The British Stake in Japanese Modernity: Readings in Liberal Tradition and Native Modernism 9781138630802, 9781315193236

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
PART 1 Britishing as Modernisation
2 Liberal Convergences
3 The Scottish Enlightenment in the Meiji Enlightenment: Chambers’s Political Economy, Seiyō jijō, Meiroku Zasshi, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’
PART 2 Modernism as Reaction
4 Memory and Historiography: Kokoro, ‘Yagoemon Okitsu no isho’
5 Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity: In’ei raisan, Fūdo, Yukiguni
6 Tradition and Nationalism: The Sacred Wood, Sekaikan to kokkakan, Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, Albyn, ‘England, Your England’
Index

Citation preview

The British Stake in Japanese Modernity

This book describes firstly a Japanese modernity which is readable not only as a modernising, but also as a Britishing, and secondly modernist attempts to overhaul this British universalism in some well-known and some less-known Japanese texts. From the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly hastened by the spectre of China after the First Opium War, Japanese modernity was bound up with a convergence with Britain’s foundational cosmology, something underscored by the British presence in Meiji Japan and the British education of key Meiji state-makers. Moreover the thinking behind Britain’s own unification in the long eighteenth century, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, is echoed strikingly faithfully in the 1860s–70s work of Fukuzawa Yukichi, ­Nakamura ­Masanao, and other writers in the ‘Japanese Enlightenment’. However from around the end of the Meiji era we can see a pointed and specific response to this British universalism, its historiography, its basis in the sovereign individual subject, and its spatial mapping of the world. Elements of this response can be read in texts including Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Fūdo (Climate and Culture), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In’ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows), Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni (Snow Country), and various works of the mid-period Kyoto School. Rarely understood in terms of its British specificity, this response should have something to say to modernist studies more generally, since it aimed at a pluralism and de-universalisation that was difficult for mainstream British modernism itself. Indeed the strength of this de-universalisation may be precisely why these ‘native’ Japanese modernist tendencies have not much been accepted as modernism within the Anglophone world, despite this field’s apparent widening of its ground in the early twenty-­ first century. Michael Gardiner is Professor in the Department of English and ­Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, England. His ­previous books include The Cultural Roots of British Devolution (2004), At the Edge of Empire: The Biography of Thomas B. Glover (2008), and The Constitution of English Literature (2013).

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The British Stake in Japanese Modernity Readings in Liberal Tradition and Native Modernism Michael Gardiner

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Michael Gardiner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-63080-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-19323-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

1 Introduction 1 PART 1

Britishing as Modernisation

7

2 Liberal Convergences 9 3 The Scottish Enlightenment in the Meiji Enlightenment: Chambers’s Political Economy, Seiyō jijō, Meiroku Zasshi, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’ 42 PART 2

Modernism as Reaction

73

4 Memory and Historiography: Kokoro, ‘Yagoemon Okitsu no isho’ 75 5 Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity: In’ei raisan, Fūdo, Yukiguni 104 6 Tradition and Nationalism: The Sacred Wood, Sekaikan to kokkakan, Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, Albyn, ‘England, Your England’ Index

136 161

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Fukuda Mahito, Atsuko Watanabe, Waiyee Loh, Michael Tsang, Cao Siyu, Zhu Chenyuan, Hugo Dobson, Claire Westall, and the librarians at the Universities of Warwick, Leeds, and SOAS, and the British Library at Boston Spa. Some of the ideas in the last section of Chapter 3 appear in another form in Year in English Studies in 2011.

1 Introduction

Descriptions of the formation of Japanese modernity still typically ­describe a negotiation with ‘the west’. I will not be suggesting that this is wrong, but this terminology can sometimes obscure the specificity of the forces behind the negotiation, as well as later modernist responses to them. I will be arguing that much in Japanese modernity and ­Japanese modernism can be related more pointedly not only to influences from ­Britain, but also to the ideas that unified and consolidated the m ­ odern British state. I will suggest that Japanese modernity in the Meiji (1868–1912) era was in large part a negotiation with the conditions of the British raison d’état unfolding over the long eighteenth ­century, and ­globalised in the nineteenth. And correspondingly, what I am c­ alling Japanese modernism, becoming apparent roughly from the post-Russo-Japanese War (1904– 05) and the post-Meiji era, can sometimes be seen as a provincialising or localising response to these conditions. Why, although Britain is understood to have been the global superpower during the Meiji era, has there not been more specificity in relating ­British mythologies to the Japanese context? One reason has been a relative lack of interest in the makeup of Britain across the breadth of the American academy, where much work in Japanese Studies happens. There is unlikely to be much description of the mythologies that consolidated Britain if Britain isn’t seen as something that had to be consolidated, that is, without appreciation of the importance of some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, to British unificatio Much of the intellectual framework of modern Japan derives from nationally specific negotiations in Britain’s peripheries, but this national specificity has tended to get lost. Another way to put this might be to say that the moral forces that allowed the unifying ideas behind the modern British state to appear universal are still in ­operation; this ­universalism seems to have an anchor in nature, and leaves behind it a metonymic chain of terms which becomes hard to unthink, for which nineteenth-century Britain is really a big England. Even when Britain’s national differences are acknowledged in theory, it can be difficult to see how the aims of state cohesion resonate in the global expansion of British values, encountered at its peak of influence by a

2 Introduction rapidly modernising Japan. So in addition to suggesting that the ­developmentality negotiated by late Tokugawa (–1868) and Meiji Japan is not simply Western, but also very largely British, I want to see its relation to the origin myths of the British state – from its creation at the turn of the eighteenth century, in more expanded moral form in the Scottish Enlightenment later in the century, and in the hands of the nineteenth-­ century traders working to ‘open’ Japan. These stories of adjustment and de-adjustment to British globalisation will be read here across texts which are probably mostly familiar, though probably not usually thought of in modernist terms. They will consider the reception of British ideas with a sense of their Britishness specifically, and their origins in a wide-scale adjustment to British commercial empire. They will suggest that much of the intellectual foundation of Meiji Japan can be tracked to a peripheral British determination to define development, and that even into the nineteenth century, these models show national aims, fitting Scotland into British union and empire in terms of progressive historiography, space, and subjectivity – a nationalness that has almost always been overlooked, even when there is a c­ oncentration on the nationalness of Japan itself. The thinking of that most iconic theorist of Meiji modernisation, Fukuzawa Yukichi, drew heavily from ­eighteenth-century Scottish Political Economy or its later incarnations, and, like the Meiji Enlightenment of which he was a part, transmitted a Scoto-British concern with development from the barbarous to the civilized, the local to the global, the ‘feudal’ to the commercial. Similar can be said about Japan’s modernist de-adjustment, which oddly mirrors Scottish modernism in its rethinking of Enlightenment’s claims to the ­universal. Japanese modernisation, this suggests, can be read in terms of an attempt to come to terms with British universalism, and Japanese modernism can be read in terms of attempts to overcome this ­universalism. Indeed the Japanese early twentieth century might be seen less as a story of ‘­overcoming modernity’ than one of ‘overcoming Britishness’. This is not to suggest that British modernity was rejected – and like ­others I will take issue with the once-common idea that 1920s-30s ­Japanese writing is characterised by a struggle to escape the modern world. Rather, during this period there arises a push for a spatiotemporal ­plurality which answers a previous unipolarity and which is readable as modernist critique. In this sense, Japanese modernism shows some of the characteristics more familiar from modernism as the Anglosphere usually understands it – fragmentation, ­temporal disjunction, a new interest in antiquity, a renegotiation of historicity, and so on. Japanese modernism can even be seen as taking the promise of the disruption of Victorian narratives more seriously than was possible for its British counterpart, and as willing to slip the gravity of the ­British Empire’s conception of the worldly – an argument made by some Kyoto School writers towards the end of the period. Japanese modernism might be ‘more modernist’ – it

Introduction  3 might loosen the bonds between the modern and the organic, stressing modernity’s status as something manufactured or staged, and something which can be radically decentred. For reasons I will explore, these modernist impulses have too often been seen as anti-­modernist, as atavistic or escapist; their serious challenges in terms of subjectivity and space have often been overlooked, even by ‘new ­modernist studies’ since the 2000s, a body of criticism often making ‘­worlding’ ­promises, though in practice operating very largely within the needs of North American institutions. To put this another way, the term modernist is understood here as deriving from a historiographical and subjective challenge, rather than following a search for recognisable modernist forms. As c­ ommentators like Susan Friedman Stanford have suggested, a serious revision would read modernist form from texts making this kind of challenge, rather than scanning texts to see if they show ­attributes already familiar as modernist.1 Extensions of modernist studies in the early t­ wenty-first century have come up with masses of ­interesting material, but they have also often transmitted an idea of modernism as something that extends ­globally from pre-existing frameworks, and have often accepted p ­ lurality in theory but in practice been beholden to institutional demands that derive, I suggest, from the very British-global origin myths the modernism is trying to overcome.2 In the sense understood by Friedman, even the documentary (‘historical’) work of Mori Ōgai or the philosophical speculations of ­Watsuji Tetsurō are quite readable in modernist terms, and I track this challenge across the thematics of various 1910s–30s texts, including those of novelists like Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Kawabata Yasunari, and writings of the Kyoto School, a loose collection of philosophers at Kyoto Imperial ­University (later Kyoto University) following Nishida Kitarō from the 1910s, now often glossed as Japan’s most i­mportant twentieth-century philosophical school. These texts answer not only ‘European’ thought (an answer by now often described of the Kyoto School), but more specifically the universalist conceptions of space and subjectivity arising from figures like Newton, Locke, and Smith, touchstones for Japan’s own ­nineteenth-century cohesion. The vehicle that takes universalist, globalising thinking to East Asia is the broad British state, and it does so with a sense of belonging to nature and commanding a whole ‘world’. This is the movement of capitalism, certainly, but beyond this it is the worldview that gives capitalism an ethics and a naturalness, and this can be tracked in Japan’s passage to and from British liberal tradition. This discussion then has two parts. The first points to some of the touchstones for Meiji modernity in ideas from Britain’s consolidating and ­expanding phases, and the second looks at how these are revisited in various modernist stories. It reframes some well-known texts, including Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro and Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni, and less familiar ones, like Mori Ōgai’s ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’ and Nishitani Keiji’s Sekaikan to kokkakan, but it is not a literary history, and confines

4 Introduction itself rather to a few suggestions on thematic readings of discrete texts. Nor does it try to make authoritative statements about literary movements or genres, its readings ranging from short historical ­fictions to travelogues to round-table discussions – nor about the authors themselves, their motives, or critical consensus about their positions. It is less an address to Japanese Studies than an outsider reading that considers British thematics in single texts. And while there are many other stories to be told about the ongoing influence of other bodies of thought, foreign and domestic, including Shintō, Confucianism, and German philosophy, these stories are not the focus of this study, which aims more modestly to track the course of British origin myths in and out of Japanese modernity. The story of the ‘in’ begins by returning to the origins of Meiji modernity to suggest an orientation of Japanese reform towards the British liberal worldview before and after kaikoku (‘national opening’). C ­ hapter 2 opens with a speculation about a cosmological convergence provoked by Japanese neo-Confucianism’s need to come to terms with the techno-­ moral incursion of the global superpower, especially after the First Opium War (1839–42), and the search for a ground on which immanent status differences could be dispersed into the endless dynamic production of inequalities grounding the British form of nature. The length of this convergence before and after 1853 complicates the idea, sometimes still assumed, that Japan’s entry to modernity is best dated from the appearance of the American ‘black ships’. In particular, Japanese restorationists had to negotiate the version of Scottish Enlightenment thinking that had driven the British imperial mission through China and empowered traders to act largely as de facto ­policymakers. There is already a large body of research on the dominant British ­presence in the Japanese Treaty Ports and its legal, social, and educational power, but here I also further describe influences on the foundations of unified Japanese authority in the traders’ ‘late Enlightenment’ values. Moreover the force of the native Japanese Anglophile adjustment, largely led at first by those educated in ­Victorian Britain, was so great that by the end of the Meiji era some British writers would see the country as a kind of honorary member of the Anglosphere, measured by British proofs of historiographical soundness, in a sub-genre I call, after one of its models, ‘Britain of the East’. Chapter 3 then looks at the still under-­reported direct intellectual influence of the Scottish Enlightenment and its nineteenth-century echoes on Japanese opinion-­ formers. It goes back to some of its sources, including the Chambers guide to Political Economy that would be adapted by Fukuzawa Yukichi (the supplement to Seiyō jijō/Conditions in the West, 1868), and notes Scottish ­Enlightenment ideas in the Meiji Enlightenment journal Meiroku Zasshi (1874–75), organ of the Meirokusha group of public intellectuals and sometime government officials, a group at times looking like a Scottish Enlightenment ­pressure group. A coda to this can be seen in a half-­forgotten 1880 paean to the restorationist radical Yoshida Shōin by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which the Meiji Enlightenment’s cleaving to the

Introduction  5 progressive individual who climbs towards worldly civilization becomes something more ambivalent. After this consideration of some of the British touchstones for Meiji modernity, Part 2 moves on to suggest modernist thematics in late Meiji and post-Meiji texts’ bracketing some of the stuff of British universalism. Chapter 4 describes a reframing of what the later Scottish Enlightenment called ‘conjectural’ history, after the historiographical breakwater of the suicide of the military hero Nogi Maresuke – a reassessment that suggests not only the end of Meiji as an era, but also the end of eras understood in terms of universal or staged history, and that is readable in Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro (1914) and Mori Ōgai’s later ‘historical fiction’ (‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, 1912/1913).3 Chapter 5 relatedly suggests a ‘shadowy’ renegotiation of Newtonian space as a ground of universal subjectivity, in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In’ei raisan (In Prase of Shadows) (1933) and Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni (Snow Country) (1935–37), and, in another sense, in Watsuji Tetsurō’s Fūdo (Climate and Culture) (1935). Finally the last chapter asks about the troubled term tradition, usually assumed to be implying a desire for continuity, but readable rather as a desire for discrete pasts, and part of a wider attempt to unsettle the British monopoly on the world-historical. In these terms, Nishitani Keiji’s Sekaikan to kokkakan (World-View and State-View) (1941) and the first symposium of the Kyoto Chūō Kōron series (1941) are placed against the ‘organicist’ curation of modernism by F.R. Leavis and early university English, and against a reincarnation of this organicism in the wartime work of George Orwell. This chapter suggests finally that although this challenge to the world-historical was largely written off after a British wartime renewal of the organicist defence, it attains a new significance with the sense of a further neoliberal defence stretching thin in the twenty-­fi rst century.

Notes 1 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on ­Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 5. 2 For example, in the kind of first paragraph often seen in this form of c­ ritical writing, in ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123(3), May 2008, 737– 48, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz describe the new modernist studies, which is supposed to be more worldly, as invented with the creation of a new US-based organisation, backed up by US journals and prizes, and anchored to North American universities. 3 Throughout this study, family names are used, contra a fairly common ­practice of using given or pen names, especially for well-known figures (so in this case, Natsume rather than Sōseki). When full names are cited, family names are given first, except when a writer uses a non-Japanese name order; and names follow the conventions given in publications, for example having no macrons where the author has published under a name with no macrons – so, for example, Ken Ito not Itō Ken. The names of authors who publish in both English and Japanese also follow the published forms – so Yuichi Kato not Katō Yūichi.

Part 1

Britishing as Modernisation

2 Liberal Convergences

A Speculation on Cosmological Convergence In 1824 Aizawa Yasushi, a scholar from the Mito School and a contributor to the epochal Mito Dai Nihon shi/Great History of Japan, met around a dozen crew from whaling ships swept ashore on the island of Takarajima in the far southwest of Japan, in today’s Kagoshima ­prefecture. Amidst communicative difficulties, a Captain Gibson wrote down a short introduction of himself and his ship, including country of origin and other cultural fragments.1 Aizawa’s short account An’i mondō (1824) contains notes on writing scripts used insofar as he u ­ nderstands them, on customs, communications, and international relations, ­information centred on Anglia or, more familiarly, Igirisu, Britain.2 The next year Aizawa ­expanded his impressions of the foreign ships in Shinron/New Theses, describing the need to adapt to the British techno-moral threat. He was concerned by British colonisation in Africa and India (­justifiably), and by the possibility of Anglo-Russian cooperation to dominate Japan (less so).3 Britain, he perceives here, expects ‘to annex all the nations in the world’, equates force and trade, and combines military or ideological means pragmatically as needs arise.4 Shinron would undergo many transformations and become a touchstone for late Tokugawa reformers, and its chain of influence, especially after the First Opium War, would animate the rebels who pressed for the alliance of han (domains) against a failing bakufu (shogunal government), which is to say Japanese national unification pointing towards the 1868 Restoration. Here I suggest that the Meiji Restoration correspondingly has more in common with Britain’s own founding Restoration of 1688 (the ‘Glorious Revolution’) than is usually stated: firstly, immanent forces become the anchors of a dynamic world (Newtonian motion), the dynamism behind the cosmology of the new British state and the background against which Japanese neo-­Confucianism would redefine social relationships – and Japanese modernity can be seen as flowing from this cosmological adaptation. Secondly, this convergence is backed up by the extensive network of British legal, trading, and educational institutions visited on the Japanese contact zones, largely transplanted from China and forcefully normalising a specifically British

10  Britishing as Modernisation understanding of individual property as natural progress. And thirdly and as a coda to this convergence, the force of this adaptation would by the early twentieth century be leading British writers themselves to describe Japan’s development in British-imperial terms. Although only one of a string of worrying encounters with British and American ships in the 1810s and 1820s, the Gibson incident was particularly pressuring, since it was joined by a new order to repel foreign ships (ikokusen uchiharai rei), and asked about the bakufu’s ability to uphold it – as Aizawa understood, this contact in particular provoked existential questions about the present administration.5 As Bob ­Tadashi Wakabayashi puts it in his groundbreaking account of Shinron, ‘largely because of the climate of opinion that New Theses helped create, politically active segments of the Japanese population made bakufu legitimacy contingent on the ability to expel Westerners from Japan by force’.6 Crucially, the moral threat is intertwined with a technical threat, and the legitimacy of the bakufu understood in terms of its effectiveness in the face of British empiricism; in the fading Tokugawa years, theses on national defences and military and naval reform would take a moral reformist tone. The survival of the existing neo-Confucianism would depend on its ability to reconcile to a ‘dynamic’ world, the world of Newtonian cosmology, something that would increasingly seem to define the powers of the Japanese form of Confucianism against the ‘fixedness’ of China. David ­Williams describes regime change happening when a toku or moral mandate gives way to an apparently more effective regime, calling forth an internal moral reorientation.7 In this sense, the British were a simultaneously military and cosmological threat, both techne and worldview, without a strong division between. Under the dynamic worldview revealed by the early ­nineteenth-century contacts, the perpetual movement of resources perceived as individually liberating threatened to disrupt immanent caste roles and thus the whole lifeworld of the Japanese han, unless the ground of the immanent could be rethought. This was especially true where there appeared to be the possibility of commoners trading directly with foreigners (one of the fears of sonnō jōi, emperor­-reverence joined to the need to repel foreigners, often simply described as ‘xenophobia’).8 Merchants would be ‘un-casted’ gradually, then more rapidly from the 1870s, released into the class system carrying a British understanding of natural progress, and Meiji reforms would be characterised by a rise of specialists in economic management.9 In large part, this can be read as an adaptation to constant dynamism understood according to empiricist, individuating rules of nature that are themselves fixed. An apparent crisis of the static would then be answered by an ­adaptation to the dynamic-as-static that underscored the new world as a world, which is to say by the application of Newtonian motion to e­ thics, ­history, and human nature – which was what had happened in Britain as a ­condition of the 1688 coup and had been expanded in the eighteenth century. This

Liberal Convergences  11 Newtonian adaptation, though, was what the bakufu could not do. The bakufu’s ability to uphold a condition of closed borders, or sakoku, had already been questioned by Japanese Dutch Studies scholars or rangakusha, until then the main conduits of European technical knowledge and an important source of ‘Japanese national’ consciousness (or interdomainal consciousness).10 But it was the British threat that forced the reassessment of historical forces described by Aizawa then others as a chance to ­reconstruct – ‘the one moment in a thousand years, the opportunity which positively must not be lost’.11 Especially during their renewed activism after the 1800s, Mito’s (neo-Confucian, nativist) cosmological search for a new anchoring of nature for the imperial realm had, ­apparently paradoxically, stressed historical flux in a way that would open them to the Newtonian fixing of the eternal in constant laws of movement – they had created a language for kaikoku or opening, and for a native agency based in a new ‘fixed dynamism’ that could be negotiated in Japan itself rather than subject to an opening that was forced.12 Shinron’s call for a reformed public morality would proliferate through the han schools, including Mito’s Kōdōkan, and the concern with historical flux would open up to British empiricism’s promise of knowledge about a fluid world. So [b]efore the opening of Japan, Britain had been feared as a threat to the stability of the Tokugawa world. Research on this one country was developed primarily as a response, and resulted in an image of Britain as a potential model for development…13 Perhaps best known in this search for a cosmological overlap, ­turning against the grain of the initial Mito defence, is Sakuma Shōzan. ­Sakuma had long been interested in science via rangaku/Dutch Studies, and is known for his reformist claim that foreign technology could be separated from foreign ethics (his 1854 phrase tōyō no dōtoku seiyō no geijutsu/­Eastern morality, Western technique – sometimes described as a precursor to ­wakon yōsai/Japanese spirit, Western technology).14 Even though China had already attempted something like a defensive ­adaption, ­nevertheless Japanese neo-Confucianism’s ‘flexibility’, and its attention to the Opium War from a distance, made it particularly ­sensitive to the ­apparent effectiveness of Newtonian universalism, the sense that it was right ­because it worked. Sakuma’s defence, in grasping the ­fluidity of the external world, would paradoxically turn into a force for ­cosmological transformation and, by the 1860s, morph into kaikoku or national ‘opening’. Adapting Mito, Sakuma attempted to ‘nativise’ many of the terms of Newtonian empiricism (or, he tried to turn Japanese neo-­Confucianism to the need for technical knowledge), moving towards a focus on the place of the individual observer in what Rumi Sakamoto calls ‘a transitional

12  Britishing as Modernisation phase between Confucian categories and the dichotomy of the subject that knows and object that is known’.15 Scientific r­ eason (or ‘­practical studies’) could be adapted by Zhu Xi Confucianism in ­particular ­because it was concerned with proofs of effectiveness; it attended to concrete changes in the world, and in doing so adapted understanding of the world.16 Knowledge was also strategic and could overreach existing moral systems, and, in a way strikingly close to how the Scottish Enlightenment would adapt Newton, history itself ‘obeyed laws of change ascertained by constant investigation’.17 Conversely, the bakufu could be perceived as failing to address observable realities, in which case, Confucianism could demand a conversion (tenkō) to a mode of thinking that was demonstrably effective.18 As Sakamoto points out, Sakuma then adds to neo-­Confucianism a concentration on the measurable and on numerical knowledge.19 Britain’s own Restoration had been just such a turn to the empirical and numerical  – a turn to ‘empiricist government’ drawing individuals into the economy, and to reliable currency as a condition of expansion (to what commentators on neoliberalism have rightly glossed as a ‘political physics’). 20 A restored Japan would accept constant fluidity while pivoting on an immanence at once neo-Confucian and ‘arithmetic’, leaving the way open for the rise of economic citizenship and then Scoto-British Political Economy. Correspondingly, a rise in business studies and a release of business-skilled people from caste status characterised restorationist activity, and from the mid-century to the end of Meiji, evidence for action was sought increasingly in economic data. 21 A ‘return’ to Confucian principles could then be described in terms of a ‘spirit of innovation’, and fixed foundations could be found in dynamic adaptation to constant experiment. 22 Sakuma’s fusion of Confucianism and inductive reason, moreover, would be intensified by the British defeat of the great Confucian power, China, in the First Opium War.23 From around 1840, ­Sakuma was pressing for a modernisation of national defences in a way that strained the limitations of Mito ideas of defence, demanding changes to both naval protection and technologies of government, which would undergo a meritocratic renovation, including ‘the promotion of talented and capable men to positions where they can serve the nation’.24 Sakuma’s Eight Policies for the Defence of the Seas, for example, describes the necessity of buying ships and improving techniques of shipbuilding and naval battle, and of building an efficient system (kōshi no hō) for the promotion of effective individuals.25 Stressing the military gap between Britain and the Qing empire, he describes elsewhere how ‘[i]t is absolutely beyond doubt that the British are ambitious and are going to take actions to bring our country to it knees’ – considering the forced opening of China, if Japan does not act now, ‘our country will be forced to do trade and business with Britain… [and] valuable goods in our country will be taken to exchange for useless things from abroad’.26 In such circumstances, personal virtue

Liberal Convergences  13 could be understood in terms of an ability to adapt to circumstances: virtue itself is eternal, but it inheres in a historically specific application of jitsugaku, or practical knowledge – a stress that would pass from Sakuma to the Chōshū (han) activists who included the first ruling groups of the Meiji era, and who would make the institutional basis of modern education a jitsugaku that looked much like the interdisciplinary experimental rationality sometimes described as a defining characteristic of Scottish education.27 And indeed from the 1840s–70s the most compelling examples of jitsugaku would derive from Scoto-British technology, from engineering to economics to historiography, and from the empiricist thinking underpinning it, echoing Scotland’s own cosmological adaptation within the eighteenth-­century British union.28 This search for fixity in flexibility would run deep in the Anglophile Chōshū generation at the heart of the new Meiji administration, a generation that would internalise a British stress on government authority as something adapting to each circumstance, the constitution’s ‘efficient secret’. 29 If, to adapt the terms of Victorian constitutionalists, the Tokugawa bakufu had collapsed from a high ground in the dominion of nature into ‘mere politics’, or raw struggle, the British empiricist understanding of the natural could appear as a ground of cosmological renovation. 30 ­Sakuma’s empiricism, moreover, made him one of the first to move towards ‘­encyclopaedism’, or the arrangement of the world as knowledge around knowing individuals, and the solution to the survival of Japanese han in knowledge of the world – Restoration as ‘diffus[ing] the principle of scientific observation to the whole population’. 31 So if flexibility through knowledge is taken seriously as the basis of a national defence, the very reforming tendencies behind the jōi or expulsionism that drove Mito could after Sakuma become a principle of national opening.32 By the mid-1850s a renewed call for imperial authority had turned against the bakufu’s unwillingness to open, and kaikoku had become associated with the protection of the realm – a tenkō that, as David Magarey Earl puts it, ‘developed a firm conviction that if need be, the entire nation (­phenomenal kokutai [national polity]) should be s­ acrificed to preserve ­ illingness turn its essential characteristics (noumenal kokutai)’. 33 This w the dynamic to renovation of the fixed has much to do with the opening to Newtonian empiricism exemplified by Sakuma. A restorationist stress on a constant (‘fixed’) dynamism, though, was probably most iconically associated with the figure of Yoshida Shōin. 34 In particular after his 1850 journey to the home of Chōshū and restorationist thinking in Western J­ apan, Yoshida denounced a bakufu rejection of foreign technology and stressed a principle of restless action within a context of interdomainal politics.35 H.D. Harootunian describes how for Yoshida, building on virtue as flexibility, a public-spirited sincerity/makoto became bound up with adaptability, and even available to barbarians, so that international trade could take place within this  general  ethics

14  Britishing as Modernisation (mirroring Adam Smith’s idea of sympathy, a universal solidarity based in the civilizing effects of exchange). 36 The Confucian jinzai or person of talent could now be defined against the background of an ethics whose universality was in its flexibility.37 This cosmological convergence is familiar in some sense, in Japanese scholarship particularly – Maruyama Masao has described something like this in chronicling the native adaptations of Confucianism that led to Sakuma’s flexibilisation and his unusual proactiveness in the process of adaptation. What I would like to stress here though is not just the restorationist-reformist turn to the empiricist and the Newtonian, but moreover the way the empiricist and the Newtonian had themselves been central to the foundation of the British state. The 1688 state grew largely from the aggressive application of ideas of natural and universal laws of motion in the realm of government authority, perhaps most iconically by John Locke. For the forces behind Britain’s own Restoration, 1688 meant adapting the fixed authority of the eternal principles of nature to the dynamic motion of bodies (or money) in space. 38 For the forces behind Japan’s Restoration similarly, especially tracking Sakuma, 1868 meant adapting a native neo-Confucian conception of nature (what would become known as honzen no sei/‘inherent nature’) to the apparent constant dynamism of the British ‘world’. This is to suggest that Japanese neo-­Confucianism finds a vocabulary through Newtonian motion; it is an adaptation to science, capitalism, and so on, but more fundamentally it is an adjustment to the founding cosmology of British government. Figures like ­Sakuma show moreover that this modernisation was an adaptation rather than a foreign imposition, based in a realignment of the relationship between the dynamic and the fixed – but nor was it a separate Japanese invention, as was sometimes implied by post-war nihonjinron (or ‘theories of the Japanese’). Britain’s fixed dynamic of physical-­fi nancial nature was evidently making the outwards movement of this nature inevitable, drawing in resources and forcing the encounter with East Asia; this is the movement that would be described for some modernists by Oswald Spengler as Faustian civilization, but which for our purposes would as well be understood as Newtonian civilization. 39 Understood by Locke as the progressive force of government, ‘financial Newtonian motion’ would universalise the evolution of the economic self, a condition of freedom, yet one that demanded obedience to ultimately arithmetic rules – an uncodified regime based in dependable money (as Newton himself would stress as Keeper of the Mint). The state established in the 1680s–1700s (from the ‘Glorious Revolution’ to the Acts of Union) is a Newtonian state, its motion always bound up in a wider world of interdependent universal rules, always relative within a system that cannot itself be moved – ‘every entire motion is composed of the motion of the body in the first place and the motion of this place out of its place;

Liberal Convergences  15 and so on…’ – and it is this governmental ‘physics’ that becomes the object of neo-Confucian adjustment.40 Locke powerfully turns this naturalism to his great apologia for r­ egime change, the Second Treatise of Government (1689), in which a natural constant motion releases resources from ‘despotic’ blocs, ­characterised by the unprogressive regime of James II, and the ­feudal yields to ­property-owning and therefore responsible individuals.41 Locke updates natural law tradition to describe such motions of money as ­inevitable – ‘The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one’ – and unidirectional, from which the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment would develop the assumption that the individuation of property gives progress its direction. For Locke a fixed standard of value is needed to allow this dynamic proliferation of propertied individuals whose consent founds government authority; and strong currency, indeed, becomes the 1688 state’s raison d’état.42 This fixity of money value ‘eternalises’ British origin myths, and encountering this fixed nature as a worldview and a t­ echno-moral regime, a flexibilised Japanese neo-­ Confucianism would adapt its own ­conception of nature or honzen to an anchoring in constant movement – so an eternal virtue could be brought to bear through adaptive action against the incumbent administration through sonnō or ­reverence for the emperor, and demand a restoration of imperial rule (ōsei fukko).43 Neo-Confucian nature could be recreated, on native terms and relative to locally (or increasingly, nationally) specific circumstances, in a way that could deal with the constant dynamism of the world superpower. Seeking like Sakuma to recalibrate the relationship between progress and immanence, the dynamic and the fixed, and particularly focused by the spectre of Britain in the Opium War, Yoshida would then come to associate kaikoku with revolutionary loyalism and a commitment to constant action that proved immanent values – ‘[v]ictory could be achieved only through a constant reassessment of military needs’.44 Particularly in the southwest, Yoshida perceived, han Anglophilia would speak to this technical need: Satsuma han’s primary model for military reform was the Royal Navy, and similar desires across han would become a reason for study in Britain specifically.45 The perception of a need for a certain understanding of change would increasingly translate to power, and Chōshū’s combination of military Anglophilia and sonnō would in large part define the values of the new country.46 From the early ’50s the travelling Yoshida helped establish this by building up interdomainal support and a degree of talismanic leadership, so that, as Harootunian puts it, Yoshida’s ‘call for an uprising of unattached patriots triggered the restorationist movement of the early 1860s’ – forces which would reject the compromise of the kōbugattai (imperial-shogunal unified forces) and identify through their proofs of virtuous action, to rise through the skirmishes of the mid’60s.47 Numerous Chōshū restorationists took Yoshida’s understanding

16  Britishing as Modernisation of action-as-restoration into the top roles of Meiji g­ overnment.48 Itō ­Hirobumi, endorsed as a 17 year old by Yoshida, rose to prominence after the 1863–64 Euro-American bombardments of the Chōshū stronghold of Shimonoseki, after which the failure of the bakufu to enforce the resulting British ultimatum at han level confirmed de facto han power and pointed towards an inter-han reconstruction.49 A similar bombardment was enacted on Satsuma’s Kagoshima in 1863 after the han’s failure to protect British citizens in the territory – sometimes called the ‘Anglo-­Satsuma War’. Both these rival han, the greatest of the southwestern anti-bakufu forces, were armed by British traders, pushing Satsuma and Chōshū towards conflict, then a conclusive rapprochement that itself largely arose from a shared Anglophilia. In the decades leading up to Restoration, the Sakuma-Yoshida influence would concentrate in these contact regions, where the han rose over the bakufu. The interdomainal imperative of fukoku kyōhei (‘enrich the nation, strengthen the military’), and the conception of the new national body as like a domain, was born in large part in the cosmological shift in han that had been British-armed.50 The military force that would become the Japanese Imperial Navy was nourished by rebel han technophilia, in Chōshū particularly, whose sense of the bakufu’s ­technological backwardness would attach it to Scoto-British traders and proliferate the desire for British ryūgaku (study abroad) amongst them.51 So for Albert Craig, ­British naval forces ‘set in motion the forces that destroyed the centrifugal forces of the Bakufu system’.52 However, not only was the empiricist Newtonian vision of nature a keystone of the British state; this vision’s development into ethics, economics, and historiography was also undertaken largely from a region which, like post-Opium War Japan, was a periphery catching up. During the Scoto-­British adjustment to union and empire, Newtonian motion was ­perceived in numerous fields of study, and, as Adam Smith put it, Newton had ‘­advanced to the acquisition of the most universal empire that was ever established in philosophy’, and demonstrated that all phenomena are ‘united in one chain’.53 Where in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) habits had been a mental ‘force’ like gravity, David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (1739–40) would expand this to see laws of ‘attraction’ in the ‘mental world’ like those in the ‘natural world’.54 Such compelling images of expanded nature would be influential throughout the Meiji era, and as Julia Adeney Thomas and others have described, the Meiji Restoration largely fits shizen or nature onto ten or heaven, allowing Confucian ethics to shade into ‘secular religion’ – in a move we might relate to a Whig assumption of a natural authority.55 The Restoration years would see frequent attempts to renegotiate the convergence of ten/heaven and shizen/nature, and Thomas talks of a search for ‘another form of modernity, resting on another form of nature’.56 The Charter Oath of 1868, the foundational doctrine of the  Meiji  state,  appealed to

Liberal Convergences  17 a ‘public good and common self-interest’ that corresponded to ‘the just laws of nature’.57 Thomas, moreover, shows how shizen/nature remained the ground on which modernity was negotiated for Meiji thinkers like Sakuma’s student, academic leader and social Darwinist Katō ­Hiroyuki, who built from natural law to representative government, or Baba Tatsui, editor of Jiyū Shinbun newspaper and scholar of British law, who ‘looked to nature to discover law… [which] as they had been for Tokugawa Neo-Confucianists, are one and the same… politics and nature are used as precise metaphors for each other, one figuring the other in uncanny exactitude’.58 The conception of nature to which this adjusts is anchored in the late seventeenth century empiricist cosmology of the modern British state, but as an ethical standard it was pressed out into empire from the Scoto-British edges. A moral Newtonian motion then helped restorationists find a new ­immanence by dispersing a previous immanence – the dispersal also undertaken relative to Locke’s ‘despotism’ – in economic terms, diffusing inequalities across an unlimited number of individual relationships. Where a benevolent ruler had been responsible for ensuring that workers were not treated like machines or beasts, in the ‘new immanence’ inequality would shift complexly and progressively, and bind together the empowerment of individualism and the disempowerment of work specialisation as described by Adam Smith.59 Where Aizawa had described a ‘unification through [Confucian] discrimination’, the ethical shift of the Restoration years would tend to reinvest dynamic inequality into the basis of a community, something as with Smith’s ‘sympathy’.60 The convergence with the cosmology of Newton and Locke (and then Smith) is ultimately a convergence with founding British state forms, and it takes on a certain inevitability with Britain’s victory in the First Opium War. The war was a performance of the effectiveness of Newtonian motion against the great Confucian power Japan now saw as unable to grasp the dynamic force of ‘free trade’, and the conflict brought to East Asia some of the most ‘practical’ and hardbitten practitioners of Enlightenment, particularly opium dealers.61 Chinese power was evidently unable to flexibilise to protect eternal virtues; in a world of Newtonian motion, it was unwordly.62 Or as Harootunian puts it, the Chinese had no vocabulary with which to think through the current crisis.63 The Opium War as a cosmological reckoning then involved a decentring of China and a different kind of centring which was not so much ­regional as ‘worlded’ in a new form of universalism and a particularly ­effective understanding of nature. Wakabayashi has described how, where before late Tokugawa Japan had been seen as an outer eastern tribe of barbarians beyond the direct light of heaven’s virtue, China’s status as Chūgoku, literally centre-country (still the term for China today in Japanese and Chinese) was challenged, and the term Chūgoku itself eclipsed.64 As attention shifted to British cosmology, China’s apparently

18  Britishing as Modernisation unreconstructed stasis led han strategists to worry that the British ­Empire could make China into another India.65 The countervailing rapprochement with Newtonian flexibility would be stressed by a unifying Japan all the way through the 1890s Sino-Japanese War, and the Japanese empire from the turn of the twentieth century retained something of this undertone of necessary defence.66 The Opium War can then be seen as a cosmological war, carrying the worldview of what J.W. Burrow has described as Britain’s ‘Scottish-­ inspired progressive Whiggism of the early years of the nineteenth ­century’.67 With this came a particularly hardened and pragmatic ­version of Enlightenment ethics – a stark commitment to ­individual ownership and a separation of the world into objects to be known and owned and subjects who know and own. Tracking the thinking of Smith and others, this separation of the world into viewing subjects and viewed objects would become understood as the historical directionality of modernity (and become, in turn, a target for the ­modernist writing of the early twentieth century). The contact zones of Japan’s foreign treaty ports, particularly from 1858, were the testing ground for this ‘hard’ Enlightenment thinking; here, the foundational claims of Political Economy were established in everyday experience, ­legal ­universalism was applied, the efficiency of armaments and logistics was demonstrated, and aspirational British models of civilization were established via ryūgaksei (students abroad). Not only had Japan formed as a country through interdomainal reform relative to the British incursion; its most fundamental understandings of modernity arose, in the 1850s and 1860s, through adaptation to this techno-moral example.

The Opium War as Moral Gateway Reports of British victories in China may have been amplified by the time they reached Japan; in any case, they certainly underscored a ‘deeprooted fear of the “superpower” Britain’.68 Although discussion of bakumatsu (late Tokugawa) Japan has often concentrated on formal diplomacy and scholar-diplomats (Ernest Satow, for example), the superpower’s greatest influence was probably through the loose semi-official networks surrounding traders, especially opium traders, who moved east with the opening of Japanese ports at the end of the 1850s. The legacy of the opium trade is paradoxical: in Whig terms, the trade is rigorously progressive since it creates property-owning and therefore free ­individuals and breaks up moribund despotisms; but this freeing depends at the same time on the mass debilitation of addiction. Ownership/addiction, moreover, is development according to natural law, and yet it has to be enforced militarily. The inevitability of this progressive concentration on property (or the diffusion of immanent inequalities, in terms of the adaptation above) divided individuals and civilizations into either transmitters or

Liberal Convergences  19 recipients of dependency, a division worried about even in 1850s Japan, as evidenced by American negotiators’ promises to ban opium ­imports – and as Brook and Wakabayashi show, Japan’s own programme of opium smuggling into China would eventually fund its own imperial projects.69 Moreover with opium came a consular system and a trade environment that would allow for the normalisation of British values in East Asia in terms of law, language, and culture, values that would be transmitted particularly to the first generations of Japanese leaders, who would, at least until the 1880s, largely see modernity in terms of British universalism. The Chinese contact zones had carried a pragmatic thinking typical of what N.T. Phillipson has called the Scottish Enlightenment’s ‘post-­ republican’ phase, as universalist thinking became practical in expanding empire in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.70 Especially after the removal of the East India Company’s (EIC’s) monopoly by the Government of India Act 1833, trading houses became packed with ambitious boys committed to principles of hard work, self-reliance, and entrepreneurialism, often Scoto-British in contrast to the largely English makeup of the diplomatic and civil services. ­A izawa’s Shinron had a point (one taken up by Yoshida Shōin) when it suggested that British activity in East Asia showed the strength of the ­British kokutai to lie in a ‘national’ religion, something we might understand in terms of a secular Protestant individualism expressed through traders’ provincial ambitions.71 The biggest player in the new opium market was Jardine Matheson, a company founded on the eve of EIC demonopolisation by two Edinburgh graduates pooling their contacts from ­I ndian opium production.72 Jardine Matheson and similar houses were able to take the lead in defining the conditions of modernity in these contact zones, while government followed and adopted ‘a policy and a strategy which corresponded very closely to the declared needs of the big opium smugglers’.73 Traders, in other words, particularly after the loss of the EIC monopoly, pressed the British ideology of a natural economic basis for authority – they were government, acting in accordance with Lockean and Enlightenment principles.74 Moreover the opium trade had a particular Lockean role in drawing in silver, and thus the underscoring of currency that for Locke constituted the 1688 state’s ­raison d’état; since the trade was viewed as smuggling by Chinese authorities, a ‘circuitous exchange’ saw private Chinese buyers bring in opium to be sold for silver bills payable in London or India.75 So [f]ar East trade was now very largely financed by Chinese silver… [meaning that] “three hundred armed and lawless men” [­smugglers] on the Pearl River had been supporting on their shoulders an i­nverted pyramid of trade in many other commodities, spanning the world from London to Boston and New York.76

20  Britishing as Modernisation This setup remained committed to the British origin myth of constant dynamism as stability, and a Newtonian movement of money naturalised the way the number of addicts would keep expanding. When this was made problematic by a mid-’30s crisis of saturation, traders made the moral case to forcibly open ‘provinces not yet addicted to the drug’, an opening understood as a step on a universalist path of development.77 Both James Matheson and William Jardine lobbied for military intervention, with Matheson interfering in the ill-fated 1834 fact-finding mission of Lord Napier, first Chief Superintendent of Trade in China, and demanding that China respond to the British (broadly, Blackstonian) demand to reassert ancient and permanent rights to commerce.78 Matheson’s 1836 pamphlet, The Present Position and Prospects of the British Trade with China, stressed natural law against Chinese intransigence, the imperative to open up resources for conversion to property, and a general liberation from the despotic monopolisation of those resources: [i]t has pleased Providence to assign to the Chinese, – a people ­characterised by a marvelous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit, and obstinacy, – the possession of a vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth, and a population estimated as amounting to nearly a third of the whole human race. It has been the policy of this extraordinary people, to shroud themselves, and all belonging to them, in mysteries impenetrable, – to monopolize all the advantages of their situation.79 For Matheson the moral case for force is made obvious by the Chinese rejection of the means to their own progress: [b]y [commerce] every man may still supply his wants. – Things ­being now become property… [and] may be bought or exchanged for other things of equal value. Men are, therefore, under an o ­ bligation to carry on that commerce with each other, if they wish not to depart from the views of nature. And this obligation extends also to whole nations, or states.80 By this measure, indeed, British traders were already owed ­compensation for Chinese dereliction towards trading duties ‘on the faith of which we have been induced to enter into vast speculations… [which are] an ­almost indispensable source of revenue to our Government’.81 This ‘post-republican’ universalism transmits Smith, certainly, but it has been hardened with Locke, and stresses a general duty to property eclipsing any of Smith’s qualms about the human effects of the demand to view the world in terms of production and property. The trigger for war would come indeed, when Governor Lin Zexu’s seizure of token amounts of opium was seen as an affront because the opium ‘was

Liberal Convergences  21 not  contraband,  it  was property’.82 Much of the affront draws from a Smithian thinking digested by Dugald Stewart, known as a populariser of Scottish Political Economy, and in the early nineteenth century a figure who Phillipson describes as ‘one of the most influential moralists in the Western world’.83 Numerous senior government figures had passed through Stewart’s tutelage, and as Anand Chitnis says, he ‘had a number of prominent Whig heirs lodge with him while they studied in Edinburgh, and other prominent Whigs of less noble birth acquired their earliest political, social and economic knowledge in his nursery’.84 Lord John Russell, for example, signator of the London Protocol of 1862, which confirmed the opening of three Japanese ports and the reduction of trade restrictions, and who would describe Stewart’s ability to ‘Enlighten all the Universe of Mind’.85 Or Lord Palmerston, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs for most of the decade on either side of the First Opium War, 1830–51, Prime Minister from February 1855 to October 1865, and a contemporary of ­Jardine at Edinburgh who lodged with Stewart from 1800 to 1803. Jasper ­Ridley describes how at Edinburgh Palmerston spent his time ‘filling many note-books and imbibing the doctrines of his teacher and Adam Smith. He accepted the doctrines wholeheartedly, and never changed his views on economics’.86 The lastingness of this influence turned out to be crucial to East Asian policy, since Palmerston was at the end of the ’30s given the choice of whether to enforce opium markets, and although the degree of concrete collusion is hard to document, he and Jardine Matheson pooled naval resources and intelligence for the war, and concurred on the natural good of opening up East Asia to British universalism.87 If this push of Smithian thinking had moral implications for Japan, it also, as described in W.G. Beasley’s classic account, made ­intervention in Japan practically more likely, since it concentrated naval firepower in the East China Sea.88 After a period of relative disinterest in ­Japan, which was rarely seen as a likely lucrative market, a move east was ­recommended by, amongst others, Karl Gützlaff, friend of William ­Jardine and interpreter for opium smuggling missions in the 1830s then at the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, who thought (rightly, if we follow the influence of Sakuma and Yoshida) that the British would be an object of cultural admiration to the Japanese.89 The British Foreign Office was covertly making plans by the late ’40s, and a shift in emphasis in dominant Whig opinion was suggested by an Edinburgh Review article of November 1852, which saw Japan in the tone of Matheson’s Lockean natural duty to release resources to those who could use them: [o]ther nations are justified in demanding intercourse with Japan, a right to which they are unjustly deprived… [t]he Japanese undoubtedly have an exclusive right to the possession of their territory; but they must not abuse that right to the extent of debarring all other nations from a participation in its riches and virtues.90

22  Britishing as Modernisation As Kato Yuzo describes, the spectre of the Opium War also turned Japan towards ‘negotiated treaties’, seen as preferable to ‘treaties of defeat’ like Nanking – making the country proactive in its ‘worlding’ and helping realise the neo-Confucian reorientation.91 Central to this opening was the Stirling Treaty (the ‘Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty’) of 1854, and although the coming of modernity has traditionally been dated to the entry of the American ‘Black Ships’, even Japan’s acceptance of the US Harris Treaty, Alistair Swale says, was driven by a desire to escape ‘the real threat, Britain’.92 In China, Governor Lin had accepted that ‘[b]y far the most important body of traders were the English’ (Arthur Waley’s term).93 Now the British Chinese consular-trading system was moved east almost intact, encouraged by the relative peace after the Second Opium War (1856–60) and a continued push during the preoccupation of the United States with the Civil War, and sharpened by the possible spread of the Crimean War to northern Japan; and before accelerating technologies (steamers, 1860, telegraph, 1871), trader-driven policy maintained a relative independence from Parliament, which had been unable to formally debate the First Opium War until long after it was underway.94 Moreover in the contact zones opening in 1859–63 (the Ansei ports  – Edo/Tokyo, Kobe, Nagasaki, Niigata, Yokohama), British ­legal ­assumptions were largely unopposed, creating ‘an elaborate – and ­virtually unique among Western countries – system of territoriality, which meant that Britons in Japan were better governed than any other group of foreigners’.95 Traders in large part were able to define their own terms, extending their authority through Merchant Consuls, for example, allowing them to establish British law as a self-evident basis of modernity. The Y ­ okohama Chamber of Commerce, J.E. Hoare relates, was able to write off rival national legal traditions as the products of ‘“despotic governments”… unsuitable for those who knew a higher freedom’ – and generally the contact zones were described as fortunate in benefitting from the law of ‘the Anglo-Saxon “races” [who were] alone… blessed with that special talent for making this form of government work’.96 A reliance on legal universalism fed into a situation in which t­ raders were de facto legislators within the ‘British dominance of the ports’, something that would continue right through the 1880s.97 British traders would come to make up over half of the population of Japan’s foreign concessions; most of the press was British-run, and most yatoi, or foreign employees, including engineers and the staff of schools and universities, were British, and often perceived by natives, with some justification, as conduits of informal control.98 British institutions very largely came to stand for the worldly and the modern, as well as the condition of Japanese national action, and Inouye Yuichi describes how [i]n the late nineteenth century, British influence far surpassed that of any other Western powers in the Far East. To achieve the goal of

Liberal Convergences  23 gaining recognition as an equal member in the Western state system, therefore, it was necessary above all for the Meiji leaders to keep a close watch on British policy.99 Moreover despite the distaste towards traders on the part of some diplomatic staff like Satow and Algernon Freeman-Mitford, traders were often more responsive to the rise of the han, and therefore the emerging reality of the new Japanese nation-state.100 Following the Anglo-Chinese pattern, ­Rutherford Alcock, Consul General from 1858, and his less acerbic and more Palmerstonian successor Harry Parkes from 1865, typically professed a strict ‘neutrality’ – traders might be amoral, but they had to be indulged day to day as a part of an emerging, flexible policy.101 Actual cultural enforcement was largely undertaken by the footsoldiers of the Lockean constitution, or as Kato summarises this, ‘British diplomacy in Japan owed more to its merchants than to its diplomats’.102 So for Grace Fox, describing the wider period 1859–83, ‘it was the British merchants, in conjunction with their Western competitors, who introduced or abetted the most numerous changes in Japanese life’.103 Although the Japanese administration would later try to hedge its debts to any one power by spreading trade across a number of countries, the pre- and early Meiji ascendancy of traders was fundamental to a unifying Japan’s adaptation to British universalism. Through these institutions and concerns, from bakumatsu times worldly development would be associated with the natural right to trade, and traders would establish much of the techno-moral infrastructure of ­Japanese modernity, with Jardine Mathson representatives beginning the move from April 1854.104 Perhaps no trader is as important in this as Thomas Glover, entrepreneur in opium, tea, beer, railways, and, briefly, that most Lockean concern of minting (adding to the British currency speculation sometimes described as keeping real Japanese autonomy at bay through the 1870s); he was joined by William Jardine’s great-nephew, William Keswick, who moved to a crypto-diplomatic role in Yokohama in 1859 (the year of the ‘Japanese gold rush’), and a position of some local power.105 Glover would sell thousands of rifles to Chōshū in the mid-’60s, and ships to multiple central Japanese concerns long after; like Jardine Matheson as a whole, he thrived on the political tension and became a major force in turning Satsuma and Chōshū into ‘new Anglophiles’, and was, in some accounts, ‘the main force behind the Meiji Restoration’.106 The arming and technical modernisation of southwestern rebel han, the conditions for Restoration, were largely funded by Glover’s own company and his contacts in Jardine Matheson.107 Glover and Jardine Matheson encouraged, organised, smuggled, and often financed the ryūgaku of the generation who would define modern Japan, including the smuggled activists later known as the Choshu Five (Itō, Inoue Kaoru, Yamao Yōzō, Endō Kinsuke, Inoue

