], Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbunsha, 1977.

Yonezawa, H., “Shanhai hôjin hatten shi” [A history of the growth of the Japanese in Shanghai], Tô-A keizai kenkyû, part 1, 22, 3 (July 1938), pp. 394–408; part 2, 23, 1

(January–February 1939), pp. 112–26.

Zhongguo minguo shi cidian [Historical Dictionary of the Republic of China], ed. Chen Xulu and Li H., Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1991.

Zhou, B., Xia Yan zhuanlüe [Short Biography of Xia Yan], Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1994.

■ Source: “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and China,” in Japanese Travelogues of China in the 1920s: The Accounts of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 6–9.

**Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and China **

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) lived a mere thirty-five years, much of it in ill health, but he filled it with experiences and writings that have long outlived him. He was born in an area of Tokyo inhabited almost entirely by foreigners; there his father sold dairy products to the Westerners. By all accounts his family life was less than happy. One of three children, an older sister had died before he was born, and his mother fell into a state of dementia shortly after his birth. He was raised by his maternal uncle and his uncle’s wife, taking their surname of Akutagawa. On the whole, although he was not a deprived child, the memories of his youth were not without pain.

In later years, Akutagawa recalled that the favorite novels as a youngster were the great Chinese epics, Xi you ji (Journey to the west) and Shuihu zhuan (Water margin), and characters from these works figure in several of the theatrical productions he describes at length in his travelogue of China. Indeed, the fact that be knew these and other Chinese novels so well, having read them many times, greatly enhanced his experiences in China. Wracked by illness from a young age, he spent many hours in his youth reading at home and in the local libraries. This voracious reading habit—he gobbled up all the Japanese writers of the Meiji period—remained with him his entire life. By the last years of the Meiji period, in his later teens, he began as well to read works in English or translated into English.

As a student in the elite First Senior High School, Akutagawa chose English literature as his major. He was a hard-working student there who never accommodated to the reckless lifestyle that many of his contemporaries adopted.

During these years he also began reading in European philosophy and extensively in continental European literature. His friend and classmate, Kikuchi Hiroshi, whose name appears in this travelogue, believed him to be the best-read Japanese of his generation.

From his youth through his adolescent high school years, Akutagawa also developed a keen interest in bizarre tales of ghosts and other supernatural phenomenon, an interest that would remain with him his entire short life.

Many of his early stories combine a penchant for the fantastic, even grotesque, with an inclination toward history. This combination can be seen in perhaps his most famous work, Rashōmon, which appeared in 1917.

456

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and China

His stories frequently demonstrate a firm grounding in tile literary traditions of both Japan and China. We may now take it for granted that educated men and women of late Meiji and Taishō times were well educated in the Chinese and Japanese classics, but we should not lose track of the fact that the acquisition of this knowledge still required many long, hard hours of study, and some certainly took that learning to higher levels than others.

Among those Japanese writers and poets of the prewar era who traveled to China, Akutagawa was in a small class with Satō Haruo (1892–1964), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), and perhaps a :few others who knew the Chinese literary tradition well. One tends to think of the late Meiji and Taishō era as a time in which Western literary trends had captured the Japanese creative imagination. Without attempting to disprove this general assessment, it is important to remember that even the greatest literary masters of the era, men and women much in debt to and heavily influenced by European literature, such as Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), also owed much to continental Asian literary traditions. Sōseki was one of the greatest Chinese-Ianguage poets ofhisday in Japan.

From 1918 Akutagawa entered into an exclusive contract to write only for the Ōsaka manichi shinbun, and over the next three years he wrote and published prolifically. In late March 1921 he went to China on assignment for the Ōsaka mainichi to write a series of articles on cultural life in China’s major cities. He had acquired sufficient stature as a writer that the newspaper owners felt that such a series would be a major publicity coup. In fact, installments of his travel narrative were carried in the Japanese-language press in China as well, making the whole journey a literary event The newspaper widely publicized the trip, and he was doted on by Japanese he met all along the way. From the later 1910s China was in the grip of intellectual ferment, the New Culture Movement or the May 4 Movement, and the Japanese press was interested in capturing that ferment for their readers. Akutagawa’s task was to convey how younger Chinese activists under the influence of Western trends in politics, literature, and the arts were confronting age-old Chinese cultural forms.

Unfortunately, he became seriously ill en route and had to wait more than a week in the Japanese port city of Moji before he was fit enough to board a ship for Shanghai. When he did arrive in Shanghai at the very end of March, he was so ill that he was forced to spend three weeks in a hospital to overcome a bout of pleurisy. His travels took him to a number of China’s major urban centers—Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing, among them.

Charged with interviewing a number of major Chinese cultural and political figures, Akutagawa hoped to get some answers to questions about die new intellectuals and their opposition to their cultural predecessors. Those interviews with several exceedingly famous Chinese intellectuals—Zhang Binglin

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and China

457

and Gu Hongming among them—are all but completely unknown to scholars of modem Chinese history.

His travels in China came to an end in early July, and his health was all but mined by the trip. He wrote a number of travelogues from this trip. The two most famous of them, those of Shanghai and Beijing, are translated in the text that follows. They make for absorbing and altogether unexpected reading.

Akutagawa was known for has tales of the bizarre and the thought-provok-ing, not for the overall sarcastic tone we see in these travelogues. His attitude borders on arrogance but without usually crossing that border, living at a time when it was as yet not imperative at every moment to remain on one’s guard in matters of cultural relativity, Akutagawa singly called everything as he saw it The early 1920s were, it should be underscored, a harsh time in China’s coming of age. For all the intellectual excitement of that time in China, there was massive and devastating urban and rural poverty. Akutagawa was not overly sympathetic, nor did he predict the collapse of China or call for Japan to become more involved on the mainland, as others of his countrymen had and would continue to do.

It is precisely in the unexpected quality of these travel accounts that one pinpoints their uniqueness. One gets neither a hint or guide to Akutagawa’s other writings from these narratives, nor do they in any way typify the hundreds of other Japanese travelogues of China from the prewar era. The famous scholar of Chinese literature, Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–1977), once noted that Akutagawa’s was his favorite piece of Japanese travel writing about China.1

Shortly after he returned home, Akutagawa tried his hand at setting a piece of fiction in a contemporary Chinese setting. In late 1925 or 1926, the year before his suicide, Akutagawa wrote the story Konan no ōgi (The folding fan of Hunan) winch began:

Aside from Sun Yat-sen who was born in Guangdong, the outstanding Chinese revolutionaries—Huang Xing, Cai E, and Song Jiaoren—were all born in Hunan. This was of course owing to the inspiration of Zeng Guofan and Zhang Zhidong. To explain this inspiration, we must consider the indefatigably strong will of the Hunanese people themselves. When I visited Hunan [several years ago], I had an almost fictional encounter, which may illustrate the dignity and deep passion of the Hunanese.

1 See Joshua A. Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862– 1945

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). For Takeuchi’s piece, see his “Aoki Masaru ‘Kōnan shun’” (Aoki Masaru’s “Jiangnan Spring”), in Takeuchi Yoshimi, Nihon to Chūgoku no aida (Between Japan and China) (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1973), pp. 211–12.

458

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and China

Akutagawa’s storyteller,a Japanese doctor, goes on to describe his trip to Changsha, capital of Hunan Province. There he meets his former Tokyo University classmates Tan Yongnian, or “Tan the eternal,” perhaps a reference to another Hunanese martyr, Tan Sitong (1865–1898), and hence to all Hunanese and the undying spirit of reform in China. (If the surname Tan is read in the Japanese way, it is pronounced hanashi or “story,” and this reading may carry the meaning of the “eternal story.”) In any event, in Changsha they meet one Yu Lan, the woman lover of a rebel leader executed just a few days earlier. Tan offers the narrator some biscuits that have been soaked in the blood of this fallen hero, saying that if he eats them, he will never become ill again. No one can stomach such borderline cannibalism except Yu Lan2 One should probably read this story as speaking directly to the enduring admiration Akutagawa had both for the Chinese who were intent on changing their dismal state and for such courageous Chinese women, though one may see a bit of the Akutagawa from his travels in China who would have balked at the sight of such a bizarre Chinese custom.

In 1926 Gai Zun published a translation of selections from Akutagawa’s various travelogues of China in the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (Novel monthly 17.4, pp. 1–26), recently brought to my attention by Professor Shih Shu-mei of the University of California, Los Angeles. In his brief introduction, Gai notes that a Japanese bookstore owner suggested he might want to read the original because of the “frequent ridicule directed by Japanese recently at your country.”

Gai immediately read it and was captivated: “There are many places where the book mocks [China], but when discussing our domestic circumstances in all fairness, things are as he says.” Akutagawa may put it starkly, he concedes, but not unfairly, unless one insists on standing by exaggerations as if they were fact. And Gai was sufficiently moved that he chose to translate several selections from the work so that fellow Chinese would be able to read it.

In addition to Shih Shu-mei, I would like to thnk Professor Ronald Egan of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Professor Yeh Wen-hsin of the University of California, Berkeley, for help with Chinese literary and theatrical terms that appeared in the text, and Professor Gail Hershatter (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Professor Christian Henriot (Université de Lyon) for technical information on Shanghai prostitution.

2 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū (The Collected works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1977), vol. 3, pp. 184–91.

■ Source: “Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels in China.” From Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought by Irene Bloom and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., 341–71. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels in China

In the preface to the account of his travels in China, Shina bunmei ki (A Chronicle of Chinese Civilization), written in the same month (January 1912) that the fledgling Republic of China was born, Uno Tetsuto (1875–1974), the renowned Sinologist, wrote:

The national conditions of China, that country which has maintained intimate contact with our land for well over a thousand years and which is separated from us by only a narrow strait, should already be quite clear to us. But, they are not clear at all.

Those who understand China by reading her revered classics and sagely scriptures of antiquity may think that China is a paradise on Earth with sages and men of virtue wafting about like the clouds. Is China really a paradise?

Based on their own limited experiences, men of the world often scorn the Chinese people and consider them ungrateful, immoral, and incorri-gible. Can we really dispense with the Chinese nation with such scorn?

I originally wrote this book in the days of the Ch’ing dynasty [1644–

1911] and sent it to my parents back home in Japan; in it I discuss a variety of matters large and small, such as Chinese customs and practices, social conditions, famous places, and ancient sights. If, on the basis of this book, a glimpse of the national conditions of China is introduced to the world, then the honor is not only mine.1

What sort of false impressions or stereotypes of contemporary China was Uno trying to overcome and why? To whom was his lengthy travel account directed? Why had he traveled to China and what did travel to China mean for him?

The Tokugawa bakufu lifted its ban on travel abroad in 1862 when the Senzaimaru, the first official ship sent on a mission to China in 223 years, set sail for Shanghai to investigate conditions there in the wake of the Opium War (1839–1842). In the years that followed, a number of brave souls and official 1 Uno Tetsuto, Shina bunmei ki (Tokyo: Daidōkan, 1912), 1–2.

460

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

emissaries journeyed to the mainland for a variety of reasons.2 Understandably, the first group to travel to China and report on what they found were Japanese scholars of Chinese history and culture, Kangakusha. Strictly speaking, several of those aboard the Senzaimaru, such as Takasugi Shinsaku (1839–1867) and Hibino Teruhiro (1838–1912), were Kangakusha; but the genre of a Kangakusha travel account of China only began to take form in the next decade, even though elements of it can be found in their earlier accounts.

2 Take, for example, the case of Sone Toshitora (1847–1910). One of the earliest advocates of genuine Sino-Japanese friendship, Sone was a naval officer who first went to China in 1873

to accompany Foreign Minister Soejima Tar. omi on official business. See Kuzuu Yoshihisa, Tō-A senkaku shishi kiden (Biographies of Pioneer Men of Spirit in East Asia) (Tokyo: Kokuryūkai shuppanbu, 1933–1936), 316. He made many trips thereafter and enjoyed the friendship of such Chinese intellectuals as Wang T’ao and Feng Tzu-yu (1882–1958). The latter wrote of him: “Among the Japanese, Sone was the most concerned with Chinese affairs.” See Feng, Chung-hua min-kuo k’ai-kuo ch’ien ko-ming shih (A History of the Revolution Before the Founding of the Republic of China) (Shanghai: Ko-ming shih pien-chi she, 1928), vol. 1, p. 303.

He made another trip to China late in 1874 and transcribed a long and detailed description of the activities of the Taiping rebels from a monk at the Ching-chi Temple. He also copied out a manifesto delivered in 1858 by Hung Hsiu-ch’üan (1813–1864) and his “kings.”

And, he compiled yet another account when he returned in 1875 and 1876, describing his travels to Chinese and Korean port cities and military installations and his meetings with local officials; he also listed the prices of virtually every product in every place he visited, as well as the temperature and a whole host of other information. See Sone, Shinkoku manyūshi (Record of Travels through China) (Tokyo: Sekibunsha, 1883), as cited in Meiji ikō Nihonjin no Chūgoku ryokōki (Japanese Travel Accounts of China from the Meiji Period On) (Tokyo: Tōyō

bunko, 1980), 1–2.

Sone’s true motives remain murky, however, for recent research indicates that he was in fact passing all his information directly to the highest levels of the Japanese government and military. He wrote a report in 1881 that detailed the cargoes at various ports in China. See his Shinkoku kakkōbin ran (An Overview of the Ports in China) (n.p., 1881). In 1884, Sone was assigned as Japan’s official observer of the Sino-French conflict over Annam, and he criticized the Japanese government for failing to come to the aid of the Chinese. See his Hō- Etsu kōhei hi (Record of Conflict Between France and Annam), ed. Wang T’ao (1886; reprinted, Taipei: Wen-hai ch’u-pan she, 1971); and Paul Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ing China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 103–4. Yet, in this 1884 trip report, he provided a wealth of intelligence on the port of Yen-t’ai (Shantung), including troop and ship numbers and the speed and variety of the ships. He noted as well that Yen-t’ai would be the crux of a naval victory over the Ch’ing. When Port Arthur fell to the Japanese in 1894, Japanese forces attacked at Weihaiwei, near Yen-t’ai, where the Peiyang naval armada was crushed, just as Sone had hinted would be the case. See Kawamura Kazuo,

“Kaigun taii Sone Toshitora no Shinkoku shisatsu ni tsuite” (On Lieutenant Sone Toshitora’s Inspections of China), Gunji shigaku (December 1978), 39:44–48.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 461

Takezoe Shin’ichirō (1842–1917) was one of the first Kangaku scholars to travel to China in the Meiji period. Following a trip of over three months there in 1876, he penned a lengthy account, composed in elegant Kanbun or literary Chinese, which he titled San’ un kyōu nikki (A Diary of Clouds in the Mountain Pathways and Rain in the Ravines, published 1879). Although Takezoe was attentive to local custom, water conservancy methods, and opium, among the more concrete realities he noted, the greater sense he conveys to readers of his account is of his having finally arrived in China, the motherland of culture as he saw it. He took great pains to make his account a lasting work of poetry and prose, not a mere travel guide; for this reason he wrote it in Chinese. He described contemporary China as a nation that had come down with a cold incorrectly diagnosed by the doctor. With proper treatment—and Takezoe applauded the modernization efforts he witnessed in China during the self-strengthening movement—the patient was sure to recover.3

The year 1884 marks the first watershed in changing Japanese attitudes toward China as revealed in this developing genre of travel accounts. The outbreak of the Sino-French War in 1884, the first major confrontation between an East Asian and a European power since the Opium War, prompted many Japanese travelers to publish reports. One of the results of China’s apparent defeat by the French and the loss of Annam was a general diminution of the grand image of China. A typical response of the time, although not the work of a Kangaku scholar, was that of Komuro Shinsuke who complained about the wartime exaggerations in the Chinese press, a characteristic he came to associate with the Chinese people generally. He also thought they were greedy, petty people with no sense of shame or integrity, concerned only with their personal advantage—the sort of condescending statement that could have been written by Arthur Smith or Père Huc, two of the more famous European travelers and commentators about China of the previous century.4

3 Takezoe Shin’ichirō, San’un kyōu nikki, translated from Kanbun into classical Japanese by Yonaiyama Tsuneo (Tokyo: Ōsaka yagō shoten, 1944). See also Takeuchi Minoru, “Meiji Kangakusha no Chūgoku kikō” (Travel Accounts of China by Kangaku Scholars of the Meiji Period), in Takeuchi, Nihonjin ni totte no Chūgoku zō (Japanese Images of China) (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1966), 232–44; and Fuse Chisoku, Yūki ni arewaretaru Meiji jidai no Nis-Shi ōrai (Sino-Japanese Intercourse in the Meiji Era as Seen in Travel Accounts) (Tokyo: Tō-A kenkyŭkai, 1938), 34–44.

4 Komuro Shinsuke, Daiichi yū-Shin ki (Record of a First Trip to China), in Meiji ikō Nihonjin no Chūgoku ryokōki, 2–3. See also the marvelous piece on Huc by Simon Leys, “Peregrinations and Perplexities of Père Huc,” in Leys, The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986), 47–94.

462

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

The most famous Japanese to visit China in 1884 was the Kangaku scholar Oka Senjin (1832–1913), and he remained there for an entire year. He composed his long and detailed account, Kankō kiyū (Trip Report), in Kanbun but without the devotion to China and her culture that one finds in the account of his forerunner Takezoe. Oka adopted a straightforward, descriptive style. The critical importance of his work is its place as the first severe critique of China by a Kangaku scholar, and it opened the door for others to follow. Adopting the familiar metaphor of illness, he diagnosed China’s disease as twofold: endoku (the poison of smoke, or opium) and keidoku (the poison of the Chinese classics). The former confronted Oka two days after arriving in Shanghai when he went to meet the famous Chinese reformer Wang T’ao (1828–1897) and was told by his intermediary, Kishida Ginkō (the nefarious mainland adventurer, 1833–1905), that Wang was indisposed, undoubtedly because of his opium addiction. Oka’s shock would give birth to a disillusionment with Chinese intellectuals generally. He questioned other Chinese closely about the extent of the opium problem, examined and described opium dens himself, and even witnessed the problem personally after a Chinese banquet. The experience left him thoroughly revolted.

The problem of keidoku involved both Oka’s sense of a Chinese slavishness to antiquity and an essential and unhealthy Sinocentrism. Throughout his travels, Oka made use of the “brush conversation” (Jap. hitsudan; Ch. pi-t’ an), the primary means by which Chinese and Japanese who shared no spoken language communicated through the medium of written literary Chinese, the lingua franca throughout East Asia. He had many hitsudan with a wealthy chü-jen (a scholar who had passed the second level of the imperial examinations) by the name of Wang Yen-yün. Oka was horrified by the waste and prof-ligacy of the Wang household. At one point he said to scholar Wang that he felt Li Hung-chang’s (1823–1901) efforts to build Chinese industry and encourage commerce would be good for China as they had been for the West. Detecting Wang’s anger. Oka gave an example from the classics, something Kangaku scholars were never at a loss for, to demonstrate that the sages had used machines to help the people. Wang responded: “The French and the English are jackals and wolves. They have nothing to say on the subject of human principles.” After further, completely fruitless, discussion. Oka concluded: “Yen-yün is a strange man. As a scholar he is a rare talent indeed, but when he talks of foreign affairs, he becomes perverse, runs to extremes, and fails to understand.”

Oka saw this as a general Chinese problem.5

5 Oka Senjin, Kankō kiyū (self-published, 1892), entry for July 25, 1884. See also Takeuchi, “Meiji Kangakusha no Chūgoku kikō,” 249–55; and Fuse, Yüki ni arewaretaru Meiji jidai no Nis-Shi ōrai, 44–58.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 463

What makes Oka’s case so interesting is that it was precisely the depth of his learning in traditional Chinese subjects that enabled him to enter elite Chinese society to a considerable extent and made it nearly impossible for his hosts to ignore him. By the same token, it meant a even starker realization of the depth of perceived decay in China. He was prepared to concede the personal, spiritual realm to Confucius and sons, but the physical realm belonged to modernization on the model of the Meiji reforms. Nothing could have brought the necessity of this dualism closer to home than a meeting he had in Shao-hsing with three Chinese students who explained in a perfectly rational frame of mind that solar eclipses were caused by a bullfrog eating the sun (following a description in the Ch’un-ch’iu, or Spring and Autumn Annals).6 It was sadly ironic that this long trip to China should produce a sustained attack on China from within the Kangaku fold.

Oka queried many Chinese about what they planned to do in the war with France, and no one came up with a satisfactory answer. Sheng Hsüan-huai (1844–1916) threw the question back, asking if Japan would enter the war to assist China. Oka squirmed: “Japan is a small island country, and we are pru-dent in our intercourse with the West. Why should we cooperate with China and incur the animosity of France for no reason whatsoever?” The best route for Japan to take, Oka ultimately decided, was “secession” (ridatsu) from the Chinese cultural world, a view completely consistent with the famous formula of “dissociation from Asia” (datsu-A) elaborated the following year (1885) by Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901).7

One equally scornful attitude can be found the same year in the trip account of the liberal intellectual Sugita Teiichi (1851–1920). Although earlier he had been favorably disposed to Sino-Japanese cooperation to confront the West, after his 1884 trip Sugita radically reformulated the issues. Either Japan would stand with China and be carved up, he claimed, or it would not only not stand aside but actually join in the carving of China. That year’s Sino-Japanese conflict over Korea, he argued, provided a pretext for just such an attack on China, and he urged immediate imperialist advances.8

Over the next two decades, greater access to travel in China by people from many different occupational groups led to a wide variety of responses to 6 See Takeuchi, “Meiji Kangakusha no Chūgoku kikō,” 258.

7 Ibid., 250, 262.

8 Sugita Tei’ichi, “Yū-Shin yokan” (Impressions from a Trip to China), included in Saika Hakuai, Sugita Kakuzan ō (The Venerable Sugita Kakuzan [Tei’ichi]) (Tokyo: Kakuzankai, 1928), 582–85.

See also Hashikawa Bunsō [Bunzō], “Japanese Perspectives on Asia: From Dissociation to Coprosperity,” in Akira Iriye, ed., The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 331–33.

464

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

contemporary China. From his 1891–1892 trip to the Yangtze delta area, Andō

Fujio, a Kangaku scholar and journalist, put together an altogether new kind of travel account. Composed of newspaper articles describing his experiences in China, Andō’s Shina manyū jikki (True Account of a Voyage to China) was explicitly written to enable the Japanese to expand their commercial and shipping interests. Since no sufficient guides to China’s geography existed, he sought to fill the lacunae, adding a wealth of information on Chinese commercial organization, local foods and clothing, and practices in marriage, funerals, and religion. Although he counseled diligence and frugality by Japanese enterprises, he also encouraged unity among like industries so as to demonstrate Japanese resolve to the Chinese. Continuing the metaphor of illness employed earlier by Takezoe and Oka, Andō spoke of China as a “sick old man” (yameru rōya) and Japan as a “lively youth” (katsuratsutaru shōnen); were China to decline farther, Japan could step in and take over, he noted.9

This sort of openly instrumental view of China was prevalent but hardly typical of the 1890s. No one, Japanese or Chinese, could deny that China was in serious trouble, but there was no single response to that dilemma in Japan or China. Miyauchi Isaburō confronted the same situation when he went to China in 1892, and his response is perhaps more typical of the confused mixture among Kangakusha of cultural Sinophilia and political Sinophobia: Although the cowardice of this people is well known to everyone, no nation opened its doors earlier, has more territory or greater population, gave rise to more wise men and heroic figures, or produced cultural relics earlier than the people of continental China. Men of letters have recited widely all the many sorts of things that we Japanese have copied from them in the past. Thus, we must be careful when we look at contemporary Chinese politics or trade. . . . Three hundred years have passed since then [i.e., the founding of the Ch’ing dynasty], and although the imperial throne has already been handed down consecutively for more than ten generations, the Chinese state has now fallen into decay and has become the laughingstock of the world.10

9 Andō Fujio, Shina manyū jikki (Tokyo: Hakubutsukan, 1892). See also Meiji ikō Nihonjin no Chūgoku ryoköki, 5; and Takeuchi Minoru, “Sandai no Chūgoku kenbun” (Travelers to China of Three Eras), in Takeuchi, Nihonjin ni totte no Chūgoku zō, 222.

10 Miyauchi Isaburō, Shinkoku jijō tanken roku (Record of a Factual Investigation of China) (Tokyo: Shinkoku jijō henshū kyoku, 1894), 1a.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 465

His account features information on seventy-seven items, from public works projects and agriculture to religious practices, military conditions, opium, women, currency, and poisonous snakes.

Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) spent the latter half of 1893 in China, and he either ignored or simply missed the harsher side of life in China altogether. Sent by the Imperial Household Department to investigate Chinese art, he concentrated on museums and curio shops and traveled about in Chinese dress with his hair in a queue. From his subsequent speeches and writings that mention his travels, we can isolate several conclusions he reached. While holding to his favorite slogan that “Asia was one,” Okakura came to believe that there was no one “China” (Shina ni Shina nashi), namely, that the cultures of the Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers were sufficiently different to warrant a basic distinction.11

As the nineteenth century came to an close, China increasingly began to attract the type of person who fashioned himself rugged. The popular image of China as an age-old country, extremely poor, and much in need of modern conveniences emerged at this time, largely because of the picture of China presented in travel reports. Also, organizations of Japanese adventurers cropped up throughout China beginning in the mid-1890s. When Takase Bintoku arrived in 1902, he insisted on traveling on foot. He noted that Chinese streets were dirty, workers and coolies looked like beggars, and the general populace was filthy and insensate—all images soon to become elemental to any portrait of China then. While a few lived in grand elegance, the lower classes enjoyed an extremely low level of hygiene. And, here was a severe problem for China: Chinese society had no healthy middle ranks (chūtō shakai), also a common view over the next few decades. After a lengthy description of life in China, particularly in Peking, Takase came to the conclusion that China was not a

“nation” (kokka) but had 400 million individuals and four thousand-year-old 11 Okakura Tenshin, “Shina nanboku no kubun’ (The Difference Between North and South China), Kokka (March 1894), 54, reprinted in Okakura Tenshin zenshū (The Collected Works of Okakura Tenshin) (Tokyo: Seibunkaku, 1939), 191–98; Saitō Ryūzō, Okakura Tenshin (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1960), 73–78; Kiyomi Rikurō, Okakura Tenshin (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1934), 70–87; Okakura Kazuo, Chichi Okakura Tenshin (My Father, Okakura Tenshin) (Tokyo: Chūō kōron sha, 1971), 84–104; Hashikawa Bunzō, “Fukuzawa Yukichi to Okakura Tenshin” (Fukuzawa Yukichi and Okakura Tenshin), in Takeuchi Yoshimi and Hashikawa Bunzō, eds., Kindai Nihon to Chūgoku (Modern Japan and China) (Tokyo: Asahi shinbun sha, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 27, 29–32; and Takeuchi Minoru, “Ajia wa hitotsu nari: Okakura Tenshin to Izuru” (Asia Is One: Okakura Tenshin and Izuru), in Takeuchi, Kikō Nihon no naka no Chūgoku (China in Travel Accounts of Japan) (Tokyo: Asahi shinbun sha, 1976), 65–85.

466

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

customs; in the same breath he claimed, apparently unaware of the non sequi-tur, that the Chinese “nation” was headed for extinction. He called on all foreign (read Japanese) educators, religious leaders, and businessman to pursue their lines of work in China.12

Among the more famous and undoubtedly the most obnoxious travel account of the late Meiji period was that of the journalist Tokutomi Sohō

(1863–1957). No sooner had he arrived in Manchuria en route to Peking than he wrote home to say that merchants in An-tung expressed what appeared to be genuine thankfulness for the protection to their property and persons now available because of Japanese domination in the region. He arrived in the Chinese capital just when “the rights recovery fever had reached 40°C.”

Agreeing with an unnamed English reporter who claimed that the Chinese defiance of the civilized powers derived from this xenophobic fever, he concluded that “‘rights recovery’ may be the other side of xenophobia.” And, revealing his true colors, Tokutomi added: “Where will this . . . movement end?

Perhaps it will unite with the antiforeign movement of the lower classes? Is such an apprehension needless anxiety? I hope it is.”13

He generally concluded that China lacked the concept of nation, a rapidly developing idea about China in Japan. He had looked hard for a Chinese sense of commonality, and all he could find was effeminacy, lack of skill and drive, and a virtual cult of despair. Although clever in planning in their own self-interest and thoroughly opportunistic, he claimed, the Chinese were, in the final analysis, untrustworthy, again virtually the identical superficial conclusions of Père Huc and Arthur Smith, two famous missionary-travelers in China some decades earlier. “In sum,” he concluded, “China is in a state of transition at present . . . But, will she be able . . . to form a national unity and raise a national spirit, while at the same time joining in the life and thought shared by the civilized nations and become a great and powerful state? This is the gravest of my many doubts.”14 In later years travel accounts of China by Kangaku scholars became the most pedantic subgenre in this entire vast literature. Every sight, every stele, every mountain or village elicited a veritable outpouring of historic and cultural information of interest largely to people who already knew it all.

12 Takase Bintoku, Hoku-Shin kenbunroku (Record of a Trip to North China), in Meiji ikō

Nihonjin no Chūgoku ryokōki, 12.

13 Tokutomi Iichirō [Sohō], Nanajūyōka yūki (Record of a Trip of Seventy-Eight Days) (Tokyo: Minʾyūsha, 1906), included in Sekai kikō bungaku zenshū (Collection of International Travel Literature) (Tokyo: Shūdō sha, 1959), vol. 11, pp. 64, 73.

14 In Sekai kikō bungaku zenshū, vol. 11, p. 74. See also Meiji ikō Nihonjin no Chūgoku ryokōki, 14–15.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 467

Furthermore, such information was always presented as if the author were gushing forth with quotations from the Shih chi (Record of the Grand Historian) or poems by Su Tung-p’o (1037–1101) that hung on the tip of his tongue; in fact, it was perfectly clear that he had packed his account just before publication back in Japan, where he had access to his library. Nonetheless, we would be hard-pressed now to imagine the excitement such men, who had lived Chinese history and the Chinese classics entirely from written texts (many of them memorized just as Chinese scholars had memorized them for centuries), must have felt as they actually came into personal contact with “China.”

This revelatory (in many cases, self-congratualatory) style, however, was still novel and fresh in the decade (1897–1906) preceding Uno Tetsuto’s travels.

During this decade several remarkable Kangaku scholars with formidable credentials in traditional Chinese learning traveled to China for the first time and left marvelous accounts of their experiences. Where earlier Kangaku travelers had been shocked by the reality of a China wholly different from their unre-alistic expections, just as Uno expected they might in his introduction, this group had both the advantage of much more information about contemporary China and the opportunity to read the accounts of earlier travelers, including Takezoe and Oka. However, they also were burdened with the developing negative images of China we have seen.

Yamamoto Baigai (1852–1928) devoted his academic life to traditional Chinese scholarship, particularly to the histories and the Tzu-chih t’ung-chien (Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government) of Ssu-ma Kuang (1019–1089), which he allegedly read six times. He was also an activist in the popular rights movement of the Meiji period and was centrally involved in the Osaka Incident, in which a number of Japanese were arrested for involvement in plotting a coup in Korea. Over a decade later in the fall of 1897, he seized an opportunity to travel through China’s major cities for several months. In many ways, his account of that trip is typical of Kangaku travelers—inclusion of capsule histories of every sight, every statue, every hillock visited, and usually with quotations from Chinese texts. Entitled Enzan sosui kiyū (Chronicle of a Trip to the Mountains of North China and the Rivers of South China), it was also the last of this subgenre to be written completely in Kanbun.

Yamamoto’s extraordinary ability in Kanbun and his journalistic contacts in China enabled him to enjoy considerable contact with Chinese reformers, such as Wang K’ang-nien (1860–1911), Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (1873–1929), and Chang Chien (1853–1926), as well as with the conservative scholar Lo Chen-yü (1866–1940).

His discussions in China were all recorded in his account, which expressed general agreement with the reformist movement. Back in Japan he maintained contacts with his Chinese friends for many years, particularly when Liang and

468

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

his mentor K’ng Yu-wei (1858–1927) were forced to flee there from China at the end of 1898. Yamamoto later organized a Sino-Japanese Cooperative Society, and he offered help to Liang’s publishing efforts from Japan. When asked by the Foreign Ministry, in view of his close association with the Chinese reformers, to inform Liang and K’ang that the Japanese government was expelling them, Yamamoto simply retused.15

Naitō Konan (1866–1934), a figure of legendary proportions in prewar Japanese Sinology, made his first voyage to China proper in the late summer and fall of 1899. I have dealt with his trip account, Enzan sosui (The Mountains of North China and the Rivers of South China) in detail elsewhere16 and will be brief here. Like Yamamoto’s similarly titled work, Naitō embellished his account with countless historical and classical references, as if to remind himself that he was actually visiting the same China that he had so long studied.

Among the many prominent Chinese reformers and intellectuals with whom he “conversed” in Kanbun were Yen Fu (1853–1921), Wen T’ing-shih (1856–1904), Chang Yüan-chi (1866–1959), Liu Hsüeh-hsün, and Lo Chen-yü. Their discussions covered many topics but always, perhaps because Naitō was so insistent, returned to the problems of rulership in contemporary China and what role Japan might play in helping China reform itself.17

Despite his insistence that Japan play a role, even if only as a model, and despite his negative remarks about the general state of hygiene there, Naitō

retained an enormous respect for China and the Chinese, as witnessed by several sketches appended to his trip report. In part, this was because of a frozen image of “China,” the motherland of culture itself, in the words of Takezoe Shinʾichirō. Naitō’s realization that China had severe problems, from opium addiction and footbinding to the lack of an adequate sewer system in Peking, 15 Masuda Wataru, “Yamamoto Ken (Baigai),” in Masuda, Seigaku tōzen to Chūgoku jijō (The Spread of Western Learning to the East and Conditions in China), 322–25, 330–33, 337–42

(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979); and Fuse, Yūki ni arewaretaru Meiji jidai no Nis-Shi ōrai, 58–64.

16 Joshua Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934) (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984), 91–109. Enzan sosui can be found in Naitō Kenkichi and Kanda Kiichiro, eds., Naitō Konan zenshū (The Collected Works of Naitō Konan) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 1–178; reading it, which is very difficult, can be greatly facilitated by the annotations in the appropriate sections of Ogawa Tamaki, Nihon no meicho: Naitō Konan (Masterpieces of Japan: Naitō Konan) (Tokyo: Chūō kōron sha, 1971).

17 This concern of Naitō’s account prompted Ojima Sukema to refer to it as a work of statecraft ( keisei). “Konan sensei to Enzan sosui” (The Enzan sosui and Professor [Naitō]

Konan), Shinagaku (July 1954), 7(3):533–34.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 469

never led him to reject China, as it had Oka Senjin and Sugita Teiichi fifteen years earlier. In fact, it never led him to the despair of the writer Lu Hsün (1881–

1936), who would soon describe the entire history of Chinese culture as that of cannibalism. His understanding of its ills went too deep for such an extreme response. Also, by the turn of the century the times had changed, and to reject China in the manner of Oka and Sugita usually carried pro-Westernization political baggage with it (as in the case of Tokutomi Sohō), anathema to someone of Naitō Konan’s education and proclivities.

This background should help explain the many different images Uno Tetsuto was trying to overcome when he set down to write his fascinating Shina bunmei ki. Although he allegedly based his report on his eighteen months of study in Peking (1906–1907), his actual travels occupied only a few months of his time on the mainland. As indicated by his title, this was not merely a simple trip report from China, as so many others had written; it was to be a descriptive account of the state of Chinese civilization. Uno had graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1900 and would become full professor there in 1918. Although barely thirty years old when he set out, Uno was already extraordinarily learned in classical Chinese traditions, citations from which appear on virtually every page of his work. He had already published several books in his major field of expertise, Chinese philosophy, especially of the Sung period. He returned to Japan for nearly seventy more years of prodigious scholarly productivity.18

As Uno’s account begins, one is easily led to believe that what follows will be the typical Kangakusha’s chronicle of each and every stone (and its history) in China, punctuated only by an occasional statement of irritation with the 18 Before his appointment at Tokyo Imperial University, Uno taught Kanbun for a time at the high-school level, where among his pupils was a young Morohashi Tetsuji (1883–1983).

For nearly two decades, he and Hattori Unokichi (1867–1939) were the two pillars of learning in Chinese philosophy at Tokyo University. In 1931 he became dean of the Faculty of Letters; in 1936 he retired became professor emeritus. From 1939 to 1944 he traveled to Peking annually to give lectures on Chinese philosophy, and he was named a professor emeritus of Peking University in 1939. His publications and annotated translations are numerous; and two Festschriften were published in his honor, one on his eighty-eighth birthday and one on his ninety-ninth. See Yen Shao-tang, Jih-pen ti Chung-kuo-hsüeh-chia (Japanese Sinologists) (Peking: Hsin-hua shu-chü, 1980), 580–81; Morohashi Tetsuji,

“Uno sensei no omoide” (Memories of Professor Uno), Tōhōgaku (1974), 48:148–49; Katō

Jōken, “Tsuitōbun” (Eulogy) Tōhōgaku (1974), 48:152; Abe Yoshio, “Daidōo ayumareta Uno Tetsuto” (Uno Tetsuto Who Traveled the Great Way of Morality), Tōhōgaku (1974), 48:154,156; and Akatsuka Kiyoshi, “Uno sensei no Jugaku shi” (Professor Uno’s History of Confucianism), Tōhōgaku (1974), 48:160–63.

470

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

Chinese. At sea for several days before landing at the port of T’ang-ku in Hopeh province (near Tientsin), Uno expresses genuine sadness at the horrific sight of people’s homes, constructed of mud, built right by the water—“they looked more like pig sties.” But he is revived when he sees, fluttering in the wind, a Hinomaru (the Japanese flag), as if reassured that one might find civilized comforts even in T’ang-ku. This is no place, he notes in fairness, to get a first impression of China. Uno’s next stop is Tientsin, where life appears much better to his eye, and then on to Peking, which is even better.19

Uno makes Peking his headquarters, and from there he begins a series of trips throughout China. His descriptions of people, places, roadside stands and their wares, fruits for sale, theater, local festivals, and the like are all interesting, but they read now like an almanac. In fact, Takeuchi Minoru has suggested that Uno’s descriptions are so thick that he may have simply borrowed much of his information from an almanac published at this time in China by Tun Li-ch’en, the Yen-ching sui-shih-chi (Almanac of Yen-ching).20 In other words, the material in the first 125 pages of Uno’s nearly four hundred-page travel account provides interesting reading in the way that an encyclopedia provides interesting reading. However, the atmosphere suddenly changes at this point.

On September 4, 1906, shortly after arriving in China, Uno leaves Tientsin by ship, although he does not mention his destination. The next day he arrives at noon in Cheefu (Chih-fu), where the sight of numerous Japanese ships in dock proves especially comforting to him. The next day he boards a German vessel that carries him past the Shantung peninsula south. On the morning of September 7, the ship docks in Tsingtao, and Uno disembarks to check in at, reportedly, the only Japanese inn there. (Several years later, after Japan seized German holdings in Tsingtao during World War I, Tsingtao would be overwhelmed by Japanese businesses, tourists, and traders.) Although Uno is unable to control his penchant for introducing historical tidbits into the sights thus far seen on this side trip, the account takes on an altogether different flavor in Shantung.

From Tsingtao, Uno boards a train bound for Tsinan. On the train, he finds himself uncomfortably surrounded for over twelve hours by Chinese and 19 Uno, Shina bunmei ki, 2–10.

20 Takeuchi Minoru, “Aru Kangakusha no Chūgoku kikō” (One Kangakusha’s Travel Account of China), in Takeuchi, Nihonjin ni totte no Chūgoku zō, 274. Tun Li-ch’en was the Chinese name adopted by Tun-ch’ung, a Manchu by birth. This work by him has been translated into English by Derk Bodde as Annual Customs and Festivals in Peking (Peiping: H. Vetch, 1936; reprinted, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1965). Thanks to Susan Naquin for bringing the translation to my attention.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 471

several Englishmen. The Chinese, he reports, were particularly talkative and

“extremely bothersome” (hanahada urusai), although he admits that he was not offended by them. An occasional mention of an ancient Chinese text and a reference to Mencius’s well-known meeting with King Hsüan of Ch’i (which had allegedly occurred nearby)—still, Uno offers not a hint as to where he is headed.

Upon arrival in Tsinan, Uno hires a rickshaw, his third mode of transport, each one progressively more primitive, to convey him to the home of a local Japanese resident. There he meets several other Japanese for a “circle of unexpected satisfaction.” For five days (September 8–12), this Japanese resident shows him the sights of Tsinan and introduces him to Governor Yang Shih-hsiang, with whom he exchanges pleasantries. On the morning of the thirteenth, he departs Tsinan, this time by horse-drawn carriage, which arrives on the afternoon of the fourteenth in T’ai-an-fu. Highly attentive to propriety, Uno pays his respects to the local prefectural magistrate, Yü Kou, immediately upon arrival.21

The next morning he rises at dawn to climb Mount T’ai (actually, he is carried up bodily, his fifth and most ancient mode of hired transport). From there he can see all around him, and now it becomes clear what this trip is really all about. He has returned, figuratively, to the fount of civilization itself. He has retraced the steps of progress back to its origins in the homeland of Confucius and Mencius. Just as Confucius climbed the sacred Mount T’ai and saw how small the realm appeared from its summit, so too does Uno Tetsuto some two thousand and five hundred years later. No longer is this travel account a historical almanac. It suddenly is transformed into the record of a Confucian pilgrimage. Now, even when Uno recounts historical and geographical details, they take on added philosophical, virtually religious, meaning. They now enhance his chronicle rather than simply occupy space.

From this point forward, every single sight elicits a profoundly meaningful impression in his ‘memory,” as his classical education comes alive. Leaving the glorious Mount T’ai, he travels for several days by land and river, again not mentioning where he is headed until he arrives. And, then, Ch’ü-fu appears in the distance:

The yellow roof tiles that I saw high in the city were the those of the Temple of Confucius (Sheng-miao). The azure tiles to its left were probably the Temple to Yen Hui [Confucius’s disciple). A forest of cypress 21 Uno, Shina bunmei ki, 125–58, citations on pp. 130, 132, respectively.

472

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

densely surround the city to the north and form a wall there—this was, without a doubt, the Chih Sheng [Great Sage] Forest.

Then, continuing in this euphoric vein, Uno reports (without a trace of arrogance): “It was as if we were a band of Crusaders, just arrived in ecstacy, looking at Jerusalem.”22

Uno’s rapture takes on religious fervor when he actually enters Ch’ü-fu and stands before the Temple of Confucius: “I was born in a land of decorum across the Eastern Sea (Tōen kunshikoku); separated spatially by several thousand li and temporally by over three thousands years, I have revered this place and looked up to it for many years. Today, whatever day it is, I visited the Temple of Confucius and gazed upon the Chih Sheng Forest.”23 Throughout his travel account, Uno is meticulous about recording not only the day of the events but the time as well. At the Temple of Confucius, it is not that he failed to remember the day—“whatever day it is”—but that the actual date had no meaning.

The spirit of Confucius had inhabited these environs for ages, and the particular date of Uno’s appearance there had no special importance; it was for all time. It was, in fact, September 18, 1906, a date Uno himself supplies several lines later. One can sense at this point Uno’s joy as he inhaled the same air as Confucius and prayed at the Confucian Temple: “Unconsciously, I bowed my head as if I were closely approaching the spirit of the Sage. Without looking I saw his spirit; without listening I heard his voice. And my insignificant little body immediately became absorbed in the great spirit of the Sage.”24

Lest the reader of this account doubt that Uno actually saw what he claims to have seen, four photographs (an important addition to travel writing) from Ch’ü-fu and neighboring Tsou county are inserted in the text at this point, including those of the gravestones of Confucius and Mencius, each with an explanatory caption. Once inside the Temple of Confucius, every single plaque to the disciples of Confucius is described. Not only do the classics come alive for Uno as he walks around these buildings and stelae, but he begins to feel as though he too is walking with the disciples of the Sage. When he visits the Chih Sheng Forest, his concludes his detailed depiction with the words: “The spirit . . . of the great sage Confucius fills the atmosphere [there] with its permanence . . . and brilliantly illuminates public morality.”25

22 Ibid., 139, 142–46, citation on p. 146.

23 Ibid., 146.

24 Ibid., 148–49.

25 Ibid., 149–53, photographs between p. 146 and p. 147, citation on pp. 152–53.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 473

When he returns to his inn, Uno finds that his view of the religious centrality of Ch’ü-fu to East Asia is corroborated by County Magistrate Liu, albeit for somewhat different reasons. “Our Ch’ü-fu,” complains Liu, “is comparable to the West’s Jerusalem, although Confucianism [K’ung-chiao] and Christianity

[ Ye-chiao] cannot be mentioned in the same breath. . . . In the Book of Genesis it states that the omnipotent God created Heaven, earth, and all creatures and that, on the seventh day, he rested. This is a most irrational, laughable matter. There has yet to be a Christian believer in Ch’ü-fu.”26 Liu’s evocation of Jerusalem is nationalistic and antiforeign; he was angry about foreign concessions in nearby Liao-chou-wan. This was not Uno’s concern in the least, and he quickly diverts his discussion to another topic.

“Does the legacy of Confucius and Mencius,” asks Uno for the second time,

“still exist in the land of Lu?” “No,” answers Liu, “our scholars prattle about Confucius and Mencius, but it’s all just chatter.” Uno offers his reader not a clue as to his reaction to this stark response, unless we read something into the absence of a comment. But Uno is only learning, slowly, what he will later include in his introduction (cited at the outset): that China of the classics is not the China of today. He has elicited his image of China not from newspapers or current events but from late Chou dynasty texts. As he leaves Shantung province on his way toward Kaifeng, he sadly notes: “Because [the state of] Lu was the site of the graves of the sages, I expected to find their legacies in as pure and simple form as in antiquity. I was greatly disappointed.”27

The rest of this side trip, to Kaifeng and elsewhere in Honan before returning to Peking, is all epilogue. In fact the next 175 pages, which include seven side trips, revert to the earlier tone of this travel account. His style becomes that of a diary; the dates are no longer incidental to his experiences and so integrated into the account (let alone unimportant as on that one day in Ch’ü-fu), but they become the organizers of the events described. The result is considerably less of Uno’s personal and immediate responses to China and considerably more detail, history, poetry, stone inscriptions—and, less exciting reading, to be sure. The trip to Shantung was obviously the centerpiece of his entire stay in China; it was his first substantial sidetrip from his base in Peking, and he never returned there.

The final 150 pages of the text are topical essays in which Uno assesses aspects of life in China and thirteen qualities he associates with the Chinese

“national character” (kokuminsei). These essays represent his effort to sort out what he observed and to enter that information coherently back into his mind 26 Ibid., 154.

27 Ibid., 155, 163.

474

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

in such a way that his world view would not be destroyed. In other words, he came to China with the classics in his head; he confronted Chinese realities that seemed to conflict with the purity and perfection of those classics; and then he returned to Japan with a vision of two radically distinct Chinas. In no way did contemporary China injure his mental picture of antiquity; the latter remained completely frozen and idealized. But he was at least able to separate the two and see the need to reintegrate them.

Uno’s travel account shares certain elements both with earlier Japanese travel and pilgrimage literature and with the pilgrimage literature of medieval Europe, and reference to those bodies of material may help explain some of the seeming disjunctures in slyle and presentation of Uno’s record. One of the earliest Japanese accounts of foreign travel was the diary of the monk Ennin (793–864), Nit-Tō guhō junrei gyōki (The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Buddhist Law). But, if one reads through this long account with any expectation of gaining an insight into the mind of Ennin, then one reads in vain. This was his account of a religious quest, and he allowed little of himself to intrude. When the priest Shunjō wrote his account of pilgrimage to Zenkōji in 1225, he similarly says virtually nothing of the scenery along the way, undoubtedly because it was superfluous to his intent in writing and, indeed, in traveling.28

As became clearer with subsequent travel and pilgrimage literature in Japan, the reason for such travel was not pleasure, not even of the beauty of a given temple; the idea was to commune directly with the spirit of a divine place. One could pray anywhere, and there were temples and shrines throughout Japan for that purpose, but to go to the source was also seen as the best.

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) put it succintly and much more poetically, if in a more secular vein:

Mountains crumble, rivers flow away, roads are changed, stones are buried and hide in the earth, trees grow old and give way to saplings, times passes and the world changes. Everything is uncertain, but coming here and seeing an inscription that without doubt was a thousand years old, I felt I was now seeing before me the minds of the men of old.29

28 Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 17–20, 121, 203, Some years ago, Edwin O. Reischauer translated Ennin’s diary into English as Ennin: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1955).

29 As cited in Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, 225. See also pp. 30, 34–35.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 475

The literature on accounts of European pilgrimages is even richer. Pilgrimage was an extremely important institution in late medieval times. Although the Church made allowances for pilgrimage to secondary holy places, such as Rome or Canterbury, the Jerusalem pilgrimage was in a class by itself, necessitating for the truly pious a long voyage (much as travel from Japan all the way to China must have been in Ennin’s day). There are hundreds of pilgrimage accounts; and it is this genre that was most responsible for making the metaphor of travel for life itself elemental to early European fiction, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to Thomas More’s Utopia, to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and numerous works by Daniel Defoe.30

Christian pilgrims had a unilinear sense of history. Getting to the Holy Land was the essential, indeed the only, reason for travel (and travel writing).

The return trip home was altogether less important. In fact, this may be why Chaucer never had his pilgrims recount their promised second tales on the return voyage. The process of getting to the Holy Land and the experiences there were all that mattered; thus, every step along the way was worthy of mention. Once there, the Holy Land set off countless images from the past, as recorded in the Bible and associated apocrypha. This was where Jesus had walked and preached and died. Time collapsed. Every sight and sound deserved translation into written form. And, when it was over, there was no purpose, save sinful egotism, in telling the story of the trip home.31

There was always an uneasy balance between the Church’s willingness to allow pilgrimages and the sin of curiosity (travel and observation for its own intrinsic sake). In a study of fourteenth-century British pilgrimage literature, Christian Zacher notes: “Pilgrimage was a theological idea and a cultural phenomenon—but above all it was a religious institution, a devotional practice which let pious Christians travel through the physical world only because their destinations were places sanctified by spiritual, otherworldly associations.” By the end of the Middle Ages, however, the “pilgrimage” had become a thinly veiled excuse to see the outside world itself.32

30 Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 11–12; Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 38, 60, 112–13, 254, 259–60, 275; and Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 78–79, 90, 229, passim.

31 Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, 50–51, 69, 77–78, 86–87, 97, 117.

32 Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 4–5, citation on p. 4.

476

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

At the end of the fifteenth century, a change transpired in the writing of pilgrim accounts, which Donald Howard associates with a transition from medieval to modern times. Now, pilgrims do include sections in their records that concern the trip home, and the return trip becomes an essential element of the trip itself. It is still not a record of the experiences of that return; rather, it involves the lessons learned, the fresh smells of home, and security from the perils of the journey. It becomes a time for summing up the experience of the pilgrimage, and it allows the author a personal voice beyond that of mere observer. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, curiosity is no longer a sin, but an intellectual strength. The betterment of the self through travel and the return of the pilgrim from the Holy Land to his point of departure are now far more important to the traveler than communing with some relic in Jerusalem.33

The travel account of Uno Tetsuto similarly centers entirely on the experiences of getting to and absorbing Ch’ü-fu (the Jerusalem of East Asia) and its surroundings; the rest of his account by comparison pales in vibrancy. In fact, the rest of the account could easily have been written without ever having been in China. Travel to China was not like going to the South Pole or the far side of the moon; as a Kangaku scholar, Uno “knew” China thoroughly before he ever left Japan, just as pilgrims to the Holy Land “knew” the Land of Israel.

Both relied exclusively on ancient texts.

Uno’s excitement as he sees Chinese soil from aboard his approaching ship, just as had been the case with Naitō Konan several years earlier, parallels European pilgrimage literature. For example, the longest and most thoroughly detailed pilgrim account of the fifteenth century was that of Felix Fabri, a Franciscan monk. Brother Felix describes the great joy (weeping, singing, and the like) of his group of pilgrims when they saw the Holy Land for the first time from sea.34

Every sight in the Holy Land, and every problem encountered aboard ship on the way there, was recorded by Brother Felix, because everything became important Nor was his merely a detailed listing of what passed before his eyes. As we have seen, Uno too had a penchant for descriptive detail, but the cataloguing of sights and sounds in Peking before his trip to Shantung and his many side trips after returning to Peking is qualitatively different from the ecstacy with which he presented the innumerable sights of Shantung.

Felix Fabri’s account was also the first pilgrimage chronicle that contained a detailed record of the return voyage. There he laid out the lessons learned as 33 Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, 42–43, 45, 48, 106–7.

34 Uno, Shina bunmei ki, 2; Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, 36–44.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 477

he reentered his life back home. One rarely made a second pilgrimage, so this event was to have inspirational meaning for the rest of one’s mortal existence.

Although Uno does not describe his return to Japan, he does append several lengthy essays about “the Chinese” in which he tries to explain the source of all their problems in an effort to introduce the contemporary bearers of a once-great civilization to his fellow Japanese.

In part this represents an attempt to domesticate “the Chinese” for the Japanese readership. Uno knew well how culturally indebted Japan was to China, and sorting out what that implied for the contemporary era—the lessons for the present following his trip to China—was highly important. Japan owed its greatness in many regards to its inheritance of mainland traditions, but Japan could only learn by negative example from contemporary China. In part these appended essays represent as well Uno’s own effort to make sense out of what he had experienced in China, an attempt to merge the China of the classics with the real China of his day. Because this effort was largely futile and indeed occasioned by a series of experiences external to China, the result is often bizarre, even confusing; although some pearls of wisdom are strewn throughout these essays, ultimately they inform us much more about Japan and Japanese concerns than about China. Many would argue this applies to all travel literature.

The four essays about “the Chinese” all aim to explain customs, institutions, and behavioral patterns. Their topics are: the Chinese family system, social welfare enterprises, the concept of “revolution” (Jap. kakumei; Ch. koming),

and the national character of “the Chinese.” Lest there be any doubt about the principal intent of these essays, Uno begins the first of them: “Because China was the wellspring of our Japanese culture, we must study the Chinese family system to speak intelligently about the Japanese family, ancient and modern.”

He then moves immediately to make an important distinction, one he shared with other Kangakusha of the time. It is wrong, he contends, to ridicule China for the present decline in political authority of the Chinese state; the government may have no power, but “the Chinese people” indeed remain an influential “ethnic group” (minzoku). This point leads Uno to the central theme of these four essays: “My feeling is that as a state China’s lack of prosperity has been due to an age-old democracy [minshushugi], the changes of dynastic control [Jap. ekisei kakumei; Ch. i-hsing ko-ming], and the lack of a unifying authority under a fixed sovereign.”35 Japanese readers, for whom this account was of course written, would immediately recognize the implicit comparison Uno has drawn here between China (with its seemingly endless string of changing 35 Uno, Shina bunmei ki, 343–44.

478

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

dynasties) and Japan (with its one, unbroken line still sitting on the throne, descended from the Sun Goddess).

He goes on to say that one reason there is still an entity known as “China,”

despite countless changes of dynasties, lies in the strength of the Chinese family as the moral fabric of society. This would have been an interesting point to investigate; but, rather than proceed to examine the contemporary Chinese family, or even to make a series of observations, Uno immediately begins citing ancient texts, such as the Hsiao-ching (Classic of Filial Piety), and speaking in stereotypical generalities about such personal qualities as “filiality.” While we may expect too much if we look for modern sociological analyses in Uno’s account, by the same token we should note that one need not go to China to quote from the Hsiao-ching, as Japanese had done for centuries. In order to make sense of the distinctive qualities of the Chinese family, Uno does what many of us would probably do: draw on our knowledge of our own culture and note the comparison with the case in China.

In Japan the imperial family embodies the principle of a large family uniting the entire nation into a single group. Thus, the thorough consistency of loyalty (chū) and filial piety (kō) exists as an absolute truth (zettai no shinri) in Japan. But China is different. There, because of centuries of changing dynastic control, this concept of the family writ large has not taken root, and the unity of loyalty and filiality has not fully developed among the populace. This, I believe, is the greatest cause for China’s weakness as a state.36

The second essay on China’s social welfare institutions begins on the same note of the sad fate that China’s “national polity” (kokutai) has long been highly democratic, understood as meaning the unstable state structure always subject to rebellion by the people. The very idea of the changeability of Heaven’s will that one finds in the Chinese classics speaks directly to the essential

“democratic” nature of Chinese civilization. Again, this thesis requires a state-society bifurcation: “In spite of its also having an autocratic state, China has long been a democracy, and the spirit of autonomy [among the local populace] has remained vibrant.” The modern Western reader (indeed, many contemporary Chinese readers as well) are likely to read all their own democratic biases into this sentence and think Uno was celebrating China’s democratic heritage. Far from it, for democracy was the root of so many of China’s ills, in his estimation.

36 Ibid., 344–46, 348, citation on p. 350.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 479

Real power in China, he continues, lies not with the central authorities but with the local gentry (kyōshin), for they are the ones who have contact with the Chinese people. Because of this Chinese democracy and the inattentive rule of the central government, local Chinese society (under the leadership of local gentry families) had taken it upon itself, he notes, to establish social and philanthropic institutions.37

After a fascinating list and description of these institutions, Uno finds himself painted into a corner. He has noted several times in his account and will soon repeat that the Chinese are by nature egotistical and individualistic.

But, we now see that they have probably the most developed system of social philanthropy in the world. Several platitudes about state and society do not elucidate this contradiction. It reflects his own efforts to understand, while simultaneously trying to explain, qualities of life in China for which a thorough knowledge of the classics provides little help. The contradictions here are important in and of themselves, for they slowly become the main story.

