Reconstructing Tradition. The Debate on “Invented Tradition” in the Japanese Modernization

• Authors: Farkas Mária Ildikó
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Several scholarly works on Japan explain the specific phenomena of the 19th century Japanese modernization in terms of Japanese tradition and culture. Against this, another trend (based on mainly postmodern theory) denies the validity of these explanations, citing the theory of “invented tradition”. This paper tries to add some thoughts to this debate, examining the concept of tradition in Japanese modernization. The second part of the article tries to demonstrate the utilization (“reconstruction” – by Eisenstadt) of tradition with a specific moment of the Japanese modernization: the founding of the modern state in 1868.

Keywords

EN

Japanese modernization Invented tradition; Ideological foundations of the Meiji; Edo-period; kokugaku

• Publisher: Instytut Kultur Śródziemnomorskich i Orientalnych PAN
• Journal: Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia
• Year: 2016
• Issue: 29
• Pages: 31-46

Dates

published

2016-12-01

Contributors

author

Farkas Mária Ildikó

• Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, Budapest, Hungary

References

• See: Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion. The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan, New York and London: Free Press, 1985; Nakane Chie and Ōishi Shinzaburō (eds.), Tokugawa Japan. The Social and Economic Antecedents of Modern Japan, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990.
• Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization; A Comparative Review, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 427.
• Bellah, Tokugawa Religion…, pp. 11–12.
• Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization…, p. 311.
• Mainly exposed by Stephen Vlastos in his essay and other essays in the book he edited: Stephen Vlastos, ‘Tradition. Past/Present Culture and Modern Japanese History’ in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998, pp. 1–18. Other (less intense, thus more conforming) examples: W. Dean Kinzley, Industrial Harmony in Modern Japan: The Invention of a Tradition, London: Routledge, 1991; Ichikawa Midori, Invented Tradition in Shinto: A New Construction of the Emperor as a God of the State, Bloomington: Indiana University, 2000.
• Bellah, Tokugawa Religion…, pp. 11–12; Robert Bellah, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 1–62. See also: Michio Morishima, Why Has Japan Succeeded? Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 4–15; Shichihei Yamamoto, The Spirit of Japanese Capitalism and Selected Essays, Lanham: Madison Books, 1992, pp. 1–22.
• Vlastos, ‘Tradition…’, p. 1.
• Reviews on Mirror of Modernity: Kerry Smith, Social History, Vol. 25, No. 1, January 2000, pp. 119–121; David R. Ambaras, H-Japan (September, 1999), H-Net Reviews: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3406 (accessed 26.05.2016); Ann Waswo, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 54, No. 1, pp. 133–135; F. G. Notehelfer, Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1999, pp. 432–438.
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• Hobsbawm, ‘Inventing Traditions…’, pp. 1–14.
• Notehelfer, Journal of Japanese Studies, p. 436.
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• Burgess, ‘The “Illusion” of Homogeneous Japan…’.
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• Notehelfer, Journal of Japanese Studies, p. 433.
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• Riegel, ‘Inventing Asian traditions…’, p. 75.
• Bellah, Tokugawa Religion…; Bellah, Imagining Japan…; Michio Morishima, Why Has Japan Succeeded?...; Shichihei Yamamoto, The Spirit of Japanese Capitalism.
• Riegel, ‘Inventing Asian traditions…’, p. 76.
• Ibid., p. 77.
• Burgess, ‘The Illusion…’.
• New works on kokugaku: See: Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; Peter Nosco, Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan, Harvard University Press, 1990; Peter Flueckiger, Imagining Harmony: Poetry, Empathy, and Community in Mid-Tokugawa Confucianism and Nativism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011; Mark McNally, Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese Nativism, Harvard University Asia Center, 2005; Mark Teeuwen, ‘Kokugaku vs. Nativism’, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2006, pp. 227–242; Susan L.Burns, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003; Michael Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period Japan. The Modern Transformation of National Learning and the Formation of Scholarly Societies, Leiden, Boston: Global Oriental, 2012.
• Burns, Before the Nation…, pp. 49–52; Nosco, Remembering Paradise…, pp. 49–67.
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• Ibid., pp. 100–155.
• Flueckiger, Imagining Harmony…, p. 155.
• Byron H. Earhart, Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity, Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1982, pp. 144–147; Bary Wm. Theodore de, Tsunoda Ryusaku and Keene Donald (eds.), Sources of Japanese Tradition II, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, pp. 15–35.
• Flueckiger, Imagining Harmony…, p. 173.