24  Britishing as Modernisation Masaru), who were passed on to Matheson in November ’63 to arrange their education, and who would later take major roles in the Meiji administration.108 Satsuma, who had had British naval ambitions since their own early ’60s experience of bakufu struggles with British forces, asked for Glover’s help with technical military education, and had their own students shipped to Britain to meet senior Foreign Office officials and receive education.109 Generally the unified Japanese navy would take much from British ships and a training partly modelled on the Royal Naval College, and came to see Royal Navy power as a ‘Greenwich ­Meridian’ of progress.110 It was partly through Glover and Co.’s links with restorationists and Parkes’s contacts in the key contact zone of Nagasaki, moreover, that Parkes, although believing in the peacekeeping abilities of the bakufu until after the Shimonoseki bombardment, came to represent the first foreign government to recognise the Meiji government in May ’68.111 Although initially intended to help cushion the effects of European modernity, these ryūgakusei came to be seen as an index of modernity themselves, and a source of competition with China. For most of them, the first experience of ‘worldly’ modernity was in Shanghai and Hong Kong, places which dramatised the British-imperial victory in the Opium War.112 The ­r yūgakusei’s experience of British Empire as a cohesive ‘national’ frame is what Maruyama Masao has in mind when he suggests that modern Japan was ‘called forth’ from the outside.113 Itō was in Britain when he b ­ ecame committed to the idea of a national body beyond individual daimyō (han feudal lords); and in ­London, housing the biggest Japanese population of any Western city, meetings between Satsuma and Chōshū, at first probably by chance, helped create the conditions for the 1866 Sacchō (Satsuma and Chōshū) alliance which brought together the two large rebel han and cleared the way for Restoration.114 These British ryūgakusei would return to nation-­defining positions – in the case of Itō and Inoue Kaoru, during the pre-Restoration crisis and having to deal with the question of kaikoku/ national opening.115 These students had become ‘new Anglophiles’ (Kato), having seen ‘Britain at its peak, before the 1874 recession, and their experience ­affected their later ideas on forming connections and ­governments’.116 For Hoare these ryūgakusei, ‘with their first-hand knowledge of life in Britain… were in a position to enlist the full weight of Victorian ­liberalism in the campaign against what a number of radicals saw as the tyranny of the Meiji state’ – and for those central to the Meiji establishment, even during later sceptical or illiberal turns, Britain would remain a ‘yardstick’ for Japanese development.117

‘Britain of the East’ Yoshida Shōin, dedicated to using British technology to counter ­British power, described Japan’s relationship to Asia as comparable

Liberal Convergences  25 to ­Britain’s relationship to Europe.118 The imagery would become familiar  – ­exceptionalist, unconquered ‘island nations with extended histories rooted in antiquity and mysticism’.119 But by the early Meiji era, the very rationalisation of production that Locke’s Scottish Enlightenment adaptors had seen as defining progress was already undermining itself in Britain, through the compression of labour in cities and the socialist and trade union crises that threatened to undermine the ‘national’ unity Itō had perceived in empire.120 At the level of empire, centrifugal threats would be answered by a great ‘culturing’ that stressed shared values across quasi­-autonomous regions of the Anglosphere, a common thread in the broad body of thought sometimes known as ‘Greater Britain’. One possible dating would put an origin of this culturing movement in the year of the Meiji Restoration, when Charles Dilke’s iconic Greater Britain imagined something like a global Anglophone ‘ethnicity’ that was less racial than cultural-­linguistic, a ‘­common spirit’ spreading across ‘English-­speaking, or… English ­governed lands’  – or an iconic ‘England’ stretching out metonymically (and later addressed by a pointedly placed Japanese modernism).121 Dilke’s tone was taken up by J.R. Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1883), which underscored the figure of metonymy: England was not a definable nation, it was a figure that could extend without changing or being defined, allowing the placed and the unplaced to become interchangeable (‘[b]y England I mean solely the state or political community which has its seat in England’).122 In 1886 J.A. Froude conceived of metonymic England as ‘a great organism’ – after the loss of the American empire, ‘[n] ew shoots sprang out again… and Oceana was reconstituted once more; this time, in a form and in a quarter more entirely suited to her naval genius’.123 This culturing would allow ‘England’ to be based in natural motion and civilizational development rather than conquest, and it dovetailed with similar constitutional thinking, for example in Walter Bagehot, or A.V. Dicey, whose 1885 Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution described a binding of authority that happened outwith any ‘political considerations’.124 As in the legal understanding being exported to the ­Japanese contact zones, the Greater Britain tradition saw authority as organic and unintentional, or as Edward A. Freeman described it in 1872, it ‘grow[s] up, without leaving among the formal acts of our legislature any trace of the steps by which it grew’ – so the constitution ‘was never made, in the sense in which the Constitutions of many other countries have been made’.125 As a ‘linguistic ethnicity’, this drew on a much longer association of development and English, going back to the numerous rhetoric guides published during the Scottish Enlightenment and aiming to improve students’ chances to help overcome their peripheral status, later becoming a staple for early nineteenth-­century Whigs – perhaps most familiarly, Thomas Macauley,

26  Britishing as Modernisation who had  described  the Opium War as a ‘most rightful quarrel’, and pressed for Anglophone universalism in empire, particularly trained on India and expressed in the well-known ‘Minute on Education’ (1835).126 By the ’60s Matthew Arnold, troubled by working-class demonstrations, was looking for a canon of civilizing works in English whose improving tendencies would be ‘as inevitable as Nature itself’.127 This mid-Victorian assumption of an improving ‘linguistic ­ethnicity’ is quite readable in Meiji Japan: many of the new u ­ niversities providing graduates for the Meiji establishment began as English schools or English teacher-training schools and were often created, sometimes modified from han schools, by ryūgakusei – as in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Keiō (1858), J.S. Mill and Samuel Smiles translator Nakamura Masanao’s Ochanomizu (1875), and influential educationalist and ­former UCL student Mori Arinori’s Hitotsubashi (1875). Occasionally in the Greater Britain genre, there were direct gestures towards Meiji Japan – in ­Dilke’s 1890 follow-up, Problems of Greater Britain, for example, which notes Japan’s influence in the eastern reaches of the Anglosphere.128 But although some Japanese liberals of the Meiji Enlightenment (to whom I come in the next chapter) would make overtures looking very much like claims for inclusion into Greater Britain, to an extent Japan would stand as Greater Britain’s limit point, and would take on – and ­transmit – much of its developmentality without actual incorporation. There were some hints of a ‘British Orient’, Earl Kinmonth describes, in the 1880s, but the Japanese absorption of the British techno-moral mission became convincing enough that, especially by the ‘worldly’ wars of the mid-’90s to the mid-’00s and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, British writers concerned with imperial affairs would widely see Japan as a kind of developmental echo of Greater Britain, as a ‘Britain of the East’.129 ‘Britain of the East’ writing can be placed within a wider interest in Japan from around the turn of the century, one that produces various kinds of thoughtful travelogue, including David Murray’s constitutionally-­interested history Japan (1894), Neil Gordon Munro’s anthro­pological Primitive Culture in Japan (1906), then later the ­Canadian Walter ­Wallace McLaren’s detailed Political History of ­Japan During the Meiji Era (1916) (which celebrates an evolution from the ‘complete domination of Japan’s political system by a military oligarchy’), and the three-­volume History of Japan (1925–26) by James Murdoch, an Aberdeen-­educated journalist and teacher of Natsume Sōseki at Tokyo Imperial University.130 In 1922 J.W. Robertson Scott would describe this wave of introductory guides to Japan as having been brokered by the ‘seven Ms’ – Mitford, ­Murdoch, Munro, Morse, ­Maclaren, “­Murray”, and M ­ cGovern.131 These ­travelogues and guides sometimes hint at a ­Japanese Anglosphere: G.J. Younghusband’s ­idiosyncratic 1894 account, for example, describes a ‘Japanned English’ spoken in Kyoto, a ­Yokohama that looks like ‘any small seaport in the United Kingdom,

Liberal Convergences  27 with a few ­rickshaws thrown in’, and Japanese soldiers singing ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon’.132 (Younghusband also more earnestly follows Seeley to describe how experience of Japan would make any traveller conservative on ­questions of empire, since it reveals the evident good of a shared institutional framework across these civilizations.133) Or for Problems of the Far East (1894) by George Curzon, later Viceroy of India, then Foreign Secretary, describing journeys in 1887–88 and 1892–93, East Asia shows [t]he increasing diffusion of the English tongue. Already spoken in every store from Yokohama to Rangoon; already taught in the ­m ilitary and naval colleges of China, and in the schools of ­Japan and of Siam; already employed in the telegraphic services of Japan, China, and Korea, and stamped upon the silver coins that issue from the mints of Osaka and Canton; already used by Chinamen ­t hemselves as a means of communication between subjects from ­d ifferent provinces of their mighty Empire – it is destined with absolute certainty to be the language of the Far East. Its sound will go out to all lands, and its words unto the ends of the world.134 But generally, ‘Britain of the East’ writing is concerned with describing ­Japanese modernity as closely homologous to, if not within, the sweep of British development, and Meiji development as a Whig ­historiography.135 For Curzon, Japan’s development is ‘the most wonderful piece of ­natural and human mechanism that the world now presents’.136 But this ­development has depended on ‘the valour of our [British] ­ancestors and the intrepid spirit of our merchants’ – who need, Curzon says in the tone of Matheson and Blackstone, more support in their natural trading roles.137 ­Curzon builds on a developmental universalism, and on ideas of Japan as half-­developed, to describe how a Japanese admiration for Britain shows the ‘efforts of a nation, still in pupillage, to assume the manners of the full-grown man’.138 This pupillage, for Curzon, is particularly apparent in Japan’s acquisition of the ‘external features of ­Parliamentary ­conduct’ – Itō’s 1892 cabinet is ‘a Whig Cabinet, composed of members of the great Whig families, the Cavendishes and ­Russells of modern ­Japan (though without their p ­ edigrees)’.139 And as with Greater Britain’s ‘ethno-­linguistic’ cohesion, this development is learned like a language – ‘Demos, having found belated articulation, is repeating… the familiar and ­venerable accents’.140 All these signs of growth suggest to Curzon that the coming century will see a swing towards the Pacific – a prescient observation that would be echoed by the 1930s–40s Kyoto School (whose point, I will suggest, can be read as a regionalisation of the global Greater Britain idea).141 Curzon is struck by how clearly Japanese civilization echoes British civilization, and has taken much of ‘the character and personality of the

28  Britishing as Modernisation men who are sustaining in positions of varied trust the interests of Great Britain in far lands’, so that the country now stands [a]t a maritime coign of vantage upon the flank of Asia, ­precisely analogous to that occupied by Great Britain on the flank of ­Europe… she sets before herself the supreme ambition of becoming, on a smaller scale, the Britain of the Far East… [seeing] that England has retained that unique and commanding position in the West which was won for us by the industry and force of character of our ­people, by the mineral wealth of these islands, by the stability of our Government, and by the colonising genius of our sons. By similar methods Japan hopes to arrive at a more modest edition of the same result in the East.142 If Curzon perceives a semi-autonomous outpost of British techno-moral modernity in a nascent Japanese empire, there is another variety of ‘­Britain of the East’ in a stress on the technical itself – the jitsugaku or practical learning that had defined the neo-Confucian convergence and drawn so many ryūgakusei to Jardine Matheson traders like Thomas Glover. One such account gives its name to this section – Dai Nippon, or, Britain of the East (1904), by the Glasgow engineer and educational reformer Henry Dyer. Dyer had been sought out by Matheson and appointed as first principal of the Kōbu Daigakkō (Imperial College of Engineering; absorbed in 1886 into Tokyo (Imperial) University, later Tokyo University), an institution planned by Itō after consultation with Matheson in the late ’70s and so central to Meiji infrastructure that, as Janet Hunter describes, ‘[b]y the turn of the century, many of Japan’s leading industrial and strategic enterprises were run by ex-students of the college’.143 In this role, Dyer reported to the Choshu Five member Yamao Yōzō, his contemporary at evening classes at Anderson’s ­College (Strathclyde University), and once a ryūgakusei under Lord Kelvin, h ­ imself a kind of hero of jitsugaku for modernising Japanese ­technicians, and a force behind a ­Tokyo-Glasgow engineering diaspora (and when the James Watt lab opened in Glasgow, Dyer claimed that Kōbu Daigakkō housed the only comparable facility in the world).144 In Dai Nippon he describes how the country’s current success has arisen from a desire to join the ‘comity of nations’, broadly understood in terms of the interests of the B ­ ritish ­Empire, a desire already in place by the time of his arrival in 1873: [t]he highest ambition of all the officials with whom I came into contact, and also of my own students, was that their country might become the Britain of the East… During the thirty years which have elapsed since that time they have kept their ideal steadily in view, and few will deny that they have gone a long way towards its ­realisation. They have laid a social foundation for national progress

Liberal Convergences  29 in a system of education which is very complete in every department, and which, in some respects, affords lessons to Britain.145 For Dyer this techno-moral development proves a ‘truly national spirit’ that allows Japan to become not only worldly, but also Britain’s ­representative of progress in East Asia.146 This thought is an ­animating force behind the Britain of the East sub-genre, and one that seems more urgent after the Russian War and the 1905 renewal of the ­A nglo-Japanese Alliance, and Dyer’s Japan in World Politics (1909) would go on to hypothesise an imperial federation – ‘[t]he combined forces and influence of Great Britain, the United States, and Japan would be sufficient to guarantee the peace of the Far East’.147 Here Dyer confirms that British technology has made Japan ‘the most wondrous example of industrial development’, and that this has, in turn, given Japan a civilizing mission like that of Britain, with the two joining as guarantors of global integrity.148 Indeed the two are now similar enough [i]n nature and… economic conditions to form a federation, which, while friendly to all the other nations of the world and co-­ operating with them in trade and industry, would be able… to advance their ­welfare not only physically but also intellectually and morally.149 Intriguingly, for Dyer in 1909 this level of development would allow Japan some degree of linguistic autonomy: Macauley’s monolingualism, Dyer says, has merely transmitted the jargon of English education, not the substance – and an Anglo-Japanese federation would use both languages.150 Moreover, as for Seeley, for Dyer Japanese empire has reached a level of civilization at which it needs a demographic safety valve; ­territorial empire should relieve urban populations of the pressures that had troubled Arnold, so colonies are a normal next stage (though as it turned out the later Japanese empire would cohere at least in part through a rejection of this idea of territory).151 Dyer suggests that J­ apan should ‘regenerate China and Korea’, and stand as an example to ‘those in a more backward condition’ – and indeed Japan’s own ‘unequal t­ reaties’ with China and the development of Korea would move towards this, though a chapter of restorationist history would be closed by Itō’s assassination in Korea in 1910.152 Dyer would go on to argue in Education and National Life (1912) that Japan’s success in British techno-moral adaptation was such that modernity could even flow the other way, suggesting something like a peak of the celebration of ‘modernising’ Japan.153 But the end of the Meiji era in that year mixed recognition of success in the British techno-moral mission with a renewed Japanese questioning of the Anglosphere hegemony on modernity, and the beginning of a crisis for Curzon’s and Dyer’s Greater British form of globalisation.

30  Britishing as Modernisation Later modernist critique would make a point of stepping away from the ‘hard Enlightenment’ expectations the British trading environment had visited on the country, and I will explore this later – before which, a look at the direct influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on the opinion formers and establishment figures of early Meiji.

Notes 1 Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in ­E arly-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge, MA: H ­ arvard University Press, 1986), 86; as described below, Igirisu has typically been translated England in North American accounts. On British gestures ­towards Nagasaki in the 1810s, cf. W.G. Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 1834–1858 (London: Luzac and Company, 1951), 5. 2 Aizawa’s An’i mondō consulted at: http://www.geocities.jp/sybrma/ 530an-imondou.html; this text was resurrected by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi and is not widely known, but an English rendition of the title might be ‘Questions and Answers on the Barbarians’, or ‘on the Westerners [i]’, and it refers to Anglia, or England – there is a gloss of this in footnote six of the archived text. 3 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 89; cf. Christopher S. Goto-Jones, P ­ olitical Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-­Prosperity (­Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 41. It is worth restating here that Japan was not yet unified, and would be unified only relative to the British threat, and came only gradually and incompletely to see itself in the terms of Western states. The problems of seeing Japan as a state agent in this sense are ­interestingly summarised in Atsuko Watanabe, Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019), 6–7, 10–11. 4 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, ix, 90. 5 Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 41. 6 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 15, 86; cf. David Magarey Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan: Political Thinkers of the Tokugawa Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981 (1964)), 95. 7 David Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance (­Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 25; toku is glossed as ‘a conventional term for “­morality” or “virtue” that in fact includes the ideas of “political ­system” and “political effectiveness”’. 8 On the eighteenth-century foundations for this shift, cf. Tetsuo ­Najita, ­Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō Academy of Osaka (­Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987), 91–92; Annette Schad-­Seifert, ‘­S cottish Political Economy in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) – ­Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liberal Economic Thought’, in eds. Sarah Metzger and Werner Pascha, Japan’s Socio-Economic Evolution: Continuity and Change (Folkestone: ­Japan Library, 1996), 109–22: 121. 9 Cf. Albert M. Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 54–56; J.E. Hoare, Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements: The Uninvited Guests, 1858–1899 (Folkestone: Japan Library, 1994), 120. 10 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 6–7, 10–11, 100–07; cf. Goto-Jones, ­Political Philosophy in Japan, 41; Albert M. Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Philosophical Foundation of Meiji Nationalism’, in ed. Robert E. Ward, ­Political Development in Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Liberal Convergences  31 ­ niversity Press, 1968), 99–148: 104; it has often been described how a U ‘­national’ consciousness at this point exists only in the han. On the limitations of rangaku discovered in the 1850s, cf. Thomas R.H. Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 35. On the rangakusha turn of interest from Russia to Britain, cf. Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 34. 11 Ed. Tsukamoto Katsutoshi, Shinron and Tekiihen (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1941), 40–41, translated in Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 96. 12 Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 37. 13 Andrew Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain: Early Travel Encounters in the Far West (Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1998), 214. 14 Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 86. On wakon yōsai, cf. Rumi ­Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science: Sakuma Shōzan and wakon yōsai ­Ideology’, ­Japanese Studies 28(2), 2008, 213–26: 213. 15 Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 224–25. 16 Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 221. 17 Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 220; H.D. Harootunian, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 162. 18 Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 64, 84–89; ­Williams also makes the interesting argument that in Confucian thinking conclusions are reached not through conscience but through Geist. 19 Minamoto Ryōen, Tokugawa gōri shisō no keifu (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1972), 324; Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 220; on Sakuma’s technological experiments, 216. 20 William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Capitalism (London: Sage, 2014), 13–16; Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 21 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 368, 402. 22 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 213–15. 23 Maruyama Masao, ‘Bakumatsu ni okeru shiza no henkaku’, in Maruyama, Chūsei to hangyaku (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1992), 111–56; Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 217–18; Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 147, 158. 24 Tetsuo Najita, Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 25–26; ­Sakuma Shōzan, ‘Nihon no kiki ni nozonde kokubō no yōmu o ronzuru no sho’, in Yoshida Shōin Zenshū/Sakuma Shōin Zenshū (Tokyo: Dai ­Nihon shisō zenshū kankō, 1931), 327–62. Focusing on British power particularly, ­Sakuma Shōzan, ‘Kaibō ni kan suru hanshuate jōsho’, in eds. Uete Michiari et al., Nihon shisō daikei, Vol. 55 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1971), 262–83. 25 Sakuma’s Eight Policies for Protection of the Seas is archived at: http:// shutou.hatenablog.com/entry/2015/10/16/204154; cf. Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 150. 26 Sakuma, ‘Kaibō ni kan suru hanshuate jōsho’, 263, 264, 266. 27 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 129–83; on the transmission to Itō, cf. Takii Kazuhiro, Itō Hirobumi – Japan’s First Prime Minister and Father of the Meiji Constitution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014 (2010)), 95–97. 28 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 114, 332–33, 388–89; Wakabayashi on Saitō Chikudō’s ‘Ahen Shimatsu’/‘The Origins and Outcomes of the Opium War’ – the Qing have never thought seriously about the ‘English

32  Britishing as Modernisation cleverness’ or their ‘shrewdness or… highly sophisticated machines’ – they ‘simply rant, “barbarian, barbarian”’, Anti-Foreignism, 139–40. 29 The term ‘efficient secret’ comes from the Victorian constitutionalist ­Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867). On liberalism’s ­tendency to conceal its metaphysical origins, cf. Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism, 16. 30 A.V. Dicey, An Introduction to the Law of the Constitution (London: ­Macmillan, 1979 (1885)), 127, 133. On the appeal to historical ­fluidity strengthening the imperial house, cf. Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 14, 134. 31 For example Sakuma Shōzan, ‘Haruma jisho o han no jigyō’, in ed. ­Matsuura Rei, Sakuma Shōzan, Yokoi Shōnan: Nihon no meicho, Vol. 30 (­Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1970), 139; Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 216, 217. 32 Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 216. 33 Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 190. On the negotiation of jōi and kaikoku, dated between Perry’s arrival in 1853 and the rise of Ii Naosuke in the bakufu towards the end of the ’50s, cf. Havens, Nishi Amane and ­Modern Japanese Thought, 33–39. 34 Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 147–49; Harootunian, Toward ­Restoration, 184–245; cf. Naramoto Tatsuya, Yoshida Shōin (Tokyo: ­Iwanami, 1969 (1951)), 22–33. 35 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 194, 208, 212–20; Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 144; Umihara Tōru, Yoshida Shōin (Tokyo: Mineruba Shobō, 2003), 47–113; Takeda Yasumi, Yoshida Shōin: Sono hito to shōgai (Tokyo: Kin’ensha, 1972), 95–108. 36 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 215–17; Earl Kinmonth, The SelfMade Man in Meiji Japanese Thought: from Samurai to Salary Man (­B erkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 38, 50; Harootunian, Toward ­Restoration, 170; discussing Higo han activist Yokoi Shōnan, ‘[f]oreign relations were based not only in the interest of Japan’s rulers, but more on the question of whether other countries are governed by virtue’, 336. 37 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 163–64, 407; on governmental effects of this ethics, 227–45. 38 Isaac Newton, trans. Andrew Motte, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World, excerpted in eds. I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall, Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries (New York: Norton, 1995), 257–74. 39 Oswald Spengler, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, The Decline of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (1918–1923)), esp. 188–225. 40 Definition VIII in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, excerpted in ed. H.S. Thayer, Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005 (1687)), 21. 41 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 1988 (1689)), 269–78, 289–94; Robert diSalle, ‘Newton’s Philosophical Analysis of Space and Time’, in eds. I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33–56: 39. 42 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 271; Harry Harootunian, ­O vercome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (­Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 55. 43 Alistair D. Swale, The Meiji Restoration: Monarchism, Mass Communication and Conservative Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 104; cf.

Liberal Convergences  33 Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 93; Takii Kazuhiro, trans. David Noble, The Meiji Constitution: the Japanese Experience of the West and the Shaping of the Modern State (Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2007 (2003, as Bunmei shi no naka no Meiji kempō)), 6–8; Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992 (1985)), 72–73. 44 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 201; cf. Yoshida Shōin, Zenshū, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1935), 405–11. 45 Many Satsuma students returning from ryūgaku in Britain would fill ­gaimushō/Japanese Foreign Office positions; to some extent han rivalries kept them from some of the high positions occupied by Chōshū. 46 Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration, 235, 315, 322–23, 393–94. On ­bakumatsu struggles for modernity, cf. George M. Wilson, Patriots and ­Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration (Chicago, IL: ­University of Chicago Press, 1992), 80–83. 47 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 42; cf. Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 130; Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain, 10; Banno Junji, trans. J.A.A. Stockwin, Japan’s ­Modern ­History, 1857–1937: A New Political Narrative (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014 (2012)), 3, 5; on Yoshida’s ‘Shiki shichisoku’/‘Seven Principles for Samurai’, cf. Hirose Yutaka, Yoshida Shōin no shiki shichisoku (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2013); the short text is also archived at: http://www12.plala.or.jp/rekisi/ sikisitisoku.html. 48 Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 133. 49 Andrew Cobbing, ‘Ito Hirobumi in Britain’, in ed. J.E. Hoare, Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, Vol. 3 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999), 13–24: 13; Takii, Itō Hirobumi, 8; Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration, 231; Swale, The Meiji Restoration, 15. As early as the 1850s, the bakufu had been forced to consult daimyō on decisions – cf. Andrew Cobbing, The Satsuma Students in Britain: Japan’s Early Search for the ‘Essence of the West’ (Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 2000), 3. 50 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 384–86; Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 223. On the ‘global’ aims of ­fukoku kyōhei, cf. Masao Maruyama, trans. Mikiso Hane, Studies in the ­Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton ­University Press, 1989 (1974)), 341–67. 51 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 242, 250, 371–77. 52 Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration, 370. 53 Dugald Stewart, The Collected Works Vol. I: Dissertation Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy Since the ­Revival of Letters in Europe (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1877 (1854 (n.d.))), 288; Adam Smith’s History of Astronomy discussed in Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 196; cf. Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985 (1762)), 145–46. On the faster passage of Newton through Scottish universities, cf. George ­Davie, ‘Adam Smith and Rousseau’, in ed. Murdo Macdonald, A Passion for Ideas: Essays on the Scottish Enlightenment, Vol. 2 ­(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1994), 110–49: 110; cf. A. Rupert Hall, All Was Light: An Introduction to Newton’s Opticks (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 219. 54 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 1985 (1738–40)), 60; cf. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment, 32. 55 For Craig, Fukuzawa comes to understand that for Burton God and nature are interchangeable – Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment:

34  Britishing as Modernisation The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 63–67. For Julia Adeney Thomas ten (‘heaven’) can be spread across the idea of the God-given and the new conception of individual ­natural rights – Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in ­Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 78. 56 Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 159. 57 Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 62–65; cf. Inada Matsunagu, Meiji Kempo seiritsu shi, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1960–61), 1–22; ­Marius ­Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard ­University Press, 2000), 333–39; Sukehiro Hirakawa, ‘Japan’s Turn to the West’, in ed. Marius Jansen, The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 432–98: 496; E. Sydney Crawcour, ‘Economic Change in the Nineteenth Century’, in ed. Jansen, The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5, 569–617: 570. 58 Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 113; on history and scientific laws, 114–17; Thomas also describes Baba’s ‘allegiance to both Japan and ­England’, 112; on Baba against the French Revolution, 127; on Baba’s ­suggestion that there is no Japanese split between nature and culture, 129; on nature as a framework for incorporating the non-West, cf. 26–27. Meiji definitions of nature are also described in Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘Concepts of Nature and Technology in Pre-Industrial Japan’, East Asian History 1, June 1991, 81–97: 83–84. Harootunian describes how in Yokoi Shōnan’s adaptation of Sung principles, makoto or sincerity is also understood as a ‘turn to one’s original nature’, and ‘if the logic [of human nature] is ­understood, we can develop a law of physics with our own resources’ – ­Toward Restoration, 344. 59 Cf. George Akita, Foundations of Constitutional Government in Meiji ­Japan, 1868–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 165. 60 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 59. 61 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 137, 142, 149; Earl, Emperor and ­Nation in Japan, 41; on Sakuma’s Bukyo Zensho in 1850, 157; cf. Banno, trans. Stockwin, Japan’s Modern History, 2. 62 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 22, 92. 63 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 4. 64 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 17–20, 31–32; Wakabayashi also points out that the early versions of this challenge were also associated with ­rangaku, 40; cf. Sakamoto, ‘Confucianising Science’, 215; Thomas, ­Reconfiguring Modernity, 42–44. 65 Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ‘From Peril to Profit: Opium in Late-Edo to Mieji Eyes’, in eds. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 55–75: 65; Annette Schad-Seifert, ‘­Constructing National Identities: Asia, Japan and Europe in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s ­Theory of Civilization’, in ed. Dick Stegewerns, Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan: Autonomy, Asian Brotherhood, or World C ­ itizenship? (London: Routledge Curzon, 2000), 45–67: 62–63; Edgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China (London: Putnam, 1964), 21; H ­ arootunian, ­Toward ­Restoration, 134; Maruyama, trans. Hane, Studies in the I­ ntellectual ­History of Tokugawa Japan, 318. 66 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 6–24, 115–16; Edward LeFervour, ‘­Challenge and Response’, in ed. Maggie Keswick, The Thistle and the Jade (London: Octopus, 1982), 171–95: 194.

Liberal Convergences  35 67 J.W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English ­Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 85. 68 Kato Yuzo, ‘The Opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration, 1837–72’, in eds. Ian Nish and Yoichi Kibata, The History of Anglo-Japanese R ­ elations, Vol. 1: The Political-Diplomatic Dimension 1600–1930 (Basingstoke: ­Macmillan, 2000), 60–86: 60. 69 Wakabayashi, ‘From Peril to Profit’, 57. On Japanese opium in Nagasaki, cf. John M. Jennings, The Opium Empire: Japanese Imperialism and Drug Trafficking in Asia, 1895–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 13; on opium and the Pacific War, cf. 91–103. On Chinese smuggling, cf. ‘Introduction: Opium’s History in China’, in eds. Brook and Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes, 1–27: 15–16, 23; Motohiro Kobayashi, trans. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ‘Drug Operations by Resident Japanese in Tianjin’, in eds. Brook and Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes, 152–66. 70 Nicholas Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in eds. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1981), 19–40: 39. On the end of the ­classical republican phase in Scottish intellectual history, and the sense that the Scottish philosophers had reduced the principles of virtue to property questions, cf. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, 31. 71 Karatani Kōjin has described how Christianity allowed young intellectuals to negotiate Meiji government authority – cited in Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 34–35. Wakabayashi describes how part of what had been behind the 1825 ikokusen uchiharai rei had been Mito’s perception of Britain’s Christianity as a ‘state religion’ – Anti-Foreignism, 64, 69, 113, 123; on the imagination of an abstract and ‘global’ social good beyond the personal benevolence of a fixed ruler, 98; on the insistence that since Christianity allows the West to grasp kokutai better, Japan needs some comparable unifying loyalty, 13–14. On Yoshida’s promotion of the cosmological shift needed to avoid ‘opium and christianity’, Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan, 208. On the compromises of the work ethic ideal of meritocracy, and Jardine Matheson’s combination of meritocracy and family connections, cf. Alan Reid, ‘The Steel Frame’, in ed. Keswick, The Thistle and the Jade, 11–49: 37–39. Jardine and Matheson would make the Parliament seat of Ashburton ‘dynastic’, with the latter succeeding the former as MP in 1843. 72 Reid, ‘The Steel Frame’; cf. Peter Ward Fay, ‘The Opening of China’, in ed. Keswick, The Thistle and the Jade, 55–79; Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 29, 99; Holt, The Opium Wars in China, 43, 63. 73 Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 106; Gordon Daniels, ‘The British Role in the Meiji Restoration: A ­Re-­interpretive Note’, Modern Asia Studies 2(4), Oct 1968, 291–313: 292. 74 On the importance of demonopolisation to the opening of China, cf. Fay, ‘The Opening of China’, 62. 75 Fay, ‘The Opening of China’, 59–61; Alain le Pichon, China Trade and Empire: Jardine Matheson and Co. and the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong 1827–1843 (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2006), 48. 76 Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars, 73; cf. 63–64; Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1999), 88–108; on the increasing speed of information during the 1830s rise of opium trading and the ripples of the 1837 silver crisis, 107.

36  Britishing as Modernisation 77 Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars, 66–67; estimates are between four and eight and a half million, with estimated capacity for 12.5 million. 78 Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars, 79; cf. 96–98; on interference with ­Napier’s campaign, 40–62. William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766) would later be rendered by Fukuzawa ­Yukichi. Cf. ­Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 14–15, 25; Holt, The Opium Wars in China, 54, 45–48, 102. A related argument to ­Matheson’s below is Samuel ­Warren, The Opium Question (London: James Ridgway, 1840), 132. 79 James Matheson, The Present Position and Prospects of the British Trade with China, Together with an Outline of some Leading Occurrences in its Past History (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1836), 1. Matheson’s ­loathing of the Chinese is given a tellingly developmental spin by a hawkish ­broadside against Chinese indolence by the literary celebrity opium user Thomas de Quincey, whose essay has marked similarities to Matheson’s – while ‘the very outposts of civilization are held by Englishmen, … [sent] out with stout arms, and a reverence for laws, and constitutional energy, and, above all, with a pure religion’, still ‘[t]he Chinese laws do not change. It is the very expression of this improgressive state that they cannot. Centuries make no reforms in a land open to no light’ – ‘The Opium Question with China in 1840’, Blackwood’s Magazine, June 1840, archived at: https:// archive.org/details/TheOpiumQuestionInChinaIn1840, 180, 189. On the uses of local conflicts for financial government ‘to gain a [territorial] ­footing’, cf. Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars, 41. 80 Matheson, The Present Position, 34, punctuation and italics as in the original; and, in the case of China, the ‘laws of nature are outraged’, 49; on the unwritten contract, 43, 79. 81 Matheson, The Present Position, 33, 32; cf. Brian Inglis, The Opium War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976), 116. 82 Inglis, The Opium War, 91–93, 125; Arthur Waley, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958), 55–58. On the 1877 Hartley Case and the failure or otherwise of Japanese officials to control opium, Jennings, The Opium Empire, 11–13; cf. Holt, The Opium Wars in China, 72–78. 83 Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, 37, 40. 84 Anand Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment and Victorian English Society (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 27. 85 Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment and Victorian English Society, 21; ‘The London Protocol, 6 June 1862’, in ed. W.G. Beasley, Select ­Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy 1853–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 216–17. 86 Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable & Co., 1970), 14; later Palmerston would describe Smith’s ideas as ‘ageless’, 14. 87 Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars, 55, 97–98. 88 Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 4, 50–51, 81. 89 Derek Massarella, ‘Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600–1858’, in eds. Nish and Kibata, The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, Vol. 1, 1–30: 22; cf. Christine Su, ‘Justifiers of the British Opium Trade: Arguments by Parliament, Traders, and the Times Leading Up to the Opium War’, Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal, n.d.: http://web.stanford.edu/group/ journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Su_SocSci_2008. pdf. On British unwillingness to go to Japan, cf. Daniels, ‘The British Role in the Meiji Restoration’, 292. On the Gützlaff-Jardine relationship, le Pichon, China Trade and Empire, 216.

Liberal Convergences  37 90 Review article attributed to Alexander Knox, Edinburgh Review 96 (1852), 348–83: 383; cf. Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 89. On Foreign Office plans, Massarella, ‘Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600–1858’, 22–25. ­ easley, 91 Kato, ‘The Opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration’, 61; cf. B Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 127–45. Japanese opening was moreover hastened by the prospect of easier British passage abroad, ­including the opening of the Suez canal – ‘Ikeda Nagaaki, Kawazu Sukekuni, and Kawada Hiroshi to Bakufu, circa 18 August 1864’, in ­B easley, Select Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy, 274–82. 92 Kato, ‘The Opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration’, 61. Britain would be making wide-scale surveys of the Ansei ports by the turn of the ’60s – W.G. Beasley, ‘From Conflict to Co-operation: British Naval Surveying in Japanese Waters, 1845–82’, in eds. Nish and Kibata, The History of ­Anglo-Japanese Relations, Vol. 1, 87–106: 100. On the avoidance of conflict with Britain, cf. Swale, The Meiji Restoration, 31. 93 Waley, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes, 58. 94 Waley, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes, 46; James Hoare, ‘The Era of the Unequal Treaties, 1858–99’, in eds. Nish and Kibata, The ­History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, Vol. 1, 107–30: 107–08; Beasley, ‘From C ­ onflict to Co-operation’, 88, 128–37, 157. On the effects of the coming of the steamer from 1860, cf. Hoare, Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign ­Settlements, 9. 95 Hoare, ‘The Era of the Unequal Treaties’, 109. 96 Letter from Yokohama Chamber of Commerce cited and discussed in Hoare, Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements, 87; cf. 27–28; Akita, Foundations of Constitutional Government in Meiji Japan, 176; Hoare, ‘The Era of the Unequal Treaties’, 110; on Japan’s inability to run its own ports, 112–3; cf. Inouye Yuichi, ‘From Unequal Treaty to the Anglo-­ Japanese Alliance’, in eds. Nish and Kibata, The History of Anglo-­Japanese Relations, Vol. 1, 131–59. The British system would also influence the 1873 legal code. 97 Hoare, Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements, 14; on the extensiveness of the 1858 British Treaty, 56. 98 Hoare, ‘The Era of the Unequal Treaties’, 114, 116. On the press, cf. Inglis, The Opium War, 93. 99 Inouye, ‘From Unequal Treaty to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance’, 132. 100 Hoare, ‘The Era of the Unequal Treaties’, 111. Traders were nevertheless often viewed by diplomats as the vulgar end of British influence – one wellknown contemporary condemnation of their behaviour is Alcock’s The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan (London: Longman and Co., 1863). 101 Hoare, Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements, 13–14; W.G. ­B easley, ‘Sir Harry Parkes and the Meiji Restoration’, The Transactions of the ­A siatic Society of Japan 12, 1975, 21–38. However, junior officials’ memoirs suggest moral and material support for restorationists – Daniels, ‘The British Role in the Meiji Restoration’, 291–313; and, a ‘triple concern for trade, a new middle class, and a constitutional settlement was clearly British in character’, 295. 102 Kato, ‘The Opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration’, 76. 103 Quoted in Pat Barr, ‘Jardines in Japan’, in ed. Keswick, The Thistle and the Jade, 153–65: 164. 104 Hoare, ‘The Era of the Unequal Treaties’, 117; Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 28, 99. On Shōgun Iemochi’s admission of international trade as ‘natural development’, cf. ‘Shōgun Iemochi to Emperor

38  Britishing as Modernisation

105 106 107 108

109

110

111

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

Kōmei, Ōsaka, 18 November 1865’, in ed. Beasley, Select Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy, 297–99. Hoare, Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements, 12, 133. Barr, ‘Jardines in Japan’, 154, 161; Kato, ‘The Opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration’, 51, 73–75. Cf. Michael Gardiner, At the Edge of Empire: The Life of Thomas B. Glover (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008), 45–66; Daniels, ‘The British Role in the Meiji Restoration’, 302. Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain, 22–28, 125–27; Cobbing, The Satsuma Students in Britain, 19–22. On the Choshu Five’s representativeness of Sacchō restorationists’ desire to go to Britain, cf. Takii, Itō Hirobumi, 10–13; Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration 316; Cobbing, ‘Ito Hirobumi in Britain’, 21. On the Glovers’ role, Cobbing, The Satsuma Students in Britain, 19–20, 35–36, 56–60, 128; on Godai’s crucial tour of England, 82. Godai would later import Northern English manufacturing to help turn Osaka into a ‘Manchester of the Orient’. Henry Dyer, Dai Nippon: The Britain of the East. A Study in National Evolution (London: Blackie and Son, 1904), 124. The ‘Greenwich Meridian’ reference is to Pascale Casanova’s Republic of World Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 (1999)), a Bourdieusian mapping of cultural value outwards from Paris – which I suggest would be better centred on the real temporal ‘still point’, or undefined centre, of Greenwich, London. Carol Gluck points to midMeiji Japanese appreciation of Chinese improvement as through its having ‘“single-­m indedly” modeled its navy on England’ – Japan’s Modern Myths, 20. Swale, The Meiji Restoration, 60–61; Inouye, ‘From Unequal Treaty to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance’, 133–34; on the 1869 visit of the Duke of ­E dinburgh, 132. On Parkes in Nagasaki, cf. Daniels, ‘The British Role in the Meiji Restoration’, 291–313: 296; Parkes only convinced his ­colleagues to withdraw neutrality on 9 Feb ’69, 312. On Parkes offering to write off reparations in exchange for the opening of ports, Beasley, Select ­Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy, 290–92, and ‘Sir Harry Parkes to Shōgun Iemochi, “Princess Royal”, off Hyōgo, 21 November 1865’, 299–300. Cf. Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain, 37–38, 50–56. Maruyama, trans. Hane, Studies in the Intellectual history of Tokugawa Japan, 342–43; Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 260, 395. Cobbing, The Satsuma Students in Britain, 60–66. Kato, ‘The Opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration’, 77. Kato, ‘The Opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration’, 78; Takii, Itō Hirobumi, 1. Hoare, ‘The Era of the Unequal Treaties’, 118, 166. Cited in Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 371 (here rendered ‘­England’s’); cf. Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 36. Hugo Dobson and Glenn D. Hook, ‘Introduction: Japan and Britain – ­S imilarities, Differences, and the Future’, in eds. Dobson and Hook, ­Japan and Britain in the Contemporary World: Responses to C ­ ommon Issues (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–17: 1. On, amongst many urging Japan to press the advantages of the ‘island nation’, Shige Shigetaka, editor of N ­ ihonjin, after 1888, Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 173–74.

Liberal Convergences  39 120 ‘The dynamics of domestic, international, and imperial politics were ­mutually reinforcing’ – Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: E ­ mpire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton ­University Press, 2007), 40; cf. 27. On Palmerston’s 1850s battles with ­Manchester School ‘libertarianism’, cf. Francis E. Hirst, Free Trade, and other Fundamental Doctrines of the Manchester School (New York: ­Augustus M. Kelley, 1968 (1903)), xviii. 121 Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in ­English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867, Vol. 1 (London: ­Macmillan, 1868), vii; cf. J.A. Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies (­London: Longman, Green and Co, 1886), 14; Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 44–53; on the export of population as a safety valve, 142–44. 122 J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (­London: Macmillan and Co., 1883), 7; on empires as competition between ‘greater’ characters, cf. 52–55. Elsewhere for Seeley national advancement is a ‘­culturing’ of tribal feeling – Introduction to Political Science (London: Macmillan and Co, 1896), 36. On Seeley’s takeup of Dilke’s language, cf. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 8–9. Cf. Froude, Oceana, 383, 385; ­M ichael Gardiner, The Return of England in English Literature (­Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 23. 123 Froude, Oceana, 4. On ethno-linguistic binding of ‘blood and sentiment’ across different stages of development, cf. Bell, The Idea of Greater B ­ ritain, 114, 189. 124 Cf. Seeley, The Expansion of England, 119–40; Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 152; Walter Bagehot, ‘An Anglo-Saxon Alliance’, in ed. Norman St. John-Stevas, Collected Works, Vol. 8 (London: Economist, 1965–86 (1875)), 335–39; Dicey, An Introduction to the Law of the ­C onstitution, 127, 133. On the English constitution as a model and apex, Seeley, ­Introduction to Political Science, 209–10; on the Hanoverian Restoration’s popular ­victory, 177; cf. Dilke, Greater Britain, 407; Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 1–2, 27, 42–44, 111. 125 Edward A. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution from the ­E arliest Times (London: Macmillan, 1872), 107; 54; elsewhere ­Freeman ­admits the historical specificity of this – a ‘purely unwritten and ­conventional code is one of the most remarkable facts in history’, 112. 126 Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (­Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 63, 70–71. On Macauley’s closeness to the Scottish Enlightenment, cf. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, 91; Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 131. 127 Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 35, 39. 128 Dilke, Greater Britain, Vol. 1, vii; Charles Wentworth Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain (London: Macmillan, 1890), 392, 396. 129 On ’80s ‘Britain of the Orient’ thinking, Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 100. 130 Walter Wallace McLaren, A Political History of Japan During the Meiji Era, 1867–1912 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1916), 354; D ­ avid Murray, Japan (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894); James Murdoch, A ­History of Japan, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1925–26); also the Edinburgh medical graduate Neil Gordon Munro’s ­Primitive Culture in Japan (London: Kegan Paul, 1906). 131 J.W. Robertson Scott, The Foundations of Japan: Notes Made during ­Journeys of 6,000 Miles in the Rural District as a Basis for a Sounder Knowledge of the Japanese People (London: John Murray, 1922), viii.

40  Britishing as Modernisation 1 32 G.J. Younghusband, On Short Leave to Japan (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1894), 66, 156–57. 133 Younghusband, On Short Leave to Japan, 53. 134 George Nathaniel Curzon, Problems of the Far East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (1894)), 435–36. 135 That is, not to describe ‘the Japan of temples, tea houses, and bric-a-brac’ – Curzon, Problems of the Far East, ix. 136 Curzon, Problems of the Far East, vii, xi, 15. 137 Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 418; Curzon also, with an eye on the everyday life of the Japanese concessions, confirms that the real power is held by merchants, 423; on lack of support for merchants, 422; he also describes how existing routes may have made Japan even better known than the near east, 5–8; on the Choshu Five as a national foundation myth, 25. 138 Curzon, Problems of the Far East, ix; and Japan ‘is assimilating all that the West has to teach her’, 394. 139 Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 19, 37. 140 Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 20. 141 Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 298, 396–97; on the foundation of ­empire at its edges, 419; cf. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 92. 142 Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 396, 420. ­ ikuchi 143 Janet Hunter, ‘British Training for Japanese Engineers: The Case of K Kyōzō (1859–1942)’, in eds. Hugh Cortazzi and Gordon ­Daniels, Britain and Japan 1859–1991 (London: Routledge, 1991), 137–46: 138–39. On Dyer’s participation in a ‘Scottish education tradition (well in advance of its English counterpart)’, or, in our terms, the Scottish Enlightenment ­technical-critical education transmitted on some level by traders, 139; cf. Nobuhiro Miyoshi, Henry Dyer: Pioneer of Engineering ­E ducation in ­Japan (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2004), 34; Dyer, Dai Nippon, 56; on Matheson’s 1878–79 proposals for the College, 57. 144 Hugh Cortazzi, introduction to Miyoshi, Henry Dyer, xxi–xxv; Hunter, ‘British Training for Japanese Engineers’; Olive Checkland, ‘Henry Dyer at the Imperial College of Engineering Tokyo, and Afterwards in Glasgow’, in ed. Hoare, Britain and Japan, 121–31: 131; Dyer, Dai Nippon, 427. 145 Dyer, Dai Nippon, 342–43; on the homologies between the two powers as exceptionalist trading empires at the edges of their continents, cf. 13, 126–27. 146 Dyer, Dai Nippon, viii, 29, 427; Japanese technological progressivism ‘will allow their influence to develop in a natural way’, 343–44; cf. Henry Dyer, ­Japan in World Politics (Glasgow: Blackie, 1909) – the power of ­Japanese ­modernity is in its ability to assimilate without ‘giving up any of [its] ­essential qualities’, 120; cf. 140. 147 Dyer, Japan in World Politics, 292–93; later Australasia is added to this, 299. 148 Dyer, Japan in World Politics, 97; on the Russo-Japanese War as a provocation for this sub-genre, v; on a Pacific-centred century, 173–299. 149 Dyer, Japan in World Politics, 97, 366. 150 Dyer, Japan in World Politics, 310–11; on the need to overcome single-­centre thought, 138–39; on national culture after Macauley’s ­monolingualism, 308–09, 356. 151 Dyer, Japan in World Politics, 294–95; recent Japanese population growth is likened to that of early nineteenth century Britain, 377; on intra-­empire ­migration, 253. In Dai Nippon, the Japanese ‘must be able to obtain whatever they require for the development of national life’, 387. ­A nnette

Liberal Convergences  41 Schad-Seifert notes this also of H.T. Buckle, who would ­influence ­Fukuzawa Yukichi, ‘Constructing National Identities’, 59. On Buckle and the Scottish Enlightenment science of history, cf. Marinell Ash, The Strange Death of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1980), 146. 152 Dyer, Japan in World Politics, 299; 184–86; ‘socialism is merely the formal statement of man’s social nature’, 101. On Sino-Japanese unequal treaties, cf. Wakabayashi, ‘From Peril to Profit’, 66–67. On Keswick on the opium lesson, cf. LeFervour, ‘Challenge and Response’, 194. 153 Henry Dyer, Education and National Life (London: Blackie, 1912), 36; on the failures of Arnoldian humanism, 8, 17; on patriotism as a Japanese lesson to Britain, 19–20, 24, 30, 33–41; on concern as to whether British education is still sufficient (and quoting Matthew Arnold to the effect that existing state schools are not humanising enough), 8, 17; cf. Dyer, Japan in World Politics, 344; Miyoshi, Henry Dyer, xv.