The third essay repeats all the empty generalizations about national character and “revolution” that Uno has already laid out above. He does interject the caveat that it is difficult to speak of Chinese national traits because of regional differences, something he reiterates constantly in the travelogue section of his account. He even admits that “it may be impossible” to depict a Chinese national character. Then, without so much as a paragraph break, he begins to do the “impossible.” After a rather idiosyncratic reading of late imperial Chinese history, the ultimate cause of all China’s problems is once again laid at the door of the country’s changing dynastic fortunes. Despite three thousand or more years of autocratic government, he claims, the Chinese classics, histories, and poetry are imbued with a thoroughly democratic spirit—and, therein lies China’s tragedy.38

How, then, if the entire Chinese tradition is to be labeled “democratic,”

can one speak of the influence of Confucianism in Japan, which decidedly does not share this democratic propensity? This is no easy matter for Uno. He has been citing text after text to prove how different the Chinese and their historical experience are from the Japanese and theirs. Although this democratic form of government fits the Chinese well, indeed is the root of contemporary China’s tragedy, he argues, it is qualitatively different from Confucius’s key idea of “serving one’s king” (sonnō). Thus, Uno distinguishes Confucius from his “democratic” epigones, Mencius and Hsün-tzu. In later ages, the prodemo-cratic, prorevolutionary ideas introduced by Mencius and others of the late 37 Ibid., 353–56, citation on p. 354. Naitō Konan was coming to similar conclusions at precisely the same time.

38 Ibid., 362–68, citation on p. 363.

480

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

Chou period held sway in China, while the teachings of Confucius never fully developed in the Sage’s own homeland. Only in Japan did those teachings find a natural home, further proof of the perfection of the Japanese kokutai. 39

This reading of the history of Chinese thought sets the stage for Uno’s delineation of the thirteen character traits of the Chinese, the longest, most revealing, and most contorted of his appended essays. Their first characteristic, expectedly, is “democratic.” Uno repeats all his major claims about how the followers of Confucius twisted his most brilliant insight (that of fidelity to one’s sovereign); as a result, subsequent thinkers and poets in China all developed ideas of self-contained, autonomous villages, and, simultaneously, because the central government was unreliable, the local populace developed self-defense organizations against bandits.40

Second, the Chinese were “femilistic” (kazokushugi) rather than oriented toward a state or central government. Again, this points to their qualitative difference with the Japanese. Third, the Chinese were “selfish” (rikoteki)— namely, concerned with personal gain—a product of their individualistic and family-oriented tendencies. Even Uno recognizes the contradiction at this point: How can the Chinese be both devoted to their families and selfishly individualistic at the same time? Chinese families are formed on the basis of individual bonds in symbiotic fashion; thus, the individual finds personal gain only through devotion to a family. The fact remains that Confucius, Mencius, and their followers through the ages consistently spoke out against selfish profit. How can it have become a basic characteristic of the Chinese people? Uno is unable to solve this conundrum, but he does note that this selfish quality has enabled the Chinese to become extraordinary businessmen.41

Uno admits that the fourth quality, superstitiousness, is one that the entire world (including Japan) shares with the Chinese. The Chinese also have a

“penchant for exaggeration” (kochōsei); in this they far outstrip the more naive Japanese. The Chinese also “follow others blindly” ( fuwa raidō). This quality would seem to pose yet another contradiction: How can the Chinese be both individualistic and selfish, on the one hand, and blind, unthinking followers of others, on the other? One would also, of course, like to know how a people, an entire ethnic group (minzoku), can be any one way or another. At fault is the 39 Ibid., 369–70.

40 Ibid., 370–73. Again Naitō Konan was developing virtually identical ideas at this time; see especially his Shinaron (On China), translated in part by Joshua A. Fogel, in Naitō Konan and the Development of the Conception of Modernity in Chinese History (Armonk, NY: M.E.

Sharpe, 1984).

41 Uno, Shina bunmei ki, 373–79.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 481

blanket fashion by which theories of national character portray entire nations or peoples. The unspoken assumption throughout these essays is that because he has actually been to China, he has gained firsthand, authoritative information about the Chinese people.

Uno additionally claims that the Chinese are also extremely “sociable,” and he offers a bizarre theory of the spoken Chinese language (which he hardly knew at all) in which the musical quality of Chinese affords it all the strengths of vowel-rich languages (a sense of peace and joy) and of consonant-rich languages (a means of articulating anger) elsewhere in the world.42 This assessment on his part is simply sophomoric, and best forgotten.

As apparently individualistic as the Chinese are, they are also, according to Uno, masters at assimilating foreign beliefs and customs of the non-Han peoples surrounding them and incorporating these alien elements into Han culture. And, as radically and proudly democratic as the Chinese are, Uno claims that they are also extremely conservative. This quality is responsible for the great difficulty Chinese reformers have had in implementing their programs.

But not only are the Chinese stubbornly selfish and resistant to external interference in their lives; they are also, in Uno’s estimation，submissive, “a people extraordinarily resigned to their lot in life” (goku akirame no yoki kokumin).

This quality has much to do with their eleventh trait, their peaceful, antiwar, antimilitaristic nature.43

The penultimate characteristic of the Chinese, according to Uno, is their extraordinary orientation toward society. This developed sense of society, he argues, fits well with their democratic, peace-loving, autonomous spirit.

Indeed, it does, but it would certainly seem to clash with their alleged traits of selfishness, individualism, and blindly following others.

Their final quality is their “leisureliness” (yūchō naru koto). The Chinese seem to Uno always to be composed and never under pressure; this is the one characteristic he suggests, albeit equivocally, that the Japanese might want to examine for themselves.44

No reader of this last essay could come away with a clear picture of the national character, if we can even speak of such a thing, of the Chinese people.

It is a potpourri of contradictory qualities, some extremely interesting. Others clearly offensive, all dated. However, it is the confusion itself that should be examined, for we learn nothing by studying Uno’s ideas by themselves in an effort to resolve the contradictions. Uno had gone to China for the first time 42 Ibid., 379–86.

43 Ibid., 386–91, citation on p. 389.

44 Ibid., 391–92.

482

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

with a preconceived image of China drawn exclusively from classical texts.

China was a place he thought he knew. He was making a pilgrimage to the origins of civilization itself. But something—many things—went wrong. The contemporary Chinese were not living up to the great standards set down in the Chou dynasty; actually, it was the Japanese who were doing it, as indicated by his bifurcation of Confucius from the subsequent Confucian tradition. Only the Japanese were still loyal to the original Confucius, while the Chinese had followed a frighteningly democratic road from the time of Mencius.

Uno was too intelligent and too devoted to Chinese (or East Asian) culture to jettison the entire Kangaku tradition, to lose faith in his image of “China.” That survived in frozen, still-life from, but contemporary China had to be incorporated somehow into this image of China. However disjointed we may find the two Chinas in reading Uno now, he felt compelled to unify them. His effort was not a rousing success, as his last essay on Chinese character traits indicates. He was still too confused himself. What is ironic is that he commenced this voyage—at least the writing of his account after returning, as noted at the outset—intent on overcoming the plastic images people had been popularizing about China. “Those who understand China,” he wrote in his introduction to this travel account, “by reading its revered classics and sagely scriptures of antiquity may think that China is a paradise on Earth with sages and men of virtue wafting about like the clouds.” One cannot help but think that this was an autobiographical admission. But what began as an effort to overcome a simplistic and stereotypical view of China ended up providing just that: a stereotypical view with thirteen well-defined national characteristics.

Uno lived nearly another seventy years and reached the pinnacle of his profession at Tokyo University in Japan. His was the last Kangaku travel account of China that, initially at least, entertained an undiluted picture of a pristine China. Kangaku scholars would still travel in China and write about their experiences, but Uno was the last of the great ones in Meiji Japan. It is a telling fact that he completed his account in 1912, just after the final collapse of the imperial system in China and just a few months before the end of the Meiji period. His is also the last travel account of China that truly followed Bashō’s credo: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.”45

45 As cited in Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, 220.

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 483

Glossary

Abe Yoshio

阿部吉雄

“Ajia wa hitotsu nari: Okakura Tenshin

亞細亞は一つなリ：岡倉天心と

to Izuru”

五浦

Akatsuka Kiyoshi

赤塚忠

Andō Fujio

安東不二雄

An-tung

安東

“Aru Kangakusha no Chūgoku kikō”

ある漢學者の中國紀行

bakufu

幕府

Chang Chien

張謇

Chang Yüan-chi

張元濟

Cheefu (Chih-fu)

芝罘

Ch’i

齊

Chichi Okakura Tenshin

父岡倉天心

Chih Sheng

至聖

Ch’ing

清

Ching-chi

淨慈

chū

忠

Ch’un-ch’iu

春秋

Ch’ü-fu

曲阜

Chung-hua min-kuo k’ai-kuo ch’ien

中華民國開國前革命史

ko-ming shih

chü-jen

舉人

chūtō shakai

中等社會

Daiichi yū-Shin Ki

第一遊清記

“Daidō o ayumareta Uno Tetsuto”

大道を步まれた宇野哲人

datsu-A

脱亞

ekisei kakumei (i-hsing ko-ming)

易姓革命

endoku

煙毒

Ennin

圓仁

Enzan sosui

燕山楚水

Enzan sosui kiyū

燕山楚水紀遊

Feng Tzu-yu

馮自由

Fukuzawa Yukichi

福澤諭吉

“Fukuzawa Yukichi to Okakura Tenshin”

福澤諭吉と岡倉天心

Fuse Chisoku

布施知足

fuwa raidō

附和雷同

goku akirame no yoki kokumin

極くアキラメのよき國民

484

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

Gunji shigaku

軍事史學

hanahada urusai

甚だうるさい

Hashikawa Bunsō (Bunzō)

橋川文三

Hattori Unokichi

服部宇之吉

Hibino Teruhiro

日比野輝寬

Hinomaru

日の丸

hitsudan (pi-t’an)

筆談

Hō-Etsu kōhei ki

法越交兵記

Hoku-Shin kenbunroku

北清見聞錄

Honan

河南

Hopeh

河北

Hsiao-ching

孝經

Hsüan

宣

Hung Hsiu-ch’üan

洪秀全

Jih-pen ti Chung-kuo-hsüeh-chia

日本的中國學家

Kaifeng

開封

“Kaigun taii Sone Toshitora no Shinkoku 海軍大尉曾根俊虎の清國視察に

shisatsu ni tsuite”

ついて

kakumei (ko-ming)

革命

Kanbun

漢文

Kanda Kiichirō

神田喜一郎

Kangakusha

漢學者

K’ang Yu-wie

康有為

Kankō kiyū

觀光紀遊

Katō Jōken

加藤敘賢

katsuratsutaru shōnen

潑刺たる少年

Kawamura Kazuo

河村一雄

kazokushugi

家族主義

keidoku

經毒

keisei

經世

Kikō Nihon no naka no Chūgoku

紀行日本のなかの中國

Kindai Nihon to Chūgoku

近代日本と中國

Kishida Ginkō

岸田吟香

Kiyomi Rikurō

清見陸郎

kō

孝

kochōsei

誇張性

Kokka

國華

kokka (nation)

國家

kokuminsei

國民性

kokutai

國體

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 485

Komuro Shinsuke

小室進助

“Konan sensei to Enzan sosui”

湖南先生と燕山楚水

K’ung-chiao

孔教

Kuzuu Yoshihisa

葛生良久

kyōshin

郷紳

Li Hung-chang

李鴻章

Liang Ch’i-ch’ao

梁啟超

Liao-chou-wan

膠州灣

Liu

劉

Liu Hsüeh-hsün

劉學詢

Lo Chen-yü

羅振玉

魯

Lu Hsün

魯迅

Masuda Wataru

增田涉

Matsuo Bashō

松尾芭蕉

“Meiji Kangakusha no Chūgoku kikō”

明治漢學者の中國紀行

Meiji ikō Nihonjin no Chūgoku ryokōki

明治以降日本人の中國旅行記

minshushugi

民主主義

minzoku

民族

Miyauchi Isaburō

宮内猪三郎

Morohashi Tetsuji

諸橋轍次

Naitō Kenkichi

内藤乾吉

Naitō Konan

内藤湖南

Naitō Konan zenshū

内藤湖南全集

Nanajū yōka yūki

七十四日遊記

Nihonjin ni totte no Chūgoku zō

日本人にとっての中國像

Nihon no meicho: Naitō Konan

日本の名著: 内藤湖南

Nit-Tō guhō junrei gyōki

入唐求法巡禮行記

Ogawa Tamaki

小川環樹

Ojima Sukema

小島祐馬

Oka Senjin

岡千仞

Okakura Kazuo

岡倉一雄

Okakura Tenshin

岡倉天心

Okakura Tenshin zenshū

岡倉天心全集

Peiyang

北洋

ridatsu

離脱

rikoteki

利己的

Saika Hakuai

雜賀博愛

Saitō Ryūzō

齊藤隆三

“Sandai no Chūgoku kenbun”

三代の中國見聞

486

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China

San’un kyōu nikki

棧雲峡兩日記

Seigaku tōzen to Chūgoku jijō

西學東漸と中國事情

Sekai kikō bungaku zenshū

世界紀行文學全集

Senzaimaru

千歳丸

Shao-hsing

紹興

Sheng Hsüan-huai

盛宣懷

Sheng-miao

聖廟

Shih chi

史記

Shina bunmei ki

支那文明記

Shinagaku

支那學

Shina manyū jikki

支那漫遊實記

“Shina nanboku no kubun”

支那南北の區分

Shina ni Shina nashi

支那に支那無し

Shinaron

支那論

Shinkoku jijō tanken roku

清國事情探檢録

Shinkoku kakkōbin ran

清國各港便覧

Shinkoku manyū shi

清國漫遊誌

Shunjō

俊芿

Soejima Taneomi

副島種臣

Sone Toshitora

曾根俊虎

Sonnō

尊王

Ssu-ma Kuang

司馬光

Su Tung-p’o

蘇東坡

Sugita Teiichi

杉田定一

Sugita Kakuzan ō

杉田鶉山翁

T’ai (Mt.)

泰

Tai-an-fu

泰安府

Taiping

太平

Takase Bintoku

高淑敏德

Takasugi Shinsaku

高杉晋作

Takeuchi Minoru

竹内實

Takeuchi Yoshimi

竹内好

Takezoe Shin’inchirō

竹添進一郎

T’ang-ku

塘沽

Tientsin

天津

Tō-A senkaku shishi kiden

東亞先覺志士記傳

Toen kunshikoku

東瀛君子國

Tōhōgaku

東方學

Tokutomi Iichirō

德富猪一郎

Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels In China 487

Tokutomi Sohō

德富蘇峰

Tsinan

濟南

Tsingtao

青島

Tsou

鄒

“Tsuitōbun”

追悼文

Tun-ch’ung

敦崇

Tun Li-ch’en

敦禮臣

Tzu-chih t’ung-chien

資治通鑑

“Uno sensei no Jugaku shi”

宇野先生の儒學史

“Uno sensei no omoide”

宇野先生の思い出

Uno Tetsuto

宇野哲人

Wang K’ang-nien

汪康年

Wang T’ao

王韜

Wang Yen-yün

王硯雲

Weihaiwei

威海衛

Wen T’ing-shih

文廷式

Yamamoto Ken

山本憲

Yamamoto Baigai

山本梅崖

yameru rōya

病める老爺

Yang Shih-hsiang

楊士驤

Yeh-chiao

耶教

Yen-ching sui-shih-chi

燕京歲時記

Yen Fu

嚴復

Yen Hui

顏回

Yen Shao-tang

嚴紹璗

Yen-t’ai

沿台

Yonaiyama Tsuneo

米内山庸夫

yūchō naru koto

悠長なるこヒ

Yūki ni arawaretaru Meiji jidai no

遊記に現はれたる明治時代の日支

Nis-Shi ōrai

往來

Yü Kou

玉構

“Yü-Shin yokan”

遊清餘感

Zenkōji

善光寺

zettai no shinri

絕對の真理

■ Source: “Japanese Travelers in Wartime China,” in Disanjie jinbainian Zhong-Ri guanxi yantaohui lunwenji 第三屆近百年中日關係研討會論文集 (Symposium from the third conference on Sino-Japanese relations over the past century), ed. Chen Sanjing 陳三京 et al.

(Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1996), 683–95.

Japanese Travelers in Wartime China

This paper grows out of a much longer study of Japanese travel writing about China from 1862, when the first legal voyage set off in over two centuries, through the end of WWII.1 I have collected 500 book-length Japanese travelogues for this period, specifically excluding diaries, most newspaper accounts, and guidebooks. This paper will be a first effort to address those travelogues produced during the war, 1937–45.

There are at least two approaches one may take with these 500 accounts: they may be seen as a mass of primary material on China at the time, or they may be used as a mirror of changing Japanese views of China. This essay is most interested in the latter approach and will examine this body of writing as providing mountains of new evidence on the changing nature of Sino-Japanese cultural interactions over a crucial century. Thus, the larger study is of how East meets East.

The number of Japanese travelers to China who penned accounts began to mushroom in the second decade of this century. Whereas the Meiji generation of travelers felt compelled to report back on everything that China had to offer their gaze, China had become a domesticated part of the everyday lives of most Japanese by the early Taishō period, and Japanese began writing and reading accounts tailored more specifically to their professional interests. Thus, for the 1910s, 20s, and most of the 30s, I have organized the material according to accounts by scholars and students, journalists, politicians, businessmen, professional travel writers, novelists, and other bodies by profession.

What happens as we enter the war years is that this useful mode of classification falls apart.

From the early 1930s, and especially with the establishment of Manzhouguo from 1932, Japanese travel writers on the whole began to assume a harsher, less sympathetic attitude toward the Chinese people and Chinese problems in general. Many reasons may have contributed to this change of tone in their narratives, not the least of which was surely the rising nationalistic mood back 1 Joshua A. Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945

(Stanford, forthcoming 1996).

Japanese Travelers In Wartime China

489

home in Japan and its confrontation with rising Chinese nationalism in the land visited.

Japanese travel on the mainland began to undergo a qualitative transformation in the face of Sino-Japanese military incidents and especially after a state of war came into existence between China and Japan in the summer of 1937.

Long before that year, Japanese visitors had seen signs of anti-Japanese activities connected with political and military events in Shandong, Shanghai, and elsewhere in China proper and in Manchuria. No traveler who left an account, however, even those few allegedly captured by bandits, was ever physically injured by Chinese at any time. When war became a reality of daily life, though, Japanese who came to China only rarely strayed from centers with Japanese civilian population or, more important, Japanese military units.

For that reason, Japanese travelers either tended to spend more of their time in Manchuria or in areas where a Japanese military presence was at least nearby. Already in the 1910s and 20s, travelers had begun devoting a growing portion of their time on the mainland to Manchuria, but that was largely for civil or cultural reasons; they wanted to see how their countrymen and women were doing in colonizing the barren wilderness of the region. They wanted to ride the South Manchurian Railway (SMR) and see the legendary sunset over the Manchurian plains. There were endemic disturbances in China proper throughout the late-Qing and Republican years, but that did not seem to scare away many Japanese travelers. If anything, it titillated their curiosity.

As travel on the whole tended to move more toward safety following the eruption of war, Japanese travel writing about China began to collapse from within. That the quality of travel accounts seriously declined is not at issue.

More to the point, distinctive profession-based sub-genres of travel writing all but evaporated, as almost all travelogues began to sound and read alike.

No longer were Japanese artists meeting, or even seeking out, Chinese artists; no longer were Chinese and Japanese novelists and poets exchanging ideas; no longer did any Chinese other than an occasional official meet with a Japanese governmental figure. The whole story of travel in China became: China and Japan at war. The reading public either no longer sought or was simply no longer getting accounts distinctive to the authors’ professions. None of this should be terribly shocking, but it does jolt the reader who has been working through the travel accounts from earlier decades, because the change is sharp, and a once vibrant literary form sadly becomes another casualty of war.

With the constraints of travel under wartime conditions and especially the political restrictions in both China and Japan during the war, the option available to those who did not wish to use their travelogues for Japanese expansionist propaganda was to stick to as detailed and factual an account of their

490

Japanese Travelers in Wartime China

observations on the mainland as they could. I will now look at a few of the Japanese travelogues of China from the war years.

One of great professional travel writers and surely the most prolific ever was Gotō Asatarō. He continued publishing into the early 1940s, though without his earlier extraordinary productivity, when in some years in the 1910s and 20s he would publish as many as 10 or 12 volumes. He adopted a completely Chinese persona back in Japan, dressing in Chinese clothes, building himself a Chinese-style home in Tokyo, and retaining all this throughout the war years.

Like others, from the late 1930s, his works stressed the importance of the war with China as well as the Chinese people’s misunderstandings of Japan’s true aims, but he also continued to stress the principal theme of his countless books on China, that the Japanese had to try ever so hard to understand Chinese sensibilities. Under such stressful conditions for someone who basically had good feelings for the country to which he had devoted his life, ambiguous messages of this sort were the best he could do. His failure to tow the line completely contributed to his being hounded by Japanese police agencies during the war and, perhaps, to his murder at their hands in August 1945.2

The educators and scholars who traveled to the mainland after the start of the Sino-Japanese War traveled almost exclusively in groups to Manchuria and north China. These included attendance at conferences, school trips, and academic investigations to view newly discovered documents or to dig sites. There are many accounts of this genre, and what they share is a distinct disinclination to mention any subject the least bit touchy. One such account, by a geographer in 1938, followed an eight-month trip through north China and Mongolia. The opening sentence was very typical of the entire account: “They say that China is the great Sphinx of East Asia.”3 Such opening lines—or functionally similar ones, such as “China of the past and China today are dramatically different”—

had become annoyingly hackneyed by this point. An author would raise the idea of China as “inscrutable,” or simply far from anything familiar, largely as a rhetorical device and then would pretend, after completing a trip, to have unlocked the mystery. In the late-19th century, such a claim might carry some glimmer of plausibility, when authors wished to stress that a knowledge of the Chinese classics would not make contemporary China transparently know-able. China could hardly still be seen as “inexplicable,” though, after hundreds 2 On Gotō Asatarō, see Mitsuishi Zenkichi 三石善吉, “Gotō Asatarō to Inoue Kōbai” 後藤

朝太郞と井上紅梅, in Kindai Nihon to Chūgoku 近代日本と中國 [Modern Japan and China], ed. Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹內好 and Hashikawa Bunzō 橋川文三 (Tokyo, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 27–45.

3 Suda Kanji 須田晓次, Yōsha 洋車 (Tokyo, 1939), p. 1.

Japanese Travelers In Wartime China

491

of travel accounts and thousands of newspaper reports had been published, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Japanese who had actually visited the country. The author of this account described markets, foods, and many local districts on walks through Beijing; and in Mongolia, he described the foods, roads, toilets, clothing, Lamaist religious practices, and similar items from the daily lives of the residents.

As one might expect, far more journalists were active travel writers on the mainland during the war years, and the famed tradition of the Japanese press opposed to its government seems to have fallen by the wayside. The Japanese reading public must have justifiably been curious about developments in China in the immediate aftermath of the commencement of hostilities with China. The year 1938 produced a large number of journalistic travel accounts.

Some of these are just as abysmal as those of Paul Theroux and Fox Butterfield, and journalists seem to have pioneered the more strident tone of travelogues of China from then on. By 1938 or 1939 most travel writers, with the stunning exception of literary figures, had picked up the themes in which journalists had effectively led the way. Journalists’ accounts are lively in tone, but stunningly reductionist and moralistic.

Shortly before he died in 1936, Lu Xun, who had been a great Japanophile, read several accounts written by Japanese of meetings with him and was horrified by their misrepresentations; he swore off all further contacts of this sort.

The main culprit was Nagayo Yoshirō (1888–1961) who published a piece in 1936 based on a meeting the previous year. In 1938 Nagayo wrote a volume on Manchuria entitled Shōnen Manshū tokuhon (Primer on the Young Manchuria) in which he introduced the new developments there to a wide reading public in Japan. Three years later, he wrote another book about Manchuria, and now, he argued, Manzhouguo, a full ten years old, had fully matured, remaining just as important now to Japan. The last line of the book was “Manshūkoku banzai.”4

The qualified exception to the general implosion of travel accounts were those of novelists and poets, who were also the most prolific travel writers about China during the war years. The great literary critic Kobayashi Hideo traveled in China in 1938 as a war correspondent. The several pieces that he wrote magnificently evoke that time from the perspective of a sympathetic observer. Because so few Chinese would talk to him, Kobayashi used the opportunity to reflect on his role as an observer, though he never allowed the reader to forget that there was a war going on. In the parts of China he visited in the spring of 1938—Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Suzhou—that was not particularly difficult.

4 Nagayo Yoshirō 長與善郞, Manshū no kengaku 滿洲の見學 (Tokyo, 1941), p. 278.

492

Japanese Travelers in Wartime China

He arrived in Shanghai in April and met an old friend from middle school, a journalist with the Japanese Air Force. Over profuse amounts of whiskey, his friend told him of the mass bombings of some 25 Chinese villages over the previous three days. Kobayashi was only happy that he did not have to file any such horrific reports, and his friend had clearly taken refuge in the bottle. “In meeting with war correspondents like [my friend] who had been here since the start of the war and listening to their stories in which war had already become a part of everyday life, I could see that this was not for me. It became clear that a novice like myself had no business showing up here all full of curiosity.” Under the circumstances, even curiosity seemed rudely out of place. When Kobayashi later arrived in Nanjing, he was told that his timing was perfect because the

“new regime” of Wang Jingwei was just about to be installed, but Kobayashi was not the least impressed.5

His description of the train ride to Hangzhou was devoted largely to the effects of the war. Even when he took time out for a boat ride on nearby West Lake, the war intruded—gunfire and artillery could be heard in the surrounding area, followed by planes flying over at low altitudes, making a frightening, earsplitting noise. “Perhaps the ducks floating on the lake have become inured to it. They didn’t budge”—a disquieting image, to say the least. In Hangzhou the next day, he heard a hard-bitten Japanese soldier say: “The three specialties of Hangzhou are mosquitoes, fires, and I’ve forgotten the third one.”6

The scene in Nanjing in April 1938 was much worse. An area set aside for refugees had ceased to exist, and the 400,000 housed there were released into the city to make their way. It was a gruesome sight, only a few months after the great massacre known to history as the Rape of Nanjing, and every morning Kobayashi would sit at his desk in his room and just observe, going out only in the afternoon.

In December of 1938 he traveled to Manchuria, though anyone looking for an ordinary travelogue of the northeast will not find it here. The opportunity occasioned by visiting sites so close to the Russian border and cities full of Russians and Chinese made Kobayashi reflect. As a student he had been deeply influenced by the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, and although he knew not a word of the language, to every Russian face he saw—on fashion-able Kitaiskaya Boulevard in Harbin, among hotel bellboys, car drivers, even beggars on the street—he assigned a famous character from Russian fiction.

Realizing how ludicrous this was—like trying to find Lu Xun’s A Q among 5 Kobayashi Hideo 小林秀雄, “Kōshū,” 杭州 in Sekai kikō bungaku zenshū 世界紀行文學

全集 (Tokyo, 1959), vol. 12, pp. 41, 47.

6 Ibid., vol. 12, pp. 12–44.

Japanese Travelers In Wartime China

493

the many faces on the streets of Beijing—it provided him with the chance to consider what “understanding” between peoples and its limitations really entailed. Can two peoples have genuine “mutual understanding,” the term so often raised as the slogan for bilateral Sino-Japanese friendship? Or, does one group inevitably “understand or not understand” a situation “based on their own personal preferences?”

Unfortunately, Kobayashi applied these interesting epistemological questions to the perennial issue of Japanese vs. others: “It is my belief that, insofar as the Chinese are foreigners, they have absolutely no understanding of the minds of the Japanese today who are participating in this war. They are not prepared for it. That is to say, we completely lack the preparation to prepare them” to understand.7

Asano Akira was a critic, poet, and former member of the Japan Communist Party. Membership in the last of these won him a period of imprisonment in the 1930s until he renounced his former views in an act of tenkō and subsequently joined the movement of romantic writers. In 1938 he was sent by a publisher to China to write essays on his impressions there, and much of what he produced is rather high-brow literary criticism. By the same token, he encouraged Japanese intellectuals to make a stronger effort to understand China better, because as Japanese interests on the mainland continued to grow, ignorance would only breed acts of anti-Japanese opposition among the Chinese. This much could have been written by an apologist for Japanese expansion, but that was not Asano’s case at all.

He was all for enhancing knowledge about China, for democracy in the region required it. And, yet, “there is no culture in China now,” he argued.

“What appears to be culture are only a degenerate corpse and a parasitic culture of ignorant overseas students. Japanese culture hasn’t yet become something to brag about to the world, but the new Japanese cultural movement is struggling to build a new Japanese culture. So, who are we to speak about reconstructing a new Chinese culture?”8 There is much that is interesting and much that is confusing in this appraisal. His travelogue was published in 1938, and it probably could not have appeared much later. Despite his clearly leftist views, Asano had no choice but to travel with Japanese troops in China.

In earlier decades, Japanese travelers had made considerable contacts with Chinese of their professions, and that level of communication became all but impossible, at least unobservable, after the war began in mid-1937. Inasmuch as that contact between Chinese and Japanese was one of the most interesting 7 Kobayashi Hideo, “Manshū no inshō” 滿州の印象, in ibid. , vol. 12, pp. 58–59.

8 Asano Akira 淺野晃, Jidai to unmeī 時代と運命 (Tokyo, 1938), pp. 298–302.

494

Japanese Travelers in Wartime China

and intriguing aspects of this entire genre of material, the whole suffered. It forced Japanese travelers to write about other things. Most concentrated on the war itself, some on themselves, while others repeated the government’s official propaganda of ill-informed Chinese protesting the clearly benevolent intentions of the Japanese.

Several perceptive travel writers were compelled by virtue of so little contact with the natives to reflect on the extraordinary circumstances allowing them to be on the mainland. In Kobayashi’s case, this reflection led to serious rumi-nations of the meaning of mutual understanding between two peoples, how one wanted to be understood and how the other understood with or without one’s assistance. He thus examined the limitations and even the desirability of

“understanding.” His answers were often less illuminating than his questions, but that does not vitiate the latter.

Interestingly, not one of the extant travelogues by businessmen from the war years remarks on the extraordinary state of affairs under which their trips were being carried out. Businessmen had been forthright in their calls, before the start of the war, for peaceful Sino-Japanese relations and genuine friendship as the basis for healthy commercial interactions. Thus, this absence may support the argument that they continued in their earlier beliefs by not openly advocating the bellicose stance of their home government and military.

To love Manzhouguo—or, at least, to proclaim such love—was a form of positive sanction for Japanese military action in the region. To love Manchuria, though, was not the same thing as professing one’s love for Japan. These toponyms are very important in reading material from that time. Manchuria was merely an area in northeast Asia in which a variety of ethnic groups lived.

Merely to claim love for that part of the world said nothing about the conflicting political forces in the region. If one went on to argue that Manchuria was either part of China’s sovereign terrain or not, then one was making a much more overtly political statement. However, since “Manchuria” had no government of its own, prior to the imposition of the puppet regime of Manzhouguo, to love it carried no political connotations. After 1932, to continue claiming one’s love for “Manchuria” and not to mention Manzhouguo might entail a subtle, implicit critique of the new regime recently created there. To proclaim one’s love for China was another matter altogether.

Taken as a whole, there seems to be something of a watershed at the year 1938 in the publication of Japanese travel narratives of China. The only accounts that so much as suggest dissatisfaction with the war (or any war) or throw, however obliquely, any doubts in the direction of contemporary Japanese policy were published no later than that year. What vanished after 1938 was not simply opposition to war or sympathy for the Chinese. What

Japanese Travelers In Wartime China

495

largely disappeared was any form of written resistance to the dominant ideology of the state, and that development undoubtedly reveals the effects of repression. In each year from 1937 through 1939, new restrictions on publishing, harsher penalties for dubious materials, and more arbitrary powers for the state were added to the previous year’s.9

Just to show how self-censorship and false consciousness can cut both ways on the political spectrum, let me mention one last travel writer. In June and July of 1942, a young Toyoda Masako, who was working for the Information Department of the Japanese Army and would later become a famous leftwing novelist, carried out an investigation of the “mopped up areas” around Suzhou.

She was accompanied by three others, all older and already famous or soon to be. She returned to China 35 years later in 1967, for a six-week trip, during the most intense period of the Cultural Revolution. Her prime goal was to visit Yan’n, “the wellspring of the revolution.” While in Xi’an, she witnessed mass meetings calling daily for the ouster of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and people being paraded in dunce caps through jeering mobs of their fellow Chinese. When she finally arrived in Yan’an and visited all the historic sights associated with that period of the revolution—Mao’s former residence, the Anti-Japanese University, the meeting room of the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee—she was overcome with emotion. It was comparable to earlier Japanese travelers’ arriving in Qufu. This section of her volume is pure adoration for Maoist thought and the Cultural Revolution.10

Her account, though, was no different from many others by Japanese, Europeans, Canadians, and Australians.

9 For a fascinating discussion of the impact of the war on Japanese literature and the new themes concerning the war taken up by Japanese writers, see Chapter 23, “War Literature,”

in Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era: Fiction (New York, 1984), pp. 906–61.

10 Toyoda Masako 豊田正子, Watakushi no Shina kikō 私の支那紀行 ( Tokyo, 1943); and Toyoda Masako, Fumetsu no Ennan, puroretaria bunka dai kakumei no shin Chūgoku kikō

不滅の延安プロレタリア文化大革命の新中國紀行 (Tokyo, 1967).

■ Source: “Nationalism, the Rise of the Vernacular, and the Conceptualization of Modernization in East Asian Comparative Perspective,” Language and Politics in Modern China 3

(January 1994), 1–12.

Nationalism, the Rise of the Vernacular, and the Conceptualization of Modernization in East Asian

Comparative Perspective

Since coming to Santa Barbara, my job description has been “comparative East Asianist,” rather than historian of China or Japan; as a result, I have had to do a great deal of reading in the histories of the other countries in the region.

Among the many things that have struck me in this connection over the past few years are not only how so much of what I initially learned in Chinese history classes has startling resonances with the other major areas influenced by Chinese culture (everybody knows that), but also how remarkably similar was the conceptualization of pressing issues in those countries with China as well as how much less extraordinary China’s historical experience becomes through comparison. The differences as well as the similarities are thrown in a fascinating relief and potentially tell us much about not only high Chinese culture but also the social and economic systems in which it found a home.

I am still very much in the process of sorting all this out toward writing a much longer work in the general area. Here I would like to focus tightly on two manifestations of the larger problem: the linkage between the rise of nationalism and the emergence of the vernacular as a literary vehicle; and the East-West mix in the conceptions of modernization. These issues were faced by all four East Asian civilizations and in remarkably similar ways.

Let me say just one further thing by way of introduction. I think this sort of comparative analysis, whether or not I do it well, leads us to far more important and interesting conclusions than does the imposition of all the foreign-origin theories that have been sweeping the field of late—the infestation has been most grotesque in the Japan field in this regard. By the same token, I want strongly and openly to disassociate myself from the regional-cultural approach that has been applied principally by social scientists using hypocoristics like NICS and NIES and Pacific Rim and whatever else.

Nationalism, The Rise Of The Vernacular

497

Modernization and the Rise of the Vernacular

Many scholars in East Asia and elsewhere have identified the rise of nationalism with the transformations characterized by the modern experience.

Nationalism has usually been seen as a positive force in China, as well as in Vietnam and Korea, whereas in Japan it has been seen as antecedent to imperialism. I think a more meaningful comparison, which is impossible here, would start with a level playing field and look at Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese nationalism in comparative terms, examine their mutual interactions, and look at the consequences of their emergence over the entire course of the 20th century, not just the first few decades.

One manifestation of nationalism that can be found in all four East Asian nations is the rise of the vernacular in its relationship both to literary Chinese culture (even in China) and to modern political movements. In China the rise of baihua (the vernacular) in the New Culture Movement is usually understood as part of the rising tide of nationalism, demonstrating a concern on the part of early Chinese radicals to bring culture to the people, and usually ignoring the fact that China already had traditions of vernacular drama and fiction that had made major strides several centuries before Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu claimed to be pioneering it.

Scholars have tended to stress to excess the differences between baihua and wenyan (literary Chinese), probably because the latter is so extraordinarily difficult, but in comparison to what readers and writers in the other countries of East Asia were working with, the differences recede rapidly. After all, both baihua and wenyan are Chinese; they are members of the same language group; they occupied clearly delineated spheres as languages; and while use of one or the other might raise political or cultural issues, it brought into question no issues of national or ethnic identity. The effort to bring baihua into a monopolizing position as linguistic hegemon early in the 20th century reveals much more of a conscious political assault on the elite culture that had so long used (many different varieties of) wenyan to communicate.

In the other countries of East Asia, what had taken one step in China would require two or more steps. First, a native written language had to be invented to compete with the imported literary Chinese—this occurred before the putative modern period—and later, a written vernacular had to be developed to contest with both the domestic literary language and Chinese. But we should keep firmly in mind that, until recent times, Chinese literary culture was East Asian literary culture to a large extent, and even into our own century it remained the medium of international discourse within East Asia.

498

Nationalism, the Rise of the Vernacular

The Japanese were not the first people on the Chinese periphery to imbibe Sinic culture, but they were the first to develop their own written language, the kana syllabaries, in general use among the Heian elite by at least the early 10th century.1

Initially, kana were considered fit only for women and were known also as onna moji (women’s script), whereas Chinese characters remained the realm of men and were called otoko moji (men’s script). But this distinction was never an inseparable divide; high-born women often learned Chinese, and men did in fact write, on occasion, in kana.

Skipping ahead to the Edo period, we still find women primarily writing in kana and men using both mediums as well as mixtures, though Confucian scholars often wrote in Kanbun (literary Chinese) or prepared versions of their writings in both Kanbun and bungo (literary Japanese), and some even managed to have their Kanbun works circulate in Qing China (as did some Koreans and Vietnamese). In response to the need for a uniform educational curriculum taught nationwide in an accessible style, a movement developed over the course of the 19th century to bring the written Japanese language into accord with the vernacular. It aroused acrimonious debate. In 1866, Maejima Hisoka called for the complete abolition of Chinese characters from Japanese textbooks. In part such calls were efforts to spread education, in part they reflected a rising aspiration for Japan to find its own distinctive identity separate from Sinic culture.2

The movement took the name genbun itchi (combining the vernacular and literary languages). In its initial stages, it emphasized the great value of a vernacular in everyday life. Later, in its better known phase, it became the medium 1 Roy Andrew Miller, The Japanese Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 120–21, 124–26.

2 Nanette Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement: Its Origin, Development, and Conclusion,”

Monumenta Nipponica 33.3 (Autumn 1978), pp. 333, 337. See also her book, Language and the Modern State: the Reform of Written Japanese (London: Routledge, 1991). The whole picture is muddled, as all historical pictures are, by the fact the some of the most extreme anti- bakufu activists, like Yoshida Shōin and his teacher Sakuma Shōzan were dedicated Kangakusha (scholars of Chinese learning) who hoped to bring a Japan derailed by a corrupt and inept bakufu back on a proper Confucian course. See Masuda Wataru, Seigaku tōzen to Chūgoku jijō: ‘zassho sakki’ [The eastern spread of Western learning and conditions in China: Notes on “Various Books”] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979), pp. 31–46. My English translation of this marvelous book is being published serially in Sino-Japanese Studies. For these pages, see Sino-Japanese Studies 3.1 (November 1990), pp. 36–46. Chinese friends have informed me that a Chinese translation is also underway.

Nationalism, The Rise Of The Vernacular

499

for the development of a modern Japanese literature, first and foremost in the pioneering vernacular style of Futabatei Shimei, who published Japan’s first modern novel in 1887.3 For all the many efforts to bring the written language into harmony with the vernacular in Japan, though, even when Kanbun was most on the defensive, we see few or no demands for the Japanese people to stop writing Chinese characters altogether because they were Chinese; Kanji may have come from China, but they had long become the shared property of all East Asians. We should note as well that this was precisely the period in which the famous 1000 or more two-character neologisms were being coined in Meiji Japan and imported back into China, an event that helped create the vernacular Chinese language.4

The Japanese never resorted to Kanbun for fiction, perhaps because Japanese fiction owed its origins to women, and women wrote primarily in kana. Of course, the Chinese themselves never developed a sustained tradition of wenyan fiction either. But they were not the only countries in East Asia. There was recently published a seven-volume series titled (in Chinese) Yuenan Hanwen xiaoshuo congkan. The series represents the bulk of the extant novels written by Vietnamese in literary Chinese, usually based on Chinese vernacular fiction or drama and Vietnamized (by changing place names, personal names, and settings). Before the Vietnamese developed their own written language, known as chū’ nôm (or nôm), in the 13th century, and before the Koreans invented the han’gŭl alphabet in the 15th century, and indeed well afterward in both cases, both used literary Chinese as the medium for written fiction. A recent Korean scholar’s estimate puts the number of extant novels written by Koreans in literary Chinese at about 600. In fact, the high point of nôm lyric poetry came only in the 18th century, and han’gŭl literature really dates from the 17th century.5

Koreans developed their own written language much later than the Japanese or the Vietnamese. King Sejong’s explicit purpose in having a written 3 Nanette Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement,” pp. 339, 342, 350, 353–54; George Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New York: Knopf, 1950), p. 403; Andō Hikotarō, “Miyajima Daihachi to Futabatei Shimei,” in Kindai Nihon to Chūgoku [Modern Japan and China], ed. Takeuchi Yoshimi and Hashikawa Bunzō (Tokyo: Asahi shinbun sha, 1974), pp. 125–43.

4 Tam Yue-him (Tan Ruqian), “Xiandai Hanyu de Riyu wailaici jiqi souji he bianren wenti”

[Japanese loanwords in contemporary Chinese and the issues involved in collecting and recognizing them], in his Jindai Zhong-Ri wenhua guanxi yanjiu [Studies in modern Sino-Japanese cultural relations] (Hong Kong: Xianggang Riben yanjiusuo, 1986), pp. 327–49.

5 Tanaka Yūko, “Nihon Chūgoku Betonamu” [Japan, China, Vietnam], Gekkan Shinika 2.2

(February 1991), pp. 8–10.

500

Nationalism, the Rise of the Vernacular

Korean language devised was to enable his people to express themselves in their everyday lives in a medium of their own, because Chinese, he believed, was so difficult for them. The Korean historian Yi Ki-baek has termed the han’gŭl alphabet “the proudest cultural achievement of the Korean people.”

While the government and the Confucian yangban elite continued to use literary Chinese, many works of a wide variety—including women’s writings—

now began to use han’gŭl.6

Traditionalists were never particularly happy with han’gŭl, and han’gŭl was explicitly used by patriotic groups from the late-19th century as a way to make their publications accessible to large numbers of people, just as the baihua movement would attempt several decades later in China. The founder of the Korean vernacular movement, Chu Sigyong, aimed at “ending aristocratic cultural slavery to Chinese culture.”7 He was not attacking the Chinese or even their culture but rather the elite in his own society for trying to remain a class apart from and above ordinary Koreans. Past Chinese dynasties may have demanded tribute, but the inferiority complex attached to the idea of sadae (serving the great) was, like the two-character term itself, a Korean innovation.

Under the Japanese colonial regime from 1910, only the Japanese language was taught in Korean schools, and thus the thrust of any movement to keep Korean alive was nationalistic by definition. With Japan’s defeat in 1945, the nation returned as a whole to han’gŭl (mixed with Chinese characters in South Korea, though fewer than in postwar Japan, and solely han’gŭl in North Korea).

The Vietnamese case bears similarities with Korea and Japan, but Vietnamese followed an even more tortuous path. I noted that the Vietnamese invented their own written language, nôm, in the 13th century. An individual nôm character was usually created out of two Chinese characters, giving it the appearance to Chinese-trained eyes of familiarity and strangeness all at once, much like the Xixia script. Nôm was arguably more easily integrated with Chinese than kana or han’gŭl because, while Japanese and Korean are highly inflected, S-O-V languages, Vietnamese more closely resembles the lack of inflection in Chinese although with an altogether different word order. There was no division of language usage along gender lines, though literary Chinese 6 Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 192–

93, 244; Gari Ledyard, “The Korean Language Reform of 1446: The Origin, Background and Early History of the Korean Alphabet,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1966.

7 Michael Edson Robinson, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–1925 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), p. 26, quotation on p. 34.

Nationalism, The Rise Of The Vernacular

501

( Hán văn) was used by Vietnamese Confucians for “serious literature” and nôm for “pleasure.”8

Like the conservative yangban who disliked use of han’gŭl. Emperor Minh-mạng of the Nguyễn tried to oust nôm from official documents at court, largely to bring order to the Vietnamese central government. Still, nôm remained in use in elementary education (often to facilitate the teaching of Confucianism to youngsters) and in literature, undoubtedly because it was the closest thing to a written vernacular that the Vietnamese had. At the same time, nôm had the capacity to undermine the state orthodox culture or at least offer alternative avenues for expression closer to native feelings.9

In the 17th century, the famous missionary Alexandre de Rhodes devised a romanization for vernacular Vietnamese, later modified and dubbed quõc ngũ’, a two-syllable expression that can be found in all four East Asian countries, meaning “national language” and hence four different things. As a medium of written discourse, however, only under the French colonial regime in the latter half of the 19th century did quõć ngũ’ come into its own. The French authorities saw it as a means of severing Vietnam culturally from the rest of the Sinic sphere, because they wanted to draw the Vietnamese elite into the French sphere. They hoped that with the continued use of quõć ngũ’ the texts of the literary Chinese heritage would recede into the dusty past.

Logically precise, but wrong! In the hands of Vietnamese reformers, nationalists, and revolutionaries, quõć ngũ’—a complex alphabet in which the tones are written as diacriticals but still far simpler to learn than an ideographic language (be it Chinese or nôm)—though initially hated because of its origins, became the medium of vernacular access directly to the Vietnamese people.

Within a generation, by the early years of the 20th century, quõć ngũ’ newspapers and journals began appearing in major cities, and quõć ngũ’ was closely linked to rising nationalism and radicalism.10

8 Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Nguyen and Ch’ing Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 51–53, 335; Wen You, “Lun Zinan (Chũ’ Nôm) zhi zuzhi jiqi yu Hanzi zhi guanshe” [On the organization of Chũ Nôm and its relationship to Chinese characters], Yanjing xuebao 14 (December 1933), pp. 201–42; Nguyễn Dình Hoà, “Chũ’ Nôm: The Demotic System of Writing in Vietnam,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 79.4

(October–December 1959), pp. 270–74.

9 Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, pp. 54–58; David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 141–44.

10 Alexander Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), pp. 78–79; David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 214–15; David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition

502

Nationalism, the Rise of the Vernacular

In addition to having two languages of their own (nôm and quõć ngũ’) and one on long-term loan from the north, the French conquest introduced yet another language necessary for social advancement. Unlike colonial Korea, where the Japanese banned the teaching of the native tongue, the French encouraged both quõć ngũ’ and French. While French was the language of the hated conqueror, the Vietnamese had had a long experience in the use of a language borrowed from a hated conqueror. Furthermore, French was indeed the language of an oppressive, unwelcome regime, but it also turned out—

upon further investigation—to be the language of Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and 1789. Major debates ensued in the 1910s and 1920s over which language—French or quõć ngũ’—was appropriate for Vietnamese to write in, while literary Chinese and nôm did in fact gradually decline in usage.11 All modern Vietnamese nationalists and radicals who came of age in the first half of the 20th century have been at least bilingual in French and Vietnamese; many (including Hồ Chí Minh) knew a fair amount of Chinese as well.

Of the four East Asian countries, then, China was the last to adopt the use of the vernacular as a means of reaching the masses in the modern period. The extent to which May Fourth intellectuals may have been influenced by China’s neighbors, perhaps through contacts made in Japan, remains an important scholarly desideratum. Many of the leaders of the New Culture Movement had been students in Japan; and Liang Qichao, who lived in Japan for fourteen years and whose writings were highly influential among Chinese and Vietnamese there and later at home, was principally responsible for encouraging linguistic borrowing from the new, rich Meiji vocabulary. I think a crucial link here is the rise of a modern, vernacular press in all the countries of East Asia.

Mixing East with West in Modernization Schemes

Another issue for comparative analysis is the manner in which the elites in each of the four major East Asian countries envisioned the modernizing process, the project of borrowing from the West while retaining the core of their own native civilization. In China this attitude is usually summed up by on Trial, pp. 145–46; Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 22–23, 49–50, 111.

11 David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, pp. 146–50, where these linguistic issues are masterfully laid out. The best overall book on the complexity of linguistic choices for Vietnamese is John DeFrancis, Colonialism and Language Policy in Viet Nam (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1977).

Nationalism, The Rise Of The Vernacular

503

a phrase attributed—I think incorrectly—to Zhang Zhidong: Zhongxue wei ti, Xixue wei yong. In this late-19th-century conception, Western technology would be grafted onto or simply used to protect Chinese civilization. It was an implicit statement of China’s weakness in science and technology, though turned around so that “science” appeared unessential to what was basic or ti.

Several decades later, Chinese students were still calling for science ( Sai xiansheng), though they were now linking it with a failing at the core of Chinese culture, the lack of democracy ( De xiansheng).

In the generation before Zhang Zhidong and the self-strengthening movement, Japanese reformers were similarly looking for a way to open their country, save it from the fate visited upon China, and yet preserve their own ethico-moral values. Sakuma Shōzan coined the term that typified this approach: Tōyō

dōtoku Seiyō geijutsu (East Asian ethics and Western technology). Since the Chinese movement apparently failed to produce modernization, its bifurcated approach of mixing East and West in discrete spheres has been seen as a failure by some, reactionary by others, while the perceived “success” of the Meiji Restoration has afforded the Japanese approach a more hospitable reception.

However, Professor Min Tu-gi of Seoul National University has demonstrated the remarkable similarity in the intellectual frameworks of the two.12 If something went wrong with the yangwu movement in China, in other words, it must lay elsewhere.

Another slogan coined in the Meiji period, though less widely used, was Wakon Yōsai (Japanese soul, Western talent). This phrase derives interestingly from a much older one, allegedly dating to the Heian period, Wakon Kansai (Japanese soul, Chinese talent). In the earlier era, when Japan had been borrowing heavily from China, the slogan was meant to remind Japanese of the need to retain their inner core. Adapted to the later 19th century, Yō replaced Kan, though the force of the slogan in the respective ages of “modernization”

remained remarkably similar.

We find a similar development in Korea. In the aftermath of several decades of anti-foreign calls by the yangban elite to ‘reject heterodoxy’ ( ch’oksa), inspired by Western and later Japanese aggression, Koreans of a self-styled 12 Min Tu-ki (Min Tu-gi), “Chinese ‘Principle’ and Western ‘Utility,’ a Reassessment,” in his National Polity and Local Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 51–62, 85–88. The salient difference between the Chinese and Japanese slogans for self-strengthening should be noted; namely, the moral values to be preserved in the Japanese case were identified with East Asia and this assumed a Sinic core, while in the Chinese case the fundament was identified with China alone. Both cases bespeak the ongoing acceptance of a common Sinic basis to the entire East Asian ethic realm.

504

Nationalism, the Rise of the Vernacular

‘enlightenment’ ( kaehwa) mind began in the 1880s to see the need for some accomodation with things Western while retaining a basic Confucian core.

This new idea materialized in the phrase Tongdo Sogi (Eastern ways, Western instruments).13 Again, the identification of this dual approach to modernization with enlightenment thought and a rejection of xenophobia bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese and Japanese cases. Korea, though, bore the added brunt of being the victim not only of Western expansionism but Japanese as well.

In 19th-century Vietnam, a permutation of this slogan was not bandied about by the elite, but debate over this tiyong (or thê�dụng) style of thinking was possibly more trenchant than elsewhere throughout East Asia. Being a French colony from the 1860s, the issue of whether to resist the French wholeheartedly or adopt their technology so as to be able to expel them at a later date was of much greater immediacy. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans were facing a threat of future humiliation; the Vietnamese already had to deal with a conqueror. As Ralph Smith summed it up some years ago: “What attitude ought the Vietnamese to take toward their conquerors? Could anything be gained by cooperation with the West, by seeking to learn from the West? And if so, what was the proper relationship between the culture and institutions of the past, and the ideas and institutions to be borrowed from the West?”14

Conclusions

More generally, I think our understanding of many other themes in the evolution of modern China can be enriched through this sort of comparative perspective. Being on China’s cultural periphery has allowed the other nations of East Asia a range of options not always available in China, although it has often come at considerable psychological, even physical cost. Using Chinese characters as opposed to a native written language or speaking a language of foreign 13 Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea, pp. 299, 302; Korea, Old and New: A History (Seoul: Ilchokak, 1990), pp. 208–209.

14 Ralph Smith, Viet-Nam and the West (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 25, 30, quotation on p. 29; Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, pp. 200, 261. In discussing the Vietnamese students sent to study in China and Japan in the movement pioneered by reformer Phan Bội Cháu from 1905, Professor Tai notes that “the students brought by Phan to China or Japan had conceived of Western learning essentially as a technique to fight colonialism; they sought to contain ideas in a strictly functionalist framework, leaving intact their fundamental values and sense of self.” Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, p. 170.

Nationalism, The Rise Of The Vernacular

505

origin as opposed one’s native tongue were rarely choices that Chinese intellectuals were compelled to make, even during periods of foreign conquest, with the possible exception of the early decades of the Qing. As a result, the issues such concerns forced to the surface—issues of national and cultural identity, issues of determining where one’s own culture ended and Chinese culture began, major issues of self-definition—had, I would argue, less of an impact on the Chinese until perhaps the confrontation with the West in the 19th century. By that time, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam had been working through these kinds of self-definitional problems for centuries, even millenia (the Japanese still are). China simply had no “other” against which to see itself.

The overwhelming influence of high Sinic culture in the other countries of East Asia was not only incredibly beneficial to their individual maturations as societies and cultures, but it also provided a natural straw-person against which a nativist movement more directly concerned with issues of self-definition could react. As Maruyama Masao and many others since have shown for Japan, the kokugaku (nativist) movement also shared much with the Sinic tradition at which it took aim in Japan; that it perceived its lack of a written textual tradition as a lacuna was due to the fact that both the major continental imports, Confucianism and Buddhism, had readily accessible and very thick canons.

Without China as “other,” nativism had no meaning in Japan.

No comparable movements developed in Korea or Vietnam, though the absence of a native response to Chinese culture of this sizable sort means neither that such movements were snuffed out in their infancy nor that Chinese culture simply overwhelmed the Vietnamese and the Koreans. Both are logical possibilities, but much more likely are two other scenarios. First, as the case of Korea seems to make clearer, Confucian culture on Korean soil was never seen as an unwelcome or alien intruder. It was not perceived in the same manner as Japanese efforts in the first half of the 20th century to replace Korean culture with Japan’s own. Confucianism was “international.” Second, as the case of Vietnam seems to make clearer, Confucian culture barely reached below the level of the elite, having little to do with the everyday lives of the agricultural populace for a variety of complex reasons. The Vietnamese elite did indeed engage in the discourse of Neo-Confucian commentaries and criticism across what we would now call national boundaries, but not (apparently) as prolifically as their East Asian neighbors.15

15 On Vietnamese Confucianism, see Tsuboi Yoshiharu, “Vetonamu ni okeru Jukyō”

[Neo-Confucianism in Vietnam], Shisō 792 (June 1990), pp. 163–78; R.B. Smith, “The Cycle of Confucianization in Vietnam,” in Aspects of Vietnamese History, ed. Walter F.

Vella (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973), pp. 1–29; John K. Whitmore, “Social

506

Nationalism, the Rise of the Vernacular

Students of Chinese history need not all become comparativists to realize that fresh light is cast on China’s historical evolution through comparisons with her cultural neighbors. I would like to go one step further and to argue, though, that little light is shed on our understanding of China’s historical development by comparing this or that element or institution with some superficially similar element or institution outside the Sinic cultural sphere. If one is looking for reasons to explain why China failed to develop along Western lines, then comparisons with the West would certainly be in order; however, such questions are fundamentally self-serving and at best turn up conclusions of a highly dubious quality.

Organization and Confucian Thought in Vietnam,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15.2

(September 1984), pp. 296–306. On Korean Neo-Confucianism, see Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea, passim; and especially The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in Korea, ed. Wm.

Theodore de Bary and JaHyun Kim Haboush (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

■ Source: “Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing in the Modern Sino-Japanese Cultural Context,” Language and Politics in Modern China 2 (July 1993), 20–31.

Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing in the Modern Sino-Chinese Cultural

Context

Fascinating developments in the new field of translation studies may help us advance our understanding of the evolving vocabulary of the Chinese Revolution in the twentieth century. Indeed, there has been an unconscious theoretical convergence between translation studies outside the China field and modern Chinese cultural history. The key concept is “culture” writ large in both cases.

Translation theory has been virtually unknown in China until recent times.

It is not that the Chinese historically have never been forced to confront the issue; on the whole, however, until the later decades of the nineteenth century, most of those who came to China were prepared to communicate in Chinese.

The important exceptions were the nativization of the Buddhist canon and the undoubtedly extensive use of Manchu during the early decades of the Qing dynasty. Since the Western nations only tagged on to the long parade of countries coming to China over the centuries, we need to look first at the other countries of East Asia for clues about translation theory in an ideographic context.

Literary Chinese was the lingua franca of the East Asian world for two millenia.

Although the Japanese invented a native script as early as the tenth century, the Vietnamese in the thirteenth, and the Koreans only in the fifteenth, in all of these cases Chinese remained the primary domestic language for politics and high intellectual culture until the dawn of the twentieth century. We shall return to this issue below.

There have been several traditions of translation theory in the West. The oldest and most long-lasting of them—the transmission of holy scripture into lands in which its language was impenetrable—interestingly parallels developments in East Asia. The story of the Septuagint graphically typifies a whole conception of translation. When the community of Greek rabbis was called upon, ostensibly, to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek, seventy rabbis separately assumed the task. They reconvened to discover that all seventy Greek translations were identical. The implication is that only one true and correct—and implicitly divinely inspired—translation existed of this text and accordingly any text. The veracity is thus guaranteed if the translator is

508

Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing

properly trained and equipped for the task. In the case of Bible translation, the translator performs a semi-divine function—working with God—to spread the holy word to those unable to master the original, for via translation they will now be assured of the equivalent experience. God may have spoken in Hebrew, but He also guided the Greek translators to the one and only possible translation of His word.1 By the same token, translation errors were, on occasion, regarded as blasphemy and punished accordingly.

This conception of translation bespeaks a word-by-word transmission of a text from one context into another. It was not important that the Greek rabbis merely conveyed the general meaning of the Hebrew Bible nor that they simply had the sentences more or less in the same order. The telling points were two: first, that every word was the same in all seventy translations, and second, that the unique translation was the equivalent (though not the equal) of the original.

Despite the multilingual nature of literate culture in Europe through the turn of the nineteenth century, no specific theory of translation was forthcoming. Many would write in Latin or translate their ideas mentally from the vernacular into Latin rather than write them down in the mother tongue.

