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Cultural cringe in Japan? - masaman - 2010-10-09
Womacks23 Wrote:As I said. I don't freaking care it was a derogatory term in ancient China. The JAPANESE dictionary doesn't say it is derogatory and sorry, if you want to overthrow the Japanese dictionary and define your own meaning of a word, you will have to come up with very convincing evidences. So far, EVERYTHING you have said was refuted. You said English didn't import Italian and the next moment a list of 1000 Italian words came up. You said 南蛮 was used in 16th century in China and all the dictionaries, like 10 of them Japanese AND Chinese, don't have that definition in them. You said kidnapping Chinese doctors were common practice but you couldn't even present the source.masaman Wrote:You are a person who stayed in Japan (I assume). Is it too much to ask you to stop mixing up Chinese and Japanese like newbies? Didn't it occur to you it's kind of rude?Will you stop pretending that the Japanese created new definitions for the kanji 蛮?
It was a derogatory term in China straight from ancient times. The Japanese KNEW this and took it to refer to Europeans (barbarians who are from the South....hmm let me think....oh yes....南蛮). If it wasn't derogatory they wouldn't have CHANGED the words after the Meiji restoration. Even after they changed the words they made it clear that they still considered Japanese culture to be superior. Why do you keep denying this?
Why do you expect me to "agree" with your opinion when there is no ground to it? This isn't really personal to me. I don't care whether or not Japanese looked down on British in 1840. But your argument just doesn't sound very convincing. I was kind of appalled when I found you didn't really have a good ground for 南蛮 argument after going on and on like that and gave me the link to the Chinese dictionary which I believe you yourself didn't really understand.
Though, I said this before but, send me your picture and I may change my stance
Cultural cringe in Japan? - quincy - 2010-10-09
zachandhobbes Wrote:The whole idea of Americans and British and other English speakers who are learning the Japanese language discussing the deep and contrived history of Japan and the philosophy of Japanese people worries me on a level that you guys will never understand.I don't know why you're worried; it looks like only there's only two people left that even care about this and one of them is Japanese.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - masaman - 2010-10-09
IceCream Wrote:what exactly does 蛮 mean to you? Rikaichan has it as "barbarian". Nearly every source i've checked has mentioned the Western Barbarians at some point. Womacks is hardly reinventing history, this is the normal translation and interpretation, it seems.In ancient Chinese, Non-Chinese people in the south are 南蛮. Others are
It may be that it doesn't reflect the attitude of the Japanese towards the west in the uncivilised, grunting and wearing animal skin clothes way... there's also lots of ways "barbarian" is used in English. Or, attitudes could have changed in Japan. But it does seem fairly clear that there was an anti-foreign attitude within certain sectors of Japanese society.
北狄
東夷
西戎
This is the ancient Chinese idea. So the Japanese to ancient Chinese eyes can be 東夷, you know what I mean? (although we were even beyond 東夷 and we were 倭 which means pretty much like "barbarian" too.)
So south east Asia to ancient Chinese was 南蛮. It is actually WEST of Japan, but in ancient Chinese it was 南蛮 and I guess Japanese used the term anyway and then the Portuguese and Spanish establish colonies there and came from that direction.
This is totally different from the Womacks view of "Japanese took it from Chinese because Chinese were calling westerners 南蛮 and they thought westerners were barbarian". It seems like Chinese didn't call westerners 南蛮. And it seems that there was no mockery element to it in Japanese even though it did in the ancient Chinese.
Moreover, as I said, Dutch and British were technically not 南蛮. They were 紅毛 (red heir). Yeah that may be not very nice either (I personally think gingers are gorgeous and don't understand why they are often made fun of. But it's not nice to address someone with their physical features regardless I guess) but I don't believe westerners were much better in calling Japanese people back then.
Edit: And if you worry about ONE character in a word, then look up the 漢字
in 卑弥呼 (The most famous pre-historic Japanese queen) and 邪馬台国 (The most famous pre-historic Japanese kingdom). Chinese definitely used these 漢字 deliberately but Japanese people today don't really care, and surely don't mean mockery when they use them. It is how people perceive it that is important. Not the root of single 漢字 in a word.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - masaman - 2010-10-09
quincy Wrote:Yeah and the Japanese guy is rather enjoying it. haha.zachandhobbes Wrote:The whole idea of Americans and British and other English speakers who are learning the Japanese language discussing the deep and contrived history of Japan and the philosophy of Japanese people worries me on a level that you guys will never understand.I don't know why you're worried; it looks like only there's only two people left that even care about this and one of them is Japanese.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - Womacks23 - 2010-10-09
masaman Wrote:So south east Asia to ancient Chinese was 南蛮. It is actually WEST of Japan, but in ancient Chinese it was 南蛮 and I guess Japanese used the term anyway and then the Portuguese and Spanish establish colonies there and came from that direction.Japanese took the word because they had roughly the same viewpoint as the Chinese. That there was a center of civilization and they were part of it and everyone outside of that circle was "barbarian".
This is totally different from the Womacks view of "Japanese took it from Chinese because Chinese were calling westerners 南蛮 and they thought westerners were barbarian". It seems like Chinese didn't call westerners 南蛮. And it seems that there was no mockery element to it in Japanese even though it did in the ancient Chinese.
Us - Civilized
Them - Barbarians
What is so difficult about this? Do you deny this line of thought in Japanese culture?
I will say it again. If 南蛮 did not have negative connotations why did the Japanese change the words after they began to consider European Civ. as advanced after the Meiji restoration?
Cultural cringe in Japan? - Womacks23 - 2010-10-09
masaman Wrote:Edit: And if you worry about ONE character in a word, then look up the 漢字Those are kanji selected purely for their readings and you know that.
in 卑弥呼 (The most famous pre-historic Japanese queen) and 邪馬台国 (The most famous pre-historic Japanese kingdom). Chinese definitely used these 漢字 deliberately but Japanese people today don't really care, and surely don't mean mockery when they use them. It is how people perceive it that is important. Not the root of single 漢字 in a word.
南蛮 was not selected because of its readings. It was taken because barbarians had appeared from the south and China had a word to refer to them. 蛮 implies that they were outside of civilized culture. Which fits exactly with the Japanese worldview. And I assure you that every literate Japanese person in the 1500s knew the history and connotations involved with using the characters.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - Womacks23 - 2010-10-09
masaman Wrote:You mean only 70 books? I'm not saying Japan ignored China completely. But nor did she the West. She was eagerly interested in BOTH. Dude. even Newtons book was translated in 1800.On one boat. You can probably assume there are 70+ on every boat that ever came from China. Trade in Chinese knowledge was big business and the Japanese were paying high prices for every Chinese book they could get their hand on.
What do you think the ratio of Chinese to European books studied in 1840s Japan was?
Cultural cringe in Japan? - Womacks23 - 2010-10-09
Funny thing is that the Chinese also refer to westerners (esp. Dutch) as 红毛. You think it is a coincidence that the Japanese also used this word?
Cultural cringe in Japan? - Womacks23 - 2010-10-09
Dear Nest0r,
I thought you might be interested in this.
Love, Womacks
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/paaf/paaf/2008/00000081/00000004/art00003
This article addresses recent claims of right-wing nationalism in Japan made in journalistic and academic commentary. It re-examines a broad range of evidence used to depict rising Japanese neo-nationalism and concludes that despite popular notions about a re-emergence of militarist attitudes, such currents are not as entrenched in Japanese public discourse as some commentators suggest. After a brief theoretical discussion of nationalism, we examine (1) opinion in Japan regarding constitutional change, (2) statements by elite policy makers which are often the focus of media and academic attention, (3) the debate surrounding the notorious New History Textbook and (4) war memory in popular culture—more specifically, manga. A detailed reading of these examples suggests that right-wing discourse is less prevalent in Japan than is often assumed.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - vonPeterhof - 2010-10-09
zachandhobbes Wrote:The whole idea of Americans and British and other English speakers who are learning the Japanese language discussing the deep and contrived history of Japan and the philosophy of Japanese people worries me on a level that you guys will never understand.I see absolutely no problem with either of these cases, in fact I get really offended when people tell me things like "Drop this subject, you'll never understand it anyway". Most of the time I do not respond, but what I really want to say is "And who the heck are you to stop me from trying?"
It kind of makes me think of Japanese forming a circle and trying to discuss why Americans value freedom and democracy yet slavery existed, something that American scholars on the subject discuss to this very day...
