Bricolage

Maruyama Masao. Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Mikiso Hane, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974)

Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan was Maruyama Masao’s first effort in his overall attempt to find an explanation of the modern history of Japan which did not depend wholly on Marxist theory, nor give all of the credit for Japan’s modernization to the West. In his introduction he makes clear the environment in which he was writing: Japan in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The context Maruyama gives, including the war in Asia, the conference at Kyoto University on “Overcoming Modernity” and the general intellectual climate make it quite amazing that a critical analysis of Tokugawa era thought could be written at all. Maruyama’s book, however, does the job well.

In the first part of the book, Maruyama attempts to explain the success of Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan by likening that period to the Hegelian “static history” of China. The relatively stable nature of Tokugawa society and its rigid, reified social structure make this period, unlike others in Japan, perfect for the growing popularity of Confucianism that Maruyama wants to talk about.

After setting the stage, Maruyama discusses the dominant school of Confucian thought in Tokugawa Japan, Chu Hsi Confucianism, discussing how early philosophers including Fujiwara Reika and Hayashi Razan uncoupled Confucianism from Buddhism, with which it had been closely related in Japan, and how it provided the thesis of Tokugawa social and intellectual organization. Maruyama does an excellent job of showing how Chu Hsi Confucianism amalgamates other traditions in Chinese philosophy, including yin/yang ideology, among others, and creates a unique place for itself in Chinese intellectual history. This very uniqueness, though, according to Maruyama, makes Chu Hsi Confucianism very inflexible, so that its followers really cannot evolve without punching irreparable holes in the overall system.

This sets up well the direction and target of the book: an explanation of the development of the Kokugaku school of thought in the late Tokugawa, which, Maruyama says, turned Chu Hsi Confucianism on its head, and yet never escaped the feudal beginnings of the Tokugawa political economy.

Maruyama’s discussion of the tenets of Chu Hsi Confucianism is thorough, coherent, and lucid. The organization of his essay takes a reader easily through a complex set of ideas. The only critiques possible here are that Maruyama’s description is a little too coherent, giving the reader a sense that he has encapsulated the universe of Japanese intellectualism in Chu Hsi philosophy, which sends a false message that Confucianism was the only stream of thought in the Tokugawa era that mattered. In fact, he makes special note of this fact later in the book when he shows that the Kokugaku scholars located the beginning of their own ideas in the 17^th century, so that the Chu Hsi thinkers of the Tokugawa period could not have been its intellectual progenitor.

Maruyama makes a case that the majority of Chu Hsi scholars were unable, because of the closed nature of Chu Hsi philosophy, to do anything more than reiterate the basic tenets of the founding thinker. This means, though, that the rigidity of Chu Hsi thought was bound to change as the Tokugawa political and social system changed over their course of existence. In a way, this is the antithesis of his original point – that Chu Hsi Confucianism was successful in Tokugawa Japan because of its feudal rigidity, which made it a static society analogous to that of China. However, he also uses this idea of slow change in the Tokugawa period to underpin a history of the subtle variations in Chu Hsi thought that evolved over the course of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, as Tokugawa society evolved. He discusses the objections to Chu Hsi orthodoxy of such figures as Yamaga Sōkō, Ito Jinsai, and Kaibara Ekken, each of whom put a crack in the foundation of the Chu Hsi school, either through innovative ideas, or through rigid adherents to the fundamental tenets.

Maruyama locates the real revolution in Japanese Confucian thought, though, in Ogyū Sorai, whose ideas, he says, led to a “complete collapse of the Chu Hsi school.”[1]

Maruyama then goes into the characteristics of the Sorai school, while acknowledging that there were still other Confucian lines of thought in existence, and that the Chu Hsi line was not completely gone by any means. He gives an account of Sorai’s interest in philology, or kobunji-gaku – the investigation of the meaning of words and ideas in the context of their own time, and explains the secular, political leaning of Sorai’s ideas.

Using his system of uncovering the ancient meanings of words, Sorai cam to emphasize the Six Slassics, rather than the Four Books that were so important to the Chu Hsi scholars. He devalued any works later than these as being essentially polemical – reactions against the thought of others in the Hundred Schools period, and thus impure ideas already changed by the changing meaning of words. He also carefully defined The Way as belonging specifically to the Early Kings as human beings, and consequently, even though they were for him sages, they were also human, and not gods. This made his thought both universal, and heavily political in focus. Maruyama even compares Sorai here to Machiavelli.

In keeping with his own goals, Maruyama in chapter four makes the link between the Sorai School and Kokugaku, contending that the two were linked, if not in intellectual genealogy, at least in terms of association, common interests, and similar approaches to the problems they set themselves.

Maruyama’s first point here is that Sorai’s ideas were in two general directions, one secular and political, the other secular and social. After his death, according to Maruyama, his students split along these lines, with the social/literary line moving more and more toward literary criticism, and the political line becoming increasingly uncompromising and inflexible in its application of Sorai’s ideas.