Few needed translation. George Steiner has suggested one possible reason for the lack of translation theory: “The epistemological and formal grounds for the treatment of ‘meaning’ as dissociable from and augmentative to ‘word’ are shaky at best.” In spite of the absence of theory, translation not only continued, but was deeply intertwined with the evolution of modern languages: “The evolution of modern German is inseparable from the Luther Bible, from Voss’s Homer, from the successive versions of Shakespeare by Wieland, Schlegel, and Tieck.”2

Translation theory began to undergo a radical transformation in the nineteenth century, as translation began to involve a conscious manipulation to

“move the author toward the reader,” to make literary texts as palatable in the target language and culture as they were in the source language and culture.

This development marks the effective realization that precise translation, especially in the case of literary works, was inconceivable without regard for 1 André Lefevere, “Translation: Its Geneology in the West,” in Translation, History and Culture, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1990), 14.

2 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 265–66, 276–78, citations on 277, 266, respectively. See also Lefevere, “Translation: Its Geneology in the West,” 16–18; Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Translation Studies (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 54, 56, 58.

Recent Translation Theory And Linguistic Borrowing 509

norms of the target language and culture.3 It is also cotemporal with the widespread emergence of vernaculars as literary mediums, where in the past Latin would have been more frequently employed. As people became less and less multilingual and as Latin declined in genetic use, the multilingual knowledge necessary for remaining abreast of “world” literature made translation all the more crucial.

We have here the emergence of a new understanding of the relationship between source text (and perhaps author) and target text (and translator). No longer was a work worthy of translation approached as a long string of words, but as an entire text. The translator now performed the all-important function of bringing into one universe a text from another which often might have remained unknown. Without English or French translations of their work, it is highly unlikely, for example, that the writings of Ibsen or Strindberg or Kierkegaard or Tolstoy or, in more recent times, I.B. Singer would have been known outside the realm of native speakers of their mother tongues; it is inconceivable, as well, that Singer would have won the Nobel Prize.

This development has now reached the point that readers outside the native languages of such authors have ceased thinking of their writings as foreign.

The same is true of the King James Bible. Translation has actually energized the target languages with new themes and genres deriving from the source languages. The phrase, “Yea, that I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”—despite the fact that it is not an entirely correct translation—has so fully entered our discourse as to make ordinary mortals believe King David spoke English.

Advances over the past two decades in translation studies have evolved from this trend. We are now in the midst of a “cultural turn.” The important unit for translation is now seen not as a series of words or sentences between languages nor even as a text moving from one setting to another. Rather they themselves are now seen as emblematic of their contexts, as cultural entities that emerge from one distinctive cultural universe. Without an appreciation of that enveloping context, translation into the target language loses much.

But traditional bemoaning of what is “lost in the translation” should also not consume our efforts excessively, for there are countless instances in which translation can clarify or elucidate a cryptic original, in which the target language rises above the source language. Generations of Germans have turned to the English translations of Kant’s critiques to understand them, and you have not lived until you have read Tsubouchi Shōyō’s translations of Shakespeare:

“Yo ni aru, yo ni aran. Sore ga gimon jya!”

3 Lefevere, “Translation: Its Geneology in the West,” 18–20 (p. 19, paraphrasing Schleiermacher).

510

Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing

Translators now speak not of source and target languages alone, but of source and target cultures as well, and the target culture is now beginning to loom almost as large as the source. There is as well less talk of good versus bad translations or faithful versus unfaithful ones. This particular extension of the development of translation studies has a profoundly dangerous aspect to it. In the hands of theorists influenced by postmodernist literary criticism, everything becomes relativized.4 All texts, translations as well as originals, emerge on an even plain. While it strikes me that there certainly is much room for nuance and uncertainty in translation, there are also certain definable criteria, if not absolutes, that must remain in play. War is not peace, and love is not hate.

Responsible members of the community of translation studies, however, are fully aware of such potential pitfalls while remaining sensitive to the new directions in their field. As Jirí Levý had noted: “A translation is not a monistic composition, but an interpretation and conglomerate of two structures. On the one hand there are the semantic content and the formal contour of the original, on the other hand the entire system of aesthetic features bound up with the language of the translation.”5 The new realization, then, is that translation is not simply the transference of meaning from one language system into another with the able use of dictionary and grammar. Language is at the heart of culture; it gives voice to culture, and translators must see the source text within its surrounding cultural context. Texts have images in cultures and these are not always the same in the source and the target. Images in turn have power through language.6

In this connection, Susan Bassnett-McGuire has argued:

To attempt to impose the value system of the SL [source language] culture onto the TL [target language] culture is dangerous ground, and the translator should not be tempted by the school that pretends to determine the original intentions of an author on the basis of a self-contained 4 For a sampling of the interface between postmodern literary criticism and translation theory, see Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991); and Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (St. Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 1991). The latter is particularly self-impressed. Denis Donohue sums up some of the almost offensive views of the late “don of deconstruction,” Paul de Man, in “Translation in Theory and in a Certain Practice,” in The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, ed.

Rosanna Warren (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 225.

5 Cited in Bassnett-McGuire, Translation Studies, 5–6.

6 Lefevere, “Translation: Its Geneology in the West,” 26–27.

Recent Translation Theory And Linguistic Borrowing 511

text. The translator cannot be the author of the SL text, but as the author of the TL text has a clear moral responsibility to the TL readers.7

Mary Snell-Hornby goes this one half-step further. She notes that, as we move toward an understanding of translation that sees it as more a cultural (rather than a linguistic) transfer, the act of translation is no longer a “transcoding”

from one context into another, but an “act of communication.” Texts are part of the worlds they inhabit and cannot be neatly ripped from their surroundings.

The new orientation in translation studies is toward the “function of the target text” rather than the “prescriptions of the source text.” Hans J. Vermeer has argued that translation is first and foremost a “crosscultural transfer.” Thus, the translator must not only be bilingual—that’s a given—but effectively bicul-tural as well. “Translation is not the transcoding of words or sentences from one language to another, but a complex form of action, whereby someone provides information on a text (source language material) in a new situation and under changed functional, cultural, and linguistic conditions, preserving formal aspects as closely as possible.”8

With the misgivings expressed above, I believe that the cultural turn in translation studies marks a major stride forward, and it can be especially useful to those of us trying to understand the evolution of the new vocabulary of the Chinese Revolution. We should note in passing that the identification of language with culture is elemental in East Asia where the two words share the same root, wen. This is, of course, not to say that Chinese and Japanese cultures are the same. Especially (though not exclusively) at the elite level, however, Neo-Confucian culture—a core canon of texts, a shared tradition of commentaries on them, specific family and societal values deriving from them, and the like—had become strikingly similar in both countries from at least the seventeenth century forward. Significant differences in social organization and particularly in the procedures by which men were chosen for political decision-making jobs remained, making the Japanese and Chinese cultural contexts similar as opposed to identical, different strings on the same guitar, different variations on the same theme.

The Japanese descendents of these elite men of the Edo period, men from the bakumatsu (late Edo) and Meiji eras who were trained initially in the 7 Bassnett-McGuire, Translation Studies, 23.

8 Mary Snell-Hornby, “Linguistic Transcoding or Cultural Transfer: A Critique of Translation Theory in Gennany,” in Translation, History and Culture, 81–82, all citations from 82. See also her book, Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach (Amsterdam and Philadephia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1988).

512

Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing

Confucian classics, would later in their careers learn Western languages and take upon themselves the formidable tasks of transmitting Western concepts into Japanese. Had it been the mid- to late twentieth century, they would surely have conveyed—as their own descendents have—the new ideas from the West into katakana expressions taken largely from English. There are two reasons for this shift: English now enjoys the reputation of an international language, and the new “coiners” lack the training in Kanbun (literary Chinese) of their forefathers. A brief trip to any electronics store in Japan will reveal just how dependent on English the new Japanese terminology is. Because these new terms are not written in Chinese characters, they cannot easily be imported (let alone reimported) into China now, as was the case with the Chinese-character compounds coined by Japanese earlier.

In the Meiji period, however, the only appropriate language for transmitting new philosophical, literary, and scientific terms was Chinese. Many of these creators of new terms were famous in their own right for composing works in literary Chinese. One of the most famous case is undoubtedly the great liberal thinker, Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901), who translated Rousseau’s Social Contract into Kanbun in the 1880s.9 Via such routes, numerous new words were coined in Chinese for the literate Japanese reading public. Because the terms then existed in Chinese ideographs, they were ready made for transport into Chinese. The second stage began roughly from the turn of the century, and, although not all terms were renativized into Chinese, the carriers were usually Chinese studying in Japan or those who had taken refuge there.

To make matters even more complicated, the Japanese coiners frequently derived their neologisms from traditional Chinese texts. The research of Sanetō

Keishū and its further development in the research of Tam Yue-him has now documented over 1000 such terms, usually two- or four-character expressions.

9 Chōmin’s translation of Rousseau did in fact not only circulate in China (often with the knowledge that the translator was Japanese); it was reprinted there as well. On its reception in China, see Shimada Kenji, “Chūgoku de no Chōmin juyō” [The reception of Nakae Chōmin in China], Nakae Chōmin zenshū geppö 2 (December 1983), 1–6; Shimada Kenji, “Nakae Chōmin Min ’yaku yakkai no Chūgoku han” [A Chinese edition of Nakae Chōmin’s translation of the Social Contract], Dōhō 40 (October 1981): 1; Hazama Naoki, “Chūgokujin ni yoru Min

’yaku yakkai no jūkan o megutte: Chūgoku de no Chōmin juyō, zoku” [On the reprinting of (Nakae’s translation) of the Social Contract by Chinese: Chōmin’s reception in China, continued], Nakae Chōmin zenshū geppō 18 (April 1986), 1–9; Hazama Naoki, “Rusō Min ’yaku ron to Chūgoku” [Rousseau’s Social Contract and China], paper presented at the international conference, “Jindai shijie yu Zhongguo” [The modern world and China], Beijing, 31 August–

3 September 1990.

Recent Translation Theory And Linguistic Borrowing 513

Many of these same terms also entered the Korean and Vietnamese languages in the early decades of the twentieth century.10

Although it is not completely exceptional, an ideographic language like Chinese—and the other East Asian languages that used Chinese and developed their own vernaculars later—may require a variety of qualifications in discussing translation, either to or from. Achilles Fang overstated the case, though he raised some important considerations:

Another fetish of a group of Sinologists who still think Chinese (classical Chinese) is a “language” in the conventional sense is their firm conviction that a perfect dictionary will smooth their way. Alas, they are whoring after false gods. First, such a dictionary is impossible to make; next, what earthly use is a two-hundred-volume dictionary to anyone? After all is said and done, the meaning is determined from the context in the largest sense of the word, and there no dictionary will avail him. Moreover, a dictionary is no help if the wrong entry is chosen.11

A great deal of research has been done on the entrance into Chinese and Japanese of the Meiji-period Japanese neologisms, though it remains scattered.

An entire generation of intellectuals in China tried to read Yan Fu’s Chinese renderings of Western concepts in his translations of Mill, Smith, Spencer, and Huxley, though most of his neologisms simply did not stick. For example, perhaps his most famous term, tianyanlun as a translation for the “theory of evolution,” was soon replaced in the new Chinese lexicon by the Japanese created term, shinkaron (Ch., jinhualun). Why such terms did not “take” in China cannot simply be sluffed off on the fact that they were too literary or assumed too profound a knowledge of classical Chinese lore. When Yan Fu was writing, there was no widespread vernacular Chinese language in use, and most of those who were able to read his translations undoubtedly understood his allu-sions (even if the Western ideas behind them remained partially obscured).

Was Yan Fu aware of the Japanese translations by Nakamura Keiu of the same texts he labored over? Has anyone ever compared the vocabularies devised by 10 Tam Yue-him (Tan Ruqian), “Xiandai Hanyu de Riyu wailaici jiqi souji he bianren wenti”

11 Achilles Fang, “Some Reflections on the Difficulty of Translation,” in On Translation, ed.

Reuben A. Brower (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 130–31.

514

Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing

Nakamura and Yan to render Western philosophical, political, and economic concepts?

There is a widespread, but extremely thin understanding of the process by which the abovementioned 1000 or so Japanese coinages were formed and entered Chinese. In fact, there are any number of actual, far more complex routes by which these terms were created and adopted into modern, vernacular Chinese. Saitō Tsuyoshi has examined a number of fascinating cases in great detail in his major work, Meiji no kotoba (Meiji words).12 He is concerned primarily with how a discrete set of expressions was forged in Meiji Japanese and how it came to be part of the modern spoken and written Japanese language. Although most of the terms studied—such as Seiyō (Ch. Xiyang, the West), shakai (Ch. shehui, society), kyōwakoku (Ch. gongheguo, republic), hoken (Ch. baoxian, insurance), and other philosophical and academic terms—also found their way into Chinese, Saitō does not examine that phase of the process. He does, though, discuss many of the terms that were suggested and subsequently dropped for various Western political institutions and systems.

In a series of fascinating studies that approaches a similar topic, though largely from the Chinese side of the picture, Mizoguchi Yūzō looks as the numerous Chinese terms that surround the complex of issues involved in laying out the modern distinctions drawn between the public ( gong) and the private ( si). He begins his analysis in Chinese antiquity and demonstrates the remarkable changes that transpired in the uses to which these terms were put over time. From the late nineteenth century, however, these terms became caught up in demands by Chinese intellectuals for Western-style political institutions.

China’s readiness for such institutions, such as representative government or democracy, were frequently justified on putative long traditions in which, for example, the “people were the basis” of the state.13

Let me conclude with one small case which should demonstrate succinctly just how thoroughly complicated this transmission process was: the particle de (J. teki), used in general to form adjectives from nouns, adverbs from adjectives, or to create the genitive case. In his unsurpassed study of the transmission of Western learning to China and Japan, Masuda Wataru (1903–77) has 12 Saitō Tsuyoshi, Meiji no kotoba, higashi kara nishi e no kakehashi [Meiji words: A bridge from East to West] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1977).

13 Mizoguchi Yūzō, “Chūgoku ni okeru kō/shi kinen no tenkai” [The development of the concepts of gong and si in China], Shisō 669 (March 1980): 19–38; Mizoguchi Yūzō,

“Chūgoku no ‘kō/shi’” (2 parts), Bungaku 56 (September 1988): 88–102; Bungaku 56

(October 1988): 73–84.

Recent Translation Theory And Linguistic Borrowing 515

described part of the story in discussing the important work of Yanagawa Shunsan (1832–70). Yanagawa was a scholar of Western learning at the end of the Edo period and head of the Kaiseijo, the main center for Western studies at the time in Japan; he also reputedly knew Dutch, French, English, and German.

A few biographical details about the life and work of the coiners of these neologisms may help us anthropomorphize this process; it puts flesh on the bones.

Yanagawa was also, though, a punctuator of Kanbun texts, written by Chinese or translations by Chinese of Western works. His reputation as a scholar was sufficiently formidable and well known that he appeared as a character at the very beginning of Nagori no yume (Lingering Dreams) by Imaizumi Mine (1858–1937),14 the daughter of Katsuragawa Hoshū (1822–81), a physician to the family of the shogun and a scholar of Dutch learning. Clearly, the community of Kangaku scholars and that of Western learning scholars had significant overlap. Among his many works, Yanagawa wrote Furansu bunten (A Grammar of French), Igirisu nichiyō tsūgo [Everyday colloquial English], and Yōgaku benran [A manual of Western Learning]; and his skills at Kanbun can be found in the literary Chinese versions of popular Japanese songs he prepared, his punctuation work on the Japanese version of the Zhihuan qimeng (The circle of knowledge), a work comprising lessons on English, Christianity, and natural science, based on James Legge’s Chinese translation. Yanagawa was also involved in a project to prepare a complete Japanese translation in twenty string-bound volumes of the Gewu rumen (Introduction to science) by W.A.P. Martin.15

Among the many terms nativized into Japan by Yanagawa and his associates was the aforementioned particle teki (Ch. de). In his personal recollections, Ōtsuki Fumihiko (1847–1928) once described the group of men who worked together translating so many of these Chinese and Western texts. The group included:

14 Privately published, 1940. Reprints: Nagasaki shoten, 1941; Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1963. See also Osatake Tateki’s study Shinbun zasshi no sōshisha Yanagawa Shunsan [Yanagawa Shunsan, initiator of newspapers and magazines] (Tokyo: Takayama shoten, 1940).

15 Masuda Wataru, Seigaku tōzen to Chūgoku jijō: ‘zassho’ sakki [The Eastern spread of Western learning: Notes on “Various Books”] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979), 17–20, 22. On Yanagawa, Narushima Ryūhoku has also written: “Yanagawa sensei ryakujō”

[Brief biography of Professor Yanagawa] and “Yanagawa sensei itsuji” [Unknown facts about Professor Yanagawa], both included in Ryūhoku ishō [Ryūhoku’s posthumous manuscripts] (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1892).

516

Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing

Yanagawa Shunsan, Katsuragawa Hoshū, Kurosawa Magoshirō, Mitsukuri Keigo [d. 1871], Kumazawa Zen’an [1845–1906], and even myself. Odd as it might seem, this group in general [also] enjoyed reading Chinese novels, such as Shuihu zhuan [Water margin] and Jinpingmei [Golden lotus]. One day we got together and began chatting, and someone mentioned inadvertently the following. It was fine to translate “system” as soshiki (Ch. zuzhi), but it was difficult to translate the term “systematic.” The suffix “tic” sounded similar to the character teki ( de) as used in [Chinese] fiction; so why not render “systematic” as soshiki teki (Ch. zuzhi de). Everyone thought it was a brilliant idea and agreed to give it a try. Eventually, we paid someone to write out the expression soshiki teki clearly and bring it to the authorities. “Have you put this into use?”

“Yes.” “This is rather extraordinary, isn’t it?” “Not that I am aware, no.”

We joked with these sorts of comic play-acting, but very often we were only able to escape difficult [translation] points with this character teki.

Ultimately, it moved from pure invention to fact, and it was used later without a second thought, as people picked up on this usage.16

Again, though, this is only half of our story. We need to know if this new colloquial usage in Japanese of teki was the source for de as a comparable particle in colloquial Chinese, or whether de entered modern baihua directly from its much earlier usage in colloquial Chinese literary texts of the Yuan and Ming periods. While twentieth-century spoken Chinese uses de almost exclusively, written vernacular texts often use de alongside the other genitive-forming particles zhi and di. Japanese has its own manner of forming the genitive, with the particle no, not the precise counterpart of teki but the two perform something more on the order of complementary, and occasionally overlapping, roles.17

Most serious scholars of the modern Chinese historical experience, even those most closely wedded to statistical data, consider culture—actually, cultural differences—elemental to their considerations in research and writing. It would be almost impossible to imagine someone making the claim that study of China could be pursued without taking culture into account. Thus, the recent turn in translation studies toward a broader, more cultural appreciation 16 Ōtsuki Fumihiko, Fukken zassan [Miscellaneous collection of Fukken] (Tokyo: Kōbundō

shoten, 1902), as cited in Masuda Wataru, Seigaku tōzen to Chūgoku jijō: ‘zassho’ sakki, 20.

17 Some of the complexity concerning this issue is conveyed in a somewhat popular essay by Suzuki Shūji, “Teki no bunka” [The culture of “teki”], in his Kango to Nihonjin [Chinese terms and the Japanese people] (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1979), 1–25.

Recent Translation Theory And Linguistic Borrowing 517

of both source and target contexts segues neatly with this widespread scholarly criterion, and concerted attention toward the linguistic Sino-Japanese innovations over the past century could not have come at a better time.

Before blanket characterizations can be put forth about the nature of this borrowing—and long before we can generalize or theorize about it—we need closer examination of as many of the different routes by which the terminology of the Chinese Revolution entered the modern Chinese lexicon from Japanese as possible. We need to study the very texts in which these terms were first used, what Western concepts they were meant to translate, what they conjured up in the Japanese setting, the process by which they entered Chinese, and the images (however different or similar from Japanese) these terms gave rise to in China. I do not mean to suggest that we conduct 1000 separate studies, but we do need many separate studies for different clusters of terms.

■ Source: “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49.2

(December 1989), 575–602.

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

Like the epic, like history, like the novel, the literature of travel has evolved through the centuries. Like them it has existed since the beginnings of oral and written literature. As with them some of its authors have been bad, others have delighted and informed their readers, and many, from the earliest times, have been popular, influential, even brilliant. As with other forms of literature its quantity and nature have varied because of political, religious, economic, and other social and human factors. And like them it includes countless subtypes that continually approach each other, separate, join, overlap, and consistently defy neat classification.1

Travel accounts form an immense literary genre of international proportions, hundreds, even thousands of years old. The global thirst for knowledge of how other peoples live has known no bounds since the reporting of travel tales first began. The reasons for this curiosity abound, from voyeurism to scholarly interest to concerns for military planning. And, the growth of information about the inhabitants of every corner of the globe has in no way diminished contemporary man’s desire to learn more from places and peoples still little known on earth and elsewhere in the universe. Indeed, an entire sub-genre of science fiction, the imaginary voyage, aims at satisfying this curiosity in the realm of the fantastic.2

Japanese travel to China recommenced in 1862 following the lifting of the ban on travel by the Tokugawa bakufu, and travel accounts began to appear immediately. What were the origins of this literary form? There were the well-known diaries of eminent Buddhist monks who voyaged from Japan to China to study with masters in the Sui, T’ang, and Sung periods.3 In addition, the domestic travel diary constituted a well-recognized genre in Japan that dated 1 Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 38.

2 Philip Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).

3 The best known example in the West is that of the monk Ennin (794–864). See Edwin O.

Reischauer, trans., Ennin: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1955); and Edwin O. Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels in T’ang China (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1955).

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 519

back as far as the Heian period, such as the Tosa nikki (Tosa Diary) of 936.4

During the centuries of Tokugawa prohibition on overseas travel, the Japanese developed a widespread and rich domestic travel literature, dating from as early as 1655.5 Other genres of Chinese writings served as models for Japanese travelers, in particular the local gazetteer (which clearly played a role in siring the guidebook as a genre).6 The other principal Chinese literary form, widely known in Japan and possibly significant in the formation of Japanese travel accounts of China, was that of the earlier fictional voyages: Hsi yu chi (Journey to the West) or T’ao-hua yüan chi (Peach Blossom Spring), for example.7 This last category is especially interesting because of the comparisons it allows us with the rise of European travel literature, as in the cases of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Thomas More’s Utopia, and most of Daniel Defoe’s work.

4 Partially translated by G.W. Sargent, in Anthology of Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, ed. Donald Keene (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1960), pp. 82–91.

5 Lawrence Bresler, “The Origins of Popular Travel and Travel Literature in Japan,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1975, Part I.

6 On non-administrative travel books of the Ming-Ch’ing period, see Timothy Brook,

“Guides for Vexed Travelers—Route Books in the Ming and Ch’ing,” Ch’ing-shih wen-t’i 4:5

(1981):32–76. On differences between travel books and guide books, Paul Fussell has the following to say:

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders, and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

Travel books are a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker’s encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative—unlike that in a novel or romance—claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality. The speaker in a travel book exhibits himself as physically more free than the reader, and thus every such book . . . is an implicit celebration of freedom.

Paul

Fussell,

Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 203. This statement, mutatis mutandis, holds for the men and women travel writers in my study.

7 For many years T’ao-hua yüan chi was considered a utopian, imaginary piece, until Ch’en Yin-k’o 陳寅恪 demonstrated that, more likely than not, it was in fact an account of a trip to a community distinctive to the Six Dynasties period. See Ch’en Yin-k’o, “T’ao-hua yüan chi p’ang-cheng” 桃花源記旁証, Ch’ing-hua hsüeh-pao 11.1 (1936):79–88. This view has not gone uncriticized. Similarly, Percy Adams has shown how reliant Thomas More’s Utopia was on the then recent travel accounts of Amerigo Vespucci. Namely, many characteristics of his Utopia are exactly as Vespucci described the New World. The very fact that the latter’s name became forever attached to the New World is a reflection of the popularity of his accounts.

See Adams, Travel Literature, pp. 41–42, 112–13; and Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).

520

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

As a discernible genre of travel accounts concerning China (as opposed to elsewhere in the world) began to emerge in the latter part of the nineteenth century in Japan, there soon followed sub-genres distinctive to the professions of the authors (politicians, businessmen, Sinologists, teachers, professional travel writers, and the like). In his magisterial treatment of the relationship between travel writing and the rise of the novel in the West, Percy Adams has also found it most useful to divide the varieties of travel literature according to the occupations of the authors.8 Within this large body, an identifiable subgroup of accounts by Japanese novelists and poets began to appear from the first years of the twentieth century.

Several issues concerning the travel account as a medium of literary reportage need to be raised at the outset. Who traveled to China, and why did they go? What places did they visit or, rather, what did they describe having seen?

Not every Japanese author or poet went to China, and some that did, such as Shiga Naoya 志賀直哉 (1883–1971), wrote nothing about it.9 By the same token, writers often did not record events we now know were occurring at the time they were in China. What one, particularly a professional writer, chose to commit to paper, was highly selective. These authors were profoundly aware of their audiences, their patrons, and what each might wish to read. They had established readerships and reputations, as well as certain modes of behavior and literary styles that their readers at home expected to find reflected in their travel accounts. The novelist and self-styled “globe-trotter” Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) made this general point explicit (in a fleeting moment of sobriety) in one of his many travelogues when he opined on a writer’s descriptions of his travels:

One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. . . .

For myself and many better than me, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places, and particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development, where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation. It is there that I find the experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form.

Just as a carpenter, I suppose, seeing a piece of rough timber feels an inclination to plane it and square it and put it into shape, so a writer is not really content to leave any experience in the amorphous, haphazard 8 Adams, Travel Literature, pp. 64–70.

9 Nor did Shiga write another novel for the five years following his return from China. Agawa Hiroyuki 阿川弘之, Shiga Naoya no seikatsu to sakuhin (Sōgensha, 1955), p. 286.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 521

condition in which life presents it; and putting an experience into shape means, for a writer, putting it into communicable form.10

Several factors distinguished the Japanese from other literary travelers to China. Few Japanese visitors learned to speak Chinese, although many Chinese were able to converse in Japanese, but virtually every author of an account for the period under study could read Kanbun (classical Chinese). This alone enabled a level of literal understanding in China that few Westerners ever attained. Communications with Chinese often took place through the medium of the “pen conversation” (J. hitsudan 筆談, Ch. pi-t’an) in which the participants wrote in classical Chinese, passing a piece of paper between them. This ability to exchange ideas, to ask questions, to use a language to communicate should not be underestimated. Masao Miyoshi has stressed how an inability to converse in English enormously hampered the first Japanese embassy to the United States in 1860.11 The same problem never presented itself to the first Japanese travelers to China (Takasugi Shinsaku 高杉晋作 and others in 1862) when travel became legal, because they had the “pen conversation.”12

Another important (and related) element for Japanese travelers was the instinctive closeness they felt to what was often referred to as Kanji bunka or the culture of Chinese characters. This sense of intimacy (real or imagined) did not always or necessarily imply love or even sympathy for China, but it did make the Japanese traveler think he or she understood China. Thus, because they could read the Chinese language, communicate with their educated Chinese hosts, gain a sense of closeness to the cultural qualities they felt they shared with the Chinese, and describe their experiences often in beautiful prose, Japanese writers who visited China and wrote accounts for the reading public back in Japan have not only left us a marvelous body of writings, but because they were the most famous travelers in their day in Japan, and doubtless the most widely read at the time, were accordingly the most likely to have had an influence in shaping Japanese attitudes and images of China.

10 Evelyn Waugh, When the Going Was Good (London: Duckworth, 1946), p. 197.

11 Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 32, 33, 36, 40.

12 Takasugi Shinsaku, Yū-Shin goroku, in Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū, ed. Hori Tetsusaburō

堀哲三郎, 2 vols. (Shin jinbutsu ōrai sha, 1974), vol. 2; Etō Shinkichi 衛藤瀋吉, “Nihonjin no Chūgoku kan: Takasugi Shinsaku ra no baai,” in Niida Noboru hakase tsuioku ronbunshū, daisankan: Nipponhō to Ajia (Keisō shobō, 1970), 3:54–55, 57, 63–67; and Ichiko Chūzō

市古宙三, “Bakumatsu Nihonjin no Taihei tengoku ni kansuru chishiki,” in Kaikoku hyakunen kinen Meiji bunka shi ronshū (Kengensha, 1952), pp. 453–91.

522

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

The poets, novelists, artists, and other literary types also form the largest occupational subgroup of those who penned travel accounts of China, and they left by far the most interesting and insightful reports as well. In fact, traveling to China seems to have become de rigueur for members of the Japanese literary scene, inasmuch as virtually every major figure during the prewar period made a trip to China, and most wrote accounts for their readers in Japan. Also, as Japan’s involvement in China grew and as the Japanese reading public became more interested in contemporary events there, China became a setting for the novels and short stories of authors such as Muramatsu Shōfū 村松梢風 and Yokomitsu Riichi 横光利一 (1898–1947).

The earliest travel account by a Japanese literary figure is that of Futabatei Shimei (1872–1912), the novelist and famous interpreter of Russian literature, who visited China in the summer of 1902. However, if he met a single Chinese person, he kept it to himself. He did meet many Russians in Manchuria and many Japanese throughout China, but his diary will today be of interest primarily to Futabatei scholars. Perhaps an inability to converse in Chinese proved too severe an obstacle to overcome. He was followed the next year by the poet Sasaki Nobutsuna 佐々木信綱 (1872–1963). Sasaki offered a lovely description of his trip along the Yangtze and the sunset outside Hankow: “I felt as if I were in some paradise.” Soochow proved to be his favorite place with its beautiful pagodas, textiles, and elegant people; it reminded him of Kyoto. He too, though, ignored virtually everything going on around him.13

The first important account of travel to the Asian mainland was Natsume Sōseki’s) (1867–1916) Man-Kan tokoro dokoro (Here and There in Manchuria and Korea). In the fall of 1909, several months after he had finished his novel Sore kara (And Then), Sōseki accepted an assignment from the Asahi shinbun to write a series on a trip through Manchuria and Korea. Although somewhat reluctant, his curiosity about what his countrymen had achieved since the victory over Russia four years earlier combined with the encouragement of his friend Nakamura Zekō 中村是公 (1867–1927), then President of Japan’s South Manchurian Railway Company (SMR), to convince him. Nakamura for his part knew well what Sōseki’s famous name could mean for the young SMR’s public relations. Well aware of this, Sōseki was not about to act as a mouthpiece for the SMR. Yet he was impressed by their work, as he noted in letters home (but not in his travel account): “As I traveled around Manchuria and Korea, I really 13 Futabatei Shimei, “Yūgai kikō,” in Futabatei Shimei zenshū (Iwanami shoten, 1953), 11:153–

89; Sasaki Nobutsuna, “Nan-Shin fukei dan,” in Tabi to uta to, in Sekai kikō bungaku zenshū

(Shūdōsha, 1959) [hereafter, SKBZ], 11:25, 28–29; “Nan-Shin konjaku dan,” Sekai kikō bungaku zenshū geppō 4 (1959): 1–2.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 523

felt as though the Japanese were indeed a trustworthy people”; “Japanese are vigorously engaging in activities all over Manchuria, and these activities are just remarkable. I thought that the Japanese were really something.”14

Sōseki put his estimable literary talents to work in describing the social conditions he witnessed. In literary terms, he consciously chose a highly objective style of reportage in opposition to the naturalism so prevalent in Japan at the time. The roots of modern Japanese realism, it has been argued, can be found in this reportage style. One of the recurring images in Sōseki’s account was his amazement at how hard Chinese laborers worked, an image picked up by subsequent travelers. When he arrived in Dairen, he observed and wrote at length about the coolies who carried huge sacks of soy beans on their backs up three flights of stairs over and over again, and always in complete silence.

“Their silence and their regulated movements, their endurance and their precision seemed to me like the shadow of fate itself. While I stood and observed them, for a moment I was overcome with an exceedingly eerie feeling.”15

One harrowing scene that Sōseki witnessed and was sadly unable to do anything about occurred in Fengtien (present-day Shenyang). He saw an impoverished old laborer in the middle of the road with the skin literally torn off his foot. People were gathered around to stare at the old man’s gaping wound, all in silence, and the victim likewise stared expressionless at the ground next to his mangled limb. Sōseki could no longer control the non-participatory reporter in himself, and cried out for a doctor, but his Chinese guide simply drove on, ignoring the incident. One senses in reading this passage that Sōseki could not escape feeling somehow complicit in a crime, and that made him much more than just a visitor in China. But, his chosen style of objective, non-personalized reportage in a curious way provided a loophole from lingering guilt. He nonetheless remained deeply troubled.16

This volume is interestingly the least highly regarded of Sōseki’s works. One has to look through many of the numerous biographical and critical writings about him to find even passing mention of it. To a considerable extent, this is due to postwar Japanese guilt at Japanese activities in China, Korea, and Manchuria. There he was trekking around Manchuria under Japanese colonial 14 Cited in Takeuchi Minoru 竹内実, “Sōseki no Man-Kan tokoro dokoro,” in Takeuchi Minoru, Nihonjin ni totte no Chūgokuzō (Shunjūsha, 1966), pp. 296–99.

15 Natsume Sōseki, Man-Kan tokoro dokoro, in Sōseki zenshū (Chikuma shobō, 1965–66)

[hereafter, SZ], 8:256–57; Takeuchi Minoru, “Sōseki no Man-Kan tokoro dokoro,” pp. 301–

304, 309, 311–13; and Itagaki Naoko 板垣直子, Natsume Sōseki: denki to bungaku (Shibundō, 1973), p. 198.

16 SZ 8:190; Takeuchi Minoru, “Sōseki no Man-Kan tokoro dokoro,” pp. 305–308.

524

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

dominion, staying in Japanese hotels, meeting with Japanese living there, riding the South Manchurian Railway, and not once did he mention these facts.17

Sōseki, I would argue, chose not to mention them because he did not want to offer the SMR free publicity, however impressed he was with their work. One scholar noted of Sōseki’s account: “I’ve heard it said that it really wasn’t Man-Kan tokoro dokoro but Sōseki tokoro dokoro. It has little to do with Manchuria and Korea and more to do with the rumors [he picked up from] the guys he met there.”18

Another element of his style, his sarcasm, has served to confuse matters. Sōseki used the expression “Chan” (short for the extremely deprecatory

“Chankoro”) to refer to the Chinese on occasion. In this he simply was unable to transcend the prejudices of his time, much in the unmistakably condescending way Evelyn Waugh referred to locals wherever he traveled. Sōseki (again, like Waugh) was just as prepared, though, to turn his sarcasm on himself. The first sentence of his account reads: “When I asked in all seriousness just what in the world the SMR was, the President of the SMR looked at me in amazement and said: ‘You sure are stupid.’”19 Incidentally, Nakamura was widely known for his vulgarity by the SMR staff who had dubbed him as “a pig in a frock coat.”

Lengthy analysis of whether Sōseki liked or disliked the Chinese people is not a productive scholarly enterprise. We can marshall enough citations of his admiration of the Chinese to combat the view that he held seriously condescending views. His travel account has important literary and historical value only if we accept his personal agenda to describe the people and their lives as realistically as he saw them. Whatever faults his work might have, it surely lacked neither for a sense of reality nor for an ability to convey that reality to the reader.

In late 1918, a young Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) traveled to China for the first time. As we know from his later travel account, he had wanted to meet with young Chinese writers in Peking or Shanghai, but he lacked the necessary connections at the time and ultimately was unable to do so. From this trip he left a number of rich descriptions of local nature, customs, foods, and clothing.20 When he returned in 1926, the Chinese political and literary scene 17 Ara Masahito 荒正人, Natsume Sōseki (Jitsugyō no Nihon sha, 1967), p. 133.

18 The statement is that of Komiya Toyotaka 小宮豊隆, as cited in Nakamura Shintarō 中村

新太郎, Nihon to Chūgoku no nisen nen (Tōhō shuppansha, 1973), 2:701.

19 SZ 8:155; and Nakamura Shintarō, Nihon to Chūgoku, 2:702–703.

20 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “Nankin fushibyō,” in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū (Chūō kōron sha, 1969) [hereafter, TJZ], 23:43–44; “Rozan nikki,” in TJZ 7:461–470; “Shina ryokō,” TJZ 23:42;

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 525

had changed so thoroughly as to offer a now famous Tanizaki a wholly different experience.

In the same year as Tanizaki’s first trip to China, the haiku poet Kawahigashi Hekigotō 河東碧梧桐 (1873–1937) alighted at the older port of Japanese entry, Ningpo. His travel account provides striking proof for the assertion that a lifetime of immersion in Kanji culture did not necessarily lead Japanese to illuminating conclusions about China. He began (in an effort to attach himself to a tradition of sorts) by saying that Ningpo was the first point at which Japanese visitors in the T’ang dynasty had touched Chinese soil. After visiting Ningpo, he came to the startling conclusion that the world had really changed since the T’ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties. Now, Shanghai was the city with an imported civilization, while the Ningpo of old had become an exported civilization (presumably to Japan). The Ningpoese, he claimed, were ashamed of the situation in Shanghai, although it is unclear what any of this means. Harping on this T’ang connection, he pointed out that, whereas at that time Japanese intellectuals had been smitten with Sinophilia, now Japanese students were embarrassed by the difficulty of their own mother tongue and by the fact that they were not born Englishmen: “This is a symptom of an illness accompanying the importation of foreign civilization.” And, no sooner had he finally come to a point than he undercut himself by claiming that art knew no national boundaries, and for that reason earlier Japanese had excelled in the writing of Chinese-style poetry and prose.21

A more interesting account is that of Ōmachi Keigetsu 大町桂月 (1869–

1925), a poet and literary scholar. He described Chilin, where he arrived in the winter of 1918–19, as breathtakingly beautiful, warranting its reputation as the “Kyoto of Manchuria,” one of a number of recurring expressions aimed at familiarizing a place by nativizing it. There is not even the hint of an imperial-istic tone here. Since Kyoto, especially in winter, was revered by Japanese as the quintessence of beauty, this was extremely high (perhaps exaggerated) praise for Chilin. For every sight Ōmachi visited in the Northeast, he had a Japanese

“Soshū kikō,” in TJZ, 6:223–43; and “Soshū kikō maegaki,” in TJZ 23:40–41. See also Takeda Taijun 武田泰淳, “‘Shanhai kōyū ki’ jidai no Chū-Nichi bundan,” Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

zenshū geppō 10 (1967): 4–5; and Ozawa Masamoto 小澤正元, Uchiyama Kanzō den: Nit-Chū yūkō ni tsukushita idai na shomin (Banchō shobō, 1972), p. 82.

21 Kawahigashi Hekigotō, “Neiha,” in SKBZ 11:178–83. In fairness, he visited numerous sights, particularly Buddhist temples, and described them all. He also went to the birthplaces of Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529) and Chu Shun-shui 朱舜水 (1600–1682), both of the Ming; and he left a rich description of the city of Shao-hsing. See Kawahigashi Hekigotō,

“Tendōji,” in SKBZ 11:183–84, 187–89, 192. He apparently also met Sun Yat-sen in Canton but was not terribly impressed.

526

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

guide, either an SMR official on the scene or a local representative of a Japanese company. From this point forward, many a Japanese literary personality was led around in Manchuria; though not necessarily shielded, their presence was known and appreciated. They often traveled at the invitation and expense of the SMR, something that Sōseki had pioneered. Ōmachi described in great geographical detail the area around Port Arthur, scene of bloody fighting during the war with Russia, and he relived some of those battles with lengthy quotations from officers of that time. This was not in the least a jingoistic chronicle.

The message is clear in the way only someone trained to write can make it: war is a horror to all sides involved.22

Two artists who journeyed to China in the second decade of the twentieth century had rather different recollections. Toriya Matazō 鳥谷又蔵 traveled to many Chinese cities over four months in early 1913 and left a diary and a series of 115 “stray notes” about his experiences. His general impression was of a disunited, filthy, egotistic country full of coolies, beggars, and starving people whose faces resembled those of animals.23

Ishii Hakutei 石井柏亭 (1882–1958) displayed somewhat more understanding, even though the period he spent in China, April and May 1919, turned out to be considerably more chaotic, especially for a Japanese. After describing the downtown area of Shanghai with its stores, people, and the concession area, he went to visit the Japanese author Inoue Kōbai 井上紅梅 (1881–?) who had taken up residence there. Together they paid a call on the Chinese writer Ouyang Yü-ch’ien 欧陽予倩 (1889–1962) who showed them his art collection and took them on a tour of an art school in Shanghai. Ishii in turn agreed to give a talk through a translator at the Kiangsu Educational Society. When the Shantung issue erupted in early May and Japan was being vilified in the press and on the streets, Ishii naturally became uneasy. He witnessed shops being forced to close and placards warning against the sale of Japanese goods.

When the coolies, dockworkers, and railwaymen went on strike, Ishii resolved to remain indoors and concentrate on his painting. Throughout this intensely anti-Japanese period, though, he had nothing derogatory to say about the Chinese. And, when Ts’ao Ju-lin 曹汝霖 (1876–1966) and his “pro-Japanese”

contingent were removed from the Peking government, Ishii noted that the anti-Japanese movement seemed to die down.24

22 Ōmachi Keigetsu, “Yuki no Kitsurin,” in Keigetsu zenshū (Kōbunsha, 1926), 3:638–67; Ōmachi Keigetsu, “Ryojun no senseki,” Keigetsu zenshū, 3:577–83.

23 Toriya Matazō, Shina shūyū zuroku (Shūyū zuroku hakkōsho, 1914), p. 31.

24 Ishii Hakutei, “Kojō nisshi,” E no tabi, Chōsen Shina no kan, in SKBZ 11:205–206, 215–17.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 527

From late March through early July 1921, the Ōsaka mainichi shinbun sent a special reporter to do a series of articles on cultural life in China’s major cities.

The reporter, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), was not yet thirty years of age but had already achieved tremendous popularity as a writer of fiction in Japan.

The newspaper widely publicized the trip, and he was doted on by Japanese he met all along the way. In fact, his installments were carried in the Japanese-language press in China as well, making the whole journey a literary event.

The Ōsaka mainichi was interested in where and how China’s ancient culture confronted the rise of new ideas, new political concerns, and new ways generally, in the midst of what we now call the May Fourth Movement. Akutagawa was charged with interviewing a number of major Chinese figures in the hope of getting some answers to these questions.

In Shanghai he met Chang Ping-lin 章炳麟 (1869–1936) at the latter’s home.

Chang became agitated as he talked about politics to his guest, and Akutagawa chose to let his host go on as he pleased rather than try to guide the conversation. To this Chang was completely amenable:

I’m sad to say that contemporary China is politically depraved. You might say that since the last years of the Ch’ing dynasty the spread of injustice has reached immense proportions. In scholarship and the arts there has been an unusual stagnation. The Chinese people, however, do not by nature run to extremes. Insofar as they possess this quality, Chinese Communism is impossible. Of course, one segment of the students welcomes Soviet principles, but the students are not the populace. Even if the people were to become Communist, a time would come at some point when they would dispense with this belief. The reason is that our national character—love for the Golden Mean—is stronger than any temporarily flared enthusiasm.25

The Chinese Communist Party held its first national congress the very month this conversation took place and in the same city; and yet, obvious contradictions aside, one senses more than a kernel of truth in what Chang predicted.

25 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Shanhai yūki,” in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū (Iwanami shoten, 1977–78) [hereafter, ARZ], 5:28–29. See also Kawata Teiichi 河田悌一, “Jinbutsu to shisōshi no kenkyū: Shō Heirin, Son Bun, Kō Yūi o megutte,” Tō-A 185 (1982): 39–51. It should be noted that Akutagawa’s is the only report we have of this exchange, as Chang left no account of their meeting.

528

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

Akutagawa had a quieter exchange with Cheng Hsiao-hsü 鄭孝胥 (1859–

1938). Cheng had been active in the 1898 Reform Movement, and Akutagawa described him as a former official of the Ch’ing, now a private scholar. Their discussion ranged over issues of concern to China broadly. Cheng despaired over the rampant chaos throughout Republican China, and he posited the return to stability should a kingly form of state be implemented and a hero emerge to run it. Despite Cheng’s profound conservatism, Akutagawa thoroughly enjoyed meeting him, his warm hospitality, and his wide learning.26 Several years later Cheng became Prime Minister in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

The third interviewee in Shanghai was a socialist by the name of Li Jen-chieh 李人傑, whom Akutagawa considered a representative of “young China,” the new voices contesting the old cultural and political forces. Fluent in Japanese by virtue of a period of study in Tokyo, Li explained that neither the Republic nor reversion to any past provided the solution to China’s problems. Political revolution had proven ineffective throughout Chinese history; what China needed and what the “young Chinese” advocated was a social revolution and a cultural movement.27

These three interviews constituted Akutagawa’s intellectual contacts in Shanghai—a conservative (Cheng), a radical (Li), and a conservative radical (Chang). Akutagawa must have chosen his subjects, or the material to include in his account, to fit this neat pattern and convey at least a sense that the entire spectrum of responses to China’s present state was to be found in the intellectual world of Shanghai alone. One cannot forget that he was an artist crafting his work for the press and his public.

In addition, Akutagawa as a novelist provided his readers with penetrating descriptions of life in China’s urban areas. Although enthralled by the elegance and beauty of Peking—“I could live here for two or three years. . . . I’ve fallen in love with it”—he was shocked by ubiquitous beggars and the stench of urine in the streets of Shanghai and elsewhere. The filth, particularly for a man ailing with pleurisy at the time, occasionally became unbearable. In a letter from Shanghai he noted: “The specialities of this place are new ideas and typhoid.”

In fact, Shanghai “was more Western than Chinese.” Despite his initial sympathy for the “young China” types with their enthusiasm and idealism, the street scenes he depicted were of a China here and now mired in a deeply depressing reality.28 Although one might argue that Akutagawa tailored his account to the 26 ARZ 5:34–36.

27 ARZ 5:47–49.

28 Yajima Michihiro 矢島道弘, “Kikō,” in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke kenkyū, ed. Kikuchi Hiroshi 菊地弘 (Meiji shoin, 1981), pp. 230–32; Shindō Sumitaka 進藤純孝, Denki Akutagawa

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 529

needs of the press, his descriptions are still moving, and the change he underwent while traveling in China (from hoping to find a combination of new and old to a sadness at China’s confused and perilous state) seems utterly sincere.

Akutagawa did many other things in China as well: attending a Peking opera performance by the renowned singer Mei Lan-fang 梅蘭芳 (1894–1961); visiting the grave of the woman revolutionary Ch’iu Chin 秋瑾 (1867–1907) in Shao-hsing and a temple built in honor of the Sung general Yüeh Fei 岳飛 (1103–41) in Hangchow; and often parading around in full Chinese dress, a practice begun by earlier travelers to China such as Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) at the end of the nineteenth century.29

In late 1925 or 1926, the year before his suicide, Akutagawa published a short story entitled “Konan no ōgi” 湖南の扇 (The folding fan of Hunan). It began: Aside from Sun Yat-sen who was born in Kwangtung, the outstanding Chinese revolutionaries—Huang Hsing 黄興, Ts’ai O 蔡鍔, and Sung Chiao-jen 宋教仁—were all born in Hunan. This was of course due to the inspiration of Tseng Kuofan 曾国藩 and Chang Chih-tung 張之洞.

To explain this inspiration, we must consider the indefatigably strong will of the Hunanese people themselves. When I visited Hunan [several years ago], I had an almost fictional encounter which may illustrate the dignity and deep passion of the Hunanese.

Akutagawa’s storyteller, a Japanese doctor, goes on to describe his trip to Changsha, capital of Hunan, where he meets his former Tokyo University classmate T’an Yung-nien 譚永年 (literally, “eternal T’an,” perhaps a reference to the Hunanese martyr T’an Ssut’ung [1865–98] and hence to all Hunanese or the undying spirit of reform in China). In Changsha, they meet one Yü Lan 玉蘭, the lover of a “bandit” (which clearly means a rebel in this context) executed just a few days earlier. T’an offers the narrator some biscuits that have been soaked in the blood of this fallen hero, saying that if he eats them, he will never become ill. No one can stomach such borderline cannibalism except Yü Lan.30

Ryūnosuke (Rokkō shuppan, 1978), p. 442; Nakamura Shintarō, Nihon to Chūgoku, 2:705; and Yoshida Seiichi 吉田精一, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke no Chūgoku kikō,” Sekai kikō bungaku zenshū geppō 4 (1959):6–7.

29 Kiyomi Rikurō 清見陸郎, Okakura Tenshin (Heibonsha, 1934), pp. 70–87; and Takeuchi Minoru, “Ajia wa hitotsu nari: Okakura Tenshin to Izuru,” in Takeuchi Minoru, Kikō Nihon no naka no Chūgoku (Asahi shinbunsha, 1976), pp. 66–85.

30 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Konan no ōgi,” in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū, (Chikuma shobō, 1984), 3:283–91.

530

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

This story speaks directly to the enduring admiration Akutagawa had both for the Chinese who were intent on changing their dismal state and for such courageous Chinese women.

One of the most fascinating cultural encounters between Chinese and Japanese belletrists occurred during Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s second visit to China in January–February 1926. In order to set his experiences in Shanghai in context, we need to go back several years to 1913, when the young Christian Uchiyama Kanzō 内山完造 (1885–1959) arrived in China. After working for several years, he opened his own bookstore in Shanghai, Uchiyama Shoten, carrying primarily Japanese volumes; as it expanded, it simultaneously became a center for discussions among Chinese and Japanese intellectuals. Uchiyama himself became something of a mediator or broker of Sino-Japanese cultural contacts and was deeply respected by all who knew him. His own diary account contains the following entry (although mistakenly placed in 1921, this should be 1926): “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō arrived. He said he wanted to meet some Chinese authors, and asked me to introduce him. So, I invited Kuo Mo-jo 郭沫若, T’ien Han 田漢, Ou-yang Yü-ch’ien, T’ang Lin 唐林, Hsieh Liu-i 謝六逸 . . . and others to the second storey of my place for a meeting. I ordered some first-rate vegetarian cuisine to be served.”31

Remembering well his 1918 failures, Tanizaki had been informed that if he wanted to meet Chinese writers he should go directly to Uchiyama’s store and introduce himself (he was, after all, a celebrated author now). “I was told that apart from Manchuria this bookstore has the largest collection of Japanese books in all China,” he noted with the interesting passing admission that Manchuria belonged to China. “One-fourth of the store’s sales go to Chinese customers, and the percentage increases every year. The Chinese buy any and every sort of book available. Philosophy, science, law, literature, religion, art—

new learning in contemporary China has largely been gained through books in the Japanese language.”32 Tanizaki was particularly impressed with the great interest taken in Japanese literature by Chinese intellectuals. He learned of Chou Tso-jen’s 周作人 (1885–1960) translations of contemporary Japanese fiction, T’ien Han’s (1898–1966) of Japanese drama, and Hsieh Liu-i’s (1900–45) of the Manyōshū and The Tale of Genji.

31 Uchiyama Kanzō, Kakōroku (Iwanami shoten, 1961), p. 122. Ozawa Masamoto (in Ozawa Masamoto, Uchiyama Kanzō den, p. 83) says that their meeting occurred in 1923. Both he and Uchiyama are wrong—internal evidence and the publication of Tanizaki’s account corroborate his dating the event to 1926.

32 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, “Shanhai kōyū ki,” in TJZ, 10:564.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 531

Tanizaki’s beautifully written description of his meetings with Kuo Mo-jo (1892–1978), T’ien Han, and others, and the wild party thrown by them in his honor is an invaluable (and altogether neglected) document for the study of Chinese literary history. Only an outsider of Tanizaki’s stature, perhaps only a Japanese writer, could have brought Hsieh, T’ien, and such an unusual assortment of people together at this time. By the same token, his arrival on the scene facilitated this first meeting between Kuo and Hsieh. Kuo was in the midst of an acrimonious debate with Lu Hsün’s group based in Peking, and Lu’s name never appears in Tanizaki’s record of his talks in Shanghai. The month after Tanizaki returned to Japan, Kuo announced in the pages of the literary journal of the Creation Society that their slogan “literary revolution” was now to be changed to “revolutionary literature.” Thus, the meeting with Tanizaki undoubtedly occurred at a time of great tension for Kuo as well.

Tanizaki found that most of the Chinese he met conversed fluently in Japanese. His first discussion at Uchiyama’s bookstore brought together Hsieh, Kuo, T’ien, Ou-yang, and several others. After pleasantries, Tanizaki broke the ice by asking about the Japanese literary works he had heard were being translated into Chinese. The Chinese pointed out that many had appeared in Chinese editions and agreed to help him collect as many as possible, but they were most troubled by the level of their own literary compositions. Ou-yang was looking forward to becoming active in film work, and apparently his company had invited T’ien Han to write a script. He even agreed to introduce Tanizaki to his company and the actresses, although all had little good to say of the state of Chinese cinema. Little in the way of politics intruded into the evening.33

Shortly thereafter, Tanizaki met with Kuo and T’ien for a walk. They conveyed their criticisms, with which Tanizaki agreed, of contemporary Japanese authors, and exchanged ideas on the art of translation. Upon returning to Tanizaki’s hotel, a little Shao-hsing wine livened up the discussion. All lamented the poor economic state of China, particularly her rural masses, and all were prepared to lay the blame squarely on the detrimental effects of the intervention of foreign capital. When Tanizaki tried to console them with the view that the same situation had once existed in Japan, Kuo assumed a more argumentative tone. China and Japan, he claimed, were fundamentally incomparable because China was not an independent country. Japan might borrow money to use as it saw fit. In China, foreigners acted as they pleased without the least regard for Chinese interests.

33 TJZ 10:566–67, 569–76.

532

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

Even if the Chinese were beaten politically, Tanizaki protested, they had often proven their inordinate economic acumen. Many times China had been conquered, but the Chinese people never perished. It was the conquerors who ultimately were conquered by Chinese culture and “melted into the Chinese crucible.” Kuo was not consoled, for past conquerors had all been peoples with lower cultural levels than the Chinese; they had been mesmerized by Chinese civilization. For the first time in history, China confronted a people with a

“higher” cultural level. In addition, they were giving money and weapons to the warlords while building themselves neutral zones (Concessions), and the result was incessant warfare. Kuo noted one side effect of the wholesale imperialist intrusion: “There probably hasn’t been an instance when the concept of nation so penetrated the general mind as it has [in China] today.” Tanizaki expressed a kind of amazed sadness, to which T’ien Han added that Chinese writers usually had no significant amount of money to contribute to the anti-imperialist cause, but they could appeal to the people of the world through poetry, fiction, and the force of art.34

Tanizaki’s description of his last encounter with the Chinese literary world is itself a minor literary masterpiece.35 The co-chairmen of the Shanghai Literary Winter Endurance Society, Ou-yang Yü-ch’ien and T’ien Han, called a banquet in his honor. Novelists, poets, artists, calligraphers, musicians, entertainers from as far away as Peking, film directors, actresses, and others in the movie business were all invited. Tanizaki suggested something a bit less ostentatious and raucous, but T’ien would hear none of it. Upon arriving at his own party, Tanizaki was introduced to each of the twenty or thirty guests already there: a violinist, an aviator recently returned from France, a master swordsman, an itinerant poet, a cameramen, a painter, and many others. He was then hustled off to a side room for the women, including famous actresses, wives and sisters of the men next door, and a number of well-known poets and calligraphers. In all some ninety people attended.

Tanizaki’s depiction of the event becomes murkier as the night proceeds, just as his own drunkenness, that of his hosts, and the clouds of cigarette smoke in the restaurant obscured clearer vision. We meet countless people introducing themselves to Tanizaki in countless ways, the master swordsman putting on a hair-raising demonstration, a short violin concert, questions about the great Kantō earthquake of 1923, singing to the accompaniment of a small Chinese orchestra, a performance on the ch’in ( koto), more and more guests arriving, and all the time gigantic quantities of alcohol being consumed.

34 TJZ 10:577–80; and Ozawa Masamoto, Uchiyama Kanzō den, p. 87.

35 TJZ 10:581–92; and Tanizaki, “Shanhai kenbun ki,” in TJZ 10:553–57.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 533

Then, suddenly, T’ien Han rose to his feet, somehow got everyone’s attention, and delivered a long speech welcoming the guest of honor.

All having gulped their Shao-hsing wine in the Chinese toasting fashion, someone shouted: “The Japanese shall now favor us with a hidden talent, for we cannot have only Chinese doing this!” Before Tanizaki had time even to blush, Ou-yang stepped in and sang a song in falsetto. Tsukamoto Suketarō

塚本助太郎, one of Tanizaki’s two Japanese friends in attendance, responded to the request for a purely Japanese tune with a nō chant. At this point, there was no delaying Tanizaki’s own performance. Kuo Mo-jo leapt from his seat to lead the audience’s anticipatory clapping. A speech was accepted in place of an act, and Kuo agreed to interpret. Apologizing for his musical inabilities, Tanizaki delivered the following address:

A new artistic movement is thriving in China today. A novelist from your neighboring land, I could never have imagined holding such an enormous gathering. I truly thank you. Moreover, tonight’s meeting is an assemblage of simple young people without any ceremoniousness—an atmosphere of genuine, purposeful freedom. When I was a young man, I too planned with up-and-coming writers to hold gatherings like this one. Looking on this evening’s [festivities], I am reminded more and more of those times, and I am full of emotion. I’m not that old yet. (Laughter erupted at this point before the interpreter could translate.) No one in the Japanese literary world thinks that I deserve such a reception. When I return home and relate my travel experiences, my colleagues will undoubtedly be very surprised. Not only as an individual but as a representative of the Japanese literary world, I want to express my deepest gratitude. Japanese writers are also divided into many cliques, and I’ll probably take a thrashing for speaking as a “representative” of them. So, let me just thank you as an individual.36

A drunken Kuo Mo-jo drove him home late that night in a speedy and altogether reckless manner. Tanizaki awoke the next morning with a hangover unparalleled, he claimed, throughout the previous decade of his life. The whole affair had been a thorough success for all concerned. Tanizaki had met the cream of the Chinese artistic and literary scene in Shanghai, especially in the fields of writing and film. And, Kuo Mo-jo, T’ien Han, and Ou-yang Yü-ch’ien had all used their contacts with him to enhance their own positions within their respective spheres of the Chinese literary world.