It is probably a manifestation of my own cultural cringe. The amount of pride my fellow Russians have in our culture's alleged incomprehensibility to outsiders really pisses me off, as well as the fact that many Westerners go along with it (like Churchill's "it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma"). This just seems to reinforce our delusions of exceptionalism, thinking that we have little or no need for "Western" logic and reason when we have our "Soul". If you study Russian literature you are bound to come across a short poem by the 19th century poet Fyodor Tyutchev that Russians quote all the friggin' time (here are some translations, including three Japanese ones near the bottom). Well, I prefer the response to that poem by a less famous modern poet Igor' Guberman - "It's about motherf***ing time/To understand her with the mind!" Both poems are adressed to Russians themselves, rather than to foreign scholars, but they are relevant to how we interact with other cultures. I do not know whether to laugh or cry when I hear a Russian patriot gush about how complex and unique our culture is, and then start summarising other cultures in two-three sentences, thinking that there is nothing more to them.
Of course, I do not think it is a good idea to assume that your knowledge and understanding of a culture exceed those of the natives, but shying away from the more deep and contrived topics of culture just because someone might tell you "It's a Japanese thang, y'all wouldn't understand" just feels like dumbing yourself down to me. So far I am enjoying following this debate, even if it did stray from the original topic a little.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - Cheesemaster64 - 2010-10-09
George Bush doesn't like black people.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - nest0r - 2010-10-09
Womacks23 Wrote:According to your friend Angela Schottelmayer, they wanted specific types of Chinese knowledge, and this did not feed into a belief that China was Great.masaman Wrote:You mean only 70 books? I'm not saying Japan ignored China completely. But nor did she the West. She was eagerly interested in BOTH. Dude. even Newtons book was translated in 1800.On one boat. You can probably assume there are 70+ on every boat that ever came from China. Trade in Chinese knowledge was big business and the Japanese were paying high prices for every Chinese book they could get their hand on.
What do you think the ratio of Chinese to European books studied in 1840s Japan was?
"Concerning Japan's intercourse with Western cultures, the example of 'Dutch learning' (Rangaku) may show that the rulers were still interested in practical and scientific knowledge, regardless of the fact that it came from the West, as long as it was not 'contaminated' by Christian views."
From one of those chinajapan.org articles: "A comparative analysis of Tokugawa diplomatic protocols and trade credentials which the bakufu introduced in 1715 indicates that the bakufu placed China at the lowest status within its international order and succeeded in establishing Japan’s superior status over China.182 While Korea and the Ryukyus were categorized as diplomatic partners, the Dutch and the Chinese were given lower statuses as trade partners...
Trade with the Dutch was then restored. The representatives of the Dutch East India Company, led by the Oranda kapitan 阿蘭陀カピタン（かぴたん）, had been allowed to visit Edo and were honored with an audience
with the shogun, as the only Europeans who retained the favor of the Tokugawa bakufu, in the third month of every year after 1633.184 The Japanese stance was that Dutch-Japanese relations had been rehabilitated as a result of the Dutch apology for their misconduct in Taiwan and their subjugation to Japan. The bakufu as a result came to regard the Dutch as hereditary shogunal vassals (fudai no gohikan 譜代の御被官) and adopted a quasi-official character in their presence. It called their service chūsetsu 忠節 (fidelity) and hōkō 奉公 (duty). On the other hand, the Chinese merchants coming to Nagasaki were treated with less form than the Dutch and were not so honored. Kaempfer noticed that the Japanese treatment of the Chinese was different from that of the Dutch, pointing out that Japanese officials and interpreters actually treated the Chinese discourteously.
The Nagasaki Magistrate’s Office (Nagasaki bugyōsho 長崎奉行所) was the highest ranking Japanese office with which they were allowed to communicate.187 The bakufu did not give them the quasi-official status which it gave the Dutch and instead treated them in the same manner as it did Japanese merchants (akindo dōzen 商人同然). 188 Hayashi Gahō called the Chinese merchants barbarians (ban’i 蕃夷) in his annotation of the collection of the writings of his father; he considered this treatment of the Chinese at Nagasaki to be proper.1"
It goes on to discuss this didn't reflect a holistic perspective of China in the worldview where they were ranking all of these countries and peoples but instead a granular, functionally focused one, as the article is fine-tuning the evidence to support its thesis that Japan saw itself as equal/superior ("Hierarchical positioning was a crucial and almost unavoidable matter not only for Japan but also for any other countries which wanted to associate with the self-proclaimed Middle Kingdom, before the Western principle of equality between sovereign nations was introduced to East Asia in the nineteenth century... Japan did not identify itself as a vassal state of China during most of its history, no matter how China saw it.")
From your favourite chinajapan.org article, we get more understanding of the organic limitations of knowledge and why certain terms would have been influenced (without, as previous quotes suggest, pushing Japan into a 'perceptually subservient/mindless copycat' role, as that was never its style):
"One of the more interest-
ing aspects of such an analysis, which remains implicit in this es-
say, is the simple fact that until 1862 no Japanese of the period
under discussion actually saw Chinese soil. "All the information from
the mainland was gained second-hand through a variety of inter-
locutors--Chinese, British, Dutch, and French--at the port of Nagasaki."
As a response to your previos selective quote, to underscore there was a mulitiplicity of perspectives that reflected practical concerns that didn't stem from a belief in Chinese superiority and British inferiority:
"The first hard news of the Qing defeat in the Opium War arrived
from Dutch and Chinese shipmen. The Qak~K~ was keenly interested in
the information; and, after inteviewing Chinese extensively in
Nagasaki, it learned that the war was a result of China's refusal to
trade in opium. From the very start, Japanese thinking was guided by
the logic of naiyu gaikan "domestic disorder and foreign disaster."
The phrase is not simply a listing of two items, but implies a connectedness in which one of the
two elements is linked to the other in a cause and effect relation-
ship. Haga might have been wise to point this out; perhaps it is too
obvious to deserve mention to a scholarly Japanese audience.
Early reports to the bafuku stressed that the Qing loss was due
primarily to poor military preparation; with the clear implication
that Japan was similarly weak in artillery and needed to make the
necessary ordinance reforms. Mizuno Tadakuni, who had
gained control over the Grand Council in 1841, solicited
and received a number of position papers on how to go about making
such reforms; this was tantamount to an admission that the Opium War
would be the cause of a basic change in Japanese foreign policy, for
the Qing loss had really shakn up Japanese leaders. The fear in
Japan was, of course, that the domestic lack of artillery would en-
able foreign aggression (gaikan) to spread from the mainland to the
sacred islands; and from there cause domestic. disquiet (naiyu)....
Okuma Shigenbou, as an effective mouthpiece the British, that the Opium War had not started because
foreigners arbitrarily violated Chinese markets and begun importing opium. It was a confrontation between Europe's spirit of free trade
and the "narrow, conservative, self-satisfaction of the Qing"
(p. 97). The Qing had simply been unable to accept the foreigners as
diplomatic equals. Lord Palmerston, Okuma continued, had not com-
menced hostilities over the importation of opium, but over the .Qing's
unfair view that all foreign governments were barbarians."
From what I've read there and via some of those prev. linked books, the Japanese did not simply fold Europe into hierarchical worldviews. Functional dynamics like diplomacy, geographic location (ease of communication, resources) and understanding of military threat and the secular impact of Christianity were factors contributing to the ability of Western knowledge to filter to Japan, not some belief that Chinese knowledge was wholly superior. This began in the 16c though I imagine having knowledge filtered secondhand contributed to the sense of urgency and radical projects that came into play in the 19c. It was complicated--aesthetic and utilitarian and based in Japan's unflagging belief in its own equality/superiority modulating a constant desire for growth and knowledge...
Likewise according to Morris Low: "One can view Chinese science as being part of a larger dynamic which has characterised the history of Japanese learning, rather than contributing to a period of retrogression. Likewise, Neo-Confucianism and jitsugaku ('practical learning') can be considered to be inseparable parts of a larger historical process of continuing growth rather than a period of stagnation. Indeed, there is considerable evidence to show that the importation of Western learning through Dutch studies during the Tokugawa period was made possible only by the prior assimilation of Chinese science.
Science and Confucianism only became truly established in Japan in the 17th century and the influence from China mainly came from books. The most authoritative works on medicine, astronomy, mathematics, military strategy and law were written in Chinese. Knowledge of the beginnings of Western science came from the Chinese translations of the original writings of the Jesuits in China. The study of Western science before the 19th century coexisted in a parasitic, rather than symbiotic, relationship with the Chinese approach to Nature."
Also from Low, directly preceding the above: "The relationship between rangaku ('Dutch studies') and Japan's intensive modernisation during the Meiji period has been at the centre of debate about the Tokugawa legacy for Japanese science. A plausible argument can be made that the origins of modern science can be found in the 17th century. Despite the 'national isolation policy', the 17th century saw a period of great activity in traditional learning and science. With the removal of the ban on the import of foreign books, bar those on Christianity, in 1720, a wave of Western influence began with the spread of rangaku throughout the country. Although rangaku was mainly concerned with medicine, there were soon translations of Western works on physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, geography, metallurgy, navigation, ballistics and military tactics. It was, arguably, more the attitudes and awareness which were engendered by Dutch studies during the Tokugawa period that was important rather than the content and continuity.