3 The Scottish Enlightenment in the Meiji Enlightenment Chambers’s Political Economy, Seiyō jijō, Meiroku Zasshi, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’ Chambers’s Political Economy The body of Japanese reformist writing proliferating from roughly the late 1860s to the late ’70s has been fairly well documented. But relatively undiscussed within this has been the extent to which the Meiji Enlightenment’s global adjustment was tracking an earlier global adjustment, that of ­eighteenth-century Scotland. Scottish Enlightenment ideas resonated with early Meiji liberals not only because of their apparent ­effectiveness – the ground of neo-Confucian convergence – but also because they suggested a model for national adaptation, originally the national adaptation to a recently expanded Britain. The Scottish Enlightenment coalesced after the quelling of Scotland’s own ‘feudal’ anti-union forces from the 1740s, and attempted to extend ­Newtonian-Lockean empiricism to redefine the terms of progress generally, and specifically to standardise and liberalise the entry conditions of imperial institutions which might otherwise have been dominated by a standing Anglo-British elite.1 Part of the story of the Scottish Enlightenment is of how an ambitious periphery was able to create global measures of development that could then be brought to bear on other peripheries. Although it drew from a pre-­existing seventeenth-century humanist tradition, the Scottish ­Enlightenment was shot through with this imperative to renegotiate ‘feudal’ backwardness, an imperative that would be exported to early Meiji Japan both directly and indirectly (the world of the free traders, the Ansei ports, and so on).2 This chapter considers the appeal of the Scottish ­Enlightenment as adapted by the Victorian liberals who would monopolise the attention of early Meiji elites and define Meiji values. The next section will look at the early 1870s journal Meiroku Zasshi, after which a brief coda considers the curious connections sending the proto-modernist writer Robert Louis Stevenson back to the restorationist hero Yoshida Shōin; but before these, I return to the texts that would be taken on and proliferated by early Meiji J­ apan’s most influential public intellectual, Fukuzawa Yukichi. Numerous studies of Japanese modernity have described the presence of Scottish Enlightenment thinking but missed the Scottish

The Scottish Enlightenment  43 Enlightenment’s Scottishness. One block to understanding this has been a relative disinterest, particularly, though not exclusively, on the part of North American scholars working within the post-war field of Japanese Studies, in the makeup of Britain. To an extent this repeats the ‘metonymic’ spread of the term England, a spread fundamental to the structure of the ‘worlding’ of British values. In both the Scottish Enlightenment and the Meiji Enlightenment, the defining aspirational movement was peripheral; ‘­England’ in the sense of civilizational icon was largely consolidated from beyond England the place, and this is important to understanding what kind of adjustment occurred. But the metonymic collapse of these terms has remained powerful in Japanese Studies, from the British orientalist Carmen Blacker’s classic The Japanese Enlightenment (1964), for example, as an icon of the post-war field.3 Examples after Blacker are almost too common to enumerate; soon after R.H. Havens describes how bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) writing borrowed from the ‘English nineteenth century’, and how ‘[b]eginning with Adam Smith, English empiricists had enunciated the doctrine that the sum of selfish individual interests equaled the general interests of society… [a doctrine] emerg[ing] after centuries of concern for freedom, equality, and individual rights’.4 The year after this, Mikiso Hane investigates ‘The Sources of English Liberal Concepts in Early Meiji Japan’.5 And so on. The pattern remains visible, in the North American academy at least, even after widely-publicised debates over Scottish devolution and independence, so that even some of the strongest accounts of Japanese cultural history still miss the centrality of national negotiation to the Meiji Enlightenment. The point here is not to nag about correct terminology or to ask for fairer representation, but rather to suggest that falling into metonymic England means missing this national specificity, and so some of the similarities between the two peripheral Enlightenments. For one thing, the negotiation of British union by urban Scots meant a difficult identification of, and overcoming of, the country’s own ‘barbarism’. The motivation for this overcoming, particularly in relation to an early eighteenth-century Anglo-British elite, was tied up with the description in many Enlightenment accounts of societies’ ascent to commercial society as something universal and open to any willing people.6 This becomes one of the most obvious characteristics of the Meiji ­Enlightenment, its search for a worldly ascent, its identification of barbarous or superstitious native tendencies. This transmission of historical universalism is one reason the term Enlightenment should be taken seriously, despite warnings like those of Alastair Swale that the correlate term keimō came later, and there was no conscious body of translations of ­eighteenth-century European Enlightenment classics.7 A ‘conscious’ movement with a canon is not needed to describe the J­ apanese repurposing of Enlightenment’s conceptual framework, especially when the civilizational aims are so substantially the same.8

44  Britishing as Modernisation This is not to suggest that these homologies, or the Scottish Enlightenment’s role in Restoration Japan’s quest to find a language of development more generally, have never been noted. Tessa Morris-Suzuki has approached the convergence I suggested in the previous chapter by describing how a Japanese neo-Confucian ‘idea of a naturally harmonious and self-regulating order’ picked up on a ‘Scottish school’ and on ‘the ­ rescott, economic theorizing of Adam Smith’.9 Similarly for Paul B. T the ‘Scottish school seems in certain ways congruent with Chinese Confucian thought about human affairs and institutions’.10 Or Annette Schad-Seifert – ‘[i]t was, importantly, Scottish economic liberalism that first redirected the Tokugawa economic discourse away from a theory of political hierarchy to an intellectual encouragement of private initiative and individual self-interest’.11 But the most serious attempt to recognise Scottish specificity within the Meiji Enlightenment has been Albert M. Craig’s Civilization and Enlightenment (2009), and its description of some of the Enlightenment texts impacting Fukuzawa in particular. Distancing himself from sonnō jōi, fundamentalist emperorism, and other movements he saw as backward or factional, the early and ­ultra-liberal Fukuzawa was the most widely read conduit of ‘western’ thought in the Restoration and early Meiji period.12 Sometimes seen as an opportunist (and for Harootunian, a ‘publicist and gadfly’), Fukuzawa was nevertheless largely responsible for the popular domestication of many of the ideas that would become staples of Meiji modernity, including Political Economy, individualism, education as a measurable value, and universalist history.13 However opportunistic and magpie-like Fukuzawa was, he was central to Meiji elites’ conception of modernity, and most of his early thinking derives in some form from the Scottish Enlightenment, not least via an 1849 volume of the Educational Course series of guides by the Edinburgh publisher Chambers, a book that turns out to be an important repository of Scoto-British ideas.14 Some of this textbook, Political Economy for Use in Schools and for Private Instruction, especially the first section on ‘social economy’, was rendered by Fukuzawa in 1867 as a gaihen or supplement to his Seiyō jijō/Conditions in the West, a major source for Meiji modernity with a circulation of hundreds of thousands.15 Craig long ago pointed out the authorship of John Hill Burton – as it happens uncredited in the book itself – though in Civilization and Enlightenment he still sees the ­Chambers guide as hack work from Burton’s ‘churning’ phase, although Burton was already known for his 1846 biography of David Hume (and later he would become Historiographer Royal).16 Fukuzawa picked up Political Economy during a six-week stay in England in 1862, along with a Chambers Encyclopaedia and commentaries on Blackstone.17 These other two books are also important parts of the ­picture of Meiji liberalism; the encyclopaedic desires of Seiyō jijō have much in common with Edinburgh-influenced empiricist concerns about collecting

The Scottish Enlightenment  45 and arranging knowledge, and feed into bunmei kaikamono, tracts on comparative civilization hugely influential from the late ’70s, including Fukuzawa’s own Bunmeiron no gairyaku/Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875).18 Along with Nishi Amane’s Hyakugaku renkan/ Links of All Sciences (1870), the encyclopaedic tendency in the Meiji Enlightenment joins a longer empiricist thread reaching back through the ­Edinburgh-published Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–), and wanting to negotiate advance in the world by configuring the world as a collection of objects of knowledge.19 Burton’s Political Economy appears to Fukuzawa not only as a ­repository of knowledge, but also as a guide to escaping b ­ ackwardness – also, of course, exactly the imperative of Enlightenment Scotland.20 Largely a digest of Adam Smith, Burton’s book channels Scottish Enlightenment methodology, deriving general principles from masses of data, and describing how Political Economy in particular, since it is empirically guided, ‘is considered rather a science than an art’. 21 Into this digest, though, Burton mixes a deal of Lockean ‘property fundamentalism’, as had the forces behind the opium trade (Phillipson’s ‘post-­republican’ phase of ­Enlightenment) – and he stresses that our duty towards the natural rules of the economy is to ‘know and obey them’. 22 Fukuzawa absorbs this Lockean understanding of the economy as nature and passes it on to Meiji civilization, or as Craig elsewhere renders Seiyō jijō: “… Since the purpose of economics is to explain natural laws ­(tennen no teisoku) that arise spontaneously in the world, the explanation of its principles is… like making clear the relation of geology to descriptive physical geography or of pathology to medicine.” P ­ rivate property is also a condition of nature… It… “is a characteristic which all living things possess naturally (tennen ni)… In the case of human property there are manifold conditions and complications. But there are none that do not stem from nature”.23 Nevertheless, Craig probably underplays the persistence of Locke in ­Burton, and so the importance of British origin myths in the Meiji Enlightenment. Craig sees Locke and Newton as part of the liberal inheritance, but not so much as part of a long empiricist campaign for the sovereignty of the economy.24 He does accept, though, that Burton transmits the standard Whig ban on revolutionary rupture while seeing 1688 as an exception and a return, which is to say that Burton tries to account for the naturalness of British authority. Burton [w]as sufficiently flexible to make exceptions for the Glorious ­ evolution of 1688 and the American Revolution. In the Glorious R Revolution, James II was at fault since he had “violated the laws of the country” and disrupted British institutions…25

46  Britishing as Modernisation But another couple of observations on this passage might bring us back more firmly to Fukuzawa’s British foundations. Firstly, although Craig probably uses ‘flexible’ to suggest a hint of pragmatism (or perhaps double standards), in British constitutional commentary this term has a more pointed ­meaning – the flexible signals the resistance of any codification that would detach authority from its claims to nature.26 In which sense, Meiji Enlightenment really was a making-flexible. Secondly and relatedly, the statement that King James ‘disrupted British institutions’ misses the way that before 1688–1707 there had been few British institutions, at least in the sense of parliamentary, bureaucratic, and cultural structures. What this implies is precisely the Whig acceptance of the British origin myth that sees the 1688 state as something not created by an action, or, if it is the result of an action, as the result of an action to end all actions, setting an ‘anterior’ form to which a people are retrospectively adjusted. The Meiji Enlightenment can be read as just such a search for a people to fit an anterior form, a form that seems to have naturally evolved rather than to have been imposed. The association of the British form of development with nature depends on this temporal manipulation. Moreover the Meiji Enlightenment, like the Scottish Enlightenment, would come to see this natural historiography as empirically demonstrable; since it is based in nature, in some sense it can be measured. Craig affirms that this historiography is anchored in property-creation, and thus sees that it is ultimately numerical, and he connects a faith in a natural order of money back to Locke, and thus ultimately to British origin myths – ‘[h]ere in a Japanese context is the “moving hand” of Adam Smith. Here is a bold statement of the eighteenth century Lockian idea of a natural social order…’. 27 To this we might add that Burton moreover explains the movement of money in a Newtonian imagery taken up by Adam Smith, ‘the “Newton of commercial society”’, for example in The Wealth of Nations – money obeys gravitational laws and finds its level ‘as naturally as water flows downwards’ – so that for Fukuzawa coming into worldly science is part of the same process as coming into the field of Political Economy. 28 Equally natural for Burton, in a tone that might have been taken from James Matheson just over a decade before, is the dispensation that ‘mankind should exchange the commodities of one place [for] those of another’, a Smithian insistence on exchange as the animating force of improvement, and one that after Fukuzawa would help ease the increasing centralisation of traders, merchants, and sararīman/ salaried workers. 29 Since a nation’s wealth depends on the extension of its merchant classes (and since, Burton insists, even ­middlemen add value), Fukuzawa takes on a profoundly British understanding of the modern nation’s dependence on an aspirational middle class, and the centrality of this middle class to a national culture.30 This understanding of a British nature indeed was corroborated by another of Fukuzawa’s acquisitions along with Political Economy, one

The Scottish Enlightenment  47 mentioned by Craig but not gone into, the 1858 account of the Whig ­constitutionalist William Blackstone by the Glasgow academic Robert Malcolm Kerr.31 Kerr’s guide opens with almost exactly the same Newtonian imagery of g­ ravity, describing how legal authority can be compared to [t]he laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations [… W]hen the Supreme Being formed the universe, and created matter out of nothing, he… established certain laws of motion, to which all moveable bodies must conform… [This is] the Law of Nature. For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with free-will to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that free-will is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.32 Like Burton, Kerr ascribes the ultimate authority of laws to ‘God and nature’, the two possible renderings of ten that had to be elided to make ­empiricism and neo-Confucianism work together in Restoration ­Japan.33 Fukuzawa’s conception of nature as heaven can then open up, after the examples of Burton and Kerr, to an empiricism of nature, to individual ownership of heaven-given resources, and even to Lockean self-­ ownership – ‘[m]an is born free. The right to freedom and ­independence which he receives from heaven cannot be bought or sold’.34 Fukuzawa also affirms that the labour of the self-owning person is legitimate when ‘directed to some end’, which is to say property (in Burton, defined as things that would not exist without exertion); so the labour theory of value can become foundational in the new Meiji regime – ‘[t]he only way in which man can add anything to the spontaneous gifts of nature is by labour, and therefore labour is the source of value’. 35 For Fukuzawa after Burton, the responsible modern individual stands before and possesses the body in order to exchange its labour and encourage the natural progress of freedom: [w]hile God has given man the gift of life, he has also given him the capacity to support that life, provided he duly employs the means. This capacity for exertion, however, would be useless without the liberty to use it. Accordingly, every human being, of whatever colour or country, has, by a law of nature, the property of his own person. He belongs to himself.36 In these models then, legitimate (property-creating) labour becomes a condition of Japan’s techno-moral success, and, as in Smith, a general

48  Britishing as Modernisation principle of the progress of the country, which moves, as Burton says, directly repeating Enlightenment historiography, ‘from a barbarous to a civilized state’.37 Fukuzawa correspondingly transmits the Scottish Enlightenment staple of staged historiography, a vision of universal progress that was now globally influential but that had origins in the context of Scotland’s need to escape its own barbarism after British union. Especially after the British techno-moral show of strength in China, the same anxiety over barbarism inhered for the liberals of the Meiji Enlightenment, and to this anxiety Fukuzawa adds the ‘staged’ idea that that East Asians are hankai, or ‘half-civilized’.38 A hankai civilization accepts that commercial society is ahead, putting Restoration Japan into the mise en scène of British modernity.39 This idea of the Japanese hankai was highly influential, and by the time of Bunmeiron no gairyaku, staged historiography had been well established.40 What this suggests is that a historiography arising from quite local Scottish anxieties came to lead Meiji Japan’s most influential writer towards an insistence that Japan’s future be defined in British terms. Meiji Enlightenment intellectuals generally would promote a vision of historical evolution towards commercial society – and a loathing of ‘unnatural’ Jacobin change, a Whig staple that continued in Fukuzawa’s followers through the ’70s.41 And conversely, an inability to grasp the labour theory of value would mean an inability to ascend to commercial society, and so a condition of being stuck in barbarism – the kind of ignorance, Burton says, still found in Scottish Highlanders and American Indians.42 Such people still exist in small clans or nations, whereas developed countries naturally globalise: this is the key to British imperial success, it is how the British union was formed, ‘by choice and mutual agreement’, and it will be the basis of the call to the global for Japan.43 In fact Enlightenment depictions at least as far back as the sermon of 1755 by William Robertson (author of The History of America), taking in Hugh Blair’s 1763 commentary on Ossian, and all the way to Walter Scott’s ‘The Two Drovers’ (1827), had lumped together American Indians and Scottish Highlanders as examples of failure to reach Fukuzawa’s hankai stage.44 Craig notes this bracketing of Highlanders and Indians, as well as recognising Robertson’s importance to Fukuzawa, but he passes lightly over Fukuzawa’s dropping of Highlanders from his rendition of Burton, saying that Fukuzawa ‘cut dull, irrelevant, or redundant materials’.45 Highlanders, though, had shown that this universalist development was domestically motivated, that this historiography was at heart a national issue. Fukuzawa put this Scoto-British developmental universalism onto a huge stage, and he gave it a home in the modernising, mostly Anglophile, education that grew very rapidly in the ’70s, most obviously through his own Keio University. Moreover after Burton, Fukuzawa could conceive of education itself in labour value terms: education may be an abstract ethical good, but it is also an arithmetic good, since it has the ability to

The Scottish Enlightenment  49 increase the value of labour.46 Education proliferates l­egitimate inequalities between individuals and thereby overcomes despotic s­ tasis.47 In this proliferation of legitimate inequalities through education is the Smithian commitment to development, now a general good for Japan, and therefore a kind of nationalism (kokuminshugi), a nationalism that a few commentators have noted, though without relating it seriously to the Scottish national self-development from which it derived.48 Fukuzawa’s Gakumon no susume (1872–76), a pedagogically-oriented text whose readership may have gone into the millions, stresses the ability of education to mobilise inequalities in this way, to allow castes to be sloughed off, opportunities to be individuated, and the Japanese to avoid becoming, like the people of ­India, ‘slaves of the British government’.49 The progressive power of education, then, is in proving the equal chances of individuals as individuals. Thus the famous claim that opens Gakumon no susume: [i]t is said that heaven does not create one man above or below ­another man. This means that when men are born from heaven they all are equal. There is no innate distinction between high and low. It means that men can freely and independently use the myriad things of the world to satisfy their daily needs through the labours of their own bodies and minds, and that, as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others, may pass their days in happiness.50 If all peoples are equal, then – the opening for a ‘worldly’ Japan – it is only because peoples are the sums of their individuals. This important idea of progressive nations as the sum of their individuals would be associated during the Meiji Enlightenment with John Stuart Mill, one of Japan’s most influential intellectual models of the ’70s, and a focus of Meiroku Zasshi. 51 An important journal produced by fellow-­travellers along with Fukuzawa, Meiroku Zasshi would spread the national developmental effort towards individualism throughout the Meiji establishment, where it would be passed out in educational, policy, and cultural realms.

Meiroku Zasshi The Meirokusha group, founded in Meiji (mei) six (roku), or 1873, and including former pupils of Sakuma, is perhaps the best-known and most influential post-Restoration conduit of British liberal ideas. The p ­ osition of first president was turned down by Fukuzawa, and went instead to Mori Arinori, a Satsuma ryūgakusei from the Godai-Glover project and an educationalist who had studied at University College London.52 Translator of their journal William R. Braisted describes the group as the standout example of ‘keimō gakusha [Enlightenment scholars]… who illuminate the darkness’ (and in doing so gestures towards a thematics

50  Britishing as Modernisation of light as progress, to which I will return).53 The very organisation of Meriokusha strikingly recalls that of the urban Scottish improving groups which grew from the mid-eighteenth century, as a loose collection of corresponding progressive public intellectuals talking through questions of current theoretical, practical, and policy importance, and animated by a national sense of negotiating provincialism.54 (And it is worth noting here that despite Braisted’s (1976) translation of Eikoku as England, Meirokusha were aware of Britain’s multinational status, and Fukuzawa himself explained this in a discussion of Britain’s parliament.55) In Meiroku Zasshi they take on an extraordinarily diverse range of subjects, including government spending, comparative religion, religious freedom, exchangeability of paper money, agriculture, prostitution and concubinage, equal rights for women, taxation, brick construction, military protocol, shipping, epistemology, foreigners’ domestic travel, and modern interpretations of folk stories, such as possession by foxes (which are still puzzling but may now ‘all be attributed to a type of mental derangement’).56 They largely celebrate urbanisation, the ‘polishing’ of manners, and the other characteristics of what Edinburgh literati had understood as the highest stage of staged ­history – ­commercial society. Contributors to Meiroku Zasshi are willing to disagree, and broadly filter their understanding of freedom of debate through J.S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859), a book whose influence can be felt throughout the journal’s 43-issue run, and whose stresses on inductive reason and individual freedom themselves channelled Scottish Enlightenment ideas.57 Typically empiricist and tending towards the social sciences, they show a staunch commitment to overcoming fixed views, which they see as prejudices, and are deeply invested in a wider commitment to the effective and to jitsugaku or practical learning.58 Indeed these collaborators often operate much like Scottish-style educational generalists, thinkers avoiding overspecialisation to address problems of wide public import – an ideal with roots in the Enlightenment but at exactly this point embattled in Scotland’s own universities, in debates over the 1872 Education Act.59 In Scottish generalism, specialisms are secondary, and technical subjects begin from ­philosophical first ­principles – and this is also what was promoted by Meiroku Zasshi contributor Nishi Amane.60 It was Nishi who adopted the term (today’s term) for philosophy, tetsugaku, which he used occasionally in Hyakugaku r­ enkan, then consistently in Hyakuichi shinron (1874), after which it spread to, amongst other places, Tokyo Imperial University, through fellow Meirokusha member Katō Hiroyuki.61 Tetsugaku acts as a meta-­ science or connecting discipline; it becomes a generalist ground from which to discuss numerous subjects.62 And building on a generalist ethic, Meiroku Zasshi more widely, like much of the writing of the Scottish Enlightenment, works to build broad developmental narratives around themes by moving from evidence gathered by an ­empiricist viewer through

The Scottish Enlightenment  51 inductive reason to general principles. The series ‘Seigaku Ippan’/‘Outline of Western Studies’, for example, by Mill translator Nakamura Masanao, takes a broad sweep from antiquity to modern times in the mode of the bunmeiron/discussion of civilization, which considers history as a global process of ‘opening’, and uses empiricist knowledge-gathering to support the staged historiography accepted by Fukuzawa. Again the drive upward to commercial society is the legitimate basis of the social; for Nakamura, Western countries [ōshū no subete] have [a]cquired liberty and follow their personal desires [chūshin no konomu tokoro ni shitagau] since they have abandoned ­useless customs that bind human freedoms. No longer silenced by useless restrictions, individuals may expand their will [kokorozashi ­(Braisted – ‘aspirations’)] and plan for public benefits.63 Similarly in a series from Issue Nine, Mitsukuri Rinshō suggests an ‘outline of the history of liberty from antiquity to the present’ that describes historical advance as the advance of the liberty of individual choice: [t]he translation of “liberty” is jiyū [despite which, Mitsukuri rests on the Latin derivation riboruchā / libertas]. This means to accord to people the free exercise of their rights [kenri] without being bound by others. To the liberty of the people may be traced the fact that the countries of Europe and America all today have excellent [zenbi o tsukushite (Braisted – ‘enjoy perfection in’)] government, and their national power is expanding.64 But of course ‘the countries of Europe and America’ are not all equal in this show of development – ‘[o]utside of Britain, however, few E ­ uropean peoples possess true liberty, since their advocates of liberty have generally been too radical to complete their designs’.65 For Mitsukuri, continental European versions of liberty are a poor model for Japan since they do not have enough developmental embedding – they are not ­organic – ­leading him to endorse the Whig cautionary tale of the French Revolution, which he contrasts with the constant British movement towards anti-despotism.66 In Issue Thirty-Seven Nishimura Shigeki confirms that Britain’s natural historical unfolding makes it the real model of jiyū/freedom, its national law [kuni no hōritsu] comparing unfavourably to the failures of political freedom in Russia (which has no Enlightenment so no freedom) and Prussia (which has Enlightenment without freedom).67 Faith in this naturally unfolding historical path is part of the reason for Meirokusha’s conviction that Japan is not yet ready for an elected assembly, and must go through the proper historical stages.68 Meirokusha perceives this as an unfolding of individual consciousness, or consciousness of individualism, something with much in

52  Britishing as Modernisation common  with  Kant’s Aufklärung/Enlightenment, and individuals’ unfolding as the unfolding of history – though this Aufklärung itself has some debt to the Scottish Enlightenment desire for ‘historicalness’.69 This unfolding, of course, is also an unfolding of class aspiration, since its representative government depends on a property-owning middle class; if Japan is to modernise it will do so as a class society, and class aspiration (as described by John Millar, for example) will drive its taste and refinements in arts.70 Historical development, moreover, is also linguistic development. Linguistic standardisation stabilises exchange (it affirms a social currency), so that, after the manner of the Scottish Enlightenment, it allows development to take place. The language of exchange in the British world as world is English, and in turning to concentrate on improvement in English, Meirokusha echoes the ambitious Scottish Enlightenment provincials who had aimed to codify rhetorical improvement to ‘democratise’ individual possibilities for improvement.71 English is advanced because it is the language of commerce, but is also, because of the developmental promise, the legitimate language of arts and literature. Some Meirokusha members wonder whether Chinese and Japanese languages can express liberty at all, and the journal floats numerous proposals for either simplifying ­Japanese or making English official. In the first issue, dedicated to language reform, Nishi hypothesises a complete acceptance of Roman (English) script to boost children’s educational development and open up the intellectual riches of Europe.72 And again the status of hankai, or half-developed, the condition Fukuzawa had outlined, is measured ultimately by progressive, property-­ creating, ­labour. In Issue Three Mori Arinori confirms that Japan’s partial achievement of civilization is down to its growing ability to see [t]he products of labour as private property, to see hard work as a source of happiness, and the specialisation of work tasks [waza o kasu; that is, the division of labour] as the basis of a ‘livelihood’, but not yet [being] able to fit this understanding to life experience, as a condition of enlightenment [kaika].73 When the rationalisation of production is accepted into everyday life, Mori says, ‘the virtues of social intercourse will spread through the liberal expansion of commerce, products will be perfected as machines are refined, and people will appreciate the true value of civilization’.74 The governmental implications of hankai status are described by Nishi, who argues in 1875 that in a half-enlightened country (hankaika no kuni), a popular assembly would be a historiographical contradiction (and might, as Mori adds, be packed with state appointments).75 Only a generalised development of the individual consciousness prevents this, but this must be a gradual and evolutionary process.76 This commitment to evolutionary development also helps explain the popularity of

The Scottish Enlightenment  53 the English advocate of Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, for M ­ ichio Nagai ‘the most widely read and possibly the most influential social and political thinker in Japan during the 1880s’, and an arbiter of civilizational ambition who followed the peak of influence of Scottish Enlightenment historiography.77 To his Japanese followers, Spencer showed the way from primitive religion, suggested rational means to catch up politically and culturally on the terms of the superpower, and tempered native impatience for parliamentary democracy.78 Nevertheless, proponents of an ‘evolutionary’ political thinking got more than they bargained for when Mori, as US Ambassador, approached Spencer for his opinion on a Japanese constitution, to hear that the foundation of a representative government would take six to eight generations to establish.79 But the model that matters most to Meiroku Zasshi is that of Mill.80 A proper account of Mill’s absorption and modification of Scottish Enlightenment traditions is beyond the scope of this study, but it is worth noting that the intellectual formation of this Anglo-Scottish liberal begins with extensive homeschooling by his father, a graduate of Edinburgh a decade or so before William Jardine and a supporter of Jardine Matheson, and someone who had often called for an expansion of Newtonian dynamism to East Asia.81 J.S. Mill’s On Liberty was translated in 1872 by Nakamura Masanao, also an educational pioneer and a collaborator with Henry Faulds, Scottish physician and pioneer of the science of fingerprinting, who was himself active in medical and educational reform in Japan from the mid ’70s to the early ’80s. Since leaving for ryūgaku in 1866, Nakamura had been deeply interested in the question of how a small nation could have defeated China – a strength he, like Fukuzawa and Burton, put down to prudent and conscientious workers gradually showing themselves worthy of a learned representative parliament.82 Soon after in Meiroku Zasshi Nakamura explains why Victorian Britain is a fitting model for Meiji development, and how, as in Mill, Britain’s success derives from the individual development of its citizens: British people of today clearly surpass their predecessors in the depth of their knowledge generally and in the just enlightenment with which they discuss legislative matters. Theories such as those of Hume have delineated the main principles of economics and have been adopted by British public opinion.83 On Liberty can be heard throughout Meiroku Zasshi, as can another Nakamura translation of another 1859 bestseller, Self-Help – by another former student of Edinburgh medical school, the improver and moralist Samuel Smiles. Nakamura’s translation of Self-Help as Saikoku risshi hen (1871) is sometimes described as a free rendition, though (unlike Fukuzawa on Burton) it follows Smiles quite closely, albeit introducing slightly different stresses – specifically in splitting chapters into

54  Britishing as Modernisation sub-chapter fragments whose titles suggest a special British a­ bility to work and improve, where Smiles had drawn his examples very largely from the Enlightenment and industrial revolution in Britain but had not underscored their national specificity (Part One of Chapter  8, for example, ‘The spirit of British people [Eikoku no jinmin] to help themselves’).84 Saikoku risshi hen circulated in over 200,000 copies, and may have been read in some form by a tenth to a fifth of Japan’s literate population.85 For Earl Kinmonth its reach was ‘almost beyond ­imagination’ – it ‘had a greater influence over young men in the early [1870s] than any other book of the day’.86 Or for Mitsuo Nakamura, it ‘was comparable with [Fukuzawa’s] Gakumon no Susume… [in] the extent and profundity of its influence’; it would be used as base text for lectures to Emperor Meiji, and circulated as an ethics textbook by the Ministry of Education.87 Again the national context of Smiles’s work has largely been lost in commentary on Nakamura (Kimonth describes ‘the English author, Samuel Smiles’), for which Smiles’s aspirational framework belongs to a fairly rootless ‘British industry’, even though Nakamura’s effort, like most discussions of modernising Japan, is seen as a struggle of the Japanese ­national – begging the question of why one of these entries into modernity is national, but the other is not.88 In fact Smiles was as much a Scoto-British promoter of ‘practical generalism’ as someone like Henry Dyer. Smiles sees engineers as brokers of scientific rationality for self-betterment, which means, as in Mill, ­national betterment, specifically drawing from a model of national betterment within British union.89 Amongst Smiles’s greatest heroes are James Watt and Newton (a model of ‘diligent application and perseverance’), figures who in Saikoku risshi hen echo the ethical lesson on labour value picked up in Burton by Fukuzawa.90 (And in Seiyō jijō Fukuzawa had adapted a short biography of James Watt and one of George Stephenson, seen as generalists with a special interest in natural philosophy, and exemplars of Britain’s techno-moral mission.91) Smiles crucially sets out by paraphrasing Mill to assert, as would Nakamura, that the development of the nation is the development of the nation’s individuals, and moreover that the developmental level of the nation of individuals can be described using exactly the Newtonian image of water we have seen used for money in Burton: [t]he Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflex of the individuals composing it. The Government that is ahead of the people will inevitably be dragged down to their level, as the Government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up. In the order of nature, the collective character of a nation will as surely find its befitting results in its law and government, as water finds its own level.92

The Scottish Enlightenment  55 Smiles moreover rightly numbers amongst Newton’s major achievements the management of currency that had constituted Locke’s raison d’état for the 1688 regime change – Newton was a technician of money who ‘proved himself an efficient Master of the Mint; the new coinage of 1694 [the 1696 Recoinage that had been so crucial to Locke] having been carried on under his immediate personal superintendence’.93 Meiroku Zasshi correspondingly worries about how the unfolding of freedom requires fiscal discipline, and frequently returns to the link between liberty and Japanese paper money.94 Smiles also affirms for Nakamura and Meirokusha a belief in property-­ creating labour as the backbone of national development, and the conviction that labour is behind British success – ‘[t]he spirit of self-help, as exhibited in the energetic action of individuals, has in all times been a marked feature in the English character, and furnishes the true measure of our power as a nation’.95 And more concisely, ‘[n]ational progress is a sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness’.96 As with the ­Scoto-British axioms transmitted to Fukuzawa by Burton, labour indexes social mobility, but labour’s value can be raised by education – and indeed Nakamura’s term for ‘industry’, benkyō, would become the normal Japanese term for ‘study’. And again for Smiles as for Burton just before, British global dominance can be explained by the understanding that value arises from labour, which has ‘in all times been a marked feature in the English character, and furnishes the true measure of our power as a nation’.97 The possibilities for self-improvement that this understanding opens up are so striking that they would, for example, surprise French visitors to London.98 The consequences of this understanding of value creation suggest for Nakamura, as well as for public liberals like Tokutomi Sohō, as Kinmonth glosses it, that ‘[t]he very spiritual core of the Japanese people was to be reworked along ­British lines’.99 Nevertheless, this faith in a liberal fruition of the ‘national’ individual left Meirokusha with the problem of bureaucracy, of how nature, government as a dynamism of property, could justify unlimited administration.100 Fukuzawa and Nakamura were cautious about curbing the advancement of ‘leading’ individuals, since, after Mill, it was the drive to individual independence that kept nations independent generally, but this also suggested a mass individual competition for positions of administrative power.101 The dangers of a rapid tracking of liberal organicism are described in Bunmeiron no gairyaku, which worries that the people may be a creation of the state rather than the other way round, so ‘in Japan there is only a government, and as yet no people’.102 Within Meirokusha, arguments over intellectuals’ complicity with bureaucracy and censorship would spill over into public accusations. As Minister of Education, Mori strengthened government control over schools and introduced certification of textbooks, and Nishi would come to be seen by

56  Britishing as Modernisation many as personifying the career of the Meiji philosopher-­bureaucrat.103 Something like this problem is described in ‘Japan’s first modern novel’, Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud) (1887), in which a samurai son with liberal and self-improving desires gets caught up in the scramble for ranks in the new bureaucracy.104 With an understanding of Lockean liberalism, the growth of bureaucracy is not surprising, since the equation of property rights and nature means that protecting developmental principles can command the limitless attention of the state. By the late ’70s there were common complaints that ‘traditional’ forms were being swept away – though of course this idea of tradition must itself be a product of the liberal adjustment, and this helps explain the growth of what is sometimes called ‘Meiji Conservatism’ from the early ’80s. ‘Meiji Conservatism’ does not end liberal developmentality, but establishes liberal developmentality as a ground to oppose – and it is only from what I am describing as the modernist convulsions of the 1900s that this developmentality could be seriously bracketed. The last Meiroku Zasshi was published in November 1875. By the late ’70s, Fukuzawa had shifted towards claims for an immanent national spirit, and he would break with Anglophone ideas of nature by 1878.105 There was a government purge of ‘proponents of British-style party politics’ in 1881, and an ossification of some of the Anglophilia seen in Meirokusha into a kind of quasi-aristocratic mimesis that would provide an easy target for mid-’80s conservatives.106 After October ’81, Itō’s government reorganised the College of Historiography and ‘officialised’ history in a way that suggested a new traditionalism (leaving, Karatani Kōjin quotes of Nakamura Mitsuo, a ‘spiritual vacuum’ from the mid-’80s).107 Meirokusha was largely absorbed into Tokyo Gakushikaiin, taking on seven of the original members, including Nishi and Fukuzawa; its stress on an unfolding of individual consciousness was dropped, and in one possible reading, like that of W.G. Beasley, power blocs from before 1868 were left almost unchanged.108 But the model of personal ­improving ambition had been established by the force of the tenkō or conversion to British liberal beliefs in the early ’70s. In the next decade, the Enlightenment authority that had filtered through native and ­Japanese neo-Confucian needs may have been opposed, but it still worked, and conservatives of the ’80s and ’90s would largely have to define themselves in its terms. Anglophile individualism found proofs in the modern aspirational self proliferating in the late 1880s and 1890s, affirmed by liberal movements such as the Jiyū Minken/Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, as well as by emboldened Protestant campaigners.109 This self is ambitious for authentic expression of an ‘inner’ core; and its Enlightenment basis of personal improvement informs an ideal kind of Meiji career, political, educational, or cultural, as well as late Meiji literary naturalism, often concerned with an inner self with much in

The Scottish Enlightenment  57 common with Meiroku Zasshi’s idea of a personal unfolding. Before this though, a degree of ambivalence could be read in developmental stories of the Meiji Restoration from the centre of Enlightenment itself, making this development seem less singular than Meirokusha would have had it.

Coda: Robert Louis Stevenson and Yoshida Sho¯in Except among Scot Lit completists and nineteenth-century Japanese ­specialists, Robert Louis Stevenson’s short tribute sketch to Yoshida Shōin has been largely forgotten. Published in the Cornhill magazine in March 1880, then collected in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), a volume including portraits of liberal heroes like Robert Burns and Henry David Thoreau, it doesn’t get a mention in the ­Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, and although a formative Pacific story, it has rarely been seriously considered next to Stevenson’s later Pacific stories, sometimes understood as a stepping point for literary modernism.110 Even within the original collection, the biographical sketch of Yoshida was seen by reviewers as at the time ‘the least strikingly satisfactory’ chapter in the book.111 However, Stevenson’s North Pacific, like the South Pacific of ‘The Ebb-Tide’ (1894), depicts a developmental anxiety that both grasps and modifies the Enlightenment openness seen in Meiroku Zasshi.112 It brings the Meiji Enlightenment back to Edinburgh, and reads Yoshida’s commitment to action back into that city’s commitment to self-improvement, introducing an element of ambivalence to it that hadn’t been there in Meiroku Zasshi’s sources. The Yoshida piece arises, moreover, from an environment directly involved with exporting literal enlightenment, since the business which took the Stevenson family into this new Pacific market, and led to the meeting between Robert Louis and Yoshida’s student Masaki Taizō, was lighthouse construction. If the export of light is to be taken seriously as producing a British form of subjectivity, as I will suggest it should in Chapter 5, the family role of this great ­chronicler of ambivalence is hard to overlook.113 In fact, Familiar Studies of Men and Books was dedicated to Stevenson’s lighthouse engineer father Robert, a figure ­already known to many in the new Meiji establishment. The Yoshida essay, then, is worth a mention for the way its Enlightenment ­historiography – and Enlightenment light – rebounded in a more ambivalent form, pointing towards the complications of modernism. The question of coastal protection as nationally unifying, of course, the need that brings the Stevensons to Japan, goes back to the urgent calls for reform of coastal defence in the Mito School and Sakuma Shōzan, themselves having to react to British power in China.114 The specific demand for a regularised lighthouse system came from the British Foreign

58  Britishing as Modernisation Office – Article 11 of the 1866 Custom Duty Treaty required their standardisation, for which the Stevenson family was contracted.115 The Stevensons recommended Richard Brunton, who was dispatched in 1868 from Edinburgh to Japan, where he would build 26 lighthouses, as well as run various infrastructure projects, including the Tokyo-­Yokohama telegraph lines and Yokohama drain system, becoming a public e­ ducationalist-engineer comparable to Henry Dyer. The lighthouse business linked the Stevensons to Meiji progressives, and their work was on the itinerary of the major fact-finding Iwakura Mission in 1871–73 (Itō its deputy ambassador), whose diarist, Kido Takayoshi, describes how on 16 October 1872 ‘as guests of the Commissioners for Northern Lights, [the Iwakura Mission] steamed 40 miles on the ship Pharos to the Bell Rock lighthouse designed by the firm of the Stevenson brothers, David and Thomas’.116 The family was also of interest to ­Masaki Taizō, who in 1878 was acting as an academic scout (probably for Tokyo Kaisei Gakkō, an institution then merging into the former ­Tokyo University, and with Meirokusha connections) in what he regarded as a world centre of Enlightenment, Edinburgh New Town – less than a mile, as it happens, from the home of John Hill Burton, and an icon of rational planning since the 1760s. But if Nakamura’s Mill suggests a linear progress originating in Enlightenment, by the 1880s Stevenson’s Yoshida is double-edged. He takes on urban Scottish developmental ambitions, but crucially, he never quite escapes the status of the savage Highlander. This frustrates the drive to escape barbarism that I have suggested becomes a global imperial story of development from its origins in the local ambitions of Scottish literati ranging from William Robertson to Walter Scott, S­ tevenson’s lifelong literary model. In his autobiographical Records of a Family of Engineers (1896), Stevenson would describe how his own family (who ‘play[ed] the character parts in [Scott’s] Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction’) began their enlightening ascent in Scotland’s own hinterlands, which he likens to the Pacific: [f]orty-two [years ago], when Robert Stevenson became conjoined… in these excursions, the barbarism was deep, the people sunk in superstition, the circumstances of their life perhaps unique in history. Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam or the Bay of Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called to take up and to return experienced seamen. On the outlying islands the clergy lived isolated, thinking other thoughts, dwelling in a different country from their parishioners, like missionaries in the South Seas.117 Moreover if Stevenson’s family are like characters from Scott’s historical novels, Stevenson’s Yoshida is an ‘antiquarian’, setting out as rōnin (samurai without master) to find a ‘new history’ to be better melded to modernity. This Yoshida has to revisit pre-modern times to negotiate

The Scottish Enlightenment  59 modernity, and has to go ‘to foreign, outlandish parts, and bring back the knowledge that [is] to strengthen and renew Japan’.118 This, for Stevenson, made Yoshida’s mission a paradoxical one – overcoming British ethics while determined to give his life in order to mark the need for a British turn. So [t]he patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may have been said to have defeated itself: he had it upon him to keep out these all-­ powerful foreigners, whom it is now one of his chief merits to have helped introduce.119 Yoshida’s modernising impulse, then, involves a deep sense of personal doubleness, comparable to the doubleness of Scott’s groundbreaking historical novel Waverley (1814), which ruefully sets the 1745 Jacobite rebellion against the necessary British modernisation to follow. Only six years after his Yoshida sketch, Stevenson would create the most famous doubled character in literary history, in ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ (1886), a story nominally set in a gentlemanly London, but easily recognisable as being ghosted onto the back streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town.120 In ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ the route upwards from the local and barbarous into the civilization of commercial society will no longer stay in place; the barbarous irrupts into gentlemanly life in a kind of historiographical revenge. And this is the duality Stevenson projects onto Yoshida, and onto the project of Japanese modernity: there is much about him that recalls Meirokusha’s idea of public duty – he is a patriot, a schoolmaster, an educationalist, and a reformer – but he is also a tyrant, a violent combatant, and an eccentric esotericist.121 He is ­attached to his sword, which his students, including Itō, make a point of discarding in favour of remote weapons (the ­‘disarming’ ban on wearing swords enacted in 1876) – weapons that, like lighthouses, demonstrate control over space, the guns, and then battleships, sourced through Scoto-British traders like Thomas Glover.122 Stevenson’s Yoshida is accomplished, and [v]ery learned in Chinese letters, or, as we might say, in the ­classics… [And yet] his personal habits were even sluttish. His clothes were wretched; when he ate or washed he wiped his hands upon his sleeves; and as his hair was not tied more than once in the two months, it was often disgusting to behold.123 Moreover in Stevenson’s Yoshida story, as in ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, the ­possibility of a movement upward from barbarism depends on the Scottish Enlightenment’s, and Meiroku Zasshi’s, ground of linguistic improvement: Yoshida’s expression is brutish and his handwriting is ‘exceptionally villainous’, but he is able to travel because of a network of poets, and ‘support himself… by his proficiency in verse’.124 There are hints

60  Britishing as Modernisation that, like Meirokusha liberals, he believes in enlightenment unfolding individual consciousness – ‘[o]ne thing naturally leads to another in an awakened mind’, and ‘so long as he had a single Japanese to enlighten… he could still feel that he was working for J­ apan’ – and yet a sense of brutality and deathliness hangs around him.125 (And if there is a disjunction between the Yoshida of Aufklärung and the Yoshida of sonnō, there is also, as Alistair Swale interestingly describes, a comparable movement between Tokutomi’s liberal biography of Yoshida in 1893 and a more conservative rewriting of 1908 – though Yoshida would really become heroic through a 1930s revisionism.126) For Stevenson this ambivalence haunts the organicism we have seen transmitted to Meiroku Zasshi – where M ­ itsukuri Rinshō and others had carefully rejected the claims of the French Revolution as a destruction of a natural unfolding, Yoshida is given no such evolutionary certainty, and in fact embodies much that is like the French Revolutionary – restorationists are like Jacobins, the bakufu is an ancien régime, and the house arrest during which Yoshida relates his story to a thirteen-year-old Taizō is an attempt ‘to confine [Yoshida] in a bastille’.127 Indeed Yoshida’s struggle with the bakufu is now [t]he old story of a power upon its last legs – learning to the bastille, and courage to the block; when there are none left but sheep and donkeys [the bakufu], the State will have been saved. But a man must not think to cope with a Revolution; nor a minister, however fortified with guards, to hold in check a country that had given birth to such men as Yoshida and his soldier-follower.128 Stevenson’s Yoshida, that is, undermines developmental ­universalism even as he seeks it; and this Yoshida points towards the ambivalence ­Japanese modernism will feel in relation to British development. In some end-of-Meiji forms, such as those of Natsume Sōseki, such an anxiety would resemble early British modernist responses to the fall of imperial ­historiography, such as those of Joseph Conrad, for whom Stevenson was an important precursor. Natsume and others would attempt to write back to the developmental singularities that had survived through Meiji Conservatism – and I turn to some of these in the second part of this study, beginning with Natsume’s consideration of the end of Meiji in Kokoro, not just as the end of an era but also as a possible end of the reign of Scoto-British historiography.

Notes 1 G.E. Davie argues that a programme for Enlightenment can be dated from Francis Hutcheson’s 1735 call for a ‘liberal-minded patriotism which would operate within the framework of Union’ – George Elder Davie, ‘Hume,

The Scottish Enlightenment  61 Reid, and the Passion for Ideas’, in Davie, ed. Macdonald, A Passion for Ideas, 1–19: 5. 2 Cf. Peter Duus, ‘Whig History, Japanese Style: The Min’yūsha Historians and the Meiji Restoration’, Journal of Asian Studies 33(3), May 1974, 415–36. John Burrow describes this as an ‘attempt to come to terms with the civic-humanist antithesis between political liberty and the development of civilization’, Whigs and Liberals, 17. 3 Carmen Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 1964). 4 R.H. Havens, ‘Comte, Mill, and the Thought of Nishi Amane in Meiji ­Japan’, Journal of Asian Studies 27(2), Feb 1968, 217–28: 217, 224; moreover, ­Havens argues, since this is nineteenth century it is ‘not the Enlightenment’. 5 Mikiso Hane, ‘The Sources of English Liberal Concepts in Early Meiji ­Japan’, Monumenta Nipponica 24(3), 1969, 259–72. 6 Cf. Davie, ‘Hume, Reid, and the Passion for Ideas’, 3; Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Craig Beveridge and ­Ronald Turnbull, The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989); Murray G.H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997), 135–36. 7 Swale, The Meiji Restoration, 91–93; Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of ­Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 72. 8 Swale, The Meiji Restoration, 97–98; Swale, elsewhere in this book, in 2009, describes Meiji weapons procurement ‘from English subjects’, 44–45; cf. A ­ lbert M. Craig – ‘the dating of “Enlightenment” is not the i­ssue. ­Fukuzawa was not translating ‘“Enlightenment” … but “enlightened,” an a­ djective that had been used for decades as the name of a stage’ – C ­ ivilization and E ­ nlightenment, 174 n.21; a similar point is made in Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought, 81. 9 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 1989), 12. 10 Paul B. Trescott, ‘Scottish Political Economy Comes to the Far East’, ­History of Political Economy 21(3), 1989, 481–502. 11 Schad-Seifert, ‘Scottish Political Economy in Meiji Japan’, 122; cf. Schad-­ Seifert, ‘Constructing National Identities’, 53. 12 Cf. Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007 (1960)), 124–40; Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 113; Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 103. 13 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 14, 15–17; Schad-Seifert, ‘Scottish Political Economy in Meiji Japan’, 114; Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 325. 14 For example Schad-Seifert, ‘Scottish Political Economy in Meiji Japan’, 112–15. 15 ‘Seiyō jijō Gaihen’, in Fukuzawa Yukichi Zenshū, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1969–71), 387–481. On the circulation, Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 146. 16 Schad-Seifert, ‘Scottish Political Economy in Meiji Japan’, 113–15; Schad-Seifert also renders the original statement on individual equality – ‘[i]n the formation of laws for the general good, all men are to be regarded

62  Britishing as Modernisation as upon one level…’ – and recognises that the levelling force is property rights, 117; Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 60; Burton as a ‘hack writer’ is in Craig, ‘John Hill Burton and Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 226. Burton also wrote at least one more title in the Chambers Educational Course series, Emigration in its Practical Application to Individuals and Communities (The Emigrant’s Manual) (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1851). 17 Norio Tamaki, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901): The Finances of a ­Japanese Modernizer’, in ed. Hoare, Britain and Japan, 38–51: 38–39. G.E. Davie points out that Scottish textbooks were maintaining a central position in global literary markets at this point – ‘Berkeley, Hume, and the Central Problems of Scottish Philosophy’ (1965), in Davie, ed. Macdonald, A Passion for Ideas, 40–69: 59. 18 Cf. Harry Harootunian, ‘Late Tokugawa Culture and Thought’, in ed. ­Jansen, The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5, 168–258: 169; Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 3–16; 247–78; ­Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 90. As contemporary examples of bunmei kaikamono: Miyake Yonekichi, Nihon shigaku teiyo (A Manual for the Study of Japanese History) (Tokyo: ­ kichi, Nihon kaika shoshi (A Short His­Fukyūsha, 1886 (1884)); Taguchi U tory of Japanese Civilization) ­(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1981 (1877–82)). Taguchi is referred to as ‘the Japanese Adam Smith’ in eds. William de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 (1958)), 509. On encyclopaedism and Keiō, cf. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2010 (1875)), trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst as Outline of a Theory of Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), chapter 2, ‘Seiyō no bunka o mokuteki to suru koto’, 25–56/ ‘Western Civilization as our Goal’, 17–43; cf. Hane, ‘The Sources of English Liberal Concepts in Early Meiji Japan’, 262, 268; Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 104. 19 Cf. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (London: Penguin, 2004 (1739)), 75–116. On Scottish encyclopaedism and Britishness, cf. Michael Gardiner, ‘A Light to the World: Colonialism and British Devolution’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6(2), June 2004, 264–81. On Hyakugaku renkan, cf. Richard H. Minear, ‘Nishi Amane and the Reception of Western Law in Japan’, Monumenta Nipponica 28(2), Summer 1973, 151–75. The translation of Hyakugaku renkan as Links of All Sciences is from Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought, 92; on the use of English language throughout, 95. 20 Cf. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 111. 21 John Hill Burton (not credited), Political Economy for Use in Schools, and for Private Instruction (Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1849), 2, 49–50. Craig describes how Fukuzawa derives from Scottish thinking inductive/comparative methodology, the idea that all peoples are equal (see below), and the conviction that progress is linear. 22 Burton, Political Economy, 51. Craig’s description is of Burton favouring the Scottish Enlightenment against Locke, since there is no ‘pre-­social state of nature’, Civilization and Enlightenment 68 – but there are numerous similarities to the ­S econd Treatise of Government. In Schad-­ Seifert, ‘Constructing National Identities’, Seiyō jijō relies on Newton and Smith, 56.

The Scottish Enlightenment  63 23 Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 106 – insertion is Craig’s; cf. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 118. In the Zenshū Vol. 1 reference above this is ‘Seiyō jijō Gaihen’, 464. Craig notes that this section inserts into and summarises the original. 24 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 12 – though on the next page he says it was written ‘before the Glorious Restoration in which William of Orange overthrew James II’, 13. The Two Treatises were written throughout the 1680s, suggesting a longer political push. 25 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 77. 26 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 65–66, 81. 27 Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 112–13; cf. 145; cf. Albert Craig, ‘Science and Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan’, in ed. Marius Jansen, Changing ­Japanese Attitudes toward Modernisation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969 (1965)), 133–60. 28 Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 107. Craig moreover extends nature to the realms of behaviour and society – ‘human nature is a part of nature’, Civilization and Enlightenment, 63. On ‘gravitational’ forces on money in Adam Smith, cf. Gavin Kennedy, ‘Adam Smith’s Use of the “Gravitation” Metaphor’, Economic Thought 4(1), 2015, 67–79; Eric Schliesser, ‘Some Principles of Adam Smith’s “Newtonian” Methods in the Wealth of Nations’, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 23a, 2005, 35–77. The water metaphor is also inherited by ‘quantity theories’ of money, which are central to British liberal economics all the way to Thatcherism. On Smith as ‘the Newton of commercial society’, John Millar, An Historical View of the ­English Government, From the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006 (1812 (1787–1803))), 404–05; cf. Christopher Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 17, 21. 29 Burton, Political Economy, 110; also, developed countries – based on the standard of Great Britain – cooperate through extending commerce, 20. Here as elsewhere sararīman is also a plural form. 30 Burton, Political Economy, 61–67, 75, 78–79, 96, 102–03; cf. the ‘staged’ description on 54–57. On Britain as the middle class, cf. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (London: NLB, 1977), 25–33. 31 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 31. 32 Robert Malcolm Kerr, The Student’s Blackstone. Selections from the Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone… (London: John Murray, 1858), 1, 2–3; also, for Kerr, Britain is able to stand as an exception to despotism because its power is vested not in one figure but in three institutions (crown, lords, commons), 13. 33 Kerr, The Student’s Blackstone, 16. 34 Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 107. 35 Burton, Political Economy, 75–76; and ‘the person who, by his industry and skill, brings property into existence, should be able to dispose of it whether during life or death…’, 59. 36 Burton, Political Economy, 3, 67–68; and ‘labour tends to the benefit of the human race’, 67; cf. 4–5, 10–12, 39–41, 67–75; cf. Fukuzawa, ‘Seiyō jijō Gaihen’, 389–90. 37 Burton, Political Economy, 6, 33–35. 38 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 103–04; cf. Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 2010) – China is ‘banished to Europe’s archaic, primitive

64  Britishing as Modernisation past’, 5; Schad-Seifert, ‘Constructing National Identities’, 50–51. Fukuzawa further associates Enlightenment with the ability to escape uncivilized (yabanteki) absolute monarchies – untitled Keiō speech, January 1874, in Gakumon no susume (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2010 (1872– 76)), 54–61. There is an interesting dramatisation of pro- and anti-­ Enlightenment positions relative to Fukuzawa in Ogawa Tameji’s Kaika mondō/‘Questions and Answers About Enlightenment’, 1874, staging in a debate between K ­ aijiṛō (kai as open or enlightened) and Kyūhei (kȳu as closed) – described in Michael Cusumano, ‘An Enlightenment Dialogue with Fukuzawa Y ­ ukichi’, Monumenta Nipponica 37(3), Autumn 1982, 375–401. 39 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 30–31; Fukuzawa’s immediate source for ideas of stages was William Channing Woodbridge’s System of Universal Geography, Ancient and Modern, c.1829, 36; Craig recognises that the transmission of staged historiography to Fukuzawa is both direct and indirect: familiarly, it comes in part from American textbooks such as Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science (1835), but Wayland’s American university education environment was steeped in Scottish Enlightenment models: ‘[s]cholars often describe Fukuzawa as an outpost of “Waylandism” in Japan, but one should keep in mind that Wayland was an outpost of Scottish thought in America’, 29–31; cf. Francis Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office, 2006 (1835)); Mikiso Hane, ‘Early Meiji Liberalism: An Assessment’, Monumenta Nipponica 24(4), 1969, 359–60; Hane, ‘The Sources of English Liberal Concepts in Early Meiji Japan’, 262, 268. On the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on US colleges, cf. Andrew Hook, Scotland and America (Glasgow: Blackie, 1975); Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000 (1992)), 39–41. On H.T. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (c.1857), translated as Eikoku kaikashi, cf. Kenneth B. Pyle, ‘Meiji Conservatism’, in ed. Jansen, The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5, 697; Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment, 92–93; George M. Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New York: Knopf, 1950), 347–48. 40 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 104–07; Goto-Jones, Political ­Philosophy in Japan, 51. This book, nevertheless, was less popular than Gakumon no susume and only widely known from the 1930s. 41 Cf. Maruyama, trans. Hane, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 19–134; Burton, Political Economy, 97–99; and Britain has shaken off restraints to embrace free trade, 114. 42 Burton, Political Economy, 14–15, 46. 43 Burton, Political Economy, 17. 44 The comparison is found, for example, in Robertson’s History of America, 1777, and Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, 1763 – cf. Robert Crawford, ‘Introduction’, in ed. Robert Crawford, The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 (1998)), 1–21; Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 16–44. 45 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 25; on Robertson, 14–15; on ­Fukuzawa’s cutting ‘dull, irrelevant, or redundant materials’, 73. 46 Burton, Political Economy, 70. On the maximisation of potential, ­Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 25–27, and chapter 10, ‘Jikoku no dokuritsu o ronzu’ (‘On Our National Independence’), 263–305; cf. Glenn D. Hook, The Internationalization of Japan (London: Routledge, 1992),

The Scottish Enlightenment  65 109; Irokawa Daiichi, trans. Marius Jansen, The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 213. 47 Education elucidates ‘grades and ranks’, Political Economy, 9; there is also a stark contrast to the Confucian conception of care, seeing a social good in curbing benevolence (old age pensions for example), 41. 48 Kevin M. Doak, ‘Liberal Nationalism in Imperial Japan: The Dilemma of Nationalism and Internationalism’, in ed. Stegewerns, Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan, 17–41: 25–26. 49 Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 122–32; Schad-Seifert, ‘Scottish Poli­tical Economy in Meiji Japan’, 118. On Japan becoming another India, cf. Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism in Japan, 123. On the circulation of G ­ akumon no susume, cf. the introduction to Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. David A. Dilworth and Umeyo Hirano, An Encouragement of Learning (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1969 (1872–76)), ix-xv: xi, claiming 3.4 million copies were produced in Fukuzawa’s own lifetime. Earl Kinmonth quotes the preface to Fukuzawa’s 1880 edition, which claims 700,000 legitimate copies in ­circulation  – ­‘Fukuzawa Reconsidered: Gakumon no susume and its ­Audience’, The Journal of Asian Studies 37(4), 1978, 677–96: 679; for Kinmonth, the ‘3.4 million’ myth was transmitted from Fukuzawa’s collected works via Blacker’s The Japanese Enlightenment; cf. G.C. Allen, ‘Education, Science, and the Economic Development of Japan’, Oxford Review of Education 4(1), 1978, 27–36: 29. On the importance of Political Economy to national wealth, cf. Tsuda Mamichi, ‘Seiron’/‘On ­Government’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Eleven, June 1874, eds. Yamamura Shin’ichi and Nakanome Tōru, Meiroku Zasshi, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1999 (1874)), 357–65; Kanda Kōhei, ‘Zaisei henkaku no setsu’ (‘Reform of National Finance’), Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Seventeen, Sept 1874, Vol. 2, 105–14; Chūhei Sugiyama, ‘Nishi Amane and Tsuda Mamichi’, in eds. Chūhei Sugiyama and Hiroshi Mizuta, Enlightenment and Beyond: Political Economy Comes to Japan (Tokyo: University of ­Tokyo Press, 1988), 59–72: 60. 50 Fukuzawa, trans. Dilworth and Hirano, An Encouragement of Learning, 1; Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 11; here I follow Dilworth’s translation; cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 45; Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 81. 51 The passage Craig quotes does move to the singular – ‘[a] human being, as he originally comes to the hand of nature, is everywhere the same’, Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 24. In Gakumon no susume, ‘Men are Equal’ is followed by ‘Countries are Equal’, but only because countries are gatherings of individuals who are formally equal; cf. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 24; Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 118. 52 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 326. 53 William Reynolds Braisted, ‘Introduction’, in ed. and trans. William Reynolds Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), xvii–xlviii: xix; and Meiroku Zasshi is ‘the most luminous of several early journals of opinion that spread knowledge of the West during the first years of the Meiji period’, xvii. This is underscored by Braisted’s translation of kaika – often rendered ­civilization – as enlightenment. 54 Here as elsewhere I see the 1740s–50s as a watershed for the growth of Scottish Britishness, for reasons including the maturing of the post-union convergence, the final defeat of the Jacobites and the Act of Proscription in 1745–46, and cooperation in the Seven Years’ War, 1756–63. 55 Fukuzawa Yukichi, ‘Eikoku gijiin dan’, Zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Keiō ­Gijuku, 1959 (first published 1869)), 485–535: 493.