36 TJZ 10:590–91.

534

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

It was actually Tanizaki who introduced Uchiyama to the poet and novelist Satō Haruo 佐藤春夫 (1892–1964) on the latter’s second visit to China the next year (1927). Satō felt a close personal connection both to Akutagawa and Tanizaki. “I am often struck by the feeling,” he once wrote, “that if Jun’ichirō

had not lived, I would have had no literary career.”37 Of the three men, Satō was the most deeply interested and best trained in Chinese literature and culture.

He translated a number of works from Chinese, including Lu Hsün’s The True Story of Ah Q.38 Satō traveled three times to China, in 1920, 1927, and 1938, and each time left a record.

Satō’s first trip of 1920 took him to Taiwan and South China, especially in and around Amoy. He had the opportunity there to meet the enlightened militarist Ch’en Chiung-ming 陳炯明, and he described in detail Ch’en’s accomplishments. In 1925 he wrote a bizarre story which drew on his experiences in Taiwan.39 He returned to China in 1927, first to Nanking, where he met his friend and guide—T’ien Han. They apparently had met earlier in Japan. At the time, just a year after Tanizaki’s festive visit, T’ien was preparing scripts for propaganda films for the Nanking regime. T’ien promised Satō a meeting with Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), but the Generalissimo was not taking visitors, least of all those from Japan it seemed. Everyone in Chiang’s immediate circle spoke excellent Japanese, according to Satō, as he relayed the widespread and bitingly sarcastic rumor that secret sessions of the Nanking government were conducted in Japanese. Satō recalled a number of frightening adventures he embarked on with T’ien, sneaking around the military police to visit forbidden historical sights, and he remembered T’ien’s incessant fighting with his wife, which had something to do with the women on the sets of his films.40

Satō then continued to Hangchow where he acquired a new guide, another old friend, the writer Yü Ta-fu 郁達夫 (1896–1945). His account here is most interesting for its depiction of his literary host; no sooner had Satō arrived than Yü dropped him off at a hotel and scurried off to a rendezvous with a girlfriend. At one point Yü took him to a local restaurant where he repeatedly banged his fist on the table and yelled at the waiters. He then explained to 37 Cited in Nakamura Shintarō, Nihon to Chūgoku, 2:714.

38 On Satō’s translation of stories by Lu Hsün, see Ko Pao-ch’üan 戈宝權, “Ah Q cheng-chuan” tsai kuo-wai (Peking: Jen-min ch’u-pan-she, 1981), pp. 57–64.

39 Satō Haruo, Nanpō, Amoi saihōsatsu, in Jisen Satō Haruo zenshū (Kawade shobō, 1956–58), 10:92–178.

40 Satō Haruo, Shina zakki, in SKBZ 11:281–81, 285. Akutagawa died while Satō was in China, and Satō mentioned his sadness several times as he visited sights he knew Akutagawa had seen.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 535

a shocked Satō: “If you don’t do this, these guys won’t treat you properly as a customer. . . . Hong Kong and Canton are just the opposite, and Foochow’s also different. . . . They wouldn’t behave this way in an open port like Shanghai either.”41 Like Tanizaki’s account, Satō’s travel reports typify one of the great values of this entire genre of material, the personal insights it offers of famous Chinese intellectuals, material often difficult to come by. Unfortunately, Satō

did not describe his meeting with Lu Hsün in Shanghai.

The novelist Muramatsu Shōfū (1889–1961) left several volumes detailing his travels to China’s major cities, particularly in the North. His first and major work of this genre, Shin Shina hōmonki (Record of a Visit to the New China), described his November 1928 trip. He had traveled to China several times previously, and this volume perceptively analyzed the changes he observed, especially in the areas unified by the KMT (his “new China”). He stressed that understanding Nanking, the new capital, was the key to understanding China.

Two-thirds of his book catalogued the many changes the KMT had brought to the city and the problems left to be faced in its reconstruction plan. This was not KMT propaganda, though, as Muramatsu quoted the complaints of the local residents, often in the form of popular ditties.42 The KMT had grandiose plans, some of which had begun to be carried out in earnest, but the leaders seemed devoted only to personal enjoyment. With the evocative power of a novelist, Muramatsu brilliantly depicted their easy life in Shanghai: greyhound races, gambling parlors, dance halls, the latest clothing fashions, and the like.43

Muramatsu traveled to Manchuria in the early summer of 1933 and described in great detail two sights in the Jehol capital of Ch’eng-te: the Summer Palace built by the K’ang-hsi Emperor and the Pa-ta Lama Temple. Although both struck him as spectacular, both were also in states of disrepair, significant commentary on a once great civilization now in decline. He took an especially 41 Satō Haruo, Shina zakki, in SKBZ 11:289–92; and Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好, “Satō Haruo sensei to Pekin,” in Takeuchi Yoshimi, Nihon to Chūgoku no aida (Bungei shunjū, 1973), pp. 227–30.

42 One such piece goes as follows:

Electric lights aren’t bright,

Telephone lines aren’t clear,

Roads aren’t level,

Water isn’t clean.

43 Muramatsu Shōfū, Shin Shina hōmonki, as cited in Meiji ikō Nihonjin no Chūgoku ryokōki (Tōyō bunko, 1980), pp. 78–79. In 1927 Muramatsu published a novel set in China, entitled Shanhai (Sōjinsha). The following year Yokomitsu Riichi visited Shanghai and began a novel, which was to become considerably more famous, by the same title. See note 52

below.

536

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

interesting look at the half-farmer and half-monk daily lives of the Lamaist monks. Traveling by an unorthodox route from Ch’eng-te to Peking, Muramatsu ran into fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops, and with no Japanese soldiers to protect him he feared capture by “bandits.” This real-life adventure concluded with his safe arrival in Peking.44

One of the great events in the writing of literary travel accounts was the publication of Yosano Akiko’s 与謝野晶子 (1878–1942) Man-Mō yūki (Record of a Voyage to Manchuria and Mongolia). Yosano was a prolific poet and translator into modern Japanese of classical Japanese literature. In 1928 she accepted an invitation from the SMR to visit Manchuria and Mongolia. She also chose to make the trip because, in her words, “the smooth handling of contacts between” China and “Japan [necessitated] one’s understanding the natural and social life there and one’s comprehension of [the Chinese people’s] feelings and emotions.”45

Accordingly, Yosano’s account consciously sought to make sense of what she was seeing and hearing. She visited factories, hospitals, agricultural stations, a prison, and an opium den, for example. Her general image of the Chinese was a positive one: a physically powerful working class who labored hard and silently, and an industrious merchant group working on a narrow margin of profit. She was equally severe in her evaluation of the Japanese residents in China. She resented their air of superiority and their blissful ignorance of Chinese customs and sensibilities. Of the anti-Japanese movement she had an opportunity to witness, Yosano wrote: “It’s surely frightful from the imperialists’ point of view, but for the Chinese people it must be celebrated in the name of humanity.”

While staying at the Yamato Hotel in Fengtien, one of a chain owned by the SMR, she and her husband were awakened one morning at dawn by a loud blast. It took them several days to sort out all that had occurred, but what they had heard was the explosion of Chang Tso-lin’s 張作霖 last train ride. This led to the massive transport of Japanese troops from Korea, and the atmosphere of growing militarization dampened their spirits. She painfully concluded: “My heart is saddened by the thought that in the end the world may isolate Japan.”46

44 Muramatsu Shōfū, “Bijutsukō, Nekka,” in Nekka fūkei, in SKBZ 12:9–13.

45 Yosano Akiko, “Kinshū ihoku no ki,” in Man-Mō yūki, in SKBZ 11:322. No copies of Man-Mō

yūki exist in the United States; I used the copy in the Tōyō bunko as well as the beautifully reproduced SKZK edition under the title “Kinshū ihoku no ki,” which comprises everything in the account save poems by the author and her husband.

46 Yosano Akiko, in SKBZ 11:309–10, 313, 318, 335.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 537

Aside from these insights into the future, Yosano’s daily observations and the respect with which she approached the subject (China and the Chinese) were superior in the travel account genre. Well educated in classical Chinese literature and culture, she, like many travelers to China, adorned her descriptions of every sight visited with its history in literature and the arts. She offered, for example, a rich description of a Buddhist temple for women worshippers in Manchuria. She also stayed at an active Taoist temple for several days to observe the monks in their daily routines, and her descriptions would still be of value to anthropologists.

When she learned that Peking would be impossible to visit in peace, because of the Northern Expedition, she decided to head toward northern Manchuria.

From the train window, she provided descriptions of the countryside, crops, ethnic groups living in the various regions and their customs, religious sights, several rural markets, and a rural theater. Her favorite place on this leg of the voyage was Harbin (often referred to with an intriguing appositional phrase, the “Paris of the East,” by many writers who had never visited the City of Lights itself), because of its wide tree-lined boulevards, European flavor, and the vast beauty of the Sungari River.

One unique aspect of her travel account was her description of meetings with the wives of Japanese living in Manchuria and with the wives of Chinese who entertained her party. The wife of one local militarist made a deep impression on Yosano when they met in Chichihar. She learned one week later that this woman had been killed aboard Chang Tso-lin’s ill-fated train.47

Like so many travelers to China in the prewar period (and the postwar period as well), Yosano was struck by how hard Chinese laborers (particularly coolies) worked. Unlike any other traveler, though, she also noted with equal astonishment how little those same workers ate to sustain such a difficult life; and she reported on just what she observed them eating, as well as how much such items cost in the Chinese markets, and talked to some of them about it.48

Yosano’s account is far richer than these few paragraphs can convey; it marks a high point not only in literary travel reportage but in the entire genre.

Later in 1928 Hasegawa Nyozekan 長谷川如是閑 (1875–1969) visited Harbin and left an account of considerably less interest, except perhaps to students of Hasegawa. Here China and Manchuria have been transformed into figurative extensions of the traveler’s ego, indicating a troubling shift in the tone of literary travel writing itself. Every experience seems to have required a personal reflection on Hasegawa’s part, in the expectation that the reader truly cared.

47 Yosano Akiko, in SKBZ 11:332, 342.

48 Yosano Akiko, in SKBZ 11:316, 319.

538

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

Staying at Harbin’s finest hotel, the Hôtel Moderne, Hasegawa felt the need to report that he craved a bath and that “moderne” applied only to the price of the room; he followed with a list of complaints. We also are subjected as readers to the traveler’s every passing thought transferred into print.49

When the writer Hayashi Fumiko 林芙美子 (1904–51) got off the train in Harbin in 1930, she looked in vain for another Japanese face. A Chinese called out to her in pidgin Russian: “Yaponski madam.” She responded in the same language: “Yaponski hoteru,” and off they went to a Japanese-owned hotel in the Russian quarter. Conversant in standard Russian as well, Hayashi met a number of Russian women in Harbin who introduced her to the poorer sections of town, and she described them in some detail. She was especially impressed by the beauty of the various places of religious worship, Russian Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian.50

Finally, Satomi Ton 里見弴 (1888–1983), writer and younger brother of the famous novelist Arishima Takeo 有島武郎 (1878–1923), traveled through China and Manchuria (21 December 1929 to 1 February 1930) with the prominent writer Shiga Naoya, on an invitation from the SMR. Shiga wrote not a word about this trip, but Satomi left a lively, crisp account full of marvelous vignettes and descriptions from the lives of the people he saw, aside from one moronic remark about the Jewish store owner who sold him a wool coat. Yet, despite his eye for detail and ear for interesting stories, this whole account reads as though China was an extension of either Satomi’s self-gratification or his ennui. It enjoyed no independent existence. As with so many authors of travel accounts, at every place he visited Satomi made a point of noting which Japanese authors had preceded him there, for it seemed to add something of significance to his own account even as he was writing it. He also offered a long description of the pleasure quarters in Peking, in which he spent a goodly amount of time and money.51

Travel accounts by Japanese poets and novelists have not attracted anything remotely approaching the attention their fictional or poetic writings have.

Often their trip reports, as in the case of Satomi Ton, are not even included in their “collected” works; in other cases, most notably that of Natsume Sōseki, the trip report is considered a poor effort rarely noted by critics. Nonetheless, 49 Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Harupin chokkō,” in SKBZ 11:346–49, 356; and Yosano Akiko, in SKBZ 11:330.

50 Hayashi Fumiko, “Harupin sanpo” and “Aki no Kōshū to Soshū,” in Santō ryokōki, in SKZK

11:447, 450, 453. On her second trip she visited Shanghai and met T’ien Han, Lu Hsün, Yü Ta-fu, and other luminaries on the left-wing literary scene.

51 Satomi Ton, Man-Shi ikken, in SKBZ 11:373–446.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 539

it is more than worthy of attention to scholars of modern Chinese history, culture, and literature, to say nothing of its interest as a reflection of Japanese views of China. And, it is primary material for scholars of Sino-Japanese relations. The detailed descriptions of people and places, through the penetrating eyes of men and women trained and paid for their abilities as writers, are second to none as firsthand accounts of China. While occasionally excessive in the quantity of ego these writers allowed themselves to invest in their subjects, they nonetheless show little sign of the firm nationalism present in the travel literature of people from other professions.

Perhaps it was precisely because literary types fancied themselves above the humdrum daily existence of mere human beings or alienated from the scene in Japan that they were able to transcend the fierce nationalism of their compatriots and, in certain cases, be sympathetic to Chinese opposition to Japanese imperialism. Some, like Yokomitsu Riichi, who visited Shanghai in 1928, wrote fiction set in China that was extremely sympathetic to the Chinese revolutionary cause. The remarkable comparison with André Malraux (1901–76) has often been noted.52

Japanese began traveling everywhere in the world from the turn of the century. China, though, then (as now) held special attraction for the Japanese way-farer of any bent, literary or otherwise. Not only was China closer and more convenient for travel, and not only did a good education in the Chinese classics facilitate communication and understanding. China also occupied an alluring place in the consciousness of all literate Japanese for obvious historical and cultural reasons. Travel there for the well-educated Japanese involved a kind of “return” to a place they had never physically been. In this respect, they were wholly different from someone like Evelyn Waugh. For all his often trenchant perceptiveness, Waugh could rarely muster more than a blasé cynicism for the lands and peoples he visited, and he rarely was able to suppress his outrageous racism. The appeal of China for Japanese literary travelers is more closely approximated by that of India for V.S. Naipaul in An Area of Darkness or that of Israel for Saul Bellow in To Jerusalem and Back: the former, bitingly critical,

“returning” for the first time to the land of his grandfather, a land whose culture had been transmitted to him piecemeal and far from the source; the latter 52 Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanhai, in Yokomitsu Riichi shū (Chikuma shobō, 1976), pp. 5–135; and Odagiri Hiroko 小田桐弘子, Yokomitsu Riichi, hikaku bungaku teki kenkyū (Nansōsha, 1980), pp. 116–35.

540

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

“returning” to the land of his forefathers, steeped in its history and culture, and studiously trying to understand the contemporary scene.53

Just at the time that Japanese travel to China became possible, both countries were beginning reform programs, and every literary visitor was well aware of this process in China. Their accounts often addressed the issue of “changing China” or “revolution” (ongoing or desperately needed). They also frequently noted how difficult transforming a nation of China’s size and age would be.

The crucial point is that “change” became the agenda, both because of efforts witnessed in China and because the Meiji reform program in Japan seemed to provide a model (a mission, in some minds) for the Chinese.

Unlike other groups of travelers to China, novelists and poets were less inclined to make wholesale generalizations about the national character of the Chinese people, or to offer policy suggestions to the Japanese government or military. This disinclination to meaningless, sweeping statements concerning the “nature of the Chinese” owes much to the current of realism in Japanese reportage literature as well as to a genuine and apparent sensitivity to China’s real predicament. The aversion to proffering advice to state planners back home speaks more directly to the literary calling and a more widespread dislike among writers for the authoritarian state.

What a given traveler saw or chose to describe was never simply a function of 20-20 vision. Some visitors to China walked right by sprawling slums and made no mention of them in their accounts. Others focused on the poverty and filth of China, seeing it as a symbol of her present destitution and future destiny. And, a few were able to recognize positive and negative features of life in contemporary China, often better than even Chinese themselves. Few travelers were driven to the despair of Lu Hsün in depicting the history of modern China as that of cannibalism. By the same token, had any Japanese voyager made such a radical assessment of twentieth-century China, it would have seemed rudely out of place.54

A sense of distance had to remain between China as an object of observation and the Japanese observer. The great British travel writer of the interwar years, Robert Byron, noted in a similar vein:

53 V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: A. Deutsch, 1964); and Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (New York: Avon Books, 1964).

54 The eminent Sinologist Kuwabara Jitsuzō 桑原隲蔵 (1879–1931), who was by no means a Sinophile, published an article on the history of cannibalism in China just at the time that the May Fourth Movement was raging: “Shina no shokujinniku no fūshū,” Taiyō 25.7

(1919): 121–24. Although the piece made not a single reference to contemporary China, he violated the unwritten sense of distance and has been vilified for this essay ever since.

Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 541

To travel in Europe is to assume a foreseen inheritance; in Islam, to inspect that of a close and familiar cousin. But to travel in farther Asia is to discover a novelty previously unsuspected and unimaginable. It is not a question of probing this novelty, of analyzing its sociological, artistic, or religious origins, but of learning, simply, that it exists. Suddenly, as it were in the opening of an eye, the potential world—the field of man and his environment—is doubly extended. The stimulus is inconceivable to those who have not experienced it.55

For Japanese travelers, China was more like Europe in Byron’s metaphorical sense. It was the bearer of “a foreseen inheritance,” not “unsuspected and unimaginable” in the least.

Yet, regardless of one’s political perspective and regardless of the great cultural debt Japan owed to China, China was not the same as Japan. The Chinese and their ways of life were objects of observation, not of identity, despite the continual use of references from home to make sense of what was being observed, a condition endemic to all travel writing. This effort—as we have noted in the cases of Ōmachi Keigetsu, Satō Haruo, and many others—to make a place seem familiar, to use language borrowed from home or some previous Japanese traveler to the same place may be understood, borrowing Mircea Eliade’s terms, as an effort to sanctify a “profane” space. If home is “sacred”

space and away from home is “profane,” recognition that a famous fellow national or a friend had stood where one was now standing, identification of a sight with something familiar from home, and repetition of an image popularized by an earlier traveler all aimed at making a “profane” space more like home, more “sacred.”56

Travel literature, like fiction, combined objective observations (sights, customs, local histories, interviews, and the like) with the author’s subjective experiences. They were mutually nourishing literary forms. Too much objectivity could lead to the charge of boredom; too much subjective intrusion might lead to the claim of mendacity. “This tension between the personal and the impersonal, the romantic and the realistic, the fanciful and the useful, is as important in the evolution of travel literature as it is in the evolution of the novel, and to study it in one form is to study it in the other.”57 Or, as Paul Fussell 55 Cited in Paul Fussell, Abroad, p. 92. The citation comes from Byron’s The Road to Oxania, a work Fussell (p. 95) considers the equivalent in the travel book genre to Joyce’s Ulysses among novels and Eliot’s The Waste Land in poetry.

56 Suggested by Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, pp. 102–103, 185.

57 Percy Adams, Travel Literature, pp. 108–109.

542

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

put in his typically flip yet insightful way: “Travel writers actually face the same problem of plausibility that confronts so-called novelists: the actual must be made to appear believable, or it cannot be used. An anomaly must be credited if it’s going to work on the reader.”58 It should not come as too great a surprise that the most penetrating insights into life in China would come from Japanese novelists and poets, men and women trained and paid to depict life around them.

58 Paul Fussell, Abroad, p. 176.

■ Source: “Japanese Approaches to the Cultural Revolution,” CCP Research Newsletter 2 (Spring 1989), 21–25.

Japanese Approaches to the Cultural Revolution: A Review of Kokubun Ryōsei’s Survey of the Literature

What follows is an extended review of an excellent summary of Japanese writings on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and the changes in China since the death of Mao Zedong and the purge of the “Gang of Four” in Kokubun Ryōsei’s “The Present State of Japanese Research on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Problems Areas.”1 Professor Kokubun of Keio University is one of the few genuinely recognizable political scientists of China in Japan. Although still young, he has already amassed an impressive list of publications, including two articles in English. This piece appeared in a Keio University publication.

Kokubun makes no pretense of covering the many hundreds of Japanese books, articles, and media editorials concerning the Cultural Revolution. For example, the National Diet Library has published a listing in its monthly bul-letin of 700–800 items published in Japanese for a period of less than two years (January 1900–October 1967).2 Kokubun gives several other, equally lengthy, listings published in Japan.

He notes at the outset that the whirlwind of events in China—from the Cultural Revolution to the Lin Biao affair, the anti-Lin Biao, anti-Confucius campaign, the Tiananmen incident, the death of Mao, the arrest of the “Gang of Four,” and the rehabilitation of Liu Shaoqi—have dramatically changed Japanese assessments of the Cultural Revolution and considerably undermined approaches adopted earlier to contemporary Chinese history.

He sees five general evaluative stances taken by Japanese scholars toward the Cultural Revolution. The first includes those who analyzed the Cultural Revolution within a Marxist framework and praised it uncritically. Such people 1 Kokubun Ryōsei 国分良成, “Nihon ni okeru Chūgoku bunka dai kakumei kenkyu no genjo to mondaiten” 日本における中国文化大革命研究の現状と問題点, Sanshokuki 三色

旗 409 (April 1982), pp. 2–6.

2 “Chūgoku bunka dai kakumei ni kansuru hōbun bunken mokuroku” 中国文化大革命に関

する邦文文献目録 [Bibliography of documents in Japanese concerning the Cultural Revolution in China], Kokuritsu kokkai toshokan geppō 国立国会図書館月報, (80–82).

544

Japanese Approaches to the Cultural Revolution

supported the “class struggle” to topple Liu Shaoqi and others suspected of

“taking the capitalist road.” Now that the Chinese have reversed the verdict on the Cultural Revolution, advocates of this position, such as Suganuma Masahisa, author of The Cultural Revolution,3 and many others, find themselves in a serious quandary. Kokubun says that they have chosen one of three options: “They can keep pace with the [new] Chinese line; they can remain silent about the Cultural Revolution; or they can consistently hold onto their earlier views” (p. 3). Suganuma, for example, has taken the first route and admitted the errors of his earlier ways. But, this is not enough. Kokubun notes that “the issue is not resolved in this manner [that is, by admission of past mistakes]. We need a reexamination of the whole scholarly attitude of these people” (p. 4). Indeed, we do. It may be a religion to them, but there is no reason that confession should exonerate people who were complicit in one of the great crimes of the Twentieth century. Others in this first group include: Ando Hikotaro4 and Fujimura Toshiro.5

The second Japanese approach to the Cultural Revolution also adopted a Marxist framework of analysis, but used it to criticize events in China. These people argued that the Cultural Revolution was either a simple power struggle or Mao’s effort to enforce his dictatorial control; and Liu Shaoqi’s plans for socialism, they claim, were more correct than Mao’s. This position closely parallels the stance taken by the Japan Communist Party which split with the CCP in 1966. As a representative work of this strain, Kokubun cites: Kawazoe Noboru and Inumaru Giichi, The Cultural Revolution in China: Its Origins and Contradictions. 6 From their perspective, the “main aim” of the Cultural Revolution “was to establish and strengthen an unlimited dictatorial control of Mao’s clique based on a deification extraordinaire of Mao Zedong” (p. 4).

It was, they conclude, “anti-democratic, anti-socialist, anti-Marxist, and anti-Leninist.” Nonetheless, they also argue that while the Cultural Revolution was a (manipulated) mobilization from above, it also embodied a participatory movement of the masses from below. Just what elements of a popular 3 Suganuma Masahisa 菅沼正久, Bunka dai kakumei 文化大革命 (Tokyo: San’ichi shobo 三一書房, 1967).

4 安藤彦太郎

5 藤村俊郎

6 Kawazoe Noboru 川添登 and Inumaru Giichi 犬丸義一 Chūgoku no bunka dai kakumei, sono kongen to mujun 中国の文化大革命—その根源と矛盾 (Tokyo: Aoki shoten 青木

書店, 1968) .

Japanese Approaches To The Cultural Revolution 545

movement they are referring to have yet to be addressed. Other scholars whose work falls into this second group include Nakanishi Tsutomu,7 among others.

The third group includes those Japanese scholars who stressed the positive aspects of the Cultural Revolution, though not from a Marxist framework. Unlike the first group Kokubun has identified, this third group did not follow in lockstep the Chinese line at the time. Although they did not deny elements of a power struggle, they were trying to assess the import of the Cultural Revolution for the contemporary world in a positive light. This group—which includes such scholars as Nomura Koichi,8 Kawachi Juzo,9 and Yamada Keiji10—has largely held to its guns despite the reevaluations underway in China. In his book Questions for the Future,11 Yamada argues that the infamous “two-line struggle” had nothing whatsoever to do with the “capitalist road;” what was at issue was the “value of socialism.” Liu Shaoqi envisioned a technocratic society supported by “bureaucratic rationalism,” but this was a far cry from either capitalist or Soviet society. The Maoist line during the Cultural Revolution, in Yamada’s words (which sound hauntingly reminiscent of many Western observers), was a challenge to “the alienation of society and mankind controlled by technocrats.” Thus, this group’s basic perspective on the Cultural Revolution was to see it as an issue of visions. One seriously wonders if they ever noticed when the actual events in China clashed with the ideals.

Kokubun’s fourth group includes those scholars who, from a non-Marxist perspective, recognized many different, textured qualities to the Cultural Revolution. Their work examined these various areas empirically without offering, as a rule, subjective judgment about the Cultural Revolution itself.

One major work in this vein was Kamibeppu Chikashi’s The Logic of the Cultural Revolution in China,12 a highly detailed account through the Ninth Party Congress of 1969. He argues that it was not a simple power struggle but a conflict between contending lines and policies. Other scholars whose work is in this category include Okubo Yasushi,13 Torii Tami,14 and Uno Shigeaki.15

7 中西功

8 野村浩一

9 河地重蔵

10 山田慶児

11 Mirai e no toi 未来への問い (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō 筑摩書房, 1968).

12 Kamibeppu Chikashi 上別府親志, Chugoku bunka kakumei no ronri 中国文化革命の

論理 (Tokyo: Tōyō keizai shinpō sha 東洋経済新報社 1971).

13 大久保泰

14 鳥居民

15 宇野重昭

546

Japanese Approaches to the Cultural Revolution

The fifth interpretative strategy for the Cultural Revolution was a thorough or practically thorough, denunciation of it from a non-Marxist perspective. Scholars of this stripe see it as a blatant power struggle without an iota of positive significance, and they tend to hold similar views about Chinese Communism and Maoism as well. Two works, cited by Kokubun, that typify this fifth stance are: Shibata Minoru, The Tragedy of Mao Zedong,16 and Kuwabara Toshiji, Mao Zedong and Chinese Thought. 17 Shibata argues that the Cultural Revolution constituted “the appalling ‘malice’ of Mao as it accumulated over a ten-year period,” along with his “tenacious” thirst “for power”

(p. 6). The “tragic” quality of the Cultural Revolution was that “Mao considered himself a proletarian Marxist, while he was convinced that Liu Shaoqi was a bourgeois revisionist.” I cannot help but feel that there were greater tragedies in the Cultural Revolution than Mao’s misconceived self-image, unless Shibata was applying the concept of tragedy in the strict sense of an Oedipal figure who ends up unconsciously destroying everything he has inherited and loved.

There is still something a bit simplistic about this analysis, as Kokubun notes.

Surely, the Cultural Revolution and the mobilization of millions of people was not just a marionette show.

Kokubun concludes by offering his own ideas about future work on the Cultural Revolution and Japanese views of it. He suggests interviews with those who actually experienced it may help convey a more realistic picture of events in China at the time. He also suggests going beyond seeing it solely as a Mao-Liu power struggle. A more recent work by Kagami Mitsuyuki,18 uses an analysis of the Red Guard movement as a vehicle to discuss various other aspects of the Cultural Revolution, such as differences between regions and units. Kokubun also encourages less political partisanship (as was so thoroughly apparent in the five schools of thought he analyzes) and more group projects. The Cultural Revolution was a complex affair which convulsed a continent for a decade. He encourages a more cumulative, relative approach to its 16 Shibata Minoru 柴田穂. Mo Takutō no higeki 毛沢東の悲劇 (Tokyo: Sankei shuppan kyoku サンケイ出版局 1979, 5 volumes).

17 Kuwabara Toshiji 桑原壽三, Mo Takutō to Chūgoku shisō 毛沢東と中国思想, (Tokyo: Jiji mondai kenkyūjo 時事問題研究所, 1969).

18 Kagami Mitsuyuki 加々美光行 Shiryo Chugoku bunka dai kakumei, shusshin ketto shugi o meguru ronso 資料中国分化大革命、出身血統主義をめぐる論争 [Source

Materials on the Cultural Revolution in China: The Debate over the Principle of Origin and Blood line] (Tokyo: Rikuetsu 陸説, 1980).

Japanese Approaches To The Cultural Revolution 547

many facets. Surely the simplistic analyses, so popular then and now, have no place on the scholarly agenda.

One thing is for sure: if Kokubun Ryōsei is indicative of the future of Japanese political science on China, then Japan will definitely be number one in at least this area.

■ Source: “The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production Debates in Soviet Russia, China, and Japan,” The American Historical Review 93.1 (February 1988), 56–79.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production in Soviet Russia, China, and Japan

A great deal has been written** **about the “Asiatic mode of production,” most of it the work of Marxists around the world, as they tried to establish what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant by the expression and what it signified for the contemporary “Orient.” Over the past decade, several scholars less involved in the Marxist discussions have addressed the debates that emerged over the Asiatic mode of production as topics in the intellectual history of Russia, China, and Japan of the 1920s and 1930s.1 More recently, a flurry of some thirty or more articles appeared in the People’s Republic of China on the issue, but the topic disappeared from scholarly journals as quickly and mysteriously as it had arisen, only to be revived again in 1985 and 1986. None of the writings on the Asiatic mode of production has yet attempted an examination of the issues raised in all the major countries in which there was debate—primarily, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan—and of the important interrelationships between them from the late 1920s through the late 1930s. Without appreciating the transnational context in which the debate took place at that time, we cannot fully understand it.

The idea of a dynamic, progressing, participatory polity in the West as opposed to a static, unchanging, despotic polity in the East goes back to the self-perception of the Greeks vis-à-vis the Persians. When Aristotle’s Politics was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, its notion of Oriental despotism was reintroduced into European intellectual currency. Probably in the fourteenth century, a lack of the right to private property was added to this concept. It was Montesquieu who reunited “despotism” with the Orient in his 1 Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (The Hague, 1977); Stephen Dunn, The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production (London, 1982); Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China 1919–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1978); and Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, N.J., 1986), especially chapter 6.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 549

attacks on French absolutism. China was then pictured as a stable, perfectly rational, enlightened despotic state.2

This portrayal of China did not change as European conceptions of the state did. As progress or democracy became elemental to the “modern” nation-state, China (and Asia generally) was found woefully wanting. Asian stagnation, backwardness, and despotism were seen as the diametrical opposites of Europe’s own self-congratulatory image as modern, developing, progressive, and free. For Georg W.F. Hegel, by way of example, China and India lay “outside the world’s history”; for Leopold von Ranke, the Chinese were one of the “races of eternal standstill”; and, for Johann Herder, “in China and India, . . . there is no true historical progress but only a static unchanging civilization.”3 James Mill and John Stuart Mill regarded the Orient as fixed to its unchanging village and unable to join the course of history without a jolt from outside. In none of these cases did this blanket portrayal of Asia or China emerge from research or even personal travel and observation. “Asia” (and its adjectival form, “Asiatic”) had become terms of derogation.

Despite Marx’s precocious vision of the Taiping Rebellion, he shared the image of China as socially stagnant. He characterized “Asiatic” or “Oriental”

society by the “absence of private property in land,” the presence of large-scale irrigation works, an omnipotent state ruling in a uniformly despotic manner, and communal landownership: a complete lack of social dynamism.4 Because the state monopolized all economic initiative in the Orient, Marx argued, Oriental society remained stagnant, unable to rechannel surplus profit or to produce class differentiation, class consciousness, and finally class struggle, the essence of all history in the words of the Communist Manifesto. 5

Engels, through his works Anti-Dühring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, published after Marx’s death, attempted to integrate Marx’s ideas on Oriental despotism and Asiatic society into the two men’s 2 Basil Guy, The French Image of China before and after Voltaire, vol. 21 of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Geneva, 1963); E. Rose, “China as a Symbol of Reaction in Germany, 1830–1880.” ** ** Comparative Literature, 3 (1951): 57–76; and Lawrence Krader, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx (Assen, 1975), 62–67.

3 As cited in Joshua A. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934) (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 3–5.

4 Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 June 1853, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence 1846–1895, Dona Torr, trans. (1942; rpt. edn., Westport, Conn., 1975), 64–66.

5 In a similar vein, George Lichteim noted that “the Orient had not evolved anything corresponding to private property in land: unquestionably one of the preconditions of feudalism”; Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York, 1961), 158.

550

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

larger theoretical system. For example, in Anti-Dühring, Engels seemed to be saying that the ruling class in the Orient was a political-administrative elite, while in the West, it was an economic class. He also emphasized the isolated, segmented village nature of Oriental society, saying little or nothing about large irrigation works.6

As the debates unfolded in the twentieth century, no one definition of an Asiatic mode of production emerged. Certain qualities on which most debaters tacitly agreed, however, can be identified. The Asiatic mode was characteristic of a society in the “East” ruled by an all-powerful despot who held final control over all matters secular and religious: Oriental despotism. This society was agrarian and highly dependent on massive irrigation projects that any given locality was unable to provide for itself; thus, every local community was dependent for its lifeblood on the center that provided these hydraulic works.

Private property was not recognized, inasmuch as the despot owned all the land. And the village was the primary unit of society. Thus, the social order based on the Asiatic mode of production lacked so much as the suggestion of dynamism.

The Asiatic mode of production seemed to explain to Marxist synthesiz-ers much that failed to fit Marxist theory properly. It enabled them to bring China, India, and other enormous areas of the world (probably the majority of the earth’s population) into their world-historical conceptions. China certainly had experienced many centuries of despotism; waterworks were extremely important; and, to an untrained eye, ancient China and contemporary China looked remarkably alike. But such a blanket explanation tends to obfuscate much more than it clarifies.

As scholarship on China and Japan improved over the years, simplistic notions such as the Asiatic mode of production no longer attracted the kind of attention they once did, even among Marxists. Nonetheless, in looking back over the Marxist debates in Russia, China, and Japan over the Asiatic mode of production, we must take the contributors and their ideas seriously but not exclusively at face value. Understanding requires appreciation not only of the literal content of the discourse in these three countries but the intellectual, political, and other motivations as well; such motivations do not vitiate the importance of the discourse itself any more than the surface impression of these debates can satisfy scholars.

Marx’s brief mention of the Asiatic mode of production** **as one of four societal formations in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 6 Sawer, Marxism and the Question, 43–52, 69–71, 75.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 551

(hereafter, Critique) is well known: “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.” Until the 1940s, that one sentence and scattered references in Capital and elsewhere constituted the strongest argument within the Marxist camp for the existence of an Asiatic mode of production. It was Soviet scholars who opened the debate, even if, on the surface, the Asiatic mode of production would seem to be of little importance to them. There was, of course, the prevalent view of prerev-olutionary Russia (held by Marx among many others) as an extremely backward, indeed reactionary, society. Yet this same society had produced the first socialist revolution.

A debate centrally concerned with the Asiatic mode of production erupted in the mid-1920s in the Soviet Union, at precisely the same time as the battles in the Comintern over the correct course for the Chinese revolution to pursue.

The two events were no coincidence, to be sure, as frankly admitted at the time by participants in the controversy. If Chinese society could be characterized as feudal or semi-feudal, then a “bourgeois-democratic revolution” was the order of the day, and an alliance with the “bourgeois” Kuomintang, as demanded by the Comintern, was appropriate. If, however, China could be described as

“Asiatic,” that meant China had a weak, underdeveloped bourgeoisie on which the revolutionary leadership could not safely rely; the peasants and the proletariat had to lead the revolution, and it could be socialist in aim.

Evgenii S. Varga, a Hungarian who had come to Russia after the failure of the 1919 Revolution in his native land, opened the debate in 1925 with an essay denying that China was feudal. Admitting the influence of Max Weber (because of Weber’s emphasis on China’s literati, the country’s incapacity to develop a dynamic bourgeoisie, and the nature of Chinese social organization), Varga claimed that China’s ruling class was a scholar-elite, that the “tyr-anny of the clan” in villages prevented the rise of domestic capitalism, and that power in China was a consequence of control over massive public works systems—in other words, the Asiatic mode of production had existed. The following year, others, including a young Karl A. Wittfogel, expressed essentially similar points of view in print.7

Another source often cited by Varga and by other supporters of the Asiatic mode was the work of Russian socialist Georgii Plekhanov (though not a 7 V.N. Nikiforov, Sovetskie istoriki o problemakh Kitaia (Moscow, 1970), 202–08. See also Sawer, Marxism and the Question, 81–82. On Wittfogel’s writings and activities in the late 1920s and early 1930s, see G.L. Ulmen, The Science of Society: Toward an Understanding of the Life and Work of Karl August Wittfogel (The Hague, 1978), especially 128–41.

552

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

Bolshevik, a mentor of Vladimir Lenin’s). Plekhanov, who was also popular among Chinese and Japanese advocates of the Asiatic mode of production, had studied Russian communal property and geography as factors that led Russia along a different historical path from Western Europe. Like Marx, he hoped that peasants acting within the primitive communal form known as the mir would propel Russian society past** **the capitalist stage. His influence among the various advocates of the Asiatic mode of production lay in this emphasis on geographic factors that would lead to distinct Eastern and Western routes of social evolution.8

The most prolific Soviet advocate of an Asiatic mode was another Hungarian refugee, best known by his Russified name of Liudvig I. Mad’iar. He served in the Soviet diplomatic corps in China in the mid-1920s and there collected materials for his first major work, Ekonomika sel’skogo khoziaistva v Kitae (China’s rural economy [1928]), a volume that became one of the central documents in the debate over the next few years. Mad’iar then went to work for the Oriental Secretariat of the Comintern from 1929 to 1934, the year in which he was purged. In 1930, he published a second book supporting his ideas on Asiatic society in China, Ocherki po ekonomike Kitaia (Essays on the Chinese economy), and a lengthy introduction to another volume, “Tszin’-Tian”: Agrarnyi stroi drevnogo Kitaia ( Ching-t’ien: The Agrarian structure of ancient China) by M.D. Kokin and G. Papaian.9

In essence, Mad’iar asserted that the Asiatic mode of production had characterized Chinese society and its economy until the beginning of the twentieth century, when notions of private property came to China from the West.

Remnants of the Asiatic mode of production in China were still important in determining the strategy of the Chinese revolution. He and the other

“Aziatchiki,” as supporters of a distinctive “Asiatic” mode of production were dubbed by their opponents, agreed that Marx had intended to describe not a single historical path for all societies throughout the world but two. Thus for Mad’iar the Asiatic element in the Asiatic mode of production was not a 8 Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development, 135–38. On Plekhanov’s ideas in this connection, see S.H. Baron, “Plekhanov’s Russia: The Impact of the West upon an ‘Oriental Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 19 (June 1958): 388–404.

9 Liudvig Mad’iar, Ekonomika sel’skogo khoziaistva v Kitae (Moscow and Leningrad, 1928); Ocherki po ekonomike Kitaia (Moscow, 1930); M.D. Kokin and G. Papaian, “Tszin-Tian”: Agrarnyi stroi drevnogo Kitaia (Leningrad, 1930), introduction by Mad’iar, 1–75; and “Lajos Magyar (Liudvig Ignat’evich Mad’iar, 1891–1940),“ Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Moscow, 1974), 15:321. Liudvig I. Mad’iar’s name has been variously mistranscribed by virtually everyone who has mentioned his work: “Ludwig Madyar” by Wittfogel, Dirlik, Ulmen, and others;

“Ludwig S. Mad’iar” by Hoston. There is no reason whatsoever to Germanicize his first name.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 553

geographically specific concept but a universal, pre-capitalist stage through which all peoples necessarily would pass.

In their work on the ching-t’ien or “well-field” system, Kokin and Papaian actually made use of the standard Chinese sources on ancient society (such as the Chou-li or Rites of Chou) in an effort to demonstrate that the Asiatic mode of production had characterized the Chou era (twelfth through third centuries bc). ** **The “well-field” system, whose existence has never been proven, was allegedly an ancient institution for dividing land along the lines of the Chinese character for “well,” which resembles a tic-tac-toe board. Eight families were said to have worked the eight plots of land surrounding the center for themselves, and the central ninth plot they worked jointly for the state. In their book (translated into Chinese in 1933), Kokin and Papaian portrayed the “well-field”

structure as a local commune used by the administrative officers of the state.

Because the state owned all the land, rent and tax in this system were united (another important element of the Asiatic mode of production). However, the authors never argued, as their opponents claimed they did, that the Asiatic mode continued into modern times.10

The Asiatic mode of production thesis was alternately assaulted and explained away by its opponents, such as Sergei Dubrovskii, who attacked it in 1929 in his work, K voprosu o sushchnosti “aziatskogo” sposoba proizvodstva, feodalizma, krepostnichestva i torgovogo kapitala (On the question of the essence of the “Asiatic” mode of production, feudalism, serfdom, and trade capital), soon translated into Chinese and Japanese. He posited ten modes of production through world history, but the Asiatic was not one of them.11 Many others claimed that the Asiatic mode of production was merely an Asiatic variant of feudalism or slavery but certainly no mode of production unto itself.

The debate reached such intensity that several conferences—in Tbilisi and Baku in 1930 and in Leningrad in 1931—were convened to resolve the issue.

The Baku papers were never published, and little has ever been reported 10 Kokin and Papaian, “Tszin’-Tian”; and Diskussiia ob aziatskom sposobe proizvodstva (hereafter, Diskussiia) (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931), 57. One anti-Aziatchik attacked the joint work of Kokin and Papaian for “claiming . . . that in the Han era in China private property in land did not exist and was all government land, and that land was neither bought nor sold.” Hearing this, Kokin shouted from his seat: “I didn’t claim that. Maybe Papaian did.” When the laughter subsided, according to the minutes (Diskussiia, 57), Papaian said: “I never claimed it.”

11 Sergei M. Dubrovskii, K voprosu o sushchnosti “aziatskogo” sposoba proizvodstva, feodalizma, krepostnichestva i torgovogo kapitala (Moscow, 1929), 17–19; and see E. Varga,

“Ob aziatskom sposobe proizvodstva,” in Varga, Ocherki po problemam politekonomii kapitalizma (Moscow, 1965), 366–67.

554

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

on the Tbilisi meeting (a conference volume exists, but it is extremely rare) except that the debate revolved around the views of T.D. Berin in favor of an Asiatic mode. The views against, as represented by Dubrovskii and Mikhail Godes, prevailed.12 Despite the anti-Aziatchik tenor of these meetings and of the press in 1930, views supportive of an Asiatic mode of production had yet to be silenced.

The Leningrad Conference of February, 1931 was much more famous. Neither Varga nor Mad’iar were invited to represent Aziatchik views, but Kokin and Papaian both attended and were thoroughly lambasted by their opponents.

Both sides came heavily armed with quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin and brandished them in warlike fashion. The most outspoken critics of the Asiatic mode of production, Evgenii Iolk and Godes in particular, rejected the Aziatchik notion of a bureaucratic ruling elite defined by its function, not its economic class. Politically, they openly claimed, the Asiatic mode of production was dangerous to the Comintern’s efforts to spur revolutionary movements among the world’s colonial peoples, because a geographically distinct mode of production could arguably render Comintern leadership unnecessary.

Godes attacked the Aziatchiki for f ailing to explain the transition from the Asiatic mode of production to the next stage of history within the categories of class struggle and Oriental society. In short, opponents of the Asiatic mode denounced its supporters for distorting the words of Marx and Engels and exaggerating what was simply an Asian variant of feudalism or slavery.13

While the expression “Asiatic mode of production” began to disappear from the Soviet press that year, its previous supporters did not. The Aziatchiki published over the next few years in respectable publications but not directly on the subject of the Asiatic mode of production.14 A few Aziatchiki even survived 12 Nikiforov,

Sovetskie istoriki, 217; and Ulmen, Science of Society, 138. The Tbilisi report was entitled Ob aziatskom sposobe proizvodstva: Stenograficheskii otchet diskussii po dokladu T. Berina [On the Asiatic mode of production: Stenographic account of the discussion surrounding the report of T. Berin].

13 Diskussiia, 14, 34, 66. See also Ozaki Shōtarō, “Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ronsō,” in Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ron (Tokyo, 1949), 65–82; Goi Naohiro, Kindai Nihon to Tōyō shigaku (Tokyo, 1976), 194–95; Kobayashi Ryōsei, Ajia teki seisan yōshiki kenkyū (Tokyo, 1970), 155–62; and Jan Pecírka, “Die Sowjetischen Diskussionen über die Asiatischen Produktionsweise und über die Sklavenhalterformation,” Eirene, 3 (1964): 147–69.

14 Kokin, for example, contributed two long essays on recent events in China for volumes edited by Godes: M.D. Kokin, “Revoliutsiia 1911 goda v Kitae,” in Probuzhdeniie Azii: 1905

goda i revohutsii na vostoke, M.S. Godes, ed. (Leningrad, 1935), 131–227; and M. Kokin,

“Kitai,” in Ocherki po istorii vostoka v epokhe imperializma, A. Alimov and M. Godes, eds.

(Moscow and Leningrad, 1934), 259–363. It was also recently discovered by a Chinese

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 555

Stalin’s purges, although most perished. Wittfogel later wrote of the Soviet Aziatchiki that “their heresy was a minor one, and it did not deprive them of their good Communist standing.”15 He also claimed that the Asiatic mode of production was not widely debated in Communist parties outside the Soviet Union. This statement was clearly untrue for both China and Japan.

The current notion that the Asiatic mode of production** **attracted little interest in China would be difficult to substantiate.16 Supposedly, because of its geographical specificity and its inherent quality of stagnation, the Asiatic mode of production had condescending (perhaps even racist) overtones for Chinese radicals. This argument is based more on abstract logic than on sources. One could equally hypothesize an approach, similar to that of the Soviet Aziatchiki, that posited the unique character of the Asiatic mode of production for China and the necessity of a socialist revolution, led by workers and peasants, because China’s bourgeoisie was too ineffective to guide a bourgeois-democratic revolution. In fact, the Asiatic mode of production was as widely discussed as any other issue in the debates on the history of society then raging in China, and the debates continued as long in China as anywhere else in the world.

An examination of journals and books of the late 1920s and 1930s reveals that many works of the Aziatchiki and their opponents were translated into Chinese soon after their initial publication, including those of Varga, Wittfogel, Mad’iar, Kokin, and Papaian. Mad’iar’s first book was actually translated several times by different publishers. Given the contours of the Soviet debate, the Chinese had access to all of the relevant Soviet materials and much of the earlier works of Marx, Engels, and others.17

scholar that Kokin was one of the earliest Russian translators of Lu Hsün’s “The True Story of Ah Q.” He published the translation in 1929 but did so anonymously. See Ko Pao-ch’uan,

“Ah Q cheng chuan” tsai kuo-wai (Peking, 1981), 52.

15 Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Study in Total Power (New Haven, Conn., 1957), 404.

16 Benjamin I. Schwartz, “A Marxist Controversy in China,” Far Eastern Quarterly, 13 (February 1954): 143–54; and Dirlik agrees with Schwartz on this point, in Revolution and History, 191–92, passim.

17 For example, there were the following translations of Mad’iar’s first book: Chung-kuo nung-ts’un ching-chi chih t’e-hsing, Tsung Hua, trans. (Shanghai, 1930), a partial translation; Chung-kuo nung-yeh ching-chi, Li Min-ch’ang, trans., stenographic copy of translation of chapter 12 (Moscow, 1929); and Chung-kuo nung-ts’un ching-chi yen-chiu, Ch’en Tai-ch’ing and P’eng Kuei-ch’iu, trans. (1930; rpt. edn., Shanghai, 1934), complete translation with additional material. Also, of Mad’iar’s second book of 1930: Chung-kuo ching-chi ta-kang, Hsü Kung-ta, trans. (Shanghai, 1933), complete translation.

556

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

As was the case in Russia, the Chinese debate on the history of society was closely entwined with revolutionary strategy. Most of the participants in the Chinese discussions were political activists first and historians second, and their historical analyses reflected a primary concern with recounting the development of Chinese society in a way that pointed directly to revolution.

Unlike their Soviet counterparts, however, the Chinese debaters soon proposed elaborate schemes and periodizations for Chinese history, occasionally with the use of recent archaeological materials (oracle bones and inscriptions on bronze artifacts).

The highly erratic Kuo Mo-jo, who had translated Marxs Critique in 1925, opened the theoretical debate over the Asiatic mode of production in China with his book Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu (A study of ancient Chinese society), first published in 1930 and reissued many times thereafter. In it, he associated the Asiatic mode of production with the primitive-communal social order. Confronted by severe criticism, Kuo changed his views (something for which he became famous), arguing in an essay of 1936 that the Asiatic mode was in fact a distinct class society predating slavery.18

Li Chi, a scholar of considerable erudition in ancient history, held views most closely corresponding to Mad’iar’s on the nature of the Asiatic mode of production. Li repeatedly stressed the simple fact that Marx had listed the Asiatic mode as one of the normal stages of social development. A Marxist therefore had no choice, in Li’s opinion, but to find it in history. Thus, Kuo Mo-jo was wrong in 1930, Li claimed, to identify the Asiatic mode of production with a pre-class society. Li argued that the Asiatic mode best described the late Shang era (through the twelfth century bc). ** **Relying on a handful of citations from Capital,19 the work of Plekhanov, and especially Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient History (a major source for Marx and Engels), Li also leveled criticism at Mad’iar for implying that the existence of the Asiatic mode of production in China’s past meant China had bypassed feudalism.20

18 Kuo Mo-jo, Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui yen-chiu (Shanghai, 1930), 176–77. Kuo’s essay in 1936

was “Chung-kuo fa-chan chieh-tuan chih tsai jen-shih: Chu yü lun-chiu so-wei ‘Ya-hsi-ya te sheng-ch’an fang-shih,’” in Mo-jo wen-chi, 17 vols. (rpt. edn., Peking, 1959), 11: 21–27.

19 This was before Kuo Ta-li’s complete translation of Marx’s text was available. Li often translated directly from German. Others made it clear when referring to Das Kapital that they were using the Japanese edition (translated by Takabatake Motoyuki).

20 Li Chi, “Tui-yü Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan te kung-hsien yü p’i-p’ing,” Tu-shu tsa-chih, 2 (March 1932): 9–11, 12–13, 28, 47–51, 114; 2 (August 1932): 9, 60; and Li Chi, “Kuan-yü Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan te kung-hsien yü p’i-p’ing,” Tu-shu tsa-chih, 3 (April 1933): 1–86. As one Japanese critic, Ozaki Shōtarō, noted at the time, Li failed to clarify the links between the Asiatic mode of production and either slavery or feudalism; he just

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 557

The historian Hu Ch’iu-yüan argued in several essays published in 1932

that if the Asiatic mode of production was anything, it was despotism, and despotism was grounded in feudalism. He thus claimed that in fact a combination of the village commune and feudal serfdom in China had produced

“Asiatic” despotism, and the Aziatchiki (particularly Mad’iar) had failed to see this because they concentrated their gaze on the scholar-official class. Hu was much impressed by the treatment of the issue of the overwhelming authority of the sovereign in East Asia given in 1928 by the Japanese Communist historian, Hattori Shisō.21

Two other participants in the debate who arrived at altogether different conclusions about the Asiatic mode of production were Wang I-ch’ang and Liu Hsing-t’ang. Wang criticized Mad’iar for his ignorance of Chinese history, the only possible reason he could imagine for positing a self-sufficient Asiatic mode in China. The Asiatic mode of production itself, he claimed, was not a complete stage in historical development but merely a variant of another (feudalism). Wang’s most interesting insight (not an original one, but the first in China) was that India formed the basis of Marx’s understanding of Asian social forms, and only occasionally was Marx referring to feudal East Asia.22

mechanically posited it some time before feudalism and in place of slavery. (See Ozaki,

“Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ronsō,105–06.) In fairness, though, no one before World War II devised a satisfying theoretical framework for the development from pre-class to class society, or from the Asiatic mode of production to the next mode of production, except for the intrusion of Western imperialism into Asia, which was said to have destroyed the self-sufficient economy.

21 Hu Ch’u-yüan, “Lüeh-fu Sun Cho-chang chun ping lüeh-lun Chung-kuo she-hui chih hsing-chih,” Tu-shu tsa-chih, 2 (March 1932): 18–19, 21, 22–23; Hu Ch’iu-yüan, “Ya-hsi-ya sheng-ch’an fang-shih yü chuan-chih-chu-i,” Tu-shu tsa-chih, 2 (August 1932): 1–4, 6, 8–9, 20–21; Hu Ch’iu-yüan, “Chuan-chih-chu-i lun,” Tu-shu tsa-chih, 2 (December 1932): 3–4, 22.

Hu cited the work of Iolk to substantiate his notion of “Oriental despotism.”

22 Wang I-ch’ang, “Chung-kuo she-hui shih-lun shih,” Tu-shu tsa-chih, 2 (March 1932): 46, 48–49, 52. Another author, Wang Li-hsi, rejected the idea that China had experienced a qualitatively distinct history requiring a special mode of production to describe. The implication, as Wang read Mad’iar, was that, prior to the imperialist penetration, China was dominated by the Asiatic mode of production; after the intrusion, China’s mode of production began to change, but important remnants of the Asiatic mode remained.

Ultimately, Wang agreed with Dubrovskii and condemned as anti-Marxist excessive stress on irrigation as a factor in social history. See Wang Li-his, “Chung-kuo she-hui hsing-t’ai fa-chan shih chung chih mi te shih-tai,” Tu-shu tsa-chih, 2 (August 1932): 2–6. Ch’en Pang-kuo, another contributor to the debates, was Li Chi’s most relentless, sarcastic, and dogged critic. He repeatedly denounced the notion of the Asiatic mode of production, reserving

558

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

Liu Hsing-t’ang made it clear that he was a follower neither of Mad’iar’s nor of Li Chi’s notion of the Asiatic mode of production, yet he had to agree with both that the lack of private property and the importance of irrigation had greatly influenced East Asian society. Although essentially repeating Dubrovskii,s critique of Mad’iar, Liu conceded that Mad’iar had offered much of value to scholarship on Chinese society. In fact, he argued, the village commune (the central element of the Asiatic mode of production) had retarded China’s development and prevented a substantial indigenous growth of commerce. In its original and remnant forms, the organization of this village commune (nung-ts’un kung-she or nung-ts’un kung-t’ung-t’i) was the source of China’s social retardation.23 Although Liu claimed no intellectual filiation with Mad’iar and the Soviet Aziatchiki (perhaps for political reasons), he ultimately did adopt some of their main ideas.

One of the fascinating elements of the debates over the Asiatic mode of production in China was the attribution of importance to certain lines of thought imported from the Soviet Union. For example, we know that the positions of Iolk and Godes at the Leningrad Conference against the Asiatic mode were studied by interested Chinese almost immediately, but it was clear to all concerned that Iolk and Godes knew nothing of Chinese history. But, if loyalty to the movement required Chinese Marxist historians to pay lip service to the victors in Leningrad, an all-powerful party in China could not as yet prevent them from often entertaining (even if they were ultimately unable to accept) the ideas of Mad’iar and other Aziatchiki, whose views on the Asiatic mode of production had simply disappeared from printed Soviet works after 1931. No Soviet writer on this issue was translated as often and as extensively as Mad’iar.

A close examination of Chinese writings on the Asiatic mode makes clear that the views of men like Godes and Iolk were dutifully invoked in China but never cited as expert. Their positions simply represented the correct Comintern line.

The two Soviet scholars whose views most influenced subsequent Chinese (and Japanese) discussions of the Asiatic mode of production were V.V. Reikhardt and, particularly, Sergei I. Kovalev. This influence is especially interesting, considering that Reikhardt and Kovalev are scarcely mentioned in the definitive Soviet work on the history of Soviet Sinology. In a volume special venom for Li. See, for example, Ch’en Pang-kuo, “‘Kuan-yü she-hui fa-chan fen-ch’i’

ping p’ing Li Chi,” Tu-shu tsa-chih, 2 (August 1932):** **4, ** ** passim.

23 Liu Hsing-t’ang, “T’ang-tai chih kao-li-tai shih-yeh,” Shih-huo, 1 (April 1935): 5, 15; Liu Hsing-t’ang, “Chung-kuo ching-chi fa-chan te pen-chih,” Wen-hua p’i-p’an, 2 (1935): 206–07; and Liu Hsing-t’ang, “Chung-kuo she-hui fa-chan hsing-shih chih t’an-hsien,” Hsin sheng-ming, 2 (October 1935): 7, 10, 16, 24, 26–27.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 559

published in 1934 on pre-capitalist economic formations, Reikhardt discussed at length the Soviet debate of 1929–1931 as the confrontation of views for and against the Asiatic mode. While Reikhardt dutifully claimed to agree with the anti-Aziatchik position that the Asiatic mode of production never existed as a distinct mode of production, he nevertheless devoted considerable space to spelling out what it had meant to Marx and Engels. Having done this, Reikhardt concluded that the Asiatic mode of production could not constitute a variety of feudalism but had to be an Asiatic variant of slavery.24

Even more widely read, analyzed, and influential was the work of Kovalev.

From his comments at the Leningrad Conference, one can see that Kovalev in 1931 had in fact been a defender of the Asiatic mode. He strictly differentiated it from slavery and feudalism and argued that it was a class society with a ruling elite that exploited agrarian laborers.25 By 1934, however, Kovalev had changed his views. He now argued that the Asiatic mode of production was not a distinctive stage of social development but an Oriental variety of the slaveholding social order in the West.26

A brilliant young historian Lü Chen-yü began to come to terms with the concept of the Asiatic mode of production after reading Kovalev (probably in Japanese translation) in 1934. Although he had earlier been more influenced by the anti-Aziatchik position, Lü changed his views and began to approach Marx’s designation of “Asiatic” in the empirical materials available on Shang and Chou slavery. He concluded in the mid-1930s, in harmony with Kovalev’s later position, that the Asiatic mode of production was essentially a variant of ancient East Asian slavery.27

Lü published two books on ancient China in 1934, both beginning with an essay addressing the issue of periodization and the Asiatic mode. In both, he raised the various views then current on the nature of the Asiatic mode, quoted Marx’s preface to the Critique, and noted Plekhanov’s well-known 24 V.V. Reikhardt, Ocherkipo ekonomike dokapitalisticheskikh formatsii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934), 54–58; and Nikiforov, Sovetskie istoriki, 250–54. Hou Wai-lu briefly discussed Reikhardt’s views in Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui shih lun (Peking, 1955), 14–15.