At the beginning of the Tokugawa period, there was some resistance from Confucian scholars such as the influential Hayashi Razan and others who were able to utilise the unified Neo-Confucian concept of Man and Nature to refute such Western ideas as a spherical earth. However from the mid-18th century, as Western astronomy gained more recognition, Confucian scholars refrained from such denials... "
Likewise we've already seen the cultural and practical views of Japan towards Europe and I think many scholars, some of them on this forum, have a pretty solid understanding of language change in Japan w/ regards to China. I don't think there's any reason to assume that the Japanese used specific kanji/terms in a perfect perceptual imitation of China and maintained that widespread perceptual mimickry locked into the word usage until suddenly changing it in the 19c.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - nest0r - 2010-10-09
Womacks23 Wrote:Dear Nest0r,Interesting.
I thought you might be interested in this.
Love, Womacks
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/paaf/paaf/2008/00000081/00000004/art00003
This article addresses recent claims of right-wing nationalism in Japan made in journalistic and academic commentary. It re-examines a broad range of evidence used to depict rising Japanese neo-nationalism and concludes that despite popular notions about a re-emergence of militarist attitudes, such currents are not as entrenched in Japanese public discourse as some commentators suggest. After a brief theoretical discussion of nationalism, we examine (1) opinion in Japan regarding constitutional change, (2) statements by elite policy makers which are often the focus of media and academic attention, (3) the debate surrounding the notorious New History Textbook and (4) war memory in popular culture—more specifically, manga. A detailed reading of these examples suggests that right-wing discourse is less prevalent in Japan than is often assumed.
On a related note, what I'm saying can be boiled down to this: I'm sure the Japanese masses were shocked, surprised, thrilled, frightened, etc. etc. as influenced by everyday life and political rhetoric and the introduction of industrialization, leading to all manner of cultural tropes and trends. This is a lengthy complex process quite different from portraying Japan as instantly being shattered by the onslaught of primitive Western Barbarian after the sudden destruction of China and a cracking open of Japan. It's no more fair to paint a simple picture of that than it is to paint the results of a survey as the accurate reflection of modern Japan, and especially not to tie the two together in a simple straight line within a paragraph or two.
Likewise even (we haven't seen it) if it was demonstrated such a thing occurred (that is, the sudden abandonment of specific nominal referent kanji during the Meiji), language change/kanji reform in the naming of Westerners would've reflected multivalent views effecting and effected by policy in a long term 'organic process' (pm215 or someone's gonna mock me for using that phrase again to discuss language change) that was never suborned to Chinese perception. Scholars can't even agree about the dynamics of social/orthographic, much less delve back centuries and code it into psycholinguistic terms working in brainwashed instants....
Cultural cringe in Japan? - Womacks23 - 2010-10-09
Last post on this subject : I think it is perfectly safe to make the simple argument that Japan and China held onto worldviews that placed themselves at the top. Which is why they both labeled Europeans as "barbarians".
If you label a group of people "barbarians" for 300 years then are literally forced at gunpoint to rapidly emulate the same people it opens up some fault lines within the national psyche. That's all I have to say really.
Had a good time talking about this stuff. Ordered about 6 new books from amazon too. Hope there are some good topics in the future.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - nest0r - 2010-10-09
As masaman said, Japan wasn't and isn't China, no matter what kanji terms they used. They didn't perceive Europe the same way as China. They didn't perceive China the same way as China. 'Barbarian' is an English term with its own connotations. Japanese views of Europe were steeped in their own worldview with regards to utility and aeshetics, but for centuries they respected European advancements, even while remaining unimpressed by others (especially urban sanitation, ha ha, but at least the other Westerners weren't sticking with 'tout a la rue' like the French, methinks ;p).
"Technological development reached such a level during this time that, historian, Susan Hanley has argued that the level of Japan's metropolitan sanitation from the mid-17th century to mid-19th century surpassed that of the West, both in terms of water supply and waste disposal. Population and mortality rates testify to the fact that a healthier environment was created for urban populations. Customs concerning hygiene, food and drink, combined with the lack of domestic animals, meant that Japanese city life was more sanitary than in the West.
The use of human waste matter as fertiliser, meant that contamination of the water supply was avoided and the risk of spread of disease minimised. In the West, the practice of pits or cesspools for disposal of such matter meant that there was a heightened risk of polluting water supplies. In England, the invention of the water closet initially caused epidemics of infectious diseases as Londoners flushed their waste into the Thames River." (Morris Low)
Rapidly emulating at gunpoint, those must've been powerful guns in the 19c they were suddenly threatened with, they even forced people in the 17c people to gradually integrate their knowledge base with European knowledge and art...
"In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch were arguably the most economically wealthy and scientifically advanced of all European nations, which put them in a privileged position to transfer Western knowledge to Japan.
Altogether, thousands of such books were published, printed, and widely circulated among the population, where the literacy rate was between 70 and 80%. Japan already had at that time one of the largest urban populations in the world, with more than one million inhabitants in Edo, and many other large cities such as Osaka and Kyoto, offering a large, literate market to such novelties. In the large cities, some shops open to the general public specialized in foreign curiosities." (Wiki 'rangaku')
"Japan was not closed to the rest of the world, so the idea that Perry opened it is an ill-founded one. Likewise, the idea that his arrival heralded the development of modern science and technology underestimates the developments which had already occurred, for example, in the form of Dutch studies, and agricultural and seagoing technology which were duly recorded in the official report compiled under the supervision of Commodore Perry. " (Morris Low)
Cultural cringe in Japan? - Womacks23 - 2010-10-09
![[Image: ?u=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fw...ja.svg.png]](http://img.weblio.jp/ic/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F6%2F66%2FTianxia_ja.svg%2F240px-Tianxia_ja.svg.png)
Cultural cringe in Japan? - masaman - 2010-10-09
Womacks23 Wrote:Japanese took the word because they had roughly the same viewpoint as the Chinese.eh, Japanese have never ever considered Japan to be a part of 中華 = the center of civilization. You shouldn't say that to Japanese people, because it'll sound offensive, and/or make you look like yet another foreigner who can't tell the difference between China and Japan. Japanese deliberately avoided to be included in 中華 and it's vassal countries. In the history of Japan, Japanese Emperor 天皇 have never been a vassal to Chinese Emperor 皇帝. That's one reason they were Emperors not Kings. 卑弥呼 back in the 3rd century was a vassal to 皇帝, and several Muromachi Shogun 室町将軍 took the style of a vassal, even it was purely nominal, when they do the trade with China, but aside from that, Japanese rulers carefully avoided being a part of 中華.
That there was a center of civilization and they were part of it and everyone outside of that circle was "barbarian".
And in any case, it is now clear that 南蛮 in Chinese is not westerners. 南蛮 in Chinese are these people. And because Portugeese and Spanish Came from south east Asia, they were called 南蛮. Dutch and British were 紅毛. You were saying that Chinese were calling westerners 南蛮 because they were barbaric, and Japanese just stole it because they shared the same view. That notion has been refuted, unless you want to write your own Japanese dictionary.
Womacks23 Wrote:I will say it again. If 南蛮 did not have negative connotations why did the Japanese change the words after they began to consider European Civ. as advanced after the Meiji restoration?南蛮人 changed to 異人 and then 外人 and now maybe to 外国人. Are you saying every time Japanese changed it, there was a fundamental change in Japanese perception on western civilization? I don't think Japanese back then were free from racism, but
there is nothing that indicates Japanese played down on the advancement of the western civilization. And also, you sound like you believe western civilization was always advanced compared to the East and Japanese should have always recognized it as so, but to be honest with you, western civilization back in the 16th century was by no way overwhelmingly advanced compared to Japanese. What put western civilization in the position it now enjoys was the industrial revolution and that happened during the 18th and the 19th century. And it was in the 18th century, when 杉田玄白 translated the western book (originally German) on human anatomy and published 解体新書, 志筑忠雄 published 暦象新書 about Newtonian mechanics, and 平賀源内 demonstrated electrostatic generator. In the 19th century, Japanese over threw Bakufu and created a parliament. It seems to me Japanese were rather quick to pick up the new stuffs.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - masaman - 2010-10-09
Womacks23 Wrote:http://img.weblio.jp/ic/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F6%2F66%2FTianxia_ja.svg%2F240px-Tianxia_ja.svg.pngExactly. Can you see you have 天子 in China, and outside circle of 朝貢国, and Japan is out side of all that, 化外の地? And ancient Chinese often gave bad 漢字 to people outside of the circle. 東夷(barbarian) 北狄(barbarian) 西戎(barbarian) 南蛮(You guessed it! barbarian), all bad Kanji. 卑弥呼, 邪馬台国 were not coincidence.