66  Britishing as Modernisation 56 Sakatani Shiroshi, ‘Kitsune setsu no utagai’/‘Doubts over Stories of Foxes’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Twenty, Nov. 1874, Vol. 2, 191–94: 191; Sakatani, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 253–54; translation follows Braisted’s except title – ‘Doubts on fox stories’; also Sakatani, ‘Kitsune setsu no ­Kōgi’/‘On the broad meaning of foxes’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Twenty, Nov. 1874, Vol. 2, 195–200; Sakatani, trans. ­Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 255–57. 57 Cf. Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought, 95–103; Havens also describes Nishi’s debt to ‘the English [Scottish] scholar, Sir William Hamilton’, who in turn influenced Mill, 95. 58 Nishimura Shigeki, ‘Seigo jūnikai (Ichi)’/‘An Explanation of Twelve Western Words’ Part One, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Thirty-Six, May 1875, Vol. 3, 214–21: 215; Nishimura, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 446–50: 447. 59 G.E. Davie, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986), 3–93; Lindsay Paterson, Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 1–10. Entry into the East India Company, and its post-monopoly successors like Jardine Matheson, had required Scottish boys’ adjustment to a more specialised education, and their success had helped heap pressure on Scottish general degrees, which suggests that generalism went ‘underground’ in such a post-­ republican tradition; it is also possible to consider the 1872 Act next to the simultaneous Fundamental Code of Education in Japan, which was aligning state education with a British-global model. 60 Nishi Amane, ‘Jinsei sentaka setsu’ (‘The Three Human Treasures’) Part Two, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Thirty-Nine, June 1875, Vol. 3, 273–81; ­Nishi, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 475–82; Nishi Amane, ‘Chisetsu’ (‘Knowledge’) Part Two, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Seventeen, Oct 1874, Vol. 2, 121–27; Nishi, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 221–25; Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, section one (untitled), 11–19, Feb 1871, section five (untitled speech to Keiō students), Jan 1874, 53–61; Minear, ‘Nishi Amane and the Reception of Western Law in Japan’, 157, 173. On inductive method, cf. Nishi Amane, ‘Naichi Ryokō’ (‘Domestic Travel’), Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Twenty-Three, Dec 1874, Vol. 2, 259–79; 287–93; Nishi, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 287–93. 61 Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought, 106–07; Havens also points out that Nishi was responsible for numerous other important neologisms, including shutai/subjectivity, kyakkan/objectivity, genshō/phenomenon, and shinrigaku/ psychology. In ‘Chisetsu’ (‘Knowledge’) Part Four, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Twenty-Two, Dec 1874, Vol. 2, 233–38, Nishi takes apart the term gakujutsu, placing gaku as science and jutsu as arts, suggesting that the essential foundations of the humanities do not change; cf. Yasuhira Yahei Kanayama, ‘The Birth of Philosophy as Tetsugaku in ­Japan’, Tetsugaku 1, 2017, 169–83: 169, archived at: http://­philosophy-japan.org/ wpdata/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Tetsugaku_Vol1_12.Kanayama.pdf; Nishi, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 275–77. Cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 25. Adam Smith’s History of Astronomy is excerpted in ed. Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997), 735–49: 747. 62 On this idea in Hyakugaku renkan, cf. Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought, 107–08; Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 25; Asō Yoshiteru, ‘Kindai nihon tetsugakushi o yomu’, in ed. Maruyama Masao, Senchū to Nihon tetsugakushi (Misuzu Shobō, 1976), 116–33. On philosophy’s role, cf. Davie, ‘Berkeley, Hume, and the Central Problem of Scottish Philosophy’, 54. 63 Nakamura Masanao, ‘Seigaku ippan’ continued, Meiroku Zasshi, ­Issue Twelve, June 1874, Vol. 1, 398–405: 404; translation mostly follows Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 159–63: 162.

The Scottish Enlightenment  67 64 Mitsukuri Rinshō, ‘Riboruchā no setsu’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Nine, June 1874, Vol. 1, 306–11, 306–07, 306; Mitsukuri, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 117–19: 117; translation mostly follows Braisted (as ‘“Liberty”’). On this liberty, cf. Nakamura, ‘An Outline of W ­ estern ­Culture’, Meiroku Zasshi, ­Issue Twelve, June 1874, Vol. 2, 398–405; Nakamura, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 159–63. 65 Mitsukuri, ‘Riboruchā no setsu’, continued, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Fourteen, June 1874, Vol. 2, 33–39; translation follows Braisted’s except for punctuation and the translation of Eikoku as Britain, Meiroku Zasshi, 180–82: 182. 66 Mitsukuri, ‘Riboruchā no setsu’, continued, 307–08; translation is ­Braisted’s, Meiroku Zasshi, 117–18. Annette Schad-Seifert points out that the Meiji version of jiyū can be read as repurposing previous Confucian understandings of the term, which had implied a mastering of one’s own ­desires – ‘Scottish Political Economy in Meiji Japan’, 116. On the Japanese experience of Victorian liberalism against Jacobins, ­Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain, 160–61. 67 Nishimura Shigeki, ‘Jishu jiyū kai’, ‘Explanation of Twelve Western Words, Part Two’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Thirty-Seven, May 1875, Vol. 3, 225–33: 220, 231–32; Nishimura, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 451–54: 452, 453–54; this comparison underscores the importance of Itō’s and his colleagues’ turn to Prussia in the 1880s. And in Issue Twenty-Nine he suggests that Britain had been reaching ­perfection even as it embarked on the path that took it to free trade – its historiography meant that it was always on the right path – ‘Jiyū kōeki ron’/‘On Free Trade’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Twenty-Nine, Feb. 1875, Vol. 3, 32–38; Nishimura, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 356–58. 68 Braisted, ‘Introduction’, Meiroku Zasshi, xxxiv. 69 This has been argued in different ways by Alexander Broadie and Cairns Craig: Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation, 43–77; Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 36–37, 77–80, 92–95, 129. Craig moreover has argued that much is lost in reducing the Scottish Enlightenment to ‘Enlightenment in Scotland’, and sees this as having been addressed by the 1986 study by Anand Chitnis – and intriguingly, an earlier work by Chitnis is the main source on Scottish Enlightenment for Albert Craig, although there have been many more detailed accounts since – Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland, 77; nevertheless, Chitnis understands a ‘Scottish school’ and its practitioners’ politics, but not a general national politics. On a possible shift from ­Kantian Aufklärung to the Scottish Enlightenment, cf. James Hutchison Stirling, ‘Kant Has Not Answered Hume’, Mind 9(36), Oct 1884, 531–47, and 10(37), Jan 1885, 45–72; Andrew Seth, Scottish Philosophy: A Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1890), 49; cf. Paul Wood, ‘Introduction: Dugald Stewart and the Invention of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in ed. Wood, The Scottish Enlightenment (Rochester, NY: Woodbridge, 2000), 1–35. On Aufklärung, cf. Michel Foucault, trans. Catherine Porter, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in ed. Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (­London: Penguin, 1991 (1984)), 32–50: 38. 70 Burton, Political Economy, 29; Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 210–11. 71 Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Philadelphia, PA: Troutman and Hayes, 1853 (1783)); George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric (Carbondale, IL: ­Southern Illinois University Press, 1963 (1776)); Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005 (1762)).

68  Britishing as Modernisation 72 Nishi Amane, ‘Yōgaku o motte kokugo o sho suru no ron’ (‘Writing ­Japanese with the western alphabet’), Meiroku Zasshi, Issue One, n.d., Vol. 1, 27–52; Nishi, trans. ­Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 3–16. 73 Mori Arinori, ‘Kaika daiichi wa’/‘First Essay on Civilization’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Three, n.d., Vol. 1, 99–101: 100; Mori, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 30–31 – Braisted’s title is ‘First Essay on Enlightenment’; translation is based on Braisted’s, though kaika as civilization is also possible. 74 Mori, ‘Kaika daiichi wa’, 100; translation is based on Braisted’s, Meiroku Zasshi, 31. 75 Nishi Amane, ‘Mōra giin no setsu’/‘On an All-Inclusive Parliament’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Twenty-Nine, Feb 1875, Vol. 3, 25–31: 26; Nishi, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 352–55: 352. 76 Nishi, ‘Mōra giin no setsu’, 31; Nishi, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 355. 77 Michio Nagai, ‘Herbert Spencer in Early Meiji Japan’, The Far Eastern Quarterly 14(1), Nov 1954, 55–64: 55; for Nagai, Spencer was followed in rank by J.S. Mill, with others far behind these; he also says of Spencer that ‘[a]lmost any ideology can be justified as a natural evolutionary product, and thus made to appear above criticism’, 64. On the defeat of (Spencer’s) social evolution as an acculturation of Japanese nature, cf. Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 160–68. On neutrality, cf. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 64. On the move from barbarous religions, cf. Goto-­Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 45. On the use of Spencer against feudalism, cf. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 100. Sometimes the Scottish empiricist and experimental psychologist ­A lexander Bain is added to this, e.g. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 21. 78 On the 1880 petition for a parliament, cf. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 27. 79 Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Naturalizing Nationhood: Ideology and Practice in Twentieth-Century Japan’, in ed. Sharon A. Minichiello, Japan’s Competing Modernities (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 114–32: 118; cf. Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 163. Later Spencer would complain that the 1889 constitution had given Japan too much autonomy – cf. Nagai, ‘Herbert Spencer in Early Meiji Japan’, 58, citing David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (1911). Elsewhere in Meiroku Zasshi, Mori echoes Fukuzawa’s/Nishi’s depiction of the hankai/hankaika stage to describe three types of nations: independent, conditional independent, tributary ­independent – ‘Dokuritsu kokken gi’/‘The Rights and Obligations of Independent Nations’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Seven, May 1874, Vol. 1, 241–46; Mori, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 87–89. 80 On Mill’s nineteenth-century echo of Hume, cf. Craig, Intending Scotland, 88; James Mill, historian, economist, populariser of the labour theory of value, and slight senior of Jardine, Matheson, and Palmerston at Edinburgh, draws from Hume and home-schools his son, 88–89; cf. Ridley, Lord Palmerston, 14. On Fukuzawa’s ‘utilitarianism’, cf. Umaji Kaneko, ‘A Survey of Philosophy in Japan, 1870–1929’, in ed. Inazo Nitobe, Western Influences in Modern Japan: A Series of Papers on Cultural Relations (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 56–69: 58–59; here, Fukuzawa is ‘a brilliant protagonist… who popularized his convictions with amazing simplicity and clearness’, 58. 81 Inglis, The Opium War, 92–93. And China is a ‘warning example’ of ‘the despotism of custom’ – Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 5. 82 Cf. Earl H. Kinmonth, ‘Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles: A Victorian Confucian and a Confucian Victorian’, The American Historical Review 85(3), June 1980, 535–56: 543, 547.

The Scottish Enlightenment  69 83 Nakamura Masanao, ‘Seigaku no ippan’/‘Outline of Western Studies’ continued, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Twenty-Three, Dec 1874, 277–79: 279; Nakamura, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 295–97: 296; here I mostly follow Braisted’s translation (his title is ‘An Outline of Western Culture’), except for his translation of Eikoku as England. 84 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 (1859)), 20; Samuel Smiles, trans. Nakamura Masanao, Saikoku risshi hen (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2008 (1871)), 64–65. J. Scott Miller points out that literal translations only entered gradually along with foreign literary styles  – ­Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 13. 85 Kinmonth, ‘Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles’, 535–36; Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 33, 45. 86 Kinmonth, ‘Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles’, 536; he also describes how Saikoku risshi hen is one of the holy books/seisho of the early Meiji era. 87 Mitsuo Nakamura, Japanese Fiction in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai, 1968), 20. 88 Kinmonth, ‘Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles’, 541–42. 89 Kinmonth, ‘Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles’, 548–49, 555. ‘The poorest have sometimes taken the highest places’ – Smiles, Self-Help, 2; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 67. 90 Smiles, Self-Help, 90–91; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 162–63. 91 Fukuzawa, ‘Seiyō jijō Gaihen’, 402–04 (on Watt), 405–08 (on ­Stephenson); cf. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 90–91. On early Meiji desires for Smith and Watt (in Tokutomi Tohō), cf. R.P. Dore, ‘The Legacy of Tokugawa Education’, in ed. Jansen, Changing Japanese Attitudes Towards Modernization, 99–131: 117. Moreover the last five of the 24 sketches in the first part of Seiyō jijō describe the steam engine, locomotive, steamship, telegraph, and gas lamps – Fukuzawa, Zenshū, Vol. 1, 313–18. 92 Smiles, Self-Help, 18; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 28. And ‘[a]s steady application to work is the healthiest training for every individual, so is it the best discipline of a state’, Self-Help 37; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 102; ‘the nation’ is rendered as Eikoku/Britain. 93 Smiles, Self-Help, 223. 94 On concerns about the exchangeability of paper money, cf. Kanda Kōhei’s series beginning ‘Shihei hikikae kongan roku’/‘An Entreaty Regarding the Convertibility of Paper Money’, Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Twenty-Two, Dec 1874, Vol.  2, 252–55; Kanda, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 283–86. Fukuzawa would later be consulted on the country’s hyperinflation after the 1877 Satsuma rebellion, and fluctuations were widely manipulated by British traders; he also takes in Burton’s Lockean concern with money integrity, again with the French Revolution as a cautionary tale – an understanding of credit as a ‘national faith’ that helps to explain British exceptionalism. 95 Smiles, Self-Help, 20; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 64; and ‘[o]ne of the most strongly-marked features of the English people is their spirit of industry, standing out prominent and distinct in their past history, and as strikingly characteristic of them now as at any former ­period’ – Smiles, Self-Help, 37; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 102. This is rendered quite faithfully by Nakamura. 96 Smiles, Self-Help, 18; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 59; cf. Kinmonth, ‘Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles’, 541. 97 Smiles, Self-Help, 20; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 64–65.

70  Britishing as Modernisation 98 Smiles, Self-Help 287–88; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 450–52; the national specificity is underscored by the Japanese chapter subtitles – ‘Furansujin no Eikoku ni jū suru mono, sekishō yori gakushi to narishi koto’/‘On a French person living in Britain becoming a scholar rather than a stonemason’. Elsewhere Walter Scott visiting the Highlands post-1745 is determined to use the experience of the Jacobite survivors – Self-Help, 115; Smiles, trans. Nakamura, Saikoku risshi hen, 206. 99 Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 121; Kinmonth also describes how Smilesian thinking helped newly disenfranchised samurai live frugally, 40–43. On Sakuma and Yoshida, Tokutomi Sohō, Yoshida Shōin (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1991), 93–111. 100 Cf. Hirakawa, ‘Japan’s Turn to the West’, 481–82; Pyle, ‘Meiji Conservatism’, 676. On Fukuzawa’s belief in organic law, Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, chapter 2, ‘Seiyō no bunka o mokuteki to suru koto’, 25–56: 25–26; Fukuzawa, trans. Dilworth and Hurst, Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 17–43: 17–18; Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, ­chapter  3, ‘Bunmei no Honshi o Ronzu’ (‘The Essence of Civilization’), 56–73; Fukuzawa, trans. Dilworth and Hurst, Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 45–58. 101 For example Nishi Amane, ‘Jinsei santaka setsu’, Part Two; this also contains a positive account of Mill, the Benthamite inheritance, and negative liberty; cf. Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, section three, 1873, 33–39. On Meiji yearning for development through individual betterment, cf. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 35. 102 Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 25–27; cf. Cusamano, ‘An Enlightenment Dialogue with Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 381. On similar views in Tsuda Mamichi and Nishi Amane, cf. Marius B. Jansen, ‘New Materials for the Intellectual History of Nineteenth-Century Japan’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20(3/4), Dec 1957, 567–97. 103 Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought, 83; cf. Thomas R.H. Havens, ‘Scholars and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Japan: The Case of Nishi Amane’, Modern Asian Studies 2–4, Oct 1968, 315–24; Pyle, ‘Meiji Conservatism’, 701; eds. de Bary, Gluck, and Tiedmann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 2, 7–8; Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 339; Minear, ‘Nishi Amane and the Reception of Western Law in Japan’, 174–75; Hane, ‘Early Meiji Liberalism: An Assessment’, 364–65. On the combination of philosophy and bureaucracy, cf. Roger F. Hackett, ‘Nishi Amane – A Tokugawa-Meiji Bureaucrat’, Far Eastern Quarterly 18(2), Feb 1959, 213–35. 104 Futabatei Shimei, Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud [or Drifting Clouds]) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2008 (1887)); Marleigh G. Ryan, Ukigumo: Japan’s First Modern Novel [translation and commentary] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967). 105 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 101; Craig quotes Fukuzawa from an 1875 letter to Tomita Tetsunosuke, presumably Craig’s translation: ‘Who says that the white men of the Western nations represent civilization? They are truly inhuman white devils! Let Christianity eat shit! Rather than sending useless priests to our country to convert those who have no need of it, it would be far better if they appointed upright and human (ningenrashii) men as ministers and consuls to punish those who rob and rape’, 182; cf. Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 116–17, 124–25; Sebastian Conrad, ‘What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural)

The Scottish Enlightenment  71

106

107

108

109

110 111

112

113 114 115

Historiography’, History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 38(1), 1999, 67–83: 68. Cf. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 71–72; Fukuzawa, trans. Dilworth and Hurst, Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 57–58; Takii, The Meiji Constitution, xi. On the push to define national essence in contrast to British rights, cf. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 102–13. On British symbolism in Rokumeikan (venue), cf. Inouye, ‘From Unequal Treaty to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance’, 142. The Choshu Five’s Inoue Kaoru would become a major voice behind treaty revision in the late ’80s. ‘Rapid’ development would be protested by groups like Gen’yōsha (1881–). Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth Century Japan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997), 27, 43; Karatani Kōjin, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2015 (1980)), 46–47; cf. Karatani, trans. Brett de Bary, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998 (1993)), 37. W.G. Beasley, ‘Meiji Political Institutions’, in ed. Jansen, The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5, 618–73; Kanayama, ‘The Birth of Philosophy as Tetsugaku in Japan’, 170. On ‘tactical concessions’ within middle-class state consolidation, cf. Stephen Vlastos, ‘Opposition Movements in Early Meiji’, in ed. Jansen, The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5, 367–431: 426; Duus, ‘Whig History, Japanese Style’, 434; Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 111–12; Masako Gavan, ‘Educating for a New Japan: Shige Shigataka’s Criticism of the Imperial Education System’, Japanese Studies 18(3), 1998, 281–94: 281–82. Cf. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 1, 18, 33, 35. On naturalism as a movement of country writers coming to the city, Shuichi Kato, trans. Don Sanderson, History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3: The Modern Years (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1991 (1979)), 159; on Protestant influence and desire for self-­ expression, 160–61. Ed. Penny Fielding, The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, Cornhill Magazine 41, March 1880, 327–34, cited here in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1901 (1882)); W.E. Henley review of April 1882 quoted in ed. Paul Maixner, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 97–100: 99. Ann C. Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). On Stevenson, Conrad, and modernism, cf. Linda Dryden, ‘Literary Affinities and the Postcolonial in Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad’, in eds. Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher, Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 86–97; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and a Quartette (London: Heinemann, 1894); cf. Michael Gardiner, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and the Meiji Enlightenment’, Year in English Studies 41(2), 2011: 58–72. Lighthouse Examination Committee Lighthouse Preservation Facility, Preservation of Meiji Period Lighthouses (Yokohama: Japan Aids to Navigation Association, 1991). Sakuma Shōzan, ‘Haruma o hangyo nite kaihan sen koto o chinzu’, in Sakuma Shōzan Zenshū (Tokyo: Shobunkan, 1913), 128; Hirakawa, ‘Japan’s Turn to the West’, 450; Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 226–27. Richard Henry Brunton, Building Japan 1868–1876 (Folkestone: Japan ­Library, 1991 (n.d.)), reprinting of Pioneer Engineering in Japan: A Record of Work in helping to Re-Lay the Foundations of Japanese Empire,

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116 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

1868–1876; Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons (London: Harper Collins, 1999); cf. Ian Ruxton, ‘The Mission’s Aims, Objectives and Results’, in ed. Ian Nish, The Iwakura Mission to America and Europe: A New Assessment (London: Routledge Curzon, 1998), 54–68: 63. Kido Takayoshi, eds. Sidney Devere Brown and Akiko Horita, The Diary of Kido Takayoshi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983–86 (1868–71)); cf. Gardiner, At the Edge of Empire, 123. Robert Louis Stevenson, Records of a Family of Engineers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 (1896)), 7, 61. Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, 123; and ‘[t]he power and knowledge of these foreigners were things inseparable’, 120. Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, 119–20; Stevenson’s Yoshida also wants to set up a university staffed by foreign teachers, 120. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (London: Penguin, 2003 (1885)), 2–70. Cairns Craig points out that ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ was profoundly influenced by Stevenson’s readings in energy and entropy, which is to say, the story concerns the directionality of scientific advance and collapse – Intending Scotland, 126. Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, 130; Stevenson also picks up Yoshida’s stress on sincerity or makoto, 120. Here ‘disarming’ refers to parliamentary commands in 1716 and 1746 (the ‘Proscription Act’) to remove weapons from Jacobites; on Fukuzawa’s discarding his sword, Tamaki, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901)’, 44. Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, 126. Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, 122, 126. Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, 120, 122; and ‘Yoshida had only to arrive to make a convert’, 125. Alistair Swale, ‘Tokutomi Soho and the Problem of the Nation-State in an Imperialist World’, in ed. Stegewerns, Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan, 68–88: 69–70. Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, 125. Stevenson, ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’, 128.

Part 2

Modernism as Reaction

4 Memory and Historiography Kokoro, ‘Yagoemon Okitsu no isho’

Kokoro and Staged Historiography The British disenchantment of Japan’s favourite novelist probably doesn’t need much rehearsal here. Called by the Monbushō (Ministry of Education) while working as a high school teacher in Kumamoto in the Kyushu (Higo) restorationist heartlands, Natsume’s 1900–03 ryūgaku became a kind of mirror of the ryūgaku of Itō’s generation, a lonely underwhelming in London that many accounts understand as killing any developmental faith he had in British liberalism and (perhaps more familiarly) English Literature.1 Natsume’s ryūgaku, and his ryūgaku’s relation to a disaffection with aspects of ‘Western’ development, have been extensively described, but what might be stressed here is how this disaffection leads to a push against the ascendancy of Scoto-British developmentality, an ascent through universal stages of civilization that demands an absolute continuity – something readable in Natsume from the mid-1900s, but particularly in his most celebrated novel Kokoro (1914). It is well understood that Kokoro is ‘epochal’, marking a change of attitude after the death of Emperor Meiji and the suicide of General Nogi Maresuke; but this epochal statement also means challenging a historiography fundamental to the British state, in which belonging is understood in terms of a constant adaptation to economic nature. Kokoro disrupts the developmental base of the abstracted economic self by reinserting the radical discontinuity of death, the self of bodily interruption, a shock from which can arise a different form of history and a different form of modernity. If the developmental assertions of British liberalism need the mutable body to be continuously converted to the subject of economic progress, Natsume, and comparably the post-Nogi writing of Mori Ōgai, understand the mutability of the productive body as a historiographical weapon. Natsume’s essays on his time in London describe fog and d ­ arkness, ­liberties that are really imprisoning, and an individualism that is ­peculiarly unfree. 2 During these three years he was taught by, amongst others, W.P. Ker and, as sometime personal tutor, W.J. Craig, editor of the King Lear volume of the Arden Shakespeare (and according to

76  Modernism as Reaction Natsume’s own account, a forgetful figure who overcharged him for ­tuition). As has been well documented, Natsume emerged dissatisfied and puzzled by his encounter with English, and wanting to reconsider the ‘Meiji-ness’ of Meiji literature as a key to the Japanese ability to act.3 His ryūgaku notes would form the basis of lectures at Tokyo Imperial University in 1903–07, where he succeeded the naturalised Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, and the basis of his ‘literary theory trilogy’, Eibungaku keishiki ron/‘Theory of Form in English Literature’ (1903), Bungakuron/‘Theory of Literature’ (1907), Bungaku hyōron/­‘Literary Criticism’ (1909).4 This struggle with the stuff of British development has typically been understood psychobiographically, with many commentators following Etō Jun’s lead in placing the 1900s texts within a British story of poverty and isolation, and an almost allergic reaction to a general hostility (tekii) felt in London, described in terms of fuan or anxiety.5 The best known of the literary theory trilogy, Bungakuron, in large part arises from this anxious encounter with English canonicity, and its ‘classifying urge’, to use Adam Smith’s term for historical smoothing. D. Cuong O’Neill describes Natsume’s difficulty with classification in a university English then understood as ‘a dense, ideological site in a struggle for self-definition’, forcing Natsume to see himself in the mirror of its disciplinarity.6 In ‘Senzen’ no shikō/‘Pre-War’ Thought (2001), Karatani Kōjin reworks the traditional story of Bungakuron as a result of a nervous breakdown, interestingly framing this in terms of a perceived mismatch of the naihatsuteki/intrinsic and the gaihatsuteki/extrinsic.7 Natsume’s trouble, Karatani says, is that Japanese Enlightenment is gaihatsuteki (it is not a ‘flowering’, he says, in a wording sometimes used of the Scottish Enlightenment, though without mentioning an adjustment to the prior gaihatsuteki of the British state) – Japanese ­Enlightenment is exposed as superficial, always waiting for an intrinsic Enlightenment, or, we might say, a renegotiation of modernity.8 Karatani sees Natsume grappling with this ultimately historiographical impasse in the confessional scenes of Kokoro, which rework the confessions of the naturalist novel to show the protagonist Sensei’s catastrophic failure to order the extrinsic and intrinsic; he moreover importantly confirms that the ‘west’/seiyō that is gaihatsuteki really means Britain, since Britain’s ability to define the terms of the intrinsic outstrips that of other European countries and is proven by the Industrial Revolution (leading him, as it happens, to retread the ground of Japan and Britain as comparably unique). 9 Bungakuron concerns a personal developmental struggle, certainly, but more widely it speaks to a moment in which the ­developmentality that had peaked with Japan’s ‘world wars’ (1894–95, 1905–06) reached a kind of historiographical crisis. These wars proved the country’s techno-­moral advance in British terms, but they also suggested a modern unhinging in which a definition of the nation in terms of a system of rival trading empires had made national agency unclear. (Moreover, it

Memory and Historiography  77 was between these wars, Earl Kinmonth describes, that there appeared the figure of the ‘anguished youth’ pressured by individual success, a figure to be revisited in the reminiscences of Kokoro.10) Elsewhere Karatani describes how Natsume’s sense of being ‘lost’ in English made him an agent of overturning or tentō, a term with strongly historiographical connotations, suggesting that individual alienation was understood not only as an effect of progress, but also as a sign of a wider historical discontinuity.11 In Brett de Bary’s gloss of Karatani, this leads Natsume to something like a Foucauldian rejection of a universalist history of stages, which he now sees as an ‘arbitrary teleology’.12 Natsume then becomes a conduit of an unsticking of the British-imperial streamlining of time, or what Harry Harootunian, adapting Walter Benjamin, describes as a general reconsideration of the fit between personal and public memory.13 Sometimes (as in Harootunian), a return of the past from this temporal streamlining has been understood as complicit with fascist desires for a ‘memorial time’ – but here I suggest that a modernist recursion of the past, and the renegotiation between personal and public memory, themselves reject the ‘auratic’ or the eternal of British conjectural history.14 In relation to British historiography specifically, anachronism can be understood as a weapon. Staged, or stadial, historiography had had to direct all embodied experience to an overarching narrative; but under a modernist historiographical challenge, personal memory becomes able to pick out discrete experiences and reinsert an intentionality into the empty time. The reclamation of the mutable body from the continuity of the economic self has high stakes, and it sends Natsume back to an anachronistic consideration of the ‘historicalness’ of death, particularly in the context of the historiographical tremors following the archaic suicide practices that seem to reappear at the end of Meiji. Staged historiography had been central to early Meiji conceptions of development, but the grasping of death as historical can underline its passing. What Kokoro suggests then, is not simply a change of era, but an overcoming of staged historiography; and the origins of this historiography are worth revisiting briefly here. The best-travelled account of history as a series of stages defined by individual property is probably in Adam Smith’s Lectures in Jurisprudence, which describes ‘four distinct states which mankind pass thro:- 1st, the Age of Hunters; 2dly, the Age of Shepherds; 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; 4thly, the Age of Commerce’.15 This last stage, that of commercial society, carries the promise of the polite customs and civilized relations (of ‘modern ­culture’) which will evolve as property evolves, and which will be the future relative to Fukuzawa Yukichi’s hankai, or half-developed, s­ tatus.16 For the Smithian thinking described by F ­ ukuzawa’s Burton, property as collective ownership is outgrown, readable in the awakening of the Scots from a barbarous past, ‘as soon as… every individual feels that he has an exclusive title to possess or to alienate whatever he has acquired by his own labour and dexterity’.17 As in Locke’s repurposing of Newton, institutionalised and

78  Modernism as Reaction refined by the Scottish Enlightenment, the forward movement of time comes to be defined by the progressive separation of objects-as-property from the individual viewer-as-owner. Meiji as an era had been largely defined by the growth of the responsible empiricist knower-­owner – and although Karatani has influentially described the ‘discovery’ of the modern Japanese self as Cartesian, it might be better described as Lockean, something I have suggested is borne out by the influence of Scottish Enlightenment ideas in the Meiji Enlightenment. Moreover for Scottish Enlightenment writing, property-­driven teleology is not only universal, it is also empirically discoverable, as described by numerous ‘anthropological’ studies, and the expansion of Newtonian ­physical rules to history itself – David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning ­Human ­Understanding (1748), for example, positing a history discoverable by ‘experiment’, or derived from scientific reason.18 Crucial for the British conception of historical progress, though, is Locke’s founding insight that it was only the unpredictability of financial exchange that was preventing the worldwide expansion of a new commercial state – making the new regime’s raison d’état its willingness to define personal belonging in terms of the dependability of stable currency across expanding imperial territory – which is to say, to set universal economic measures of time as a condition of citizenship. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding expects a continuity for an empiricist self; his Two Treatises of Government apply this empiricist self to a ‘national’ community of property owners. As George Caffentzis has argued, in Locke’s “labor theory of property,”… we find one of the first attempts to derive the right to property from the categories and properties of the ego… [and] this theory presupposes the notion of the person, and the conditions of personal identity. What is mine today need not be “mine” tomorrow unless I am the same person. It is not enough to be the same man or woman, one must be the master and “proprietor of one’s person” to constitute the “foundation of property”.19 Personal time in this sense means arranging experience within an ­overarching financial stability, with value residing in [t]he realm of consciousness and memory, whereby memory too becomes an act of appropriation of a past action by a present consciousness…. [whereas t]he great enemy of property is oblivion, since the loss of conscious mastery over time and succession leads inevitably to the breakdown of property… [so] Locke’s “labor theory of property”… might be more property redefined as the “memory theory of property”. 20

Memory and Historiography  79 ‘Memory as appropriation’, in retrospect, is what will seem to have defined the Meiji era. And after the death of Nogi, suicide becomes the ‘oblivion’ that refuses to reduce the embodied part of the self to continuity. Suicide appears as a destruction not only of the self as property (and as property-owner), but also of the temporality that had depended on this idea of the self.21 This self had rested on conjectural time – as hinted as early as Smith’s History of Astronomy, the sense of a natural ‘classifying urge’ that causes discrete data to be adjusted to a continuity, leading to a conception of progress that reduces experiences to their ‘“most simple” and “most natural”, even if not necessarily “most agreeable to fact”’.22 The central role of conjectural time in the Anglosphere economic pressure on East Asian Enlightenment suggests that Albert M. Craig phrases it unfortunately when he describes Fukuzawa’s influences – ‘[a] common feature of all Scottish thinkers was their methodology: they rejected conjecture in favor of facts’.23 Conjecture was precisely what this historical abstraction was. This indeed was confirmed by Dugald Stewart, tutor to ‘post-republican’ Whigs like Lord Palmerston, recovering the idea from Smith in these terms – the ‘necessity of supplying the place of fact by conjecture’.24 The East Asian campaigns themselves had taken on a language of historical stages, as in Palmerston’s description of the first skirmishes of the Opium War as ‘the Chinese passing through “the usual and unavoidable stages of the Intercourse of strong and Civilized nations with weaker and less civilized ones…”’.25 And such understandings were apparent in early Meiji reformers’ view of Britain – when the Ikawura Mission visited the British Museum in September 1872, Kume Kunitake recorded how [w]hen one looks at the objects displayed in the museums, the ­sequence of stages of civilization through which a country has passed are immediately apparent to the eye and are apprehended directly by the mind. 26 This is the staged historiography that placed Meiji Japan as the miseen-scène of British civilization, and it is because of the association of the Meiji era with the conjectural that the historiographical critique is so pointed in Kokoro, in which the death of Emperor Meiji and the subsequent suicide of General Nogi Maresuke act as a frame within which to reconstruct Sensei’s earlier life. Nogi’s death in this story becomes a ­historiographically disruptive action suggesting not just another time but another temporality, a writing against history as pure continuity and the continuous editing of memory. The success of Nogi at the battle (or siege) of Port Arthur at the turn of 1905 had confirmed his status as a particularly modern war hero, lauded in the new media of magazines and films, with a celebrity that seemed to exceed his physical presence. 27 He died with his wife in front

80  Modernism as Reaction of imperial portraits during Meiji’s funeral, in an act often understood as junshi or ‘death in service’, suggesting feudal connotations. 28 Meiji’s death had already been a temporal shock that prompted a widespread ­reconsideration  – as Carol Gluck puts it, ‘the illusory continuity and the underlying changes were now identified with both the reign and the monarch’. 29 Kokoro adds anachronism to this continuity, returning from Meiji’s high period an old story in the form of an isho or testament. Narratively, the testament becomes a pointedly curated version of the past, put into the hands of a youthful narrator known only as Watakushi (‘I’), echoing the I of the watakushi shōsetsu or shishōsetsu/‘I-novel’, a retrospectively named genre growing from naturalism and by the last decade of Meiji typically associated with the search for authentic individual experience, and centralising a seeing-knowing narrator much as had literary realism, or indeed the ­narrator of the Lockean Bildungsroman.30 Watakushi encounters this mid-Meiji story through his friendship with an older figure known only as Sensei (generically, ‘teacher’). ­S ensei’s testament sets up a historical parallel between the two youths, in the present and probably in the 1890s – and in this ‘inner’ story Sensei himself becomes the Watakushi/I. Sensei, it turns out, has been haunted since his own student days by the suicide of his friend K following a competition for their landlady’s daughter, Ojōsan (generically, ‘young woman’). In part Sensei’s sense of guilt derives from K’s inability to cope with romantic love, understood as a modern choice of relationship ­between choice-bearing individuals (and to some extent marked by a shift to ren’ai over koi to describe the love relationship, also a concern of Tayama Katai’s naturalist classic Futon (1907)). 31 This understanding of romantic love obviously holds an overtly progressive promise, but this promise is not merely Western, it is specific to the Scottish Enlightenment’s historiography of developmental stages. It is described, for example, by John Millar’s Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), in which romantic love signals the ascent to commercial society: where the feudal father had acted as a family despot, rationalised production – which is to say, in Smith’s terms, progress itself – made children move into towns for work, where they would compete for partners. 32 Romantic love between choice-bearing individuals, then, is a developmental marker, and was indeed a basis of the naturalist fiction of the 1890s–1900s (as well as, for Fukuzawa and Meiroku Zasshi after Mill, a condition of gender equality). So for Millar [t]he advancement of a people in manufactures and commerce has a natural tendency to remove those circumstances which prevented the free intercourse of the sexes… Being no longer withheld by ­mutual fear and jealousy, they are led by degrees to contract an ­acquaintance, and to carry on a more intimate correspondence. The

Memory and Historiography  81 men and women of different families are permitted to converse with more ease and freedom, and meet with less opposition to the indulgence of their inclinations.33 But in Kokoro this marker of developmental productivity brings a historical sticking point, and the trigger for a historiographical interruption in the form of the death of K, and eventually of Sensei after Nogi. The resulting marriage is itself also pointedly unproductive, despite its promise – no children are born to ­S ensei-as-Watakushi and Ojōsan (her real name Shizu echoing Nogi’s wife Shizuko), by implication because of a sense of accursedness, and this is what leads Sensei to nominate Watakushi as heir. Yet when Ojōsan/Shizu recalls the term junshi after Meiji’s death, Sensei is left with a narratively peculiar sense of the marriage ‘going to plan’ – it was never meant for productivity, or it had interruption ­concealed within it. 34 Something else, then, is brought out here from the watakushi shōsetsu or shishōsetsu – in a sense the highest stage of naturalism, and often stories of a solitary young male in Tokyo struggling to find an authentic self beyond scattered experiences, a ‘conjectural’ account of the personal that Tomi Suzuki describes as a ‘transcript of experience’.35 In Kokoro this leads to the recursion of an embodied and ‘primitive’ experience, and it returns an unincorporated past, a past that is real but buried under conjectural abstraction. What Masao Miyoshi describes as the ‘private universe’ of the shishōsetsu, or, as in Millar, the multiple individual interactions taking place in the commercial urban environment, is in Kokoro subjected to a historical reframing.36 Watakushi is somewhat aware that the distractions of Tokyo can destroy memory, noting that he forgot his first meeting with Sensei in Kamakura after returning to the city.37 Kokoro subjects the personal memory of the shishōsetsu to an epochal change, revealing in the shishōsetsu, as Dennis Washburn says, ‘a symbolic death: living in a significant present gives meaning to the self but creates the dilemma of isolation’.38 This de-individuation of memory, moreover, is pointedly staged against the successes of Japan’s British techno-moral mission, and is set near the Koishikawa arsenal, where Sensei and K attend university (probably Natsume’s own Tokyo Imperial University).39 When Watakushi replays Sensei-as-Watakushi’s move to Tokyo, he comes from the old Satsuma stronghold of Kagoshima, a pointed choice, since his family duties and education force him into a negotiation between Tokyo as world city and the contact zone whose bombardment by the British in 1863 had galvanised rebel aspirations – which is to say that Watakushi has one foot in the founding moment of Anglo-Meiji history.40 Kagoshima was also the last outpost of jōi fundamentalism to be subdued by the new Meiji government at the Battle of Shiroyama in 1877, and it was at this battle that Nogi’s loss of the regimental flag led to his own request for orders for

82  Modernism as Reaction junshi, which he then postponed till the death of Meiji (Nogi’s ‘lord’), just as Sensei postpones his own suicide.41 In a pointedly modernist move, then, Kokoro anachronistically returns the founding events of the era to unsettle its retroactive cohesion, Caffentzis’s condition of Lockean continuity, the ‘appropriation of a past action by a present consciousness’. Within this ‘inner’ story, Sensei-as-Watakushi is at first given a conjectural mission; he follows what he will later identify as the ‘spirit of Meiji’, ambitiously adjusting himself to its progressive principles. But he has something of a shadowy double in K, who is more vested in ­intransigent, non-progressive temporalities, the times of rituals, cyclical routines like counting beads, and ‘the habit of talking in terms of the Buddhist concept of dedicated self-discipline’, his determination leading him into a poverty that eventually forces him to lodge with Sensei-as-Watakushi, and so to the love triangle.42 But Sensei-as-Watakushi’s conjectural life is interrupted, permanently as it turns out, by the discovery of K’s dead body.43 K’s corpse carries anachronism, bringing the ‘dead time’ of the non-­continuous. This kind of character doubling is quite familiar from Scottish literature reconsidering the Enlightenment’s demand for ascent from local barbarism in staged historiography, and is a theme that travels from Walter Scott through Stevenson’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ – or, for that matter, Stevenson’s ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’. Sensei-as-Watukushi has been swept along by staged progress, something that can only be recognised ­retrospectively – thus the irony of his generic name, Sensei, a term nominally meaning teacher but transliterable living (sei/ikiru) – in advance (sen/saki). Sensei crystallises an empty kind of aheadness, something Watakushi perhaps realises when he notes that Sensei has no career and no teaching credentials.44 He is ahead in terms of being pointed forward within hankai, half-development, with a modern E ­ nglish-language education in the kind of institution now filling the country’s most powerful positions. And yet as in Jekyll and Hyde, the shock to the conjectural means the admission of the existence of barbarity within civilization in a troubling simultaneity. K’s corpse is de-enlightening – it is discovered in ‘dim lamp light’, and it causes Sensei-as-Watakushi to stutter ‘shimatta’, roughly ‘oh no!’ but transliterable as a loss (ushinau) of plans (saku), or the sense of a collapsed temporality.45 This darkness will spread into a room that is pitch black (makkuro), and set up a thematics of light and dark that Natsume will hold all the way to his unfinished Meian/Light and Shadow (1916) – a thematics sometimes read psychobiographically to suggest the ‘“dark side” of the author’, but also a darkening I will see as desubjectifying in the next chapter.46 It is this shock that causes Sensei-as-Watakushi to live ‘as if already dead’ – he enters a new kind of suspension of time he knows to be suffused with death, and only resolvable by recovering the body as a time marker, in the anachronistic suicide.47 The mature Sensei’s realisation of the power of anachronism reaffirms this body shock, and it comes with

Memory and Historiography  83 the cannon at Nogi’s funeral, implying the techno-moral advance that had replaced barbarous corporeal swords with remote weapons – but here felt as a physical force, striking him in the chest (mune ni uchimashita), de-­abstracting his body, putting him back in a non-conjectural world.48 Unearthing buried memories, the cannon sounds like ‘an elegy for an age which had passed. When I thought about it later, it could also have been a salute to General Nogi. Taking the Special Edition, without thinking I said to my wife, “Junshi! Junshi!”’49 In the anachronistic suicide, then, personal memory can detach from conjectural demands, and the past can exist as past, without being ­abstracted into an overarching continuity.50 Memory can be seen returning actual pasts into the flow of continuity: [I]’d forgotten the term junshi. There had been no need to use it, and it had sunk to the bottom of my memory, like something which had rotted away. When I heard my wife joking I remembered, and turned to her and answered, if I commit junshi, it’s really junshi for the spirit of Meiji.51 Moreover to look back on an era now associated with continuous adjustment is to sense that the determinations of Meiji historiography have now left people ‘living on after [ikinokotte iru]’.52 To realise this ‘afterness’ is to realise that staged (or property-driven) developmentality is itself historically placeable – and this becomes the basis for a conversion or tenkō in thinking about the relation of self and world.53 It means a realisation of having been suspended from a universalism whose moral foundation is always placed anterior to any moment of experience. And this looks much like the experience of Nachträglichkeit, or belatedness, or ‘afterwardsness’, suggested not long before Kokoro by Freudian ­psychoanalysis – in which an awareness of old memory traces is triggered by a new event, forcing a reconsideration of the past, or a realisation that an ‘editing’ process has been needed to produce a continuity of memory.54 Something like this is noted by Karatani’s Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen/The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980), which describes how after returning from London ‘Sōseki appeared obsessed with the phenomenon of the “belated” [okure] nature of choice’, an obsession bound up with his ‘sense that he had been “cheated” by English literature [eibungaku]’.55 This is what I am suggesting should be added to the staged historiography transmitted by early Meiji elites – but it also now stands relative to the discipline of English firming up during Natsume’s ryūgaku (and reaching fruition in Cambridge in the 1920s with figures like I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis). Relative to the canonicity of English – a canonicity that can, I have argued, be understood as the cultural expression of the British constitution – reading experience is always belated, always catching up to standards of value that are anterior to the reading and can never quite be

84  Modernism as Reaction grasped. If generally ‘belatedness’ is forced on peripheral regions by capitalism’s need for uneven development, a fundamental belatedness is also made an existential condition by the globalisation of staged historiography in the British Empire. Empire ‘canonises’ the ideal anterior of Greenwich Mean Time, ground zero of the techno-moral mission recognised by ­nineteenth-century ­Japanese naval desires, and a producer of belatedness, and the ­Newtonian-Lockean subject has the same anteriority. And for Susan Stanford Friedman, this issue has been inherited by studies of modernist writing – a description of ‘modernity outside the West as “belated”, “derivative”, or “imitative” leaves the West in place as the site of innovation and suggests that the Rest can be at best a diluted, pale, or secondary vision of the “original” modernity’.56 As it happens, before Karatani Nachträglichkeit had also been ­described in terms of writing by Jean Laplanche’s and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s authoritative The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1973/ ), for which it marks a disruption of the subject of linear history that brings ‘access to a new level of meaning… to rework [the subject’s] earlier experiences’, and demands a re-transcription of memory which ‘it has been impossible in the first instance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context’.57 Sensei’s testament is certainly such a re-transcription – it exposes limits of the ‘meaningful context’ and asks for memory to be reframed. The testament’s curation, or its performance, in the framing of the third part of the novel, then suggests something like a modernist estrangement or Verfremdung – it takes experience out of the time in which it has been naturalised.58 Denaturalised, the coming era may not fit staged historiography at all, and it may have a new access to the past. This is something familiar from modernism’s desires for the archaic, but it is particularly charged in this transition from Meiji.