25 S.I. Kovalev, in Diskussiia, 78–80; and Moritani Katsumi, Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ron (Tokyo, 1941), 97–108. Kovalev’s influence was entirely theoretical. He was not an East Asian specialist and offered nothing of direct import to the discussions concerning China or Japan. He was, though, well known and influential in the Soviet Union. See Dunn, Fall and Rise, 52–53.

26 This view was apparently incorporated into the first edition of his textbook (1934), but it was lifted in its entirety from the second edition: S.I. Kovalev, Istoriia drevnogo mira, 2d edn. (Moscow, 1955). See also Nikiforov, Sovetskie istoriki, 250–52.

27 Ozaki, “Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ronsō,” 108–11.

560

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

caveat that Marx probably would have changed his ideas on the Asiatic mode and antiquity had he read Morgan earlier. In one of these books, Lü claimed that Plekhanov was “absolutely correct” and in line with the critical “spirit of Marxism.” In the other book, he noted that Plekhanov was “wrong,” revisionist, and had influenced Mad’iar, Wittfogel, and others.28 Both essays proceeded to exactly the same summary of Mad’iar’s views on China and the Asiatic mode of production and his exaggerated emphasis on water as an explanatory factor in history.29

In 1937, Ho Kan-chih summarized the entire Chinese debate on the history of society to that point. While he criticized “Comrade Mad’iar” and the whole

“Asiatic” notion as unsound, he saw fit to do so only after describing Mad’iar’s views in great detail. He argued that, although the Asiatic mode of production may have long ceased to exist, its remnants continued to retard the normal development of Chinese society. He noted that the Chinese had been disturbed by Mad’iar’s idea that the Asiatic mode continued to influence Chinese social organization until the intrusion of the West in the nineteenth century, but he generously forgave Mad’iar, who had by then “corrected” his views. Ho then introduced the debates among Japanese historians, nearly a decade old at this point, on the Asiatic mode of production.30 In fact, he devoted considerably more space to developments in Japan than to the Chinese side. Ho’s evenhanded and extended treatment of the debate over the Asiatic mode of production is striking, especially considering that he claimed to oppose the idea in principle.

Throughout the 1930s, a large number of Japanese writings on Marxism, history, and Chinese society and history were translated into Chinese. This trend continued even after 1937, when full-fledged war erupted with Japan.

One volume that survived the war and has been cited in writings from the People’s Republic was a translation of Hayakawa Jirō’s Kodai shakai shi (A history of ancient society), published in Kweilin in 1942.31 Hayakawa did not see the Asiatic mode of production as a distinct epoch in social development but 28 Lü Chen-yü, Shih ch’ien-ch’i Chung-kuo she-hui yen-chiu (Peiping, 1934), 12, 14; and Lü Chen-yü, Chung-kuo yüan-shih she-hui shih (1934; rev. edn., Shanghai, 1942).

29 The volume with the positive assessment of Plekhanov has been reprinted several times in China, most recently in 1980: Lü Chen-yü, Shih ch’ien-ch’i Chung-kuo she-hui yen-chiu (1961; rpt. edn., Peking, 1980).

30 Ho Kan-chih, Chung-kuo she-hui shih wen-t’i lun-chan (Shanghai, 1937), 2–3, 10–16, 29–58.

31 Hayakawa Jirō, Ku-tai she-hui shih, Hsieh Ai-ch’un and Yang Mu-p’ing, trans. (Kweilin, 1942).

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 561

rather as a transitional phase between the dissolution of the primitive commune and the emergence of slaveholding in antiquity.

Lü Chen-yü continued to write on the Asiatic mode of production through the early 1940s, when it was no longer widely discussed elsewhere. His extraordinarily broad reading in the relevant Japanese materials and in the Marxist classics made his work of the early 1940s the fullest Chinese statement on the subject to date. He located five perspectives on the Asiatic mode that had by then been advanced in the international debate: that it was a special Oriental path of historical development; that it was not slavery but a mode of production parallel to it, namely, an Asiatic variant of slavery; that it formed a distinctly Oriental feudalism which otherwise followed the universal laws of development; that it was a pre-slaveholding society or a transitional mode of production linking primitive society and slavery; and that the view of Godes and others had “liquidated” Mad’iar’s “water theory” and denied the Asiatic mode of production altogether. Lü found fault with all five, for in his opinion only Kovalev’s solution opened the way to resolve the issue once and for all.32

By the early 1940s, Lü had another difficult hurdle to leap. Stalin had announced that all world history passed through a formulaic sequence of five historical modes of production, and the Asiatic mode of production had not made the list. In a brilliant act of scholarly legerdemain, Lü simply argued that, since Marx and Engels wrote of the Asiatic mode, it could not lie outside Stalin’s five (even though it clearly was not there). No contradiction here, for Marxist-Leninist theorists were to blame for the confusion. Marxism-Leninism, he warily noted, offered undoubtedly correct theory, but it could never replace the historical evidence.

Kovalev’s later interpretation provided the key to a solution of this conundrum. Kovalev claimed that the Asiatic mode of production existed as a “variant of slavery” in ancient East Asia. Where Stalin had written “slavery,” Lü argued that one should read “Asiatic mode of production as a variant of slavery” in the case of China. Lü’s own work on the Shang period seemed to demonstrate a slaveholding society with certain “Asiatic” elements, so Kovalev’s ideas worked this far. Kovalev went on to suggest, however, that in medieval East Asia certain elements of the Asiatic mode of production remained and forged a distinctive variant of feudalism, and here Lü had to part company with him.33

32 Lü Chen-yü, “Kuan-yü Chung-kuo she-hui shih te chu-wen-t’i,” in Lü Chen-yü, Chung-kuo she-hui shih chu-wen-t’i 4th edn. (Shanghai, 1950; originally published in 1942), 2, 4. This volume of essays has been reprinted (at least) twice: Shanghai, 1954 and 1961.

33 Lü Chen-yü, “Ya-hsi-ya te sheng-ch’an fang-fa yü so-wei Chung-kuo she-hui te ‘t ’ ing-chih-hsing,’” in Chung-kuo she-hui shih chu-wen-t’i, 30–44. He also expressed the highest regard

562

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

In 1943, the eminent historian Hou Wai-lu included a long discussion of the Asiatic mode of production in a work on ancient Chinese society. Again, he did not openly advocate the Asiatic mode, but, by pointing to the Asiatic qualities of ancient Chinese slavery, he was adopting a position akin to Kovalev’s.34 In a new book in 1948, Hou devoted considerable space to an analysis of the issue in the earlier Soviet, Chinese, and Japanese debates.35 In 1955, Hou republished this book under a new title and with a new introduction because of renewed debates in China on the nature of ancient Chinese society.36

Although little was written in China on the Asiatic mode of production between 1955 and the international revival of the issue in the early 1960s, it should be dear that, contrary to the general impression, it never disappeared, not even during the war years, which was the only hiatus in the Japanese debate. By the same token, no Chinese historian after the mid-1930s supported the concept of a mode of production distinct to Asian or Chinese society. Yet the repeated efforts to come to terms critically with this idea of a mode of production named with geographic specificity in the context of otherwise univer-ally ascending stages of historical development continued through the 1940s and into the 1950s. It surfaced again in the early 1960s and again in the early 1980s, but, while discussed at length by many and sundry, it has never gained a sustained following.

In Japan, the Asiatic mode of production gained a considerable following and was debated every year in the leftist scholarly press through the late 1930s. Like their Chinese and Soviet counterparts, the Japanese participants in the debate were concerned with the fate of the Chinese revolution, as they were with the future of a Japanese revolution. In addition, the Japanese for the work of Reikhardt and Hayakawa Jirō, both of whom were heavily influenced by Kovalev. Lü reserved special vituperation for the Japanese scholar Akizawa Shūji. Akizawa published widely in left-wing journals on the Asiatic mode of production and the nature of Oriental society. By the end of the 1930s, his views had clearly evolved into pure and simple window dressing for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Japanese rationale for invasion and occupation of the Asian mainland, by borrowing arguments from the arsenal of the Asiatic mode of production, such as stagnation. Only Japanese imperialism, in his estimation, could remedy it. Lü’s labeling Akizawa a mouthpiece for

“Japanese fascism” may have been excessive, but his criticism hit the mark. Lü Chen-yü, ** **

“Jih-pen fa-hsi-ssu-ti te Chung-kuo li-shih-kuan p’i-p’an,” in Chung-kuo she-hui shih chu-wen-t’i, 131–49.

34 Hou Wai-lu, Chung-kuo ku-tien she-hui shih lun (Chungking and Chengtu, 1943), 61–104.

35 Hou Wai-lu, Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui shih (Shanghai, 1948), 13–32.

36 Hou Wai-lu, Chung-kuo ku-tai she-hui shih lun (Peking, 1955), 1.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 563

debaters had a more thorough training in Marxism-Leninism than their Chinese counterparts.37

The immediate issue of the Asiatic mode of production for Japanese Marxists was tied into the larger debate on the nature of the society that emerged in Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The Rōnō faction (named for their journal) argued that the restoration was a bourgeois-democratic revolution, while the orthodox Kōza faction (named for a famous collection of essays they published in 1932) saw it as absolutist in character, as neither the bourgeoisie nor the feudal landlord class had led the restoration, allowing an all-powerful state to fill this leadership vacuum. While the Rōnō faction was ready for a proletarian revolution in Japan, the Kōza faction accepted the Comintern determination that Japan needed a two-stage revolution, the first to topple the emperor system and the second the capitalists. As a result, the debate on the Asiatic mode in Japan was almost entirely carried on by Kōza faction Marxists, since it was not of immediate importance to the Rōnō faction.38

The central issue for Japanese commentators on the Asiatic mode of production was the enormous role played in Japan’s modernization efforts by the state, the imperial institution. The emperor system represented not a progressive historical development but a repressive legacy from the past, something to be overturned. It looked much like an Asiatic remnant in Japan, at a time when such an institution did not exist in China (1920s and 1930s). However, a Japanese critic risked lese majesté if he identified the Asiatic mode of production (as the object for revolution) with the emperor and Japan’s top-heavy state system in the post-restoration period, a force of ever more oppression and militarism in the Shōwa era (from 1926). In fact, the Asiatic mode of production became a metaphor for the resistance of Japanese society to development.

The Japanese participants effectively shared among themselves the tasks of translating the pertinent materials from Russian, German, and Chinese, thus eliminating repetition of effort. Their work had a salutary effect on the scholarly level of the controversy in Japan. All the major writings of the Aziatchiki and anti-Aziatchiki appeared through the first half of the 1930s, and a full translation by Hayakawa Jirō of the Leningrad Conference papers appeared in 1933.39 Because of the political commitment to the Chinese revolution, major 37 On the assimilation of Marxism (and Marxism-Leninism) in Japan and all the Japanese factors therein, see Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development, 35–54.

38 Hoston,

Marxism and the Crisis of Development, 145.

39 Mad’iar’s first book, Ekonomika sel’skogo khoziaistva v Kitae appeared in a Japanese translation in 1931, and his revised 2d Russian edition (minus his introductory chapter on the Asiatic mode of production) in 1934. Mad’iar’s second book was translated serially in

564

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

writings from the Chinese debates, particularly books by Kuo Mo-jo and T’ao Hsi-sheng, rapidly appeared in Japanese as well.40

The Japanese contributors to the debate often combined lives as active Communists with dedicated scholarship, and the abrupt conclusion of the debate over the Asiatic mode in the Soviet Union had no such effect in the Japanese scholarly press. Stalinist efforts to end discussion of the Asiatic mode of production failed in Japan, as they had in China, because Japanese (and Chinese) Marxist scholars felt strongly that they had to fit Marx’s generic pattern with native historical development, and both Japanese and Chinese were committed to having a social revolution.41

The earliest attempt to explain the meaning of the term “Asiatic mode of production” appeared in a long essay by Fukuda Tokuzō in 1927. Although Fukuda laid out all the available citations from Marx, the best conclusions he could suggest were that “Asiatic mode of production” denoted the primitive village commune, that Marx seemed to equate “Asiatic” with “Indian,” and that the topic needed much further study.42 The first serious effort to place the Asiatic mode of production in Japanese history appeared in Hattori Shisō’s Meiji ishin shi (A history of the Meiji Restoration, [1928]), the book Hu Ch’iu-yüan later cited with admiration in China. Hattori related Marx’s notion of the Asiatic mode of production to the combination of handicraft production and small farmer agriculture in the economy of the Edo period (1601–1868).43 The first Japanese theoretical treatment of the Asiatic mode of production and its place in Chinese history appeared the following year in an article by Hirata the early 1930s, finally in full in 1936. Inoue Terumaru, trans., Chūgoku nōson keizai kenkyū

(1931); 2d Russian edition: Shina nōgyō keizai ron (1934); 2d book: Tanaka Tadao and Andō

Hideo, trans., Shina keizai gairon (1936). Hayakawa Jirō, Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ni tsuite (Tokyo, 1933).

40 Goi,

Kindai Nihon, 179–83. See, for example, Kuo Mo-jo, Shina kodai shakai kenkyū, Fujieda Takeo, trans. (Tokyo, 1938); and T’ao Hsi-sheng, Shina shakai no shiteki bunseki (Tokyo, 1929). Their books were also reviewed in Japanese journals, for example: Suzuki Shun,

“Tō Kishō to Chūgoku seiji shisōshi,” Rekishigaku kenkyū, 1 (December 1933): 120–23; and Shida Fudōmaro, “Saikin no Shina shakai keizai shi kenkyū,” Rekishigaku kenkyū, 1

(January 1934): 223–27, among many such essays.

41 In this, I agree with Hoston’s recent point ( Marxism and the Crisis of Development, 153):

“Marxist scholars and revolutionary activists [in Japan] firmly believed that the integrity of Marx’s social theory required a correct identification of the mode of production that dominated contemporary Japan and China.”

42 Fukuda Tokuzō, “Yuibutsu shikan keizai shi shuttatsuten no saigimmi,” Kaizō (June 1927): 46, 54; and (September 1927): 62.

43 Hattori Shisō, Meiji ishin shi, in Hattori Shisō zenshū, 24 vols. (Tokyo, 1973), 1: 55–56.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 565

Yoshie, who adamantly claimed that Marx and Engels had not characterized Chinese society by feudalism but by the Asiatic mode and that this Asiatic mode was essentially a feudal form of exploitation. In other words, China was Asiatic on the surface but fundamentally feudal at heart. Several months later, the party leader Noro Eitarō similarly explained the Asiatic mode of production as a form of state feudalism.44

Through the years 1929–1931, numerous articles touched on the Asiatic mode of production, offering a variety of interpretations. The first article devoted solely to the issue of the Asiatic mode itself appeared in May, 1930.45 Although the author, Terajima Kazuo, accepted the recent resolution of the Sixth Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China was not characterized by the Asiatic mode of production but was semi-feudal, he maintained that this decision concerned only the realm of practice. The theoretical front left many unanswered and debatable problems. Terajima’s view closely resembled Mad’iar’s, and the next few issues of the journal in which his essay appeared, Puroretaria kagaku (Proletarian science), ran several articles on the Asiatic mode of production and numerous pieces concerning China.

In 1931, Itō Zōhei began his work, Nihon kokka no seiritsu katei (The formative process of the Japanese state), by quoting Marx’s preface to the Critique and asking what this sequence of modes of production meant for the study of Japanese history. What was unclear for the Asiatic (while spelled out for the other modes of production), he argued, were the social and economic systems attached. From this interesting observation, Itō concluded that in Japan the Asiatic mode of production emerged in the primitive communal stage of history and lingered in remnant form through slavery to feudalism.46 Late that year, Hani Gorō essentially concurred that the Asiatic mode of production leaned either toward the slaveholding or the serf mode.47 He continued to struggle with this strange concept in a long article through the following year, after gaining access to Mad’iar’s first book in translation. His conclusions remained the same: the Asiatic mode of production was basically slavery or serfdom, was linked initially to the decline of primitive society, and 44 Hirata Yoshie, “Shina kakumei to nōgyō mondai, **” ** Shisō, 86 (July 1929): 72–75, 78; and Noro Eitarō, “Nihon ni okeru tochi shoyū kankei ni tsuite,” Shisō, 88 (September 1929): 54.

Noro was arrested by the police on 28 November 1933 and murdered by them in 1934.

45 Terajima Kazuo, “Marukusu Engerusu ni okeru ‘Ajia teki seisan hōhō’ no igi,” Puroretaria kagaku, 2 (May 1930): 47–59. See also Goi, Kindai Nihon, 177.

46 Itō Zōhei, Nihon kokka no seiritsu katei (Tokyo 1931), 197, 199, 207, 240.

47 Hani Gorō, “‘Ajia teki seisan yōshiki’ no mondai ni yosete,” Teikoku daigaku shimbun (21 December 1931), as cited in Goi, Kindai, Nihon, 196.

566

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

represented the earliest stage of class conflict in world-historical development.

This last point was new and became more important as the debate proceeded.

The Asiatic mode of production in China, Hani argued, was not fundamentally distinct from feudalism.48

In 1932, the papers from the Leningrad Conference began to appear in Japanese translation. The political victory of the anti-Aziatchiki in Russia might have aborted Japanese discussion of the Asiatic mode, but the tempta-tion to work through all the intellectual problems posed by this mysterious concept, which seemed to contradict other Marxist notions, proved stronger than the Soviet efforts to strangle debate, and few Japanese scholars were prepared to abandon the Asiatic mode of production altogether.49

The debate mushroomed in 1933 and 1934, and three schools of thought emerged. In the first were advocates of the Asiatic mode as synonymous with pre-class society; others saw it as a transitional era from the primitive commune to slavery; and still others regarded it as the first class society. In each of these related points of view, the Asiatic mode of production was not unique to Asian society but part of the universal historical progression. A second school of thought included scholars who continued to maintain that the Asiatic mode was an Asian variant of either slavery or feudalism. In these two positions, both derived from Soviet views, the Asiatic mode of production was geographically specific. Finally, there were scholars who saw the Asiatic mode less as a distinct era bounded by two others in the historical continuum than as a quality that distinguished the long-term development of pre-capitalist Oriental society from primitive communism through feudalism: namely, stagnation and despotism.

Hayakawa Jirō was an early and consistent contributor to the Japanese debate. In 1933, he was prepared simultaneously to suggest that Japanese society after the Taika Reforms of 645 resembled the Asiatic mode of production, that Mad’iar and Varga had held incorrect positions, and that “of course, the Asiatic mode of production is a kind of feudalism.”50 He came under ferocious criticism that year. Some attacked his idea that placed the Asiatic mode after 48 Hani Gorō, “Tōyō ni okeru shihonshugi no keisei,” Shigaku zasshi, 43 (February 1932): 1–42; 43 (March 1932): 1–40; 43 (June 1932): 26–58; and 43 (August 1932): 48–58; especially part two subtitled “Ajia teki seisan yōshiki to Shina shakai,” 43 (March 1932): 5, 16, 22, 28, passim.

49 Ozaki, “Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ronsō,” 88. Akamatsu Keisuke was one of those ready to give up on the Asiatic mode of production altogether.

50 Hayakawa Jirō, “Nihon rekishi to ‘Ajia teki seisan yōshiki’” ** ** Rekishi kagaku, 2 (March 1933): 19–21.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 567

the Taika Reforms. One author simply asked what had happened to slavery in Japanese history.51

In 1934, Hayakawa began to publish work on the Asiatic mode of production in a new vein, now denying that it had anything to do with feudalism; it was this incarnation of his work that was published in Chinese translation. He now regarded the Asiatic mode of production as one social formation that emerged in the process of the dissolution of primitive society. He meant to offer the Asiatic mode of production the dignity of its own place as a bona-fide mode of production, one of Marx’s original four, and thus a class society, in fact, the first. He also linked it, citing Capital, to a complex system of tribute-bearing vassalage (kōnōsei) established when one community conquers another.52 The reason that Hayakawa’s Asiatic mode of production resembled slaveholding is neither coincidental nor because he viewed it as an Asian variant of slaveholding society. Rather, he saw the Asiatic mode as most potentially operative at that stage of social development when one society has conquered a more primitive society and put an unequal system of enforced vassalage into effect.

This action would destroy the pristine commune and begin a path toward slavery—and the Asiatic mode fell along this path in Hayakawa’s formulation.

In their early contributions, Hattori and Hani agreed with Iolk’s position that regarded the Asiatic mode of production as an Asiatic variant either of feudalism or slavery. When he looked back at the debate in the immediate postwar years, though, Hattori chiefly remembered the confusion and plethora of views spawned as texts poured into Japan from Russia and elsewhere. He recalled a 51 Aikawa Haruki, “Ajia teki seisan yōshiki no Nihon rekishi e no ‘tekiyō ron ni kanren shite,”

Rekishi kagaku, 2 (May 1933): 41, 47; and Aikawa Haruki, “Ajia teki seisan yōshiki to Nihon hōkensei ni kansuru ronsō (1),“ Rekishi kagaku, 2 (Fall 1933): 69.

52 Hayakawa Jirō, “Tōyō kodai shi ni okeru seisan yōshiki no mondai,“ Rekishi kagaku, 3

(December 1934): 72–74, 79–80; and Shiozawa Kimio, Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ron (Tokyo, 1970), 23–27. Hayakawa’s early critic, Aikawa Haruki, took a position in 1933 akin to Godes’s view that the Asiatic mode of production was an Asian form of feudalism. This was Hayakawa’s view in that year, but Aikawa disagreed on important details, such as when it was supposed to have transpired in Japan’s past. Late in 1933 and early the following year, his views began to change in a direction curiously similar to Hayakawa’s. Now he argued that the Asiatic mode of production constituted history’s first class society. By 1935, he had come in contact with Kovalev’s later views, which unquestionably influenced him.

Aikawa still held to the notion that the Asiatic mode of production was the first class formation, but he added that it was based on a patriarchal slaveholding society. Aikawa Haruki, “ Ajia teki kannen keitai e no keikō: Ajia teki seisan yōshiki to Gōdesu teki kenkai,”

Shisō, 139 (December 1933): 68–69, 77–86; Ozaki, “Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ronsō,” 91, 98–99; Shiozawa, Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ron, 28–29.

568

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

comment made in 1935 by one of the lesser-known participants: “It is my feeling that for us to aim toward a proper understanding and explanation [of the Asiatic mode of production], it is an indispensable precondition that we clearly elucidate the [appropriate] documents and methodology of Marxism and in addition that our concrete knowledge of history be filled out considerably.”53 In this, Hattori wholeheartedly concurred.

No Japanese scholar involved in this debate made more prolific use of the available doctrinal, as opposed to the empirical, material than did Moritani Katsumi. In 1934, he demonstrated great versatility in handling the writings of Marx and Engels in an essay that placed the Asiatic mode of production before slavery at the final stage of the primitive commune.54 Over the next few years, he published several more articles on the subject, finally putting them together as a book in 1937. Working with one basic source that he quoted in whole or in part literally dozens of times and usually in boldface—that one sentence from Marx’s Critique—Moritani claimed that the Asiatic mode of production constituted a full-fledged epoch in the universal societal pathway. If Marx had not meant it as a genuine historical stage, Moritani argued, echoing Li Chi, he would not have stated it so clearly to be one. Moritani identified the Asiatic mode of production with the “agricultural commune” (nōgyō kyōdōtai), a technical term indicating a society that emerged from the lower-level, primitive commune. The Asiatic mode of production then constituted a generic social and economic formation in the larger transition from pre-class to class society on the way to slavery and beyond. As such, it could not have been meant to be geographically specific to Asia but rather to be a “category of world history”

whose primary qualities had been reached earliest and most clearly in Asia—

hence its name.55

Ozaki Hotsumi, a famous journalist executed for his role in the Sorge spy ring, closely followed Moritani’s explanation of the Asiatic mode of production in a series of lectures given at Tokyo Imperial University in early 1939, published later that year as Gendai Shina ron (On contemporary China). For Ozaki, the fact that the “village commune” was responsible for Social stagnation was obvious; the really important question was how it had been preserved for so long. His answers were less satisfying: the importance of wet-field agriculture 53 Hattori Shisō, “Nihon ni okeru Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ronsō no shūketsu” (1948), in Hattori Shisō zenshū, 21: 14–17, 19, 21–22, quotation on 22, emphasis in original. The author of the quotation is Tatsumi Tsuneyo.

54 Moritani Katsumi, “Shina keizai shakai shi no shomondai,” Rekishi kagaku, 3 (April 1934): 5–6.

55 Moritani,

Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ron, 2–3, 52, 63–64, 68, 70, 72–73, 82, 85, 89–90.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 569

in addition to the great ability of China’s social structure (before the intrusion of the capitalist powers) to assimilate conquerors and their lower social and cultural levels.56

Watanabe Yoshimichi arrived at similar conclusions in his book, Nihon kodai shakai (Ancient Japanese society). He argued that Asiatic society preceded antiquity and was based on communal relations. The Asiatic mode of production was also, however, a transitional era, the last stage of primitive communism and the incubus for the formation of a society that recognized private property. In order to posit such a transformation from a pre-class to class society, Watanabe had to generate an explanation for the origin of class differentiation within the undifferentiated commune.57 If all history was the history of class struggle, the Asiatic mode of production had a singular role to play in societal development, for it marked the true beginning of world history linking pre-class and class society.

Another winding path through a variety of views was traveled by Akizawa Shūji. Initially, he was attracted to Hayakawa’s depiction of the Asiatic mode as a tribute-bearing system. From late 1935, he abandoned this approach and rejected the assumption that the Asiatic mode of production was a class society preceding antiquity. Instead, he pointed to slavery as the first class society, labeled Mad’iar’s ideas “myth,” and now identified the Asiatic mode of production with the “village commune” (nōson kyōdōtai or, as he translated it, Dorfgemeinschaft), acknowledging that this social formation postdated the 56 Ozaki Hotsumi, Gendai Shina ron (1939; rpt. edn., Tokyo, 1964), 31, 33–34. See also Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 197. In a letter to his wife from prison, Ozaki returned to the theme of the nature of Chinese society. Dissatisfied with his earlier treatment of the topic, he now felt that China was not thoroughly “feudal,” but combined an Oriental despotic state structure and bureaucracy with an emerging feudal society. The designation “semi-feudal” was therefore appropriate. “You’re probably not very interested in these things,” he admitted in concluding this letter, as he awaited interrogations and eventual execution for high treason, “but I’m making notes to write up on another occasion.” His next letter (two days later), returned to the subject of state (Oriental despotism) and society (feudal) in China. “While water control is surely of immense importance, I think some scholars far exaggerate it . . . Trying to explain Egypt, Babylonia, India, etc. as a group and all with

‘water’ has serious limitations as well as numerous spatial and temporal problems,” an argument foreshadowing criticisms years later of Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism. Ozaki Hotsumi, Aijō wa furu hoshi no gotoku, in Ozaki Hotsumi chosakushū, 5 vols. (Tokyo, 1983), 4:43–44.

57 Not unlike explaining the autogenesis of life on earth. Watanabe Yoshimichi, “Nihon Kodai shakai no sekai shi teki keiretsu: Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ronsō,” in Nihon genshi kyōsansei shakai to kokka no keisei, Hara Hidezaburō, ed. (Tokyo, 1973), 19–20; and Shiozawa, Ajia teki seisan yōshiki ron, 21–22.

570

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

primitive commune. Because members of the “village commune” had already begun to engage in individual (as opposed to group) activities, the village appeared to be in transition from common ownership to the sprouts of private ownership. Nonetheless, significant communal aspects remained and continued to influence social structure for some time. In fact, Akizawa asserted, the

“Village commune” stayed in place for an inordinately long stretch of time, not allowing the process of individuation and atomization, observable elsewhere in world history, to develop unfettered. The primary result was the kind of

“Asiatic stagnation” commonly seen in China.58

In Akizawa’s view, the Asiatic mode of production did not qualify as a distinct stage of history, nor did it necessarily apply only to Oriental society. It did prefigure the first social formation in the historical progression—slavery—and Akizawa was relentless in his criticism of anyone who had placed it elsewhere.

He thus vilified all those (Godes, Iolk, and others) who had suggested that the Asiatic mode constituted an Asiatic variant of feudalism, for how could the decline of the primitive commune lead to the formation of feudalism? What had happened to slavery? Ultimately, in a flash of extreme confusion, Akizawa concluded that the Asiatic mode of production was an “Asiatic” slavery, adding, as if to underscore the confusion: “The basic characteristic of ‘ancient’

Asiatic society is the unique and incomplete development of slavery, constricted by the obstinate persistence of the village commune.”59 Akizawa was fiercely attacked for his views, especially his notion in the late 1930s that the only resolution to stagnation in China was Japan’s invasion. No one reserved more vitriol for him than did Lü Chen-yü, but it is doubtful that Akizawa ever saw Lü’s attacks.

Why were serious historians of any nationality** **attracted to this strange concept named with apparent geographic specificity, and what explains its continuing attraction? While efforts to eliminate the Asiatic mode of production from Soviet discussions of East Asian history were successful by the early 1930s, the debates in China and Japan were just gaining steam at that point.

The issues surrounding the Asiatic mode of production and its apparent importance as a retarding element, either in full-fledged form or as a lingering remnant in subsequent historical stages, were just too important to termi-nate discussion.

58 Akizawa Shūji, “Jōdai ni okeru shakai keizai teki kōsei,” in Ninon kodai shi no kiso mondai, Watanabe Yoshimichi, Itō Kimio, Hayakawa Jirō, and Akizawa Shūji, eds. (Tokyo, 1936), 314–15, 324–25; and Akizawa Shūji, Shina shakai kōsei (Tokyo, 1939), vi, 5–8, 18, 89–93.

59 Akizawa, Shina shakai kōsei, 168–69, 171–76, 183, quotation on 183.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 571

Marxist historiography was only taking root in East Asia when the debates on the Asiatic mode of production began. As soon as native Chinese and Japanese historians confronted Marxism, the enigma of the Asiatic mode of production emerged. And, Marx was no help, for a close look at his writings revealed conflicting signals: the entire Orient was afflicted with the retarding characteristics of the Asiatic mode of production; yet the Taiping Rebellion might spur a social revolution in China and the West (as he wrote for the New York Tribune), and Japan had experienced a normal feudal stage of development (as he wrote in Capital).

Leszek Kolakowski has pointed out that the Asiatic mode of production seemed to contradict three basic tenets of Marxist theory, which was in part the reason for Stalin’s efforts to eliminate it. First, standard Marxism spoke of the primacy of productive forces, whereas the Asiatic mode of production seemed to stress geographic factors; second, Marxism ordinarily emphasized the necessity of progress in the history of society, while the Asiatic mode was tied up with social stagnation; and, third, Marxism underscored the universality of social development, while the Asiatic mode by contrast modified that claim, seeing it solely as a Western phenomenon.60

On the surface, the interest of Soviet scholars appears both simpler and more bewildering than that of scholars in China or Japan. The Aziatchiki were the trained Sinologists, who could read and speak the Chinese language, who had lived in China, and who were sympathetic to China. They were concerned with working out the details of the Asiatic mode of production and how it fit East Asian history and society. But because the Soviet debate was so consciously conditioned by the requirements of the Chinese revolution and the Comintern’s role therein, it was highly politicized from the start.

While Mad’iar and the other Aziatchiki seriously attempted to apply Marx’s ideas on “Asiatic society” to China and elsewhere, the response to them at the time was blatantly political. The attacks of Iolk and Godes at the Leningrad Conference clearly never aimed at proving point by point that Mad’iar or Varga mis understood Chinese history or Chinese society. In their estimation, the Aziatchiki misinterpreted Marx and Engels—a far worse error—and thereby endangered the future of the Chinese revolution and presumably the Comintern’s role in it.

What remains bewildering is the intensity of the attack on the Aziatchiki in the Soviet Union. The simple answer is that Stalin sought control over the Chinese movement, and so he and his proxies insisted that it was not ready for the socialist phase but had to pursue the more moderate, bourgeois-democratic revolution, and align with the Kuomintang, designated as 60 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1978), 1: 350.

572

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

the party of the bourgeoisie. The Aziatchiki called for a socialist revolution because the influence of the Asiatic mode of production had retarded China’s development, China’s experience with capitalism was extremely young, and the Chinese “bourgeoisie” was too weak to lead a revolution. The Trotskyists at precisely the same time were arguing that Chinese capitalism was sufficiently developed for its proletariat to proceed with a socialist revolution. Stalin and his supporters did away with both of these bothersome groups, often by labeling the Aziatchiki as Trotskyists.

This explanation goes some way in elucidating what happened to the Soviet debate, but it does not explain the variety of anti-Aziatchik perspectives that appeared in print in the Soviet Union through the early 1930s. Some said the Asiatic mode of production never existed; others said, without documenta-tion, that Marx meant it as an “Asian variant of feudalism”; still others said, also without substantiation, that it replaced slavery in the Asian historical context.

Which one was the orthodox Stalinist description? We simply do not know.

When Stalin in the late 1930s released his definitive statement of the five stages of universal historical development, the Asiatic mode of production was gone, not to reappear in the Soviet Union until de-Stalinization in the early 1960s.

A tentative explanation of the intensity of the sentiment against the Asiatic mode of production mixed with a confusion of refutations would be that those

“debaters,” most of whom knew little of China, were striving to ally with the side they expected would prevail, to demonstrate concerted and vigorous support for Stalin’s position, but that they were unable in the early 1930s to fix on the “correct” anti-Aziatchik position.

The Chinese case is equally baffling, albeit for different reasons. Although the early participants in the debates on the history of Chinese society, from which the debate on the Asiatic mode emerged, were not established historians at the time, they and many others became historians as the years progressed. How is it that Marxism attracted their attention in such a rapid and thoroughgoing manner? It could be argued that the political activism of Marxism-Leninism first caught their eye and that theory followed naturally. In other words, Marxism-Leninism posited a revolution in the immediate future, and history, if properly interpreted, could prove that scientifically. Thus, the scientific pretensions of Marxism in conjunction with an emphasis on revolutionary practice provided the key to its appeal to the Chinese.

This explanation, accurate as far as it goes, only illuminates a part of the larger picture. The work of Marx and Engels on the “Orient” shared all the culture-bound prejudices, misinformation, and general ignorance of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. They often wrote in terms of ethnic stereotypes and used data from travelers to seventeenth-century India to characterize nineteenth-century China. One can easily imagine that

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 573

the notion of an Asiatic mode of production would nauseate nationalistic Chinese historians in their first encounter with it. Chinese radical thinkers had by then been struggling for several decades to have China accepted as a

“normal” country, of course with distinctive qualities but fundamentally participating in the same linear path to a glorious future. Historical materialism offered them this pathway. In fact, if the racist overtones of the Asiatic mode of production could be ignored, it might offer them an express ticket to that destination. Thus Chinese historians wrestled long and hard with the Asiatic mode of production. Some found a place for it in the “normal” historical flow.

Others followed the Russian example and described it as an Asian variant of feudalism in China. Few, surprisingly few, denied its validity on the basis of its Eurocentrism.

Arif Dirlik has argued that we have to understand the genuine appeal of historical materialism for Chinese historians in the 1920s and 1930s.61 The question is why. Did Marxism represent a crystallization of theoretical truth? Did it offer a uniformly optimistic view of the future? Chinese historians of this period were initially captivated by Marxist theory, since historical materialism simultaneously made the parameters of understanding clear, provided a plan of action, and gave order to a chaotic world. Historians were thus intrigued by historical materialism as theory, but they were engrossed by Marxism-Leninism as a political instrument. To paraphrase Mao Tse-tung, politics took command, even then.

Chinese historians did not necessarily, consciously or unconsciously, use historical materialism merely to buttress their political plans. They had no choice but to use the Marxist classics as the occasion required. In part, this is why Reikhardt and Kovalev, of negligible import in the Soviet debates on China (and East Asia, generally), became central in the Chinese and Japanese debates on the Asiatic mode of production. These two Soviet writers enabled the Chinese historians to keep intact all the elements of Marxist historical theory, including the Asiatic mode, while explaining away the not-so-attractive side of the Asiatic mode of production by seeing it as just another name for a

“normal” stage (slavery) elsewhere. Thus China retained its integrity as a historical society progressing along regular stages of development, albeit with a certain distinctiveness because of the variant quality of its slaveholding period. Reikhardt and Kovalev offered the Chinese and the Japanese the best of both worlds.

There is something deeper and psychologically more telling at the root of the appeal of Marxist historical theory to the Chinese. Perhaps it is true 61 Dirlik,

Revolution and History, ** **21–36, passim.

574

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

of everyone, but what was clearly true of Chinese Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s was their need for some absolute ontological security, some approach to the understanding of contemporary society, politics, and history that was beyond question, beyond the mundane realities of the contemporary world.

No one doubted the essential validity of Marxist theory, insofar as it was understood. Class struggle, social evolution through stages of development, and all the basic trappings of historical materialism were never debated; they were simply accepted on faith. By comparison, the issue of a distinct Asiatic mode of production was insignificant in the extreme. In fact, the debate on the history of society, by comparison, was a major triviality, a huge intellectual exercise, as budding Chinese Marxist historians began to expand their capacities as scholars.

The Japanese case presents its own set of enigmas. If the idea of the Asiatic mode of production was offensive to the Chinese, as some have argued, it should then certainly have been to the Japanese as well. Marx had noted that, because of the nature of Japanese feudalism, Japan’s social development would probably follow that of the West, and hence Japan was, strictly speaking, not “Asiatic.”62 But no sooner did Japanese Marxist historians tackle the Asiatic mode of production than they launched into an immensely rich debate that produced a wide variety of views. Searches for its existence in Japan’s past began at once. Hattori Shisō placed it in the Edo period, while Hayakawa Jirō

found it in the mid-seventh century, a thousand years earlier.

The Japanese took to Marxism, much as they had to Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism in earlier times and to industrial capitalism in our own, with extraordinary gusto and intellectual interest. Many thought the revolution was soon to come, but their approach to the study of history does not reveal a dominant political bent. One can see clearly that these young Marxist scholars, primarily of the Kōza faction, were struggling to make sense of change and the lack of it in history, of the meaning of historical stagnation, and the place of the Asiatic mode in history. For the Japanese, the principal issue was the origin of an overwhelmingly powerful Japanese state (the emperor system) since the time of the Meiji Restoration. Here, many Japanese critics found the lingering effects of “Asiatic” society, even if Japan had never experienced a pure Asiatic mode of production or had done so centuries before.

62 “Japan, with its purely feudal organisation of landed property and its developed petite culture, gives a much truer picture of the European middle ages than all our history books, dictated as these are, for the most part, by bourgeois prejudices. It is very convenient to be

‘liberal’ at the expense of the middle ages”; Karl Marx, Capital, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans., 3 vols. (New York, 1947), 1: 741n.

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production 575

In China, the imperial system had been overthrown in the name of republicanism (or bourgeois democracy in Marxist terminology) in 1911, but a sustained modernization effort had failed. Political devolution, economic deprivation, and social instability were rampant and plain to see. China’s apparent inability to forge national unity through political or social integration was consistently blamed on the self-sufficient, undynamic nature of the Chinese village, one of the hallmarks of the Asiatic mode of production, even if few Chinese critics actually claimed that China might ever have been characterized as “Asiatic.”

Mad’iar’s work was popular in China, not so much because he attracted followers, but because he had a deeper understanding of the issues involved in Chinese society and history. He had lived and conducted research there, and even if his ideas found little fertile ground, the focus of his analysis and that of many Chinese scholars were similar.

One would think that the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions would retire the concept of the Asiatic mode of production from the Marxist schema for all time, and indeed certain neo-Marxist critics in the West have so argued.

Who could still possibly entertain the absurd notion of Asia as stagnant?

With all the research of the past two generations, who could still argue, as Wittfogel did in the late 1950s, that water control was the root of a monolithic despotism throughout the Orient? Where was the “rural commune” to be found? Committed Marxist historians in the West, such as Jean Chesneaux, felt a need to bridge this gap between the two Marxes, the universalist and the Orientalist.63 This goal required ignoring questions that might topple the entire edifice by looking for ways to incorporate the changes of the postwar world into Marx’s nineteenth-century schema, much as fundamentalists find sanctions for everything in scripture. It also required considerable sleight of hand, for the overwhelming weight of postwar scholarship flies in the face of most of the basic elements of the Asiatic mode.

Most recently, however, more essential questions are being asked. The Chinese are beginning to examine socialism itself, such as Chou Yang’s suggestion that there may in fact be alienation under socialism and Hu Yao-pang’s subsequently retracted statement that Marxism may have limited applicability for China. In Japan, there has been considerable discussion of the Asiatic mode of production since the conclusion of World War II, influenced by the 63 Jean Chesneaux, “Le Mode de production asiatique: Quelques perspectives de recherche,”

La Pensee, 114 (January–February 1964): 33–55; “Où en est la discussion sur ‘le mode de production asiatique’?” La Pensée, 122 (July–August 1965): 40–59; 129 (September–October 1966): 33–46; 138 (March–April 1968): 47–55.

576

The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production

development of sociology and the Weberian-Marxist theory of local community (kyōdōtai) as well as by postwar European work on the Asiatic mode of production, such as that of Hungarian scholar Ferenc Tökei. Japan has also recently witnessed a concerted scholarly rebuttal of the postwar dominance of Marxism in the Japanese academy, taking different forms in different places.64

At Kyoto University, where Marxist economics was first taught in Japan, the theory of historical stages has been seriously attacked as of little use for an understanding of China, and many who previously applied developmental schemes to Chinese history are in the process of retracting them.65 The attack-ers have left many questions unanswered, many others unasked, and still others poorly addressed, but at least basic issues are now on the table for discussion.

At the same time, the Asiatic mode of production may reappear, as it has over the past few years, for altogether inverted reasons and with curious results.66

When something as strange as the Asiatic mode of production becomes the object of debate in modern China, a society in which the press is so closely controlled, we are well advised to look for another message. The Asiatic mode can be an important vehicle for Aesopian criticism. Through a discussion of the Asiatic mode of production, for example, one can advance a thinly veiled criticism of the tremendous despotic power of the state or its ruler (for example, Mao Tse-tung). Or, it might be used implicitly to buttress the notion of China having a distinctive path to socialism. Or, a Chinese historian may be testing how far he or she can stretch the boundaries of accepted Marxist theory. These purposes appear to have been behind the debate in 1980–1981 on the Asiatic mode of production in China. It is precisely because of the Asiatic mode’s unsolved nature within historical materialism that it can be raised and lowered for debate, used as a metaphor for something more important and beyond the ken of direct, public discussion (as it was for the emperor system in pre-war Japan). It seems to appear on the Marxist scholarly agenda during periods when a Marxist orthodoxy is just taking form, is breaking down, or does not exist at all.

64 Carol Gluck, “The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography,” Journal of Asian Studies, 38 (November 1978): 25–50; Ferenc Tökei, Sur le mode de production asiatique (Budapest, 1966).

65 See, for example, Tanigawa Michio, Medieval Chinese Society and the Local “Community,”

Joshua A. Fogel, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), especially 50–59.

66 See T’ien Jen-lung, ** “Chien-kuo i-lai Ya-hsi-ya sheng-ch’an fang-shih wen-t’i t’**ao-lun tsung-shu,” Chung-kuo shih yen-chiu, 3 (1981): 147–59, especially 158–59. Recently, an extremely sophisticated treatment of Marx’s ideas on the development of non-Western societies was published in China: Lin Chun, “Marx’s Conception of the Non-Capitalist Route (1870s–1882),” Selected Writings on Studies of Marxism, 5 (1985): 1–23.

■ Source: “Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the South Manchurian Railway Company,”

in Life Along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Itō Takeo (M.E. Sharpe, 1988), vii–xxxi.

Introduction: Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the South Manchurian Railway Company

In November 1906, following the Russo-Japanese War, Japan acquired the South Manchurian Railway (SMR). Gotō Shimpei was named its first president and he immediately made plans for inaugurating a Research Department.

“Research” was something Gotō considered utterly essential to colonial management. Tokutomi Sohō once said of Gotō: “Everyone has his own peculiarities. ‘Research’ is something that always hung close to Gotō like a briefcase.”1

The Research Department began in April 1907 as a small agency and changed its name many times, at its height, around 1940, encompassing a total of 2,354

employees. It lasted for thirty-eight years, before the arrest of many of its main operatives by the Kwantung Army and Japan’s defeat in World War II spelled its demise. Who came to work for it and why? How did they see themselves? To what use was their research put, and what did they think about that? These are a few of the questions to be addressed in this introduction.

With Japan as the major force in Manchuria after 1906, Gotō Shimpei proceeded with his master plan for colonial development through research.

The SMR received a huge quantity of capital, 200 million yen, half from the government and half in a public offering. It was never simply a for-profit company, for the SMR had a sense of immense responsibility, of mission. Among other things, Gotō wanted to be sure Manchuria never ceased to be under Japanese control, and that necessitated the immigration of 500,000 Japanese to the area.2

The slogan he devised for his conception of colonial control has been the object of considerable discussion: bunsō teki bubi, or “military preparedness in civil garb.” Itō records Gotō’s words on the subject:

1 Cited in Yamada Gōichi, Mantetsu chōsabu, eikō to zasetsu no yon-jūnen (The Research Department of the SMR, Forty Years of Glory and Frustration) (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shimbun sha, 1977), p. 9.

2 Hara Kakuten, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi to Ajia kenkyū” (A History of the Research Department of the SMR and Asian Studies), part I, Ajia keizai 20, 4 (April 1979): 48, 60; and Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 12, 29–30.

578

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

In short, colonial policy is military preparedness in civil garb; it is carrying: out the hegemon’s strategies under the flag of the kingly way. Such a colonial policy is inescapable in our time. What facilities, then, are necessary to see it through?

We have to implement a cultural invasion with a Central Laboratory, popular education for the resident populace, and forge other academic and economic links. Invasion may not be an agreeable expression, but [language]

aside we can generally call our policy one of invasion in civil garb. . . . Certain scholars have said that the secret of administration lies in taking advantage of the people’s weaknesses. . . . Insofar as the secret to administration does hang on the weak points of mankind’s way of life and in fact has throughout history, it is that much more so with colonial policy.3

No mincing of words here. A main research office was established in Dairen, a branch in Tokyo for the first project in January 1908, and the East Asian Economic Investigation Bureau (EEB) later that year. Both the human and natural sciences were to be researched, and a massive network of facilities took form in Manchuria and later in China proper. Gotō had been trained as a medical doctor in Germany, and the methodical, clinical approach to research problems became a hallmark of SMR research.

Gotō asked Professor Okamatsu Santarō of Kyoto University, an expert in Chinese law, to head the Research Department. Okamatsu had led the team that researched the “o1d customs” of Taiwan when Gotō had been colonial civil governor there. But, Okamatsu had never run the kind of Research Department now envisioned for Manchuria, so Gotō sent him to Europe to study the operations of such an outfit. Manchuria was many, many times the size of Taiwan; it was not yet an outright colony of Japan; and the Research Department had not yet acquired the kind of staff needed for a comparable study of Manchuria.

Nonetheless, Gotō regarded it as absolutely indispensable to colonial management to have detailed research on the “Old Customs of Manchuria,” for without this background knowledge, transforming and protecting the region would be difficult.4

3 Cited in Itō Takeo, Mantetsu ni ikite (Life Along the SMR) (Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 1964), pp. 16–17.

4 There has been considerable scholarly criticism of the massive volumes that this research produced: Manshū kyūkan chōsa hōkoku (Report on the Investigation into the Old Customs of Manchuria), 9 vols. Nonetheless, this research did uncover lots of historical materials unknown or thought lost. See Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 3, Ajia keizai 20, 6 (June 1979): 58–68; and Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, p. 36. See also “Chūgoku kyūkan no chōsa ni tsuite: Amagai Kenzaburō shi o meguru zadankai” (On Research into the Old Customs of China: Roundtable Discussion with Amagai Kenzaburō), Tōyō bunka 25 (March

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 579

The next major project, begun in response to a suggestion of Shiratori Kurakichi (founder of the Tokyo University School of Sinology), was a research facility for the study of Manchurian and Korean history and geography. Only an age of imperialism could have brought together two such different personalities as Shiratori and Gotō. Shiratori was the quintessential scholar, whose only thoughts about contemporary China were scornful and condescending.5 With the Japanese now ruling the roost in Manchuria as well as in Korea (which would be officially annexed in a few years), Shiratori saw a prime opportunity (with Japanese military and financial support) to get his hands on previously unseen quantities of documents lying dormant throughout the region. Gotō

had another vision altogether, but that would not become apparent until their three reports were published in 1913–1914. Shiratori had mobilized the cream of Tōdai Sinology, all of whom were his students, to compile this work: five volumes with a total of about 2,250 pages. Considering the short time they had to prepare this research, Shiratori’s young men produced a magnificent piece of pioneering scholarship, a major inspiration to subsequent generations of Japanese, Chinese, and Western scholars.6

Gotō and subsequent SMR heads were not pleased, and the facility was immediately closed in 1914. Shiratori removed the materials to the Faculty of Letters at Tōdai and continued work for the next twenty years, producing another thirteen volumes of research. Gotō’s displeasure was with the lack of colonial drive on the part of the pedants who had collected the documents with his money. Whatever scholarship their work may have achieved, he found little worth in it for Japanese colonization of the region under study. This mix of scholarship and colonial policy, bunsō teki bubi in Gotō’s words, became the main research tradition at the SMR. Even though many of the researchers 1958): 50–123; and Fukushima Masao, “Okamatsu Santarō hakushi no Taiwan kyūkan chōsa to, Kahoku nōson kankō chōsa ni okeru Suehiro Gentarō hakushi” (Professor Okamatsu Santarō’s Research into the Old Customs of Taiwan and Professor Suehiro Gentarō in the Village Studies of North China), Tōyō bunka 25 (March 1958): 22–49.

5 On Shiratori, see Tsuda Sōkichi, “Shiratori hakushi shōden” (Short Biography of Professor Shiratori), in Tsuda Sōkichi zenshū (Collected Works of Tsuda Sōkichi), vol. 24 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976): 107–61; and Joshua A. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō

Konan (1866–1934) (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984), pp. 119–20.

6 Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 14, Ajia keizai 21, 7 (July 1980): 111, 113–14,116–18.

The volumes are: (a) Manshū rekishi chiri, vol. 1 (459 pp.); vol. 2 (686 pp.), publ. 1913, comp.

Shiratori Kurakichi, Yanai Wataru, Matsui Hitoshi, and Inaba Iwakichi. (b) Chōsen rekishi chiri, vol. 1 (366 pp.); vol. 2 (394 pp.), publ. 1913, comp. Ikeuchi Hiroshi and Tsuda Sōkichi.

580

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

forgot this fact at times, the leaders never did. As Hara Kakuten has accurately noted, “research” organs were not established for the sake of scholarship, but to facilitate the management of Manchuria and the operations of the SMR.

In the late 1910s, the Research Department (or Research Section, as it was called after late 1908) began slowly to expand its staff, principally through its EEB, to 51 employees in 1918. By 1926, the number reached 167, and after the Manchurian Incident of 18 September 1931 it began to mushroom. The post-World War I era witnessed a boom in research institutes in the private industrial sector in Japan, and a competition developed for staff from university graduates. Only around 1920 did the SMR begin to consider hiring youngsters fresh out of college.7 Itō Takeo, who completed school that year, recalls seeing an SMR recruitment poster on the Tōdai campus and going to sign up for a test.

Why would a liberal-minded young man run off to join a colonial company in a foreign country? From the time he graduated from Tokyo University in 1920 until the end of the war, Itō Takeo’s life was consumed by SMR research on China. His autobiography is a fascinating document in the history of that immense Japanese colonial enterprise, its collection of invaluable materials on China, and the tragedy of those idealistic young men who went to work for the SMR and were broken by the Kwantung Army. As an undergraduate, Itō and his school buddies had become aware of large social issues of the day.

Henry Smith has shown how these confused but concerned young men looked to themselves for standards the nation could no longer supply. Finally they formed the Shinjinkai (New Man Society), a liberal group of boys facing real problems in Japan and the world and posing timeless, imponderable questions about mankind. Ozaki Hotsumi, who later joined the SMR as a consultant, was one of Itō’s classmates also in the Shinjinkai. “The typical member of the Shinjinkai,” writes Chalmers Johnson, “adopted this socially tolerated method of student protest but took care not to go so far to the left as to endanger his chances for bureaucratic employment.”8

But why the SMR? Itō explains that through the Shinjinkai he and his friends met men they admired like Sano Manabu, who was active in social 7 Andō Hikotarō Mantetsu: Nihon teikokushugi to Chūgoku (The SMR: Japanese Imperialism and China) (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 1965), p. 236; Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,”

part 2, Ajia keizai 20, 5 (May 1979): 63–67; and Harada Katsumasa, Mantetsu (The SMR) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984), pp. 138–39.

8 Henry Dewitt Smith, Japan’s First Student Radicals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. xii, passim; Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 29–30; and Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 9, Ajia keizai, 21, 1 (January 1980): 69–70.

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 581

movements in Japan and was also working for the EEB. They had already been introduced to China and the Chinese revolution through the lectures of one of their heroes, Professor Yoshino Sakuzō, the patron saint of Taishō democracy.9

There was an excitement after World War I, when the Western powers were no longer so powerful in East Asia, about the possibilities for social reform, not just in Japan but all over East Asia. Manchuria was sparsely populated; Japan was feeling a population and job crunch; and peaceful expansion for economic development became a popular notion of Japan’s role in forging the new, postwar international order. It is worth reiterating that Japanese liberalism and reformism have never been strictly separated from something known generically as “Japanese imperialism.” Young men like Itō Takeo were not thinking about the conquest of Asia when they joined the SMR, and under their leadership many other like-minded young men came to the research agencies of the SMR.

There were, however, other men associated with SMR research who had radically different ideas about the future of Northeast Asia. Take, by way of example, the case of Ōkawa Shūmei. A believer in Indian Buddhism, he made a sharp transition to radical pan-Asianism when he learned of British imperialism and its deleterious effect on the real India. Two years later, in 1918, he joined the EEB. In China he made contact with Kita Ikki, the noted fascist and former friend of Chinese revolutionary Sung Chiao-jen, and got to know others who would later form the extreme right wing. He attracted a good number of followers in Manchuria in the 1930s.

Another group of right-wing SMR researchers who worked intimately with the Kwantung Army would include first and foremost Miyazaki Masayoshi.

Miyazaki had studied in Moscow before World War I, and he was there at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. He became the leading figure among SMR

Russian specialists, particularly in economic matters. He later forged close ties with Ishiwara Kanji and the Kwantung Army, responding to their call for researchers to take a more active role in the military’s planning. He was there for the Kwantung Army at the time of the Manchurian Incident.10

It is much less difficult to understand why men like Ōkawa, Miyazaki, and those associated with such groups as the Manchurian Youth League went to 9 Itō,

Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 43–50.

10 Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 10, Ajia keizai 21, 2 (February 1980): 71–78; Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 61–63; Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Profile of Asian-Minded Man: Ōkawa Shūmei,” The Developing Economies 7, 3 (1969): 367–79; Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 3, pp. 61–62; and Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 109–10, 208.

582

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

work for the SMR. Nonetheless, the atmosphere among researchers was decidedly liberal and antimilitary. Every memoirist and every critic who has written about SMR research institutions, regardless of their political views, recalls the vibrantly open and free atmosphere there. That atmosphere made it possible for such different types to mix and work together. It also made research at the SMR and in Manchuria generally a much freer place than Japanese institutions or Japan.11 As the political climate moved to the right at home, the SMR would become a haven for many leftists under great pressures in the mother country.

The Kwantung Army had high hopes for the research, but it was still unhappy at what it perceived to be a lack of direction on the part of the Research Section. For all their antimilitary feelings, the researchers could hardly fight the Kwantung Army; in fact, they often needed military protection in the field.

This mutual need was satisfied when Sada Kōjirō became head of the Research Section in the mid-1920s. Sada worked hard to convince the Kwantung Army that by creating an anti-Japanese incident out of Chinese nationalism in Manchuria, the military could strengthen its hold in the region.12 It may not be too far-fetched to say that the Manchurian Incident was the result.

After the Incident, it became increasingly apparent to many SMR researchers that they had no choice but to go along with the Kwantung Army. The volte-face of SMR President Uchida Kōsai illustrates this shift. Although initially antimilitary, after September 1931 he began proposing Manchurian independence, and he earned the disgust of many of his employees. By contrast, Vice-President Eguchi Teijō abruptly resigned, saying: “This [Incident] is Napoleon’s Moscow. It will end in dismal failure.” But, despite its harsher stance, the military still needed the research resources of the SMR to carry out its plans for construction in Manchuria/Manchukuo. It was able easily to entice Miyazaki Masayoshi and several others to plan the creation of an agency that would prepare policy for a new regime in Manchuria. Ultimately, they formed the Economic Research Association (ERA) within the SMR in January 1932, shortly before the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo was announced, 11 Noma Kiyoshi, “Mantetsu keizai chōsakai setchi zengo” (The Establishment of the ERA of the SMR), Rekishi hyōron 169 (September 1964): 69, 72; Andō, Mantetsu, p. 236; Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, p. 142; and Nakanishi Tsutomu, Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de (In the Tempest of the Chinese Revolution) (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1974), pp. 78, 81.

12 Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 88–95; Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 3, pp. 60–61.

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 583

Miyazaki and his co-workers then moved en masse over to the ERA to help facilitate the passage of research information to the Kwantung Army.13

Loyal research staffers began to fear for their autonomy, one of the cherished traditions at the Research Section. Their leaders could no longer be trusted, for everyone knew that SMR presidents came and went as a function of party politics back home, and now the head of research, Sada Kōjirō, was demonstrating more fidelity to the military than to his own men. Word got out in mid-1933 that, at the Kwantung Army’s instigation, the Secretariat for Manchurian Affairs was planning a massive reorganization of the SMR to place it directly under the control of the military. Unified military control in the region, it was hoped, would facilitate economic and industrial development.

