Organizer and Chair: Christopher L. Hill, Columbia University
Discussant: Judith Farquhar, University of North Carolina
Classically, the emergence of concepts of authorizing the political, economic, and social formations of modernity in East Asia has been viewed as a process of finding proper equivalents in target languages to express purportedly universal concepts arriving from the West. This panel departs from such a normative narrative of the transfer of ideas by situating the translation, appropriation, and rearticulation of Western ideas in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912) in a geopolitical context that encompasses the hegemonic position of Europe and North America in East Asia, the role of Japan as coercive mediator in the reproduction of these practices elsewhere in the region, and the policies of internal colonization carried out within Japan under the guise of universal exigencies.
The panel builds on recent scholarship that recognizes the historicity of the discursive regimes of modernity and treats the translation of these regimes as a historical and political practice eluding categorization either as Westernizing or as authentically native. Nonetheless each panelist seeks to address the weak points of a simply discursive approach to this problem. As a whole, the panel approaches the formation of these institutions as abrupt shifts that appeared directly through and in response to the extension of the world market and imperialist geopolitics to East Asia, shifts that nonetheless conceal their historicity under the guise of universality and retrospectively constructed causality.
Panelists examine the role of specific rhetorical strategies in the writing of national history during the period of bunmei-kaika, the creation of new vocabularies in the practice of international law in negotiations with Korea and China, and the totemic status assumed by certain categories such as those of language and money in the institutionalization of literature and the gold standard. By analyzing particular practices of translation, appropriation, and rearticulation as well as the "universality" of metropolitan languages themselves, each panel seeks to reveal the mechanisms through which the institutions that these practices authorize were naturalized and gained the status of universals.
Christopher L. Hill, Columbia University
Japanese historiography during the first two decades of the Meiji period was dominated by bunmeishi, or history of civilization, a genre that appropriated discussions of trade in English political economy to argue that intercourse (kosai) was the key to the development of nations. By rearticulating the tropes of English liberalism’s ideal of uninhibited exchange, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Taguchi Ukichi and other writers of bunmeishi were able to rewrite the history of Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration as a history of blockage and distortion. They maintained that by accepting ideas from abroad and dismantling local customs and institutions that blocked the natural unity of the Japanese "people," a new Japan could stop the advance of European and American empires in Asia and achieve the prosperity of the metropolitan powers.
The paradigm of national history in bunmeishi represents nation-states as transhistorical unities that exist prior to their interaction. The writers of bunmeishi maintained that inequalities among nation-states stem from the facility of intercourse within each state and may be explained by examining the history of intercourse in individual nation-states. Beginning from the counter-assertion that the modern nation-state exists only in apposite, geopolitical relation to other states, this paper contends that in bunmeishi the trope of intercourse, in all its ambiguities, is the precondition for the establishment of the nation-state as a political-economic subject in historical discourse. The trope of intercourse thus established the epistemological framework through which intellectuals constructed new histories of the Japanese archipelago that legitimated the policies of internal conquest and social engineering of the Meiji state and the integration of Japan into the global market.
Alexis Eastwood, University of Chicago
In the early years of the Meiji regime, legal concepts were brought into the kanji world which demanded new vocabularies or new uses for old terms. As the government applied these terms to Japan, Japanese policy writers and legal scholars created a new lexicon that displaced the norms of exchange between countries that had long held. The legal terms of the Law of Nations (bankoku koho)—words such as "sovereignty," "independence," and "annexation" that had been newly rendered into kanji—were crucial to the Japanese government’s endeavors to write a new practice of inter-nation exchange. Writers of foreign policy used these new terms not only to engage with the American and European legal lexicon of warfare and trade but also to reorder the terms of interaction within Asia.
Examples of this process can be seen in diplomatic discussions in 1875–76 between Meiji and Yi representatives concerning the Treaty of Kanghwa and in negotiations in 1885 with Qing officials on the Treaty of Tientsin. By 1910 Japanese leaders maneuvered fully within the vocabulary of international law to legitimate Japan’s inscription of Korea into Imperial Japanese territory. In examining diplomatic practice during this period, this paper highlights the creation of terms that incorporated a self-proclaimed "universal" order in relations between nations. These words were translated back into European languages and within the kanji world to create a new terminology of power that has had and continues to have binding meaning throughout the twentieth century.
Ioannis Mentzas, Columbia University
The Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki spent the first two years of our waning century in London, dispatched by the Meiji state so that he might return an expert in the English language. The need to produce English-speaking subjects corresponded to the transition to a gold standard (1897) through which Japan, distancing itself from Asia’s silver-based trade, acceded to the international (Western) sphere of exchange. Soseki shared the state’s interest in English because it seemed to be emerging as a kind of universal language—like gold, with an exchange value relatively stable across time and space. He expected the same from English literature. Yet once in London, Soseki questioned the logic of transcultural value upon which he had been acting. Although disillusioned, Soseki did not reject the intrinsic value of aspirations to universality: he embarked on a lonely journey to a Theory of Literature which would sort and classify the constants of literature. He almost went mad.
This paper uses Soseki’s confrontation with English literature to examine globality as a process through which perceived peripheries’ subscription to money-forms of all sorts (including English) is coded as voluntary. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the components of economy and language. Analogies should focus strictly on the unguaranteed "leaps" (Karatani) that constitute both, and which tend to be concealed in similar ways by retroactive structuralization. A set of leaps, however, can be described properly as a looming structure when outsiders are forced to leap into a domain within which leaps are naturalized as merely routine exchange. The spread of capitalism and English are such structures.