Anachronism, Modernism, Ars Moriendi When Kokoro gives Sensei’s testament up to be curated by Watakushi as editor, it suggests that the production of the previous continuity has involved its own editing processes. Although rarely seen by Anglosphere readers as modernist, this shows clearly modernist effects in the disjunctions and anachronisms pulling away from the continuous progress of a previous era – in Britain associated with Victorian earnestness, misguided pieties, global empires. The memory it returns is ghostly – indeed the last part of the novel is voiced by the dead Sensei – and the dead have grasped some agency from the undead, or the absolutely continuous, with the passing of the era. The flutter of moral panic caused by Nogi’s own anachronistic suicide is picked up on in the foreboding of Watakushi’s father when he hears the news about Nogi, and the h ­ istoriographical shock threatens a redefinition of a national people; Meiji’s death had already, as Jay Rubin puts it, seemed to cohere ‘a larger, more inclusive

Memory and Historiography  85 group than had been spontaneously affected by any previous national event’.59 Like Kokoro, nogimono, or writings on the Nogi a­ ffair, became preoccupied by this question of the animating anachronism. Mori Ōgai, for example, although perceived as a key European importer, moved towards anachronism in his post-Nogi ­stories, returning Nogi’s junshi to suicides in the Kan’ei era (1624–44). The best known of these is probably Mori’s ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’/‘The Testament of Okitsu Yagoemon’, completed on the day of Nogi’s ­funeral and published in Chūō Kōron in October 1912, then followed by a ­modified version in June ’13, and saying much about the historiographical return of the deathly.60 Even more than Natsume, Mori was bound up with the circumstances of Nogi’s suicide. As Surgeon General of the Army, Mori had had a longstanding relationship with Nogi, and the two had studied in Berlin in the late ’80s (after Mori’s early interest in German thinking had been nurtured by the Meirokusha liberal Nishi Amane), and served together in the Russo-Japanese War; Nogi moreover had been consoled on the death of his son during his own campaign by Mori’s poetic expression of the loss.61 On Nogi’s suicide, Mori abandoned current work ­to turn to more or less allegorical historical stories drawing from the form of gaishi, or unofficial narratives of minor samurai, particularly the Hosokawa clan, who by the Kan’ei era had moved west to Kyushu.62 This return to Kyushu, of course, parallels Natsume’s and Watakushi’s, and ‘Okitsu’ in particular returns to Nagasaki, a key British contact zone before the ­Restoration, where traders like Thomas Glover had helped galvanise Sacchō power and had provided Restoration with its technical means. In Mori’s story, in Nagasaki Okitsu meets a ship arriving from Annam (Vietnam) and gets into a disagreement about his choice of treasure for his lord from amongst the imports – agarwood (jinkō, sometimes translated a­ loeswood) – during which he ends up killing a rival in self-­defence.63 After this killing Okitsu, like Nogi and Senseias-Watakushi, requests an order for suicide (in this case seppuku, death by disembowelling), the refusal of which condemns him, like Sensei, to an existence of waiting for death (the ‘empty passage of the days and months’).64 After a long military service leaves him alive, Okitsu takes the opportunity of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of his lord – a delay that, in the first version of ‘Okitsu’ at least, makes the timeline of the story closely comparable to that of Nogi.65 Why, though, would the agarwood be worth such a death? Partly ­because of its redefinition of the relationship between value and time, which is what makes it interesting in the immediately post-Meiji world. The agarwood’s appeal is in its scent when burned during sadō (‘tea ceremony’, a ritual with associations with seppuku and feudal l­oyalty) – which is to say in its mutability, precisely in its inability to act as a store of value over time, in the sense that for Locke had made silver fundamental to national belonging. This gift refuses the property-fixed subject

86  Modernism as Reaction associated with British time, and rather suggests the possibility of a mutable, embodied present. This is what Okitsu’s aggressor Yokota Seibe has missed about this choice of gift: [i]f it were a case of whether we should give or take a province or a castle, then of course we should fight the Date to the bitter end. But was this not just a piece of wood to be burned in the firepot of a room designed for sadō? It was unthinkable to spend so much money on it.66 Sadō as a ritual was also a protection from instrumentalism, a concentration on a shared present that avoided evolutionary and conjectural streamlining, and suggested a mutability that would join the Buddhist stresses of the early Kyoto School in a relocation of the personal present. Where Natsume’s K comes from a background of True Pure Land Buddhism/Jōdo Shinshū, Mori’s Yagoemon echoes Pure Land stories (ōjōden) describing retaking the experience of death.67 Sadō is also dō, or way, a movement not dependent on a world of fixed objects or human instruments, which is to say not obeying the separation of seeing-­ owning subjects from seen-owned objects that defines the progressive in economic terms. In its passingness, the wood pointedly stands outside the flow of the British progressive; and the second version of ‘Okitsu’ (although sometimes rightly described as having less overt thematisation of junshi) hints that its value is in its entanglement with the persons who might in a more British ‘worlding’ have tried to objectify it. The wood’s value is in its refusal to join an object world: [e]ven if the wood were not so highly esteemed, because it is p ­ recisely the rare article [chinpin] I asked you to obtain, it was perfectly proper that you considered it appropriate. If one looked at everything only from a utilitarian [kōriteki] viewpoint, all the things most cherished in this world would go out of existence.68 This ‘utilitarian’, of course, gestures to the tradition carried on by the Mill who had been so influential on early Meiji liberals – the kōri of kōriteki or utilitarian is the kōri of kōrishugi/utilitarianism, and utilitarianism is what now fails. With the end of Meiji, anachronistic mutability returns, and the mutable body is again a measure, opening up to experienced time. This is the sense in which suicide is ‘politicised’, and becomes once more bifū (beautiful custom), an archaic term now contrasted to a Meiji historiography which had seen suicide as barbarous. Mori’s suicide stories then suggest the same kind of historiographical break as Kokoro, and imply a national people reconceived in these terms. So Mori’s ‘Abe ichizoku’ (1913), like other suicide stories, awakens worries about a counter-progressive chain reaction.69 This out-of-timeness  stands as a

Memory and Historiography  87 modernist assertion of other possible histories – as Sensei realises in his melancholic claim not that he is old-fashioned, but that he is ‘an anachronism’.70 Like Natsume, Mori understands this relative to the framework of the Meiji era – in his 1914 retelling of the Sakai Incident of 1868, for example (the incident, as it happens, that delayed Parkes’s trip to Edo/Tokyo to consolidate Britain’s relationship with the new Japanese ­government) – in which natives convicted of attacking foreign soldiers violating han territory ask for seppuku rather than execution at the order of foreign powers.71 And not far from these stories is the restorationist icon of Yoshida Shōin, whose death drive had been a drive to mark the epochal change of thinking forced by British hegemony – and indeed something of this was inherited by Nogi himself, who in youth joined Yoshida’s uncle Tamaki Bunnoshin of Shōka Sonjuku.72 Anachronism, of course, is familiar as a characteristic of modernism, even in Anglophone writing. Ezra Pound, at exactly this point (1912–14) immersing himself in East Asian culture, attempted to build an aesthetics around the determining power of things, which is to say bits of the world that are not property and do not correspond to property-­driven progress – in which interest in things that are not objects Pound comes close to the thinking of the early Kyoto School. But the stakes in J­ apanese modernism are particularly high, and concern the possibility of inhabiting a meaningful time across a whole society. In cultural history, this means a significant reworking of the self of naturalism; and a distancing from naturalism in Natsume and Mori, the two foremost literary powers of the post-war era, accompanies this temporal unsettling.73 A somewhat tragic quest for subjective authenticity had characterised naturalism as early as Futabatei’s Ukigumo, buoyed by the theoretical thesis Shōsetsu shinzui/Essence of the Novel (1885) by Tsubouchi Shōyō, student of Ernest Fenollosa and Walter Scott translator, and a particular influence at Waseda University (as Tokyo Senmongakkō); this had laid the way for a naturalism that would rise to ascendancy within the bundan (­Japanese literary establishment) at the turn of the 1900s, and is often seen as reaching a peak with Tayama’s Futon.74 If, as Mitsuo Nakamura suggests of Shōsetsu shinzui, ‘the “modernity” formed under Western ­influence… succeeded in annihilating the artistic concepts of the past and in replacing them completely’, Natsume’s and Mori’s nogimono can be seen as returning pastness as disjunctive modernism, much like Pound’s 1917 desire for a ‘corrective to the sham traditions of the recent past’, an aesthetic aiming at ‘affirming forgotten standards’.75 Mori had adapted Tsubouchi in the early ’90s and had praised the naturalness of the shishōsetsu, and had added to the form in Maihime/ The Dancing Girl (1890), and there is a defence of naturalism as late as his ‘Chinmoku no tō’/‘The Tower of Silence’ (1910), an allegory of the Kōtoku Incident (the execution of a dozen suspects after an attempt on Emperor Meiji’s life) – in which, for a hypothetical Parsi people,

88  Modernism as Reaction naturalism is a defence against a paranoid and despotic government.76 By this point, though, Mori had already taken a swipe at naturalism’s sordid psychodramas in Uita Sekusuarisu/Vita Sexualis (1909), and Dilworth and others have him giving up on naturalist acceptance in ‘Yo ga Tachiba’ in the same year.77 Never quite a naturalist, Natsume had similar concerns about the movement’s individualist stresses, and moved away from career-establishing early comic stories – Wagahai wa neko de aru/I am a Cat (1905–06) and Botchan (1906) – through a scepticism over naturalism from 1908, to the more overt historiographical challenge of Kokoro.78 Kokoro moreover looks like a direct reworking of Futabatei’s Ukigumo, in which Bunzō, like Sensei-as-Watakushi, struggles to adapt to Tokyo, despite the overblown British ryūgaku credibility of his teacher – who claims to know Herbert Spencer – and loses a romantic contest to Noboru, whose name puns on ‘advance’.79 In Ukigumo characters’ chances are more or less made to track, albeit tragically, a Meiji Enlightenment faith in Smilesian industry; in Kokoro this Smilesian self-bettering hits its historiographical limit.80 In Ukigumo the young progressive Osei arbitrates between male claims more or less according to their liberal Anglophile credentials; in Kokoro Ojōsan/Shizu is the one who encourages death by junshi.81 Ukigumo’s environment indeed is like the environment of Sensei’s youth, with the rise of the ‘modern, individual self’ of the late ’80s and early ’90s – the naturalist environment Kokoro’s ‘outer’ frame seeks to recreate.82 Naturalism for Masao Miyoshi was Japan’s first modern literature, since it was built on a European sensibility (it provided local content for ‘global’ form), and it was predicated on a true self uncovered through ‘absolute sincerity… [that] banishes fiction as outright deception’ – but the post-Meiji Natsume and Mori stood markedly against any such search for a true self and any such banishment of fiction, rather arguing, as Miyoshi puts it, ‘strongly against fiction’s abandonment of fictionality’, and foregrounding the assumptions on which a continuous memory had been based.83 This kind of modernist disjunction, or denaturalisation, of Meiji’s ‘sham traditions’, to borrow Pound’s phrase, was made urgent by the potential for tenkō, or political conversion, that followed the Meiji era but had been in the air since the war, in some ways standing relative to Japanese modernism as the temporal shock of the Great War stands relative to British and European modernism.84 The immediately post-war environment saw major domestic unrest (the ‘Hibiya Riots’, protesting the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth), and fed into an aggressive new confidence and imperial policy in Taiwan and Korea, and a ‘campaign of re-indoctrination’ by the government.85 As Shuichi Kato discusses, though, the post-war environment also saw a massification of literacy and an expansion of university education – as, eventually, would British reforms following the Great War – setting the stage for a modernist

Memory and Historiography  89 negotiation of disruption.86 Banno Junji describes the Russo-­Japanese War as ‘total’ in a new way, with a widespread call-up across classes and large tax raises, leading to an enforced reconsideration of the form of the people.87 Where Fukuzawa’s Burton had suggested a faith in the global trading empire system to maintain a wider peace under the management of the greatest empire, Britain, the Russo-Japanese War suggested a fading of the historiographical certainty of this peace. Something of this was perceived by Mori, who began collecting materials for his H ­ osokawa stories around this point, years before Nogi’s suicide.88 Mori moreover hints at a historiography of death as interruption in ‘Mōsō’/­‘Delusions’ (1911; translated by Richard Bowring as ‘Daydreams’), in which a narrator (typically glossed by commentators as Mori himself) reconsiders his own lack of fear, reflecting that he has known since childhood that [b]ecause I had been born into a samurai family, I had to be ­prepared to commit suicide. I remember thinking that this might well involve some physical pain that would just have to be endured. Well, then, perhaps I am a “barbarian”.89 This modernist crux of the post-war era environment is described in Natsume’s Shumi no Iden/The Heredity of Taste (1906), which perceives a new barbarism in Shinbashi (a centre of modern development and the pivot of the Tōyoko railway in 1872), where a crowd have assembled to celebrate the victory and greet the ‘grubby and wretched soldiers’.90 Natsume’s story unfolds a desire to retrace and reinscribe the developmental passage to this point, with the face of one soldier triggering a memory from Port Arthur of a dead Kōsan, envisioned carrying the regimental flag – the responsibility that had led Nogi to his condition of limbo, now nearing an end.91 The resulting crisis of linear history also found an answer in state power and a kind of revived traditionalism, the official push to a rationalised Shintō for example.92 Natsume’s push is not ‘traditionalist’ though; or, it does not conceive of a tradition free from modernity – it is more historiographically serious and has more in common with the Anglophone modernism of the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. W.B. Yeats’s perennial sense of a civilizational unwinding, for example, his fear that signs like the 1916 Irish uprising signalled the end of a great era (and for that matter his eye on the world of Newton and Locke).93 Or James Joyce’s ‘general preoccupation with the collapse of progressive theories of history’; or D.H. Lawrence’s ‘attract[ion] to the idea of an antique wisdom occluded or suppressed by centuries of European civilization’; or Virginia Woolf’s struggle with the representational challenges of the great interruption of the war.94 As is widely accepted, the trauma of the Great War helped confirm a return to ‘cyclical and

90  Modernism as Reaction degenerative theories’ within British early modernism, in the influence, for example, of J.G. Frazer, who drew from the Scoto-­British ambivalence of Scott and Stevenson, and stressed biological mutability in a way that would become central to the mythopoeia of T.S. Eliot.95 Pound’s demand to make it new was really a call to anachronism, meaning a disruptive return of an unmediated past within a naturalist continuity, in something like the way in which, for Kyoto School founder Nishida Kitarō, ‘the return of the past [fukko] always meant a renewal [ishin]’.96 But in terms of the critique of imperial development specifically, surely closest to Natsume’s concern with the fall of unifying time was the turn of the century Joseph Conrad – himself influenced by ­Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Pacific – in Alamayer’s Folly (1895), and especially, Heart of Darkness (1899).97 Natsume and Conrad also project a thematics of development onto another thematics of light and dark, and the native workers of Heart of Darkness fade into the dark much as would K in Kokoro: ‘[t]hey were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom’.98 More generally Heart of Darkness shares much with Kokoro’s de-­ enlightening, its journey through refractions and shadows collapsing the story of stages of civilization; it was published in Blackwood’s a few months before Natsume arrived in London, and turned the imperial beacon into the city of Natsume’s grey ryūgaku, ‘one of the dark places of the earth’ – and moreover underscored the historiographical fall by originating its journey in Greenwich, zero-point of clock time and naval logistics, but now pointedly lacking a historiographical unity.99 Shumi no Iden had already used Conrad-like language to describe an irruption of barbarism at the peak of Japan’s Meiji achievement in its ‘world’ war – in the ‘great slaughterhouse on the plains to the north of the Asian continent’, where demonic forces ‘walking on the edge of the black clouds, shouted “Eat the flesh!”’100 Dennis Washburn has noted a possible link between Conrad’s excoriation of colonial exploitation and Kokoro – Sensei’s ‘being forced to gaze into the dark void of discontinuity evokes… the image of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and recalls the apocalyptic sense of the self that Sōseki shared with British writers at the end of the last century’.101 For Etō Jun, there is an influence from the British 1890s, the decadent movement particularly, itself gesturing to a civilizational crisis, and connecting to Natsume’s rejection of his given role as ‘commander of English literature’.102 Or for David Pollack: [i]n exploring the possibilities of a Japanese “self” that might correspond to a presumed Western one, Sōseki discovered at its “heart” (kokoro) much the same darkness that Joseph Conrad did in Heart of Darkness, published in 1902 [in single-volume form], near the end of Sōseki’s two-year stay in London’.103

Memory and Historiography  91 None of these important hints at Conrad in Natsume, however, place Heart of Darkness relative to the unravelling of British temporalities of empire, and correspondingly they tend to underplay Kokoro’s historiographical critique, and its historical challenge as modernism. It is true that Natsume’s and Mori’s stories at first glance share little with the Anglosphere understanding of formal modernism; and much of the most interesting commentary on Japanese modernism has been complicit in the assumption that the modernist form is only ever imported – for example Roy Starrs’s 2011 reading of Gennifer Wiesenfeld’s account of Mavo, mid-1920s Tokyo-based activists adapting an interest in Italian futurism to one in Russian constructivism and seeming to mark the coming of high modernism.104 Nor did many of the attempts to expand modernist studies in the 2000s take very seriously the kinds of expression of discontinuity that suggested ‘illiberal’ visions of history, which remain institutionally hard to swallow. Books like Kokoro, suffusing its narrative with a deathly non-continuous time, certainly do suggest a modernist challenge, but one that the stakes of liberal historiography would make it hard for Anglophone commentators to read as modernism. A serious approach to this would, as Susan Stanford Friedman describes, begin with the challenge and read modernist form from it – rather than trying to track the import of modernist form, it would ‘turn to the specificities of a given modernity and then ask what creative forms it produced’.105 Nevertheless, Natsume’s and Mori’s 1910s challenges do dovetail with more recognisably modernist Japanese concerns with speed, the cinematic, and so on, like those of Kitagawa Fuyuhiko and Yokomitsu Riichi; and, as it happens, Mori had himself translated the Futurist Manifesto in March 1909 (long before Mavo’s interest), before moving to the more obviously archaic form of the 1912–’18 suicide stories – and yet for Doris Bargen it is the Nogi episode that gives him a ‘modern sensibility’.106 Karatani suggests, moreover, that there is a juxtaposition of fragments in ‘Okitsu’ that lacks a perspectival vanishing point and gives it something of a collage form.107 Suicide as a historiographical weapon would go on delivering hints of the archaic throughout the long post-Meiji ‘interregnum’ that ­David Williams sees as not finding a tenkō till the Pacific War. The historiographical deathly would be taken up by the Kyoto School’s 1920s repurposing of Martin Heidegger’s imperative to live with authenticity, or Eigentlichkeit, with an everyday consciousness of death structuring experience.108 Some Kyoto figures would understand Eigentlichkeit as forcing a person to live with constant subjective interruption. And something similar would be taken from Kyoto Buddhism for the Pacific War effort, as in Tanabe Hajime’s ‘notorious’ (‘Zen nationalist’) encouragement to drafted students to grasp their own death.109 In literary productions, a similar death would pass in some form through Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Dazai Osamu, and eventually and most familiarly Mishima Yukio, whose ‘Yūkoku’/‘Patriotism’ (1961) aestheticises the temporal

92  Modernism as Reaction focus perceived by a pre-seppuku soldier and his wife (pointedly not joined by romantic love or competitive individual choice), following the failure of the 1936 army coup (the ‘2–26 incident’).110 By the time of Mishima’s story, the historiographical suicide has turned into a kind of deathly erotic, in which death focuses an intensified awareness in the present to allow the soldier to ‘fill every moment of his time without gaps with the creak of [his wife’s] soles. The time began to give off glimmers like a jewel’.111 Unsurprisingly given its overtly ‘fascistic’ thematisation of death in 2–26, Mishima’s performance of his own suicide has tended to be seen more as a source of embarrassment than one of historiographical critique: Yamazaki Masazaku describes its tastelessness, Ian Buruma its looking ‘the way a tourist imagines a true Japanese should know how to die’, Harootunian its performance as ‘simply another commodity that was rapidly consumed and forgotten’, and, perhaps most damningly, Karatani its farce to the Meiji suicides’ tragedy.112 The point of descriptions of this performance as overblown is well taken – but to an extent such diagnoses risk missing the way that when directed at the demands of British liberal historiography on the productive body, suicide is always an anachronism, always out of time or belated, always something like a quotation of another time.113 The out-of-timeness of the modernist death in Mori and Natsume indeed has sometimes been recognised – Washburn for example has Mori ask ‘why someone he admired would choose to end his life in such an anachronistic manner’.114 What has not been recognised is British historiography’s fear of anachronism, its determination to mediate pasts into an abstracted continuity. The unmediated past wrecks conjectural history; for Lockean liberalism, it means a crime against value, for ­neoliberalism it means terminologies and behaviours that contravene the dynamic expansion of individual sovereignty. The tendency for dead pasts to return to haunt the empty presents of neoliberalism has even inspired the sub-field of hauntology, a field specific to Britain and describing the ghostly traces of half-forgotten fragments and the lost futures they imply.115 The lost memories of Natsume and Mori return with something of this haunting, and bring with them the hint of other possible histories. Increasingly Japanese modernism would suggest that conjectural history is only one possible temporality – and the developmental faith that it outgrows would eventually morph into, in the phrase popularised by the 2008 financial crisis, ‘zombie capitalism’ – the phase of capitalism that needs special measures to stop workers from committing suicide, leaving them, like Sensei, to live on.116 Revisiting this conversion to staged historiography also suggests there can be a conversion away from it (and there was some talk of a ‘Taishō Restoration’).117 None of this, of course, is to idealise suicide in general – the ­anachronistic suicide can only carry historiographical weight relative to specific ‘post-conjectural’ circumstances. But if Anglophone readers find a degree

Memory and Historiography  93 of strangeness in these characters’ rushing towards their own deaths over matters as apparently trivial as pieces of wood, nevertheless it is worth considering a comparable strangeness in the demand that people never make final decisions over their own bodies. Locke and fellow activists had understood that those who broke natural law, who violated the rational progressive use of the owned body to create property, had proven themselves incapable of the abstraction that would qualify them as human.118 This is a paradoxical taboo, though – to own the body and exchange its labour is in Lockean thinking to become free, but not free enough to decide on this condition of the body itself. British public institutions correspondingly have to enforce a sweeping taboo over destroying the source of value, something that eventually becomes very obvious in a neoliberal (or ‘neo-Lockean’) era. Suicide can only ever be an aberration, or a mental dysfunction. In the UK, suicide prevention has warranted a dedicated Minister since October 2018, and is managed by a wide umbrella of state institutions.119 The Zero Suicide Alliance, for example, which is sponsored by National Health Service management bodies, and aims to ‘rid the UK of suicide’ – doing so oddly echoing the modern innovators of a productive labour rationale: [t]he concept of zero suicide is inspired by the Henry Ford system in Detroit, which began a programme of screening every patient for risk of suicide, not just those with mental health issues, in 2001 and enjoyed significant results… The Zero Suicide Alliance aims to challenge the thinking that simply reducing suicide rates is enough. The Zero Suicide Alliance believes that no death by suicide should be regarded as either acceptable or inevitable.120 The anachronistic death is uncomfortable in part because it is exactly what British subjectivity has to deny. The shadowiness spreading from K’s corpse introduces an indeterminate zone into the progressive separation of owning subjects and objects as property. This shadowiness appears often in early twentieth-century Japanese writing, though it is something elusive for British modernism, which always seems to be called back to the blinding light of subjectivity. And to this blinding subjectivity, and its Japanese modernist responses, I turn next.

Notes 1 Here English Literature means not only literature in English but also a canonicity, codified between around the 1860s and the 1920s, building out from ‘England’ as an ideal rather than a place. Much of this is carried by the term eibungaku/English Literature, in which ei covers both English language and Britishness. On anti-ryūgaku, cf. Ara Masahito, Natsume Sōseki nyūmon (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967), 103–06. 2 Cf. Natsume Sōseki, ‘Watakushi no kojinshugi’, Nihon kindai bungaku zenshū, Vol. 11 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1954), 396–416; translated by Sammy I. Tsunematsu as ‘My Individualism’, in My Individualism and

94  Modernism as Reaction The Philosophical Foundations of Literature (Boston, MA: Tuttle, 2004), 25–57: 33–35; ‘in no part of the world, are people both as free and as policed’, 48. ‘Watakushi no Kojinshugi’ closely follows Kokoro and is based on lectures at Gakushūin, where Nogi was President in 1907–12 till his death, and argues that we should have a self but not be selfish – cf. David Pollack, Reading Against Culture: Ideology and Narrative in the Japanese Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 62–63; Dennis Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 169. A reminiscence of Craig is Natsume Sōseki, ‘Kurēgu Sensei’, Zenshū, Vol. 12 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2017), 208–17; Natsume Sōseki, trans. Sammy I. Tsunematsu, ‘Craig Sensei’, in Spring Miscellany and other London Essays (Boston, MA: Tuttle, 2002 (1909)), 110–18; an alternative translation is in ed. and trans. Damian Flanagan, The Tower of London (London: Peter Owen, 2004), 152–59; cf. Kii Nakano, ‘Sōseki’s Stay in London’, in Natsume Sōseki, eds. Kii Nakano and Peter Milward, The Tower of London (Brighton: In Print, 1992), 11–20; Deguchi Yasuo, Sōseki to fuyukai na Rondon (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobō, 2006), 72–84; cf. Etō Jun, Natsume to sono jidai, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1970), 82–96. At Tokyo Imperial University, Natsume had been taught by James Main Dixon, a leading scholar of Scots language who had gone there from Dyer’s Kōbu Daigakkō. 3 Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 169–70. On the idea that the question kindai to wa nanika/what is modernity (concerning a coming to subjectivity or otherwise) is also the question what is Japan?, cf. Richard F. Calichman, Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 155. 4 Cf. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 56–58; Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 49–54; Natsume Sōseki, ‘Shinkei suijaku to Bungakuron,’ Ketteiban (Tokyo: Shinchū bunko, 1986 (n.d.)), 40–49; Ara, Natsume Sōseki nyūmon, 108; Kobayashi Toshiaki, Yūutsu naru Sōseki (Tokyo: ­S erika Shobō, 2016), 288–98. 5 For example Etō Jun, Natsume Sōseki to sono jidai, Vol. 2, 38–51, 129–80, 198–210; also Natsume Sōseki (Tokyo: Tōkyō Raifu, 1956) (in which the author’s name is given in furigana as Atsushi). In writings on London, Natsume’s environment is often described in light-and-dark terms, the streets are foggy, and his accommodation is insan/sad (literally, shadow and sadness). 6 D. Cuong O’Neill, ‘Tragedy, Masochism, and Other Worldly Pleasures: Reading Natsume Sōseki’s “Bungakuron”’, Discourse 28(2/3), Spring/Fall 2006, 78–97: 90–93; cf. ‘Introduction: Natsume Sōseki and the Ten-Year Project’, in eds. Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 1–36: 27–28; on the influence of ‘English sociology, which mixed together classical liberalism, utilitarianism, and Social Darwinism’, 13. On the need to deal with the ‘scientific’ of literature, cf. Komori Yōichi, Sōseki o yominaosu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho, 1995), 87–107; on London and the battle with English, 58–70; Komori also importantly quotes Tomiyama Takao on how (as is later overlooked by O’Neill) English Literature/eibungaku did not yet properly exist at this point, suggesting another take on Natsume’s understanding of disciplinarity, 67–68; cf. Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 13–14. 7 Karatani Kōjin, ‘Senzen’ no Shisō/ Pre-War Thought (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001), 195. Some others have pointed out that Natsume had troubled

Memory and Historiography  95 mental health since the 1890s, as in Kato, trans. Sanderson, A History of Japanese Literature, Vol.3, 135–36; Natsume is said to have taken a ‘Zen health break’ in 1894. 8 Karatani, ‘Senzen’ no Shisō, 193–94; he also notes that any attempt to separate the naihatsuteki and the gaihatsuteki is superficial, and this characterises wakon yōsai, associated above with the moment of Sakuma Shōzan, 196; cf. Alan Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 23, 27. 9 Karatani, ‘Senzen’ no Shisō, 194–96; cf. Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 101; Karatani, trans. de Bary, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 76. 10 Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 334. 11 Brett de Bary, ‘Karatani Kōjin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature’, in eds. Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991 (1989)), 235–57: 237–39; de Bary uses ‘inversion’ for tentō. 12 De Bary, ‘Karatani Kōjin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature’, 240– 41; Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 21; here I follow de Bary’s translation, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 16. 13 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 210, 213–14; on a ‘memory industry’, 218–21. For Harootunian’s Benjamin, a historicist conception of continuous progress obeys a logic of the commodity – Harry Harootunian, ­History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 101. Name (H.D. or Harry) follows the use in publications. 14 Cf. Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth Century Japan, 19. 15 Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978 (1763)), 14. Albert M. Craig recognises this – Civilization and Enlightenment, 15–18. 16 Cf. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment, 71–77; Murray Pittock, ‘Historiography’, in ed. Alexander Broadie, The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 258–79: 260. 17 William Robertson, The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1842 (1777)), 1; cf. Burton, Political Economy, 57–71. 18 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 (1748)), 76. On similar empiricist historiography in Adam Smith, cf. ed. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology, 649; ‘human nature’ allowed physical principles to be ‘translated’ to institutions, and ‘applied to the modes of government’, 672; cf. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (London: Penguin, 2003 (1776)), 479–84; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (1767)), 80–81. On the importance of ‘evolutionary’ history, cf. Craig, Intending Scotland, especially 99–118. On anthropology, a ‘core commitment to examining man in his rude state and using a variety of sources to access the said state in order to anchor a historical account of human nature’, cf. Aaron Garrett, ‘Anthropology: the “original” of human nature’, in ed. Broadie, The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, 79–93: 89. For Robertson, an accumulation of data would lead to the discovery of ‘the existence of constant and universal principles of human nature’ – ed. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology, 675–76, discussing Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth (1769).

96  Modernism as Reaction 19 Constantine George Caffentzis, Clipped Coins: Abused Words and Civil Government, John Locke’s Philosophy of Money (New York: A ­ utonomedia, 1989), 52–53. 20 Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, 53–54; on the binding of the relationship between present property and future pleasure, 81. 21 Natsume also worries over memory as a key to the awareness behind an I – Natsume, trans. Tsunematsu, My ­Individualism, 74. 22 Quoted in ed. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology, 675– 76; cf. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the ­Historical Nation, 77. 23 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 23. 24 Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.’, in Adam Smith, eds. W.P.D. Wightman, J.C. Bryce, and I.S. Ross, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980 (1793)), 292–96. On Newton, Locke, and Smith, cf. Stewart, Collected Works, Vol. 1, 287–313; Stewart, ‘Theoretical or Conjectural History’, excerpted in ed. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology, 669–74: 670–71; cf. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain, 263. 25 Letter from Palmerston to Russell, 5 Oct 1864, cited in Ridley, Lord Palmerston, 543; cf. Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation, 75. 26 Takii, The Meiji Constitution, 33; and ‘nothing is better than a museum for showing clearly the stages by which these processes happen’, 34. It is worth noting that the Japanese calendar was reformed a few months later. 27 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 221–24. 28 Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (­Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983), 223; and the Nogi suicide was the ‘perfect climax to the Meiji pageant’, 222; Idota Hiroshi, Nogi Maresuke Junshi/Ikō (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha, 1989), 31–37. Sharalyn Orbaugh points out that all accounts are influenced by Nogi’s own death poems, establishing the idea that he had been looking for a way to die since 1877 – ‘General Nogi’s Wife: Representations of Women in Narratives of Japanese Modernization’, in eds. Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder, In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 7–31: 11–12. There is a detailed account of Nogi’s suicide poems and testament in Robert Jay Lifton, Shūichi Katō, and Michael R. Reich, Six Lives, Six Deaths: Portraits from Modern Japan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979 (1977 as Nihonjin no shiseikan)), 29–66: 31–32. As has sometimes been pointed out, Nogi describes jisatsu rather than junshi, although junshi does indeed describe his action. There is a translation of and commentary on Nogi’s jisei (‘death poems’) in Doris Bargen, Suicidal Honor: ­General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki ­(Honolulu: U ­ niversity of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 78. 29 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 226. 30 Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding understands perception as a kind of conversion of the world to personal property, and this provides a major basis for the eighteenth-century novel – William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48–51. For Karatani Kōjin, the shishōsetsu expanded after the Russo-Japanese War – Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 166. On the growth of the category of shishōsetsu, cf. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 2–3.

Memory and Historiography  97 31 Cf. Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2010 (1914)), 267–70; Natsume Sōseki, trans. Meredith McKinney, Kokoro (New York: Penguin, 2010 (1914)), 192–93; on romantic love, individualism and naturalism, cf. ­Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 74–76. 32 John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks: Or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances Which Give Rise to Influence and Authority, in the Different Members of Society (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006 (1778)), 169–70. This, partly filtered through J.S. Mill, strongly influences Fukuzawa’s gender politics, cf. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 74–76; Watsuji Tetsurō, trans. Geoffrey Bownas, Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1971 (1961 (1935))), 139. 33 Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 143–44. 34 Natsume, Kokoro, 311; Nastume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 223; ‘K’s dark figure’ is Natsume, Kokoro, 272; Nastume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 216. 35 Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 93. 36 Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 153, 175; Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, xii, 15; cf. xiii; Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 101. Tomi Suzuki moreover suggests that shishōsetsu as a generic marker only came later to be projected backwards, so it was always retrospective, and to associate it with continuity is to interpolate memory – Narrating the Self, 2, 6. 37 Natsume, Kokoro, 16; Nastume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 9–10. 38 Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 15, 171; and Natsume tackled ‘the personal isolation in the larger discontinuities of his historical moment’, so that (glossing Etō Jun) Natsume’s aesthetic belongs ‘at the juncture between his desire to create a more certain identity for himself and his awareness of the larger historical dislocation that Meiji Japan was undergoing’, 166. 39 Natsume, Kokoro, 193–96, 259–61; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 139–40, 186–87. The arsenal’s billows of smoke are also mentioned in the Gakushūin lectures – Natsume, trans. Tsunematsu, My Individualism, 98. 40 For example Natsume, Kokoro, 65–68, 72–73; Natsume, trans. ­McKinney, Kokoro, 43–44, 48–49. 41 Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 46, 48–49. 42 Natsume, Kokoro, 287–89; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 206– 07; cf. Natsume, Kokoro, 249, 219–21; Natsume, trans. McKinney, 179, 158–59; here I follow Meredith McKinney’s translation. Cf. David Pollack, ‘The ­Philosophical Dimensions of Human Nature in Kokoro’, Monumenta ­Nipponica 43–44, 1988, 417–27: 424–25. 43 Natsume, Kokoro, 220–21; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 169. 44 Natsume, Kokoro, 36; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 23. 45 Natsume, Kokoro, 301–03; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 216–17. 46 Natsume, Kokoro, 302–03, 307; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 217, 220; Pollack, ‘The Philosophical Dimensions of Human Nature in Kokoro’, 417–19; cf. Pollack, Reading Against Culture – Natsume is exploring the dark side of bunmei kaika, 53. 47 Natsume, Kokoro, 320; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 229. 48 Natsume, Kokoro, 323; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 231. 49 Natsume, Kokoro, 324; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 232. 50 A common criticism of Japanese ‘reactionary modernism’ is that it claims to revitalise what is ‘lost’, but that this is only what is becoming the ‘past’ for the first time; however seeing a dissociation with staged time would suggest that real pasts have to be unearthed – and I suggest below that this

98  Modernism as Reaction is a decoupling from a totality rather than a promise of a totality. On the memorialisation of Nogi, cf. Idota, Nogi Maresuke junshi/ikō, 195–208. 51 Natsume, Kokoro, 324; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 232. 52 Natsume, Kokoro, 323; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 231. 53 David Williams usefully glosses tenkō as ‘a sense of an age coming to its inevitable finish, of time reaching its end’ – The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 101–03; ‘[t]he old dispensation has fled. In the Confucian tradition, this signals to those most intensely involved in the now dead regime that it is time to depart because the toku one struggled so assiduously to maintain and keep vibrant is now, in every sense, passé. Thus the hour of the blade arrives’ – 101–02. Some Kyoto School writers would agree with Heidegger in seeing the failure to perceive the ends of time as a failure of authenticity – cf. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 100. 54 Cf. Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 174. 55 Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 51; here I follow Bret de Bary’s translation – The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 38; eibungaku is rendered as non-capitalised, ‘English literature’, suggesting literature in English, though there is also a case for the capitalised, which is to say the institutional form. Karatani’s book became widely known in the Anglosphere after this 1993 translation and branding for the North American academy by a foreword by Frederic Jameson (Jameson is clear that the book is not for readers of English but for ‘North American readers’). Karatani also describes Natsume’s Bungakuron as rejecting the ‘universal character of English literature,’ and senses that he has been cheated by it – Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 15; Karatani, trans. de Bary, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 12. On Natsume and English, cf. O’Neill, ‘Tragedy, Masochism, and Other Worldly Pleasures’, 78–98: 78; ‘deceived by ­English’, 91. 56 Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 140. 57 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (London: Karnac, 1988 (1973)), 112. 58 Cf. Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 181. 59 Natsume, Kokoro, 148; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 102; cf. ­Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 173. On newspaper reactions, cf. Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, 221–23. On fears of a fetishisation of suicide at the time, for example surrounding Arishima Takeo’s Aru onna (A Certain Woman) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995 (1911–13/1919)), cf. Kato, trans. Sanderson, A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3, 184–85; Isamu Fukuchi, ‘Kokoro and “the Spirit of Meiji”’, Monumenta Nipponica 48–4, 1993, 469–88: 485; Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 220. 60 Mori Ōgai, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, Ōgai Rekishi bungaku shu, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2000 (1912)), 1–22; Mori, trans. Richard Bowring, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’ (first version), in eds. David Dilworth and J. Thomas Rimer, The Historical Fiction of Mori Ōgai (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1991 (1977)), 47–52; also archived at: http:// www.­aozora.gr.jp/cards/000129/files/45209_30640.html. Here I follow Bowring’s translation and the archived unpaginated Japanese original, first version unless specified. 61 Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 59; cf. Matsushita Yoshio, Nogi Maresuke ­(Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1985 (1960)), 41–69. 62 Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 85; cf. Atsuko Sasaki, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Texts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 39. On the importance of Nogi’s junshi to the turn to historical fiction in Mori, cf. Washburn, The Dilemma of the ­Modern, 33–34. Cf. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 47.

Memory and Historiography  99 63 Mori, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, n.p.; Mori, trans. Bowring, ‘Okitsu ­Yagoemon no isho’, 49. 64 Mori, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, n.p.; Mori, trans. Bowring, ‘Okitsu ­Yagoemon no isho’ (second version, 1913), 59. 65 Mori, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, n.p.; Mori, trans. Bowring, ‘Okitsu ­Yagoemon no isho’, 47; and the preface to the second version – ‘I do not know how old Okitsu was when he died, but…’, 52. Mori’s 1915 ‘Rekishi sono mama to rekishibanare’/‘History as it is and History Ignored’ would reconsider the historical licence in the first ‘Okitsu’, equating his waiting period with that of Nogi, since the historical should imply the contingent, or in our terms the ‘non-conjectural’; cf. Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 192; eds. Dilworth and Rimer, The Historical Fiction of Mori Ōgai, 6. 66 Mori, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, n.p.; Mori, trans. Bowring, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, 48. 67 Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 90. 68 Mori, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, n.p.; Mori, trans. Bowring, ‘Okitsu ­Yagoemon no isho’, 56–57. 69 Mori Ōgai, ‘Abe ichizoku’, Ōgai rekishi bungaku shū, Vol. 2, 23–82; Mori,  trans. David Dilworth, ‘The Abe Family’, in eds. Dilworth and Rimer, The Historical Fiction of Mori Ōgai, 65–99: 81; Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 28–29, 161. 70 Natsume, Kokoro, 323; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 231; here I follow McKinney’s translation; cf. Fukuchi, ‘Kokoro and “the Spirit of Meiji”’, 485. 71 Mori, trans. David Dilworth, ‘The Incident at Sakai’ (‘Sakai Jiken’), in eds. Dilworth and Rimer, The Historical Fiction of Mori Ōgai, 129–51: 140– 46; cf. Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 140; on seppuku as virtuosity in ‘Sakai Jiken’, 145. On Parkes’s trip, cf. Gordon Daniels, ‘The British Role in the Meiji Restoration’, 310–11. 72 Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 33–34, 37–38; cf. Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration, 156. This can be related to the title of the book, the question of whether the bakufu has heart. On Yoshida Shōin’s understanding of will to act as kokoro, Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 224. 73 Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 73–74; cf. Yoshida Seiichi, Sakushū 4: Ōgai to Sōseki (Tokyo: Ōfū, 1981), 157–73. 74 Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan, 24; Beongcheon Yu, Natsume Sōseki (New York: Twayne, 1969), 20. On naturalism and shishōsetsu, cf. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 72–73. On the rise of naturalism and shishōsetsu by the early ’20s, William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 20. On Tsubouchi’s influence at Waseda, Kato, trans. Sanderson, A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3, 160. Japanese specialists have frequently warned about seeing naturalism, meaning the European movement, as equal to Japanese nachurarizumu (which is nevertheless also usually rendered naturalism, as I do here) – cf. Yu, Natsume Sōseki, 21; Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 1; Mori Ōgai trans. Helen Hopper, ‘Chinmoku no tō’, in ed. Thomas Rimer, Youth and Other Stories (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 215–222: 217; Kato, trans. Sanderson, A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3, 164. It has to be accepted that the term has a different etymology and is less about scientific verifiability than it is about personal sincerity – but in terms of the subjectivity of the author/­protagonist, this has a similar result. 75 Nakamura, Japanese Fiction in the Meiji Era, 8, 36; Andrzej Gasiorek, A History of Modernist Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015), 96, 161–66, 170–71.

100  Modernism as Reaction 76 Mori Ōgai, ‘Chinmoku no tō’ (1910), archived at: https://www.aozora. gr.jp/cards/000129/files/3336_23054.html; translated as ‘Tower of Silence’, in Mori, ed. Rimer, Youth and Other Stories, 216–30. On Maihime, Dilworth and Rimer, The Historical Fiction of Mori Ōgai, 21–22. 77 Mori Ōgai, Uita sekusuarisu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1993 (1909)); Dilworth, ‘The Significance of Ōgai’s Historical Literature’, in eds. Dilworth and Rimer, The Historical Fiction of Mori Ōgai 12–42: 4; cf. Mori Ōgai, Seinen ­(Tokyo: Iwanami, 2017 (1910)). 78 Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905– 1931 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 19–20; Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 89. 79 On Bunzō’s coming to Tokyo, Futabatei, Ukigumo, 13–23; on Noboru’s advance and his performance of liberalism, 67–68; on Ishida’s credentials in Britain (Ryan – ‘England’), 104–05; he is on nodding terms with Spencer but doubts if Spencer will recognise him after the years, and he knows ‘the splendor of the Parliament buildings, London’s prosperity, the colourful horses and carriages, the menus, the clothing and canes and shows… [o]n the other hand, he knew nothing at all about Japanese life’, Futabatei, trans. Ryan, Ukigumo: Japan’s First Modern Novel, 277. 80 Ryan, Ukigumo: Japan’s First Modern Novel, 171. 81 On Osei’s Anglophile education through Bunzō, Futabatei, Ukigumo, ­21–23; cf. Ryan, Ukigumo: Japan’s First Modern Novel, 175. 82 On the ‘modern, individual self’, Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 8. 83 Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 73–74. Dennis Washburn suggests origins for the fall of naturalism as far back as the Russo-Japanese War – The Dilemma of the Modern, 115; on Natsume’s description in ‘Bungei to dōtoku’ (1911) of a sense of a long naturalist domination, 168. Cf. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 90; on a reading of the shishōsetsu that suggests that fiction is un-Japanese and affirms a mythology of Japanese immediacy, 3–4; on Maruyama Masao’s (1949) idea that ‘the west’ mediates reality, 4. 84 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 118; Carol Gluck – post-1900s ideology is not just ‘mechanical and Newtonian’, Japan’s Modern Myths, 29. 85 Cf. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 271; Sharon Minichiello, ‘Introduction’, in ed. Minichiello, Japan’s Competing Modernities, 1–21: 4–5; ­Rotem Kowner, ‘The War as a Turning Point in Modern Japanese History’, in ed. Kowner, The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 29–46: 29, 36. On the buildup to the war and the need for an Anglo-Japanese Alliance, cf. T.G. Otte, ‘The fragmenting of the old world order: Britain, the Great Powers, and the war’, in ed. Kowner, The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War, 91–108. 86 Kato, trans. Sanderson, A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3, 191–92. 87 Banno, trans. Stockwin, Japan’s Modern History, 136–40. 88 Burton, Political Economy, 18–20; Washburn, The Dilemma of the ­Modern, 189; Mori also turned to waka and ‘national’ forms during the Russian War. 89 Mori Ōgai, ‘Mōsō’, Zenshū, Vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1972), 195–217; Mori, trans. Richard Bowring, ‘Delusions’, in ‘Youth’ and Other Stories, 167–81: 170, 171. Here I follow Bowring’s translation. 90 Natsume Sōseki, ‘Shumi no iden’, Zenshū, Vol. 2, 183–246; trans. Sammy I. Tsunematsu as The Heredity of Taste (Boston, MA: Tuttle, 2004 (1904)), 10, 22–24, 29; Tsunematsu prefers the orthography ‘Shimbashi’; here and below I follow his translation; on the Tōyoko railway 18 n.1. Cf. Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain, 66. On the loss of soldiers’ goodwill, cf. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 90.

Memory and Historiography  101 91 Nogi himself had been inconspicuous at the January 1906 returning ­parade – Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 59. 92 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 185–86. 93 Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queens University Press, 1993), 171, 173; on Yeats’s rising sense of the apocalyptic after the First World War, cf. 174. 94 Surette, The Birth of Modernism, 38, 70; Woolf, The Voyage Out (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 (1915)). On war and memory, cf. the contributions of Paul Fussell in dir. Adam Curtis, The Living Dead, ­Episode One: On the Desperate Edge of Now, BBC, 1995. 95 Surette, The Birth of Modernism, 67; on an ‘occult’ commitment to the historical as degenerative, 78; cf. Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 156–75; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘A Descent into the Past: The Frontier in the Construction of Japanese History’, in eds. Donald Denoon et al., Multicultural Japan: Paleolithic to Postmodern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81–94: 86; cf. Karen O’Brien, ‘Between Enlightenment and Stadial History: William Robertson on the History of Europe’, in Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 16(1), 1993, 53–64; Craig, Intending Scotland, 112–13; also, ‘Robertson Smith’s and Frazer’s accounts of primitive religion represented a conjectural history of the kind that Dugald Stewart believed to be characteristic of Scottish thinkers of the eighteenth century’, 116. 96 Cf. Surette, The Birth of Modernism, 57–58; Eric Hayot, ‘Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time’, in eds. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms ­(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 149–70: 161; Pound’s Canto 53 – ‘­Tching prayed on the mountain and/ wrote MAKE IT NEW’. On N ­ ishida’s lecture to the emperor, cf. Augustín Jacinto Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past: Tradition and the Political Microcosm in the later Nishida’, in eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 132–48: 144. 97 Gasiorek, A History of Modernist Literature, 80. 98 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 1990 (1899)), 156. 99 Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, 138. 100 Natsume, ‘Shumi no iden’, 185; this partly follows Natsume, trans. Tsunematsu, The Heredity of Taste, 17, spelling modified; and the narrator watching the returning crowds is unable to cheer Banzai!, Natsume, ‘Shumi no iden’, 189–91. 101 Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 175. 102 Etō Jun, Shinpen Etō Jun bungaku shūsei, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1984), 210; Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 171; Fukuchi, ‘Kokoro and “the Spirit of Meiji”’, 482. 103 Pollack, Reading Against Culture, 66. 104 Roy Starrs, Modernism and Japanese Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); Starrs also describes a sense of ‘inheriting’ Western literature, 216. On differences between Japanese experience and the formal patterns of the Western novel, cf. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, xiii. To Mavo William Gardner adds a wider avant-garde movement, including the publications Nihiru and Sekai Shijin – Advertising Tower, 31; the mid-’20s ­environment takes in ‘an imagination of revolution; a strong will toward artistic and personal freedom; a related emphasis on either the daily life of the artist, or… the artist’s very life force; and a rhetoric embracing the seeming opposites of creation/ destruction or affirmation/ negation’, 36.

102  Modernism as Reaction 05 Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 5. 1 106 On Kitagawa and Yokomitsu, cf. William O. Gardner, ‘Japanese Modernism and “Cine-Text”: Fragments and Flows at Empire’s Edge in Kitagawa Fuyuhiko and Yokomitsu Riichi’, in eds. Wollaeger and Eatough, The Oxford Book of Global Modernisms, 571–97: 571; Gardner, as it happens, stresses speed and dynamism in a way that recalls Newtonian motion. Cf. Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 189; Starrs, Modernism and Japanese Culture, 103. 107 Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 220. 108 Chiba Tokuji, Nihonjin wa naze seppuku suru no ka (Tokyo: Sanshūsha, 1994), 81. 109 Yumiko Iida, ‘Constituting Aesthetic/Moral National Space: The Kyoto School and the Place of the Nation’, in ed. Christopher Goto-Jones, Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 75–95: 85; cf. Christopher Ives, ‘Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida’s Philosophy’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 16–39: 27. Tanabe’s address to students in Kyoto University Newspaper, ‘Farewell Words to Students on the Way to War’, is in Tanabe Hajime Zenshū, Vol. 14 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1964), 415–16; discussed in James W. Heisig, ‘Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 255–88: 269–72. This discussion is expanded into journals like Daijōzen in Kita Kiyohide, ‘D.T. Suzuki on Society and the State’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 52–74: 60. On the limits of what he sees as sloganeering, cf. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Kusa no ne no fuashizumu: Nihon minshū no sensō taiken (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1987). On the ‘case against Tanabe’, cf. Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War: The Kyoto School philosophers and post-White power (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 108– 09; cf. Steve Odin, The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 60, 319–20; cf. 64; Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 90 n.21, 204; on the Kyoto School as ‘necrophilic’, 193. 110 Cf. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 225. The Imperial Rescript of 1890 had stressed different principles of harmony for husband and wife, and this has more to do with the long tradition from which Mishima draws – cf. Pollack, ‘The Philosophical Dimensions of Human Nature in Kokoro’, 417. 111 Mishima Yukio, ‘Yūkoku’, in Mishima, Zenshū, Vol. 20 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000–06), 13–39: 25; cf. Lifton, Katō, and Reich, Six Lives, Six Deaths, 231–74, esp. 264–65. 112 Yamazaki Masazaku and Ian Buruma quoted in Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan, 43–44; Karatani quoted in Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 197–98; Harry Harootunian, ‘Constitutive Ambiguities: The Persistence of Modernism and Fascism in Japan’s Modern History’, in ed. Alan Tansman, The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 80–111: 107. A more sympathetic account is in Lifton, Katō, and Reich, Six Lives, Six Deaths, 231–74. 113 Something of this is hinted at, albeit pejoratively, in Wolfe’s description of ‘Mishima’s atavistic “postmodern” suicidal gesture’ – Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan, xv. 114 Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 189; Bargen, Suicidal Honor, 60, 86. 115 For example Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zer0, 2014).

Memory and Historiography  103 116 As miira – mummies – Natsume, Kokoro, 168; Natume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 121. On suicide prevention in post-2008 capitalism, cf. Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working (Winchester: Zer0, 2012). 117 On suicide as ‘revitalisation’, cf. Lifton, Katō and Reich, Six Lives, Six Deaths, 280–81. On calls for a ‘Taishō Restoration’, George M. Wilson, ‘Restoration History and Shōwa Politics’, in ed. Wilson, Crisis Politics in Prewar Japan: Institutional and Ideological Problems of the 1930s ­(Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1970), 71–78: 71. 118 Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, 141. 119 BBC News, ‘World Mental Health Day: PM appoints suicide prevention minister’, 10 Oct 2018: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45804225. 120 ‘Zero Suicide Alliance: FAQs’: http://zerosuicidealliance.com/faqs/. The Henry Ford Health System is in fact a Detroit healthcare provider, though this is unclear from the Zero Suicide Alliance’s account.