The SMR employees association, under the leadership of Itō Takeo, decided to confront the army. They issued a manifesto which began with the words:

“The SMR is an inheritance bequeathed by the Meiji Emperor, and it will permit no arbitrary violations.” As he vividly describes below, Itō immediately fell under a shadow, suspected by the military police and criticized openly by the Manchurian Youth League, but he persevered. The association decided to send representatives to the SMR stockholders’ meeting in Tokyo with the authority to speak on behalf of the entire SMR staff. Even the SMR board of directors tried to stop this “unthinkable” opposition to the Kwantung Army—unsuccessfully. Ultimately, Itō realized that the only sane solution was for the employees association to devise its own reorganization plan, which the military eventually accepted.14 Although ostensibly a victory, this was the last gasp of overt research independence. The Kwantung Army now had high hopes for research to be prepared by the ERA.

It was one of the fascinating ironies of this whole subject that the man hired to head the Era’s “agricultural economy” desk a position of considerable importance and responsibility, was a well-known Marxist from Kyoto University, Ōgami Suehiro, a man much influenced by Japan’s first Marxist economist, Kawakami Hajime. Ōgami came to the SMR on the recommendation of his senior classmate from Kyōdai, Amano Motonosuke, perhaps the most famous scholar of Chinese agriculture in the postwar period and also a Marxist. From the mid-1930s, they and others brought numerous left-wing scholars onto the research staff. ERA research still served the needs of the military, and this fact 13 Itō,

Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 154–55; Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 97–102; Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 19, Ajia keizai 22, 1 (January 1981): 78–79; and Noma, “Mantetsu keizai,” pp. 72–74.

14 Itō,

Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 156–64; Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 4, Ajia keizai 20, 7 (July 1979): 52–54.

584

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

no one denies. ERA staffers prepared enormous quantities of reports, surveys, and document collections on every aspect of the economy, natural resources, local industry, and agriculture of Manchuria and North China. Research for the strategic needs of the army was carried out in six areas—agriculture, the general economy, timber, livestock, marine produce, and transport.15

Although researchers could no longer oppose the military in their reports, there were several other means by which they might express their own views.

For example, the 101 members of the ERA staff sent to study agriculture and water utilization based their examination on the unit of the village. After a thorough analysis of the contemporary state of village life, their reports often stressed rural poverty in China and the ill it boded for public order.

Indeed, it could lead to banditry or rebellion, code words for anti-Japanese or Communist uprisings. The implication was clearly that unless conditions were improved, the Japanese Army would have monumental problems on its hands.

Independent views might also see the light of day in one of the SMR serial publications. Tremendous debates transpired on such things as the nature of the Chinese economy, and the lingua franca of these debates was always Marxism.

In addition there were private ways to retain one’s integrity, such as the study groups of SMR researchers on Marx’s Capital or Wittfogel’s work.16

In 1935 Itō Takeo was transferred to the SMR office in Tien-tsin, near the Chi-tung (Kitō, in Japanese) area recently demilitarized by the Japanese Army.

He used his time to devise a rural investigation scheme for twenty-five villages in Chi-tung, to which the military promptly and unexpectedly consented. Itō

was an avid student of the work of Liudvig I. Mad’iar, and he used the theories of this Hungarian refugee in the Soviet Union to frame the overall questions asked about the nature of Chinese villages, water control, and the like.

Concern at this time with the Chinese village was not just an ERA phenomenon. Many scholars—John Lossing Buck, Wilhelm Wagner, Karl A. Wittfogel, and Mad’iar among others—focused on it as holding the secret to the Chinese 15 Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 132–33; Ishidō Kiyotomo, “Mantetsu chōsabu to Marukusushugi” (The Research Department of the SMR and Marxism), vol. 2 in Undō shi kenkyū (Studies in the History of the Movement), ed. Undō shi kenkyūkai (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1978), pp. 8, 10–11; Kusayanagi Daizō, Jitsuroku Mantetsu chōsabu (The True Story of the Research Department of the SMR), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Asahi shimbun sha, 1979), p. 121; Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 19, pp. 84–87; part 20, Ajia keizai 22, 2 (February 1981): 87–90; part 21, Ajia keizai 22, 3 (March 1981): 89; part 25, Ajia keizai 22, 7 (July 1981): 91–95, 97–98; part 18, Ajia keizai 21,12 (December 1980): 56–67; and part 29, Ajia keizai 23, 2 (February 1982): 74–75, 79.

16 Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 30, Ajia keizai 23, 3 (March 1982): 71–74; Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, p. 129; and Ishidō, “Mantetsu chōsabu to Marukusushugi,” p. 10.

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 585

economy, and the works of all these foreign scholars were translated by SMR

organs in the 1930s. Itō hoped that his fourteen teams (thirty-one researchers in all) would be able to apply “scientific” (namely, social scientific) methods and come up with “scientific” results. Although the reports were criticized then and Itō felt that they fell somewhat short of “science,” we are nonetheless indebted to these researchers for bequeathing us a wealth of data not otherwise available anywhere, even though it may have served the military’s needs.

In actual fact, as Hara Kakuten has shown, some of the research findings did not accord with the military’s wishes, and this led to distrust and eventual tragedy for some of the researchers.17

After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, the short-lived Industrial Department, which had replaced the ERA, was renamed the Research Department again (the Research Section having been dissolved shortly after the founding of the ERA). The military was becoming desperate, as it now needed large-scale integrated research for long-term planning. To that end, the Research Department underwent an enormous expansion from early 1939. The scholars brought onto the staff in the late 1930s were largely left-wing, socialists and Communists. This was precisely at the time when Marxism was all but banned in Japan, when (as Yamada Gōichi put it) if the expression shakai (social) appeared in the title of a book, it was usually confiscated. As Itō notes, and many have followed him in this regard, Japanese leftists were prepared to come to Manchuria for three reasons: their political movements in Japan had been crushed; they had been arrested and made tenkō (true or false); or their pasts were known and they were unable to find work at home.

The SMR research organs welcomed them with open arms, especially because the SMR was expanding and because these people, politics aside, were trained in research and had a “scientific approach. Hama Masao put it well:

“Between Japan and Manchuria there was an ‘intellectual time-zone change.’”

Among the many leftists who joined the SMR in the late 1930s were Ishihama Tomoyuki, Hosokawa Karoku, Itō Ritsu, Gushima Kenzaburō, and Ozaki Hotsumi. Some of these fellows then helped others, and some came with letters of introduction from former members of the Shinjinkai to the SMR’s Shanghai office where Itō Takeo was now in charge. This body of leftists then proceeded, ironically, to aid the main players in Japan’s pursuance of total war.18

17 Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 32, Ajia keizai 23, 10 (October 1982): 58–61; part 31, Ajia keizai 23, 8 (August 1982): 77, 80, 82–86; and the details of the reports of the various research teams summarized in part 33, Ajia keizai 23, 12 (December 1982): 85–88.

18 Ibid., part 5, Ajia keizai 20, 8 (August 1979): 99, 102–103; Itō, Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 217–19; citation from Kusayanagi, Jitsuroku Mantetsu chōsabu 1:25.

586

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

The Kwantung Army must have been aware of all the thinkers of dangerous thoughts who were coming to work for the SMR. Staffer Yamaguchi Susumu recalls that when he left the Research Department in 1942 to return to Japan, he was given a party at a Shanghai restaurant, and the “Internationale” was sung by way of send-off.19 This would have been unimaginable in Japan, and the army must have known about such things. I have no definitive answer to this puzzle, just a few suggestions. Perhaps the army believed these tenkōsha had truly reformed. More likely the military’s need for overall large-scale research by a large number of well-trained social scientists, knowledgeable in the latest methodologies, outweighed immediate political interests. Men like Ōgami Suehiro were indeed Marxists, but only as intellectuals or theorists, not as movement activists. Might an otherwise obtuse military have been aware of such subtle distinctions? Might it have been willing to accept the value of Marxist analysis while keeping close wraps on any spread of a social (or socialist) movement in Manchuria or North China?

Indeed, many left-wing researchers had managed to conceive of the role of Japanese imperialism as ultimately progressive as far as Manchuria’s and China’s social development were concerned. In 1937 Ōgami wrote an essay arguing that the perspective of class was appropriate to historical research but that, in the final analysis, the state took precedence over class. Most researchers buried themselves in the institutes of the SMR to wait out the war.

Among the major “integrated” studies were the famous village investigations of North China, which have been used by Ramon Myers, Philip Huang, and most recently Prasenjit Duara. The SMR now had considerable experience with field work in Chinese villages (throughout Manchuria and Chi-tung), and a more thorough, long-term investigation was launched in 1940, completed in 1942. The fascinating background to this cycle of research has never been discussed in English. Although space precludes a detailed analysis here, one should at least note that, beyond the many volumes of research reports, an additional eighty or more articles were published in the SMR journal Mantetsu chōsa geppō by these very researchers on Chinese agriculture and village society.20 This represents an untapped gold mine. The subjects of several other 19 Kusayanagi,

Jitsuroku Mantetsu chōsabu 1:25.

20 Ibid., pp. 122–25; Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 34, Ajia keizai 24, 1 (January 1983): 60–66; part 35, Ajia keizai 24, 2 (February 1983): 80–84; and part 36, Ajia keizai 24, 3 (March 1983): 56–57, 60–62. Niida Noboru makes three important points about these village studies: (1) While they were surely part of Japan’s colonial aims, the researchers themselves were just scholars, without any political motives. (2) The aim of the research was not to come up with a “definitive thesis” ( teisetsu) but to find, insofar as they could,

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 587

massive, “integrated” studies can only be mentioned: Chinese property laws, the textile industry, financial structures and practices, inflation, rice markets and brokers, wartime economic conditions, and much more.21

A remarkable story surrounds perhaps the most interesting of the “integrated” projects of SMR research, discussed briefly by Itō: “The Investigation of the Resistance Capacity of the Chinese” (Shina kōsenryoku chōsa). The implications of such a study for military needs are self-explanatory. In mid-1938 a base office in Dairen was set up, and research began out of the Research Department branch offices in Nanking, Hankow, Canton, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, with the center of operations under Itō’s auspices in Shanghai.

There were thirty researchers in all, including Ozaki Hotsumi. Nakanishi Tsutomu (Kō) had responsibility for writing up the group’s findings.

Unbeknownst to all but a tiny handful of his co-workers was the fact that Nakanishi was all the time an operative of the Japan Communist Party (JCP).

He had entered the Tō-A dōbun shoin (East Asian Common Culture Academy) in Shanghai m 1929, a common route into the SMR, and there he acquired a mastery of the Chinese language. During his time in school in China, he and several schoolmates developed overwhelming sympathies for the Chinese revolution, and they felt part of an international workers’ movement When he was finally expelled from school for his activities, he returned to Japan to take guidance from the JCP.

He returned to China to enter the SMR (presumably under a JCP directive) in April 1934. Hidden away as a small cog in a mammoth machine, he made his own studies of the workers’ movement and general economic conditions in Manchuria, which were published in SMR journals in 1934–1935 and were completely in the analytical Marxist vein.22

the “living laws” ( ikeru hō) that operated within Chinese society, replete with all their contradictions. (3) The research was carried out in the latter half of the Sino-Japanese War, and the researchers were unable to see the internal changes underway in Chinese villages at the time, new elements emerging and to be found in post-1949 society. See Noma Kiyoshi, “Chūgoku nōson kankō chōsa no kikaku to jisseki” (The Planning and Execution of the Village Studies in China), Rekishi hyōron 170 (October 1964): 9; and Hara,

“Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 35, pp. 80–81.

21 Analyzed in much detail in Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 37, Ajia keizai 24, 4 (April 1983): 61–63, 67–78; part 38, Ajia keizai 24, 5 (May 1983): 42–50; and part 39, Ajia keizai 24, 6 (June 1983): 74–80.

22 Nakanishi,

Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, pp. 35–37, 47–48, 77–78, 81–83. On the Tō-A dōbun shoin, see Douglas R. Reynolds, “Chinese Area Studies in Prewar China: Japan’s Tōa Dōbun Shoin in Shanghai, 1900–1945,” Journal of Asian Studies 45, 4 (November 1986): 945–70.

588

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

By 1937 Nakanishi had developed the commonplace Communist depiction of the Chinese economy as “semifeudal and semicolonial.” Manchuria was different, however, and he broke with the party line and disagreed with Ōgami’s designation of “semifeudal” for the Northeast. In Manchuria, according to Nakanishi, one could clearly see the development of capitalism underway. The debate evolved in SMR serials, entirely in the language of Marxism, although it was not entirely a theoretical exercise. Nakanishi had been one of Itō Takeo’s Chi-tung village investigators, and he had spent fifty-five days in four villages (one in each of four counties), questioning locals about land practices and the like. His analysis of the “ruthless feudal exploitation” of landlords in China, backed up by large quantities of data, provided the background for several more research essays in SMR journals. He also travelled extensively in China on his own or to make political contacts.23

Throughout his years in China, Nakanishi was establishing and retaining contact with a small circle of JCP and CCP agents. What these contacts ultimately amounted to is difficult to surmise; for it is precisely in this extremely intriguing aspect of his activities in China that Nakanishi combines a large dose of boasting with little real information. The result is a combination of frustration and infuriation on the part of the reader of his memoirs, for even the names of his Chinese Communist contacts are usually only pseudonyms.

Two words he repeats endlessly throughout his memoirs are undo (the movement) and soshiki (the organization).24

For some reason Nakanishi, a low-level SMR employee and a sub rosa Communist, received major responsibility in this project, most likely because he, of all people, was on good terms with the military. He had served for a time in the Shanghai office of the special services unit of the Kwantung Army. He threw himself into this new work with a supreme sense of confidence that could only have been supported by complete methodological certainty. His assessment of the resistance capacity of the Chinese was not simply going to be a comparison of Chinese and Japanese troop strength or abstract economic might. One had to analyze the specific nature of the formation under wartime conditions of China’s capacity to resist Japan materially, politically, and economically. The five basic elements to be studied in the formative process of Chinese resistance were: its weaknesses as a semicolonial, semifeudal states; its national development over the previous century, especially the 23 Yamada,

Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 139, 150–52; Nakanishi, Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, pp. 96–101, 112–15.

24 See, for example, Nakanishi, Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, pp. 142–45, 166, 177, passim, especially the very last lines of his book, p. 275.

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 589

previous two decades; its backward rural economy; international conditions; and, finally, the Japanese occupation of China and the consequences of a guerrilla war.25

Two years after the commencement of research, a huge report was drawn up for submission to the Kwantung Army. It stressed the importance of political rather than purely economic factors in the mobilization of China’s capacity to resist. Although Nakanishi was attacked by a more devoted Marxist on his staff for not giving sufficient weight to economics, he took the blame for this and stressed that for him “politics” encompassed “revolution.” He argued that the political and economic realms had been inextricably united over the previous century of rapid modernization in China. And now the Japanese invasion had forced an alliance between the CCP and the KMT.26

China was an immense agrarian society, the report argued, and Japanese forces could occupy all of its major cities while the hinterland would become the bases of anti-Japanese resistance. For, and here Nakanishi injected results of his earlier research, the city and the village were not organically linked by economic ties as was the case in modern states. The links, such as existed, were extraeconomic. Researchers examined eleven places of Chinese resistance, especially in the countryside, and studied rural reconstruction, peasant mobilization, and the flow of goods to the resistance bases from foreign countries. They concluded that the Chinese could resist from the rural areas for an exceedingly long time in what would become a war of attrition, and that they would continue to receive military hardware from the USSR. In other words, Japan could not win military in China without stretching supply lines so far as to be unable to protect them.

The report went on the compare the roles of the CCP and the KMT in mobilizing resistance. It found the key in the CCP’s superior political organization and military leadership. The Communists had been successful because they were implementing land reform programs to gain peasant support. The report emphasized that, because of the conditions of the United Front, these land policies were no longer aimed at eliminating private property in land or wiping out landlords as a class. By contrast, the KMT sought to preserve the landlord 25 Shina kōsenryoku chōsa iinkai, Shina kōsenryoku chōsa hōkoku (Investigative Report into the Resistance Capacity of the Chinese) (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1970); Nakanishi, Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, pp. 220–21; and Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 41, Ajia keizai 24, 8 (August 1983): 83–84.

26 Miyanishi Yoshio, Mantetsu chōsabu to Ozaki Hotsumi (The Research Department of the SMR and Ozaki Hotsumi) (Tokyo: Aki shoten, 1983, pp. 56–57, 60, 65; and Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 41, pp. 85–86.

590

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

system; once trapped by the masses, such landlord-KMT types often realized they were better off with the Japanese, and Wang Ching-wei provided the perfect example. The fall of Hankow had made many Chinese landlords fear that support for Chiang Kai-shek would only insure their destruction, and that they now had to throw in their lot with the Japanese. But the real bases of resistance were in the rural hinterland, primarily under Communist control. Whereas the countryside could carry on economically without the urban areas, the reverse was not true. Thus, conquest of China’s coastal cities did not imply control over China and the end of resistance; in addition, without the flow of goods from the countryside it ultimately would be impossible even to hold these areas.

After all, even after the fall of Hankow and Canton, unoccupied China was still larger than the continental United States.27

Even from this brief, skeletal description of an extraordinarily rich study, it should be clear that Nakanishi was right in almost every way. Japan could not defeat China militarily. When Mao Tse-tung’s “On Protracted War” became known shortly after this report was completed, it made many of the same points. Nakanishi now had to present his report to its sponsors, the Kwantung Army. He persuaded the commanding officer of Japan’s Nanking Army that what he had to say was important, and he and Gushima Kenzaburō, a collaborator on the study, travelled by military transport to Tokyo to make the same report to General Staff Headquarters. There they argued on the basis of their findings for a political end to the war in China. When they were finished there was silence; finally a young staff officer asked: “So, then, what sites would it best for us to bomb? I’d like to know the key points.” It is impossible to know if he was being sarcastic, if he was hiding something, or if he was just an idiot. They lectured elsewhere in Japan, before returning to China for engagements before military and civilian audiences in Peking, Chang-chia-k’ou, and elsewhere.28

As it became clear that the essential points of this study were in actuality taking place for all to see and defeat loomed large on the horizon, the military responded by “killing the messengers.”

The first sign of trouble was the arrest in November 1941 by the Kempeitai (military police of the Kwantung Army) of Suzuki Kohei, Satō Daishirō, and about fifty other organizers of a peasant cooperative movement in northern Manchuria. Suzuki had been a member of the Shinjinkai at Tōdai, became 27 Hara, “Mantetsu chōsabu no rekishi,” part 41, pp. 86–87, 89–91; part 42, Ajia keizai 24, 9

(September 1983): 82–91; Kusayanagi, Jitsuroku Mantetsu chōsabu 1: 20–21; and Nakanishi, Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, p. 222.

28 Citation from Kusayanagi, Jitsuroku Mantetsu chōsabu l:22; Nakanishi, Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, pp. 224, 242; and Itō, Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 219–21.

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 591

involved in left-wing politics in the 1920s, was arrested three times in Japan, and was a well-known theorist and author of Manshū no nōgyō kikō (The Structure of Manchurian Agriculture). At the invitation of Ōgami Suehiro, he joined the Research Department, although he later broke with Ōgami theoretically stressing (with Nakanishi) that developing capitalism characterized Manchurian agriculture. He left the RD in July 1940 to devote himself to organizing peasants in Manchuria. For their part, the authorities saw the agricultural collective movement, and its founder Satō Daishirō in particular, as organizing peasants in the interest of the rural areas, not working for the greater glory of the Japanese Empire.29

In June 1942, Nakanishi was arrested. He had expected the ax to fall at any moment, especially after the arrest of his friend Ozaki Hotsumi, and had packed his bags in preparation for departure to Yenan where fellow JCP

member Nosaka Sanzō spent the entire war. Nakanishi claims to have known that Ozaki was a JCP member, but nothing at all about the Sorge spy ring. The Kempeitai had been following him for some time, apparently having begun to suspect his Communist sympathies after hearing his report on the resistance capacity of the Chinese. Apprehended with him in this sweep were his longtime friends, classmates at the East Asian Common Culture Academy, and fellow sub rosa Communists Anzai Kuraji, Ozaki Shōtarō, and Nishizato Tatsuo.30

The Kempeitai became convinced that what linked all these groups—the peasants organizers, the Ozaki circle, and Nakanishi and other members of the JCP—was the SMR’s Research Department. No one was especially surprised then when the arrests moved over directly into the research staff. A Kempeitai order dated 17 September 1942 read in part:

(1) The complete picture of the Communist movement among those associated with the SMR has now become clear as a result of the 28 January operation [arrests in the agricultural cooperative movement]. (2) The Kempeitai of the Kwantung Army will move to extract and remove it. (3) The heads of the Kempeitai in the cities of Hsinking, Dairen, Harbin, Fengtien, and Chin-chou 29 Tanaka Takeo, Tachibana Shiraki to Satō Daishirō: Gassakusha ji-ken Satō Daishirō no shōgai (Tachibana Shiraki and Satō Daishirō: The Agricultural Cooperative Incident and the Career of Satō Daishirō) (Tokyo: Ryōkei shosha, 1975), pp. 1–5; Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 150–52; and Kodama Taizō, “Hiroku: Mantetsu chōsabu” (Memoir: The Research Department of the SMR), Chūō kōron 75, 13 (December 1960): 201, 203–204.

30 Nakanishi,

Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, pp. 263–65, 269–74; and Itō, Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 237–39.

592

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

are responsible for the arrest and detention of suspects according to item one of the enclosure. Arrests will begin on 21 September.31

Roughly fifty researchers were rounded up late that September. Among them Ōgami was arrested in Kyoto, where he was back teaching economics at Kyoto University. A second group of SMR employees, including Itō Takeo, was arrested in June and July 1943. There he was reunited, with former members of the Shinjinkai, apparently one of the sufficient conditions for arrest. Ōgami and four others died of typhoid fever contracted in Manchurian prisons.32

The Kwantung Army had also begun a massive confiscation of books and periodicals in an effort to substantiate the existence of an intricate Communist plot among Japanese in Manchuria. The result was an 850-page tome, completed in 1944, entitled Zai-Man Nikkei kyō sanshugi undō (The Communist Movement of Japanese in Manchuria), It analyzed hundreds of books and articles principally from SMR publications for the political bent of the argument, and it described the background and activities of numerous SMR staffers.

In spite of their expectation of being apprehended after others’ arrests, most SMR employees and subsequent commentators seem genuinely surprised that the “‘SMR Incident” took place. Weren’t these researchers, whatever their theoretical views, aiding and abetting the Kwantung Army’s conquest of Asia?

Hadn’t they been providing the military with reams of research? The answer to both questions is, of course, yes. In fact, many lived out their lives with a profound sense of guilt. Ishidō Kiyotomo, a former Shinjinkai member from Tōdai and an SMR researcher, threw a wet blanket on this whole discussion several years ago when he argued that the SMR Incident has to be understood purely as an army operation. Zai-Man Nikkei kyōsanshugi undō, he argues, is a tissue of pure fiction, proof of nothing. If the SMR was packed with actively engaged Communists, why were those arrested charged as individual violators of the peace preservation law, and only a few charged as conspirators? The whole mess was an elaborate excuse for the military’s failures in China, he claims, and this helps explain why many arrested researchers languished in prison for several years before even being indicted.33 The authorities were unable to get their stories straight. With the exception of Nakanishi Tsutomu and a tiny handful of others, all talk of “Mantetsu Marxism” (the term is Yamada Gōichi’s, but the idea is widespread), he argues is utter nonsense.

31 Cited in Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, p. 162.

32 Nakanishi, Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, pp. 266–67; Itō, Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 239–43; and Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 155, 158–60, 163–65.

33 Itō, Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 243–51; Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 154–55; and Ishidō,

“Mantetsu chōsabu to Marukusushugi,” pp. 11–12, 16–18.

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 593

Except for the five who died of fever, arrested researchers did not suffer excessively in prison, certainly not as much as apprehended Chinese Communist guerrillas. Itō Takeo recalls their screams from regular torture sessions every evening, although he himself was scarcely ever questioned. Nakanishi says not a word about his prison experiences, interrogations, or torture; and he welcomes 15 August 1945 as a glorious event, a “May Fourth for East Asia.” Released from prison that November, he stayed in Tokyo to take his marching orders for the new postwar movement rather than return home to his certainly anxious family.34

At one point in his memoirs, Nakanishi, who became a celebrity in the postwar Communist movement in Japan, says of SMR field work:

Our immensely detailed research in no way served the cause of Japanese imperialism. Just before the 7 July [1937] invasion and war in China, the Japanese military authorities in North China requested of the research organs of the SMR a study of whether they could manage the five provinces of North China severed from South and Central China. The conclusion reached by the SMR study was no.

Itō Takeo similarly suggests that the military attacked the SMR as part of an irrational, antiscientific bias.

From the very beginning the military welcomed and made use of the results of our research activities, but as defeat in the war became more clearly ominous, the situation changed. They compelled intellectuals to provide all sorts of materials and to study them, but when the results of all this research pointed to defeat, it was extremely undesirable to them. Although the military realized that it would be defeated, they had to continue to fight, and in order to cover over this complex they abused their final authority and the Research Department of the SMR was liquidated.

The dissolution of the Research Department did not have to wait for the 15th of August—it had occurred in the arrests of 1942–43. The real significance of the SMR Incident lay in the fascist assault and repression by the military of our scientific work.35

There is more than a kernel of truth in both these assessments. The Japanese military had some of the finest minds at their disposal to carry out the most detailed theoretical and field work studies that have ever been done by anyone in China. None of the researchers really fooled themselves into thinking that they were not collaborating with the army; many actually felt that, although 34 Itō,

Mantetsu ni ikite, p. 244; Nakanishi, Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, p. 275.

35 Nakanishi,

Chūgoku kakumei no arashi no naka de, p. 115; Itō, Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 256–57, emphasis Itō’s.

594

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

they disagreed fundamentally with the military, in the final analysis they had the best interests of Japan and the Japanese at heart. The army listened closely to what SMR researchers said and wrote.

The problem is that when an SMR report conflicted with what the army really wanted to do, as startlingly apparent in its response to Nakanishi’s report on China’s resistance capacity, the army simply ignored it. A comparison with the American military and the war in Vietnam suggests itself here. The United States was similarly fighting a limited war against a guerrilla foe with principal support in the villages (not the cities); and one can imagine General Westmoreland’s commissioning an American Nakanishi to prepare a report of the Vietnamese resistance and receiving exactly the same conclusions the Kwantung Army got. The interesting thing is that the U.S. Army, of course, had no such research operation as the SMR, and the U.S. government was often criticized in the 1960s for being colossally ignorant of Vietnamese realities; for, if it knew anything about its enemy and that enemy’s history, the argument went, it never would have waged such a land war in Southeast Asia. The Kwantung Army had the largest research institute in the world at its beck and call. When it commissioned just such a report, it simply ignored the conclusions, arrested the authors, and pressed on with a calamitous and brutal war.

This experience should make us all pause and reflect. The simple fact that after 1932 the SMR researchers were not exercising free rein over the topics of their research is important. The vanity that one reads in the memoirs of those whose lives were linked to SMR research, vanity in the sense that their work, because of its “scientific” pretensions, was somehow beyond reproach, is startling. The army ran the whole show. The only freedom that researchers had was within parameters prescribed by the army. When the army needed a scapegoat, it blamed the researchers for reports full of Communist influence.

The army did what it wanted.

I think that the questions often raised about the utility of this immense volume of research bequeathed by the SMR may be meaningless. Philip Huang and others caution that however valuable the village studies may seem, they were ultimately the product of an aggressive occupying force. First of all, the village field work in Manchuria and China proper was but one tiny part of the SMR’s total research accomplishment. Second, researchers were clearly aware at the time of the extraordinary situation in which they found themselves.

Third, if bias is imputed to researchers because of natural sympathies for their Japanese army sponsors (something, in any event, that is patently false for the most part), then would they not have striven to make their reports as accurate as possible? Finally, if there is any systemic prejudice in SMR research that

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company 595

postwar scholars using this material should be aware of, it is ironically the general intellectual Marxist inclination of all the research, especially the village studies and the numerous articles published separately in SMR journals.

In the postwar period many former SMR researchers found jobs without much difficulty in Japanese institutions of higher learning, something that had been virtually impossible for people of their general intellectual persuasion in the 1930s. Others became involved in leftist postwar politics. They lived with a mixture of guilt and pride: guilt for their service to Japanese imperialism; pride for their accomplishments as free-thinking scholars, a fact attested to by their arrest by the real perpetuators of aggression. Itō Takeo, Kazami Akira, and several others came together shortly after the war to organize a Sino-Japanese Friendship Association, which, like comparable associations elsewhere in the world, combined an uncritical respect for the People’s Republic of China with criticism for the policies of the Japanese government vis-à-vis China. When their delegations returned from trips to China, they reported on a new, liberated country, something rapidly approaching heaven on earth.36

A number of SMR researchers decided to stay in China after the collapse of Japan and the SMR. Some of these men wanted to facilitate the transfer of the SMR’s immense holdings to the Chinese. Although many returned to Japan after a period of five to ten years, they were instrumental in negotiating Sino-Japanese normalization. Yokogawa Jirō, an SMR sociologist arrested in 1943, remained in China for many years after 1945. Sarakura Masao, an employee in the Ore Deposit Geological Research Division of the SMR, chose to stay in the Northeast after the arrival of the Eighth Route Army. He worked for years with Chinese technicians to pass along the technological advances in Manchurian energy resources to the Chinese. Blamed for an accident and arrested as a

“counterrevolutionary element,” he eventually was repatriated to Japan where he wrote his memoirs, Jinmin fuku nikki (A Diary of Serving the People). In it he explained that he felt the SMR had a responsibility that its nearly forty years of research not go for naught.

Many of the SMR researchers who obtained university positions after the war became major figures in postwar East Asian studies. Village investigators Niida Noboru, Amano Motonosuke, and Hatada Takashi are just three of the most prominent names in three different fields. They have all gone to pains in the decades since the war’s end to assume some measure of guilt, albeit unconscious, for Japanese imperialism, while retaining a sense of pride in their truly 36 Itō,

Mantetsu ni ikite, pp. 272–74, 277–78.

596

Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the SMR Company

formidable accomplishments. This was also the only opportunity any of them would ever have to do field work in China.

Itō Takeo first published his memoirs in 1964, long before the more recent spate of books on the SMR, the Research Department, and Manchuria itself.

His book has become a minor classic in this area of research and remembrance in Japan, in part because he was able to bridge many ideological gulfs that otherwise separated Japanese connected to these events in China and Japan. The integrity of his position has reached a position that has now become virtually unassailable. His memoirs were the starting point for Yamada Gōichi’s study of the Research Department in 1977 and the most often quoted secondary source in Hara Kakuten’s mammoth study of the Research Department published a few years ago.

When I first decided to translate Mantetsu ni ikite in 1984, I discussed it with Mr. Sakatani Yoshinao in Tokyo. It turned out that Mr. Sakatani was a close personal friend of Itō, and when he communicated the news Itō was overjoyed.

He died shortly thereafter. I sent my draft translations of chapters to Sakatani as I completed them, and his corrections and comments amount to over one hundred pages. Was a translator ever so fortunate? Particular difficulty arose with a number of names of Germans who were invited to Japan as consultants in the early days of the SMR. All the biographical information supplied by Itō

concerning Messrs. Thiess, Wiedfeldt, and others was simply copied uncritically by subsequent scholars (Yamada, Hara, and others) into their accounts, despite the fact (as I recently discovered) that this information is not completely correct. I have amended the translation in those few places where Itō

introduced extraneous and incorrect material.37

37 Ibid., 271–72; Yamada, Mantetsu chōsabu, pp. 182–83.

■ Source: “A New Direction in Japanese Sinology,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44.1

(June 1984), 225–47.

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

Chūgoku shitaifu kaikyū to chiiki shakai to no kankei ni tsuite no sōgōteki kenkyū 中国士大夫階級と地域社会との関係についての総合的研究

[ Studies on the Relationship Between the Literati Class and Local Society in China], Tanigawa Michio 谷川道雄, ed. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 1983.

Historical materialism has dominated postwar Japanese historiography on China, but its great influence is now crumbling or, rather, in the process of being overcome. The noble postwar task of rescuing China from theorists of stagnation by giving her a history, making her historical development resemble that of any European country or Japan, and thus bringing her into the course of world history foundered ultimately when more facts proved exceptions than regularities to the “basic laws of world history.” One could point to traits in Chinese society over time which indicated developmental stages in modes of production. The next step of claiming thereby the unity of the universality of world history with the particularity of the Chinese experience proved considerably more problematic. The distinctiveness of Chinese society could never simply be generated by the “mode of production.” For example, large-scale land management (as a mode of production) and a despotic state structure did coexist in time but should not have, for theory dictated that small peasant management accompany the despotic state.

The “basic laws” position (namely, the strict Marxist stance of stages of historical development through which all societies pass: ancient-slavery, medieval-feudalism, modern-capitalism) has been most closely identified in the postwar era with Tokyo University, although many prewar Marxist scholars were educated at Kyoto University. Niida Noboru’s 仁井田陞 impassioned declaration in the early 1950’s equated the identification of a “feudal” era in China (when and how it developed, what it was, and when and how it was overcome) with the very return to China of her history. This identification virtually constituted a humanitarian act.1 That was over thirty years ago, and little of

* All publishers are located in Tokyo unless otherwise noted.

1 Niida Noboru, “Chūgoku shakai no ‘hōken’ to fyūdarizumu” 中国社会の「封建」とフ

ューダリズム [“Feng-chien and Feudalism in Chinese Society”], Tōyō bunka 東洋文化 5

(April 1951): 1–39; revised in Niida, Chūgoku hōsei shi kenkyū 中国法制史研究 [ Studies in

598

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

theoretical substance has been added to this position since. Much research has called this whole paradigm into question. The recent and most telling rebuttals of the Marxist analysis of Chinese history have come from Kyoto, first from her medieval and ancient historians and now in a comprehensive treatment covering Chou through late Ch‘ing in the volume under review. The study group that produced this volume met at regular intervals in Kyoto over a three-year period (1980–82), with scholars coming from as far south as Okinawa and as far north as Sendai, though the overwhelming majority of contributors were trained at Kyoto University.

The volume is a collection of fifteen essays, preceded by a summary introduction by Tanigawa Michio, one of Japan’s leading historians of medieval China. The book is not primarily focused on refuting Marxism, but implicit in the way Tanigawa and the other authors construct the central problem is a refutation. The impetus for convening the study group from which this volume emerged was a general dissatisfaction with our understanding of the distinctiveness of Chinese society and a search, not temporally fixed, for the nature of the shih-ta-fu 2 士大夫 or literati class as a ruling elite distinctive to premodern China (defined here as pre-Western impact). Before getting entangled in the issues of the shih-ta-fu as property owners or as a talent pool for the despotic state to transform into bureaucrats, these essays locate the shih-ta-fu’s most basic element in their direct contact with the common people and the arena of that contact—local society—where the two groups coexisted.

Once we can answer such questions as how to differentiate the shih-ta-fu and the common people over time, or how the shih-ta-fu were able to maintain control in local society, we will know much more about the basic structure of Chinese society.

Who were the shih-ta-fu, and how old is the term? The expression shih-ta-fu originates in the Chou ruling hierarchy of ch‘ing 郷 (minister), ta-fu or tai-fu 大夫 (lower rank of minister), and shih 士 (“knight”)—all beneath the princes and feudal lords of the Ch‘un-ch‘iu period.3 Tanigawa argues that, as a historical category, shih-ta-fu had already begun to take form in the Eastern Chou.

They were the class strictly differentiated from those they ruled, the shu-jen 庶人 (commoners or peasants). The shih-ta-fu were often given lands with Chinese Legal History], vol. 3, Dorei nōdo hō, kazoku sonraku hō 奴隸農奴法家族村落法

[ Laws Governing Slavery and Serfdom, Laws Governing the Family and the Village] (Tokyo University Press, 1962), pp. 97–146.

2 Also read shih-tai-fu.

3 Cho-yun Hsu, Ancient China in Transition: An Analysis of Social Mobility, 722–222 BC.

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 5–8.

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

599

vassal powers under the Chou feudal system. While the shu-jen’s primary social function was to produce on the land, the ruling class as a body enjoyed religio-ceremonial and military duties. In this way, the two major classes of ancient China complemented each other’s functions.

Most analysts have been considerably less sanguine about the nature of elite-mass relations in ancient China, even those who have studied the phenomenon. But Tanigawa is not focusing on oppression and its instruments per se as an index to the origins of a local elite; rather, he is trying to come to terms with the origins of that elite (and indeed its oppressive capacity) by using something other than economic determinism or a spruced up version of the same. This remains implicit, however.

The ruling class lived off the produce of feudally allocated lands which provided an economic basis for their ceremonial and military needs. Scholars have long debated the role of shu-jen in all this. At the same time that the ruling class enjoyed special privileges, it also bore the task of supervising and maintaining order for the whole of society. The difficulty of distinguishing the elite’s privileges from its duties remains the distinctive inconsistency or contradition of China’s elite. Rarely has the class structure of Chinese society been addressed on the basis of this “contradiction.” If this contradictory nature of shih-ta-fu persists through Chinese history, then it may prove useful in understanding Chinese social structure.

In the Chou, membership in the ruling class was determined by the clans that constituted that class. The clans reproduced themselves by offering the appropriate training to clan members who were prospective members of the elite. The Six Arts comprised the basis of this education and included training in ceremonial and military matters. The special privileges, beginning in the Chou, afforded the shih-ta-fu a certain transcendent power. These privileges were in part exercised through Confucian education and learning, which was in turn linked to a moral consciousness on the part of the shih-ta-fu as the guardians or superintendents of local society.

The first essay in this volume, “Chūgoku kodai kanryōsei keisei ni kansuru ichi shikaku” 中国古代官僚制形成に関するー視角 [“One Perspective on

the Formation of the Bureaucracy in Ancient China”], by Emura Haruki 江村

治樹 (Nagoya University), addresses the Warring States period. The ruling elite of the Western Chou appear clear to us in origin, economic base, and social and political roles because of the overriding importance of clan ties to society and politics. But in the Eastern Chou, as a bureaucratic system and a centralized ( chün-hsien 郡県) empire began to take shape, relationships between rulers and ruled become less evident. Emura begins with the basic issue of the nature of the new ruling class of officials, and he questions the view of Masubuchi

600

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

Tatsuo 増淵龍夫, who has argued that a patriarchal bureaucracy emerged in the territorial states at the end of the Eastern Chou.4

While not openly disagreeing with Masubuchi’s construction of the problem, Emura stresses that Masubuchi looked solely at the sovereign-minister (or lord-vassal, chün-ch‘en 君巨) personal bonds and not at the social environment which gave rise to them. Emura points out that Confucian as well as Mohist philosophers of the Warring States period called for the bureaucratic recruitment of “men of virtue” ( hsien-che 賢者), and that in fact men were often selected on the basis of their demonstrated “virtue.”5 He wants to revise the generally held theory that the chün-ch‘en bond brought a gross inbalance to rulership, and he shows with a healthy use of the Shih-chi 史記 that designations of “virtue” were often based on popular views.

In graphic terms, Emura is suggesting that the relationship of sovereign-minister-populace was not a strictly vertical despotism. The ministers, upon receiving the confidence of the people, were honored by the sovereign. In other words, by the Warring States era the officials enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy than had their precursors when the tsung-fa 宗法 system was still intact.

Tomiya Itaru 富谷至 (Kyoto University), in his essay “Shin Kan ni okeru shonin to shigo: oboegaki” 秦漢における庶人と士伍・覚書 [“Notes on

shu-jen and shih-wu 士伍 in the Ch‘in and Han”], looks at the legal positions of and legal distinctions between officials and commoners in the Ch‘in-Han era in contrast with the earlier period. He examines the meanings of the two expressions shu-jen and shih-wu as they appear in the Shih-chi and Han-shu 漢書. Tomiya argues that shu-jen were: (a) people freed from slave or servitude status; (b) exonerated or pardoned criminals; and (c) men of high station 4 First in Masubuchi’s “Sengoku kanryōsei no ichi seikaku” 戦国官僚制の一性格 [“One Characteristic of the Bureaucracy of the Warring States Period”], Shakai keizai shigaku 社会

経済史学 21.3 (1955): 1–32; also included in his Chūgoku kodai no shakai to kokka 中国古代の

社会と国家 [ Society and the State in Ancient China] (Kōbundō, 1960). Later, in his “Iwayuru Tōyōteki senseishugi to kyōdōtai” 所謂東洋的専制主義と共同体 [“ ‘Oriental Despotism’

and the ‘Community’”], Hitotsubashi ronsō 一橋論叢 47.3 (March 1962): 22–50; and “Shunjū

Sengoku jidai no shakai to kokka” 春秋戦国時代の社会と国家 [“Society and the State in the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Periods”], in vol. 4 of Iwanami kōza: sekai rekishi, kodai 岩波講座:世界歴史, 古代 [ Iwanami Symposium on World History—Ancient Period] (Iwanami Shoten, 1970), pp. 139–83.

5 Emura has also addressed this topic in “ ‘Ken’ no kannen yori mitaru Sei-Kan kanryō no ichi seikaku”「賢」の観念より見たる西漢官僚のー性格 [“One Characteristic of the Western Han Bureaucracy as Seen From the Ideal of Hsien”], Tōyōshi kenkyū 東洋史研究

34.2 (September 1975): 29–49.

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

601

who had committed a crime. The recurrent expression mien wei shu-jen 免為

庶人 does not, he claims, refer to dismissed officials returned to commoner status.6 Following the suggestion of Tsuruma Kazuyuki 鶴間和幸,7 Tomiya believes this expression referred to officials who, for one reason or another, were relieved of their stipends. Shih-wu referred to the rank held by an official ( shih 士) who, for the commission of an offense, had been stripped of the rank he held and his stipend. In other words, it was a rank within the official status system of “zero rank,” the mark of Cain if you will.

Tomiya’s interesting conclusion is that receiving a stipend and possession of shih rank are what distinguished official from commoner in Ch‘in-Han society.

In the Chou this distinction had been based on the blood relations stipulated by tsung-fa principles; in Ch‘in-Han times, imperial power seems to constitute the decisive element. In the subsequent era of disunion, the Six Dynasties period, the situation will again change. Noteworthy, though, is the enhanced degree of autonomy for the shih-ta-fu class from Chou to Han.

Kawakatsu Yoshio 川勝義雄 (Kyoto University), who has contributed more than any other scholar to our understanding of the developing autonomy of the local intellectual elite, has argued that the late Later Han marks the end of an era (China’s ancient period), as the ch‘ing-liu 清流 (Pure Stream) movement presages the origins of the aristocratic class of the Six Dynasties era.8 Although Kawakatsu did not contribute to this volume, Higashi Shinji 東晉次 (Ehime University) follows his lead in the essay, “Go-Kan chishiki kaisō no keisei ni kansuru oboegaki” 後漢知識階層の形成に関する覚書 [“Notes on the

Formation of the Intellectual Class in the Later Han”].

Higashi sees the formation of a shih 士 class (or “intellectual class,” as he puts it), with a sense of leadership responsibilities in all spheres, beginning from the time of Han Wu-ti 漢武帝 and the official sanctioning of Confucianism. By the end of the Former Han, shih groups had established a virtually national network. Higashi, however, wants also to stress the process of maturation undergone by local society which accompanied the formation of a local intelligentsia. The rise in popularity of Confucianism led to the 6 This was the position taken by Katakura Minoru 片倉壤, “Kandai no shigo” 漢代の士伍

[“Shih-wu in the Han”], Tōhōgaku 東方学 36 (September 1966): 1–14.

7 See Tsuruma Kazuyuki, “Kanritsu ni okeru funkyū kitei ni tsuite” 漢律における墳丘規

定について [“On Rules Governing Funerary Mounds in the Han Legal Code”], Tōyō bunka 東洋文化 60 (1980): 1–21.

8 Kawakatsu’s important essays on this theme have been collected in Part One of his recent volume, Rikuchō kizokusei shakai no kenkyū 六朝貴族制社会の研究 [ Studies on the Aristocratic Society of the Six Dynasties Period] (Iwanami Shoten, 1983).

602

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

development, particularly from the middle of the Later Han, of new personal bonds within the officialdom of teacher and disciple (or school). At the same time that they were charged with maintaining local order, local officials who taught in the areas to which they had been sent also forged such bonds. Higashi concludes that the link between the formation of a shih class and the spread of Confucianism insured that they would emerge as an intellectual class.

They were tied to their positions in local society, while it acquired autonomy through them. Both the Chou ruling class and the shih in the Warring States, Ch‘in, and Former Han enjoyed a position removed from and above local society and people, but the intellectual class from Later Han into the Six Dynasties, according to Higashi, clearly possessed a sense of independence extraordinary for any era in Chinese history. We have good reason to call them an aristocracy.

Ueda Sanae 上田早苗 (Nara Women’s University) examines the function of Confucianism in the control of local society by shih-ta-fu in his study

“ ‘Gatsuryō’ to Go-Kan shakai: kyūjutsu o megutte”「月令」と後漢社会：救

恤をめぐって [“ ‘Yüeh-ling’ and Later Han Society: On Relief”]. He focuses on the relationship between politics and local society, on the one hand, and the ku-wen 古文 (ancient text) school, on the other, by looking at the uses to which one text, the “Yüeh-ling” 月令 (a chapter of the Li-chi 礼記), was put.

Wang Mang 王莽 and his “political advisors,” Liu Hsiang 劉向 and Liu Hsin 劉歆, were the first to use the “Yüeh-ling” politically in a series of policies for nurturing and securing the people’s livelihood. In the Later Han, Emperor Chang 章帝 cited the “Yüeh-ling” as an authority in his efforts to bring relief to the impoverished and destitute by opening lands for them to work.

Ueda next examines in detail Ts‘ui Shih’s 崔寔 Ssu-min yüeh-ling 四民月令

[“ ‘Yüeh-ling’ for the four classes of men”],9 an almanac of the great landed clans ( hao-tsu 豪族) living in local villages. In it he recorded the production activities and the everyday lives of these landed clans. Son of a ku-wen scholar who had studied under a man Emperor Chang had sought as his own teacher, Ts‘ui wrote his book towards the end of the Later Han with the aim of restoring local social control to the landed clans through relief work. Because the central government proved incapable in the latter half of the second century, it fell completely to the landed clans to bring aid to local society. Ueda concludes 9 Annotated, translated, and studied by Moriya Mitsuo 守屋美都雄, Chūgoku kosaijiki no kenkyū 中国古歳時記の研究 [ A Study of Ancient Chinese Almanacs] (Teikoku Shoin, 1963); Shih Sheng-han 石聲漢, Ssu-min yüeh-ling chiao-chu 四民月令校注 (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1965); and Miao Ch‘i-yü 繆啓愉, Ssu-min yüeh-ling chi-shih 四民月令輯釈 (Taipei: Nung-yeh ch‘u, pan-she, 1981).

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

603

with a discussion of how the Five Pecks of Rice Movement 五斗米道 based their system of charitable inns upon “Yüeh-ling” prescriptions.

The spread of the ku-wen movement at the end of the Later Han provides the background for Yoshikawa Tadao’s 吉川忠夫 (Kyoto University) essay,

“Go-Kanmatsu ni okeru Keishū no gakujutsu” 後漢末における荆州の

学術 [“Scholarship in Ching-chou at the End of the Later Han”]. With the disintegration of state unity towards the end of the Later Han, the empire split into provincial entities centered upon the official headquarters of the privin-cial governor or chou-mu 州牧. Ching-chou 荆州 was one such region, and Liu Piao 劉表 was provincial governor there. Great scholars from the North came together and formed an erudite cultural “salon” under Liu’s patronage.

Yoshikawa argues that the highest quality scholars in the entire country comprised what might have appeared merely as a salon from the outside, and that the social fluidity of chaotic times led to the cohesion of this national-level phenomenon at a specific locale.

What Higashi cites as the autonomous inclinations of local society are evident in Ching-chou, according to Yoshikawa. Here we do not simply have one locality in conflict with the center, but a locality which contains something of the center. The scholarly mold associated with Ching-chou spread to other regions of China as well. In this way, he argues, it was a harbinger of scholarship in the Six Dynasties, based on ku-wen values with broad intellectual concerns beyond Confucianism to include mathematics, divination, medicine, alchemy, archery, and so on. Yoshikawa groups all of these fields so as to characterize Ching-chou learning as humanistic studies ( jen-wen-hsüeh 人文学

[ jimbungaku]).

Learning or scholarship itself, then, became for shih-ta-fu a great system encompassing the principles of the universe as well as techniques for everyday life. As we begin to move into the Six Dynasties era, a problem confronts us: on what basis did the shih-ta-fu, as the foci of intellectual leadership and particularly as hao-tsu in local society, form relations of coexistence with the local populace? How, in other words, were their special privileges as a ruling class transcended? Tanigawa himself has written at length on this question and has located his solution in the moral ethic of the shih-ta-fu.10 Tsuzuki Akiko 都築

晶子 (Ryūkyū University) takes this one step further in her important essay, 10 See, in particular, Tanigawa’s “Chūgoku chūsei shakai ron josetsu” 中国中世社会論序

説 [“Introduction to a Theory of Medieval Chinese Society”], in Chūgoku chūsei shakai to kyōdōtai 中国中世社会と共同体 [ Medieval Chinese Society and the “Community” ]

(Kokusho Kankōkai, 1976), pp. 1–116; and most recently in his short essay, “Chūgoku chūsei ni okeru ‘oyake’: kyōdan, meibōka shihai, kokka” 中国中世における「公」: 教団名望

604

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

“Shoshi to kyōri shakai: Go-Kanmatsu Gi-Shin ki ni okeru kyōri shakai no tōgō

ni tsuite” 処士と郷里社会：後漢末〜魏晋期における郷里社会の統

合について [“Retired Scholars and Local Society: The Unification of Local Society From the End of the Later Han Through Wei-Chin”].

Tsuzuki’s refinement of the Tanigawa thesis focuses on the scholars in retirement ( ch‘u-shih 処士) as an intermediary group between the great landed clans (hao-tsu) and the people. From the end of the Later Han, men known as ch‘u-shih abandoned the salacious political world, content to pass lives of honorable poverty, out of office, as self-made protectors of the Confucian faith.

Their assumption of the life-style of a kind of sage apparently won the support of many people, and when the organization of local society crumbled they became leaders in the effort to reorganize it. Although originally one element of the landed clans, retired scholars dissociated themselves from what they perceived as the decadence to which the landed clans had declined and inaugurated a movement to purify landed clan leadership in local society.

Tsuzuki points out that the success of retired scholars in this effort can be seen in the Wei-Chin period when members of the landed clans class attained higher cultural (and ethical) aims in an aristocratic society patterned after the retired scholar life-style. In this way the contradiction of a hao-tsu class positioned in one corner of society while at the same time ruling all of society is resolved through the mediation of the ch‘u-shih. One of Tsuzuki’s essential points is that the aristocratic houses of the Six Dynasties period formed a kind of “public institution” ( kōkyō kikan 公共機関) for local society.

In his introduction, Tanigawa suggests a political aspect in this development from self-centeredness ( ssu 私) to public-mindedness ( kung 公) on the part of the local elite. The “aristocracy” was another name for the class prominence of the shih-ta-fu, who now owed their social position not to imperial endowment but to having granted it among themselves on the basis of their allegiance to the Pure Stream movement and “local reputation” ( hsiang-lun 郷論). Again the links to local society emerge. The Later Han witnessed both the formation of a distinctive shih-ta-fu class and the maturation of local society, processes which continued into the subsequent era. The permeation of the aristocratic system into local society profoundly influenced local administration.

A major change in the bureaucratic state of the Six Dynasties period was the remarkable increase in the authority of the local aristocracy for the delegation of office. The more a regime sought security, the more it had to abide by this reordering of priorities, a situation unique to this era of political disunion.

家支配国家 [“The ‘Public’ in Medieval China: Religious Groups, Rule by Local Notables, the State”], Gekkan hyakka 月刊百科 (October 1982), pp. 27–29.

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

605

Regimes might rise with military might and establish a supreme military government, but they had to accommodate the local aristocracy in the assignment of official posts. The example of the Northern Wei provides a clear illustration of this development from a military to a civil state. At first the regime established garrisons ( chen 鎮) to secure local control, and later many of these were converted into regular political districts ( chou 州). This also betokened a state of non-Chinese, Northern origin ( T‘o-pa 拓跋) becoming encompassed in the “civilizing” aristocratic system. Emperor Hsiao-wen’s 孝文帝 (r. 471–500) policy of “detailed determination of families and clans” ( hsing-tsu hsiang-ting 姓族詳定) less than a century after T‘o-pa warriors first conquered North China implied the conclusion of this process, as the state now sought stability through accommodation with the Han aristocratic system.11

Yasuda Jirō 安田二郎 (Tōhoku University) deals with this problem for the Hsiang-yang 襄陽 area (Hupei) in the first half of the fifth century in his essay

“Shin-Sō kakumei to Yōshū (Jōyō) no kyōmin:

Gunsei shihai kara minsei shihai e” 晋宋革命と雍州(襄陽)の僑民: 軍

政支配から民政支配へ [“The Replacement of the Eastern Chin By the

Liu-Sung Dynasty and Migrants to Yung-chou (Hsiang-yang): From Military to Civil Rule”].12 Because of the protracted warfare and chaos in North China, many men of shih background migrated South and established temporary residence in Yung-chou. Before the rise of the Liu-Sung, Yung-chou was placed under a military garrison over which the “provincial governor” ( tz‘u-shih 刺

史) who was also a general held control. No civil official system was installed.

With the advent of the Liu-Sung regime and when migrations from the North began in earnest, policies to place certain lands off limits to migrants, to construct a civil bureaucracy, and to accommodate the great houses were adopted.

As government moved from a primarily military organization to a primarily 11 Described in detail in Kawakatsu Yoshio, Gi-Shin Nambokuchō: Sōdai na bunretsu jidai 魏晋南北朝：壮大な分裂時代 [ Wei, Chin, Northern and Southern Dynasties: An Era of Great Disunity] (Kōdansha, 1974), pp. 331–33.

12 Other work on this topic would include: Ueda Sanae, “Go-Kan makki no Jōyō no gōzoku”

後漢末期の襄陽の豪族 [“The Great Clans of Hsiang-yang at the End of the Later Han”], Tōyōshi kenkyū 東洋史研究 28.4 (March 1970): 19–41; Yasuda Jirō, “Nanchō no kōtei to kizoku to gōzoku dogōsō” 南朝の皇帝と貴族と豪族·土豪層 [“Emperors, Aristocrats, and Local and Powerful Great Clans in the Southern Dynasties”], in Chūgoku chūsei shi kenkyū 中国中世史研究 [ Studies in Medieval Chinese History], ed. Chūgoku chūsei shi kenkyūkai 中国中世史研究会 (Tōkai University Press, 1970), pp. 203–45; Inaba Hirotaka 稲葉弘高, “Nanchō ni okeru Yōshū no chii” 南朝に於ける雍州の地位 [“The Place of Yung-chou in the Southern Dynasties”], Shūkan Tōyōgaku 集刊東洋学 34 (November 1975): 1–15.

606

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

civil one, Yasuda argues, migrants were integrated into the order of the aristocratic system. This reformation of the aristocratic order tells us much about the influence exercised by these migrant shih from illustrious Northern Chinese families who could no longer abide life under military rule in their native areas.

Yasuda’s argument describes the spread and leveling of aristocratic society.

The aristocratic families of migrant shih were initially not regarded as equals of the great Southern houses which enjoyed imperial patronage. Dissatisfaction on the part of the poorer local houses with stagnation, specifically that of the centrally chosen illustrious lines, became a powerful motive force for dynastic change in the tumultuous Southern dynasties. This served both to breathe life into aristocratic society as well as to effect an equalization within the entire aristocratic class, again evidencing that the root of the aristocratic system lay in local society.

Interestingly, when the Northern Wei fell into a state of crisis, it was Han Chinese shih-ta-fu who supported it by organizing military blocs at the local level. How this process unfolded in the Shantung 山東 area is described by Kegasawa Yasunori 気賀沢保規 (Toyama University) in his piece, “Tō-Gi Hoku-Sai seiken to Kanjin” 東魏=北斉政権と漢人 [“The Eastern Wei-Northern Ch‘i Regime and Han Chinese”]. At the end of the Northern Wei, rebellions arose in reaction to the estrangement of the official aristocratic lineage system from both the realm of families of Northern stock as well as from Han local society, a topic Tanigawa has studied more than anyone else.13

The reaction was led by Han shih-ta-fu who rallied soldiers of non-Chinese stock together with local militias. In contrast to the transition from Western Wei to Northern Chou, when these two forces fought together to topple the aristocratic ranking system itself, in the Shantung region we witness the two forces intent on reviving a stagnating aristocratic system. Kegasawa shows how the latter attempt ended in frustration and failure. One commonality he cites between these two historical transitions is the link between the Han shih-ta-fu 13 See, for example, “Hoku-Gi tōitsu teikoku no shihai kōzō to kizokusei shakai” 北魏統

ー帝国の支配構造と貴族制社会 [“The Structure of Power and Aristocratic Society Under the Unified Empire of the Northern Wei”], and “Hokuchō kōki ni okeru shinkyū

kizoku-sei no kōsō” 北朝後期における新旧貴族制の抗争 [“The Conflict Between New and Old Aristocracies in the Latter Part of the Northern Dynasties”], Parts 2 and 3, respectively, of his Zui-Tō teikoku keisei shiron 隋唐帝国形成史論 [ An Historical Analysis of the Formation of the Sui-T‘ang Empire] (Chikuma Shobō, 1971), pp. 123–217, 219–359; and

“Takubatsu kokka no tenkai to kizokusei no saihen” 拓跋国家の展開と貴族制の再

編 [“The Development of the T‘o-pa State and the Reorganization of the Aristocracy], in vol. 5 of Iwanami kōza: sekai rekishi, kodai, pp. 199–243.

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

607

and local society. He also provides an analysis of the complex power structure of the Eastern Wei-Northern Ch‘i which was tied to the Shantung locality.