As I have been saying it is how users perceive the word that is important. A famous web shop, 楽天, recently opened up the business in China and they call it 楽酷天. I and many Japanese think it's a horrible horrible name, but I guess in China it sounds kind of cool. Ideograms sometimes create interesting situations.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - masaman - 2010-10-09
Womacks23 Wrote:Funny thing is that the Chinese also refer to westerners (esp. Dutch) as 红毛. You think it is a coincidence that the Japanese also used this word?Not that this is at all important to my argument, but I can't find any Chinese dictionary that gives me that definition. It says it means orang.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - masaman - 2010-10-09
IceCream Wrote:But 尊皇攘夷 is Japanese, not Chinese...尊王攘夷 was again taken from an ancient Chinese political movement in the 8th century BC.
i totally get that Japan wasn't entirely closed to Western ideas, and had their own technology as well as learning taken from both China and the West.
i also understand that the term "barbarian" has lots of different usages, even in English, and is a translation. But the question to me, is why sooooo many texts are using the translation "barbarian" in the 1st place. It certainly seems like the Bakufu and the 攘夷 movement do signify a large anti-western sentiment within the Japanese population at the time. It also doesn't seem particularly strange that there would be, given the problems christianity had caused in Japan, the seclusion laws, and the utterly horrible British trade of Opium and the ensuing war... if i was in Japan at the time, i think i'd be more than a bit worried that they would do the same thing to Japan, subjugating all the advances to drug addiction if they were allowed to enter.
here it says that the Mito scholars (the 尊皇攘夷 people) were the majority, and the Dutch scholars the minority: http://www.thecorner.org/hist/essays/japan/perry.htm
again, its just a summary, and unfortunately there's no links to real texts, so...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnō_jōi
There is definitely nationalistic flavor in 攘夷, and it was in fact a nationalistic movement. This movement happened after the Opium War and it is probably fair to say the Opium War, at least in part, incited it. It was more about the issue of national security than an issue of the perception of western culture, and if some country was raging a war against another to force feed opium, she deserves some name calling imo. In any case, it was a movement that lasted only a decade, and I don't think it says anything about Japanese general perception of western culture.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - nest0r - 2010-10-09
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ang_mo
Uncertain which usage came first, perhaps the Taiwanese Hokkien copied the Japanese term and used it more 'demonically' due to the different perception and power dynamic they had with the Dutch than the Japanese did, who immediately began looking into their warships, weaponry (arquebus), medicine, etc. in ~1600.
That term 紅毛 was still used descriptively much later for respected works of Dutch learning such as 紅毛雑話 (1787); hardly a purely derogatory epithet that represented a Chinese-driven scorn for all things Western, denying the possibility that 南蛮 et al could possibly defeat the Chinese and other Asian areas in battle (esp. since they apparently did that and established forts right from the onset, re: Dutch control of Taiwan in 17c). Just a mixture of varying levels of superficial xenophobia based in things like hygiene and mannerisms offset by long term, steadily growing awareness of European civilization.
I think most people would agree that the Japanese people were 'affected' by Perry (a vast understatement) but to portray it as primarily a sense of anxiety and insecurity due to blind racism triggered by China's downfall is inaccurate to say the least.
I just read this, it's really cool and accessible from what I can tell, especially the 'visualizing narrative' aspect. Presents many perspectives, so I'd try to avoid reading selectively and instead read it all neutrally. ^_^
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/black_ships_and_samurai/index.html
Cultural cringe in Japan? - masaman - 2010-10-09
nest0r Wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ang_moOh, it's 福建. No wonder it's not in standard Chinese dictionaries. It sounds like the term was used in south east Asia and Japan during that era.
Uncertain which usage came first, perhaps the Taiwanese Hokkien copied the Japanese term and used it more 'demonically' due to the different perception and power dynamic they had with the Dutch than the Japanese did, who immediately began looking into their warships, weaponry (arquebus), medicine, etc. in ~1600.
That term 紅毛 was still used descriptively much later for respected works of Dutch learning such as 紅毛雑話 (1787); hardly a purely derogatory epithet that represented a Chinese-driven scorn for all things Western, denying the possibility that 南蛮 et al could possibly defeat the Chinese and other Asian areas in battle (esp. since they apparently did that and established forts right from the onset, re: Dutch control of Taiwan in 17c). Just a mixture of varying levels of superficial xenophobia based in things like hygiene and mannerisms offset by long term, steadily growing awareness of European civilization.
I think most people would agree that the Japanese people were 'affected' by Perry (a vast understatement) but to portray it as primarily a sense of anxiety and insecurity due to blind racism triggered by China's downfall is inaccurate to say the least.
I just read this, it's really cool and accessible from what I can tell, especially the 'visualizing narrative' aspect. Presents many perspectives, so I'd try to avoid reading selectively and instead read it all neutrally. ^_^
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/black_ships_and_samurai/index.html
Thanks for the link. It was a good read. But it says "barbarian" so many times
I guess it really is catchy. I can't think of the Japanese counter part of "hairy barbarian" though. I don't know any word that means that and can't find anything. Possibly 毛唐 but that's not "barbarian" and it was originally a word for Chinese people.
Cultural cringe in Japan? - nest0r - 2010-10-09
Yeah, even factoring in nativism and xenophobia with its contextual and often rhetorical extremes from certain areas, the word 'barbarian' is clearly not a very accurate translation to keep repeating. All the views of different Asians and Europeans reflects something quite different from the 'barbarian' tag, which is used in English at least to refer to primitive peoples in the scientific, technological, intellectual sense. The other elements are cosmetic.
I just found a book called The Making of Modern Japan that looks pretty interesting for English readers. Too bad my energies are often devoted to other areas of history and historiography when I so occupy myself in that direction.
That reminds me, I still need to finish Jared Diamond's seminal Guns, Germs, and Steel book.
On a related note: When Baghdad was the centre of the scientific world
By the way, I couldn't help but laugh at the 'blue-eyed barbarians' thing where the portraits literally depicted them with blue eyeballs.
On the topic of Orientalism in pictures, I read this book a few years ago, quite good: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1711337
Cultural cringe in Japan? - nest0r - 2010-10-09
Womacks23 Wrote:That's one way of looking at it, or: http://gaijinass.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/japan-land-of-the-gun/ <-- I think this explanation is more common and accurate.nest0r Wrote:Japan recognized European advances centuries before China lost to the British. They knew especially about their military prowess. It was a gradual development in relations and importation of practical knowledge from China and the West while Japan's national identity and esteem solidified; the radical, widespread projects that came later were not jarring in the sense that Japan thought Britain was Inferior and China Great.The Tokugawa sure did come to power with the help of muskets but as soon as they had power over a unified Japan they quickly banned the importation of Western weaponry because they deemed them "uncivilized" weapons.
Wow, when you just toss out simplistic, authoritative statements, it really is easy to narrate history.
Our swords = Civilized
Guns = Uncivilized
Of course there is the theory that guns were banned because the Shogunate didn't want any other daimyo obtaining weapons to overthrow Edo. Like they restricted trade to China to obtain a monopoly on the supply of precious metals...so no Daimyo could use Chinese money to raise an army.
Reminds me of an anecdote I heard about the development of the 'fast draw'/居合道, where samurai paranoid about ninja attacking them while sitting and doing a prebattle recital or whatever wanted to make sure they could defend themselves quickly. That's probably/maybe terribly inaccurate, though, but it came to mind regardless. ;p
Cultural cringe in Japan? - nest0r - 2010-10-09
This'll be my last post in this thread also. ;p I just had to post this article (get the .pdf if you have access, the formatting's bad here) because it touches on so many ideas that I agree with it's scary, at least the sections relevant to topics here. Sorry for the length:
SUSHI, SCIENCE, AND SPIRITUALITY: MODERN JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY AND ITS VIEWS OF WESTERN SCIENCE - Thomas Kasulis
Japan seems to present two profiles to the West. One is that of a West-
ernized nation that is a major economic power in the world. Seeing the
skyscrapers of Tokyo's downtown districts, hearing Western rock or
classical music even in village coffee shops, or tasting the French cuisine
of its fine restaurants, it is easy for one to think of Japan as part of the
Western-based family of cultures. This face of Japan seems to confirm the
interpretation of Habermas and others that European rationality is dom-
inating the world. We might be led to expect that with the passage of
time, Japan will become, if anything, even more like the West.
Yet, there is also the other, non-Western, profile as well. It appears to
the consternation of foreign business people trying to establish Western-
like contractual relations with Japanese corporations. It appears to the
frustration of social scientists in their attempts to apply to the Japanese
context Western models of social, political, or economic analysis. It
appears even to philosophers who have tried to study Japanese thought.