• See several chapters in Burns, Before the Nation…, especially pp. 68–101; Nosco, Remembering Paradise…, pp. 160–203.
• Helen Hardacre: ‘Creating State Shintō: The Great Promulgation Campaign and the New Religions’, Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1986, pp. 29–63, 36. See also: Burns, Before the Nation…, pp. 220–223.
• Burns, Before the Nation…, pp. 220–223.
• Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen…, pp. 199–204.
• Michael Wachutka, Restorative and Innovative Elements in Early Meiji Religious and Educational Politic: http://www.desk.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/download/es_9_Wachutka.pdf (accessed 26.05.2016), pp. 189–190.
• Hardacre: ‘Creating State Shintō…’, p. 32.
• Helen Hardacre: Shintō and the State, 1868–1988, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 17.
• The term first appeared in Aizawa Seishisai’s work: Shinron, in 1825. W. G. Beasley, The Modern History of Japan, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985, pp. 50–53, Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825, Harvard East Asian Monographs 126, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 100–135.
• Marius B. Jansen, ‘Meiji Ishin: The Political Context’ in Meiji Ishin: Restoration and Revolution, Nagai Michio and Miguel Urrutia (eds.), Tokyo: United Nations University, 1985, pp. 5–6; Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning…, pp. 123–135.
• Bellah, Tokugawa Religion…, p. 102.
• Burgess, ‘The Illusion…’. For the thesis that modern Asian varieties of nationalism were not simply borrowed from the West but made good use of premodern and culturalist concepts see: Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Hardacre, Shintō and the State…, pp. 42–58.
• Hardacre, ‘Creating State Shintō…’, p. 35.
• Mito school: Herschel Webb, ‘The Development of an Orthodox Attitude Toward the Imperial Constitution in the Nineteenth Century’ in Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization, Marius B. Jansen (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965, pp. 167–192; Beasley, The Modern History of Japan…, pp. 50–53; Jansen, ‘Meiji Ishin…’, pp. 3–20; Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning…, pp. 51–58.
• Burns, Before the Nation…, p. 69; John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto, New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p. 64.
• Burns, Before the Nation…, p. 69; Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…, p. 64.
• Ibidem.
• Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period…, p. 13.
• Ibid., p. 11.
• Ibid., p. 9.
• Breenand and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…, p. 64.
• Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period…, p. 13.
• Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…, p. 21.
• Ibid., p. 109.
• Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period…, p. 11.
• Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…, p. 110.
• Earhart, Japanese Religion…, p. 152.
• Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period…, p. XI.
• Wachutka, Restorative and Innovative Elements…, p. 189.
• Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…, p. 64.
• Hardacre, Shintō and the State…, p. 17–18.
• Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…, p. 21.
• Yoshiro Tamura, Japanese Buddhism: A Cultural History, Tokyo: Kosei, 2000, pp. 156–158; Hardacre, Shintō and the State…, p. 27.
• Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…, p. 22.
• Conrad Totman, A History of Japan, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, pp. 407–408.
• Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…, p. 64; Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period…, p. 16.
• Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period…, p. 9.
• Ibid., p. 10.
• Ibidem. Here he cites Sakamoto Koremaru, Kokka Shintōtaisei no seiritsu to tenkai, Tokyo: Kobunda, 1993, p. iii.
• Hardacre, Shintō and the State…; Sakamoto, Kokka Shintō…; some of the newest works: Breen and Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto…; Trent E. Maxey, The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014; Jun'ichi Isomae, Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shintō, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2014; Jun’ichi Isomae, Japanese Mytholohgy. Hermeneutics on Scripture, London: Equinox, 2010; Jason Ānanda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012; John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (eds.), Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami, New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period…, pp. 9–13.
• Ibid., p. XI.
• Uchino Goro, ‘Early Modern Kokugaku (National Learning) and the New Kokugaku: Their Growth and Significance’ in Cultural Identity and Modernization in Asian Countries: Proceedings of Kokugakuin University Centennial Symposium, Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics, Kokugakuin University, 1983: http://www2.kokugakuin.ac.jp/ijcc/wp/cimac/uchino.html (accessed 12.06.2012).
• Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths. Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, Princeton: Princeton Unicersity Press, 1985, pp. 123 and 139.
• Ibid., p. 139.
• Wachutka, Kokugaku in Meiji-Period…, p. 10.