5 Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity In’ei raisan, Fūdo, Yukiguni

Light, Perspicuity, Grime: In’ei raisan I have suggested the importance of the specific conditions of the Scottish Enlightenment to modern Japan; here, I want to add that in these terms the light of Enlightenment is to be taken seriously. The light of Enlightenment is not merely symbolic, it is also ontological, and a m ­ odernist re-­ perspectivising or ‘shadowing’ of light can suggest a ­reconfiguration of its ontology. A universalism of space and light ultimately deriving from Britain’s ‘empiricist authority’ demanded that objects and subjects be clearly separated as a condition of progress, and that space be arranged around the observer-owner, a subjectifying then projected onto the ideal of a Newtonian or Lockean government. One of the threads of Japanese modernism is to challenge this universalism of space, re-­entangling viewers and their worlds. So where some commentary on Japanese literature has described a turn from this light as a nostalgic avoidance of modernity, here I suggest that a shadowy aesthetics can rather be understood in terms of a modernist response, and I read this, in various forms, in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In’ei raisan/In Praise of Shadows (1933), Watsuji Tetsurō’s Fūdo (Climate and Culture) (1935), and Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni (Snow Country) (1935–37). Understood in one way, the formation of the British state is primarily a universalisation of perspective, isolating a viewing-owning subject in space. One of its most influential sources, to be expanded on in the Scottish Enlightenment particularly, was Newton’s Opticks (1704). Newton had been describing experiments in light and colour as early as 1672, and had influenced Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which had understood vision as ‘the most comprehensive of all of our senses’, and treated cognition in spatial terms, with objects of perception held in place ‘by the light of nature’.1 This was crucial to the post-1706–07 (Acts of Union) cultural making of Britain: for Alexander Pope’s proposed epitaph, Newton was a creator of light as a bringer of rationality to nature – ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;/ God said, Let Newton be! and all was light’.2 Pope’s 1711 ‘Essay on ­Criticism’ picked up on Newton’s experiments to suggest a spectral

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  105 language in which truth is dispersed by false eloquence but focused by eloquence.3 More widely, these experiments gave poetry a vocabulary of light as Britishing-as-improvement that eventually led to, amongst other things, the horror of darkness in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).4 In such an improving poetics, the observer attains an unusual primacy, and must be both part of the physical world and ontologically prior to it, in order to make categorical statements about it – the dualism that would become familiar in government in Locke’s ‘self-owning’ citizen.5 Also as with Locke, progress is defined by the separation of the world into observers and objects (property)  – and its rigorously scientific form in Newton would provide a strong rationale for the spatial arrangement of the nascent empire into anterior authority and regions sentenced to catch up. Again much of the culturing of this took place in the periphery where development from barbarism seemed particularly urgent, Scotland. Newtonian ideas passed more quickly through Scottish universities than through English ones, and Scots were particularly instrumental in seeing the new British state as light itself.6 In 1727, James Thomson, best known as the author of The Seasons and ‘Rule, Britannia!’, echoed Pope’s ­description of Newton as the bringer of a light that had ‘[s]hone undiscovered, till his brighter mind/Untwisted all the shining robe of day’ – and T ­ homson’s ‘Liberty, a Poem’ explicitly associated this light with the new British union.7 Placed at the maritime and temporal ground zero of Greenwich, the origin that sweeps objects before it, Thomson’s speaker looks at a rainbow with Newtonian eyes, and exclaims: “O the dear Prospect! O majestic View! “See BRITAIN’s Empire! Lo! the watry Vast “Wide-waves, diffusing the Cerulean Plain… As Parents to a Child complacent deign Approvance, the CELESTIAL BRIGHTNESS smil’d…8 Much of this visual-spatial developmentalism would be taken on by the Meiji Enlightenment. We have already seen this in the reformist desire for remote weapons and the encyclopaedic desire to arrange knowledge, and it is worth noting that bunmei, civilization, associated by Fukuzawa at least since the 1864 draft of Seiyō jijō with natural law and now a­ ssociated with development, is transliterable culture-light – as in the generic term for writings on bunmei kaika (‘civilization and enlightenment’)  – and bunmei became, Carol Gluck describes, a ‘universal q ­ ualifier’ by the 1900s.9 Meiji itself is a government by light, ‘bright-­government’, and, although mei, or light/bright, had had numerous iterations in East Asian governments, in Meiji it became discursively bound up with development as such. M ­ oreover, as in Meiroku Zasshi, the Meiji Enlightenment generally promoted linguistic clarity in a way that tracked

106  Modernism as Reaction a Scottish Enlightenment understanding of clarity as development.10 For the Scottish Enlightenment’s rhetorical improvers, clear language a­ llowed for easier exchange of ideas understood as objects, and exchange meant development. The Meiji Enlightenment’s sense of clarity as d ­ evelopment had already been registered in terms of the British union in Scotland’s need, as William Barron put it in 1781, ‘to polish her language and her pronunciation’.11 Enlightenment rhetoric courses took this polishing seriously, associating language improvement with the removal of imperfections conceived in visual-spatial terms. Put otherwise, polishing is the ­progressive motion that separates discrete objects of discourse from the subjects who speak them.12 Thus the improvers’ stress on ­perspicuity – which for Lord Kames’s ­Elements of Criticism (1762) outweighs all other aesthetic properties of language, and for George Campbell is the most important characteristic of good English.13 Or perhaps most influentially, for the Enlightenment progenitor of university English, Hugh Blair, perspicuity is ‘a quality so essential in every kind of writing, that for the want of it, nothing can atone’.14 The goal of Enlightenment rhetoric courses, as Blair puts it, is language ‘in the clearest and most natural order’ – language that wipes away political impediments to the unfolding of natural law; it is this that fits them for modernity and the era of commercial empire, which in this thinking is the highest stage of civilization, and desired by all.15 This is also the pressure for linguistic perspicuity that stands b ­ ehind genbun itchi, or the ‘unification of speech and writing’. ­A lthough it ­became mainstream in the 1910s, genbun itchi can be traced back through Maejima Hisoka’s 1867 petition ‘Reasons for Abolishing C ­ hinese Characters’, then 1870s campaigns for language ­rationalisation.16 In 1874 in Meiroku Zasshi, Nishi Amane described how J­ apanese could gain a technical advantage by reducing the number of kanji (‘­Chinese characters’).17 Without the distorting (‘non-phonetic’) force of kanji, language would be more universal and more objective – more representative.18 Efficient exchange, and therefore development, ­demanded a polishing away of kanji to leave kana (phonetic writing), or even demanded the language of improvement itself, English. Mori Arinori would go on to argue for English to be made the country’s lingua franca, and Nakamura Masanao to press for the absorption of English language ­materials into educational curricula.19 By the end of the ’70s the Yomiuri Shinbun (newspaper) had significantly simplified its vocabulary, ­standardising verb and copula forms, and applying furigana (marks showing the readings of kanji in ‘phonetic’ script). 20 The Kana no Kai (‘Society for Phonetic Script’) was established in 1884, and the Romaji no Kai (­Society for English Script’) in 1886, as was the Ken’yūsha literary society, which promoted genbun itchi. 21 The ideal of de-­kanjification as perspicuity would also underscore Tsubouchi Shōyō’s call for ‘everydayness’ in Shōsetsu shinzui (1885), followed through in Futabatei Shimei’s ‘positive declaration on the value of gembun itchi’, and surviving

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  107 in Natsume’s first fiction  successes, as in Wagahai wa neko de aru.22 Dennis Washburn describes how genbun itchi would gradually become consolidated as ‘a synthesis of literary and colloquial language’ used ‘to express concerns about the Japanese sense of belatedness in the face of Western imperialism’. 23 But belatedness, of course, goes together with a developmental framework based in perspicuity, and the suspension of communication from an ideal origin. Karatani Kōjin describes something like this spatial suspension in his ­account of the entanglement of perspective and narration in early modern Japanese literature: by the turn of the 1890s, kanji’s ‘heterogeneity’ had been ‘given up to vocalisation’ – a victory of a representational ideal he describes, following Jacques Derrida, as phonocentric, and which we might gloss as possessing perspicuity. 24 Karatani importantly links this ­representational ideal to an institutionalisation of transcendental individuality (or subjectivity) – though, perhaps because of a background in poststructuralism, his touchstone is Descartes, where we might prefer to concentrate on the institutional incarnation of transcendental individualism in ‘Newtonian government’. 25 Karatani explains how genbun itchi ‘helps normalise a certain perspectival configuration’ anchored to the individual subject as depth – so genbun itchi is tied to the ‘discovery’ of interiority. 26 Indeed for Karatani it was genbun itchi, or the Japanese drive towards perspicuity in language, that made possible the ‘discovery of the self’. 27 (Moreover this drive also determines the understanding of landscape, allowing the world to be thought of as physical space – it lays a philosophical ground for extensive empire. 28) But because this self is also subject to physical laws, it must repress its transcendental origins – a deconstruction-type argument that might be related to Britain’s national origin myths in 1688, for which subjectivity accompanies ‘discoveries’ of laws in nature. 29 Tracking Karatani, transparency is needed to create the seeing-owning subject and the empire of objects it commands – but this empire is disturbed by the opacities of modernism. 30 Modernism in this sense might then be understood as a shattering of the glass of perspicuity. The shadowiness and counter-naturalism of the later Natsume suggest this, and indeed Meredith McKinney’s translation of Kokoro has Shizu starting out by impressing with her perspicacity (the original is rikairyoku), but nothing of the kind after the scandal.31 It is possible also to suggest that in the next decade, Japanese modernism can be perceived as pressing ahead with critiques of transparency, while British modernism slides back towards a stabilisation of objects in space. In her search for canonical gold standards in The Common Reader in 1925, Virginia Woolf pins the core of modern British literary tradition to the stability of objects as they appear for the use of the Lockean hero depicted by the unionist pamphleteer and ‘Britain’s first novelist’, Daniel Defoe.32 In Defoe’s great Pacific ‘Bildungsroman of money’, the Crusoe

108  Modernism as Reaction who labours alone to create value gives the world order through a stable ­ bject of narrative perspective and clear objects.33 Crusoe had been an o some desire in Meiji Japan, particularly amongst Protestant converts: if it is true, as Karatani argues, that the association of Protestantism with freedom allowed young Meiji intellectuals access to individual progress, Crusoe provides a kind of model, and it straddles the roles of ­canonicity – an ideal model of language and narrative positioning – and i­ndividual labour in mobility (and moreover it resonates with the self-­reliant and pragmatic ideals of financially challenged samurai).34 The stakes of perspicuity in Japan, by this point, had been magnified by Taishō consumerism’s threat to transform Tokyo into a city of homogeneous illumination. One of the most pointed responses to this was Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s 1933 essay In’ei raisan, a wandering ­discourse on aesthetics, environment, and light, translated by Edward G. ­Seidensticker in 1955 then by Thomas J. Harper in 1977 as In Praise of Shadows.35 In’ei raisan has often been misleadingly glossed as a nostalgic attempt to ‘escape from time’, and it is one of Harootunian’s prime suspects for a fascist-sympathetic aestheticism, or a wishful ‘sanctuary’ of the e­ ternal.36 Seidensticker himself sees this Tanizaki as producing ‘dreamy anthems to a day when beauty did not seem compelled to fight against its time’.37 The image of fighting time is telling, but perhaps not for the reasons assumed – if we accept that an ‘eternalisation’ of time is demanded by the progressive separation of subjects and objects in space, what ‘cloudiness’ fights is not the passage of time but, on the contrary, the automated time that has been robbed of passingness, and therefore its ethical intention. (Moreover, Sakai Naoki adds, Tanizaki’s reputation as a carrier of nostalgic (nosutarujikku na) Japan was a post-war invention, but his work is really better understood in terms of ambivalence.38) ‘Clouding’ is a means of creating meaningful, active time. In’ei raisan’s imagining of an ‘opaquing’ of Newtonian u ­ niversalism, moreover, puts it close to the concerns of the Kyoto School. Like T ­ anizaki’s other late ’20s to early ’30s writing, it is set in Kansai, the western region taking in Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto itself. Tanizaki’s writing follows the path of Kyoto School founder Nishida Kitarō, who in 1910 had moved from teaching English at Gakushūin under Nogi’s ­mentorship to Kyoto, where he and his followers worked on minor perspectives on E ­ uropean philosophical history.39 Although rarely described with the same ­seriousness, In’ei raisan’s critique of subjectivity, space, and consumerism is quite comparable to those of figures more obviously following Nishida, and similarly gnaws at Newtonian universalism.40 In Tanizaki’s case the move was encouraged by the 1923 Kanto earthquake, often cited in periodisations of literary history, and a marker for a change in conceptions of the present, as well as for Tokyo’s ‘world’ status.41 The earthquake destroyed or damaged 70% of the homes of metropolitan Tokyo, but was also perceived as potentially transformative; it scattered

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  109 metropolitan thought and helped bury nostalgic novelistic accounts of old Edo.42 Ken Ito’s psychobiographical account suggests that moving from the former British concession area of Yokohama, Tanizaki looked forward to a rebuilding, to be disappointed by a greater homogenisation, with more public space arranged around department stores, advertising, and illuminated displays.43 And with this move, Elaine Gerbert notes importantly, Tanizaki’s writing took a ‘kinaesthetic’ turn, becoming more ‘earthed’, or, in our terms, less bound to progressive light.44 Tanizaki was already looking back at Tokyo’s consumerist space in what may be his best-known work, Chijin no ai, serialised in 1924–25 in Osaka Asahi (an Osaka newspaper), and translated in 1985 as Naomi. In this story, typically read as a ‘counter-shishōsetsu’, an anti-hero ­living in a ‘shoddy Western-style house near the tracks of the National ­Electric train line’ meets the narcissistic young femme fatale Naomi (a pun – now-me), who embodies Taishō consumerism and leaves him, in a kind of reversal of the Scottish Enlightenment aim of individual romantic love, with sexual desires that are really commodity fetishes – her moga/modern girl dress, and even her name in English.45 The National Electric line housed numerous such lonely sararīman/salaried workers, depictions of whom were becoming common, today perhaps familiar from numerous Ozu Yasujirō films (such as Umarete wa mita k ­ eredo/I Was Born, But… (1932) – or from commentators like Harootunian’s favoured Aono Suekichi’s Sararīman kyōfu jidai/Era of Sararīman Fear (1930)).46 Chijin no ai is more than a simple castigation of ‘westernisation’, though. It is also an undermining of the subjective authenticity of the shishōsetsu – its reliance on confession, notably – and a commentary on a hypnosis by light. The modelling of Naomi’s commodity-fetish sexuality on Hollywood films came at a time when cinema was sometimes imagined to blind the senses and to standardise the speed of ­perception, and film as visual standardisation would be associated by some Kyoto School thinkers with amorality and passive self-interest.47 (Steven C. Ridgley has moreover suggested that Tanizaki himself, having been involved in writing and supervising film scripts at the start of the ’20s, came to stress the weakness of film compared with the resistant strength of writing.48) Another step towards the opacity of In’ei raisan came in Tade kuu mushi/Some Prefer Nettles (1929), in which the Kyoto householder resides in unlit interiors, practices ohaguro (blackening teeth), and states that ‘[a] white bath or toilet is a piece of Western foolishness…’.49 Here and in Manji/­Quicksand (1928), it is in Tanizaki’s shabby modern suburbs that the spatial ordering of Japan’s belatedness, its ‘catching up with the world’, takes place, leaving Kyoto comparatively haptic  – bare feet on tatami, mouldy darkness.50 Kyoto signals the kind of return to antiquity that Pound imagined addressing recent ‘sham traditions’, it moves back to the authority behind regime change, and it sites Tanizaki’s lightproofing, his interruption of the march of perspicuity as progress.

110  Modernism as Reaction Possibilities for resistance to this version of the progressive (shinshuteki) are the main concern of Tanizaki’s essay, and its setting in contrast to the burgeoning capital.51 Tokyo had expanded at the rate of 40,000–60,000 residents per year, and was understood by conservatives as splitting ­families as children left – iede or leaving the ie/household – recalling Mito ­concerns over urban decadence and the divisive effects of empty education, and indeed Shimazaki Tōson’s tale of declining families in Ie/The Family (1910–11), but also John Millar’s corollary of commercial society in ­individual urban actors.52 In a widespread ’20s contest over public space, bright ­shopping streets proliferated, and Harootunian describes a Taishō celebration of acceleration, the consumption of advertising, and ‘light-­viewing’.53 (A ­signal of the Taishō turn to light, indeed, had been in the use of ­electric lamps for Emperor Meiji’s funeral.54) The use of neon in particular rocketed around the turn of the ’30s, by which time Tokyo looked like an inheritor of Baudelaire’s description of Paris as the city of light – Tanizaki describes how, although there are still some dim oil lamps on the Champs Élysées, there are now few such interruptions in Tokyo, or even Osaka.55 Tanizaki’s shadowiness is not a dialectical ­rejection of light, but rather an interruption of light’s ontological supremacy, making clear views shadowy and perspectives uncertain.56 And just as light is not simply ‘opposed’, nor is the historiography of Enlightenment, ­Tanizaki ceding in an important comment that there is no ‘turning back’ (gyakumodori) from the ‘superior civilization’ of the day.57 Tanizaki does, though, recognise this over-lit world of the turn of the ’30s as a flooding by aspirational individualism, and sees this as being contested in the domestic interior. His interior is conceived against the background of the rise of housewife lifestyle magazines and a­ dvertising that opened the home to consumer aspiration (as in Ie no hikari, ­transliterable as ‘light in the house’).58 But the ie or household is not just the interior of a building, it is the relational roles incarnated in this place, understood by Tanizaki in something like the Heideggerean sense of dwelling.59 The story of In’ei raisan is of how the relationships of the household are standardised by light – something nicely imaged in the way the elderly are now shepherded by traffic lights – and p ­ ossible ­resistances to this individuation.60 Tanizaki’s thought experiment then is of a household dwelling suspending the Newtonian production of ­viewing subjects. (And such a suspension had been suggested by Heidegger in Being and Time (1927)  – ‘[b]efore Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not “true”… The laws become true through Newton’.61) Such an interior would be built, rather, on a non-subjective or ‘ecological’ ­ontology – and the speculation of the essay is on the kind of stuff this interior would contain. It would resist technologies that determine rooms in perspectival or utilitarian terms, electric lights most obviously, but also electric fans, gas heaters, bathroom tiles, and especially that transmitter of transparency, glass.62 Shadowy materials can be found for each room, beginning with

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  111 the wood-and-paper toilet Tanizaki tells us Natsume liked, making the room seem less like an arrangement of objects than, as Akira Mizuta Lippit puts it, ‘an exoskeletal extension of the body’.63 The self becomes ‘environmental’ in its contact with materials, another point that sounds Heideggeran but also returns to the term ishokujū, literally ‘clothing food and living’, a term perhaps associated with Watsuji Tetsurō within Kyoto thinking, but also returning to Fukuzawa Yukichi’s early descriptions of Western customs.64 In Tanizaki, ishokujū describes not encyclopaedic objects but nebulous presences with inconclusive boundaries – yōkan (‘bean jelly’), for example, has a ‘cloudy translucence… as if the very darkness of the room were melting on your tongue’, and akamiso (red miso) ‘blends with darkness’.65 Generally in In’ei raisan physiological sensations (seiriteki kaikan) make object boundaries blur into the shadows of the room, leaving quasi-objects or, in Nishida’s terms, non-­objects, things still entangled with the perceiver rather than inertly waiting to be owned. Shadows cling to lacquerware, corrupting its boundaries and dragging them into Buddhist non-subjectivity – they have zenmi, a ‘sense of Zen’ (reduced to ‘mystery’ in Seidensticker’s translation).66 In’ei raisan’s environment then holds the possibility of ego dissolving into mu/nothingness, and Newtonian space into a shadowy non-space. In ­shadowiness is the possibility of an active presence, in comparison to the blinding light which disengages by automating time as subject-­ production, an automation that leaves a freezing or numbness (mahi).67 Unlike Newtonian space, shadowiness conceals strata of non-individual belonging, biophysical entanglements, or binding rituals that might be called ‘ethnic’, and it houses the ancestors who live on in the shadowy room in muted (chōshi no yowai) colours.68 Here spirits (chimi) and the souls of the dead live on in the uncanny (bukimi na) interior as undefined presences, unlike the European portrayal of ghosts, as ‘clear as glass’.69 This interior in a sense is Gothic, but not the British Gothic that formed an underside to Enlightenment modernity, nor even the Gothic cathedral Spengler saw as the European civilizational form – a Faustian civilization, but concretised in a Newtonian extension into space: the shadows of the Japanese temple are not created by a relentless movement upwards, they are the foundation on which it is built.70 And rather than the depth which for Karatani links subjectivity to landscape, in In’ei raisan depth (fukasa) is less an extensive dimension than the possibility of concealment from light – as Gregory Golley puts it, depth is ‘both constituted and obscured by “shadows”’.71 Moreover in contrast to the imagery of the British eighteenth-­ century Newtonian poets, in In’ei raisan the light spectrum does not command perception. The beauty found in dark interiors might rather be described in terms of a phantom (gen’ei no) whiteness (unlike ­Tanizaki’s Naomi’s very white skin, for example) – a whiteness which is not really a colour at all.72 Nor, indeed, is the ethnicity which binds

112  Modernism as Reaction this interior reducible to a British spectral typology of race, which tends to see adulterations of whiteness as blemishes.73 In contrast to which Tanizaki suggests cloudy, and recalls the opacity of nō theatre masks, which act as a denaturalising force as they had for Anglophone modernists, particularly Yeats and Pound – from around 1916 Yeats described them as bringing invisibility, and retained his diet of Japanese reading into the 1920s.74 In Pound’s case, a refusal of transparency would lead, via Ernest Fenollosa, to a belief in the ‘thingness’ of the Chinese ‘ideograph’ (kanji) that looked almost like an antidote to Meirokusha’s faith in clear representation.75 For Pound the ideograph became a conduit to a lost past, or as Christopher Bush puts it, ‘not simply a different writing system, but a point of entry into a radically other worldview’.76 After a number of collections of Imagist poetry, the ideograph had come to stand for modernist poetics as a whole, aestheticising the thing without instrumentalising it as an object – an image that was, as Daniel Tiffany puts it, ‘non-visual, insofar as it resists, contests, and mediates the experience of visuality, but also in its preoccupation with the invisible’.77 Or for Bush, ‘[d]espite its occasional rhetoric of transparency and immediacy, Imagism is… ultimately about the limits of language as a medium of seeing and showing, of registering appearances’.78 In Tanizaki the thought experiment of an opaque world inevitably leads to wider speculation about non-subjective interactions: another knowledge might be understood to rise from Japan’s own ‘struggle for modernity’, in an echo of Nishida’s proposal that Newton’s ­order of natural phenomena should be understood rather as an order of ­phenomena of consciousness (as well as the experiments in relativising Newtonian thinking with the Under the Banner of the New Science project (1928–)).79 This is a modernist imagining of ‘the nature and function of light, electricity, and atoms’ as understood in different forms (kotonatta sugata).80 Tanizaki suspends, as Aaron Gerow puts it, the ­determining power of the ‘discourse of light and shadow [in] the existing technology itself’, and imagines technologies and cultures that embrace ­shadowiness – ­radio, for example, that doesn’t cover silences with continuous sound, and ­hospitals that don’t insist on blinding white rooms.81 And intriguingly, the process of writing itself would be different, more tactile, ­embodied, and object-entangled – pens would be made more like brushes and would be in contact with the page for longer, and the ­paper itself would be less reflective, and offer more texture in writing.82 ­(Tanizaki, moreover, an opponent of genbun itchi, followed this down to the level of grammar, stressing that the Japanese language doesn’t need a subject.83) Again such a modernity struggle would see a recursion of ­anachronism – not as a ‘fight against its time’, but in a modernist figure of the non-­ conjectural presence of the past. In’ei raisan is drawn to ancient temples, particularly of the Nara-Heian eras (eighth to twelfth centuries), and

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  113 finds in them the kind of space that might be domesticated in the house, in the alcove or tokonoma. The Kyoto temple is still unlit by overhead light, and illuminated by more ephemeral sources, such as candlelight reflected in gold.84 This particular flickering illumination also directly answers Locke’s flattening of time as financial adjustment: ­Tanizaki’s gold is not precious because it is a quasi-permanent store of labour value – just the opposite, its value is intermittent and transient.85 The ‘dark illumination’ of the temple strips gold of its subject-binding continuity. And this is true for all metals when polished, the progressive process of removing blemishes for visual fidelity. For Tanizaki, polishing gold in fact debases it. Polishing silver destroys the tarnish that is its real character, the dull light (nibui hikari) of cloudy jade has a poor equivalent in ­diamond, and European glass loses something relative to Chinese glass. The overemphasis on transparency in polishing is dehistoricising; it is in the sunken illumination (shizunda hikari) of cloudy or unpolished things that the possibility of memory remains, which is to say the history of physical contact, occupations of place which escape being erased by blinding light.86 Materials become ‘valuable’ through touch, and touch writes time onto their surfaces – so metals’ patina (sabi) gives them a ‘sheen of antiquity’ and embeds them in experienced time (or conversely, protects them from empty productive time).87 Or in Lippit’s imaginative rendition of this, ‘grime has its own gloss’ – it has a kind of ‘negative luminosity’ that acts as an archive that would otherwise be destroyed by light.88 This is to understand the Enlightenment imperative of polishing as a ­wiping away of experience, or a cultural amnesia; and if polishing ­destroys memory by rearranging space around a subject, grime (aka) ‘divides the subject from itself’.89 It is in this sense that a disruption of the totality of light is also a disruption of the subjectivity made normal by the British ‘worlding’. And since this subjectivity has been created ultimately to convert the world to objects as property, its disruption is always also a disruption of the consumerism that develops from this British worlding. Shadowiness becomes able to stand against growing consumerist demands on attention, most obviously in advertising. But the flooding by light is not merely a request for attention, it is more fundamentally a call to subjectivity. So there is a developmental inevitability to the hellish lights that now flood hotels, even in Kyoto, bringing not so much Western bad taste as an inevitable imperative to attract – really, to produce – customers.90 The light is not primarily there to help with something else, like reading or sewing; it is a teleology, and any remaining shadowy spots have to be destroyed – which of course is exactly what would happen with the deployment of light weapons at the end of the Pacific War.91 There is even in In’ei raisan an odd precognition of this destruction, twelve years before 1945, with the evisceration of shadow looking something like a nuclear blast: cool breezes are turned into hot

114  Modernism as Reaction winds, white dots scar the sky, after-images overwhelm the senses, and shadowy calm is swept away.92 This link is not entirely impressionistic, since the 1945 bombings that make a decisive point for the Anglosphere can themselves be read as part of a Newtonian lesson about subjectivity and ­progress, delivered to a region now seeming self-evidently ‘despotic’. (And this l­esson was almost delivered to Kyoto itself: as is perhaps now well known, Kyoto was at one point a first choice target, and probably only spared because ­President Truman was advised that destroying its ­heritage might turn ­ agasaki ­Japan towards the Soviet Union. The British contact zone of N was only substituted because the Kokura arsenal, which replaced the Koishikawa arsenal depicted in Natsume’s Kokoro after damage by the ’23 earthquake, was obscured by smoke from firebombing.93) Light weapons can eviscerate intransigent memories and leave the path open to standardised space and so universalist histories – they ‘engrave’ cities, as is familiar from pictures of the ghostly residue of human silhouettes left after the blast.94 After Tanizaki, this engraving can be understood as a destruction of the resistant ‘thingness’ which held physical memory. And the potential to ‘polish’ intransigent space was so important to the reassertion of liberal historiography after 1945 that, despite chronic war debt, Britain took on its own nuclear programme, to sit within the welfare state and prove Millar’s assertion that development softens or ­dephysicalises war.95 One role of these light weapons might be described as to destroy any shadowy betweenness that entangles observers and things. And conversely, an environmental betweenness in Kyoto-related writing sought to overcome a monopoly of empiricist models of space as a basis of belonging – not least the betweenness of Watsuji Tetsurō.

Fūdo and the Environmentalising of Newtonian Space Some of the commentaries that constituted an Anglophone reassessment of the Kyoto School at the end of the twentieth century struggled for ways to circumvent an apparent lack of (progressive) political values, some recovering it ‘as philosophy’, as Christopher Goto-Jones has described, some ­seeing its main usefulness as pointing up a reaction to Taishō and early Shōwa capitalism.96 More recently, though, some Kyoto figures have been read in terms of an ecological overcoming of subject-­ centredness, ­notably the Monbushō-sponsored German ryūgakusei, Watsuji ­Tetsurō.97 ­Serialised from 1928 and published in complete form in 1935, then translated by Geoffrey Bownas in 1961 as Climate and Culture, Watsuji’s Fūdo is ­partially a response to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1927), published just as Watsuji arrived in Germany. But Fūdo can also be recognised as an attempt to overhaul the subjectivity that had defined the concept of the progressive in the B ­ ritish Empire – what I have described as a ­Newtonian-Lockean-Smithian subjectivity. Fūdo is worth a mention next to In’ei raisan for its ­desire to

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  115 overcome an imposed universalism of space, a desire with both geopolitical and aesthetic implications, and joining to wider reconsiderations of empiricist space in defining the national community, and of an alternate mode of modernity.98 Much of Fūdo is comparable to In’ei raisan – its concerns with subjectivity and space, and indeed with the ie/house – and has a broadly Kyoto thinking behind it (though thematic connections in Kyoto have tended to be described in terms of biographical happenstance).99 ­Watsuji’s idea of fūdo, usually taken as climate and transliterable as wind-earth, might be seen rather literally as an ‘environmental determinism’, but is probably better understood as a modernist mythopoeic ­narrative. It picks up on a submerged Japanese ‘climatological’ genre, and is much like the kind of environmental speculation Scottish ­Enlightenment literati thought they were superseding – associated by John Millar, for example, with Montesquieu, and seen as a kind of superstition.100 Fūdo also echoes some Anglophone modernists’ Heideggerean desires for an active reconnection with the world, but within the context of a Kyoto thinking seeing the Heideggerean critique as signalling a legitimacy crisis for a ‘Western’ subjectivity that wanted to recreate the world around its own individual needs, and led to nihilism and authoritarianism.101 Many commentators on Kyoto’s Heideggerean critique have understood it relative to the Cartesian self, but I have suggested that it is in Locke that subjectivity takes on a governmentality and a global reach – so in terms of the ‘ownership of nature’, Watsuji and other ‘environmental’ writers can be seen as speaking to the Lockean subject, itself largely born of an economic adaptation of Newton. Watsuji’s critique also places his work strikingly close to what would come to be known as ecocriticism: fūdo as environment determines not only topography, custom, and so on, but also the conditions of subjectivity – which for Watsuji are no longer anterior to experience as in Newton.102 Watsuji expresses this binding of the personal and the e­ nvironmental in the now well-known example of the cold – the experience of the cold goes beyond subjectivity since ‘[t]he instant that the cold is discovered, we are already outside [ex-sistere – soto ni dete iru] in the cold’.103 ­Selfhood is actively discovered in fūdo; fūdo is active, and always in ­process.104 Fūdo, moreover, determines our perception of history – ‘­history is ­climatic history and climate is historical climate’ – and in the first v­ olume of his Rinrigaku/Ethics (1937), Watsuji would take this ­further in the Heideggerean statement that the natural world is not ­beyond the ­human world, a direct rejection of the Lockean crystallisation of nature as something objectively definable, and so of nature as a framework of human laws.105 This shift indeed can be understood as a Japanese version of Heidegger’s move from epistemology to ontology, a move away from reliance on the anterior seeing-knowing self and the conditions set by empiricism. For Watsuji, as Steve Bein glosses, ‘we are always already grounded in a ­social network that is itself always already

116  Modernism as Reaction grounded in historico-climatic space, or fūdo’.106 Locke’s object-world was a world of nature waiting to be made into property by an owning subject; ­Watsuji’s nature is always relational, and can’t be instrumentalised.107 So Bein and Robert E. Carter both (separately) note Watsuji’s divergence from Locke’s tabula rasa, and Watsuji’s insistence that there is ‘no independently existing mind’ (Bein), but rather a ground of constant climatic interference (Carter).108 Or for Jin Baek, fūdo means a bracketing of empiricist perception, or a world not built on self-­owning persons – or, in more familiarly modernist terms, a world in which subjectivity is fractured.109 In Watsuji from the early ’30s, this push to reframe space and subjectivity was tied to a critique of capitalist psychology, which he sees as not only a search for limitless profit (mukigen na eiri) but also a sacred duty (shinsei na gimu) – that is, he rightly associates it with the belief in the self that characterises British ‘secular ­religion’ – and it is in this that Europe imposes itself.110 The shadowy self then is, as in Tanizaki, a decentralisation of institutions based around the rational economic actor, as well as the possibility of a national recovery beyond British empire. Watsuji would unpack this fragmentation in the introductory sections of Rinrigaku, which break down the term ningen, or human, into its constituent parts, nin – ­person, and aida – between – basing the personal in a division that recalls the ‘subject divided against itself’ described by Lippit of Tanizaki.111 In its betweenness the term ningen, Watsuji argues, is unlike other languages’ terms for human, like homo or ­anthropos – it doesn’t tend towards subjective discreteness, and its unity inheres in a negation.112 The self is then based in betweenness or aidagara – and importantly for ­Watsuji echoing Tanizaki, this also colours knowledge from the social sciences, which has been predicated on the stable viewer, which is to say that the whole Enlightenment discovery of a world should now be bracketed.113 Correspondingly, ningen sonzai/human existence modifies Heidegger’s idea of Dasein or sonzai to try to make it attentive to the active structuring of space – sonzai has to be place-specific. This corresponds to a growing contemporary insistence on the way Japanese space does not correspond to the concepts of territory and state that now constitute the world system, and it introduces a degree of perceptual plurality into the spatial framework that had grown from light experiments and become a basis for Newtonian empire.114 In Watsuji, like Tanizaki, the social self is in the shadowiness of aidagara, not the clarity of the ­Newtonian-Lockean subject. This is a form of the self open to what Nishida had called junsui keiken, or pure experience, a c­ oncept adapted from William James to describe the pre-subjective, in which actor and environment are entangled, contra British epistemology.115 The implications of this fragmentation of subjectivity are modernist, but they are also provocatively ‘illiberal’, which is part of why Kyoto thinking has been so gingerly approached by Anglophone academics (and barely appears in

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  117 even recent modernist studies). The primacy of the subject as an owner of rights can collapse, as in Nishida’s description of an artist’s creative attempt to ‘become’ the thing depicted – a process with much in common with Heidegger’s craftsman who understands the world by working in it, but difficult for academic commentators bound to institutional demands that the person never be ‘objectified’ (or better, never be treated as a thing).116 This sense of object-entanglement also underwrites Fūdo as a modernist fiction, in which three historical empires with three local climates give rise to three civilizational types – monsoon (monsūn), ­desert (sabaku), and meadow (makiba). The monsoon type, covering much of East Asia, is characterised by abundant resources and a quiet, resigned character that contrasts with the meadow people’s (Spenglerian) character of ­extension and conquest; monsoon people are a non-­progressive people who stress cyclical histories (which is to say they also may be predisposed to modernist aesthetics’ stress on non-linear historiography).117 As the personality underpinning the British Empire, meadow people have understood nature as something docile to be moulded – but the limitations of this are revealed by a relativisation of their definition of the world.118 (There is a strange familiarity to this stress, besides its relation to British natural law – when the turn of the century ‘Britain of the East’ speculations looked at above described the rise of the Pacific, this sometimes had climatic undertones, George Curzon for example describing Japan’s overtaking India relative to a character defined by an ‘abundance of water’.119) For Watsuji as for Tanizaki, a relativisation of space and of clarity-as-progress suggests a reconsideration of technology: electric lighting has been promoted by meadow people who don’t need protection from humidity or heat but do need to clarify the gloom, but monsoon people have more sensitivity to the shadowy interior that houses betweenness/aidagara. The shadowy, then, might be understood as an ontology that Japanese modernism brings to the world, and to the world’s definition of the ‘world’, just as ‘Europe’ (Britain) had brought the specifically positional but ethically universal light of Enlightenment. Indeed like Tanizaki, Watsuji describes dwelling as relational rather than individual, and countering the progressive dispersal of individuals as workers that the Scottish Enlightenment had described as proof of progress. For the Millar who had wanted to move away from Montesquieu’s climatic speculations, the dispersal to the cities of the children of families previously under the rule of ‘despotic’ (pre-liberal) fathers made them choice-bearing individuals and so civilized people; for Watsuji, a shift in the historiographical assumptions of Newtonian space makes biophysical bonds reappear in a whole that ‘takes precedence over its individual members’.120 Again the shadowy house interrupts the meadow (Smithian) productivity dependent on the individuation of

118  Modernism as Reaction workers and owners – so although Japanese houses stand back from the street, they aren’t separated into ‘individual and independent rooms which are separated by thick walls and stout doors secured by intricate locks so that only key-holders may come and go freely’.121 As in Tanizaki’s interior, space is marked rather by shōji (paper screens) and fusama (sliding doors), which are not solid barriers between individual cells, but ‘only partitioned within a unity of mutual trust [sōgo no shinrai ni oite ­shikirareru nomi]’.122 Considering the kind of ­European subjective shift to which this responds, it is hard not to imagine the town houses of ­Edinburgh New Town, constructed from the 1760s ­onwards, an ­expression of individualism whose separateness may indeed have acted as a brake within Enlightenment, since they separated off potential discussants. If the individuation of space is progress in the Newtonian-­Enlightenment paradigm, for the Japanese relativisation the deindividuation of space is also a temporal interruption – Tanizaki describes how since shōji are light-absorbing, they get in the way of the forward march of perspicuity, and standing before them with vision blunted, clock time seems to disappear.123 Tanizaki’s and Watsuji’s ‘spatial turn’ then takes a counter-­Newtonian critique into everyday living space, and it is largely in architecture (along with philosophy) that Watsuji has been taken up in the Anglosphere. This begs the question, though, of why such a spatial turn was not addressed by the 2000s ‘new modernist studies’, which claimed exactly such a spatial ­reconsideration (and which might indeed find more that is ­recognisably modernist in Tanizaki and Watsuji – subjective fragmentation, the ­recursion of the archaic, an engagement with Heideggerean ­ontology).124 Doubtless this has something to do with the institutional need to protect subjectivity in Anglosphere liberal institutions, and a similar ­reticence is visited also on other attempts to relativise light and space. A ­comparable de-universalisation of optics, though, is also readable in mainstream literary texts, and has been noticed in the visual distortions of Kawabata ­Yasunari’s much-loved story Yukiguki/Snow Country.

Distortion Ethics: Yukiguni If we accept that the British Empire understanding of progress has a basis in a standardisation of space, and ultimately in the governmentalisation of Newtonian optics, we might also expect attempts to challenge this understanding to appear as visual distortions, much as I have described of the shadowiness of In’ei raisan and Fūdo. Optical interruptions are also readily readable in Kawabata’s Yukiguni, a book with a huge domestic following and one of three works cited in Kawabata’s 1968 Nobel Prize award. Kawabata had begun in modes more readily recognisable as modernist, as a member of the Bungei jidai/ Literary Age journal group, then the Shinkankakuha/‘New Sensation’

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  119 movement, and a distancing from shishōsetsu naturalism had led to the urban carnivalesque of the immediately pre-Yukiguni novel Asakusa kurenaidan/Gang of Asakusa (1929–30).125 Yukiguni, serialised between 1935 and 1937 then r­ eworked numerous times with a full version ­published in 1948, and translated by Seidensticker as Snow Country in 1956, stages a contrast with the city of light that looks something like Tanizaki’s, and modifies a longer concern in fiction with light in ­cityscapes (as in Satō Haruo’s Den’en no Yūutsu/The ­M elancholy of the Country (1919)).126 But as with In’ei raisan, Yukiguni’s scepticism of universals has tended to result in it being seen as an attempt to fix a Japanese essence outside of time, Nina Cornyetz for example describing how the story ‘looks nostalgically back towards a mythic past’.127 In a reading with much in common with the fascism-seeking tradition associated with Harry ­Harootunian, Cornyetz describes an ‘auratic’ that arises from a false promise of a time outside modernity she associates with recursions of the past (a promise ­Harootunian himself describes as being found in shading).128 Crucially, it is Kawabata’s visual distortions that make him, Cornyetz suggests, culpable of refusing universalism, of promoting an ‘“Asian” spirit’ ­instead of a ‘global’ spirit – and a desire for an auratic past turns on a ‘­spectral’ switch, found in mirrors, glass, and ‘ocular technology’, transforming objects ‘into what they “should” or “could” be, which surpasses what they are’.129 Cornyetz’s is a telling critique: Yukiguni is certainly concerned with a ‘localisation’ of optics, and it might be seen less as a novel than as a series of loosely bound scenes – or for Masao Miyoshi, a ‘kaleidoscopic succession of images’ fitted onto haiku or renga form.130 But this critique’s suspicion of localisation returns us ultimately to a British totalisation, the progressive identification of nature as an object­-world (and indeed Cornyetz’s term, ‘auratic’, has been used by Ian Baucom to describe the eternalness of the placeless icon of ‘England’ in empire, or what I have described as the basis of the British metonymy – whereas local place is what interrupts this auratic).131 So while I build here on Cornyetz’s insightful description of Yukiguni’s visual distortions, the definition as fascism of the optical splintering of time into pastness is much more problematic. Such distortions might rather be seen as a modernist imagining of an outside to progress-as-­object-creation, or an acknowledgement of alienation in the globalisation of ownership. Visual distortion is central to this rupture, as is the relativisation of the city of light. Where In’ei raisan had used Kyoto for its counter-Newtonian thought experiment, Yukiguni takes this to the resort town of Yuzawa onsen in Niigata. Less than 200 km from Tokyo, Yuzawa was ­nevertheless remote depending on snow conditions – in fact to get there was to live Fūdo’s Heideggerean ecology of finding oneself to be entangled with the cold. As pointed out in Okude Ken’s careful mapping of the story, the now-iconic tunnel that links Yuzawa was only opened a year after the

120  Modernism as Reaction geisha Komako arrived, and at the time of the story was still acting like a border (kokkyō rashii).132 The shift in optics then is bound up with a shift in climate, understood as a determinant of selfhood. The snow, that is, isolates Yuzawa from the city of light. But the snow also has figurative and perspectival functions.133 Snow breaks down the spectral referential palette of the eighteenth-century Newtonian poets; in the snowy environment, colours themselves can become ‘thingly’, and, as with In’ei raisan, can exist outwith the light spectrum and beyond commercial reproduction (doubtless giving commentators like Cornyetz worries about possible claims to the ‘auratic’); outwith commercial reproduction they remain welded to the landscape, the ­mountain, the buildings, and take on its characteristics.134 Towards the end of the book, a long, narratively aimless passage describes the bleaching (sarasu) of cotton crepe using snow and ash water – and ­indeed involving an active knowledge of ‘in’yō no shizen’, ­transliterable as ‘the nature of light and dark’.135 Snow can also change colours; it can be ­dazzling, obscuring, or life-giving, and it can become suddenly h ­ aptic – soft, or warm – as indeed throughout Yukiguni the terms of light and dark can themselves cross over into cold and warmth.136 Memories can return as a haptic interruption of continuous time, and pasts appear through visual dysfunction, leading even to an element of confusion as to when the protagonist’s object of desire, Yōko, exists.137 Optical ambivalence also, as in Tanizaki, returns the biophysical histories that have been eclipsed by the demand for individualism, in the ‘gloomy [uttōshii] houses of generations of ancestors submerged in snow’.138 The in (kage, shadow) of Tanizaki’s temple’s becomes in Yukiguni the mountains’ texturing of light and shade, kagehinata, the play of ontological shadows – ­throughout, the observed object-world refuses to stay still, to be fully known as object.139 And again with this unsettling of an object-world comes an u ­ nsettling of the Scottish Newtonians’ stress on clarification-as-progress. C ­ ertainly it is easy to see a flavour of the nostalgic in this search for memory in the opaque, and something comparable to Meiji conservatives’ faith in the countryside – but commentaries like Cornyetz’s probably miss the potential radicalism of nostalgia, or a haunting by the past, relative to the stabilising force of British continuous time.140 In England’s own ‘reactionary’ writing of the time, moreover, there were frequent gestures towards a ‘­politics of nostalgia’: if in Chijin no ai, the electrical wires around bunka jūtaku (‘western-style’ housing developments, literally ‘culture housing’) threaten to eclipse the specificity of place, soon after this H.V. M ­ orton’s popular In Search of England (1927) would wonder why the country couldn’t stay like the wireless Shrewsbury.141 Similar hard-to-reach villages were described by Cyril Joad and S.P.B. Mais, as well as F.R. Leavis, to whom I will come, and indeed there were a few crossover moments: the J.W. Robertson Scott who in 1922

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  121 published a thoughtful account of changing conditions in The Foundations of Japan turned three years later to similar work in England’s Green and Pleasant Land.142 Versions of organic mythologies follow urbanisation in each place.143 Roads are seen as structuring the space of the English regions as trains structure the space of regions like Niigata, and both involve a new occupation of Newtonian claims over space. The train, Carol Gluck interestingly argues, was a key marker of Meiji ­modernisation – and yet in Yukiguni the train journey to Yuzawa is tied to a narrative of spatial failure.144 It is on the train that Newtonian optics become ­unsettled – throughout, illumination comes from the mountain, from people’s faces, or the stars, but overwhelmingly from the snow, which reflects dimly, much like Tanizaki’s temple gold. And illumination by snow also echoes the dying thoughts of Okitsu in Mori Ōgai’s ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’ – ‘there is no need to light another [candle]. There is sufficient reflection from the snow at the window to enable me to cut across my wrinkled stomach’.145 Indeed the early struggle through snow that introduces Yuzawa ­contains what is probably the book’s most iconic string of visual distortions. In this well-known passage, a window acting as a mirror sets up a series of visual descriptions with an uncertain perspectival ground: [o]utside it was growing dark, and the lights had been turned on in the train, transforming the window into a mirror… In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the r­ eflected figures superimposed like a film. The figures and ­background were unrelated, but the figures were transparent and ­intangible, and this and the background growing dim in the d ­ arkness melting together [tokeai] gave the impression of a world not of this world [kono yo naranu].146 In this condition of irreducible optical ambivalence, ‘[t]he reflection in the mirror was not strong enough to erase [kesu] the light outside, nor was the light strong enough to dim the reflection’.147 Shimamura, the weary protagonist temporarily escaping the city of light, then finds it hard to pick out anything conspicuous, and to tell whether transparent-­seeming faces belong to a world of objects.148 (Later similar plays of light will see Komako seeming to be transparent, and Yōko’s eyes give off a ‘penetrating light [sashitōsu hikari]’.149) It is uncertain whether light is emitted from, passes through, or is reflected by, objects and persons, and in a way that brackets the Newtonian command of space, the landscape itself has ontological weight.150 As in Fūdo, nature fails to stay in place, so that ‘[t]he mirror floating over the evening scenery and the other snowy mirror… were part of nature [shizen no mono], and part of some distant world [tōi sekai]’.151 The optical ambivalence of the window-as-mirror is also related to the double exposure of a film (eiga no nijū utsushi), so that

122  Modernism as Reaction what seemed a key vehicle for the standardisation of perception in ­Tanizaki and early Kyoto now fails to resolve its two images into one.152 The theme of the instability of film becomes structural in the story, ending in a conflagration in a cocoon warehouse being used as a cinema.153 If film had meant a unification of speed as the polishing of communication had meant a unification of progress for Enlightenment literati, the failure of film is a failure of the time-unifying power of these optical means. In the story these temporal demands are described as hypnosis by Komako herself, who thinks that Tokyo people find it difficult to be honest because they are distracted (ki ga chiru).154 It is the speed of Tokyo life that has sent Shimamura to Yuzawa in search of seriousness or majime, pressed as he is by anxiety/fuan – also the usual term for Natsume’s condition in London (so, Okude suggests, Shimamura carries a shadow with him).155 Tokyo’s demand for speed and clarity is contrasted to ­Yuzawa’s shadowy intransigence, even with the sense that relations in space can be altered – the mountains can slip their perspective, and the stars can come closer.156 This is a conjecture of a de-­objectified ­heavens – stars imagined to be removed from the ­universalism of ­Newton’s Principia (1687), which had insisted that [t]he light of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun and from every system light passes into all the other systems; and lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, [God] hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another.157 Yukiguni’s stars are not placed at ‘immense distances’, though, and rather seem to weigh themselves out of the sky, or so Shimamura thinks as he looks upwards in an odd caesura after he and Komako discover the fire in the cocoon warehouse, with the shape of the Milky Way appearing ­distorted.158 This has less to do with wilful irrationality than with a modernist positing of a world not entirely explicable in Newtonian terms, and Masao Miyoshi has interestingly compared this imagery to that of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), in which that most ­Newtonian symbol now stages a bodily entanglement contrasting with its eighteenth-­century objective use (‘the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit’).159 If the e­ ighteenth-century Newtonian poets had extended the spatial command of Opticks into a cosmic universalism, Yukiguni hypothetically suspends them in a cosmic localism, recalling Nishida’s particularism, which was itself an element of another understanding of the ‘universal’.160 Newtonian laws of motion do not cease to operate, but they no longer have an ontological monopoly, and this is what some commentators find troublesome. Cornyetz is particularly appalled by the idea that in Kawabata there could be a ‘particular Japanese nature’ – Yukiguni’s nature is only ‘second’ nature;

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  123 it is not ‘nature itself’, it is not the Newtonian nature that is imagined to have no ideological baggage.161 But as Julia Thomas points out in her careful tracking of the term in Meiji Japan, ­n ature has tended to act as an intellectual framework for ­incorporating the non-West, and this organic mobilisation of nature is what we see being speculatively undermined here.162 These modernist texts then suggest a kind of speculative ‘denaturing’, bringing heterodox understandings of space, and correspondingly heterodox understandings of political authority. Moreover it is quite possible to see Yukiguni’s ­interruption of an increasingly discrete and knowable ­object-world not as an appeal to the timeless but as a way out of the timeless, out of the flattened time that automates progress as ever-­increasing perspicuity.163 For the texts considered in this chapter, nature might indeed involve the kind of ontological entanglement Opticks and its Scottish Enlightenment adaptations had needed to be increasingly impossible. For critiques in the tradition of Cornyetz and Harootunian, it is precisely these texts’ failure to maintain unentangled subjects, which is to say economic subjects recognising economic history as real history, that opens them to fascist sympathies. But to insist on such an accusation is also to downplay efforts to renegotiate space, and the political implications of this renegotiation. Control of space remains central to the organisation of agency in these terms. After the Second World War, an emboldened British optical regime would go on to develop a massive apparatus of surveillance, nominally for the Lockean purpose of protecting physical property, but increasingly for the neo-Lockean purpose of making behaviour ‘objective’. Looking back at Yukiguni from this context, it is hard to see what is so objectionable in trying to reinsert into the automated separating-off of objects, into ‘what is’, as Cornyetz puts it, a kind of ethical intention, an ambition for a world outside the economic progressive, or what Cornyetz calls ‘what should be’. If this is ‘overcoming modernity’, in the phrase seized on by Harootunian and others in Kyoto writing (gendai no chōkoku, reworked by him as overcome by modernity), what it is overcoming might be understood as spatial uniformity, with its transcendental claims to neutrality in defining the modern self as a disengaged owner of knowledge. In their various ways writers like Tanizaki, Watsuji, and Kawabata ­respond to this with a modernist making-opaque. Something like this tendency is known to readers of Anglophone modernism – Gertrude Stein’s unfolding and refolding sentences, for example, blurring the boundaries of the re-­ presentational and the concrete, and frustrating the Smithian demands on language to exchange ideas.164 But for inter-war Japan a deperspectivising ­modernist aesthetic might be seen as having existential stakes, since on this depends the possibility of a life beyond the automated progressive. Cornyetz, though, seems unsure about the ­existence of a native modernism at all – modernism is assumed not to derive from Japan, but to be imported from somewhere else (we might say from the anterior space of

124  Modernism as Reaction the Newtonian viewer) – though oddly Japanese fascism is able to contribute to world fascism. In the next chapter I want to stress, following the arguments of Robert Crawford and others, ­something like the opposite of a ‘placeless’ ­modernism – modernism as ‘provincialising’, and able to extend a challenge of spatial and temporal fragmentation – a challenge Japanese modernism might show British modernism to be avoiding.

Notes 1 Cf. Hall, All Was Light, 45; Simon Schaffer, ‘Glass Works’ (1989), in eds. ­Cohen and Westfall, Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries, 202–17: 205; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ­(London: Penguin, 1997 (1689/1690)), book II, chapter IX, ‘Of Perception’, ­section  4, 144–45; cf. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: ­Newton’s Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets (Westport, CT: ­Greenwoood, 1979 (1946)), 7, 82. 2 Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, 37. 3 Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’ described in Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, 9. 4 Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, 4, 126. 5 Cf. Robert diSalle, ‘Newton’s Philosophical Analysis of Space and Time’, in eds. Rob Iliffe and George E. Smith, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 34–60: 36–37; Bernard Cohen, ‘Newton’s Method and Newton’s Style’, in eds. Cohen and Westfall, Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries, 126–43: 141–43. 6 On Scottish Newtonians, cf. Christine M. Shepherd, ‘Newtonianism in Scottish Universities in the Seventeenth Century’, in eds. R. Campbell and A. Skinner, The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (­Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 65–85; Leonidas Montes, ‘Newtonianism and Adam Smith’, in eds. Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (Oxford: O ­ xford University Press, 2013), 36–53. On Colin Maclaurin, cf. ed. Broadie, The Scottish ­Enlightenment: An Anthology, 781–95; Maclaurin, ‘From an Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries’ (1748), excerpted in eds. Cohen and Westfall, Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries, 122–126. 7 Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, 38, 12; cf. Berry, The Idea of ­C ommercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment, 21. 8 James Thomson, ‘Liberty, A Poem’, in Liberty and The Castle of Indolence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986 (1727)), 40–147: 101; cf. 43. 9 Cf. Schad-Seifert, ‘Constructing National Identities’, 49; Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, 39; Gardiner, At the Edge of Empire, 67–75; Craig, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi’, 109. Tessa Morris-Suzuki points out that Fukuzawa’s bunmei contrasts with Chinese bunmei in being a dynamic process of spiritual improvement – Reinventing Japan, 17–18; cf. Gluck, Japan’s ­Modern Myths, 253–54. 10 de Bary, ‘Karatani Kōjin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature’, 256. On English as a global middle class aspiration, cf. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 59. 11 William Barron, Lectures on Belles Lettres and Rhetoric, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806 (1781)), 36; discussed in Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 37–38.