Charles Moore, the founder of the East-West Philosophers' Conferences
half a century ago, felt able to write authoritatively about the "Chinese
mind" and the "Indian mind." When he tried to write about the "Jap-
anese mind," however, he could do no better than call it "enigmatic."1
These reactions raise serious questions about how really "Western" Jap-
anese rationality has become.
In short, Japan is a striking example of an Asian nation that has been
successful at Western-style industrialization, technological development,
and capitalistic expansion. Still, it has somehow also kept much of its
own values and modes of behavior. How can this Western thinking and
Japanese thinking exist in the same culture? Part of the answer is
undoubtedly social or historical and best left to the analyses of specialists
in those fields. Part of it is also philosophical, however. Since the major
influx of Western ideas and technology into Japan in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, Japanese philosophers have often addressed these
very issues. In particular, they have asked (1) what the Western form of
scientific and technological thinking is and (2) how it might function in
Japan without eroding spiritual and moral values traditional to East Asia.
In this essay we will briefly examine two philosophical strategies
representative of trends in modern Japanese philosophy. First, we will
examine the early twentieth-century thought of Nishida Kitaro and his
attempt to put Western science into its place, a logical realm subordinate
to that of ethics, spirituality, and aesthetics. Second, we will explore how a
contemporary Japanese philosopher, Yuasa Yasuo, has seen a possible
complementarity between modern Western science, especially medi-
cine, and traditional Asian thought about the mind-body complex.
Before discussing either philosophical approach, however, we need a
sketch of the historical and cultural context of the Japanese encounter
with Western thought. Only against that background can we clearly
frame the problematics of modern Japanese philosophy.
To frame the specifics of the historical circumstances under which
Western thought entered modern Japan, it is first useful to consider gen-
erally how ideas move from one culture to the next. Often, of course,
they are imposed on a culture by a foreign military occupation. Until
1945, Japan was not in such a situation, however, and by then its inter-
nal processes of modernization (or Westernization) were already well
under way. For that reason, there has been no prominent modern Jap-
anese philosophy of "decolonization" as there has been in twentieth-
century Indian, African, Islamic, and (to a lesser extent) Chinese thought.
Even among Japanese critics of Westernization, the rhetoric has usually
not been what "they" (Westerners) have done to "us" (Japanese), but
what "we" have done to "ourselves."
In short, Westernization was somewhat like an import item for Japan
in the free marketplace of ideas. The issue may have been conditioned
by external circumstances (most notably, the expansion of Western
imperialist powers into Asia and the Pacific), but to some extent, at least,
the Japanese welcomed the imported product. The question is: under
what circumstances does a culture freely accept foreign ideas? This is
too complex an issue to address fully here. It is easy to let such a ques-
tion drift off into abstract dialectics concerning the logic of intercultural
(mis-)understanding, however. So, for our background purposes, let us
simply pursue for a bit the marketplace analogy. How does a product
penetrate a foreign market? First, there must be a system of distribution:
the product must be made available to the foreign market. Second,
the product must develop an attractive image in the new culture. Third,
the product must meet some need, or generate some need, in the per-
ception of the potential consumers. Last, the product must suit the tastes
of its new cultural home.
To explain these basic categories further, let us consider an extended
analogy: the rapidly growing number of sushi restaurants in U.S. urban
areas. How can we understand this phenomenon in terms of the mar-
ketplace principles just outlined? It is not simply the inherent taste of sushi that has given it its market
niche in the American restaurant industry. Since the 1950s it has been
common knowledge in the United States that the Japanese eat raw fish,
yet few Americans wanted to try it. The issue, therefore, is what moti-
Philosophy East & West vated Americans to want to try it. What changed between the 1950s and
228 the 1980s such that a broadening spiral of supply and demand could
develop? The most obvious difference, of course, was the emergence of Japan
as a powerful economic presence in the world generally and in the
U.S. specifically.
This economic change caused more Japanese business
executives to reside temporarily in the United States, thereby establishing
the demographic base in large cities for economically supporting a small
number of local sushi restaurants. At the same time, more Americans
visited Japan for business reasons, often sampling the local fare as part of
the hospitality extended by Japanese business associates. Hence, avail-
ability increased. Furthermore, as Japan became one of the richest
countries in the world, Americans came to admire its power. Americans
began to think it worthwhile to emulate the Japanese, not merely observe
them from afar as a land of exotica. Hence, we find the principles of
availability/distribution and positive image.
One Japanese quality Americans admired was their health. The
average Japanese male's life expectancy was almost a decade longer
than the average American's. One factor in
maintaining that health might be the Japanese low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. As the young American
professionals of the baby boom years approached middle age and began
to worry about heart disease, the "power lunch" of raw beef and egg so
fashionable on Wall Street in the early 1980s was increasingly replaced
by foods like sushi. This data shows that sushi was perceived as fitting a
societal need to shift dietary habits. The third criterion of the marketplace
was met. The first three factors combined to create a context in which a sig-
nificant number of Americans would try eating sushi. Then, the fourth
condition could be met. If the Americans would acquire a taste for the
new food-if they found sushi to be a desirable dietary option-it would
become possible for sushi bars to establish a market niche in the Amer-
ican restaurant business. That is what seems to have happened.
Similar conditions had to be met for Japan to assimilate Western
ideas, science, and technology. There were two major periods of influx
from the West: the sixteenth century and the modern period starting in
the mid- to late nineteenth century. In the first case, Westernization was
eventually rejected, whereas in the modern period, it has been accepted.
Let us briefly examine each case in terms of the four conditions just
outlined.
The first factor is availability. In the sixteenth century, Westernization
was offered to Japan primarily via Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits and
Franciscans. Following the arrival of the missionaries, there was a mod-
erate amount of trade between those European countries (including the
Dutch shortly later) and Japan.
The second factor is the positive image of the host culture. The
power trappings of Europeanization and Christianity were dual. First,
they brought knowledge of the outside world. Maps helped explain the
geopolitical constitution of the lands beyond Asia. These were relevant
to assessing the opportunities and dangers of future contact with Europe.
The Japanese also found the foreigners fascinating: the aristocrats and
samurai experimented with things European, including Portuguese dress.
The Japanese admired the European worldliness, including the news,
ideas, and goods they brought from afar. It might be noted, however, that
the Japanese did find the Europeans rather crude culturally. There was
some interest in Western foods (sukiyaki, for example, apparently devel-
oped as an attempt to make a Portuguese stew with native ingredients)
and some exposure to Western art, but in general the Japanese felt more
consternation than admiration for the unbathed, bearded barbarians.
Most importantly, however, the Europeans brought new technology:
some medical and scientific knowledge, but also the military technology
of rifles and cannon. This brings us to the third condition-internal need.
For centuries preceding the arrival of the Westerners, Japan had
been in a state of civil war, in which various barons were jockeying for
territory and political power. There was the need for unification under a
new military-political order. The strife ended with the rise to power of
three successive military dictators: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyo-
tomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), and Tokugawa leyasu (1542-1616). His
mastery of Western firearms helped Nobunaga dominate the country
militarily, for example. The new leaders initially respected and encour-
aged Christianity as an aid to unification. They feared the political and
military power of the Buddhist sects, many of them having their own
militia of armed monks, often numbering in the thousands. Therefore,
conversion of the populace to Christianity was not only tolerated, but to
some extent encouraged.
In short, the introduction of both Western weaponry
and Western religious ideas together served the need of uni-
fying the country under the hegemony of the respective military dictators.
The support for these Western influences soon eroded, however.
Ironically, this happened because Christianity and weapons technology
no longer served the purposes of protecting the sovereignty of the mili-
tary elite. Hideyoshi learned that the history of the world outside Japan
showed that where European missionaries went, European navies and
armies soon followed. That hundreds of thousands of Japanese might
have a spiritual bond with priests connected to the imperialist courts of
Europe was not an idea that Hideyoshi and leyasu relished. Christianity
was, therefore, first persecuted and then proscribed.
The Tokugawa shoguns also realized that guns did not serve the
purpose of a unified state under an iron-fisted rule. A peasant can be
taught to fire a rifle in a few hours and kill a samurai swordsman who has
spent decades perfecting his skill. Furthermore, ten men with rifles and
cannon could kill a hundred archers and swordsmen. Hence, by the
1630s guns were, in effect, banned.4 If the Tokugawas could ensure that
only the samurai had power and that this power was strictly controlled
by regulating the numbers and locations of the samurai, they could
effectively rule the country through a central bureaucracy. They did so
for over 250 years. During most of that time, with the exception of a few
Dutch traders who visited an outlying island under scrupulous super-
vision, Japan closed itself off from European contact. Hence, the Euro-
peanization process lasted for less than a century, and its effects were
intentionally restricted severely.