The Six Dynasties period, then, marked the heyday for shih-ta-fu autonomy as a class, an autonomy supported in local society and which in fact signalled the rise to prominence of local society itself. With Sui reunification of China came the abolition of earlier institutions for official appointment, as well as the transformation of the Nine Ranks 九品 system for official recruitment into the examination system. Both developments served to dissolve the unity of the shih-ta-fu class and political power, wherein local society functioned as intermediary. Yet Tanigawa sees this reverse as only institutional, for the historical movement which had propelled local society into political power was rooted in the shih-ta-fu class and would continue even after the Sui made these institutional reforms. The movements described by Yasuda and Kegasawa indicate a process at work from the end of the Later Han through the Six Dynasties, and the formation of military blocs from the Western Wei through the Sui was part of this process.14 Nor did this movement come to a halt in the Sui, for the rebels that rose at the end of the Sui emerged as leaders of local military blocs. Thus, over this four-century period, local society gave birth to leadership strata one after another with each new wave of political reform; and these leaders shared political power and formed an aristocratic class. Tanigawa has argued that the overall group of new and old shih-ta-fu—from officially acknowledged houses, to the newer aristocratic class of poor and Northern-origin families, to the civil and military officials who rose in the late Sui rivalries—ultimately comprised a massive reservoir for the T‘ang bureaucracy.

It was only when a unified T‘ang secured its base of power that this wave motion was calmed and the Sui institutional reforms actually achieved success. To preserve their position, the shih-ta-fu class had to ally itself closely to central power, and in fact many of the aristocratic houses moved from their native places to the capital. Where, then, did that leave local society?

Otagi Hajime 愛宕元 (Kyoto University) approaches this problem by examining the life of one shih from the era of the great Southern dynastic houses, and his descendants, in the essay “Tōdai Konan shakai no shūkyōteki kankei o baikai to shita shijin to chiiki shakai: Junshū Jinseikan Gi hōshi hi o tegakari ni” 唐代江南社会の宗教的関係を媒介とした士人と地域社会: 潤州仁

14 Tanigawa Michio argues elsewhere that the Wu-ch‘uan garrison, the core of the Western Wei and Northern Chou regimes, was a kind of amalgam of shih-ta-fu and men of Northern stock, backed up by local society. See his “Busen chin gumbatsu no keisei” 武川

鎮軍閥の形成 [“The Formation of Military Cliques in the Wu-ch‘uan Garrison”], Nagoya daigaku Tōyōshi kenkyū hōkoku 名古屋大学東洋史研究報告8 (February 1982): 35–63.

608

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

静観魏法師碑を手掛りに [“Shih and Local Society Mediated by Religious Contacts in Kiangnan society Under the T‘ang: The Stone Inscription to Taoist Priest Wei at the Jen-ching Monastery in Jun-chou (Kiangsu)”]. The inscription eulogizes a Taoist priest by the name of Wei Lung 魏隆 born at the very end of the sixth century into a poor but noble house tracing its roots back into the Liang and Ch‘en dynasties. Inscribed on the reverse side of the stone were 540 names, seventy-six of whom, all from the same village, bear the surname Wei. They included commoners, priests, and officials (with low local positions, some in education). Otagi’s point is to demonstrate that the Weis protected their positions as low-level officials from the Southern Dynasties, and were able to retain a latent power in the Chien-k‘ang 建康 (Nanking 南京) region.

Otagi also shows how they retained leadership roles in local society through the religious authority of Taoism. The Weis preserved local offices through the system jen-tzu 任子 (hereditary transmission of official position), and since jen-tzu was itself in the late Six Dynasties and early T‘ang a deformed incarnation of the aristocratic system, Otagi regards the power of Wei descendants as a product of the Six Dynasties aristocratic system in decline. On the other hand, the fact that the Weis continued to exercise influence in local society in the years under study implies a continuity from the Six Dynasties through the Sui and into the T‘ang.

What effect did the T‘ang-Sung transition have on the nature of bureaucratic recruitment and the local officialdom? Chikusa Masaaki 竺沙雅章 (Kyoto University) deals with this theme in his essay, “Sōdai kanryō no kikyo ni tsuite”

宋代官僚の寄居について [“On the Temporary Lodgings of Sung Period

Officials”].15 From the Sung era, the shih-ta-fu class became virtually indistin-guishable in meaning from the bureaucracy. Chikusa sheds light on shih-ta-fu lifestyles in the Sung from the standpoint of the bureaucracy by looking at a host of issues concerning “officials in temporary residence.” There were many officials in the Sung, but not nearly enough posts to go around. As a result, many without official positions, for example those awaiting new appoint-ments, took up temporary lodgings in convenient areas and often engaged in illegal activities such as the confiscation of local lands. The court responded by enforcing various interdictions in an effort to break the link between such officials and the lands on which they were resident. Chikusa sees the shih-ta-fu actions as a desire to secure personal stability and wealth (which the officialdom had as yet failed to offer them), and the government’s bans as especially 15 A shortened version of his fuller piece which appeared in Tōyōshi kenkyū 東洋史研究

41.4 (June 1982): 28–57.

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

609

severe. We have here one indication (with evidence drawn from a variety of locales) of the change from T‘ang to Sung in the life of bureaucrats.

Unlike the earlier Six Dynasties period, the immediate basis for the shih-ta-fu from the Sung on was not local society. Now they owed their existence to the official status gained through the examination system. In the Six Dynasties, the aristocratic class had been bureaucrats because shih-ta-fu were recognized through the local recommendation system. From the Sung, however, it was on the contrary one’s existence as a bureaucrat which led to recognition as a shih-ta-fu. From this perspective, the T‘ang-Sung transition gives the appearance of having caused a reversal, but the process was not merely contingent on dynastic change but rather part of a larger historical continuity.

Even Max Weber noted that examination officials in China were not administrative specialists but educative politicians. The examinations tested one’s understanding of classical learning and ideas on public policy. Tanigawa feels they thus embodied a shih-ta-fu spirit that combined knowledge and morality.

In other words, examination officials were not imperial lackeys but men saddled with the burdensome political task of governance in the realm. Although we might detect similarities here with the role of knowledge and morality in the relations of the Six Dynasties aristocracy to local society, after the Sung all blood or regional elements associated with family status or clan connections for the shih-ta-fu class had to be abstracted or sublimated into the bureaucratic system itself. Moreover, the method for establishing one’s knowledge and morality was completely objectified from the local recommendation system into the examination system.

We must, then, ask what meaning “local society” had for shih-ta-fu from the Sung era on, and what meaning shih-ta-fu had for local society. Heinous acts of illegality on the lands where shih-ta-fu temporarily resided, as documented by Chikusa, represent one point of contact, a negative manifestation of the examination bureaucrat’s abstracting autonomy in local society.16 Chikusa also discusses positive efforts by locally resident scholars to aid people in need by cooperating with the local administration, and thereby gaining local trust.

The most interesting conceptual essay (and the only one to touch on the Ming dynasty) is Mori Masao’s 森正夫 (Nagoya University) look at the situation confronting shih-ta-fu from the Sung through the Ch‘ing, “Sōdai igo no 16 Chikusa has dealt with a similar issue in his “Hoku-Sō shitaifu no shikyo to baiden, omo ni Tōha sekitoku o shiryō to shite” 北宋士大夫の徙居と買田:主に東坡尺牘を資

料として [“Change of Residence and Purchase of Fields by Officials of the Northern Sung, Material Primarily Drawn from the Letters of Su Tung-p‘o”], Shirin 史林 54.2 (March 1971): 28–53.

610

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

shitaifu to chiiki shakai: mondaiten no mosaku” 宋代以後の士大夫と地域

社会: 問題点の模索 [“Shih-ta-fu and Local Society from the Sung Dynasty On: In Search of the Issues”]. While generally praising postwar Japanese studies of landlordism which have elucidated the material base of China’s ruling class from the Sung on, Mori expresses considerable dissatisfaction with scholarship on the intellectual and moral leadership of the ruling elite in the same era.17 The former does not provide us ipso facto with the latter. The ordered integration of society toward which the ruling class strived was the essence of their intellectual-moral leadership, and this was manifest, of course, at the level of local society. A problem immediately presents itself, for as we have just noted, to the extent that the post-T‘ang shih-ta-fu class and the examination officialdom were identical groups, the intervention of local society was no longer necessary. Logic aside, Mori points out, the realities of history demonstrate that the relationship between shih-ta-fu and local society became closer with each subsequent era. Each age brought the examination system further into local society, while local public and private educational facilities expanded considerably. Remarkable growth in the number of those sitting for the examinations led to the development of a literate class remaining in local society, reaching down even to the level of the peasantry.

Mori treats separately the shih-ta-fu of the Sung-Yüan, Ming, and the Ch‘ing.

Past scholarship on the Sung and Yüan has shown a tendency among shih-ta-fu to live as “retired scholars” with heart and soul devoted to local society in complete rejection of the bureaucratic world.18 Even the shih-yin 市隠 (literally, those who escape the world and live in hiding in the marketplace) of the Ming were a kind of shih-ta-fu linked to these earlier models. Miyazaki Ichisada 宮崎

市定 posed this shih-yin type in contrast to bureaucrats pursuing careers while remaining in contact with their own native areas.19 Mori goes one step further 17 Mori published a series of review essays on Japanese theories concerning the Chinese gentry: “Nihon no Min-Shin jidai shi kenkyū ni okeru kyōshinron ni tsuite” 日本の明

清時代史研究における郷紳論について [“Gentry Theories in Ming-Ch‘ing Historical Studies in Japan”], 3 parts, Rekishi hyōron 歴史評論 308 (December 1975): 40–60; 312

(April 1976): 74–84; and 314 (June 1976): 113–28.

18 Chikusa Masaaki, essay cited above in n. 16; and Naitō Konan 内藤湖南, “Shina kinsei shi” 支那近世史 [“Modern Chinese History”], chapter 16 in vol. 10 of Naitō Konan zenshū

内藤湖南全集 [ Collected Works of Naitō Konan] (Chikuma Shobō, 1969–76), pp. 510–20, especially the section entitled “Kakyo seido no mushi to dokushojin kaikyū no seiritsu”

科擧制度の無視と讀書人階級の成立 [“Disregard for the Examination System and the Formation of a Literati Class”], pp. 513–15.

19 Miyazaki Ichisada, “Mindai Soshō chihō no shitaifu to minshū” 明代蘇松地方の士大

夫と民衆 [“The Literati and the Masses in the Su-Sung Area in the Ming”], Shirin 史林

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

611

in documenting cases of shih-ta-fu resident in rural villages: namely, intellectuals with Confucian training but with no interest whatsoever in becoming examination officials. Their tenacious moral and intellectual leadership, linked to individual character led, Mori says, to the formation of a rural integration of shih and commoner.

The question remains as to how we are to link (a) the fact that an examination officialdom emerges in the Sung era without the need for the intermediacy of local society, and (b) the leadership role of shih-ta-fu in local society. Mori suggests an avenue to resolving this dilemma in the ch‘u-shih, the “retired” or

“distancing” (from central politics) quality, of shih-ta-fu. Although many young intellectuals were educated and qualified to serve as bureaucrats, ossifica-tion and decay in the political realm made such careers impossible for them, and they left the official career route in search of a path to independence.

They were not trained simply as imperial toadies, but had a moral and intellectual leadership component in their own self-conception, and this aspect compelled them to choose a “retired” life-style. This, then, is the link which resolves Mori’s “antinomy,” for among the examination officials themselves there coexisted two opposing tendencies: cogs in a bureaucratic structure on the one hand, they sought personal autonomy on the other. This latter aspect, a response to perceived crassness in the official world, pushed many shih-ta-fu away from major population centers and into a cohesive bond with local society. At the same time, Mori notes, local society was also being adversely affected by bureaucratic decadence, and the “retired” group of shih-ta-fu served to bring relief to local society and expunge this pernicious influence.

Although he deals with an altogether different period from Tsuzuki Akiko, Mori’s treatment of the “retired scholar” aspect of the shih-ta-fu resembles her analysis of retired scholars in the late Later Han. The earlier retired scholars were manifestations of the pure shih-ta-fu spirit, but surely some of that spirit rubbed off on shih-ta-fu in office. This spirit is represented by Chikusa’s locally resident scholars, but either at home or as temporary residents elsewhere the shih-ta-fu were linked to local society in their role as “educators.”

Morita Kenji 森田憲司 (Nara University) addresses the educational role played by low-level scholars in local society during the Yüan period in his essay “Sainanro kyōju Ri Teijitsu o megutte: Hibun no senja to shite no kyōkansō” 済南路教授李庭実をめぐって:碑文の撰者としての教官層

[“On Li T‘ing, shih, Instructor on the Chi-nan Circuit: Educational Officials as Authors of Stone Inscriptions”]. He approaches this problem by examining 37.3 (June 1954): 1–33; reprinted in vol. 4 of his Ajia shi kenkyū アジア史研究 [ Studies in Asian History] (Kyoto: Dōhōsha, 1980), pp. 321–60.

612

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

the relationship between people who wanted stone steles inscribed to their ancestors and the person asked to do the inscriptions, Li T‘ing-shih. Offically, Li served in a local educational capacity along two circuits in Shantung. His clients for inscriptions mostly included low-level local bureaucrats and some peasants; Morita regards this group as the leaders of the lowest unit of local society. Even Li was not sufficiently important to warrant mention in the official history. In addition to their educational duties, Morita argues, Confucian officials performed such tasks as carving stone inscriptions for local men of influence, and they often left a record of this in the county gazetteer. He offers a fascinating insight into this side occupation, the human links it fostered, and the centrality of local schools and the local educational system to this process.

Where Mori’s essay notes that the development of the examination system and educational institutions contributed to increasing the body of the shih-ta-fu group locally, Morita’s work specifically traces this development to clarify the cultural position of schools in local society. One might ask where the Taoist views located by Otagi in Kiangnan fit into this picture. Tanigawa suggests that the local educational establishment was severely constricted by the center, and that it could only restore its cultural-educational function by assuming various diverse forms in local society. The advent of an increasingly autocratic monarch from the Sung era on nurtured a sharp opposition between center and locality that had not been visible in the Six Dynasties period.

Although this opposition often remained latent, it continued to grow and became even deeper under the alien Ch‘ing regime. One of its manifestations is the variety of ways in which the local elite expressed themselves on issues of concern to local society. This is Ōtani Toshio’s 大谷敏夫 (Kagoshima University) theme in his excellent essay, “Shindai kyōshin no rinen to gen-jitsu: Hōtō, hōken, seidenron o chūshin to shite” 清代郷紳の理念と現実: 朋党·封建·井田論を中心として [“Ideal and Reality in the Ch‘ing Local

Gentry: Concerning the Debates over Cliques, Feudalism, and the Well-field System”]. It should be noted that Ōtani has authored a number of important articles which examine the confluence of political and intellectual issues in Ch‘ing history.20

20 See, for example, his “Tai Meisei danzai jiken no seijiteki haikei” 戴名世断罪事件の政

治的背景 [“The Political Background to the Conviction of Tai Ming-shih”], Shirin 史林

61.4 (July 1978): 1–37; “Yōsei ki o chūshin to shita Shindai Ryoku’ei gunsei ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu” 雍正期を中心とした清代緑営軍制に関するー考察 [“An Analysis of the

Green Standard Army of the Ch‘ing, Centering on the Yung-cheng Reign”], Tōyōshi kenkyū

東洋史研究 34.3 (December 1975): 81–123; and “Hō Seishin no jitsugaku shisō ni tsuite”

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

613

Ōtani argues that the statecraft debate which began in the Ming and continued into the Ch‘ing dynasty concentrated on three issues: p’eng-tang 朋党 or cliques and parties feng-chien 封建 or “feudalism” (i.e., decentralized political power); and ching-t‘ien 井田 or the classical (perhaps mythical) well-field system of land tenure. The debates, carried on by local gentry ( hsiang-shen 郷紳) in their capacity as a locally resident elite, arose over problems between the center and the locality concerning political, economic, and cultural leadership (or control). For example, the feng-chien debate centered on autonomous rule for local cities under imperial control; the debate over cliques and parties was concerned with the propriety of alliance between the sovereign and the shih-ta-fu; and the well-field debate aimed at returning “official lands” ( kuan-t‘ien 官田) and garrison lands (t‘un-t‘ien 屯田) to impoverished officials.

The displeasure of the Yung-cheng 雍正 Emperor forced these debates to subside for a time, and in fact a number of figures were impeached.

Administrative decadence during the reign of the Ch‘ien-lung 乾隆 Emperor led, however, to the reemergence of statecraft thought primarily in Kiangnan cities, and this trend unfolded further in the Chia-ch‘ing 嘉慶 and Tao-kuang 道光 years. Particularly in opposition to Ch‘ing rule, Ōtani argues, did local society under the leadership of the statecraft shin-ta-fu class come to speak on its own behalf. He cites the works of Wei Yüan 魏源, Kung Tzu-chen 龔自珍, Feng Kuei-fen 馮桂芬, and others. One further example was the hsiang-tung 郷董 system21 whereby responsibility for local administration in matters relating to water control was placed in the hands of the local gentry, who functioned in a sort of official-managerial capacity from mid to late Ch‘ing. Both Ōtani and Mori note that the economic development of local society at this time took the form of markets centering on the county unit. The economic as well as political maturation of local society, with a local elite supporting local interests, led to the demand for fundamental political reform.

Ōtani carries his analysis through the yang-wu 洋務 (early Westernization) era and examines the influence of the Western impact on statecraft thought.

包世臣の実学思想について [“On Pao Shih-ch‘en’s ‘Practical Learning’”], Tōyōshi kenkyū 28.2–3 (December 1969): 162–95.

21 See Ōtani’s article, “Shindai Kōnan no suiri kankō to kyōtōsei” 清代江南の水利慣

行と郷董制 [“Irrigation Practices in Kiangnan in the Ch‘ing Period and the Hsiang-tung System”], Shirin 史林 63.1 (January 1980): 144–68. See also Kojima Yoshio 小島淑男, “1910

nendai ni okeru Kōnan no nōson shakai” 一九一〇年代における江南の農村社会

[“Rural Society in Kiangnan in the 1910s”], Tōyōshi kenkyū 東洋史研究 32.4 (March 1974): 87–105; and Kojima Yoshio, “Shinmatsu no kyōson tōchi ni tsuite” 清末の郷村統治

について [“On Village Control in the Late Ch‘ing”], Shichō 史潮 88 (August 1964): 16–30.

614

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

Inoue Hiromasa 井上裕正 (Shimane University) deals with the relationship between the shih-ta-fu class and local society in the midst of this process. In his essay “Go Ranshū to Kanton shakai, toku ni Kakeimatsu-Dōkō shoki ni oite”

呉蘭修と力ントン社会: 特に嘉慶末道光初期において [“Wu Lan-hsiu

and Canton Society in the Late Chia-ch‘ing and Early Tao-kuang Periods”], he examines the nature of the relationship forged between Wu Lan-hsiu and other intellectuals on the basis of the “first opium debate” in the late Chia-ch‘ing years.22 Wu organized a group of chu-jen 擧人 and sheng-yüan 生員

into the Hsi-ku-t‘ang 希古堂, a literary society closely linked to Juan Yūan’s 阮元 Hsüeh-hai-t‘ang 學海堂. Following Wu’s activities closely, Inoue demonstrates his role as an intermediary in the “debate” over legalizing opium that took place indirectly between Pao Shih-ch‘en 包世臣 and Ch‘eng Han-chang 程含章. Furthermore, Wu’s essay “Mi-hai p‘ien” 弭害篇 (On repressing the injurious) later became the basis for Hsü Nai-chi’s 許乃濟 famous memorial to rescind the ban on opium.

Although the Opium War has long been seen as the beginning of modern Chinese history by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars—Marxist and non-Marxist alike—Inoue sees it rather as the culmination of a longer historical process beginning earlier and continuing afterward. At the root of this historical process was the integrated realm of local society and the shih-ta-fu class. Inoue’s case study apparently confirms Mori’s hypothesis that this unified structure continued to support Chinese society into the late Ch‘ing.

22 Inoue has also addressed opium-related issues in “Kindai Chūgoku gaikōshi kenkyū ni tsuite, toku ni Ahen Arō ryō sensō ki no Chū-Ei kankei o chūshin ni shite” 近代中国

外交史研究について, 特にアへン·アロー両戦争期の中英関係を中心について

[“On Studies of Modern Chinese Diplomatic History, Particularly Sino-British Relations at the Time of the Opium and Arrow Wars”], Tōyōshi kenkyū 東洋史研究 34.1 (June 1975): 116–27; “Shindai Kakei Dōkō ki no ahen mondai ni tsuite” 清代嘉慶道光期のアへン問

題について [“On the Opium Issue in the Chia-ch‘ing and Tao-kuang Eras of the Ch‘ing dynasty”], Tōyōshi kenkyū 41.1 (June 1982): 58–83; “Shindai Kanpō ki no ahen mondai ni tsuite, toku ni Kanpō hachi (1858) nen ni okeru ahen boeki no gōhōka o megutte” 清

代咸豊期のアへン問題について, 特に咸豊八(一八五八)年におけるアへン貿

易の合法化をめぐって [“On the Opium Issue in the Hsien-feng Period of the Ch‘ing, Particularly the Legalization of the Opium Trade in 1858”], Shirin 史林 60.3 (May 1977): 73–106; and “Shindai Kakei ki no ahen mondai ni tsuite, Kakei ki zempan no ahen kinrei o chūshin to shite” 清代嘉慶期のアへン問題について, 嘉慶期前半のアへン禁

令を中心として [“On the Opium Issue in the Chia-ch‘ing Period of the Ch‘ing Dynasty, Particularly the Ban on Opium in the First Half of the Chia-ch‘ing Era”], Shimane daigaku hōbun gakubu kiyō, bungakuka hen 島根大学法文学部紀要, 文学科編 4 (December 1981): 43–68.

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

615

A major element unifying these studies of shih-ta-fu life over a two thousand year period is the link between the generic moral-intellectual character of the shih-ta-fu and control of the local populace. This collection of essays represents the first effort in any language to study this relationship over time in a scholarly way. By focusing on local society—the world in which people actually led their lives—these studies try to locate the role of this moral-intellectual realm in everyday life. This aspect of the local elite’s existence has often been noted in the past, but it is usually relegated to at best a secondary importance, as intellectual and moral concerns often are. Here, all the authors, and Tanigawa most vociferously, argue it is not a facade but a real facet of class control in imperial China.

These essays also demonstrate that the structure of control was not a static phenomenon, and they show the changes over time, particularly before and after the great T‘ang-Sung divide, in the mechanisms for local rule. One of the more significant accomplishments of this volume has been to establish more clearly many of the connections between the examination system and local society from the Sung era onward. Of course, research into one local area does not necessary apply in its findings to any other locality, and can only be refined through comparative research elsewhere.

The final essay in this volume, by Uemura Yasuo 植村泰夫 (Kyoto University), examines similar issues of local society and control for a region of Indonesia: “Nijū seiki sho Shidoarujo no desa kyōyaku ni okeru desa shuchō

no chii o meguru oboegaki” 20世紀初シドアルジョのデサ協約におけ

るデサ首長の地位をめぐる覚書 [“Notes on the Position of the Village

( desa) Head in the Village Covenants of Sidoardjo County in the Early 20th Century”]. Its inclusion in this volume is somewhat confusing; at best it suggests approaches for future research.

At long last we in the West have some common ground for dialogue in the study of Chinese history. The study of local history and local elites has been a passion of Western scholars over the past decade or more, primarily for scholars of the later imperial period. Now we have a systematic attempt by Japanese scholars to examine the same phenomena, with the added advantage of a preponderance of studies on the pre-T‘ang period in which the Japanese have traditionally excelled.

This focus on the structure of local power in China is not an entirely new direction in Japanese scholarship. Tanigawa and Kawakatsu have been working for some time on the nature of local society and the centrality of what they call the “community” ( kyōdōtai 共同体) to Chinese social structure in the period from Han through early T‘ang. Actually the root of this investigation goes back to Naitō Konan 内藤湖南 (1866–1934), Japan’s foremost scholar of Chinese

616

A New Direction in Japanese Sinology

history in the prewar years. Naitō identified in local society the highest level of any meaning for understanding the mechanics of how China operated. He also clearly downplayed the importance of the central government, particularly after the T‘ang, as irrelevant to an understanding of daily life in China.

In the immediate post-war years, prewar scholarship became the object of a mass cathartic denunciation as the sinological world exorcised from its midst any trace of scholarship that might have, consciously or unconsciously, contributed to Japanese imperialism on the Asian mainland. Naitō and his writings were generally vilified as a cosmetic cover for avowedly aggressive aims; and there can be little doubt that Naitō believed in certain avenues of Japanese expansion and that his scholarship may have supported his political views.23

Unfortunately, Naitō’s scholarship was shunned together with his politics, and so his important scholarly insights were ignored by all but a few for some time. There seems no longer to be any embarrassment associated with citing Naitō’s writings—he has even been given a rather high assessment in China recently.24 While it may be premature to announce the dawn of a “new age,”

since Marxism in a variety of guises continues to occupy an important place in Japanese sinology, it is interesting to note that as “the postwar has ended” (to use the Japanese expression) the truly significant scholarly contributions of the prewar years loom ever larger.

23 I discuss this in my forthcoming book, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934), Harvard East Asian Monographs (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1984).

24 Hsia Ying-yüan 夏應元, “Nei-t‘eng Hu-nan ti Chung-kuo shih yen-chiu” 内藤湖南的中

国史研究, Chung-kuo shih yen-chiu tung-t‘ai 中國史研究動態 2 (1981): 1–16.

■ Source: “On the ‘Rediscovery’ of the Chinese Past: Cui Shu and Related Cases,” in The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 3–21.

(Originally in: Perspectives on a Changing China (Westview, 1979), 219–35.)

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past: Cui Shu and Related Cases

What is meant by the “rediscovery” of some old text, ancient heritage, or person from another era? A whole range of differing circumstances surrounds each of the various entities that we include under this rubric. For instance, the rediscovery par excellence was Dunhuang, where for centuries texts had been preserved in a cave in Gansu Province, apparently without a soul ever having seen them. A less perfect although still exemplary case involved the works of Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), the brilliant protonationalist and anti-Manchu her-mit from Hunan, whose writings were supposedly unknown for 150 years until Zeng Guofan (1811–1872) sponsored their republication. Wang’s works were not totally unknown during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; in fact, from the research of Chinese scholars in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we know that more than a handful of Chinese scholars saw Wang’s writings in manuscript form and commented on them in their own essays throughout this lengthy hiatus. As one eminent sinologist explained to me, “It took a big shot like Zeng Guofan to sponsor the publication of so sensitive a writer as Wang.”1

This essay concerns several even less perfect cases of phenomena her-alded, nevertheless, by their promoters as “rediscoveries” (Chinese zai faxian; Japanese sai hakken)—in particular, that of the remarkable eighteenth-century historian and classical scholar Cui Shu (1740–1816). Cui’s works were never lost or sealed in a cave, nor were they remotely anti-Manchu; the importance of his ideas simply had been ignored for a century. Thus, his “rediscovery” involved the resuscitative efforts of twentieth-century scholars who found contemporary meaning in his writings that had been missed or ignored by other readers

* This essay is a slightly revised form of the one that appeared in Perspectives on a Changing China: Essays in Honor of Professor C. Martin Wilbur on the Occasion of His Retirement, ed.

Joshua A. Fogel and William T. Rowe (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979), pp. 219–35.

1 See Tang Mingbang, “Wang Chuanshan shiji fangwenji” [A Record of Visits to Historical Spots Relating to Wang Fuzhi], in Wang Chuanshan xueshu taolunji [A Symposium on the Learning of Wang Fuzhi], ed. Hunan Hubei sheng zhexue shehui kexue xuehui lianhehui (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 574–91. When this article first appeared, the “eminent sinologist” referred to here was still living. Fang Chaoying (Zhaoying) has since passed away.

618

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

for many years. What is especially interesting about the case of Cui Shu is that his rediscovery occurred twice—once in China and once in Japan—under entirely different circumstances, and it therefore provides us with a fascinating case of comparative sinology. Thus, this essay has the following aims: (1) to present several cases of “rediscovery” of earlier historians by both Chinese and Japanese historians of this century; (2) to ask why Cui and others were seen as so vital by their revivers; (3) to interpolate possible Sino-Japanese connections; and (4) to discuss the importance of the rediscovery effort itself.

For nearly half a century the historiographical output of the Republican period has been shielded from critical evaluation by two connecting forces: (1) a pervasive nationalism, which among other things has taught students of modern Chinese history that all foreign powers and Japan in particular were monstrous ogres at virtually every turn (this can greatly distort one’s perception of events in twentieth-century history and bring an emotional charge to terms like “imperialist”), and (2) the research of a handful of men, like Hu Shi (1891–1962) and his group of students, whose overwhelming intellects have made serious criticism of their work, or in fact their whole intellectual project, extremely difficult. This essay concentrates on the latter of these forces, which itself was heavily influenced by Chinese nationalism. In recent years historians have begun to liberate themselves from this influence and slowly have gained a better understanding of both scholarship in and the history of the Republican period. Nevertheless, much work remains to be done; much needs to be reassessed. Furthermore, whereas we know something about political ties between the Chinese and Japanese in that period (e.g., Sun Zhongshan, Li Dazhao, China rōnin, anarchism), we know much less of intellectual or scholarly ties. For that matter, we know little about late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Japanese sinology. I hope to contribute here to a better understanding of these traditions of scholarship.

Cui Shu’s Dual Rediscovery

In the April 1923 issue of Guoxue jikan [Journal of National Studies], Hu Shi introduced Cui Shu, a then little-known scholar from Zhili, to a large segment of the Chinese intellectual world. Several years before, Gu Jiegang (1893–1980), Hu’s pupil, had begun a laborious process of editing and punctuating Cui’s entire corpus of writings; the final product appeared fifteen years later in 1936

in sixteen string-bound volumes ( ce) as the Cui Dongbi yishu [Collected Works of Cui Shu]. In his biography of Gu, Laurence Schneider wrote that “of all the obscure scholars that he resuscitated . . . none had been more obscure than

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

619

Cui Shu, nor did any receive more lavish treatment and studied reverence.”2

Schneider suggested that Hu learned of Cui from Zhang Xuecheng’s writings, but as the late Arthur Hummel pointed out in his superb essay on Cui, there is in fact “no evidence” that Zhang knew of Cui Shu’s existence.3 The information came from elsewhere.

The Cui Dongbi yishu contains not only an edited and punctuated edition of Cui’s writings, it includes numerous essays by those who collaborated with Gu in the project (Qian Mu [b. 1895], Qian Xuantong [1887–1938], Hu Shi, William Hung [Hong Ye; 1893–1980], Zhao Zhenxin, and others); reprints of portions of many essays that touch on Cui; a complete punctuated edition of the extant writings of Cui’s younger brother Cui Mai ( Cui Degao xiansheng yishu

[Collected Works of Mr. Cui Degao]) and of four of Cui’s ancestors, several in-laws, and close relatives; maps of Cui’s travels; and more. In the following year William Hung and others prepared an index to Ciu’s work, the Cui Dongbi yishu yinde, as part of the Harvard–Yenching index series.4

Throughout much of the introductory sections to the Cui Dongbi yishu, thanks and praise are traded among the editors with great delight over their completed project.5 Perhaps the most revealing of these sections, however, is Gu Jiegang’s own prefatory comments, in which he explains in detail how he 2 Laurence A. Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 93.

3 Arthur Hummel, “Ts’ui Shu” (Cui Shu), in Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912), ed. Arthur Hummel (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), p. 778. This short essay on Cui is the best I have seen in any language. Hummel was apparently really taken with Cui. Professor Chaoying Fang, who did a great deal of work on the Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period project, told me that he added to or touched up virtually every entry in that volume except Hummel’s on Cui, to which he made no alterations whatsoever. See also Arthur Hummel, “Portrait of a Scholar,” in There Is Another China: Essays and Articles for Zhang Poling of Nankai (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948), pp. 131–50.

4 Hong Ye (William Hung) et al., eds., Cui Dongbi yishu yinde [Index to the Collected Works of Cui Shu] (Beijing: Harvard–Yenching Institute Sinological Series, no. 5, 1937). Considering all the truly seminal works in Chinese culture that still have no indexes, this index to Cui’s writings stands out remarkably; it reflects the kinds of concerns surrounding this whole project, which I shall discuss presently.

5 Qian Mu’s introduction deserves special mention for its typically brilliant command (even forty years ago) of all sorts of materials. His conclusion that Cui Shu, like Chinese people and thinkers in general, always suffered from an over-abundance of reverence for antiquity, is the hallmark of his famous Zhongguo jin saibainian xueshu shi [Chinese Intellectual History over the Past Three Hundred Years] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1986). Qian Mu, “Xu”

[Introduction] to Cui Dongbi yishu, ed. Gu Jiegang (Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1936), vol. 1, pp. 15–17. Every subsection of this work has its own pagination.

620

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

found various of the Cui materials and identifies who helped at which points of the project. This is interesting less for its content than for the fact that Gu makes no mention that Cui’s works had been edited, punctuated, and published thirty-two years earlier in Japan.6 We will return to this omission shortly.

In the case of Cui Shu, something closer to the ordinary usage of the term

“rediscovery” occurred at the turn of this century with a group of Japanese sinologists.7 In 1900 one of the founders of the Kyoto school of sinology, Kano Naoki (1868–1947), was performing some research in Beijing when the Boxer Rebellion erupted. He is said to have gone to great risks in carrying out with him twenty-five juan in manuscript form of Cui Shu’s most famous work, the Kaoxin lu [Record of Investigating Beliefs]. When he arrived in Japan, he showed them to Naka Michiyo (1851–1908), who is generally considered the father of modern sinology in Japan and is the man who coined the term Tōyōshi (East Asian history).8 Naka was convinced quickly that Cui was someone of intellectual import and set out to prepare an edited and punctuated edition (with Japanese-reading punctuation) of the Chinese texts of Cui’s writings.

6 Gu Jiegang, “Xu” [Introduction] to Cui Dongbi yishu, vol. 1, pp. 1–4. Gu reveals later in other prefatory notes, comments, and by the inclusion of various essays that he was fully aware of the Japanese edition, and Hu Shi knew of it many years before. Gu, though, chose to ignore it here.

7 This side of the story has yet to be told straight through with full accuracy. For partial accounts, see: Hashimoto Masayuki, “Sen-Shin jidai shi” [History of the Pre-Ch’in Period], in Meiji igo ni okeru rekishigaku no hattatsu [The Development of Historiography from the Meiji Period], ed. Rekishi kyōiku kenkyūkai (Tokyo: Shikai shobō, 1933), pp. 407–9; Tam Yue-him, “In Search of the Oriental Past: The Life and Thought of Naitō Konan” (Ph.D.

dissertation, Princeton University, 1975), pp. 171–74; Naitō Konan, Shina shigaku shi [History of Chinese Historiography], in Naitō Konan zenshū [Collected Works of Naitō Konan], eds.

Naitō Kenkichi and Kanda Kiichirō (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1969), vol. 9, pp. 393–94. This last source is the most accurate.

8 Miyake Yonekichi, “Bungaku hakase Naka Michiyo kun den” [Biography of Professor of Literature Naka Michiyo], in Naka Michiyo, Naka Michiyo isho [The Remaining (i.e., as yet unpublished) Works of Naka Michiyo], ed. Ko-Naka Michiyo hakase kōseki kinenkai (Tokyo: Dai Nihon tosho, 1915), pp. 32–33; and Goi Naohiro, Kindai Nihon to Tōyō shigaku [Modern Japan and East Asian Studies] (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1976), p. 52. The story goes that at a meeting of middle and upper normal school teachers in 1894, Naka proposed a division of the generic course, “Gaikoku rekishi” (History of foreign countries), into “Seiyōshi” (Western history) and “Tōyōshi” (East Asian history). His proposal was accepted, and so the term Tōyōshi was born. For Naka it meant all East Asian nations (except Japan), with China at the center. By 1897 the Japanese Ministry of Education had recognized Naka’s proposal, and a textbook bearing the title Tōyōshi soon followed. The terms Seiyō and Seiyōshi predate this episode, as does the expression Tōyō.

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

621

In December 1900, an announcement of the project appeared in the main Japanese historical journal of the day, Shigaku zasshi [Journal of History], and said that Naka’s edition would appear as the second item in the Shigakkai sōsho

[Series of the Historical Association]. The notice concluded by reiterating that Cui Shu’s work was extremely important and that it expressed the realization of the idea of “anticipating [clouds and] rainbows in the midst of a great drought” ( taikan ni gei o nozomu), a kind of awkward allusion to the “Liang Huiwang” chapter of the Mencius.9

Naitō Konan (1866–1934), the other principal founder of the Kyoto school, read this notice while in Ōsaka as a staff member of the Ōsaka asahi shinbun and wrote an article, “Dokusho gūhitsu” [Random Notes on Books Read], which the serial Nihon published on January 2, 1901. He apparently had known of Cui before Kano found the Beijing texts, for in his lectures at Kyoto University, which were later turned into the Shina shigaku shi [History of Chinese Historiography], he noted that Naitō Chisō (1826–1902; no relation), an eminent historian of Japan, had read of Cui in the Kuochao xianzheng shilüe

[Biographies of Prominent Chinese of the Qing Dynasty],10 was impressed, and mentioned it to Konan. Chisō had died already, and Konan already owned his own set of Cui’s works by the time of the first Shigaku zasshi notice.

9 “Kōshin roku no honkoku” [Reprinting of the Kaoxin lu], Shigaku zasshi 11.12 (December 1900), p. 127. Mencius, “Liang Huiwang,” xia, 11, no. 2. James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Vol. II: The Works of Mencius (London: Trübner and Co., 1861), p. 47. In this passage, Mencius is referring to an incident from the Shujing [Classic of Documents] to illustrate how anxiously and excitedly the people viewed the great work being done by Tang—later, in the same section, Mencius says, “it was like rain falling at the right time, the people were ecstatic” ( ruo shi yu xia, min ta yue).

10 This account of Cui’s ideas is fascinating and oddly never previously attracted anyone’s attention (so far as we now know). It describes Cui’s distinctive historiographic approach, which we shall examine shortly, and goes into considerable detail. See Li Yuandu, Guochao xianzheng shilüe (Taibei reprint: Wenhai chubanshe, n.d.), vol. 86, pp. 1651–61. As an aside, there is also an entry (from two sources) on Cui in the Guochao qixian leizheng chubian

[Biographies of Qing Venerables and Worthies, Arranged by Categories], comp. Li Huan (Taibei reprint, 1966), vol. 14, p. 8282; this predates all rediscovery efforts by at least a decade, the whole collection having been completed in 1890. I have gone through rapidly the works of Naitō Chisō that I could locate and have found no reference to Cui Shu; my guess is that the communication to Konan was either by letter or done orally. For a brief introduction to Naitō Chisō, see Takasu Yoshijirō, “Kaidai” [Explanatory Preface], in Mitogaku taikei [Great Compendium of the Mito School] (Tokyo: Ida shoten, 1941), vol. 7, p. 15. Chisō was a Kangaku scholar from the domain of Edo who lived into the mid-Meiji era. His principal work was the multivolume Tokugawa jūgodai shi [A History of the Fifteen Generations of the Tokugawa].

622

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

Naitō Konan’s edition was almost certainly a text that had been in Japan since late Tokugawa times. As he personally communicated to his student, Kanda Kiichirō (1897–1984), his edition had come from China and was held in the library of the domain of Tōdō in Ise; this is odd, considering that Cui’s works are not listed among the Chinese books that made their way to Japan in the Edo period.11 In his response to this notice, Naitō reported that his own copy of the Cui Dongbi xiansheng yishu [Collected Works of Mr. Cui Shu] had fifty-five juan and that the Kano–Naka edition did not even contain the complete Kaoxin lu. He went on to suggest strongly that Cui Shu’s works be published as a zenshū (collected works) for the benefit of future readers and cheerfully offered his copy to the Shigakkai sōsho editors. Naitō then moved briefly to a discussion of Cui’s life written by his disciple and original compiler, Chen Lihe (1761–1825), and to the entry on Cui in the Kuochao xianzheng shilüe of which Naitō then translated a large portion.12 Naitō concluded in a thinly veiled tone of slight disgust concerning the way in which the Shigaku zasshi reporters had ended their first notice about “long droughts”; he worded his statement in such a way as to defend Qing scholarship of the Jiaqing (1796–1821) and Daoguang (1821–1851) periods against the idea that this had been a thoroughly arid era in serious historical research.13

In the next issue of Shigaku zasshi, a month later, the editors fell all over each other in apology for their errors in the earlier notice and in gratitude to

“Naitō Konan’s great kindness . . . and genius.” They also reported that Naitō

had lent his edition to Naka Michiyo.14 Naka spent the next three years poring over these texts, punctuating them, correcting errors, and preparing them for 11 Kanda Kiichirō, “Naitō Konan to Shina kodai shi” [Naitō Konan and Ancient Chinese History], in Tonkōgaku gojūnen [Fifty Years of the Study of Dunhuang] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1960), p. 90; and Ōba Osamu, Edo jidai ni okeru mochiwatari sho no kenkyū [A Study of the Books Brought over from China in the Edo Period] (Suita: Kansai daigaku tōzai gakujutsu kenkyūjo, 1967).

12 Hashimoto and Tam, following Hashimoto, argue that Naitō prepared a biography of Cui (in this essay), based on rare works (Tam, “In Search of the Oriental Past,” p. 173) and explicated the Kaoxin lu (Hashimoto, “Sen-Shin jidai shi,” p. 408). In actuality, Naitō

merely translated the section on Cui from the Kuochao xianzheng shilüe, not at all a rare source. Implicit in his doing such a translation, I believe, was criticism of the Shigakkai sōsho project, because there are sections in the source translated that refer to works by Cui that the Shigakkai sōsho people did not know of.

13 Naitō Konan, “Dokusho gūhitsu,” in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 7, pp. 16–17, 21. Originally published in Nihon on January 2, 1901.

14 “Futatabi Kōshin roku no honkoku ni tsuite” [Again on the Reprinting of the Kaoxin lu], Shigaku zasshi 12.2 (February 1901), pp. 125–26.

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

623

publication. In the midst of this work, he published an article on the critical importance of Cui Shu’s Kaoxin lu.15 By 1903 three of four prospective volumes were published; by April 1904 the entire project was complete.16 Naka was so excited with this Cui Shu find that in his more popular work, Naka Tōyō ryakushi

[Naka’s Brief History of East Asia], published in December 1903 while he was still engaged in his Cui Shu research, he devoted a full half page of praise to Cui and the Kaoxin lu, more space than was allotted to Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), Wang Yangming (1472–1529), Sima Qian (135?–93? bce), or virtually any other figure in East Asian history.17

Such an extremely high estimate of Cui was not limited to Naka Michiyo.

On the one hand, Kano seems to have retained a measure of objectivity with respect to Cui;18 and Naitō, aside from a considerable number of references to Cui’s judgments about the validity of certain ancient texts—to which he referred in his own history of ancient China—seemingly wrote nothing about Cui of an evaluative nature.19 On the other hand, however, many others wrote extremely adulatory things about Cui, including Naka’s biographer and a famous historian in his own right, Miyake Yonekichi (1860–1929), who in commenting on Naka’s edition of Cui’s works compared Cui to Motoori Norinaga (1830–1901)—Motoori’s Kojiki den [Commentary on the Kojiki] and Cui’s Kaoxin lu both being exemplary criticisms of biased views of the true meaning of the classics20 (albeit an entirely different set of classics). The general enthusiasm for Cui must have been remarkable, for seventy years later, in his history of the 15 Naka Michiyo, “Kōshin roku kaidai” [Explication of the Kaoxin lu], Shigaku zasshi 13.7

(July 1902), pp. 51–61.

16 Sai Tōheki isho [The Collected Works of Cui Dongbi], ed. Naka Michiyo, four volumes (Tokyo: Meguro shoten, 1903–4).

17 Naka Michiyo, Naka Tōyō ryakushi (Tokyo: Dai Nihon tosho, 1903), pp. 170–71.

18 Kano Naoki, Chūgoku tetsugaku shi [History of Chinese Philosophy] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975), pp. 604–8.

19 From his lecture notes for the Shinchō shi tsūron [General History of the Qing Dynasty], we know that he had planned to discuss Cui but simply overlooked this note during the lecture: “Wang Fuzhi, Fang Bao, Chen Houyao, Gu Liangao, Wang Maohong, and Cui Shu: they came out of the Song school and later became followers of the Han school.”

Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 8, p. 459. See also Naitō Kenkichi, “Atogaki” [Afterward], in Naitō

Konan zenshū, vol. 8, p. 493.

20 Miyake Yonekichi, “Bungaku hakase Naka Michiyo kun den,” p. 37. A scholar of Japanese history and a contemporary of Naka, Miyake was famous for his innovative use of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of history and as such is considered along with several others to have set down the roots of a modern historiography and pedagogy in Meiji Japan. He was also a phenomenal linguist. See Kadowaki Teiji, “Miyake Yonekichi,”

in Nihon rekishi dai jiten [Great Encyclopedia of Japanese History] (Tokyo: Kawade shobō

624

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

Qing dynasty, Masui Tsuneo introduced him as “Nihon no gakusha konomi no Sai Jutsu” (Cui Shu whom Japanese scholars so like).21

The excitement that greeted Cui Shu’s rediscovery in Japan found a parallel twenty years later in China. It is difficult to assess how aware of the Japanese edition of Cui’s works Chinese intellectuals were, and it is even harder to say how much use Gu, Hu, and the others made of the Naka edition.

shinsha, 1975), vol. 9, p. 107; and Yamane Tokutarō, “Miyake Yonekichi,” in Ajia rekishi jiten

[Encyclopedia of Asian History] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1961), vol. 8, p. 409.

21 Masui Tsuneo, Shin teikoku, saigo no kyodai teikoku [The Qing Empire: Last of the Great Empires], vol. 7 of Chūgoku no rekishi [History of China] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1974), pp. 316–17.

A brief comparison of the original Cui Dongbi xiansheng yishu compiled by Chen Lihe (with an afterward dated 1825) with the Naka edition and the Gu Jiegang edition seems in order at this point. I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to look through a rare copy of one of the original editions of the Cui work at the Kyoto University Library and to make use of Professor Kuwabara Jitsuzō’s (1870–1931) own copy of the Naka edition, which is replete with Kuwabara’s red-penciled notes and place markers throughout the text. (Kuwabara’s collection was donated to the library of the Faculty of Letters at Kyoto University by his son, Professor Kuwabara Takeo.) Naka Michiyo’s work entailed a reprinting on excellent paper of the contents of the original Chen edition with the addition of punctuation and a certain amount of textual analysis of copying errors. In essence, Gu Jiegang did the same thing. Aside from general clause and sentence breaks, however, the punctuation systems differ. Naka, of course, inserted the Japanese reading punctuation ( kaeriten) that enables a Japanese reader of literary Chinese to reorder the sentence so that it may be read in the ordinary Japanese word order, thus indicating subjects, objects, verbs, and even articles. On the other hand, Gu used Western punctuation with periods and commas, even adding quotation marks, exclamation points, and, most significantly, separate indications (with differently textured marginal lines) of toponyms, titles of texts, and personal names. (Compare Cui Dongbi xiansheng yishu, comp. Chen Lihe, 55 juan, afterward dated 1825; Naka Michiyo, ed., Sai Tōheki isho; and Gu Jiegang, main editor, Cui Dongbi yishu). The major difference between the two twentieth-century editions, aside from numerous prefaces and reprinted material not by Cui himself in the Chinese one, was the discovery by William Hung of a lengthy poetry collection of Cui’s, the Zhifei ji [The Knowing Fallacy Collection], which he found in the Yanjing University Library in 1931, over a decade into Gu’s project. It had been listed in Cui’s own original table of contents, but when Chen Lihe later compiled this edition of Cui’s writings, the Zhifei ji was not included and was thus presumed lost. It and several other bits and pieces supposedly lost were similarly punctuated, edited, and included in the thirteenth ce of the Chinese edition. (See Gu, “Xu” [Introduction], to Cui’s Zhifei ji, in Cui Dongbu yishu, vol. 13, pp. 2–3, 16. Hu and Gu discovered several other hitherto “lost”

Cui poems and essays, also inserted in this volume of the collected works. This is the major contribution of the Chinese edition.)

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

625

Arthur Hummel, who translated Gu’s introduction to the Gushi bian [Symposium on Ancient History] as The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian, states without a trace of doubt that “in 1921 Dr. Hu Shih [Hu Shi] came across a Japanese edition” of Cui’s works, surely the Naka reprint.22 “Though this is an excellent reprint,” wrote Hummel elsewhere, “it attracted little notice in China,” except for an occasional mention, often with glaring errors or misunderstandings.23

Yet the Chinese editors clearly knew of Naka’s work and even praised it here and there. In a 1923 article, Hu Shi stated plainly that, as a result of Naka’s work,

“Chinese gradually came to know that such a man as Cui Shu has lived.”24 Hu pointed out also that Liu Shipei (1884–1919) had seen the Japanese text and was influenced by it to write a short biography of Cui for the journal Guocui xuebao

[Journal of the National Essence] as early as 1907. This essay was punctuated and included in the Gu Jiegang edition of Cui’s works. Similarly, Zhao Zhenxin, who proofread the original Cui Dongbi xiansheng yishu for errors, remarked in a preface that Cui was not at all well known in China until Naka’s edition was published.25 Near the very end of the Chinese edition were selections from a number of Chinese works relevant to Cui and translations of several Japanese writings; Gu pointed out in his introduction to this section (one of the few times Gu had anything to say of the Japanese edition) that the Naka reprint had led to Cui Shu’s first recognition by Chinese scholars such as Liu Shipei and Ge Xiao, a recognition that spread slowly. Other references to the Japanese text in the Gu edition include several paragraphs in translation from Miyake Yonekichi’s biography of Naka as well as an excerpted translation by the young historian Zhou Yiliang of an essay on Cui by Okazaki Fumio (1888–1950) that appeared in 1927 in Shinagaku, the pre-eminent journal of the Kyoto school of sinology.

Cui Shu and the Uses of History

As Schneider points out, Cui Shu’s writings were “the single body of thought most influential on Ku Chieh-kang’s [Gu Jiegang’s] study of antiquity.”26 Let us scrutinize this influence a little more closely. Gu learned from Cui a 22 Ku Chieh-kang (Gu Jiegang), The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian, trans. Arthur Hummel (Leyden: E.J. Brill Ltd., 1931), p. 82, note 4.

23 Hummel,

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, p. 776.

24 Hu Shi, “Kexue de gushijia Cui Shu,” reprinted in Cui Dongbu yishu, vol. 3, p. 3.

25 Zhao Zhenxin, in Cui Dongbu yishu, vol. 1, p. 55.

26 Schneider,

Ku Chieh-kang, p. 94.

626

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

historiographic method of unveiling the layers of spuriousness in successive treatments of antiquity. While Confucius spoke of antiquity going back no further than the sage-kings Yao and Shun, by the Han dynasty Sima Qian began his Shiji [Records of the Grand Historian] with the Yellow Emperor; later historians went still further back to Fuxi. In Cui’s language this process is called bushang or bushang gu, “adding on to antiquity,” and, in explicating this process by which fabricated strata of history were added on backward in successive periods, Cui was performing an act of Confucian reverence; in Schneider’s words, “with each new discovery of a layer of counterfeit history over the authentic classical stratum, Cui became more assured that he was performing his calling to protect the Tao [Dao], protect the Sages, and protect the canon.”27

Gu Jiegang used and developed this approach in a more secular manner to brilliant ends in his own studies of ancient Chinese history.

As in the case of Cui’s rediscovery itself, however, we find a slightly earlier, parallel development in Japanese historiographic circles. Naitō Konan, one of the central figures in the Japanese rediscovery of Cui Shu, in 1897 published one of his first book-length works, Kinsei bungaku shiron [A Historical Discussion of Modern Japanese Scholarship],28 from a series of articles previously published in the Ōsaka asahi shinbun. It was essentially an intellectual history of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868); however, Naitō selected as

“absolutely the most original and enlightening scholars in the three hundred years” of the Tokugawa era: Tominaga Nakamoto (1715–1746), Yamagata Bantō

(1748–1821), and Miura Baien (1723–1789),29 an extraordinarily unorthodox selection when one considers that these three figures were barely known at that time. Naitō was particularly impressed by Tominaga, a virtual unknown until the publication of Naitō’s work, and his book, Shutsujō kōgo [Emerging from Meditation].30 Tominaga (like Yamagata and Miura) was a nonsamurai, 27 Laurence Schneider, “From Textual Criticism to Social Criticism: The Historiography of Ku Chieh-kang,” Journal of Asian Studies 28.4 (August 1969), p. 777; and Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang, pp. 197–98.

28 For an explanation of why the title of this work is to be translated in this way, see Ojima Sukema, as quoted by Naitō Kenkichi, “Atogaki” [Afterward] to Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 1, p. 687.

29 Naitō Konan, Kinsei bungaku shiron, in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 1, p. 58.

30 A beautifully annotated and punctuated edition of the Shutsujō kōgo with readings provided has been prepared by Mizuta Norihiza, in Tominaga Nakamoto, Yamagata Bantō, Nihon shisō taikei [Compendium of Japanese Thought] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973), vol. 43. For more on Tominaga, see Ishihama Juntarō, Tominaga Nakamoto (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1942). For other discussions of Tominaga by Naitō, see “Ōsaka no chōnin to gakumon” [Ōsaka Merchants and Their Scholarship], originally a lecture presented in

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

627

nonprofessional scholar from an Ōsaka merchant background, and Naitō was especially pleased by his commoner origins. It appears, interestingly enough, that Naitō first heard of Tominaga from Naitō Chisō, as evidenced by Konan’s first essay concerning Tominaga, “Choin sango” [Scattered Words in the Shade of a Tree of Useless Wood], published in 1893.31

In the Shutsujō kōgo, Tominaga presented his theory of kajō (Chinese jiashang; “accumulation to” or “adding on to antiquity”) in debunking the development of Buddhism. He demonstrated that as each new Buddhist sect preached the superiority of its heaven to all those preceding it, there accumulated a hierarchy of heavens, created backward. Naitō Konan employed this theoretical conception to study ancient Chinese history. He showed that while Confucius generally cited the Duke of Zhou (or Tang) as the essential beginning of Chinese history and institutions, Mozi went back to King Yu of the Xia dynasty. Mencius went back even further to Yao and Shun, who both abdicated their thrones to men of virtue rather than to their own sons, as had Yu—hence Mo-tzu’s ideal was not as good as the earlier Yao–Shun paradigm.

Somewhat later, the Daoists went back as far as the Yellow Emperor, before Yao and Shun; the nongjia (agriculturalist school) made Shennong the beginning, and the divination school went still further back to Fuxi; finally, the Daoist alchemists ( fangshi) spoke of the sanhuang (three deities)— tianhuang (heavenly deity), dihuang (earthly deity), and taihuang (great deity)—as the start of it all.32 Professor Miyazaki Ichisada, one of Naitō’s most famous disciples, Ōsaka in 1921, later included in Nihon bunka shi kenkyū [Studies in the History of Japanese Culture], in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 9, pp. 149–57; “Ōsaka no chōnin gakusha Tominaga Nakamoto” [Tominaga Nakamoto, a Scholar of the Ōsaka Merchant Class], in Sentetsu no gakumon [The Scholarship of Former Wise Men], in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 9, pp. 370–93, esp. pp. 377–78 on kajō; “Tominaga Nakamoto no ‘Okina no fumi’ni tsuite’ ”

[On Tominaga Nakamoto’s “Letter of an Old Man”], Chūgai nippō (March 11, 1924), in Naitō

Konan zenshū, vol. 6, pp. 227–29; and “Ōsaka no ichi ijin” [One Great Man from Ōsaka], Ōsaka asahi shinbun (January 22, 1905), in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 4, pp. 408–11.

31 See Naitō Konan, “Choin sango,” in Ruishu dashu [Tears and Saliva], in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 1, pp. 380–400; the reference to Naitō Chisō appears on p. 380.

32 This is laid out much more elegantly in Naitō Konan, Shina jōko shi [Ancient Chinese History], in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 10, pp. 19–23, 145–46. For a slightly different rendition, see Naitō Konan, “Ōsaka no chōnin gakusha Tominaga Nakamoto,” in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 9, pp. 387–88. Naitō also used this kajō methodology in his studies of the Shujing, Erya, and Yijing; all are included in his Kenki shōroku [Short Essays for Clarification], in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 7. They are “Shōsho keigi” [Pondering Doubtful Spots in the Shangshu ( Shujing)], vol. 7, pp. 9–23; “Jiga no shin kenkyū” [A New Study of the Erya], vol. 7, pp. 24–37; and “Eki gi” [Doubts about the Yijing], vol. 7, pp. 38–47.

628

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

has remarked of this inverse development: “A lineage of saints was formed in a direction opposite to the chronological order, a lineage generated by different schools successively vying for superiority.”33

Clearly, Cui Shu’s bushang and Tominaga Nakamoto’s kajō are extremely similar, if not methodologically identical, ideas. Gu draws directly from Cui and Naitō directly from Tominaga. Miyazaki has suggested that Gu Jiegang’s work on ancient China may have been influenced by Naitō, but he frankly admits that he cannot say for sure.34 And, nowhere does Gu make reference to such an influence. While he certainly knew of Naitō either through the Cui Shu project (although neither he nor any other of the Chinese editors ever mention Naitō’s contribution) or many other possible links, according to Gu his source was always Cui. Similarly, we know that Naitō was intimately aware of Cui Shu’s historical theories; however, citations to Cui’s works in Naitō are always to corroborate this or that exegetical point and, aside from the instances mentioned above, not of an overall historiographic nature; for that Naitō had Tominaga.

One might suggest that we have here a dual case of scholarly nationalism, with each twentieth-century historian explicitly deriving his source of inspiration from the eighteenth-century scholar of his own nation. This view does not adequately describe Naitō, however, because, although firmly nationalistic, his vision was much broader and he often relied on the writings and theories of Chinese scholars past and present. For Naitō the overall East Asian sphere centered on China, whose culture he considered the most advanced in the world. Witness, for instance, his admiration for the works of Sima Qian, Zhao Yi (1727–1812), Qian Daxin (1728–1804), Gu Yanwu, and particularly his close friends, Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) and Wang Guowei (1877–1927), among many others. It would sound strange indeed to hear Naitō echo the kind of sentiments we will soon hear Hu Shi and Luo Zhenyu utter. Yet Gu does not seem 33 Miyazaki Ichisada, “Dokusōteki na Shinagakusha Naitō Konan hakase” [An Innovative Sinologist, Professor Naitō Konan], in Chōgoku ni manabu [Studying China] (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1971), p. 257. This essay had been brutally translated as “Konan Naito: An Original Sinologist,” Philosophical Studies of Japan (1967), pp. 93–116.