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  125 12 For example Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 229–43. 13 Kames, Elements of Criticism, Vol. 2, 383; Campbell, Philosophy of ­R hetoric, 216. 14 Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 102. 15 Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 62. Cf. ‘[p]erspecuity is to the understanding what light is to the eye’, Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 216; Mark Salber Phillips, ‘Adam Smith, Belletrist’, in ed. Knud ­Haakonssen, The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 57–78: 60. On rhetoric as a picturing of ideas, cf. Stephen J. McKenna, Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 98–104. 16 On Maejima Hisoka, cf. Ryan, Ukigumo: Japan’s First Modern Novel, 64. 17 Amane, ‘Yōgaku o motte kokugo o sho suru no ron’. There is a partial counter-argument in Shimizu Usaburō, ‘Hiragana no setsu’ (‘On Hiragana’), Meiroku Zasshi, Issue Seven, Vol. 1, 263–68; Shimuzu, trans. Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi, 96–101. 18 Cf. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 16, 175, 184; Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 58–59. 19 Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 73. 20 Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 81. On debate on this amongst newspaper letter writers, cf. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 172–74. On the ongoing revision of newspapers according to genbun itchi, cf. Suzuki, ­Narrating the Self, 96. 21 Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 3–12; Miller, Adaptations of Western ­Literature in Meiji Japan, 113. 22 Ryan, Ukigumo: Japan’s First Modern Novel, 10, 67, 95; Miyoshi, ­Accomplices of Silence, 16. 23 Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 85. 24 Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 57–69. On the link ­between phonocentrism and interiority, cf. de Bary, ‘Karatani Kōjin’s ­Origins of Modern Japanese Literature’. 25 Cf. Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 228–29. This may also show a lineage from Nishida – cf. de Bary, ‘Karatani Kōjin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature’, 244. 26 Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 205; on Freud’s idea of the emergence of abstraction and interiority, and genbun itchi, 53–54. 27 Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 86. 28 Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 44. As is described in the ­afterword to Chapter One added to de Bary’s translation, discovery of ­landscape was actualised in Hokkaido, the wide-open space that also had to be s­ ubdued contra Russia – Karatani, trans. de Bary, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 40–44. 29 Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 46. On the repression of the ­origins of literature, cf. de Bary, ‘Karatani Kōjin’s Origins of Modern ­Japanese Literature’, 244. 30 Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 211; cf. Kato, trans. Sanderson, A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3, 140–41. 31 Natsume, Kokoro, 56; Natsume, trans. McKinney, Kokoro, 37; cf. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 90. 32 On Natsume’s seeing Robinson Crusoe’s work, contra Woolf, as mechanical and tending towards listing, cf. Yu, Natsume Sōseki, 39. Defoe importantly lobbied for the new British union as a financial power – one able to ‘draw the balance of interest, or state… the affairs of both nations into

126  Modernism as Reaction one ­account current’ – and which stressed the importance of empiricism, ­fi nancial ­stability, and vision – Daniel Defoe, History of the Union (Dublin: J. E ­ xshaw, 1799 (1709)), 59, 61. 33 Virginia Woolf, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, The Common Reader (Second ­Series) (London: Hogarth (1965 (1932)), 51–58. The phrase ‘Bildungsroman of money’ is used by George Caffentzis of Defoe’s novels in general but ­especially of Captain Jack – Clipped Coins, 79. 34 Cited in Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 34–35. 35 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, In’ei raisan (Tokyo: Chūkō, 2009 (1933)); Tanizaki, trans. Thomas J Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows (­London: Vintage, 2001 (1977)). 36 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 229, 288; Kevin M. Doak, ‘­Fascism Seen and Unseen: Fascism as a Problem in Cultural Representation’, in ed. Tansman, The Culture of Japanese Fascism, 31–55: 41–42; Harootunian, ‘Constitutive Ambiguities’, 84; Harry D. Harootunian, ‘Time, Everydayness and the Specter of Fascism: Tosaka Jun and Philosophy’s New Vocation’, in ed. Goto-Jones, Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, 96–112: 101; Nina Cornyetz, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of ­Representation in Kawabata Yasunari’, in ed. Tansman, The Culture of Japanese ­Fascism, 321–54: 337–38; Alan Tansman, ‘Introduction’, in ed. Tansman, The ­C ulture of Japanese Fascism, 1–28: 7. 37 Edward G. Seidensticker, ‘Introduction’, in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, trans. Edward G. ­Seidensticker, Some Prefer Nettles (Tade kuu mushi) (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956 (1929)), vii–xvii: ix. 38 Naoki Sakai, ‘Pakkusu Amerikāna no shita de no Kyōto gakuha no t­ etsugaku’, in eds. Naoki Sakai and Isomae Jun’ichi, Kindai no chōkoku to Kyōto gakuha: Kindaisei, teikoku, fuhensei (Kyoto: Kokusai Nihon Bunka ­Kenkyū Sentā, 2010), 3–28: 5–6; cf. Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 74–75. 39 Cf. Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, 79. The term minor comes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 (1975)). 40 Cf. Minichiello, Japan’s Competing Modernities, 3. On Nishida and ­capitalist crisis see Bret W. Davis, ‘Turns to and from Political Philosophy: The Case of Nishitani Keiji’, in ed. Goto-Jones, Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, 26–45. 41 Cf. Aaron Gerow, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies at University of Michigan, 2008), 7; Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 183. 42 Weisenfeld, Mavo, 77–81; cf. Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of ­Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 139; on the ­earthquake as a rupture in memory in Kawabata Yasunari, 151. On ­Tanizaki’s perception of old Edo in Kansai, cf. Karatani Kōjin, Imi to iu yamai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003 (1975)), 264. 43 Ken K. Ito, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 106–08; cf. Seidensticker, ‘Introduction’, in Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles, vii; Harootunian, Overcome by ­Modernity, 183, 191. On the growth of advertising across media in the 1920s, and the growth of media in general in that decade, cf. Gardner, Advertising Tower, 19–29. 44 Elaine Gerbert, ‘Space and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taishō ­Writings’, in ed. Minichiello, Japan’s Competing Modernities, 70–90: 70, 79; cf.

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  127 S­ tephen Dodd, ‘Fantasies, Fairies, and Electric Dreams’, Monumenta ­Nipponica 49(3), Autumn 1994, 287–314. 45 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Chijin no ai (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1960 (1924–25)); Tanizaki, trans. Anthony H. Chambers, Naomi (London: Secker and Warbug, 1986 (1985)), 16; quotation follows Chambers’s translation; cf. Kato, trans. Sanderson, A ­History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3, 141; Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 11, 151–52, 169, 59–60; on Tanizaki against genbun itchi, 176. On the moga/modan gāru/‘modern girl’ as harbinger of material ­realities threatening the family, cf. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 25; P ­ ollack, Reading Against Culture, 49. 46 Cf. Ozu Yasujirō, dir., Umarete wa mita keredo/I Was Born, But… (­Tokyo: Shōchiku, 1932); cf. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 295; on Maede Hajime’s 1928 Sararīman Monogatari/Story of a Sararīman, 290; Aono Suekichi, Sararīman kyōfu jidai (Tokyo: Senshinsha, 1930). 47 Specifically, Tsumura Hideo – cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in ­Japan, 120; Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 62; on photographs as s­ tripping light from Buddha, 74. 48 Steven C. Ridgley, ‘Tanizaki and the Literary Uses of Cinema’, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 3(2), 2012, 77–93: 79, 84, 86, 91; cf. Chiba Nobuo, Eiga to Tanizaki (Tokyo: Seiabō, 1989); Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, 91; Joanne Bernardi, Writing in Light: The Silent ­Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Detroit, MI: Wayne State ­University Press, 2001); Aaron Gerow, ‘Celluloid Masks: The Cinematic Image and the Image of Japan’, Iris 16, Spring 1993, 23–36. 49 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, trans. Howard Hibbert, Quicksand (New York: ­Vintage, 1995 (1928–30)), 195–96. 50 Tanizaki, trans. Hibbert, Quicksand, 46; cf. 17–20, 35–38, 110–12. Tanizaki’s later ‘Kyōto o omou’ (1962) would describe Kyoto’s struggle against roads, ­electric lines, and abstracted space to avoid becoming like Tokyo, whose residents are homeless (kokyō no nashi); Kyoto still suggests a livable l­ocality – Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Zenshū, Vol. 22 (Tokyo: Chūō ­Kōronsha, 1966–70), 478–82. 51 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 50; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of ­Shadows, 48. 52 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 159, 188, 207; on fears over young ­people’s ‘nihilistic’ reading habits in the 1900s, 170–71; Cornyetz, ‘­Fascist ­Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation in Kawabata ­Yasunari’, 341. On post-First World War industrial expansion, cf. Harootunian, ­History’s Disquiet, 114. On schoolteachers’ and educators’ culpability in ­homogenising urban culture, cf. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 153. On the social ­embedding of the ie in Tokugawa Japan, cf. Nakane Chie, trans. S­ usan Murata, ‘Tokugawa Society’, in eds. Nakane and ­Ōishi Shinzaburō, Tokugawa Japan: The Social and Economic Antecedents of Modern J­ apan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990), 213–31: 216–22; Shimazaki Tōson, Ie (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2006 (two vols.) (1910–11)); Kato, trans. Sanderson, A History of Modern Japanese Literature, Vol. 3, 161. 53 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 18, 64, 198. In the short 1934 essay ‘Tōkyō o omou’/‘Thinking about Tokyo’, Tanizaki sees the city as having been ‘pillaged by modern civilization’ – glossed by Ito, Visions of Desire, 107. On worries over vulgar entertainments, cf. Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 251. 54 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 213.

128  Modernism as Reaction 55 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 56; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of ­Shadows, 63. 56 Cf. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 187. 57 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 18; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of ­Shadows, 16. 58 Cf. Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Naturalizing Nationhood: Ideology and Practice in Twentieth-Century Japan’, in ed. Minichiello, Japan’s Competing ­Modernities, 114–32: 125; Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 188–89; cf. Odin, The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, 62; Harootunian, ­History’s Disquiet, 122; Harootunian, Overcoming Modernity, 27. On Monbushō interior exhibitions as early as 1919 (‘Exhibition for the Improvement of ­Everyday Life’/Seikatsu kaizen dōmeikai), cf. Weisenfeld, Mavo, 214. On the spread of Japanese mass media in the 1920s, and their description as modanizumu, cf. Gardner, ‘Japanese Modernism and “Cine-Text”’, 571. 59 Martin Heidegger, trans. Albert Hofstadter, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001 (1951)), 141–59. 60 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 63–64; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 59–60. 61 Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stamburgh, Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996 (1927)), 208. As has often been pointed out, most of the writers of the Kyoto School at the time read German. 62 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 8–10; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 6–8. General Electric introduced a domestic air conditioner in 1935, though electric fans retained greater popularity – Jin Baek, Architecture as the Ethics of Climate (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 62. 63 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 10–12; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 8–9; Lippit, Atomic Light, 23. 64 Fukuzawa Yukichi, ‘Seiyō ishokujū’, Zenshū, Vol. 2, 189–209. 65 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 25; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 27; cf. Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 28–30; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 27–29. 66 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 27; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of ­Shadows, 25; cf. Lippit, Atomic Light, 24. 67 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 57; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 55. Irena Hayter has mentioned Satō Haruo’s description of being ­enraptured by film but also how this splits the senses to prioritise a ‘­western’ ocular-centred perception – ‘Figures of the Visual: Japanese Modernism, Technology, Vitalism’, Positions 25(2), 2017: 293–322: 295. In both ­Tanizaki and the Heideggerean Watsuji, time is created in the ­relation to the environment rather than as an extrinsic organisation of subjectivity. 68 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 32; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 30; cf. Odin, The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, 58, 319–20. 69 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 49; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of ­Shadows, 47. 70 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 30; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 30. On the temple form, Spengler, The Decline of the West, 105–07. 71 Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, 91. 72 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 49–52; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 46–49; cf. Tanizaki, In’ei Raisan, 33; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 31. 73 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 48–49; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 50–51.

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  129 74 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 51–52; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 46–48; cf. Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 40–43; Tanizaki, trans. ­Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 38–41; Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, 16, 19; Lippit, Atomic Light, 24–26. It is worth noting a similarity between this refusal of ‘spectral race’ and David Williams’s description of the Kyoto School resisting an Anglophere ‘white republic’ – Defending Japan’s Pacific War. On Pound and Yeats and their interest in nō, cf. Carrie J. Preston, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 23–101. On Yeats’s ideas on nō masks’ beauty as otherworldly, their uses in stagecraft, their stress on invisibility, and their conduit of the deathly, cf. Shotaro Oshima, W.B. Yeats and Japan (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1965), 37–60; on Yeats and Zen, 61–68; on Buddhist emptiness, 89–97. 75 Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 3. 76 Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 15, 18–19; on sensation as ‘a point of entry into a radically other worldview’, 33; on the ideograph as a dissolution of the conventions of Western thought, 26. 77 Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 33. On Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts’, cf. ed. ­Peter Jones, Imagist Poetry (London: Penguin, 1972), 15–18; on ­Fenollosa’s ­(ascribed) idea of interpenetrating humanity and nature, 39. On the ­influence of imagism, for example on T.S. Eliot, 40. Cf. Daniel Tiffany, ­R adio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) – ‘even if we acknowledge that Pound wished to exploit certain features of the ideology of vision (such as its association with objectivity) by designating modern poetry as imagistic, we must not ignore the subversion of the visible and the empirical that he proposes in the name of the Image’, 21. 78 Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 31. 79 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 16; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 14; Odin, The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, 62; Nishida Kitarō, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives, An Inquiry into the Good (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990 (1911)), 160. On Under the Banner of the New Science, cf. Kevin M. Doak, ‘Nationalism as Dialectics: Ethnicity, Moralism, and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Japan’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 174–96: 183. On a ‘relativist historical framework for science’, cf. Andrew Feenberg, ‘The Problem of Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 151–73: 159. On Fukuzawa’s faith in experimental science, cf. J. Victor Koschmann, ‘Maruyama Masao and the Incomplete Project of Modernity’, in eds. Miyoshi and Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan, 123–41: 128. 80 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 16; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of ­Shadows, 17. 81 Gerow, A Page of Madness, 22; cf. Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, 152; Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 17–20; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 18–21. 82 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 16–17; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 17–18. 83 Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 178. 84 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 23, 36–40; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 23–24, 35–38. 85 Cf. Burton, Political Economy, 118–21. Locke usually discusses silver, but only because of its commonness at the time – gold and other precious metals are implied.

130  Modernism as Reaction 86 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 19–22; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 20–22. 87 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 20; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of ­Shadows, 22. 88 Lippit, Atomic Light, 23. 89 Lippit, Atomic Light, 23. 90 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 58; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows 53; cf. Lippit, Atomic Light, 24. 91 There is a comparable argument in Jameson’s foreword to de Bary’s ­translation of Karatani’s Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen – t­ ransparency is linked with neutral, non-ideological, expression, vii–xx: xv. 92 Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 59; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of ­Shadows, 54–55. 93 Alex Wallerstein, ‘The Kyoto misconception’: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy. com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconception/; cf. Mariko Oi, ‘The man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb’, BBC News, 8 Aug 2015: https://www. bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33755182. 94 Lippit, Atomic Light, 83–84. On light weapons, cf. Paul Virilio, trans. Patrick Camiller, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 2009 (1989)). 95 Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 229–35. 96 On In’ei raisan as merely a traditionalist counterpoint to Taishō ­capitalism, ­ ulturalism’, Margherita Long, ‘Tanizaki and the Enjoyment of Japanese C Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 10(2), Fall 2002, 431–69; cf. H.D. Harootunian and Tetsuo Najita, ‘Japanese Revolt against the West: ­Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century’, in ed. Peter Duus, The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 6 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 711–73. 97 Watsuji is sometimes removed from the Kyoto School because of his work at Tokyo University from 1934; but as well as being a purely biographical explanation, this risks missing his embedding in Kyoto before this. 98 Watsuji Tetsurō, Fūdo (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2015 (1935)); also in Watsuji ­Tetsurō, Zenshū, Vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1962–63), 1–256; here I follow Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture; it is worth noting that Bownas uses a 1929 version and so misses chapter 5 on Herder, Hegel and the historicity of fūdo. The reconsideration of space in defining political communities is undertaken in the early 1940s by, for e­ xample, Ezawa Jōji, Kokubō chiseiron (Tokyo: Ganshōdō, 1944). 99 Tanizaki’s personal connections are described in, for example, Takeda ­Atsushi, Motogatari “Kyōto gakuha” (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 2001); Sono Tomoko, ‘“Kyōto nettowāku” to “Geijutsuka Mura” – kōkyōken ni okeru chishikijinron o bunseki shikaku toshite’, Kansai Sociological R ­ eview 10, 2011, 161–17. 100 Watsuji, Fūdo, 16–18; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture, 6–7. On John Millar against environmental determinism in Montesquieu, cf. Aaron Garrett, ‘Introduction’, Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, ix–xix: xiv. Thomas describes 1890s precursors – Reconfiguring Modernity, 173–74. 1 01 Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past’, 138. 1 02 Inutsuka Yū, ‘Sensation, Betweenness, Rhythms: Watsuji’s Environmental Philosophy and Ethics in Conversation with Heidegger’, in eds. J. Baird Callicott and James McRae, Japanese Environmental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 87–104: 89–90, 94, 100–01. On the question of

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108 109 110 111

112

‘whether the phenomena of climate are in essence objects of natural science’, cf. Watsuji, Fūdo, 9–10; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and ­Culture, 1. Watsuji, Fūdo, 12–16; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture, 3–6; here and elsewhere I follow Bownas’s translation. Baek, Architecture as the Ethics of Climate, 24; cf. Bruce B. Janz, ‘­Tetsuro, Fudo, and climate change’, in ed. Martin Schönfeld, Global Ethics on ­Climate Change: The Planetary Crisis and Philosophical Alternatives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 45–56: 48. Watsuji Tetsurō, Rinrigaku, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2007 (1937)), 272–336; trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter as Ethics (­A lbany: State University of New York Press, 1996 (1937)), 181–221; also Watsuji, Rinrigaku, Vol. 1, 181–82; Watsuji, trans. Yamamoto and Carter, Ethics, 119–20; here I follow Yamamoto and Carter’s translation. William R. Lafleur’s foreword to Carter’s translation of Rinrigaku (later quoted again by Carter as representative of Watsuji’s work in his introduction to the Kyoto School) questions how uniformly ‘the west’ accepts individualism, though he doesn’t specify traditions any further than this, vii–ix. On fūdo as the ground of experience giving rise to clothing, architecture, and so on, cf. Bein, ‘Climate Change as Existentialist Threat’, 111. On non-anthropocentric historiography in Kyoto thinking, cf. Nishitani Keiji, eds. Jonathan Morris Augustine and Yamamoto Seisaku, The Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, 1900–1990 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 52; cf. Matteo Cestari, ‘The Individual and Individualism in Nishida and Tanabe’, in ed. Goto-Jones, Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, 49–74: 49. Steve Bein, ‘Climate Change as Existentialist Threat’, in eds. Callicott and McRae, Japanese Environmental Philosophy, 105–19: 115; Bein draws this into an ecological argument that ‘climate change necessitates cultural change, and cultural change necessitates individual change’, 116. Baek, Architecture as the Ethics of Climate, 17; on this in Andō Tadao, 64–69. Moreover for Watsuji this thinking on nature can be dated to the Nara and Heian eras, the time of Tanizaki’s exemplary temples – cf. M ­ ichael F. Marra, ‘The Aesthetics of Tradition: Making the Past Present’, in ed. Michiko Yusa, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of ­C ontemporary Japanese Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 153–66: 158. On Nara cultural plurality in Watsuji, cf. Chiara Brivio, The Human ­Being:  When Philosophy Meets History. Miki Kiyoshi, Watsuji ­Tetsurō and their Quest for a New Ningen, unpublished PhD, University of Leiden, 2009, 36. Steve Bein, ‘Watsuji Tetsurō: Accidental Buddhist?’ in ed. Yusa, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy, 207–29: 215–16; Carter, The Kyoto School, 143. Baek, Architecture as the Ethics of Climate, 15–18. Yuasa Yasuo, Watsuji Tetsurō: Kindai nihon tetsugaku no unmei (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakujutsu Bunko, 1995), 178–79. Watsuji, Rinrigaku, Vol. 1, 19–20; Watsuji, trans. Yamamoto and Carter, Ethics, 9–10; Odin, The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, 396; Richard Bernier, ‘National Communion: Watsuji Tetsuro’s Conception of Ethics, Power, and the Japanese Imperial State’, Philosophy East and West 56(1), Jan 2006, 84–105: 86. On ningen as the movement of absolute negativity, cf. Brivio, The Human Being, 49. Watsuji, Rinrigaku, Vol. 1, 25–28; Watsuji, trans. Yamamoto and Carter, Ethics, 13–15.

132  Modernism as Reaction 113 Cf. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 291; Inutsuka, ‘Sensation, Bet­weenness, Rhythms’, 95; Baek, Architecture as the Ethics of Climate, 8. 114 Cf. Yasuo Yuasa, ‘The Encounter of Modern Japanese Philosophy With Heidegger’, in ed. Graham Parkes, Hedegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987), 155–74: 167; here Watsuji’s stress on space is interestingly linked to his writing on the voyage to Germany; on his answer to a European philosophical concentration on time, 171–74; cf. Brivio, The Human Being, 46. Heidegger’s ‘being in the world [Inder-Welt-Sein]’ is challenged by Watsuji’s ‘human existence in ‘“public” [yononaka]’ – Inutsuka, ‘Sensation, Betweenness, Rhythms’, 93. Dasein is sometimes rendered gensonzai, or ‘present’ sonzai. 115 Odin, The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, 64; Joel W. Krueger, ‘The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousness and Embodiment’, William James Studies 1(1), 2006, 1–16; Nishida, trans. Abe and Ives, An Inquiry into the Good, xv, xvii–xviii; Christopher Goto-Jones, ‘The Kyoto School and the History of ­Political Philosophy: Reconsidering the Methodological Dominance of the Cambridge School’, in ed. Goto-Jones, Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, 2–25: 13; Tetsuaki Katoh, ‘Language and Silence: Self-­Inquiry in Heidegger and Zen’, in ed. Graham Parkes, Heidegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990), 201–11: 206. ­Nishida’s exploration of junsui keiken/pure experience is in the first part of Zen no kenkyū – Nishida, trans. Abe and Ives, An Inquiry into the Good; cf. Miyakawa Tōru, Nishida, Miki, Tōsaka no tetsugaku (­Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967), 49–52. On the shadowiness of the mutual negation of self and world, Watsuji, Rinrigaku, Vol. 1, 32–33; Watsuji, trans. Yamamoto and Carter, Ethics, 18; cf. Rinrigaku, Vol. 1, 154–80; Watsuji, trans. Yamamoto and Carter, Ethics, 101–18. On Kyoto School s­ ubversion of epistemology, cf. Feenberg, ‘The Problem of ­Modernity in the ­Philosophy of Nishida’, 161. 116 Nishida, trans. Abe and Ives, An Inquiry into the Good, 4, 17, 26, 47, 54, 58, 77, 137; cf. Carter, The Kyoto School, 31–32. 117 On monsoon type, Watsuji, Fūdo, 34–62; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, ­Climate and Culture 18–39; on Japan’s ‘typhoon nature’ within the monsoon ­climate, Watsuji, Fūdo, 199–251; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture, 133–70. Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published in German in 1918 and was likely read in the original by most of the Kyoto School. 118 Watsuji, Fūdo, 91–178; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture, 59–118; especially Watsuji, Fūdo, 163–64; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, ­C limate and Culture, 108–09 – ‘The main constituent of western Europe’s gloom is a scarcity of sunshine…’. 119 Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 8. On Japan’s potential strategic importance to India as well as Britain, cf. Dyer, Japan in World Politics, 300–07. 120 Watsuji, Fūdo 210; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture, 141. 121 Watsuji, Fūdo, 218–20; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture, 147–49; cf. Watsuji, Fūdo, 217–18; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and ­C ulture 145–46 (Bownas’s translation); cf. Odin, The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, 64–65; Lippit, Atomic Light, 24–26. A ­similar point is made by Aono Suekichi, whose anxious sararīman ­perceives ­distances between family members in the suburban house – ­Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 36. 122 cf Watsuji, Fūdo, 215; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture, 145; and shōji and fusama partition rooms in terms of ‘a spirit of absence of separation’, Watsuji, Fūdo, 243–44; Watsuji, trans. Bownas, Climate and Culture,

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  133

123 124

125

126 127 128

129

130 131 132 133 134 135 136

164–65. Steve Odin – ‘ningen is disclosed not only in the ie “household” institution as a mode of collective group-consciousness but even in the openended architectural design of the traditional Japanese house [contrasted to] the compartmentalized structure of a traditional European home’ – The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, 65. Tanizaki, In’ei raisan, 34–37; Tanizaki, trans. Seidensticker, In Praise of Shadows, 32–35. Cf. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity’, in eds. Wollaeger and Eatough, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, 499–525: 499. Friedman is discussing Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 2010); cf. Gerbert, ‘Space and Aesthetic Imagination in some Taishō Writings’, 71. Gardner, ‘Japanese Modernism and “Cine-Text”’, 573–74; Lippit, ­Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 119–57; Seiji M. Lippit, ‘A ­Melancholic Nationalism: Yokomitsu Riichi and the Aesthetic of ­Cultural Memory’, in ed. Stegewerns, Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan, 228–46: 230; Gerow, A Page of Madness, 13–15; Okuno Takeo, Nihon bungakushi: kindai kara gendai e (Tokyo: Chūō ­Kōronsha, 1970), 109. On shinkankakuha as visible modernism, cf. Gardner, Advertising Tower, 21. On shinkankakuha elements in Yukiguni, cf. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 102; on shinkankakuha roots in imported avant-gardes, 96. ‘Sensation’/kankaku also has the meaning of sense-perception. Here I use the full version of Yukiguni, but place the book within the late ’30s. Nina Cornyetz, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation in Kawabata Yasunari’, 323; cf. 337–38. On Satō, cf. Gerbert, ‘Space and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taishō Writings’, 76. ­ awabata Cornyetz, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation in K Yasunari’, 335; on fascism as ‘representation for the sake of r­ epresentation’, 327. Harootunian perceives, after Walter Benjamin, a culturalism that is apolitical in its privileging memory – Overcome by Modernity, xxv; ‘­shading’ is 45; cf. Harootunian, ‘Constitutive Ambiguities’, 84. Cornyetz, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation in Kawabata Yasunari’, 322, 341; cf. 328–30; on Kawabata’s Nobel Prize speech of 1968 and the ‘nothingness of the orient’, 330–33; cf. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 156–57. The question of the primacy of the ‘as it should be’ has been noted as a problem for Nishida’s ethics in, for example, Christopher Ives, ‘Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida’s Philosophy’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 16–39: 29. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 111; cf. 105. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Okude Ken, Yukiguni o yomu (Tokyo: Miyai, 1989), 120–23. Kawabata Yasunari, Yukiguni (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2015 (1935–37)), 96; Kawabata, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker, Snow Country (London: ­Penguin, 2011), 70. Kawabata, Yukiguni, 97; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 71; cf. Kawabata, Yukiguni, 83–84; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 58. Kawabata, Yukiguni, 149–52; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow ­C ountry, 104–07. For example Kawabata, Yukiguni, 54, 60; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 39, 43.

134  Modernism as Reaction 137 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 22, 54–55; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 16, 39; Cornyetz, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of ­Representation in Kawabata Yasunari’, 337. On haptic memory, cf. ­M iyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 105. 138 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 154; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 109 – ‘the gloom where generation after generation of his ancestors had endured the long snows’. 139 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 74; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 52. 140 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 178–82. Harootunian describes the l­iterary critic Kobayashi Hideo’s desire to transcend history – Overcome by ­Modernity, 85. 141 H.V. Morton, In Search of England (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2002 (1927)), 172; cf. Gardiner, The Return of England in English Literature, 20–23. 142 J.W. Robertson Scott, England’s Green and Pleasant Land (London: ­Jonathan Cape, 1925). The last section of Scott’s The Foundations of ­Japan, ‘The Problems of Japan’, is largely about rural economies in Japan’s progress towards ‘national greatness’, 358–71: 371. 143 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 282. 144 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 101. The first, very short, train line in J­ apan was laid by the Jardine Matheson trader who had been the key point of contact for modernising arms deals for Sacchō restorationists, Thomas Glover. On the English ‘ruralists’, cf. Gardiner, The Return of England in English Literature, 17–54; on Mais’s (1936) injunction to walk slowly through the countryside, 25. 145 Mori, ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’, n.p.; Mori, trans. Dilworth, ‘Okitsu ­Yagoemon no isho’, 51. 146 Kawabata, Yukiguni 8–10; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 5–7. On the fall of anthropocentrism, cf. Nakamura, Japanese Fiction in the Meiji Era, 82 – ‘the author is no longer in the center of the world he is describing…’. 147 Kawabata, Yukiguni 11; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 7–8. 148 Kawabata, Yukiguni 10–11; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 7. 149 Kawabata, Yukiguni 52, 125; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 37, 89. On penetrating eyes, cf. Okude, Yukiguni o yomu, 147–69. 150 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 52; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 37. 151 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 55; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 39, my stress following Seidensticker’s translation. 152 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 10; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 7. Seiji M. Lippit discusses a similar spectrality in Asakusa no kurenaidan/ Gang of Asakusa, in which there is also a failure of resolution of figure and ground, and film ‘functions as an external substitute for an i­nternal human capacity to dream that has by now atrophied’ – Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 138–39. 153 Kawabata, Yukiguni 161; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 113. 154 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 46, 66; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow ­C ountry, 65, 89. 1 55 O’Neill, ‘Tragedy, Masochism, and Other Worldly Pleasures’, 83; Okude, Yukiguni o yomu, 126, 128, 130–31; cf. Yoshimoto Takaaki, Natsume Sōseki o yomu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2003 (2002)), 129–98. 56 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 60, 96; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Coun1 try, 43, 70; cf. Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 28–29.

Optics, Progress, and Subjectivity  135 57 Newton in ed. Thayer, Newton’s Philosophy of Nature, 42. 1 158 Kawabata, Yukiguni, 166; Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, Snow Country, 116. 159 Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 109; D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London: Penguin, 2007 (1915)), 459. 160 Cf. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, 71. 161 Cornyetz, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation in ­Kawabata Yasunari’, 331, 339. 162 Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 27. 163 Cornyetz, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation in ­K awabata Yasunari’, 337. 164 For example Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003 (1914)).

6 Tradition and Nationalism The Sacred Wood, Sekaikan to kokkakan, Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, Albyn, ‘England, Your England’ Continuity and Class: The Sacred Wood, Culture and Environment Especially relative to a body of thinking like the Kyoto School, there is often a hint of accusation in the term tradition. This is despite the fact that there are much more virulent demands for tradition in British ­modernism – though, as I have suggested, the object of British tradition can be seen as a kind of solid-state progressivism. In fact, some of the books in the sights of this accusation, Tanizaki’s In’ei raisan, for example, have little to say about tradition – correlate terms like dentō are notably absent, and his domestic interior is conceived as working within modernity.1 In part, the accusation often relies on an elision of traditional and past: Japanese writers are seen as envisioning an auratic time that becomes a solution to modern alienations, when they might simply be trying to remember the past. The past, I have suggested, is routinely excluded in British modernity, which demands a ‘conjectural’ continuity between past and present, leaving the past no independent existence. British modernism’s understanding of tradition, correspondingly, often involves a protection from the past, or alternatively from determinable presents. In this last ­chapter, I consider the stakes of pulling away from tradition as continuity, and indeed defining a national specificity separate from this continuity, as part of a modernist challenge to British origin myths. I set one of the key adaptations of modernism for university English, F.R. Leavis’s Culture and Environment (1933), and an iconic text of the post-war defence of the eternal, George Orwell’s ‘England, Your ­England’ (1941), against the first Chūō Kōron symposium in Kyoto, Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon/Japan from the Viewpoint of World History, and Nishitani Keiji’s Sekaikan to kokkakan/View of the World, View of the Nation, both from 1941. I suggest firstly that there is a serious distinction to be made between tradition as continuity and tradition as a recovery of discrete times, secondly that the Kyoto challenge to the world-historical has not been taken seriously enough, and thirdly that an attenuation of neoliberalism means that these challenges can no longer be written off so easily.

Tradition and Nationalism  137 Since Nishida, Kyoto thinking had understood tradition as an active social production, based in myth and grounded in ritual, growing from a conscious present, and pointing towards a future that is actively created.2 This contrasts with a British insistence that tradition is inactive, relying on a concealment of its own creation and claiming roots in ­nature – a structure made necessary by the 1688 coup. The denial of action in tradition was an eighteenth-­century Whig staple, but in the later twentieth century it was also a staple of the British left. The critical standard of the ‘invented t­ radition’, for example, in the term taken from the book by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, sets out to debunk peripheral nationalisms as mythological, but can see no such need in Britain itself.3 The universalist implication is quite right, in a sense  – Britain is beyond the national since it is beyond any active definition (or codified constitution), and this high ground beyond the national has been relied on by a paradoxically ‘patriotic’ British left, especially since the start of the second world war. The power of this claim is ultimately also behind what David Williams describes as the liberal castigation of the Kyoto School as nationalist (or ultranationalist, or fascist), in a line he reads from ­Peter Dale’s The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (1986) and Tetsuo Najita’s and Harry H ­ arootunian’s chapter in the Cambridge History of Japan (1989), through the diagnoses that characterise parts of James Heisig’s and John Maraldo’s Rude Awakenings (1994), and more so, Harootunian’s Overcome By Modernity (2000) – against which he tracks a revisionism travelling through Graham Parkes in 1997, Ōhashi Ryōsuke in 2000, and himself in 2004.4 I will go on to suggest that Williams’s argument about a fear of provincialising the ‘white republic’ (the Anglosphere, the US in particular) is even stronger when returned to its origins in the origin myths of the British state. Collections like Rude Awakenings, though, are important sources of comparative markers – Augustín Jacinto Zavala’s linking of Nishida and T.S. Eliot, for example, which has both these figures looking for a language that ‘brings past and present into contact’, and seeing tradition both as ‘the constitutive principle of historical reality’ and as ‘the self-­determination of the eternal present’. 5 Zavala’s link is significant: Eliot’s conception of tradition’s ability to overcome modern alienation does bring him close to the early Kyoto School, and Nishida was not alone in Kyoto in gesturing towards the Eliot of The Sacred Wood (1920).6 There are questions to be asked, though, about Kyoto’s ‘bring[ing] past and present into contact’, a wording that suggests an organic welding of times. Not all understandings of tradition show the British horror of the unmodified past, needing the present and past to continually co-adjust. Where Nishida understands tradition in terms of a more or less Hegelian mutual negation of times with discrete aspects, for the Eliot of The Sacred Wood these times do not stand apart, but are simply modulations of a metonymic stretch

138  Modernism as Reaction from an ideal origin (the origin of the empiricist viewer who confirms the universal rules of space, of the anterior subject, the uncodified constitution, and so on).7 Eliot is certainly attracted by the archaic, but the archaic must be filtered through the organic British order (something like Caffentzis’s ‘memory theory of property’). Or as he puts it in an ­often-quoted passage, poetry’s ability to heal also demands a modification of ‘all the works of art that preceded it’.8 So [t]he existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for ­order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.9 This necessarily relates to the constant evisceration of discontinuity demanded by the ­conjectural history Smith and others saw as a condition of progress, and for which the present is made meaningful by hosting a unifying abstraction. Eliot then, despite appearances, tends towards Scottish Enlightenment historiography, but particularly the ‘harder’ uses of Scottish Enlightenment against p ­ olitical intention, and iconically against the great interruption whose warning was taken by Meirokusha, the French Revolution. Anti-Jacobinism pivots on the assertion that the ousting of James II was not an action like the revolution – it was a renunciation of action through which a force of nature bound restorationists and, as Edmund Burke put it, ‘all their posterity for ever’.10 The tradition anchored by this active disavowal of action, which is to say British tradition, contrasts with Nishida’s tradition, and indeed is oddly close to the desire Harootunian describes of Kyoto for ‘a past that had not yet been assimilated into the requirements of a continuity identified with the present’.11 In Eliot, anti-­ Jacobin continuity becomes a component of literary modernism; but this was not the understanding of Nishida or Kyoto writers, for whom the present demands consciousness, and mutability can be a site of temporal fissure. If this indeed suggests a divergence of understandings of tradition, it would be played out institutionally in the 1930s. In criticism and poetic practice, British modernism saw an Eliotic hardening overtake the avant-garde in this decade (bolstered institutionally by language philosophy, university English, and similar movements).12 British ‘reactionary modernism’ was frequently even more virulent about modern threats than was Kyoto, even within the accepted mainstream. This much is suggested by the project to defend tradition as continuity in F.R. and Q.D. Leavis from the turn of the 1930s, to be pressed on to the educated middle class in general. F.R. Leavis’s Culture and Environment (1933), co-written with schoolteacher Denys Thompson apparently for pedagogical ends, describes dangers in advertising, cinema, and popular urban diversions in a tone not far from Tanizaki. Leavis describes these

Tradition and Nationalism  139 modern dangers in terms of ‘mechanisation’, his carefully un-­Marxist (and Arnoldian) term for ­commodification – and he does so just as Watsuji is describing a ‘machine culture’ limiting American civilization to arithmetic measures (though the founding empiricist and ‘arithmetic’ power, of course, was the British state).13 Leavis champions Eliot’s need for tradition to be time-binding, and links it to an organic defence against the discontinuities associated with machine culture.14 An obvious problem with this organicism is that British tradition as a binding of times is always backed by ‘machine culture’. Without increasing productive efficiency, as in Adam Smith, this fusing of times is not possible. So although Leavis perceives a traditional landscape being destroyed by class concerns, B ­ ritish tradition is dependent on class concerns.15 This argument might have worked differently if it had aimed to recover an England beyond British origin myths – it might have worked even for ‘Merrie England’  – but Leavis’s England is imagined not to change in 1688; it becomes ‘England’, not a place, but an icon. Or in ­Benjamin’s term leveraged against Kyoto by Harootunian (but used of ­Anglo-Britain by Ian Baucom), this ‘England’ is auratic. For Leavis, and Cambridge English more widely, the ­literary canon is a way to capture the auratic and anchor an anterior standard of aspiration, especially after the shock of the war.16 Canonicity as c­ ontinuity is d ­ eployed against imagined modern threats whose scale far outstrips even the ­Japanese examples given by Harootunian as evidence of fascist sympathy, and amounts to nothing less than ‘a vast and terrifying disintegration’ being waged by ‘the whole world outside the classroom’.17 In the face of this pressure, only literary language can bind time together meaningfully, much like Lockean currency – ‘if a language tends to be debased… then it is to literature alone, where its subtlest and finest use is preserved, that we can look’.18 So ‘while we have our language tradition is, in some essential sense, still alive… there is our spiritual, moral, and emotional tradition’.19 Leavis’s literary fund managers, or clerisy, in the term he borrows from Coleridge, then have a paradoxical role, both constantly separating themselves from material aspiration and vehemently protecting it as an enabler of tradition; and upon them, as he describes in an essay in For Continuity (1933), ‘depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition’.20 Michael Bell, picking up on Fred Inglis’s Radical Earnestness (1982), has argued for a Heideggerean reading of these hopes for poetic ­language, a desire to break down an epistemological dualism of self and world into a ‘“world” of the experience’.21 The desire to overcome dualism is ­familiarly modernist, and we have seen a version of it in Tanizaki – and yet without this dualism British civilization would not exist. A Heideggerean Leavis would have to overcome Lockean government but also rely on Lockean government to exist. But such a Heideggerean desire to overcome does describe some German importers like Nishitani Keiji – and

140  Modernism as Reaction Heidegger’s Germany was a key destination for Kyoto ryūgakusei, for reasons ranging from a perception of European philosophical crisis, to the Kantian influence on the League of Nations, to the resonance of the late Meiji ‘Prussian turn’, to the low cost of study under Weimar hyperinflation.22 Much Kyoto thinking follows Heidegger’s perception of discontinuities in European metaphysics to question a liberal individualism, and indeed a class politics, that it perceives as having run its course – but the Leavisite, British curation of this would be deeply invested in a defence of individualism and its inevitable expression in social class.23 Bell offers a fascinating reminder that Leavis’s work is not just anti-modern bluster, and it does suggest an area of crossover with mid-period Heideggerean Kyoto, but it leaves this puzzle over Leavis’s paradoxical reliance on ‘machine culture’. Kyoto modernism, on the other hand, ‘inorganic’ but committed to something like Eigentlichkeit/‘authenticity’, might rather mean grasping the past as past. The past here is not something to be used, it is not property, and it is not constantly adapted to the present. Moreover, Leavis’s model ground for tradition in Culture and ­Environment has more than a hint of the auratic, both a kind of local folk tale and a miraculating space where modern ruptures can be overcome. As local, Leavis’s gestures towards depictions of village life by a son of a Surrey wheelwright family, George Sturt, run oddly parallel to the Japanese ruralism Harootunian associates with the fascist auratic. Julia Thomas describes Yokoi Tokiyoshi’s 1927 ‘picture of a tightly circumscribed world of anti-commercial rural enterprise’, and an ideal community in which everyone ‘willingly puts out the maximum labor, takes pleasure in work, is in sympathy with the environment, and finds happiness in nurturing the growth of plants and animals’.24 In Leavis’s Sturt in 1933 we find much the same, but with an added organicist claim on the eternal; village life and work unfold without interference, interruption, or history – and to watch a wheel being made is to watch ‘the skill of England, the experience of ages’.25 Leavis’s Sturt’s world is a world without Nishida’s active creation, a world in which a present comfort is maintained by mutually adjusting times, rather than mutually eviscerating times. So [f]arm-waggons had been adapted, through ages, so very closely to their own environment that, to understanding eyes, they really looked almost like living organisms… The age-long effort of ­Englishmen to get themselves close and ever closer into England was betokened in my old farm-waggon… an organism in which all the parts interacted until it is hard to say which was modified first….26 This is the Eliotic co-dependence of present and past that denies any ­origin or autonomy for either – tradition as adjustment – and it makes the labour theory of value attain a kind of perfection (something echoed by the Leavises’ targeting of mass culture as leisure).27 Tradition

Tradition and Nationalism  141 is  imagined not to be property-dependent, yet is intimately bound to ­property-creating work, and as Eliot had it in The Sacred Wood, ‘you must obtain it by great labour’.28 While this Leavisite version of ­tradition makes claims for an increased consciousness, its continuity nevertheless makes it r­ eadable as an avoidance of consciousness, if consciousness implies present awareness (or, as Nishida put this distinction, consciousness that is unconscious rather than owning itself as an idea).29 So for Gary Day, ‘[a]lthough consciousness is bound up with the notion of tradition in Culture and Environment it may be possible to view the latter in a way that frees it from some of the problems associated with the former’.30 In Culture and Environment, and in For Continuity and Revaluation (1936), and eventually The Great Tradition (1948), such a defence of continuity might be read as the last great stand of Greater Britain, or what some Kyoto thinkers would call the Atlantic empire. 31 With a commitment to Buddhist (first phase) and Confucian (second phase) understandings of mutability, Kyoto School thinking had a different understanding of consciousness – as holding the seeds of a presentness that might decentre empire in what mid-period Kyoto would see as a different conception of the worldly. Acceptance of fragmentation in tradition implies another kind of world, and, it is possible to argue, a world with an ear for the modernist stress on discontinuity.32 In some Kyoto writing, that of Tanabe Hajime for example, discontinuity can be seen as that which makes history historical.33 Something like this ‘tradition of discontinuity’ is indeed later described by the Nishida student Miki Kiyoshi in his ‘Dentōron’/‘On Tradition’: [w]e usually understand tradition [dentō] as having flowed towards us in a continuity [renzokuteki ni]… But this understanding is onesided to say the least. For one thing, tradition is not continuous. Historically we see over and over that in any given era completely forgotten things… can be resurrected as tradition.34 In Miki’s understanding, recalling Nishida, history does not grow ­naturally (shizenseichōteki) but is active (kōiteki).35 Tradition lives, but it does not necessarily evolve. And as with Nishida, a contrast is to be made with British tradition, for which there is always an element that is natural and outside time. A modernist push would then inhere in ­‘provincialising’ tradition-as-timeless; and this would belong to a wider provincialisation of a historical ‘world’.

The Worldly and the World-Historical: Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, Sekaikan to kokkakan For the ’30s Kyoto School, an emerging crisis in Europe suggested a c­ risis of a monopolisation of subjectivity, and a crisis of the world that had

142  Modernism as Reaction depended on this. The consequences of Japan’s victory in its own ‘world’ wars and the stretching thin of global colonial empires had suggested that the world could now no longer be conceived only in terms of European agency. This would mean an attempt to disperse historicism, and a consideration of the world-historical (sekaishiteki).36 The term world-historical was of interest to Kyoto generally, and notably to Nishitani Keiji, a former Nishida student who returned to Kyoto after studying with Heidegger, and participated, along with Kōyama Iwao, Kōsaka Masaaki, and ­Suzuki Shigetaka, in the three 1941–42 symposia organised by the literary journal Chūō Kōron – one of two symposium series, the other being the perhaps better known Bungakkai ‘Kindai no Chōkoku’/‘Overcoming ­Modernity’. Although Takeuchi Yoshimi, one of the first post-war writers to take the Chūō Kōron debates seriously again (in 1959) is right that Kyoto writers underestimated the voraciousness of the militarists, the first Chūō Kōron symposium was part of a larger anti-war campaign, specifically associating with the Yonai faction against Prime Minister Tōjō, whose authority would soon be consolidated by the attack on Pearl Harbor.37 Still pre-Pearl Harbor, the first symposium was the least affected by censorship and so perhaps the most useful as a guide to Kyoto’s ideas of the world-­historical, but on publication in Chūō Kōron on the first day of 1942 it attracted significant police attention; future collaborations were made more difficult, and eventually all Kyoto thinkers would be pressured by wartime authorities.38 Takeuchi describes how the two sets of Kyoto symposia have a ‘double agenda’, having to be aware of both the Pacific resistance to Anglophone hegemony and Japan’s own emerging imperialist desires.39 It was at this moment of fraught renegotiation that some of the most serious critiques of British globalisation would take place. For these participants, a crisis of authority in the face of non-European agency has become unavoidable, and ‘the philosophy of history must specifically be a philosophy of world history’.40 Japan is in an unusual position relative to this recalibration of the world-historical or sekaishiteki, having passed the techno-moral tests set by the British Empire to become a world power, but with a long history of negotiating the foundations of power in terms of space and subjectivity not completely bound to the nineteenth-­ century empire system or the European nation-state. The Kyoto School was not simply in line with the current geopolitical thinking which theorised an East Asian region standing against a subject-centred conception of territory, but, as has now often been described, its provincialisation of the European foundations of political authority does point towards widespread support for an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, increasingly coopted and reconceived by the military as ‘territorial empire’.41 For these writers, a new understanding of the sekaishiteki would recognise that consciousness of the world-historical is a defining characteristic of the age, but also that this consciousness of the world-historical suggests a decomposition of the subjectivity behind the nineteenth-century world.42

Tradition and Nationalism  143 So for Nishitani here, the decentring of subjectivity in historical consciousness brings the possibility of the displacement of a unipolar world, or what we have called metonymic empire, anchored in an anterior authority and stretching out seamlessly.43 The world-­historical would no longer be unified around a seeing-knowing self, or a legal ­subject defined by ownership of rights.44 The current crisis suggests that the demands of this subject-centring have led to nihilism – and like Watsuji before him Nishitani would go on to examine the question in Nietzsche (Nihirizumu, 1949; ­translated as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, 1990) (and part of Nishitani’s wider project would be to mobilise aspects of a ‘Japanised’ German thought against British universalism).45 Echoing the terms of Leavis and Watsuji, Nishitani describes the authoritarianism resulting from economic self-interest as ‘mechanized civilization’, something that has given rise ‘to imperialistic struggles such as the Great War… [and] Europe’s crisis’.46 ­Nihilistic or economically determined subjects in fact lack agency, since the path of progress is always set out for them, something evident from the modernist anti-hero and somewhat ­Eliotic figure of the sararīman, whose path in life is always determined by ­unattainable aspiration.47 A n ­ ational cohesion will be important in resisting Anglophone hegemony, but the national will not be understood in the terms of the ‘national’ empire that has stretched subjectivity into a world; and for Kyoto thinkers this rejection shows a ground of commonality with Asian ­decolonisation, and a general statement of provincialism in the desire for ‘a non-­imperialistic unification of the world’.48 Imperialism, at least in terms of British globalisation, has arisen from a natural status given to subjectivity, something stressed by David Williams’s account, and rightly seen by Williams relative to many Anglophone critics’ need to reinsert subjectivity as a measure of the political acceptability of Kyoto thinkers. However, although subjectivity may be ‘European’, it is also the existential condition of British globalisation; it is what ­eighteenth-century Britain bequeathed to the nineteenth-century world, and saw as a condition of meaningful history.49 The Chūō Kōron participants then perceive an increasingly defensive British Empire as being in danger of ‘democratic totalitarianism’; and they think the British Empire now shows a blind spot comparable, tellingly, to the blind spot of China before the First Opium War.50 From Nishida onwards, Kyoto thinking, on the contrary, conceives of a worldly nation as a nation that empties itself into the world, turning to an awareness of absolute nothingness/zettai mu, a community based in self-negation (jiko hiteisei) (in which sense Nishida’s Nihon bunka no mondai/The Problem of Japanese Culture (1940) bears comparison with Heidegger’s salvation through abysmal nothingness).51 Belonging in such a nation would inhere in a desubjectification.52 And for Nishitani, this desubjectification can help the nation navigate the hegemony of the Atlantic empire to conceive of modernity in more plural terms. 53

144  Modernism as Reaction Kōyama Iwao’s own Sekaishi no tetsugaku/Philosophy of World ­History (1942) would see these ideas in a way close to some of the contemporary concerns of geopolitics, which posited an East Asian counter-politics in which social bonds were more intrinsic than the abstracted bonds between rights-bearing individuals, a non-subjective mapping he calls chiri, translatable as geography, though he also uses Watsuji’s term fūdo, and which binds questions of agency to the environmental.54 A locality’s politics, economics, and culture can be ascertained from its chiri, but its chiri also inheres in its conception of the world-historical.55 Localities’ and regions’ histories are intertwined with world history, their cultures are intertwined with world cultural history, and at ‘the basis of the reality of the historical world’s plurality [tagensei], various geographical [chiriteki] conditions differ according to place, and constitute necessary and substantial components of the uniqueness of that region’.56 In locality lies worldliness, and the possibility of overcoming unipolar history. So echoing Watsuji’s response to Heidegger, stressing a reconsideration of the role of the understanding of space in belonging, Kōyama describes a world-historical woven from place-specific fabric; he does not deny the current techno-moral ascendancy, but attempts to localise it.57 Kōyama and the other participants in Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon then attempt to bracket an apparently redundant idea of the sekaishiteki or world-­historical to argue for ‘a plurality of “historical worlds”’/rekishiteki sekai, and in doing so they build on Nishida’s idea of basho – a term translatable as place, but also suggesting an awareness without a subject, and an active (non-conjectural) relationship with the historical world.58 The world-historical is made up of a plurality of basho, or in Nishida’s famous phrase, a ‘world of worlds’.59 The world of worlds implies a conception of the worldly that can overcome the standoff between self and world: if eighteenth-century individualism became nineteenth-­ century nationalism and the universalism of the Atlantic empire, the twentieth century might be seeing a worldly awakening to a ‘universal’ of the specific.60 Miyakawa Tōru has described a move from ‘Japan in the world’ to ‘the world in Japan’, a world of particular characteristics (tokushuteki na sekai) as the basis of a universal world (fuhenteki na sekai), where this term, universal, no longer implies ‘globalisation’ in the British sense.61 Meaningful movement through time can then be disentangled from property-defined progress – and Christopher Goto-Jones interestingly suggests that Nishida’s forgetting of the subject-object division might now be read as something like a Bergsonian ‘opening’ (or as Nishitani puts this, a common leap into transcendent openness).62 For the Chūō Kōron participants moreover, this struggle to relativise authority based in an empiricist conception of space, the concern of Japanese geopolitics, also begs the question of relativising empiricist knowledge in general. For Nishitani here like Nishida before him, science education should avoid becoming merely instrumental and defined

Tradition and Nationalism  145 by subjective needs by including a philosophical element – and in this it can be seen as reapproaching the spirit of the Scottish educational generalism that had had to go underground within empire.63 Early Meiji positivism had cleared the way for a historical framework ‘fitted… to the facts of the real’ – conjectural history, with its need to join up discontinuous facts, going right back to Smith’s History of Astronomy – but this could now be opened to critique much in the way Heidegger had attacked positivism’s understanding of nature as out there.64 (And as it happens this discussion of historiography is followed by a speculation about different approaches to astronomy – with (European) or without (East Asian) ‘experimental rationality’.65) Conjectural history is now explicitly seen as limited in that ‘[h]owever many facts we bring, and however many revisions we make, it can never finally fit’.66 Globally unified histories, that is, are inadequately world-historical.67 This is a specific kind of modernist challenge, but it is one that speaks powerfully to the difficulty later described by Susan Stanford Friedman of the expansion of modernist studies (and the limitations of some varieties of World Literature) – the way [g]enuine plurality is notoriously hard to achieve because the move from the singular to the plural all too often obscures the covert ­continuation of a model, ideal type, yardstick, or point of reference to which divergent others are silently compared.68 Richard F. Calichman had described something like this glossing Takeuchi: Western reflection takes as its goal the absolute reduction of difference to the meaning of difference; because this difference somehow gives itself to be identified by the West, it shows that it is in the final analysis nothing other than the West itself.69 The remainder left over from the desire to absorb into the temporality of the same is incomprehensible, and a source of fuan or anxiety – the feeling of Natsume in London.70 But Britishness is hardwired to resist this retemporalisation. The remainder can be read, relative to Leavis and similar, as a fear of a radically provincialised world; and Williams understands this in terms of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s later better-­known description of a provincialised Europe, as well as recalling ­postcolonial thinkers’ claim that colonialism’s ‘hegemonic’ phase is characterised by an enforcement of humanism, which depends on a universalism of the subject as owner of human rights.71 (Or as Watsuji had this in ­Rinrigaku, ‘universal humanity’ is a European creation.72) The symposium participants agree that colonialism has made a crisis of relativity inevitable – something that had driven the Kyoto School’s sense of a need to attend to European philosophy.73

146  Modernism as Reaction There is a vivid mythopoetic imagining of this provincialising movement in Nishitani’s own Sekaikan to kokkakan/View of the World, View of the Nation (1941). In Nishitani’s story, the ‘Atlantic empire’ (British universalism) is seen as one of the world’s historically and geographically overlapping oceanic civilizations, described, with an echo of the tripartite structure of Watsuji’s Fūdo, as the Mediterranean, the ­Atlantic, and the Pacific.74 The metaphor of the seas was an important one, since in some of the revisionist thinking of the turn of the ’40s, East Asia held the potential to overhaul the European state system of territorial authority, and within this, seas suggested a non-subjective, non-­territorial interzone.75 The belonging that inheres in this may be in some sense ethnic, but this does not make it racial in the sense of nineteenth-­century British typology, and indeed race in the sense of nineteenth-century British typology is what it exceeds.76 Nishitani places the world-historical in the non-exclusivity of the seas, which are both discrete and mutually defining, as [t]he world’s major seas [kaimen, ‘sea levels’] have become one sea. When the Atlantic became central, Britain [Eikoku], having been no more than a peripheral region in the era of world history centred in the Mediterranean, became the focus of world history. At the same time, there was a growing self-awareness of ancient places of peripheral distribution, as the Pacific was awakened. The Pacific became the focus, and central to world politics…77 If the Mediterranean world was defined by physical conquest, and the Atlantic world sought to unify a human type, today’s Pacific refuses any universal subject form beyond specific practices.78 Recognition of the displacement of subjectivist understandings of territories and peoples gives Japan a specific world-historical role (yakuwari, sometimes read more loadedly as duty) to provide models of pluralism or tagensei relative to the European state system.79 This is what is behind what Nishitani describes elsewhere as Japan’s becoming a synthesiser of ideas, a claim now ‘notorious’ as exceptionalist but also understandable as a form of modernist bricolage in which elements of disparate modernities are rearranged free of binding global historiography.80 In which sense, Nishitani’s ‘oceanic’ modernism imagines multiple worlds running simultaneously, as against the metonymic continuity inherited by Leavis and Eliot and now readable in an anxious need to defend empire from twentieth-century dispersal.81 Also particularly telling is the way the radical provincialisation ­described by Kyoto echoes a provincialising modernist movement within the heartlands of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modern ­adjustment – Scotland – a region itself relatively invisible to Leavisite university English. Perhaps the most familiar argument along these lines is that of Robert Crawford, whose description of modernism as

Tradition and Nationalism  147 provincialism begins with the adjustment seen in the Enlightenment rhetoric courses I have described above as a ‘polishing’ movement (Smith, Kames, Campbell, Blair), and tracks forward to the radically outward-­ looking localism of the Scottish Renaissance.82 A modernist and broadly ‘nationalist’ political-literary movement dateable roughly to 1926–35, the Scottish Renaissance has roots in the crisis of continuity following the First World War that also animated the Leavises’ defence, and is perhaps most known to general readers through Hugh MacDiarmid’s decentred take on Eliot’s The Waste Land, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926).83 MacDiarmid’s de-universalising aesthetic has an eye on a pre-Enlightenment world (his famous injunction to return to Dunbar, not Burns), but also weaves this archaism in high modernist (Poundian) style into contemporary concerns to create a worldly-in-the-nation not far from Nishitani. Reaching beyond organic ideas of language then being institutionalised by Leavis and Cambridge English, MacDiarmid turns to ‘Synthetic Scots’, an artificial dialect incorporating past forms from historical dictionaries, and suggesting the tradition of mutually eviscerating times described by Nishida. In ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’ (1931), published in Eliot’s Criterion, MacDiarmid ­moreover mirrors the Kyoto rejection of a separation of action and knowledge, at least for a post-British Scotland – so that the Heideggerean poesis Bell had suggested of Leavis is only accessible after a process of provincialisation.84 Scottish Renaissance writers generally resemble Kyoto in seeing the worldly in terms of this post-British ethics of place. Where N ­ ishitani perceives a ‘global horizon immanent in the nation’, MacDiarmid’s ­Albyn (1927) describes the aim of a ‘diversity-­in-unity’, a conception of a ‘national worldly’ much like Nishida’s world of worlds.85 And this is a great civilizational de-universalisation: picking up on G. Gregory Smith’s 1919 idea of Scottish literature’s inbuilt ambivalences, MacDiarmid describes how Renaissance modernism [i]nstead of being a disparate thing destined to play a baroque, ­ornamental, or disfiguring rôle – chacun à son gôut – in English ­literature may be awaiting the exhaustion of the whole civilization of which the latter is a typical product in order to achieve its effective synthesis in a succeeding and very different civilization.86 This is the provincial as overcoming the British global, a ­Renaissance tenkō that is anathema to the Leavisite institutionalisation of modernism not because Leavis is anti-provincial (he isn’t, as shown by his defences of Lawrence against Eliot’s urban cosmopolitanism), but because of a new potential for active challenge to the Atlantic world as world. Cairns Craig describes how Scottish writers had to be dropped in Leavis’s and Richards’s founding Cambridge canon, to disappear entirely by Leavis’s Great Tradition in 1948 – so although now seen as a major modernist force, MacDiarmid’s recovery was largely a phenomenon of the later twentieth

148  Modernism as Reaction century.87 Especially after the institutional restrengthening of the British liberal defence, from the ’30s but especially from the early ’40s, MacDiarmid, like Nishitani, became easy to write off as ­nationalist – that is, not based in natural economic subjectivity – the lens, as Williams describes, through which Kyoto can be read as fascist (and can be relatively ignored in fields like postcolonial ­studies and World Literature).88 This castigation of this world-historical shift as nationalist is revealing, and Williams catalogues actual historical counter-­indications (ultranationalism had been defeated mid-­decade in the failed coup of 2–26 and damned by Nishida and the Kyoto School’s own push against Tōjō; and it is not always obvious how a ’30s nationalism would differ from the nationalism, say, of Fukuzawa in the 1870s  – besides which, we might add, nationalism has not prohibited inclusion into the post-colonial canon, as figures like Frantz Fanon attest).89 He also recognises that the stakes of this defence are ‘the exhaustion of Whig history as a manifestation of liberal ethics’, and even ‘the exhaustion of liberal history itself’, and that this means that any degree of violence can legitimately be mobilised against it – in which sense he might be describing Newton’s pursuit of counterfeiters as destroyers of the natural terms of exchange.90 If this moment of 1941–42 is a historical watershed, it leads to a redoubled defence – the 1945 bombings for Williams are an ­A nglosphere historiographical revenge, and for Akira Mizuta Lippit an evisceration of the historical archive; and after this and under the management of SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), Japanese historians tended to return to ­European theories of underdevelopment, the idea that Japan ‘was behind by three to four centuries’.91 Ōtsuka Hisano, for example, who in Sebastian ­C onrad’s description equated the 1945 defeat with the possibility of the fruition of British modernity in Japan, and who ‘considered the dissolution of ­E nglish feudalism and the destruction of the ancien régime in post-war Japan to be equivalent processes in world history’.92 But a­ lthough it is easy to see the taboo on localism as nationalism as responding to a ­Japanese military creation of a ‘real territorial empire’, after 1941 the great castigation of historiographical challenge as nationalism was backed by a tremendous growth of militarisation in Britain itself, and the state’s gaining new access to personal and family life in rationing, evacuation, and a hugely expanded BBC.93 ­A fter this moment, British authorities would have an unprecedented ­l icence to castigate local anomalies, and it is to this recuperative ‘nationalist castigation of nationalism’ that I turn finally.