The influx of Western scientific ideas nurtured a burgeoning Jap-
anese interest in studying the material world. It might be thought that
Japanese intellectuals would be hesitant to relinquish that interest. It is
significant, however, that Neo-Confucianism, especially that of Zhu Xi, *,
also entered Japan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, primarily via
Zen Buddhist monks who brought back to Japan texts acquired during
their pilgrimages to China. In that Neo-Confucian tradition there was
also the notion of investigating natural things to understand their laws or
principles. So, although there was not the mathematical dimension
emergent in the contemporary Western science, Neo-Confucianism did
offer an empirical interest in the ways of nature.6 The Tokugawa sh6guns
opted to support that East Asian empiricism over its Western counterpart.
Why? Partly because Neo-Confucianism framed its naturalism within a
social ethic, a dimension of its system that the shogunate could use as
part of its state ideology. In short, although Western science and tech-
nology were available in the sixteenth century and although they often
had the right image, their practical need was limited and temporary.
They also lacked the ethical orientation to fit the image of the state that
the Tokugawa shoguns had wanted to foster. So, it was marginalized.
The second Europeanizing phase in Japan is more pertinent to our
philosophical purposes. When Commodore Perry forced Japan to open
its ports to trade with the West in 1853, Japan once again encountered
Westernization in a dynamic and disturbing way. Accessibility to the
West had suddenly become a given. The West was at Japan's doorstep,
and unlike the early seventeenth century, Japan was no longer
in a position to tell it to go away. Japan felt squeezed and threatened. The
United States had expanded across North America and into the Pacific;
Britain and France were sweeping across the Asian and African con-
tinents; and Japan's nearest mainland neighbors, China and Russia, were
countries of continental dimension.
The second condition for developing a taste for the foreign was also
clearly present-a respect for the foreign culture. Western technology,
including the technology of warfare, had developed enormously since
Japan's last direct contact. The Tokugawa shoguns had kept Japan in a
basically feudal mode for about 250 years. Japan envisioned two possi-
ble destinies: either be a pawn in the imperialist power plays of European
and North American expansion or be an imperialist power in its own
right through extensive economic, political, social, and technological
reconstruction. It chose the latter course. It undertook an extensive pro-
gram to modernize all sectors of the society: the government, education,
industry, and the economy. Much of this movement was obviously a
response to the outside threat of imperialist encroachment. At the same
time, however, it was a response to an internally generated need-our
third condition for accepting the foreign.
The Western intrusion came toward the end of a process of national
change. The power of the sh6guns had waned over the decades, and
thoughts of revolutionary change had been brewing for some time.
Through information leaking into the country via the heavily restricted
trade with the Dutch, intellectuals were at least peripherally aware of the
scientific, medical, and technological revolution occurring
in the West.
Hence, the internal desire for political and social reform dovetailed with
the fear of foreign encroachment. Together, they supported the moder-
nization movement. By the early twentieth century, Japan had achieved a marked suc-
cess. It had defeated both China and Russia in wars and had signed a
major pact with Great Britain that treated the two countries more as
equals. The development of science and technology had become a high
priority in education, politics, and the economy.7 There could be no
turning back. The new Japanese industrial society had an enormous
appetite for natural resources not available within its own archipelago.
Modeling itself on its Western imperialist mentors, Japan looked to
secure its supply of resources overseas on the Asian mainland and
throughout the Pacific Basin. Japan had become an imperialist power
and had set into motion a sequence of events that would result in the
Pacific theater of World War II.
It is clear, therefore, that the first three conditions-accessibility,
respect for the foreign culture, and internal need-were met. Japan had
had a profound taste of Westernization. The issue was now whether that
taste was palatable and desirable. In the early part of the Meiji period
(1868-1912), intellectuals had expressed the hope that Japan could
modernize without changing its underlying cultural value system. This
ideal had been expressed in the slogan "Eastern morality and Western
techniques" (t6y6d6toku to seiy6geijutsu) popularized by Sakuma Sho-
zan (1811-1864), for example. The more the Japanese intellectuals
studied Western culture, however, the more skeptical they grew about
the possibility of changing their country's social, economic, and political
system without also changing its religious and moral values. Toward the
end of the nineteenth century, for example, there was even an idea that
science and Christianity had developed together so intimately in the
West that it might be advisable for the Japanese emperor to convert to
Christianity. The pro-Christian contingent did not win out in the end, and
the emperor remained the chief priest of Shint6. Still, many prominent
families in the modernization movement did convert. Even today,
although Japan is only one percent Christian, Christianity's influence
among higher social and economic classes is inordinately strong.
The examples of Sakuma's slogan and the plan to baptize the
emperor are revealing. Obviously, even early on, the Japanese were
acutely aware of two philosophically significant points. First, Western
science and technology seemed to be packaged with a value system,
one that at least appeared inimical to traditional Japanese values. Sec-
ond, many intellectuals sensed that the historical development of the
Western economy and the technological world it governed were some-
how related to Christianity. Yet, they also sensed, much to their credit,
that the connection between Western science and Western values and
the connection between Western economics or politics and Western
religion were contingent historical facts, not logical necessities. That is,
they did not make the common mistake of assuming that what had hap-
pened had to have happened. They would, almost from the start, hope
that they could have Western economic and technological development
without adopting Western values in religion, ethics, and aesthetics. Was
this hope justified? This has been a major issue in modern Japanese phi-
losophy.
In exploring this issue, we must be wary of Western cultural
assumptions about science. In the West, one often thinks of scientific
thinking as acultural, a universal form of theory and practice transcending
national boundaries. Unlike art, religion, society, and even morals, we
do not tend to speak of, say, French physics as opposed to Indian phys-
ics, or German biology as opposed to Chinese biology. Certainly, there
may have been indigenous Asian ideas about physical things or life, but
they were not "scientific" in the modern Western sense of a science
involving empirical observation, controlled experiment, and mathemat-
ical modeling. Certainly, there is much truth in that view of science. (Only in the
past couple of decades has the West undertaken a postmodern critique
of science, increasingly treating it as a social and cultural construction.)
Yet, it is also true that the view of modern technology in Japan is quite
different from the one dominant in the West. We must remember that it is
the West that invented the modern scientific method of discovery and
the technological principles for applying what was learned. Japan, as it
has with so many other things that have become important to itself,
imported the very idea of modern Western science. For the West, scien-
tific thinking was a natural culmination of a sequence of ideas and trends
in its history. It developed science originally as a way of discovering the
laws, at first assumed to be the divine laws, of the universe. Assuming
God gave humans the rationality to find the divine pattern, early modern
Western scientists reasoned that it was their destiny to use that knowl-
edge to complete the act of creation, to modify the world, to make it a
better place.
For the Japanese, however, the modern scientific and technological
mode of thinking came from outside only about 150 years ago. With
their traditional Buddhist and yin-yang notions that the world is always in
a process of change, technological alteration was accepted as part of the
natural order. Nature is changing, so we must adapt to it. Indeed, we
are part of the natural change itself. From the traditional Japanese per-
spective, human technology is as natural as, say, the technology of a
beaver. It is not part of a divine plan.
This raises doubts about the common Western presupposition that
science and technology must destroy traditional, nonmodern, non-
Western forms of human rationality, values, and spirituality.
We often forget what modern science's own ideology is supposed to maintain:
science is essentially value-free. The problem is that the Western tradi-
tion has intimately connected science with scientism, that is, with the
belief that the scientific way of knowing is somehow primary, founda-
tional, or privileged. We should also note that in our scientism, we tend
to collapse science into the realm of physics, that is, the discipline which
gives a mathematical model for the forces of the universe. The Galileos,
Keplers, and Newtons were interested in finding the key to explaining
the universe. Mathematics became that key. To go from the idea that
mathematics is the key for all scientific knowledge to the idea that sci-
entific knowledge is the key for all knowledge in general was obviously a
great leap, but one that enthusiasm could span. Westerners were seeking
a replacement for the medieval science of theology; they wanted a sin-
gle, holistic theory that would yield the one great, uppercase Truth.
The Japanese, on the other hand, were not traditionally looking
for that. They were often interested in having a set of lowercase truths, each
getting the job done for the task at hand. For them, truths were not
monolithic but plural, not holistic but partial. The truth varies with the
context. Without context, there is no truth."1 As Zen Master D6gen
(1200-1253) argued in the "Genj6okan" chapter of his Shdobgenzo, the
fish is correct to see the ocean as a translucent emerald palace.
The human being far out at sea is correct to see the ocean as a great circle.