34 Miyazaki Ichisada, “Naitō Konan to Shinagaku” [Naitō and Sinology], in Kindai Nihon o tsukutta hyakunin [One Hundred Men Who Made Modern Japan] (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 1966), vol. 2, p. 412. Kanda Kiichirō, a scholar of ancient China, has also noted the striking similarity between Gu’s and Naitō’s methodologies; see Kanda, “Naitō Konan to Shina kodai shi,” p. 88. For other intellectual connections between Gu Jiegang and Japanese sinology, see Ogura Yoshihiko, “Ko Ketsugō to Nihon” [Gu Jiegang and Japan], in Ware Nyūmon ni ari [I Stood at the Dragon Gate] (Tokyo: Ryūkei shosha, 1974), pp. 3–31, originally published in Shisō (January 1972).

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

629

to reflect this kind of eclecticism; by the same token, Naitō did not have to contend with numerous brilliant Chinese Japanologists.

**Why Cui Shu? **

This is indeed the crucial question. The simple answer, that Hu and Gu made a remarkable, independent rediscovery for China of one Cui Shu, a forgotten eighteenth-century man of great historiographic talents, seems no longer sufficient to explain their selection of this figure. Schneider’s answer takes us a little further into the problem but is still just the tip of the iceberg: “Cui was a perfect subject for the scholar’s hall of fame because of the range and brilliance of his critical thought, his charming style of writing, and, of course, his mistreatment by the Chinese scholar—official world.”35 The Cui find may have been happily unexpected (although I have serious doubts about this possibility), but the general scheme into which Cui was either placed or forced must be brought into clearer focus.

We should first bear in mind the continuing search by late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals for precedents in their own culture for views and attitudes deemed “modern” in their own day.

Scholars of all political persuasions took part in this search, which at times seems to have taken on the air of a parlor game. In due course we find Huang Zongxi dubbed “China’s Rousseau” by Chen Tianhua (1875–1905), Guan Zi (d. 645 bce) labeled “the first Chinese materialist” by Feng Youlan (1895–1990) and others; and Kang Youwei (1858–1927) identified as “China’s Luther” by Liang Qichao (1873–1929). Wang Fuzhi has been seen alternately as China’s answer to the eighteenth-century French materialists, to Kant, and to Hegel; he has even been portrayed as a proto-Marxist by many different scholars.

In such a context, we can see that Cui was a fortuitous find indeed. To scholars of the early Republican era it was clear that one of Western scholarship’s superior points was its reliance on the scientific method and its use of proof in the discipline of history. The numerous fallacies and contradictions and the political conservatism inherent in Western positivistic thought36 were disregarded. Cui appeared as an early paragon of Western-style historical research, while his methodology demonstrated that China’s tradition of hard, critical historians proudly survived into the period of the Jiaqing reign. This theme is 35 Schneider,

Ku Chieh-kang, p. 93.

36 This theme has been treated by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).

630

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

self-evident in the title of Hu’s inaugural article, “Kexue de gushijia Cui Shu”

[Cui Shu, a Scientific Historian of Ancient China]. Interestingly, Hu admitted thirteen years later, in an introduction to Gu’s edition of Cui’s works, that he may have overestimated Cui’s greatness in this 1921 essay, given that much new material, relevant to the study of ancient China (specifically mentioned are oracle bones and bronze inscriptions) had been uncovered in the past century, but he adamantly maintained that Cui’s scientific spirit of “investigate and only then believe” ( kao er hou xin) would never die.37

Science (it was, in fact, scientism) was a magic word in early twentieth-century China, as it remains to a certain extent, and its forced entrance into the methodology of modern humanistic studies betokened another magic word, progress. This attitude lay behind Hu Shi’s practice of proudly counting the number of proofs supplied by various Qing textual critical ( kaozheng) scholars seeking to prove the authenticity or spuriousness of sections of the classical canon, and then pointing to this as evidence of an indigenous scientific strain in Chinese scholarship.

Such a line of argument, however, reflects only one part of the overall picture. As we have seen, Cui had been rediscovered much earlier in Japan and was known in China considerably before Hu and Gu began to work on his writings and to lionize his spirit. To a large extent, the zeitgeist of early Republican intellectual circles lent Cui the aura of a “pioneer” in their eyes, a view that could not be mustered thirty years earlier in China when the Naka edition first appeared but could be in mid-Meiji Japan. The idea that someone can be ahead of his or her time is, of course, as ahistorical as it is meaningless; nonetheless, certain figures of the past do often strike us as more “modern” than others. This appearance or illusion, however, is entirely due to the concerns of the present, and in the 1920s Cui was for the first time perceived in China as a forerunner of critical, scientific historical research.

Similarly, Wang Fuzhi, even after being rediscovered, was not actively republished and circulated until the 1900s and 1910s, when people perceived his peculiarly irreverent attitudes and his contempt for the influence of state orthodox Confucianism on conceptions of history and certain historical figures. Perhaps most important in Wang’s case was the realization that he advocated a developmental, progressivistic, protomaterialistic theory of history and an anti-Manchu nationalism (theoretical as well as emotional) with extraordinarily

“modern” (ca. 1900–1911) applicability. His historicism had Chinese roots—

Du You (735–812) of the Tang had argued along similar (although not widely accepted) lines—but his nationalism and indeed his conception of China as a 37 Hu Shi, “Xu” [Introduction], to Cui Dongbi yishu, vol. 1, pp. 4, 6–7.

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

631

“nation” seem to have had little meaning until the late Qing–early Republican era. In this way, rediscovery may be possessed of a largely self-serving objective totally unrelated to the normal usage of the term.

It is vital that we understand that the cluster of names we associate with a historical period or incident has not fallen from the sky but has been supplied to us by former scholars. Hu Shi and his group of students and colleagues did significant groundwork, particularly with the Cui Dongbi yishu, and we have not as yet transcended them.

Finally, it appears that there was a great deal more conscious effort at work in the Chinese rediscovery of Cui Shu than in the Japanese. More than an act of scholarship (as it seems was the case with Naka Michiyo), Gu Jiegang and Hu Shi were engaged in such enormous labors, much of which already had been done, virtually as an act of nationalism. While Naka seems never to have had any intention that his edition be consumed widely by people other than scholars, Gu’s and Hu’s work was intended clearly as a popularization of Cui Shu, to make him known to as wide an audience of Chinese readers as possible. This kind of nationalistic scholarship shines through in a comment made by Hu Shi in his 1923 essay: “That such a great scholar with such impressive writings should have been buried for a hundred years [ sic] is indeed a great shame to the Chinese intellectual community.”38 This same attitude is reflected in a comment made in 1899 by Luo Zhenyu in an introduction to his edition of Naka Michiyo’s Shina tsūshi [Comprehensive History of China], written in literary Chinese: “Alas, it is shameful [indeed] that the history of our country cannot be written by our own kinsmen but must be written by one of another country.”39

Despite fifteen years of work preparing the Cui Dongbi yishu for publication, with a certain amount of time to reflect on Cui’s real importance, Gu Jiegang noted in a letter to Qian Xuantong that regretfully Cui was only a “Confucianist criticizing ancient history; not an historian criticizing ancient history.”40 Of course, one should not necessarily be held accountable by the scholarly community for comments made in private (or semiprivate) letters, but it is clear that Gu was dismayed here because Cui could not fully jump from the 38 Hu Shi, “Kexue de gushijia Cui Shu,” in Cui Dongbi yishu, vol. 2, p. 5.

39 Quoted in Miyake Yonekichi, “Bungaku hakase Naka Michiyo kun den,” p. 27. Naka Michiyo’s Shina tsūshi was the first modern comprehensive history of China. It has been translated into literary Japanese by Wada Sei as volumes 418–20 in the Iwanami bunko series (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975).

40 Quoted in Schneider, “From Textual Criticism,” p. 777.

632

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

eighteenth century into the twentieth: Cui must remain a creature of his time.

In a more level-headed moment, Gu fully understood this dilemma: I could not minimize his [Cui’s] limitations, the work being marred by traditional prejudices and by excessive faith in the classics and the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius. It would be unfair, however, to reproach him for this: he was born in a home that reverenced the Song philosophy, and his purpose in writing was to brush aside everything that stood in the way of an understanding of the ancient sages. He employed the critical method primarily to further this end. Our duty is to go a step further and overthrow his preconcep-tions, reconstructing classical study upon new foundations.41

Our task now is to take one step more than Gu’s generation.

Two Further Rediscoveries

Several other rediscovery efforts of the twentieth century may elaborate on and perhaps even elucidate this problem. Naitō Konan is generally accorded the honor of being the first person to have recognized anew the value of Zhang Xuecheng’s (1738–1801) brilliant historiographic insights.42 Naitō began reading Zhang’s major works, the Wenshi tongyi [General Principles of Literature and History] and the Jiaochou tongyi [General Principles of Bibliography] in 1902 and later, through connections in China, was able to obtain a manuscript copy of Zhang’s writings, the Zhangshi yishu [The Writings of Mr. Zhang], in eighteen ce. Naitō relates that he was so excited about reading Zhang’s works that he read all that he possessed straight through to the end and then gave part of them to Kano Naoki; later, Zhang was to become something of a rage at Kyoto University. Yet, despite all the praise others have accorded him, Naitō

admitted that Chinese such as Zhang Ertian (1869–1945) and Sun Deqian (1869–1935) had known of and had been reading Zhang’s work for some time; 41 Ku,

Autobiography, p. 83.

42 Paul Demiéville, “Chang Hsūeh-ch’eng and His Historiography,” in Historians of China and Japan, ed. W.G. Beasley and E.G. Pulleyblank (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 176–77; Mitamura Taisuke, Naitō Konan (Tokyo: Chūō kōron, 1972), p. 127; David Nivison, The Life and Thought of Chang Hsūeh-ch’eng (1738–1801) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), pp. 2, 284; Miyazaki Ichisada, “Dokusōteki na Shinagakusha,” p. 263; Momose Hiromu, “Chang Hsūeh-ch’eng,” in Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, p. 40; Shimada Kenji, Chūgoku kakumei no senkushatachi [Pioneers of the Chinese Revolution] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1970), p. 240.

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

633

and we know that Zhang Binglin (1869–1936) and perhaps even Gong Zizhen (1792–1841) were aware of Zhang Xuecheng’s ideas.43

A native of eastern Zhejiang and landsmann of Zhang Xuecheng, Zhang Ertian was the author of Shiwei [The Little Things in History], published in 1911, in which he actively attempted to revive the historiographic approach of his fellow native.44 However, I do not believe that this was the connection to which Naitō Konan’s praise of Zhang Ertian and Sun Deqian referred. Naitō

knew of Zhang Xuecheng well before 1911 and in that year, probably before he knew of the Shiwei, gave a lecture in Hiroshima on Chinese historical scholarship in which he noted that “the most famous figure of the Eastern Zhejiang school was Zhang Xuecheng. It was he who made the general differentiation of schools between Eastern and Western Zhejiang; and his work, the Wenshi tongyi, is a brilliant comprehensive discussion of writings on history ( shiron) or historiography ( shigaku).”45

Naitō was friendly with Shen Zengzhi (1850–1922), author of Menggu yuanlu jianzheng [Notes on the Origins of the Mongols], and considered him an exceptionally gifted scholar. Shen’s “disciples,” whom Naitō also personally knew and for whom he was also full of praise, were Zhang Ertian, who later compiled the Menggu yuanlu jianzheng and added his own jiaobu 43 Naitō Konan, “Shō Gakusei no shigaku” [Zhang Xuecheng’s Historiography], appended to Shina shigaku shi, in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 11, p. 471. Zhang Ertian and Sun Deqian are mentioned by Naitō but not by Nivison. Zhang Binglin’s reference to Zhang Xuecheng is cited by Nivison, Life and Thought, p. 283. Gong Zizhen is listed for discussion by Naitō

but never discussed in this context, because no student notes from this lecture existed at the time this work was compiled; see Shina Shigaku shi, in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 11, p. 447; however, Nivison makes this possible connection elegantly clear, Life and Thought, pp. 281–82. Naitō provides elaboration of Sun’s and Zhang’s ties to Zhang Xuecheng in the field of bibliographic studies ( muluxue or mokurokugaku); see Naitō, Shina mokurokugaku

[Bibliographic Studies in China], originally lectures at Kyoto University, April–June 1926, in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 12, p. 437. This book provides much information on Zhang’s contribution to this field.

44 See Deng Zhicheng, “Zhang jun Mengqu biezhuan” [A Biography of Mr. Zhang Mengju (Ertian)], Yanjing xuebao 30 (June 1946), pp. 323–25. Zhang’s interests were widespread, although he is perhaps most famous for his role in the writing and compiling of the Qing shi gao [Draft History of the Qing Dynasty].

45 Naitō Konan, “Shina gakumon no kinjō” [The Present State of Chinese Scholarship], originally presented as a lecture in Hiroshima on August 8, 1911, in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 6, p. 56. In the Shinchō shi tsūron, given as lectures in the summer of 1915, Naitō had virtually adulatory things to say about Zhang: “No one who came after him could compare with so rare a genius” as seen particularly in the Wenshi tongyi; see Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 8, p. 368.

634

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

(addendum), and Sun Deqian, author of the Hanshu yiwenzhi juli [Selections from the Bibliographic Treatise of the Han Dynastic History], Taishigong shuyi fa [How Sima Qian Wrote (the Shiji)], and Liu Xiang jiaochouxue zuanwei [On Liu Xiang’s Bibliographic Methodology]. Naitō, in fact, requested that Zhang be asked to contribute an essay to a Festschrift dedicated to him; he was asked and complied.

The man who Naitō always claimed, but never it seems wrote down, was the real rediscoverer (or recognizer) of Zhang Xuecheng was Tan Xian (1830–

1901). The recognition of Zhang’s genius appeared in Tan’s diary, the Futang riji

[Futang’s Diary], a work that Naitō not only regarded highly but often firmly

“advised his students to read.” He had obtained a copy of it either at the very end of the Meiji era or at the beginning of the Taishō era (ca. 1912).46 Thus, while Tan was not the source of Naitō’s own interest in Zhang Xuecheng, Naitō

sought to give him the recognition that he felt Tan deserved. We can only guess that Naitō may have initially learned of Zhang Xuecheng from Sun Deqian or Zhang Ertian (or possibly Shen Zengzhi, whom be met in China in 1902), and it is equally possible that they in turn learned of Zhang from Tan Xian, whom it seems Naitō never met.

In 1920 Naitō published in Shinagaku a brief biographical sketch of Zhang Xuecheng, which he prepared from his own copy of the Zhangshi yishu, under the title but without the intent of being a full-fledged nianpu (chronological biography).47 Shortly thereafter, Hu Shi published a much longer, full-fledged 46 Kanda Kiichirō and Mitamura Taisuke, “Sengaku o kataru: Naitō Konan hakase”

[A Discussion about a Past Wise Man: Professor Naitō Konan], roundtable discussion by Kaizuka Shigeki, Mitamura, Kanda, Miyazaki Ichisada, Naitō Kenkichi, Nagata Hidemasa, and Yoshikawa Kōjirō, Tōhōgaku 47 (January 1974), pp. 157–59. This transcribed discussion has been reprinted along with five similar ones previously published in Tōhōgaku as Tōyōgaku no sōshishatachi [The Founders of East Asian Studies], ed. Yoshikawa Kōjirō

(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1976), pp. 94–96, 98. On Tang Xian, see Morohashi Tetsuji, ed., Dai Kan-Wa jiten [Great Chinese-Japanese Dictionary] (Tokyo: Taishūkan shoten, 1957–60), vol. 9, p. 11034; Tang was a juren of the Tongzhi period. Recently, in the mainland journal Lishi yanjiu, a letter from Zhang Binglin to Tan Xian dated 1897 was republished, and it was explained that Zhang considered Tan to be his teacher. The intent of the letter was to attack Kang Youwei and his group of reformers. See “Jindai shi ziliao jieshao: Zhang Taiyan gei Tan Xian de yifeng xin” [Introducing Source Material on Modern History: A Letter from Zhang Taiyan to Tan Xian], Lishi yanjiu 3 (1977), pp. 124–25. For the Naitō Festschrift, see Shigaku ronsō: Naitō hakase shōju kinen [Essays in Historiography Presented to Professor Naitō on His Sixty-fifth Birthday], ed. Nishida Naojirō (Kyoto: Kōbundō shobō, 1930); Zhang’s essay appears on pp. 273–74.

47 Naitō Konan, “Shō Jissai sensei nenpu” [A Chronological Biography of Zhang Shizhai (Xuecheng)], Shinagaku 1.3–4 (October 1920), in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 7, pp. 67–79.

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

635

nianpu, which, as the great French sinologist Paul Demiéville has remarked, was “a form contrary to all the theories of Zhang Xuecheng.”48 In his introduction to his work, the Zhang Shizhai xiansheng nianpu [Chronological Biography of Mr. Zhang Xuecheng], Hu echoed a by then familiar lament: “What is most shameful for us [Chinese] is that the first scholar to prepare a chronological biography of Zhang Shizhai [Xuecheng] was a foreigner.”49

Hu had intended only to write a kind of corrigendum to Naitō’s 1920 piece, but he claimed to have found so many errors and omissions that he ultimately wrote his own, much more detailed nianpu. Naitō almost immediately wrote a response to Hu, indicating that he was happy to have been the instrument of Hu’s recharged interest in Zhang Xuecheng. Naitō explained that he did not believe in a long nianpu as a viable way to discuss a man’s work and intellectual development but preferred rather a short, simple nianpu, more like a lūli ( rireki, personal resume), to complement a larger investigation of a subject’s ideas. Naitō also pointed out in this response doubtful spots in Hu’s nianpu, important facts missing from both of their efforts, and the vital sources he had discovered since 1920 of writings by Zhang’s friends and acquaintances (principally Wang Zongyan).50 Naitō later provided this promised larger discussion of Zhang in his brilliant essay, “Shō Gakusei no shigaku” [Zhang Xuecheng’s Historiography], written shortly after the response to Hu Shi.

Why Zhang Xuecheng? The Chinese canonization of Zhang Xuecheng by Hu Shi provides material for us to enhance our picture of rediscovery built around Cui Shu. If we trace Naito’s proposed pedigree for the recognition of Zhang Xuecheng’s import back to Tan Xian, then there really is no reason to speak of rediscovery at all in this case, and even less so if the Gong Zizhen connection to Zhang is accurate. Just over a generation separated Zhang’s death from Tan (and Gong’s life overlapped Zhang’s for almost a decade); at best we can say that Zhang’s genius was not recognized by his contemporaries or their immediate successors. Yet, once Hu Shi gleaned the contemporary relevance of Zhang’s ideas, inspired by reading Naitō’s Shinagaku piece, Zhang became 48 Demiéville, “Chang Hsūeh-ch’eng,” p. 177.

49 Hu Shi, Zhang Shizhai xiansheng nianpu [A Chronological Biography of Zhang Shizhai]

(Taipei: Commercial Press, 1968), p. 1. Kang Youwei is often credited with making Zhang known to the Chinese intellectual world; I have been unable to see just where Kang fits into this particular rediscovery effort. As with other Kang endeavors, I suspect it may have been largely a self-professed achievement.

50 Naitō Konan, “Ko Tekishi no shincho Shō Jissai nenpu o yomu” [On Reading Hu Shizhi’s Recently Written Chronological Biography of Zhang Shizhai], Shinagaku 2.9 (May 1922), in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 12, pp. 80–90; and Naitō, Shina shigaku shi, in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 11, p. 447.

636

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

another “significant” but ignored figure who required active resuscitation so that Chinese scholars could be proud of their own heritage.

One puzzling question then is why Zhang and Cui were both used by the Hu Shi group of early Republican scholars in this fashion. The answer is probably simple. The marked differences between Zhang and Cui were topics for specialized research and thus irrelevant to the overall project of revival. In the view of Hu’s group, Zhang and Cui shared the dubious distinction of having been shamefully forgotten and ignored—that they had this in common superseded any philosophical or methodological differences and rendered them source material not for a better approach to the study of history but for election into the pantheon of great Chinese scholars, a pantheon enriched by their belated entrance. Similarly, Hu (and one assumes his students in the early Republic) prided himself on the distance he maintained from political affairs; his “liberalism” surely supported the acceptance for revival of two or more dissimilar men.

Closely related to the case of Zhang Xuecheng is that of Zheng Qiao (1104–

1162), the Song historiographer and author of the Tongzhi [Comprehensive Record]. This writer also was resuscitated in China by Hu and his circle well after having gained renewed attention in Japan through the work of Naitō

Konan, who made Zheng’s ideas central to his own Shina shigaku shi. Zheng had been forgotten soon after his death until Zhang Xuecheng realized the great importance of his conception of the way historical works need be written, i.e., in a comprehensive ( tongshi) fashion, not broken into individual periods ( duandai shi). However, as Zhang was “forgotten,” so, too, Zheng went into his second decline. When Naitō and others began to work on Zhang, Zheng Qiao was “unearthed” in the process.51

51 On Zheng, see Naitō Konan, “Gisaku ichidō” [One Strand of a Draft Idea], written in Kanbun, first published in Shinagaku 6.4 (August 1931), in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 14, pp. 78–84; see also Naitō, Shina shigaku shi, in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 11, p. 450; Naitō, Shina mokurokugaku, in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 12, pp. 407, 411–14, 420, 425, 430–31, 433–34. Also of value is an essay by Naitō’s son that provides information on this rediscovery in China and Japan: Naitō Shigenobu, “Tei Shō no shiron ni tsuite” [On Zheng Qiao’s Historiography], Tōyōshi kenkyū 1.2 (September–October 1936), pp. 1–13. See also Suzuki Shun, “Tei Shō” [Zheng Qiao], in Tōyō rekishi dai jiten [Great Encyclopedia of East Asian History] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1938), vol. 6, p. 385. For Gu Jiegang’s work on Zheng, published in Guocui xuebao as early as 1923, see Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang, passim.

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

637

A Different Kind of Rediscovery

One final case illustrates strikingly the degree to which historiographical currents, and ideological currents as well, followed a two-way course between China and Japan. This case, documented by Professor Shimada Kenji, formerly of Kyoto University, is that of the rediscovery by Naitō Konan and others of the late Ming eccentric philosopher Li Zhi (1527–1602). In the Ming section of Naitō’s Shina shigaku shi, initially given as lectures around 1915, the greatest space is reserved for an explication of Li Zhi’s view of history, which is extremely surprising considering that Li was still a virtual unknown in 1915.

In China, Li did not return to the scholarly limelight until Wu Yu’s 1916 essay,

“Ming Li Zhuowu biezhuan” [A Biography of Li Zhuowu (Zhi) of the Ming], was published.52 Even his 1915 reference to Li was not Naitō’s first, however, for in a 1901 article entitled “Dokusho ki sansoku” [Notes on Three Books Read], published in the serial Nihonjin [The Japanese], the third entry is “Ri-shi Sōsho” [Mr. Li’s Cangshu].53 Yet, as Shimada makes clear, Li’s whole rediscovery becomes murky at this point for a number of reasons.

The first actual modern mention of Li in a Chinese publication came in two short pieces in the journal Guocui xuebao [Journal of National Essence], late in 1905.54 Chinese students overseas in Japan, though, undoubtedly knew of Li earlier, because while in Japan many of them had become intimately aware of and reverential toward the great shishi (man of valor) of the late Tokugawa era, Yoshida Shōin (1830–1859). Shōin had been reading Li Zhi’s works in prison shortly before his execution in 1859 and was greatly impressed with Li’s spirit and individuality.55 Li’s suicide also apparently gave Shōin courage to face his 52 Wu Yu, “Ming Li Zhuowu biezhuan,” Jinbu zazhi 9.3–4 (1916), reprinted in Wu Yu wenlü

[The Writings of Wu Yu] (Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1921), vol. 2, pp. 20–51. See Shimada Kenji, “Watakushi no Naitō Konan” [Naitō Konan for Me], Naitō Konan zenshū

geppō 6 (June 1970), p. 6. For a discussion of Li Zhi in English, see Wm. Theodore deBary,

“Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming Thought,” in Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. deBary (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 145–247.

53 Naitō Konan, “Dokusho ki sansoku,” in Naitō Konan zenshū, vol. 12, pp. 28–30.

54 “Da Jiao Ruohou shu” [Reply to Jiao Ruohou’s Letter] and Jiao Ruohou, “Li shi Cangshu xu” [An Introduction to Mr. Li’s Cangshu], Guocui xuebao 1.11 (1905), pp. 1a–2b of the

“zhuanlu” section; see Shimada, “Watakushi no Naitō konan,” p. 7.

55 Yoshida Shōin, “Ri shi Funsho shō” [A Summary of Mr. Li’s Fenshu], in Yoshida Shōin zenshū, ed. Yamaguchi ken kyōikukai (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1934–36), vol. 9, pp. 1–24; and Yoshida Shōin, “Ri shi Zoku sōsho shō” [A Summary of Mr. Li’s Xu cangshu], Yoshida Shōin zenshū, vol. 9, pp. 25–53. See also K.C. Hsiao, “Li Chih,” in Dictionary of Ming Biography (1368–1644), ed. L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (New York:

638

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

own imminent decapitation. In turn, so impressed was Liang Qichao with stories he heard of the sacrifice and bravery of Japanese shishi, he took the Japanese name Yoshida Shin—from Shōin and Takasugi Shinsaku (1839–1867), a prominent disciple of Shōin’s, respectively—when in Japan in 1898 to escape execution after the failure of the Hundred Days Reform.56

The Japanese scholar and political activist Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945) once employed Naitō as his assistant, and the latter had in fact ghostwritten several of Miyake’s most famous works, including Shinzenbi Nihonjin [Truth, Goodness, Beauty—the Japanese]. In Miyake’s 1893 book, Ō Yōmei [Wang Yangming], there is an epilogue by Miyake’s colleague, Kuga Katsunan (1856–1907), lauding Li Zhi. The influence of Wang Yangming and his school on the Meiji Restoration shishi is well known. In this epilogue, Kuga pointed out that Li Zhi (himself a follower of Wang Yangming) was deeply revered by Yoshida Shōin, and with this Kuga presented the very first Meiji period writing honoring Li Zhi—three years later Chinese students first came to study in Japan and twelve years later the Guocui xuebao articles appeared. Shimada suggests strongly that Naitō

Konan’s 1901 article in Nihonjin was seen by Chinese students overseas in Japan and triggered Li’s revival; as evidence he cites the notice in the inaugural issue of Guocui xuebao, which states that the editors were in touch with the “journal of Miyake Yūjirō [Setsurei] and Shiga Shigetaka,”57 none other than Nihonjin.

Concluding Remarks

It should be clear that, short of a Dunhuang, “rediscovery” as used by historians in the past has various connotations in various settings. Perhaps zai faxian and sai hakken are misnomers; they are certainly misleading if taken literally.

The actual linkages by which a great figure from the past is brought back to the fore seem to rely to a considerable extent on the politics, concerns, biases, and changing interests of contemporary scholars as well as the exigencies of the times in which the latter live; this ultimately may be more revealing to us as historians than the rediscovered person or persons. We have seen how the revival project in the hands of Hu Shi and his colleagues virtually provided us with our present curriculum for the study of modern Chinese intellectual Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 817; and Shimada Kenji, “Ri Shi” [Li Zhi], in Ajia rekishi jiten, vol. 9, pp. 211–12.

56 Kitayama Yasuo, Chūgaku kakumei no rekishiteki kenkyū [Historical Studies of the Chinese Revolution] (Kyoto: Minerva shobō, 1972), p. 81.

57 Shimada, “Watakushi no Naitō Konan,” p. 8.

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

639

history. One would like to know why, for example, the cluster of eighteenth-century figures we read about is always the same. Why do we always talk about Zhang Xuecheng and Dai Zhen (1724–1777), who was also popular with the Hu Shi group, and not Qian Daxin (1728–1804), Zhao Yi (1727–1814), Zhu Yun (1729–1781), Shao Jinhan (1743–1796), or Wang Mingsheng (1722–1798)? Largely responsible for this, I believe, is the work of Liang Qichao (and Kang Youwei before him), Hu Shi, the early Gu Jiegang, Qian Mu, William Hung, and a handful of other towering intellects who in the late Qing and early Republican eras did an enormous service to our field in bringing into popular focus a number of men largely forgotten or ignored by earlier generations of Chinese. As scholars, however, it is our responsibility not merely to accept this legacy, but to examine it vigorously and criticize its flaws.

It is especially interesting to note the style of reintroduction by which the principals of this essay re-emerged on the twentieth-century scholarly agenda.

In Japan, where these men first were rediscovered for the most part, the intended audience was limited to academic circles. Neither was there concern to popularize these men’s work nor, more significantly, can we detect any signs of defensiveness or nationalistic pride. Of course, the rediscovered figures were Chinese, but not even in the case of Naitō’s work on Tominaga do we see a massive sales campaign touting the newly found figure.58 At least, this reveals the greater sense of self-assuredness on the part of Japanese scholars, which in turn was a reflection of the comparative firmness of China’s and Japan’s respective international positions in the early twentieth century. It is clear that Hu Shi and his group were, however unconsciously, using scholarship in an attempt to bolster China’s national self-esteem.

As I hope I have shown, these scholars were, like everyone else, products of their age, and their concerns reflect that age, just as this author’s concerns reflect our own irreverent times. It should not be surprising that Zhang Xuecheng and Li Zhi continue to fascinate contemporary students of history and philosophy in the West, whereas Cui Shu seems to have gone into a second eclipse. We live in a time when a probing philosophy of history (Zhang) and a lifestyle reflecting a nonconformist philosophy (Li) are far more popular than textual exegeses shallowly (in a philosophical sense) informed only by classical Confucian truth.

Perhaps the best heuristic device for understanding the idea of rediscovery may be found in E.H. Carr’s paradigm for election into the realm of “historical facts”: An event must first be nominated by one historian, seconded by another, 58 Naitō Konan comes closest to this in his Kinsei bungaku shiron and in his essay “Ōsaka no ichi ijin,” cited above.

640

On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past

and then after several votes are cast in its favor by other historians, it can be deemed properly “historical fact.”59 However, this model only describes the act of rediscovery without any indication of causation. Here Benedetto Croce’s observations of over a generation ago on historical judgments can be of service: One always draws on present experience and needs, and in so doing, one lends any period (or personality) under study the character of “contemporary history.”60 In the final analysis, what is history as we know it other than historiography?

59 E.H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Penguin, 1976), pp. 8–30, esp. 12–13.

60 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, trans. Silvia Sprigge (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962), p. 19.

Index

Abahai 215

Cai Cheng 316

Abe Yasuta see Abe Yasutarō

Cai E 457

Abe Yasutarō 288

Cai Yuanpei 9

Abe, Kōbō 390

Campbell, Joseph 216

Abu-Lughod, Janet 87

Cao Yin 316 n. 30

Adams, Percy 520

Ch’en Chiung-ming 534

Aguinaldo, Emilio 21

Ch‘eng Han-chang 614

Ai see Kyū

Chang Ping-lin 527

Ai Siqi 95

Chang Yuan-chi 468

Aikawa Haruki 567

Chang, Emperor 602

Akiyama Kenzō 311 n. 20

Chen Dewen 219 n. 14

Akizawa Shūji 562 n. 33, 569–570

Chen Hongmou 316

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 455, 527, 529, 534

Chen Jie 6–7, 12

n. 40

Chen Kan 314 n. 24

Alcone, Benjamin 377 n. 9, 382, 389

Chen Keyuan 310

Alda, Alan 211

Chen Lihe 622, 624 n. 21

Amano Masusaburō 352–353

Chen Qiyuan 277

Amano Motonosuke 583, 595

Chen Ruqin 288

Ambrose, Stephen 211

Chen Shimei 293

Andō Fujio 464

Chen Shou 301

Andrews, Julia 9

Chen Tianhua 629

Ankaku 302–303

Chen Yusong 280

Anzai Kuraji 439–440, 591

Chen Zuen 94

Aoki Masaru 30, 31

Cheng Fangwu 445

Arai Hakuseki 34, 42, 54–55

Cheng Hsiao-hsü 528

Araki, James T. 218–219 n. 14

Cheng-hua Wang 11

Arao Kiyoshi 438

Chiang Kai-shek 590

Arendt, Hannah 43

Chikamatsu Monzaemon 321

Aston 280

Chikusa Masaaki 608–609, 611

Atlan, Corinne 218 n. 14

Chin Shunshin 213–215

Atsushi see Nagura Inata

Chŏng In-ji 304 n. 8

Atwood, Christopher 218

Clavell, James 210, 215

Claypool, Lisa 9

Beilis, Mendel 388

Coble, Parks 96

Benjamin, Walter 87

Cochran, Sherman 84, 97

Benl, Oscar 219 n. 14

Cohen, Israel 386

Bergère, Marie-Claire 96–97

Confucius 626–627, 632

Berry, Paul 5 n. 2, 6 n. 4, 13

Costner, Kevin 221

Bester, John 219 n. 14

Craig, Albert 67

Bickers, Robert 97

Croce, Benedetto 640

Bohr, Niels 221

Cui Shu 617–631, 635, 639

Bourdieu, Pierre 300

Bowersock, G.W. 220 n. 16

Dai Zhen 639

Brown, Shana 7, 12

Davis, Walter 8

Buck, John Lossing 584

de Bary, Wm. Theodore 1

Byron, Robert 540

Debray, Régis 87–88

642

index

Demiéville, Paul 635

Garbo, Greta 89

Deng Shi 11

Gao of Guodong, Mr. 315

Deng Xiaoping 4, 98

Ge Xiao 625

Deng Yanda 440

George, Henry 17

Des Forges, Alexander 87–88

Godai Tomoatsu 283

Di Baoxian (Di Pingzi) 10–11

Gong Zizhen 633, 635

Dickens, Charles 211

Goodman, Bryna 97

Ding Jiesheng 292

Goodwin, Doris Kearns 211

Ding Xiaoai 211 n. 3

Gotō Shimpei 577–579

Domar, Evsey 382 n. 20, 389, 391

Gotō Shōjirō 284

Dorgon (Prince Rui) 215

Gu Jiegang 618–620, 624 n. 21, 625–626,

Du You 630

628–632, 636 n. 51, 639

Du Yuesheng 96

Gu Yanwu 623, 628

Duara, Prasenjit 586

Guan Zi 629

Dubrovskii, Sergei M. 553

Guangwu (Emperor) 60

Duus, Peter 432 n. 2

Guiloineau, Jean 218 n. 14

Guo Moruo 29, 40, 369

Earp, Wyatt 221

Gushima Kenzaburō 578 n. 4, 585, 590

Egan, Ronald 458

Gyoin, Mori 385, 387

Eguchi Teijō 582

Emura Haruki 599–600

Hama Masao 585

Enami Tetsuo 297–298

Hamada Atsushi 304 n. 8, 311 n. 21

Engels, Friedrich 548, 550

Hamada Hikozo 37 n. 20, 293

Etō Shinkichi 390

Hamashita Takeshi 34 n. 15

Han Huiyan 292

Fabri, Felix 476

Han Wu-ti 601–605

Fairbank, John K. 67, 73

Hanan, Patrick 222 n. 19

Feng Kuei-fen 613

Hani Gorō 565

Feng Youlan 629

Hao Jie 311, 314

Feng Zuozhe 315 n. 30

Hara Kakuten 580, 585, 587 n. 21, 596

Fogel, Joshua A. 5 n. 2, 13–14, 25 n. 1, 36

Harada Gorō 9

n. 19, 339 n. 3, 342 n. 7

Harayama Akira 218

Fu Baoshi 10

Harrell, Paula 40

Fu, Poshek 92

Haruko Iwasaki 80, 371

Fujieda Akira 218

Hatada Takashi 595

Fukuda Chiyosaku 353–354

Hattori Unokichi 469 n. 18

Fukuda Tokuzō 564

Hay, Jonathan 286 n. 23

Fukushima Kunimichi 320

Hayakawa Jirō 566–567

Fukuzawa Yukichi 39

Hayashi Fumiko 538

Funakoshi Hisao 440–446

Hayashi Razan 315, 317

Funatsu Tatsuichirō 358

Hayashi Yūkichi 343, 347–348

Furumaya Tadao 93

He Lili 211 n. 3

Fussell, Paul 541

Heco, Joseph 37 n 20, 293–294

Futabatei Shimei 384, 522

Hegel, Georg W.F. 549

Henriot, Christian 84, 90, 92, 94, 98,

Gai Zun 458

337 n. *, 458

Gaimushō 281

Hepburn, James C. 290–292, 294

Gamble, William 291

Herbert Franke 73

Ganjin (C. Jianzhen) 218

Herbert Marcuse 629 n. 36

index

643

Herder, Johann 549

Ishihama Tomoyuki 585

Hershatter, Gail 458

Ishihara Shintarō 45

Hibino Teruhiro 460

Ishii Hakutei 526

Higashi Fumio 386 n. 26

Ishii Tankō 292

Higashi Shinji 601–603

Ishikawa Gozan 6

Hiraishi Naoaki 34 n. 15

Ishikawa Kansen 286

Hirata Atsutane 53

Ishikawa Yoshihiro 33 n. 13, 74

Hirohito, Emperor 344

Ishiwara Kanji 581

Ho Chi Minh 99

Itō Hirobumi 279, 284, 290

Ho Kan-chih 560

Itō Jinshirō 288

Hong Xiuquan 213

Itō Ritsu 585

Hong Ye 619

Itō Takeo 447–448, 451, 577, 580, 583–585,

Hongfeng Nüshi see Kyū

587–588, 592–593, 595–596

Honig, Emily 97

Itō Yonejirō 340

Honma Senzō 294

Itō Zōhei 565

Horiuchi Tateki 356

Iugovich, A.I. 375

Hoshino Hisashi 56

Iwabashi Takeji 442

Hosokawa Karoku 585

Iwai Shigeki 65

Hou Jigao 311

Hou Kang’an 289

Jiang Jieshi 32

Hou Tingzun 288

Jiang Kai-shek 440

Hou Wai-lu 562

Jiang Zhou 310

Howard, Donald 476

Jinmu, Emperor 355 n. 16

Hsiao-wen, Emperor 605

Johnson, Chalmers 580

Hu Bishan 286 n. 22

Johnson, Linda 85

Hu Gongshou 6, 13, 286–287, 293

Jordan, Donald 92 n. 27

Hu Shih 618–619, 620 n. 6, 625, 628–631,

Judge, Joan 91, 337 n. *

634–636, 638

Junji, Banno 434 n. 6

Hu Zongxian 310–311

Huang Shiquan 286

Kabalkin, Roman Moiseevich 377

Huang Xing 23, 457

Kaburagi Tatemoto 288, 293

Huang Zongxi 623, 629

Kaizuka Shigeki 66

Huang Zunxian 12, 40, 278, 318, 325

Kajiyama Masaru 59 n. 14, 60

Huang, Philip 586, 594

Kamei Nanmei 47, 49–52, 54, 56, 63–64

Huc, Père 461

Kan Masatomo 56

Hummel, Arthur 619, 625

Kan’in, Imperial Prince 354

Hung, William 619, 624 n. 21, 639

Kanda Kiichirō 620 n. 7, 622, 634 n. 46

Huo Yuanjie 306

Kang Youwei 20, 629, 634 n. 46, 639

Kano Naoki 620–623, 632

Ihara Shigebee 285, 287 n. 24

Kanpo (Kōjun Daishi) 302 n. 5

Ikeda Chikugo 278, 289

Kaspe, Semyon 392

Ikeda Shigeo 348

Katakura Minoru 601 n. 6

Inoda Kōhai 384

Katō Yūzō 432 n. 2

Inoue Hiromasa 614

Katsura Shōsuke 214–215

Inoue Kaoru 279

Katz, Boris 377 n. 9

Inoue Yasushi 218–219

Katz, Emile 378

Inumaru Giichi 544

Kaufman, Abraham 387, 388, 392

Iriye, Akira 1, 2

Kawabata Teiji 344

Ishidō Kiyotomo 592

Kawachi Juzo 545

644

index

Kawahigashi Hekigotō 525 n. 21

Li Jen-chieh 528

Kawai Teikichi 439–441, 443–444

Li Lisan 440

Kawakami Hajime 440, 583

Li Renshu 286 n. 22

Kawakami Tōgai 293

Li T‘ing-shih 611–612

Kawakatsu Yoshio 68, 601, 605, 615

Li Yangong 311, 314

Kawakita Nagamasa 90

Li Yu 222 n. 19

Kawashima Shin 41

Li Zhi 637–639

Kawazoe Noboru 544

Liang Qichao 27, 29, 33, 40, 43–44, 72, 91,

Kazami Akira 595

278, 281 n. 12, 629, 638–639

Keene, Donald 215, 222

Lillehoj, Elizabeth 13

Kegasawa Yasunori 606–607

Ling Susheng 293

Kennedy, John F. 221

Ling Ziyu 293

Khorvat, Dmitri L. 379, 380

Liqiang, Bian 213 n. 8

Kim Ok-kyun 19

Lishi yanjiu 35 n. 16

Kimura Akira 307 n. 12, 319 n. 40

Liu Hsiang 602

Kishida Ginkō 6, 277, 290–295, 462

Liu Hsin 602

Kita Ikki 439, 581

Liu Hsing-t’ang 557–558

Kobayashi Rokurō 283

Liu Hsüeh-hsün 468

Kokin, M.D. 553

Liu Jianhui 36 n 19, 88–89, 279 n. 10,

Kokkin Taiyō 305

283 n. 17

Kokubun Ryōsei 543, 546

Liu Jing 60

Komatsu Shigeo 440–441

Liu Kwang-ching 73

Komuro Shinsuke 461

Liu Musha 218–219 n. 14

Konoe Atsumaro 438

Liu Piao 602

Kovalev, Sergei I. 558, 559 n. 25

Liu Shaoqi 440

Kovno (Kaunas) 84

Liu Shengguang 31–32, 43,

Kuhn, Philip 1

Liu Shipei 625

Kuhn, Thomas 56

Liu Wenhui 289

Kumashiro Enchō 277

Liu Zhuang 60

Kume Kunitake 56

Lo Chen-yü 468

Kume Masao 49

Lou Shiyi 219 n. 14

Kung Tzu-chen 613

Lu Cheng 33

Kuo Mo-jo 531, 556

Lü Chen-yü 559–561

Kushibe Gozaemon 288

Lu Hanchao 97

Kuwabara Jitsuzō, Professor 624 n. 21

Lu Hsun 469

Kuwabara Takeo, Professor 624 n. 21

Lu Jia 59

Kwŏn Che 304 n. 8

Lu Wangxiang 286

Kyū 285, 287

Lu Xun 83, 369–371, 435, 437, 445–446

Kyūkichi 291

n. 23, 435, 437, 445–446 n. 23

Luo Dajing 302–303

Lai, Yu-chih 7, 12, 92

Luo Zhenyu 10, 628, 631

Leo Ou-fan Lee 84

Lynn, Richard 278

Lerman, Leon 378 n. 11, 388 n. 31

Leszek Kolakowski 571

Mad’iar, Liudvig I. 552, 584

Levin, Pearl 378, 382

Maeno Ryōtaku 36

Levin, W. 387

Mair, Victor 46

Li Chi 556

Major, Ernest 90–91

Li Hung-chang 462

Malraux, André 99

index

645

Mao Tse-tung 159, 160, 573, 576, 590

Morisaki 339 n. 4

Mao Zedong 95, 221, 260, 262, 495, 543–546 Morita Kenji 611–612

Marshall, E.G. 211

Moritani Katsumi 568

Martin, Brian 96–97

Moritomi Shōkai 379

Marx, Karl 548, 575

Mote, Fritz 73

Mašâîh Muhammad (Mashayihei

Motoori Norinaga 55–56, 623

Mahama) 307

Moy, Jean Oda 218 n. 14

Masini, Federico 86 n. 12

Mozi 627

Masubuchi Tatsuo 599–600

Mu Mutian 445

Masuda Wataru 369–372

Muirhead, William 89

Masui Tsuneo 624

Murai, Consul-General 348

Matsueda Shigeo 370

Muramatsu Shin 90

Matsumura Akira 36 n 18, 78

Muramatsu Shōfū 342–343, 349–350,

Matsuura Michisuke 53

351 n. 13

Medhurst, William 36

Murata Zōroku 212

Mencius 627, 632

Myers, Ramon H. 432 n. 2, 586

Meng Yue 5n3, 13, 85, 87, 295 n. 38

Michener, James 210–211, 215

Naftaly, Eve 378, 387, 391

Mill, James 549

Nagai Unpei 6

Mill, John Stuart 549

Nagai Unpyō 286

Minbao 23

Nagao Jisaku 283–284

Ming (Emperor) 60

Nagataki, Consul-General 340

Mitamura Taisuke 2

Nagura Inata 287–289

Mitsukuri Rinshō 290

Nagura Jūjirō see Nagura Inata

Mittler, Barbara 90

Naitō Chisō 621

Miura Baien 626

Naitō Konan 1–2, 5, 10–11, 13, 67–68, 71, 343,

Miura Sukeyuki 63

468, 615–616, 621–623, 626–629,

Miyajima Hiroshi 34 n 15

632–638

Miyakawa Hisayuki 10, 13

Naka Michiyo 620–625, 630–631

Miyake Setsurei 638

Nakai, Kate Wildman 34 n. 15

Miyake Yonekichi 53–57, 64, 623, 625,

Nakami Tatsuo 218–219

631 n. 39

Nakamura Fusetsu 8, 9

Miyake Yūjirō 638

Nakanishi Kōseki 286

Miyamoto Chiyo 376

Nakanishi Tsutomu 439, 441, 449, 451,

Miyamoto Fuino 376 n. 7

587–594

Miyauchi Isaburō 464

Natsume Sōseki 456, 522–524

Miyazaki Hachirō 15

Nezu Hajime 438

Miyazaki Ichisada 66, 610, 627–628

Niida Noboru 586 n. 20, 595, 597

Miyazaki Masayoshi 581–583

Nishi Amane 276

Miyazaki Ryūsuke 21–23

Nishizato Tatsuo 437, 439–440, 446, 451, 591

Miyazaki Tōten 14–23

Nomura Koichi 545

Miyazaki, Tamizō 16, 17

Noro Eitarō 565

Miyazaki, Yazō 16–19

Nosaka Sanzō 441, 591

Miyoshi, Masao 521

Numata Jirō 36

Mizoguchi Yūzō 34 n 15

Nurhaci 215

Mizuno Shigeru 440

Mizuta Norihiza 626 n. 30

O’Brian, Hugh 220–221

Mori Masao 609–614

Ōba Osamu 77–80, 314, 372

646

index

Ōbayashi Toraji 288

Qian Xuantong 619, 631

Odagiri Masunosuke 358

Qoninci 306

Ōgami Suehiro 583, 586, 588, 591–592

Oka Masayasu 297

R.M. Kabalkin see Roman Moiseevich

Oka Senjin 462, 469

Kabalkin

Okada Hidehiro 218

Reikhardt, V.V. 558

Okada Kōsho 286

Reischauer, Edwin O. 67

Okakura Tenshin 465

Richardson, Samuel 220

Okamatsu Santarō 578

Roberts, Luke 80, 371

Okamoto, Consul-General 351

Ōkawa Shūmei 581

Sada Kōjirō 582–583

Okazaki Fumio 625

Saitō Mareshi 28, 29, 30n7, 33, 42 n 26

Okazaki Takashi 60–62, 64

Sakatani Yoshinao 596

Okita Hajime 93

Sakuma Zōzan 279

Okuhara Seiko 286

Saltzman-Li, Kate 371

Ōmachi Keigetsu 525–526

Sanetō Keishū 32, 38, 41–42

Ōmura Masujirō 212

Sano Manabu 580

Ossin, Sara 378, 388 n. 31

Sansom, George 66

Otagi Hajime 607–608, 612

Sarakura Masao 595

Ōtani Mitsuo 64

Sasaki Nobutsuna 522

Ōtani Toshio 612, 613

Satō Daishirō 590–591

Otokichi 283, 291

Satō Haruo 369–370, 435, 456, 534

Ōtomo Shin’ichi 305 n. 10, 307 n. 12, 311

Satō Nobuhiro 37, 38, 41

n. 21, 319 n. 40

Satō Saburō 33–34, 36–37, 40 n. 24, 41

Ōtomo Yoshishige 305

Satomi Ton 538

Ōtsuki Gentaku 36

Schaarschmidt, Siegfried 218 n. 14

Ouyang Jian 33

Schneider 618–619, 625–626, 629

Ouyang Yü-ch’ien 526

Scholem, Gershom 88

Ozaki Hotsumi 83, 437, 443–444, 451, 437,

Sela, Ori 24

443–444, 451, 569 n. 56, 580, 585, 587,

Semenov, Grigorii 381

591

Shao Jinhan 639

Ozaki Shōtarō 439, 591

Shen Zengzhi 633–634

Ozawa Masamoto 530 n. 31

Shen, Kuiyi 10

Ozawa Seiji 390

Shi Cuntong 33, 44

Shiba Ryōtarō 210–222

Pan Jiatang 317

Shibusawa Eiichi 282

Pao Shih-ch‘en 614

Shiga Naoya 538

Papaian, G. 553

Shiga Shigetaka 638

Peattie, Mark 337 n. *, 338 n. 2, 345 n. 8,

Shih Shu-mei 458

432 n. 2, 433 n. 3, 432 n. 2, 433 n. 3

Shikijō Ryōyū see Ankaku

Pelliot, Paul 66, 216

Shimada Kenji 72, 637–638

Perdue, Peter C. 25 n. 1

Shinagawa Tadamichi 281–282

Perry, Elizabeth 84, 97

Shinjinkai 23

Pimiko (or Himiko) 301

Shionoya On 369

Ping Zhai 288

Shirai Yukiyoshi 440

Plekhanov, Georgii 551–552, 556, 559–560

Shiratori Kurakichi 579

Shōtoku (Prince) 78

Qian Daxin 628, 639

Sidotti, Giovanni Battista 34

Qian Mu 619, 639

Sieffert, René 219 n. 14

index

647

Sima Qian 623, 626, 628, 634

Tan Sitong 458

Skidel’skii, Lev Shmulevich 378

Tan Weng 293

Smedley, Agnes 83, 443

Tan Xian 634–635

Smith, Arthur 461

Tan Yongnian 458

Smith, Henry 210 n. 1, 580

Tanaka Tadao 440

Snow, Edgar 392–393

Tanaka Takeo 322–323

Soejima Tatsuoki 440

Tani Kanjō 289

Soga Yūjun 284

Tanigawa Michio 68, 597–599, 603–604,

Sone Toshitora 460 n. 2

606–607, 609, 612, 615

Sone Tsunenosuke 290

Tanizaki Jun’ichirô 435, 456, 524, 530–533

Song Jiaoren 43–44, 457

Tao Demin 78

Song Xiaocheng 293

Tao Jingsun 445

Sorge, Richard 83, 443–444, 451

Tao Zongyi 304–305

Spielberg, Steven 221

Tashiroya 281

Stalin 388

Teisha see Kyū

Sternberg, Josef von 96

Tejima Hirotoshi 440

Stone, Oliver 221

Teng Gu 10

Struve, Daniel 219 n. 14

Tetsuō 285–286

Su Tung-p’o 467

Tōchūken Kumoemon 21

Su Zhongxiang 35 n 16

Tokugawa Akitake 282, 288–289

Sugihara Chiune 84, 390

Tokugawa Ieyasu 315, 317

Sugita Genpaku 36

Tokunaga Shōkai 379

Sugita Teiichi 463, 469

Tokutomi Sohō 466, 577

Sugiyama Kimiko 390

Tokuyō Seiju 305

Sun Deqian 632–634

Tominaga Nakamoto 626–628, 639

Sun Renpu 292–293

Tomiya Itaru 600–601

Sun Yanfeng 289

Tomonari Genpei 281

Sun Yat-sen 14–15, 20–23, 43–44, 457, 529

Torii Yumiko 34 n 15

Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) 343

Toriya Matazō 526

Sung Chiao-jen 581

Traig, Abe 378

Suzuki Kohei 590

Triệu Ðà 58

Suzuki Tsutomu 64

Triệu Mạt 58

Ts’ao Ju-lin 526

T’ien Han 531

Tsou, Tang 1

Tachibana Shiraki 440

Tsuda Mamichi 276

Takahashi Inosuke 288

Tsuda Sōkichi 48

Takahashi Kōsuke 93

Tsuruma Kazuyuki 601

Takahashi Yuichi see Takahashi Inosuke

Tsuruta Takeyoshi 6 n. 4, 13

Takase Bintoku 465

Tsuzuki Akiko 603–604, 611

Takasugi Shinsaku 212, 280, 283, 296, 460,

Tu Weiming 216

638

Twitchett, Denis 73

Takatsuna Hirofumi 94

Takeda Taijun 370

Uchida Kōsai 582

Takeuchi Minoru 470

Uchiyama Kanzō 83, 434–435, 451

Takeuchi Yoshimi 27, 29–30, 45, 370, 457

Uchiyama Shoten 530

Takezoe Shin’ichirō 284, 461

Ueda Sanae 602

Taki Seiichi 369

Uemura Yasuo 615

Tamaki Maeda 9

Ueno Kagenori 284

648

index

Umeya Shōkichi 43

Waugh, Evelyn 520

Uno Tetsuto 459, 467, 469–470, 473, 477,

Weber, Max 551, 609

481–482

Wei Lung 608

Usui Katsumi, Professor 345

Wei Yüan 613

Wei Zhongxian 216

Varga, Evgenii S. 551

Wen (Emperor) 59

Vespa, Amleto 392, 393 n. 40

Wen Shengguang 440

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 221

Wen T’ing-shih 468

Vinograd, Richard 10–11

Weng Guangping 322–325

von Ranke, Leopold 549

Wilbur, C. Martin 1

Wittfogel, Karl A. 584

Wagner, Rudolf 84–85, 90

Wolff, David 373 n. 2, 375 n. 5

Wagner, Wilhelm 584

Wong, Aida 8

Wakabayashi, Bob T. 80

Wouk, Herman 210–211, 213–215, 217

Wakeman, Frederic Jr. 84, 95, 97

Wu (Emperor) 58

Waley, Arthur 216

Wu Anlong 320 n. 42, 323 n. 48

Wang Baoping 6n5, 13, 315 n. 28

Wu Lan-hsiu 614

Wang Ching-wei 590

Wu Zhihui 43, 44

Wang Daozhi 286

Wujiang see Nagai Unpyō

Wang Duqing 445

Wushan see Ishikawa Kansen

Wang Fuzhi 617, 623 n. 19, 629–630

Wushui see Yasuda Rōzan

Wang Gongbi 41

Wang Guowei 628

Xia Yan 437

Wang Huiyin 316

Xiang Zhongfa 440

Wang I-ch’ang 557

Xiaofei Tian 35 n 17

Wang Kesan 5

Xiong Dayun 320 n. 42, 323 n. 48

Wang Mang 602

Xiong Xiling 33

Wang Mingsheng 639

Xiong Yuezhi 100

Wang Peng 314

Xu Guangping 435 n. 8

Wang Renbo 288–289

Xu Hai 310

Wang Tao 286, 289, 462

Xu Xiqi 288

Wang Weiqi 289

Xu Yuting 6, 286

Wang Weixiao 288

Xuanzong 24

Wang Wenguang 309 n. 15

Xue Jun 308

Wang Xiangrong 301 n. 3, 308

Xugu 286 n. 22

Wang Xiqi 314 n. 26

Wang Xuanfu 288–289

Yabe (or Yae) Kisaburō 289–290

Wang Xuewen 440, 441

Yagi Saiji 288, 293

Wang Yangming 623, 638

Yamada Gōichi 585, 592, 596

Wang Yiting 8

Yamada Keiji 545

Wang Yizhong 299 n. 1

Yamagami Masayoshi 445, 446 n. 23

Wang Yong 306 n. 6, 315 n. 28, 322

Yamagata Bantō 626

Wang Zhentai 289

Yamaguchi Susumu 586

Wang Zhi 310

Yamamoto Baigai 371, 467–468

Wasserstein, Bernard 43

Yamamoto Sanehiko 386 n. 26

Wasserstrom, Jeffrey 97–98

Yamamura Yūichi 215

Watanabe Mitsuo 319–320

Yamane Yukio 39 n. 22

Watanabe Shōnen 288

Yamanouchi Yōdō 222

Watanabe Yoshimichi 569

Yamaoka Sōhachi 211

index

649

Yanagida Tōkichi 280

Yu Qianyun 293

Yang Shih-hsiang 471

Yu, King 627

Yang Shoujing 7

Yuan Shikai 23, 213

Yang Xiuqing 213

Yang Yi 305

Zeng Guofan 617

Yao 626–627

Zhang Binglin 33, 43–44, 633

Yao Chengyan 288

Zhang Ertian 632–633

Yao Nai 316

Zhang Huanxiang 386

Yao Wendong 12

Zhang Minquan 33 n. 13

Yasuda Jirō 605–607

Zhang Shizhai 635

Yasuda Rōzan 6, 13, 285, 287 n. 24

Zhang Xiuzhi 288

Yasui Gengo 348

Zhang Xuecheng 619, 632–639

Ye Xiaoqing 91

Zhang Zhidong 358

Yeh Wen-hsin 84, 92, 95, 97–98, 458

Zhang Zuolin 386, 392 n. 38

Yeh, Catherine 94

Zhao Tuo 59

Yen Fu 468

Zhao Yi 628, 639

Yichu 302

Zhao Zhenxin 619, 625

Yokogawa Jirō 595

Zhe Sheng 288

Yokoi Shōnan 37

Zheng Minqin 219 n. 14

Yokomitsu Riichi 99, 376, 539

Zheng Qiao 636

Yosano Akiko 456, 536–537

Zheng Ruozeng 310–311

Yoshida Shigeru 32

Zheng Shungong 305

Yoshida Shin 638

Zheng Yuqing 308

Yoshida Shōin 37, 637–638

Zheng Zhenduo 369

Yoshikawa Kōjirō 66

Zhou Qiqian 371–372

Yoshikawa Tadao 603

Zhou Yiliang 625, 627

Yoshino Sakuzō, Professor 581

Zhu Yizun 315–318

You Tong 317

Zhu Yun 639

Yu Dafu 40, 369, 445

Zimmerman, William 388 n. 31, 389

Yu Hongjun 351

Zou Yiren 354 n. 15

Yu Lan 458