Coda: Patriotism, Nationalism, and Neoliberalism The provincialising movement of Kyoto and Japanese modernism, although beaten down by a post-1945 Anglophone defence against the local, might

Tradition and Nationalism  149 nevertheless might have something to say to the old empire, as this defence has rumbled on into what we might describe as the authoritarian liberalism of the twenty-first century, which seeks to punish any contravention of the borders of the subject as an owner of rights. A non-­conjectural understanding of tradition would speak to this, but non-conjectural t­ radition, I have suggested, is something that key institutional models of British modernism had to avoid. Leavis’s civilizational models are typically brokers of ­continuity – not least D.H. Lawrence, who offers an aesthetic bridge over ‘a gap in the continuity of consciousness’.94 So in Culture and Environment, Leavis quotes a passage from Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to sum up the damage to the organic life of ‘England’: [t]he car ploughed on through the long squalid struggle of ­Tevershall… It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocer’s shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the greengrocer’s! the awful hats in the milliner’s! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster and gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements, “A Woman’s Love,” and the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows… “England my England!” But which is my England?95 Such mobilisations of the organic are perhaps familiar; less so the way that after the ‘worldly’ moment of 1941, the organic defence ‘massified’ and even became central to mainstream British socialism. This is probably best exemplified by the influence of George Orwell, not someone usually thought of an inheritor of a Leavisite (or a ‘Laurentian’) influence. One scene in Orwell’s Coming Up For Air (1939) closely repeats Leavis’s Lawrence passage, as the protagonist’s car ploughs on through a squalid modernised Oxfordshire that compares ­unfavourably to his childhood memories, which in turn look somewhat like those of Leavis’s Sturt. George Bowling’s return has been prompted by dissatisfaction with consumer alienations in an environment much like that of Leavis and Morton, or Tanizaki and Ozu, a life in ‘a line of semi-­detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-­weekers quake and shiver’.96 As he drives, Bowling goes through his own litany: [e]verything slick and streamlined, everything made out of s­ omething else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-­turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees.97

150  Modernism as Reaction On returning, Bowling finds that his childhood home has been s­ wallowed by development and labour migration, and he is forced to conclude that ‘[t]he old life’s finished’, that there is no redemption, and that the European horrors are all coming. But if at first glance this looks like a debunking of organic ideology, behind it is a kind of realist conviction that ‘England’ (Britain) will have to toughen its defence of what Williams calls toku, or ethical mandate.98 Orwell will call this rebranding of organic ideology patriotism, and he will recycle passages from Coming Up For Air almost intact in the wartime essay ‘England, Your England’ (1941), whose title echoes Lawrence’s story of wartime dislocation ‘England, My England’.99 Hugely influential on post-war Britain and quoted ever since by mainstream British politicians, ‘England, My England’ was published within months of the first Chūō Kōron symposium and Nishitani’s Sekaikan to kokkakan, and belongs to the same moment, as the war threatens to expand to test definitions of the worldly.100 Unlike the Kyoto symposium, though, Orwell’s patriotism goes with the grain of the ‘Atlantic empire’, seeing authority as uncodifiable and eternal and only graspable through fleeting impressions, in the ‘dozens of small things [that] conspire to give you this feeling’, beer, bad breath, and ‘the law’.101 Tradition is precisely the metonymic glue that allows these fleeting impressions to join up – so where Japanese geopolitics understood the nation as a specific organism to avoid its being subsumed by the borders of empiricist or subjectivist states, for Orwell English civilization is an unlimited organism; it ‘is continuous, it stretches into the future and past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature’.102 Moreover, of course, because ‘England’ is eternal, it never changes form, even when the size or jurisdiction of the state changes – which is why for Orwell it can take at least six different names while apparently referring to the same entity.103 The proliferation of British universalism, familiarly, is not active, it is the work of nature. Crucially, Orwellian patriotism would now be brought to bear in the fight against powers revealed as political (‘inorganic’) or nationalist. Orwell reasserts the Atlantic empire just as Nishitani tries to disperse it; Orwellian patriotism is Kyoto modernism’s inversion. (And it is worth noting also that Orwell’s final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, oddly inverts Nishitani’s Sekaikan to kokkakan, in a dystopia of universalism with three oceanic civilizations, including a death-worshipping Eastasia and an Atlantic empire named after J.A. Froude’s Oceana, in which law is too ‘natural’ to be codified, and pasts are modified automatically.104) This matters because Orwellian patriotism would become the bedrock of the post-1945 castigation of alien historiographies, and so eventually the environment that reads the Kyoto challenge as inhuman nationalism.105 The contrast is confirmed by Orwell’s 1945 essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’: patriotism means the return of the instinctual, nationalism means a grab for power; patriotism is neutral, natural, and limitless; nationalism

Tradition and Nationalism  151 is exceptionalist and leads to fascism.106 ‘Celtic nationalism’, which Orwell sees in MacDiarmid in particular, is an evil alongside Japanese nationalism, exemplified by Natsume’s predecessor Lafcadio Hearn.107 Massified by wartime and post-war technologies of consensus, Orwellian patriotism has stuck as a shorthand for condemning local anomalies. Before this point, British liberals had had few qualms about a language of race – the Beveridge Report, for example, or Keynesian eugenics; after this point Britain could be returned to a path on which expressions of non-­individual belonging are progressively purged, and liberalism could proliferate by condemning the typology of race that it had created itself. My point here, though, is that the era of authoritarian liberalism has seen some real doubts arise about this casually demonising use of the term ­nationalism, doubts that should say something about our ability to read Japanese modernism’s revision of British modernity. If Orwellian ­patriotism crystallises a defence of unipolar Anglosphere power long after the apparent attenuation of its world-historical purpose, it is nevertheless seen to be stretched thin by the long unfolding of the implications of the Scottish Renaissance and the de-universalising process that leads, most recently, to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. Despite obvious political differences, the interruption implied by the 2014 referendum, as interruption, is fundamentally the same as that of Kyoto modernism; it addresses the same historiography, and is the result of Scotland’s own long adjustment and de-adjustment, as suggested in l­iterary-historical terms by Crawford’s account of modernism as provincialism. The 2014 referendum attracted exactly the same kind of accusation of nationalism, and indeed Orwell’s formula, patriotic not nationalist, was overtly revived by the old centripetal imperial forces – amongst many other examples, David Cameron’s March ’14 appeal to Scots to vote against independence and for the ‘British brand’, reported as a desire to ‘fight Scottish nationalism with British patriotism’.108 What is telling here though is how the term nationalism was seen to be stretched thinner than ever: nuclear disarmament, health service funding, educational access, renewable energy – these now all had to be described as nationalist desires. An example of the resulting burdens on the term I’ve described elsewhere is an immediately pre-referendum leader article in the Guardian newspaper, which struggled to square its own Orwellian patriotism with the e­ vidence that Scottish independence campaigns concretised much of what they claimed to want – a problem solved by simply falling back on the key term itself: although these campaigns showed ‘a reassertion of some of the things that matter most to this newspaper and its readers’, ‘[n]ationalism is not the answer to social injustice’.109 The crux of this showdown is that this term, nationalism, no longer holds the same power for those with an interest in British current affairs; the everyday British use of the term is widely understood as a way to get rid of tricky questions about the late neoliberal order.

152  Modernism as Reaction In this moment especially, Japanese modernism has much to say about universalisation of the subject defined by individual ownership, and the consequences of a failure to provincialise. Japanese modernism certainly has an issue with ­capitalism, but I have suggested a focus on its issue with the cosmological framework behind capitalism, with British universalism as a natural authority. Like the Scottish de-adjustment, Japanese modernism is important to the unthinking of the universals behind the old superpower, defending itself in ever shriller terms. Nevertheless authoritarian liberalism is extremely difficult to provincialise within Britain itself. Such a provincialisation would raise questions of what kind of historical shifts can really be made, and what kinds of modernist challenge might have suggested them. If the Meiji R ­ estoration is viewed as a kind of achievement of self-creation, this leaves something to say about the difficulty of thinking of an equivalent tenkō or conversion in Britain itself.

Notes 1 Minamoto Ryōen, ‘The Symposium on “Overcoming Modernity”’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 197–229: 223; cf. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 158. 2 Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past’, 134. 3 Eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Despite these problems, the ‘invented tradition’ approach is also taken by Stephen Vlastos for Meiji Japan in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 4 Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, xx, xxvi, 36, 48–49, 91; on the Kyoto School recuperated post-mid-1990s as philosophy, 143; in Rude Awakenings Williams sees an attempt ‘to restage the old struggle between the Allied and Axis powers of the Second World War’, 144; on the revenge of the Anglosphere after 1945, 173–76; Graham Parkes, ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and the Political Correctness of the Modern Academy’, Philosophy East and West 47(3), online version: n.p.: http:// www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/Philosophical/Putative_Fascism.htm. On Dale’s view of Nishida as ultranationalist, cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 3. 5 Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past’, 135; Nishida Kitarō, ‘Rekishiteki keisei sayō toshite no geijutsuteki sōsaku’, Zenshū, Vol. 10 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1965), 177–264. 6 For example Nishitani Keiji, Shūkyō to wa nanika, trans. Jan van Bragt as Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 (1961)), 51–52. 7 Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past’, 136–37; James Heisig, ‘The Religious ­Philosophy of the Kyoto School – An Overview’, Japanese Journal of ­Religious Studies 17(1), 1990, 51–81: 57. 8 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen and Co., 1932 (1920 (1919))), 49–50. 9 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 50.

Tradition and Nationalism  153 10 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1986 (1790)), 104; Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 49. 11 Harry Harootunian, ‘Constitutive Ambiguities’, 87; cf. 83–84. On the promise ‘to restore the regime of cultural spirit and to show how the essentials of Japan’s cultural endowment had remained unchanged since the Stone Age’, Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 117, 141; cf. Cornyetz, ‘­Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation in Kawabata Y ­ asunari’, 338. 12 Mulhern, The Moment of Scrutiny (London: NLB, 1979), 15, 18. 13 Discussed in Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 279–80. On Leavis’s ‘machine civilization’ and Arnold, cf. Richard Storer, F.R. Leavis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 47. 14 F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950 (1933)), 11, 122; Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 118, 139. On Eliot cf. F.R. Leavis, ‘T.S. Eliot - a reply to the condescending’, in Leavis, ed. G. Singh, Valuation in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 (1929)), 11–16: 12–13; also, ‘[t]his most modern of the moderns is more truly traditional than the “traditionalists”’, 12. As Bell glosses Leavis, politics can implement social changes, but it can’t generate a guiding understanding – F. R. Leavis, 116; on the influence on Leavis of The Sacred Wood, 57. F.R. Leavis, ‘T.S. Eliot and English Literature’, in Valuation and other Essays, is discussed in Gary Day, Re-Reading Leavis: Culture and Literary Criticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 62. 15 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 81. 16 Mulhern, The Moment of Scrutiny, 25–28. On the role of the Newbolt Report (‘The Teaching of English in England’) in mobilising the sense of shock at educational standards exposed by the war, cf. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 89, 93. The first English degree courses at Cambridge ran from 1926–27. 17 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 1, 87. On this threat, cf. F.R. Leavis, ‘D.H. Lawrence’, in Leavis, For Continuity (Cambridge: ­M inority Press, 1933 (1930)), 111–48: 137; and Q.D. Leavis’s excoriation of the mass book industry (dedicated to her husband), Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932). 18 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 80–82, 90–94; moreover, this holds in place the ‘currency of Spiritual and emotional life’, 120; cf. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979 (1948)). And value ‘can only be spiritually discerned’ – Michael Bell, F.R. Leavis, 13 (London: Routledge, 1988); cf. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 22. 19 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 79–82. One of the bestknown criticisms of the organic society is Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), which argues that Leavis misses out penury and exploitation from his picture of organic England. This does address Leavis’s blind spot in perpetually recreating a middle class, but it has fewer qualms about the developmental framework. 20 F.R. Leavis, ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’, in Leavis, For Continuity, 13–46: 13–14; cf. ‘Prefatory: Marxism and Cultural Continuity’, 1–12: 10. On the turn to sensibility as class protection, cf. Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 88; cf. Mulhern, The Moment of Scrutiny, 36. 21 Fred Inglis, Radical Earnestness: English Social Theory (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982), 102–03; Bell, F. R. Leavis, 36, 39, 43; on the creative edge of language giving life to a communicative lifeworld as a whole, 99; both Lawrence and Heidegger search for a ‘pre-metaphysical mode of being… in modern times’, 10. On Heideggerean tendencies in Leavis’s key

154  Modernism as Reaction model D.H. Lawrence, cf. Michael Bell, D.H. Lawrence: Language and ­Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7. 22 Brivio, The Human Being, 37; cf. Takeda, Motogatari “Kyōto gakuha”. David Williams compares Woodrow Wilson’s definition of globalism – The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 16; Thomas W. Burkman, ‘Nationalist Actors in the Internationalist Theatre: Nitobe Inazō and Ishii Kikujirō and the League of Nations’, in ed. Stegewerns, Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan, 89–113: 98. On the League of Nations, cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 87. 23 Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past’, 138. 24 Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 196. It is worth noting that Thomas here draws from Stephen Vlastos’s historical depiction, which is sold on the ‘invention of tradition’ tradition; cf. Vlastos, Mirror of Modernity, 80. 25 Sturt quoted in Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 80. 26 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 85; cf. George Bourne [George Sturt], Change in the Village (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1959 (1912)). 27 Cf. Day, Re-Reading Leavis, 51; on similar 1920s arguments over leisure time, 48; on organic work, 50–51. 28 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 49. 29 Cf. Minamoto, ‘The Symposium on “Overcoming Modernity”’, 218. Eliot is slightly cryptic about the ‘conscious present’, which he sees as making the ‘past’s awareness of itself’ powerless, suggesting that the past is simultaneously recalled and dismissed – ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 54. 30 Day, Re-Reading Leavis, 61. 31 Arnold discussed in Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 43; cf. 135–37; cf. Bell, F.R. Leavis, 12, 17, 47; Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011 (2007)), 166. 32 Cf. Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1943 (1942)), 180–83; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 211–12 (second symposium). 33 Horio Tsutomu, ‘The Chūōkōron Discussions, Their Background and Meaning’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 289–315: 305. 34 Miki Kiyoshi, ‘Dentōron’, repr. in ed. Koyasu Nobukuni, Miki Kiyoshi ikō “shinran” – shi to dentō ni tsuite (Tokyo: Hakutakusha, 2017 (1947)), 122–30: 123–24. 35 Miki, ‘Dentōron’, 124–25. 36 Feenberg, ‘The Problem of Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida’, 153–54; Iida, ‘Constituting aesthetic/moral national space’, 91. 37 Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, xlviii, 102; Mori Tetsurō, ‘Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 316–32: 316; Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in ­Japan, 115. On Pearl Harbor as an expression of the new Tōjō consensus, Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 83. 38 Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, xlv–xlix, liii, 57; Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Resistance, xix. Mori describes Nishitani’s integrity in opposing ultranationalism, ‘Nishitani Keiji and the Question of ­Nationalism’, 323. On Nishida’s re-entry into politics after 1940, ­G oto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 75. 39 Quoted in Matsumoto Ken’ichi, Preface to Kawakami Tetsutarō et al., ­Kindai no chōkoku (Sendai: Fuzanbō, 1979), viii–ix; discussed in Bret W. Davis, ‘Turns to and from Political Philosophy: The Case of Nishitani Keiji’, 36.

Tradition and Nationalism  155 40 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 3; Nishitani, ­Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime ­Resistance, 110; translation is ‘must become’, but otherwise I mostly track Williams’s translations. 41 Takeyama Michio, Shōwa no seishinshi (Tokyo: Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 1985 (1983)), 131; Watanabe, Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination, 187–218. 42 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 4; Nishitani, ­Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 111; translation is ‘now governs human awareness everywhere on the planet’. 43 Cf. Davis, ‘Turns to and from Political Philosophy’, 27. This is corroborated by ­Naoki Sakai – cf. Brett de Bary, introduction to de Bary, trans. Karatani, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 1–10: 2. 44 Davis, ‘Turns to and from Political Philosophy’, 40. 45 Nishitani Keiji, Nihirizumu (Tokyo: Kōbundō 1949); trans. Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (Albany: State ­University of New York Press, 1990). 46 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 22, 23; Williams, working from the Chūō Kōron journal version, has ‘capitalism, mechanized civilization if you will’, Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 122. On race, Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 194–95, 197–98; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Resistance, 213–14, 221–23; cf. Mori, ‘Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism’, 318. There is also a case to be made here about the rejection of racial typologies in the native conception of the national, which has nevertheless often been described as racial. Williams translates minzoku as nation. He also makes a case for race-thinking characterising the US side of the Pacific War, and for the crushing of Japanese natives being viewed like the crushing of American natives, a developmental necessity – Defending Japan’s Pacific War, 174–75. 47 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 49–50; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 137–38; cf. Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 61. The sararīman in Aono Suekichi is discussed in Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 202–13; cf. xiii. 48 Davis, ‘Turns to and from Political Philosophy’, 36; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., ­S ekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 174–45; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, 206–07 (second symposium). On the need to maintain a ­national people against Nazism, Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki ­t achiba to Nihon, 107, 169–70. For Williams, Kyoto is more sceptical over race than the US Army or presidents, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 31; there is also a hint that the US’s fear of Japan as feudal might be compared to the country’s relationship to native Indians, and so to the historiography of William Robertson and other literati. Cf. Nishida Kitarō, Nihon bunka no mondai (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1982 (1940)). On fascism as colonialism after the collapse of a historical world, cf. Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 125. 49 On the Meiji state as built on subjectivity, cf. Karatani, Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen, 129–30; Karatani, trans. de Bary, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 94–95.

156  Modernism as Reaction 50 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 320; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 291 (third symposium); cf. Davis, ‘Turns To and from Political Philosophy’, 27. 51 Cestari, ‘The Individual and Individualism in Nishida and Tanabe’, 58, 70; cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 95; Katoh, ‘Language and Silence’, 205. On Nishida avoiding the subjective in Nihon bunka no mondai, cf. Kita, ‘D.T. Suzuki on Society and the State’, 84–85; cf. Mori, ‘Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism’, 351. 52 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 67; Nishitani, ­Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime ­Resistance, 147; Davis, ‘Turns to and from Political Philosophy’, 35–37; Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past’, 143–44. On the world-historical facing off against the world, cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 88. 53 Cf. John Maraldo, ‘Questioning Nationalism Now and Then’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 333–62: 351; Yusa Michiko, ‘Nishida and Totalitarianism: A Philosopher’s Resistance’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 107–31: 126–27. 54 On the Japanese adaptation of geopolitics to a challenge on behalf of the primacy of social bonds over political structures commanding abstracted rights-bearing individuals, cf. Matsuzawa Hiroaki, ‘Jiyū shugi’, Tenkō: kyōdō kenkyū (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1962), 249–310; Watanabe, Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination, 187–218. 55 Kōyama Iwao, Sekaishi no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Kobushi Shobō, 2001 (1942)), 166. 56 Kōyama, Sekaishi no tetsugaku, 108–09, 116. 57 Kōyama, Sekaishi no tetsugaku, 273. 58 Maraldo, ‘Questioning Nationalism Now and Then’, 351; Williams, ­Defending Japan’s Pacific War, xxxiii; Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past’, 135; Mori, ‘Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism’, 319. 59 Davis, ‘Turns to and from Political Philosophy’, 36; cf. Iida, ‘Constituting Aesthetic/Moral National Space’, 90; Doak, ‘Nationalism as Dialectics’, 305; Goto-­Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 90–92, 134; Christian Uhl, ‘What was the “Japanese Philosophy of History?”: An Inquiry into the Dynamics of the “world-historical standpoint” of the Kyoto School’, in ed. Goto-Jones, Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, 112–33: 115; Feenberg, ‘Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida’, 173; and Japanese history needs to become more internationally minded, 150. Williams also follows Robert Young to describe the Japanese significance of Arnold Toynbee’s identification of the West’s consciousness of its own relativity after globalisation from the 1870s – cf. Young, White Mythologies, 19; Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, 175. On Toynbee’s suggestion that a global division can be imagined between a Judeo-Christian Europe and a Buddhist East, cf. Nishitani, eds. Augustine and Yamamoto, The Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, 51. On Nishida’s ‘world of worlds’, cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 32. 60 Cf. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 63; Miyakawa, Nishida, Miki, Tōsaka no tetsugaku, 46–47. 61 Miyakawa, Nishida, Miki, Tōsaka no Tetsugaku, 24–25. Nishida himself avoided the term fuhenteki/universal, here used to indicate the overarchingness of the world-of-worlds. Goto-Jones also notes Nishida’s turn from the term fuhenshugi, universalism, to sekaishugi, ‘worldism’ or worldiness – Political Philosophy in Japan, 94. The modernity accepted by Tokugawa now looks like groundless change and needs another historiographical

Tradition and Nationalism  157 turn  – Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 35–37; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 128–30; cf. Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 24–25; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 122–23. 62 Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 134; cf. Mori, ‘Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism’, 318. Nishitani’s choice for Monbushō-­ sponsored ryūgaku was Henri Bergson, though Bergson was unavailable due to ill health – Carter, The Kyoto School, 93. 63 Robert E. Carter, Preface to Nishitani, eds. Augustine and Yamamoto, The Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, i–iii: ii; Feenberg, ‘Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida’, 159. Or in Williams’s rendering, ‘[t]he impact of… the empirical or positivist spirit casts an irresistible shadow over human existence. Once one has awakened to its powers, one is changed forever’ – Nishitani, ­Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 10; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 130. 64 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 24–25; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime ­Resistance, 122–23. 65 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 30; Nishitani, ­Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime ­Resistance, 126. 66 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 33; Nishitani, ­Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 127. 67 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 36–37; ­Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime ­Resistance, 128–30. For Kōyama, there is no equivalent conception of developmental progress (hatten shinpo) in Japan – Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 33; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 127. On technology’s inability to save humanity, Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 40–41; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 131–32; on mechanistic civil­ ization causing total war, Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 42; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 132–33. On Kyoto thinkers seeing Enlightenment progress as eclipsing actual possibilities for historical development, Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 253. 68 Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 42. 69 Calichman, Takeuchi Yoshimi, 160–61. 70 Calichman, Takeuchi Yoshimi, 160–61. 71 Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 118, 175; cf. Yusa, ‘Nishida and Totalitarianism’, 117; Abdul J­ anMohammed, ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, Critical Inquiry 12(1), 1985. 72 Watsuji, Rinrigaku, 45–46; Watsuji, trans. Yamamoto and Carter, Ethics, 26. 73 Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 11–19; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 115–19; Davis, ‘Turns To and from Political Philosophy’, 29. 74 Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan, 110–11; Nishitani Keiji, trans. Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism ­(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990 (1949)), 175–78; Zavala, ‘The Return of the Past’, 147; Feenberg, ‘The Problem of Modernity

158  Modernism as Reaction in the Philosophy of Nishida’; Iida, ‘Constituting Aesthetic/Moral National Space’, 91; Nishitani Keiji, Sekaikan to kokkakan (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1942 (1941)), 66–67, 97; Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, 101. ­Williams points out about the Kyoto symposia that the reach of American hegemony meant that there was a literal truth to the idea that the control of minor waterways had a global geopolitical purpose – The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 76–77. 75 Cf. Philip E. Strindberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 76 Graham Parkes has made a serious case for Nishitani’s anti-racism particularly, in ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School’, n.p., especially n.23. 77 Nishitani, Sekaikan to kokkakan, 67, 67–69. 78 Jan Van Bragt, ‘Kyoto Philosophy – Intrinsically Nationalistic?’, in eds. Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, 233–54: 249. 79 Cf. Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, 30; Williams also suggests that Kyoto’s reading of Hegel predates a similar Hegelian turn in France that would eventually lead to late twentieth-century literary theory, 44, 67; Nishitani, Sekaikan to kokkakan, 67, 80; without alliance with a world-historical power, China would be overrun by European powers, 203–11; cf. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 103; Uhl, ‘What was the “Japanese philosophy of history?”’, 120. 80 For the second symposium, Anglo-American (beiei) hegemony can be relativised by ‘cultivat[ing] a self-conscious synthesis… [of] historical necessity [rekishiteki na hitsuzen]’ – Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, 157–65; Nishitani, Kōsaka et al., trans. Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance, 195–201; cf. Minamoto, ‘The Symposium on “Overcoming Modernity”’, 217; Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 8; Feenberg, ‘Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida’, 154–55; de Bary, introduction to Karatani, trans. De Bary, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 3. Nishitani describes how elements of modernity have been brought separately and so don’t have their original ­interrelatedness – Nishitani Keiji, trans. Richard F. Calichman, ‘My Views on “Overcoming Modernity”’, in ed. Calichman, Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 (n.d.)), 51–63: 51. 81 Although he has little time for ‘fascistic’ Kyoto thinking, something of this Japanese simultaneity is to an extent also part of Harootunian’s model, in which Edo and European modernities work together – History’s Disquiet, 124. Harootunian describes Japanese modernity and European modernity as ‘coeval’. 82 Something like this model has been extended by Scott Lyall on the work of Hugh MacDiarmid p ­ articularly – Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 83 Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’, in eds. Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken, Complete Poems, Vol. 1 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993 (1926)), 81–167; T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, as The Waste Land (London: Hogarth Press, 1923 (1922)). 84 Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place, 36. 85 Hugh MacDiarmid (as C.M. Grieve), ‘Albyn, or, Scotland and the Future’, in ed. Alan Riach, Albyn: Shorter Books and Monographs (Manchester: Carcanet (1996 (1927)), 5–13; cf. Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place, 36–37; Lyall also describes how a ’20s push towards

Tradition and Nationalism  159 European modernist mainstreams, for example in MacDiarmid’s Scottish Chapbook, was also a push for a Scottish distinctness; moreover contra Leavis, MacDiarmid calls for a radicalisation of education, and sees what G.E. Davie would later call a generalist tradition in terms of a wider preparation for subordination, 46–51. Cf. Mori, ‘Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism’, 321. 86 MacDiarmid, ‘Albyn’, 13; on ‘diversity in unity’, 24; on ‘antisyzygy’, 22; in a parallel to the Kyoto symposium’s concern about direction, MacDiarmid’s stress ‘is completely at variance with the “direction” of English’, 4; cf. G. Gregory Smith, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (­London: Macmillan, 1919); Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place, 42. 87 Craig, Intending Scotland, 143–44. 88 A very similar question has been raised by Christopher Goto-Jones of Nishitani specifically – ‘The Kyoto School and the history of political philosophy’, 3–4; cf. Friedman, Planetary Modernism, 126–28. 89 Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, 99; cf. Yusa, ‘Nishida and Totalitarianism’, 110; here Nishida is discussed likening the revolt to the French Revolution; Frantz Fanon, trans. Constance Farrington, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001 (1961)). Here the hyphenated term ‘post-colonial’ suggests a temporal distance from colonialism. 90 Parkes, ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School’, n.p.; Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, xxvi, 36–37, 49; on the misleading translation of sōryoku sen as ‘all-out war’, xxx–xxxiv; on violence against the illiberal, 61. 91 Conrad, ‘What Time Is Japan?’, 67, 74, 77. 92 Conrad, ‘What Time Is Japan?’, 74. 93 Cf. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association, 1999 (1989)). 94 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 52–56, 94–97. Leavis describes the current era as an era of Lawrence – D.H. Lawrence, Novelist (London: Pelican, 1973 (1955)), 303. Bell describes this as Heideggerean, with Lawrence opposing vulgar expressions of technological power and pressing towards a ‘world’ defined by Being in the world – D.H. Lawrence, 8, 10, 58. 95 D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, quoted in Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 94; first ellipsis is mine, second is Leavis’s; this quotation is not footnoted or ascribed in Culture and Environment. Cf. ‘through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life… “A Woman’s Love!”… Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare’s England! No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-­conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous side dead, but ­ awrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Penguin, 1990 (1928)), dead’ – L 158–59. ­Lawrence’s perception of civilizational threat, Leavis suggests in For Continuity, was passed on to the historiography of Western decline in Oswald Spengler, whose ‘very idiom is often curiously Laurentian’ – L ­ eavis, ‘D.H. Lawrence’, 140; ­Francis Mulhern describes Leavis’s approval of­ Spengler’s ­diagnosis of modern rootlessness, The Moment of Scrutiny, 35. 96 George Orwell, Coming Up For Air (London: Penguin, 1984 (1939)), 14. 97 Orwell, Coming Up For Air, 27. 98 Orwell, Coming Up For Air, 223–24.

160  Modernism as Reaction 99 D.H. Lawrence, ‘England, My England’, in England, My England and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1995 (1922)), 5–33. 100 Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific War, 43. 101 George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, in Essays (London: Penguin, 1994 (1941)), 138–88: 139, 144. On the ‘Greater Britain’ analogy to the law above politics, cf. Dicey, An Introduction to the Law of the Constitution. 102 Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, 139. 103 Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, 145. 104 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 2004 (1949)). 105 Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, 142. 106 George Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945), in Essays, 300–17: 300; Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, 141. 107 On ‘Celtic nationalism’, as exemplified by MacDiarmid, Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, 310; on Lafcadio Hearn, spelled Hearne, 306. 108 Kate Devlin, ‘Cameron evokes spirit of Team GB with pro-Union speech’, Herald, 7 Feb 2014: http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/politics/ referendum-news/cameron-evokes-spirit-of-team-gb-with-pro-unionspeech.23375921?_=34eae97f9cb0567369fcb5e1f782f58ae2b30b69. On Cameron’s ‘patriotic vision’, cf. Christopher Hope, ‘David Cameron in final “patriotic” plea to Scots not to quit the UK’, Telegraph, 14 Sept 2014: http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scottish-­i ndependence/11095696/­ David-Cameron-in-final-patriotic-plea-to-Scots-not-to-quit-the-UK.html. 109 Guardian editorial, ‘Britain Deserves another Chance’, 12 Sept 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/12/­g uardianview-scottish-independence; they also claim in Lockean tone that progressive issues are better judged by the Bank of England.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. ‘Abe ichizoku’ (Mori) 86–7 agarwood 85 Aizawa Yasushi 9–11, 17, 19, 30n2 Alamayer’s Folly (Conrad) 90 Albyn (MacDiarmid) 147 Alcock, Rutherford 23 anachronism 84–93 Anglo-Chinese consular trading system 22–3 Anglo-Satsuma War 16, 81 An’i mondō (Aizawa) 9, 30n2 anti-Jacobinism 34n58, 51, 69n94, 138 Arnold, Matthew 26 ‘authoritarian liberalism’ 149, 151, 152 Baba Tatsui 17 Bagehot, Walter 25 bakufu (shogunal government) 9–13, 16, 24, 60 bakumatsu (end of Tokugawa) 18, 23 Banno Junji 89 Barron, William 106 Beasley, W.G. 21, 56 Bein, Steve 115, 116 Bell, Michael 139–40, 147, 153n14, 159n94 Benjamin, Walter 77, 139 Blacker, Carmen 43 Blackstone, William 27, 44, 47 Blair, Hugh 48, 106 Braisted, William R. 49, 50, 65n53 ‘Britain of the East’ 24–30, 117 British ‘reactionary modernism’ 138 British universalism 2, 5, 19, 21, 23, 25–6, 104, 143, 146, 150 Broadie, Alexander 67n69 Brunton, Richard 58 Bungakuron (Natsume) 76 bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) 43, 105

Bunmeiron no gairyaku (Outline of a Theory of Civilization) (Fukuzawa) 45, 48, 55 Burke, Edmund 105, 138 Burns, Robert 57 Burrow, J.W. 18 Burton, John Hill 44–8, 53–5, 58 Caffentzis, George 78, 82 Calichman, Richard F. 145 Cambridge History of Japan (Najita and Harootunian contribution) 137 Cameron, David 151 Campbell, George 106 Carter, Robert E. 116 ‘Celtic nationalism’ 151 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 145 Chambers’s Political Economy 42–9 Charter Oath (1868) 16 Chitnis, Anand 21, 67n69 Christianity 19, 35n71, 56, 108 Chūgoku (term for China) 17 Chūō Kōron 85, 136, 142–4, 150 Civilization and Enlightenment (Craig) 44 Coming Up For Air (Orwell) 149–50 Confucianism 4, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 65n47, 67n66, 98n53, 141 Conrad, Joseph 60 Conrad, Sebastian 148 Cornyetz, Nina 119, 120, 122, 123 cosmological convergence 9–18 Craig, Albert M. 16, 44–8, 65n51, 70n105, 79 Craig, Cairns 61n6, 67n69, 72n120, 147 Craig, W.J. 75 Crawford, Robert 124, 146, 151

162 Index Culture and Environment (Leavis and Thompson) 136, 138–41, 149 Curzon, George 27–8, 117 Custom Duty Treaty 57–8 daimyō (han feudal lords) 24 Dai Nippon (Dyer) 28–9 Davie, G.E. 60n1, 62n17 de Bary, Brett 77 De Quincey, Thomas 36n79 Defoe, Daniel 107 ‘democratic totalitarianism’ 143 Derrida, Jacques 107 Dicey, A.V. 25 Dilke, Charles 25, 26 Dilworth, David A. 88 A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (MacDiarmid) 147 Dyer, Henry 28–9, 54, 58 Earl, David Magarey 13 Education (Scotland) Act 1872 50 Education and National Life (Dyer) 29 Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) 91, 140 Elements of Criticism (Kames) 106 Eliot, T.S. 90, 137–9, 141, 146, 147 encyclopaedism 13, 44–5, 62n18, 105, 111 ‘England, My England’ (Lawrence) 150 ‘England, Your England’ (Orwell) 136, 150 English Literature 75, 83, 90, 93n1, 98n55 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume) 78 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 16, 78, 96n30, 104 The Expansion of England (Seeley) 25 Familiar Studies of Men and Books (Stevenson) 57–60 Faulds, Henry 53 Faustian civilization 14, 111 Fenollosa, Ernest 87, 112 ‘financial Newtonian motion’ 14 First Opium War 4, 9, 12, 16–24, 143 For Continuity (Leavis) 139, 141 Frazer, J.G. 45, 90

Friedman, Susan Stanford 3, 84, 91, 145 Froude, J.A. 25, 150 fuan (anxiety) 48, 57, 60, 76, 122, 145 Fūdo (Climate and Culture) (Watsuji) 5, 104, 114–18 Fukuzawa Yukichi 2, 4, 42, 44–9, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 61n8, 62n17, 89 Futabatei Shimei 56, 100n79 gaishi (unofficial narratives of minor samurai) 85 Gakumon no susume (Fukuzawa) 49, 54 genbun itchi 106–7, 112 Gerbert, Elaine 109 Gerow, Aaron 112 Glorious Revolution of 1688 45 Glover, Thomas B. 23–4, 59, 85 Gluck, Carol 80, 105, 121 The Golden Bough (Frazer) 45 Goto-Jones, Christopher 114, 144 Government of India Act 1833 19 The Great Tradition (Leavis) 141 Gützlaff, Karl 21 Hane, Mikiso 43 hankai (half-developed) civilization 48, 51, 69n94, 138 Harootunian, Harry 13, 77, 119, 137, 153n11 Harper, Thomas J. 108 Harris Treaty (Treaty of Amity and Commerce (United States and Japan)), 1858 22 Havens, R.H. 43, 66n61 Hearn, Lafcadio 76, 151 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 90, 91 Heidegger, Martin 91 Heisig, James 102n109, 137 History of Astronomy (Smith) 79, 145 Hoare, J.E. 22 Hobsbawm, Eric 137 Hume, David 44, 78 Hunter, Janet 28 Hyakugaku renkan (Links of All Sciences) (Nishi) 45, 50 In’ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows) (Tanizaki) 5, 104–15, 118–20, 136 Inglis, Fred 139 Inouye, Yuichi 22 In Search of England (Morton) 120

Index  163 Jacobite rebellion of 1745 59 Jameson, Frederic 98n55 James, William 116 The Japanese Enlightenment (Blacker) 43 Japanese neo-Confucianism 4, 9, 10, 14, 15 Japanese Treaty Ports 4 Japan in World Politics (Dyer) 29 Jardine Matheson 19–23, 28, 35n71, 53 Jardine, William 20, 21, 23, 53 jitsugaku (practical knowledge) 13, 28, 50 jiyū (freedom) 14, 47, 50, 51, 55, 56, 108 Joad, Cyril 120 Joyce, James 89 junsui keiken (pure experience) 116

Lippit, Akira Mizuta 110 Locke, John 14–17, 19, 20, 25, 45–6, 55, 56, 78, 85, 92, 93, 104–5, 113, 115, 116 London Protocol (1862) 21

kaikoku (‘national opening’) 4, 11, 13, 15, 24 kana (phonetic writing) 106 Kana no Kai (‘Society for Phonetic Script’) 106 kanji (‘Chinese characters’) 106, 112 Karatani Kōjin 35n71, 76–8, 83, 84, 91, 92, 98n55, 107, 108, 111 Katō Hiroyuki 17, 50 Kato, Shuichi 88 Kawabata Yasunari 3, 5, 104, 118–23 Kerr, Robert Malcolm 47 Ker, W.P. 75 Keswick, William 23 Kido Takayoshi 58 Kinmonth, Earl 26, 54 Kitagawa Fuyuhiko 91 kōbugattai (imperial-shogunal unified forces) 15 Kokoro (Natsume) 75–84, 88, 90–1 Kōyama Iwao 142, 144 Kume Kunitake 79

Macauley, Thomas 25, 29 MacDiarmid, Hugh 147–8 McKinney, Meredith 107 McLaren, Walter Wallace 26 Mais, S.P.B. 120 Manji (Quicksand) (Tanizaki) 109 Maraldo, John 137 Maruyama Masao 14, 24 Matheson, James 20–1, 36n79, 46 Meian (Light and Shadow) (Natsume) 82 ‘Meiji Conservatism’ 56 Meiji Enlightenment 2–5, 26, 42–6, 48, 57, 76, 78, 88, 105, 106 Meiji Restoration 9, 16, 23, 57, 152 Meirokusha group 4, 49–52, 55–7, 59, 60, 85, 112, 138 Meiroku Zasshi 4, 42, 49–57 Millar, John 80, 110, 115 Mill, J.S. 26, 49, 53 Mitford, Algernon 23 Mitsukuri Rinshō 51 Miyakawa Tōru 144 Miyoshi, Masao 81, 88 Mori Arinori 26, 49, 52, 55, 86–9, 91, 106 Mori Ōgai 85–89 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 44 Munro, Neil Gordon 26 Murdoch, James 26 Murray, David 26 The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (Dale) 137

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence) 149, 159n95 The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Laplanche and Pontalis) 84 Lawrence, D.H. 89, 149, 159n95 Leavis, F.R. 5, 83, 120, 136, 138–41, 143, 145–7, 149 Lectures in Jurisprudence (Smith) 77 Lin Zexu 20, 22

Nachträglichkeit (belatedness) 83–4 Nagai, Michio 68n77 Najita, Tetsuo 137 Nakamura Masanao 26, 51, 53, 106 Nakamura Mitsuo 54–6, 87 nationalism 49, 137, 144, 148–52 Natsume Sōseki 5, 26, 60, 75–7, 81–3, 85–92, 107, 111, 114, 122, 145, 151

164 Index natural law tradition, 15–18, 20, 93, 105, 106, 117 Newtonian space 114–18 nihonjinron (‘theories of the Japanese’) 14 Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature) (Karatani) 83, 96n30, 98n55, 125n28, 130n91 ningen sonzai (human existence) 116 Nishi Amane 45, 50, 106 Nishida Kitarō 3, 90, 101n96, 108, 111, 112, 116, 117, 122, 125n25, 132n115, 133n129, 137–8, 140, 141–4 Nishitani Keiji 3, 5, 136, 139–40, 142–4, 146–8, 150 Nogi Maresuke 5, 75, 79 ‘non-conjectural’ tradition 144, 149 ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (Orwell) 150 Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (Millar) 80 O’Neill, D. Cuong 76 On Liberty (Mill) 50, 53 Opticks (Newton) 104, 122–3 Orwell, George 5, 136, 150 Orwellian patriotism 150–1 Ōtsuka Hisano 148 Overcome By Modernity (Harootunian) 137 Parkes, Harry 23 Phillipson, N.T. 19 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke) 105 Political Economy for Use in Schools, and for Private Instruction (Burton) 44 Pollack, David 90 ‘post-republican Enlightenment’ 4 Pound, Ezra 87 Problems of the Far East (Curzon) 27 Protestant individualism 19, 56, 108 Radical Earnestness (Inglis) 139 The Rainbow (Lawrence) 122 Ranger, Terence 137 Records of a Family of Engineers (Stevenson) 58 restorationist movement 12–17 Revaluation (Leavis) 141

Ridley, Jasper 21 Rinrigaku (Ethics) (Watsuji) 115 Robertson, William 48, 58 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 107–8 Romaji no Kai (Society for English Script) 106 Rubin, Jay 84 Rude Awakenings (Maraldo and Heisig) 137 Russell, Lord John 21 ryūgaku (study overseas) 16, 23–4, 26, 28, 49, 53, 75, 76, 83, 88, 90, 114, 140 The Sacred Wood (Eliot) 137, 141 sadō (‘tea ceremony’) 85–6 Saikoku risshi hen (Self-Help) (Nakamura) 53–4 Sakamoto, Rumi 11–12 Sakuma Shōzan 11–17, 21, 49, 57 Schad-Seifert, Annette 44, 61n16 Scott, J.W. Robertson 26, 120 Scott, Walter 58, 82 Scottish Enlightenment 1–5, 12, 15, 19, 25, 30, 42–72, 76, 78–80, 104–6, 109, 115, 117, 123, 138 Scottish Political Economy 2, 21 Scottish Renaissance 147–8, 151 Second Opium War 22 Seidensticker, Edward G. 108, 111, 119 Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (Heidegger) 110, 114 Seiyō jijō (Conditions in the West) (Fukuzawa) 44–8, 105 Sekaikan to kokkakan (View of the World, View of the Nation) (Nishitani) 5, 136, 141–8 Sekaishi no tetsugaku (Philosophy of World History) (Kōyama) 144 sekaishiteki (‘world-historical’) 5, 136, 141–8 Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon (Japan from the Viewpoint of World History) (Chūō Kōron symposium) 136, 141–8 ‘Senzen’ no shikō (‘Pre-War’ Thought) (Karatani) 76 seppuku (death by disembowelling) 85, 87, 92 Shimazaki Tōson 110 shishōsetsu (I-novel) 80–1, 87, 109, 118 shizen (nature) 16–17

Index  165 Shosetsu shinzui (Essence of the Novel) (Tsubouchi) 87, 106 Shumi no iden (The Heredity of Taste) (Natsume) 89–90 Smiles, Samuel 26, 53–5 Smith, Adam 3, 14, 16–21, 43–9, 63n28, 76, 77, 79, 80, 117, 123, 138, 139, 145 Smith, G. Gregory 147 Spencer, Herbert 53, 88 Spengler, Oswald 14, 111, 159n95 spirits 111, 119, 145 Starrs, Roy 91 Stein, Gertrude 123 Stevenson, Robert Louis 4, 42, 57–60, 90 Stewart, Dugald 79 Stirling Treaty (Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty), 1854 22 ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ (Stevenson) 59, 82 Sturt, George 140 suicide 77, 79–87, 91–3 Suzuki, Tomi 81 Swale, Alistair 22, 43, 60 Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles) (Tanizaki) 109 ‘Taishō consumerism’ 108, 109 Takeuchi Yoshimi 142 ten (heaven) 16, 47 tenkō (conversion) 12, 13, 56, 83, 88, 91, 98n53, 147, 152 tetsugaku (philosophy) 16, 50, 54 Thomas, Julia Adeney 16–17, 34n55, 123, 140 Thompson, Denys 138 Thomson, James 105

Thoreau, Henry David 57 Tiffany, Daniel 112 Treatise on Human Nature (Hume) 16 Treaty of Nanking, 1842 21 Trescott, Paul B. 44 ‘The Two Drovers’ (Scott) 48 Two Treatises of Government (Locke) 15, 62n22, 63n24, 78 Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud) (Futabatei) 56, 87, 88, 100n79 Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi 10, 17, 30n2 Washburn, Dennis 81, 90, 107 The Waste Land (Eliot) 147 Watsuji Tetsurō 111, 114–18, 123, 130n97, 132n114, 139, 143–146 Wiesenfeld, Gennifer 91 Williams, David 10, 91, 98n53, 137, 143, 148 Yamazaki Masazaku 92 Yeats, W.B. 89, 112, 129n74 Yokohama drain system 58 Yokomitsu Riichi 91 Yoshida Shōin 4, 13–16, 19, 24, 42, 57–60, 87 Yukiguni (Snow Country) (Kawabata) 5, 104, 118–24 ‘Yūkoku’ (‘Patriotism’) (Mishima) 91–2 Zavala, Augustín Jacinto 137 Zero Suicide Alliance 92 Zhu Xi Confucianism 12 ‘zombie capitalism’ 92