The celestial deities are correct to see the ocean as shining like a string
of jewels in the sunlight. They are incorrect only
if they claim that their view is the only correct view.12 Therefore, the Japanese
had the ten- dency to accept science without its being a scientism. Science is true
within its own context; traditional Japanese values in religion, ethics, and
234 aesthetics are also true within their own contexts. This interpretation of
science as no more than one example of multiple, equally valid con-
textual systems was sometimes found in turn-of-the-century Japanese
philosophy.
As students of Western philosophy, however, Japanese thinkers
began to see difficulties in a theory of contextual truth that did not
articulate any hierarchy or criterion of appropriateness for the different
contexts. In such a philosophy, there could be no overall consistency,
nor any dialectic progress toward an ever more inclusive system. Surely,
it was thought, some forms of rationality necessarily evolve out of others;
some forms of thinking are simply of a higher order than others. Once a
culture develops science, it does not go back to animism. At least such
was the argument of Western thinkers like Comte and
Hegel, and the early twentieth-century Japanese philosophers were acutely aware
of their theories. Is scientific knowledge somehow higher than, say, reli-
gious ways of explaining and assimilating reality? Is scientism-a possi-
ble byproduct of Westernization-philosophically justified? If so,
Western technique could not logically exist alongside Asian morality.
These concerns were anticipated by Japanese philosophers early in
this century. Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), the founder of the Kyoto
School, ruminated about this problem throughout his career. We will
consider two major phases of his thought. The first phase was
developed mainly in his first book, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyQ),
written in 1911.
Inquiry into the Good was written at the very end of
the Meiji period, a time when Japanese national confidence was on the
upswing and the country had the opportunity to reflect seriously on the
full implication of Westernization. In that pioneering work, indeed in all
his works to follow, Nishida struggled with the great philosophical issue
of his time-the juxtaposition of Western science and technology with
traditional Japanese values. If Japanese values were to coexist alongside
Western empiricism, there would have to be a common philosophical
structure embracing and grounding the two. Otherwise, Japan would,
intellectually, at least, suffer a cultural schizophrenia.
As a philosopher, Nishida was able to take the issue out of its cul-
ture-bound form (such as the question of whether the emperor should
become Christian in order to help modernization) and universalize it into
the classic Western problem of the relation between fact (is) and value
(ought). In this way, Nishida saw himself addressing a fundamental philo-
sophical question, not just a cultural problem. One option open to
Nishida was to follow the route of Hume and Kant, bifurcating fact and
value into two separate domains and (for Kant) two different kinds of
reasoning. This approach would, of course, affirm the possibility of sep-
arating Western science from Japanese values. But at what cost? Nishida
knew that such a separation of is and ought was itself a divergence from
the Eastern tradition. It was, in the final analysis, a Western approach to
the problem, and it would indeed seem strange that only a foreign way of
thinking could justify preserving Japanese values.
So Nishida tried to bring fact and value, empiricism and morality (or
religion or art), back together in a way consonant with the Asian tradi-
tion. At the same time, he thought his theory should be Western enough
in form to serve the needs of an increasingly Westernized society. Here
Nishida, like his childhood and lifelong friend D. T. Suzuki, found the
writing of William James particularly provocative.15 Rather than analyze
science and value as two unrelated systems of reason, Nishida used
James' notion of "pure experience" to articulate the common experi-
ential flow toward unity underlying both the scientific and valuational
enterprises. The surface differences notwithstanding, on a deeper level,
science, morality, art, and religion share a single preconceptual drive (or
"will") to unity. On the intellectual level, Nishida called this process
"the intellectual intuition." Such was the basic thrust of his maiden
philosophical work. This solution to the fact/value, or is/ought, dilemma also satisfied
Nishida as a practicing Zen Buddhist. Zen's ideal is the achievement of a
preconceptual state of experiential purity ("no-mind") that becomes
enacted pragmatically in various concrete ways, including thought.'6 For
both James and Zen, thought is the temporary response to a break in the
original unity of experience, a response which is itself intended to bring
back the original unity of the experience. As Nishida put it, "pure
experience is the alpha and omega of thought."
Inquiry into the Good became immediately popular among Japanese
intellectuals and is probably today still the best-known work in modern
philosophy among the Japanese. It is questionable how many of those
intellectuals actually fathomed the nuances of Nishida's theory, but the
major point for them was that Nishida had made Western-style philoso-
phizing into something Japanese. His writing style had a Western ring to
it, yet its fundamental insights were consistent with Japanese tradition.
With Inquiry into the Good, modern Japanese philosophy-the so-called
Ky6to or Nishida School-was born.
As Nishida's philosophical thinking further matured, however, he
grew dissatisfied with Inquiry into the Good-not with its purpose, but
with its philosophical form, its structural presuppositions. In particular,
he criticized its psychologism (or "mysticism," as he sometimes called
it). At the heart of his uneasiness was that Inquiry into the Good had
attempted to solve the problem of the science/value split by appealing to
a kind of experience, asserting it to be the ground of both the is and the
ought. Nishida's readings in the Neo-Kantians during the period shortly
after the publication of Inquiry into the Good made him sensitive to the
problem of how forms of judgment, rather than strata of experience,
236 interrelate.17 That is, his concerns shifted from philosophical psychology
to epistemology.
Throughout his life, Nishida constructed and subsequently razed his
own attempts at systematic philosophy. He was an adamant critic of his
own work and never seemed satisfied with the mode of explanations he
had developed thus far. So the second phase of his thought rejected the
idea that Inquiry into the Good had explained anything at all; it had
simply described the drive of consciousness toward unification. One
problem was that the psychologistic standpoint could only trace the
evolution of thought in the individual's experiential process. It could, for
example, describe how the desire for unity would lead to the emergence
of scientific, moral, and religious thinking. But what about the fields of
science, morality, and religion themselves? How can we analyze the
interrelation of their claims without limiting them to modes in the biog-
raphy of a particular person's own experience? It is, after all, one matter
to say that my empirical, moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences
relate to each other, and quite another matter to say that science, mor-
ality, art, and religion are related. The first is to connect experiences
within myself, the latter to connect kinds of judgments about what is
right. Nishida was impressed with the Neo-Kantian attempts to articulate
and explain the rationale of judgments and came to believe his earlier,
Jamesian view to be overly subjectivistic.
This new interest led Nishida to examine more closely the structure
of judgmental form, what he called its "logic" (ronri). The fundamental
insight he explored was that any judgment necessarily arises out of a
particular contextual field, place, or topos. The Japanese word for this
contextual field is basho. There may be a plurality of truths and contexts,
but how do those contexts interrelate? In effect, Nishida wanted to argue
for the priority of the religious over both the idealist and empiricist, over
both the psychologistic and the scientific. Although his argument was
complex and refined or revised over many years, we can briefly sum-
marize his point here in order at least to suggest how his line of
thought developed.
Nishida analyzed closely the logical structure of judgmental form.
Because he believed that any judgment necessarily arises out of a par-
ticular contextual field or place, his task in his later years was to explain
the logic of those fields (basho no ronri). One way this system came to be
formulated was in terms of the three basho of being, relative nothingness, and absolute nothingness.
Roughly speaking, these corresponded to the
judgmental fields of empiricism, idealism, and what he called the field of
the "acting intuition" (koiteki chokkan).
Nishida's "logic of basho" is a complex system always in flux and
under revision. Still, it represents Nishida's most integrated and system-
atic attempt to deal with the issues of fact and value. To see the overall
structure of Nishida's logic of basho, we can consider a simple empirical
judgment-for example, "this table is brown." Scientific statements are
generally of this form. They seem to express pure objectivity; the obser-
ver is so neutralized that he or she does not even enter into the judgment
per se. They are statements about what is, statements about being (hence,
the nomenclature "basho of being").
Yet, Nishida asked in what contextual field (basho) is such an
objective judgment made? Where does one stand in
making such a judgment about being? Nishida argued that such a judgment actually
also makes judgments about our own consciousness. To neutralize the
role of the observer as ordinary empirical judgments do is to say some-
thing about the observer-its role can be neutralized and ignored. This is
an odd thing to say, however, since the larger contextual field of the
judgment "the table is brown" is something more like "I see a brown
table, and because what I see is real and external to my self, I can delete
any reference to the self." So, Nishida maintains, the field or place of
empirical judgments is really within the encompassing field of judgments
about self-consciousness. Empiricism is actually dependent on, stands
within, a field of judgments about self and its relation to the objects of
experience. Since empirical judgments, as empirical judgments, ignore
the being of the self, treating it as a nothing, this encompassing field can
be called the "basho of relative nothingness." The self is, relative to
empirical judgments, treated as a nothing. Of course, from the standpoint
of the basho of relative nothingness, the self is very much a something,
the very thing empiricism assumes, yet ignores. This insight, when taken
literally, becomes the basis for idealism, theories that maintain that all
knowledge is based in the mind.
Yet, Nishida was no idealist either. He criticized idealists (including
Kant, Hegel, and Husserl) for not recognizing the true character of the
basho within which their theories were formulated. The mistake of the
idealists, according to Nishida, is that they think of the self as a thing,
either a substance or a transcendental ego. Nishida claimed that the "I"
in the previously stated judgment "I see a brown table and...." is not an
agent, but an action, what he called the "acting intuition." So the basho
of idealism that sees the self as both subject and object is itself encom-
passed by a third basho, the contextual field of "absolute nothingness."
The acting intuition is both an active involvement in the world and an
intuitive reception of information about that world. It is a process, not a
thing, so it can never be either the subject or the object of itself. It can
never be the gist of judgment-it is absolutely a nothing when it comes
to any judgment. Hence, it is called "absolute nothingness."
The acting-intuiting process (the absolute nothingness) is, therefore,
the true basis of judgments about both fact and value. On the surface
level, fact is, as it were, the intuiting side, whereas value is the acting
238 side. Yet, one never exists without the other. The two are moments
or profiles of a single process. The facts we discover are influenced by
what we value, and what we value is influenced by what we discover.
Thus, as Yuasa Yasuo has explained in his analysis of Nishida,19 the
intuition is also active (informed by value) and the acting is also passive
(as response to data received). The two poles of the process are totally
inseparable.
For Nishida, therefore, science cannot replace spirituality, nor can it
be separated from questions of value. Within its own terms, in its own
basho, science can advocate an impersonal, value-free objectivity. But
what makes science possible is the scientist-a person with interests,
values, and creativity. It is human intention that cordons off a place
within which science can function.
Furthermore, human intentionality can he explained within its own
mentalistic or idealistic terms, as we do in phenomenology, psycho-
analysis, and some forms of psychology. In taking the self as their starting
point, these disciplines have a clearly demarcated field within which to
function. Yet, Nishida asks, what makes that field possible? Even "self" is
a construction. It is not a given, but a product. As the idealists recognize,
the self creates values that direct human activities like science. Nishida
noted, however, that focusing an analysis on the self, indeed the very
idea that there is a self, is itself a value. Nishida maintains that there is
something more basic than self that constitutes the self-a responsive
and creative process. That there is something more basic than self is a
fundamental insight related to religious, ethical, and (sometimes) aes-
thetic values. It is this ineffable ground that is the basis for both self and
the empirical world as known through science. At least such was Nishi-
da's argument.
To sum up, in Japan, science did not have to break free of religious
roots. It did not have to establish its hegemony. Rather, science and
technology were foreign imports used to meet a set of practical needs
related to political, military, and economic necessity. The traditional
Japanese understanding of religion in terms of responsiveness and crea-
tivity was not displaced or successfully challenged by a new way of
knowing. It did not have to be. The spiritual could continue to be a
cornerstone of Japanese values, and, as Nishida tried to show, science
could be seen as a special contextual extension of it, rather than a chal-
lenger to it.
Of course, not every Japanese philosopher agreed with Nishida. Yet,
his impact has continued to be significant in Japan. In preparation for the
college entrance examinations, only one book of Japanese philosophy is
required reading: Nishida's Inquiry into the Good. Nishida's philosoph-
ical system is significant as an early, prewar philosophical struggle to
articulate how it was possible to maintain "Asian values" and still
develop "Western technique." His theory, in effect, justified what was
already the social practice of giving science its "place" alongside the
"places" of traditional religious and moral values. His philosophical
theory showed, if nothing else, a distinctively Japanese way of accepting
science without paying homage to the totem of scientism.
Has this tradition continued into more recent Japanese philosophy?
The Kybto School of philosophy founded by Nishida remains one of the
most vigorous traditions in Japanese thought today.20 Even philosophers
who are not directly connected with the school still appreciate Nishida's
pioneering work. We may wonder, therefore, whether there can be some
fruitful interaction between Japanese and Western thought in the future.
Yuasa Yasuo (1925- ) is a Japanese philosopher who has been giving
this issue some extensive thought over the past two decades, especially
in terms of philosophical and medical views of the body. Since his works
are beginning to be available in English translation,21 let us briefly dis-
cuss his theory and its implications for our present theme.
Yuasa notes that, like science in general, Western and Asian medical
traditions arose out of a radically different set of assumptions. He espe-
cially focuses on contrasting models of the body. With the birth of mod-
ern science in the West, the metaphor of the body as mechanism has
become highly influential. Against this background, the West has tended
to understand the living body's relation to the dead body as analogous to
a machine that is either operative or turned off. Hence, modern Western
medicine derives to a great extent from the anatomical information
learned through the dissection of corpses or vivisection of animals,
neither of which allows access to the functions of the conscious human
body. More recently, the model was enhanced by the study of physiol-
ogy in terms of organs and their biochemical functions. For Yuasa, what
is significant is that most of this information was amassed under the
assumption that the body can be understood independently of the mind,
the physical mechanism independently of consciousness.
Asian forms of medicine such as Chinese acupuncture, on the other
hand, developed out of the study of living, conscious human beings. The
operative assumption is that the mind-body forms a single energy system
responsive to the field in which it functions. To a traditional Asian med-
ical theorist, it would be counterintuitive to study a dead or unconscious
human body. It would be like trying to study electromagnetism with the
electric current turned off.
Because of this difference in philosophical assumptions, Asian and
Western medical traditions developed expertise in radically different
aspects of human health and disease. Acupuncture developed highly
sophisticated procedures for controlling pain, for example. (It is hard to
study pain by dissecting a corpse.) On the other hand, Western medicine
became expert at the physical manipulation of the body through surgery,
240 for instance. (Surgery would not develop very far in a culture where
patients were conscious and unanesthetized.)
In recent decades, Western medicine has developed increasingly
sophisticated instruments for studying the living, conscious human being.
There has been, therefore, a concurrent interest in psychosomatic and
holistic approaches to medicine. Conversely, Asians have been learning
Western medical techniques and have shown an interest in Western
surgical, pharmaceutical, and diagnostic approaches. So, we are finding
a situation in which two different conceptual schemes-and their corre-
spondingly different claims about the body-are being brought into
conjunction. Can the two systems influence and enrich each other?
Yuasa claims they can, but only if each side is willing to call into ques-
tion some of its most treasured assumptions. Since the Western tradition
is more familiar to most of us, let us list just two major assumptions that
Yuasa believes must be rethought in the Western view of the body.
According to Yuasa, the modern West has generally tended to
assume that the relationship between the mind and the body is fixed and
universal. That is, Western theorists tend to ask, "What is the relationship
between the mind and the body?" Yuasa points out that, in contrast,
most Asian traditions assume there is a range of interaction and integration
between mind and body. For example, as I learned to type or play the
piano, the relationship between my mind and my fingers changed.
Originally, my mind had to "tell" my fingers what to do in a separate,
self-conscious act. The fingers responded slowly, awkwardly, and impre-
cisely. Now my fingers are more the extension of my mind when I type
or play the piano. This suggests modification in the mind-body system.
Yuasa also points out that traditional Asian medicine retained its
intimate relation with Asian spiritual disciplines. The Indian yogin is a
good example of how the integration of mind and body is considered to
be both a spiritually and medically healthy goal. As we noted already,
modern Western science had to separate itself from religion in order to
develop. Fasting, contemplation, prayer, chanting, and repetitive ritual
exercises can all shed light on aspects of our bodies as well as our souls,
but these activities have fallen outside the concerns of the Western sci-
entific study of the body. Modern Western medicine has only recently
begun to explore the therapeutic benefits of biofeedback, relaxation
exercises, visualization techniques, and so forth. In effect, these origi-
nally spiritual exercises are beginning to find their way back into our
Western understanding of the body.
The second assumption that Yuasa believes Western
mind-body theories should reexamine concerns what he sometimes calls the "third
entity" that is neither mental nor somatic, but the basis of both. Taking
physics for its paradigm, modern Western science has drawn too strong a
bifurcation between matter and energy. If we were to take biology, not
physics, to be the ground of science (as Asian cultures did, in many
respects), then we would see the need for this third term. In fact, we
would be asking not about matter and energy's applicability to biology,
but rather about this third term's relation to nonhuman phenomena.
A Yuasa believes that in East Asia, the Chinese concept of qi (ki in Jap-
anese) is just such a third term. It is interesting that it is foundational to
East Asian theories of acupuncture, artistry, electricity, and cosmology
alike. What Yuasa calls for is a more Western physical study of this
phenomenon that is not even as yet recognized as a category
in the West. Such research is, in fact, under way in both China and Japan.
From the examples of Nishida and Yuasa, what summary statements
can we make about the modern Japanese philosophical views of science
and technology?