Both Sorai’s school and the Kokugaku school of Motoori Norinaga. , he says, were interested in The Way as essentially political, but where Sorai and his followers saw The Way, and the examples of the Early Kings as universal, Norinaga made them specific, saying that there is no one Way, but that the Way is different depending on one’s cultural and political context. Thus, the Way for Japanese must be different from the Way for Chinese.

What is important here is Maruyama’s method of analyzing this connection. In a very Hegelian way, he sees the Kokugaku scholars as the antithesis of the Sorai school. He emphasizes the connection between the two in order to juxtapose their ideas. Since both are in fact dealing with The Way of Confucianism, even if one is in the process of rejecting it, neither has escaped it. This is the way toward a synthesis which will bring a new paradigm according to the Hegelian model of historical change. Maruyama is here trying to show that Japanese intellectuals, while they were still trapped in a feudal mode of thought (or perhaps because they were so trapped), were developing an indigenous kind of modernity. His careful discussion of the development of political and philosophical differentiation of national morality and religion, as when he shows that Norinaga was able to use Sorai’s personalization of the Confucian Sages to make them human, and thus subject to error. This allowed Norinaga to claim that Japan’s emperors were related to gods, and for the Kokugaku scholars, this made Japanese belief systems in fact more real than those of Chinese Confucianism, since the sages were humans reacting to social context, while Japan’s emperors were descended from the creators.

Ultimately, Maruyama comes back to his own reasons for doing the history that he has undertaken. In his conclusion, he makes it clear that he sees an intellectual history of Tokugawa era Japan as legitimate in part because it does not fit within the political chronology, but shows a development of its own, and in part because, he admits, he is looking for the growth of a modern consciousness in Japanese thought. He apologizes for concentrating solely on the disintegration of Confucianism by way of noting that Confucianism was at the beginning of the Tokugawa period the main stream of Japanese philosophical thought, and that its disintegration was unexpected. Once again, in his conclusion, he turns to the Hegelian construction of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, by suggesting that the pre-modern consciousness of the early Tokugawa period had to be erased through a process by which Confucian rationalism was replaced by the irrational and the subjective (Kokugaku), and then the synthesis of the two would create a new modern paradigm.

What Maruyama leaves unsaid, but implicit in his formulation, is that this movement toward modernity was interrupted by the arrival of Commodore Perry and those who followed from the West, and necessity and contact forced a Western modernity on Japan, and that this uncomfortable modernity led to many of the problems that would become the cause of the Second World War.

Maruyama’s thesis is compelling, and his analysis and command of ideas and history superb. However, the entire book is more complete than I expected it to be, with all loose ends tied up, even though, by his own admission, Maruyama fails to deal with other streams of political, moral, and religious thought that were available in the same period. Such neatly tied up ends seem to suggest, and evidence Maruyama presents support this, that in many cases, the theory here has driven the evidence rather than the other way around. Maruyama is searching for an alternative “Japanese Modernity,” and in the sophistication and concreteness of Kokugaku ideas, he finds what he is looking for.

[1] Maruyama, p.67.

Platt, Brian.  Burning and Building:  Schooling and State Formation in Japan,

1750-1890.  Cambridge, MA & London: 2004.

In Burning and Building, Schooling and State Foundation in Japan, 1750-1890 Brian Platt is trying to find “The Local in the Nation-State.”[1]  Platt’s question arises primarily from his reading of earlier treatments of the rise of Japan’s Meiji State, and the role of education in that rise, particularly Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman’s edited volume Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji.  While praising this body of work, the chief fault that Platt finds in that volume and other secondary literature on this topic is twofold: a general lack of attention to the developments in education, as if they were dictated by the state without contest, and a sense that the educational and intellectual changes that occurred during the Tokugawa Period created the “preconditions” for modern education which allowed a smooth transition from premodern to modern (read ‘Western’) educational organization.

            Heavily informed by histories of education reform in the modern West, Platt’s primary question in this volume comes from Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, and is concerned with the contested nature of educational reform.  Platt here is deconstructing the binary opposition view of public education systems imposed by governments on unsuspecting and naïve populations for purposes of molding good citizens of the nation-state.[2]

            After posing this question, or rather, having Sayer and Corrigan pose it for him, Platt spends the rest of the book bursting the binary opposition bubble.  He takes as his first concept Gramsci’s thoughts on hegemony, and grants to readers that the purpose of the Meiji state in its early education reforms was, “hegemonic – it involved an attempt to secure the dominance of one particular vision of education over other visions.”[3]  However, Platt immediately refuses to accept that in a hegemonic system, the hegemon gains complete control, or even ascendancy.  Instead, he argues, in the case of Meiji education reform, the battle for hegemony was a cultural, not a physical battle, and that particularly the attempts by American Modernization theorists to view it in a binary way in the past have failed because they did not attribute agency to all of the players in the system.[4] 

            In fact, Platt wants to show the development of the Meiji Education system as a site of negotiation between the new government, which was engaged in a project of creating a nation-state, and national subjects, and local government, elites, and commoners who were the ones who had to attend school and pay for and carry out education reforms.  The fact that the Meiji government not only allowed space for, but saw the need to accede to local demands and contexts Platt argues shows that the achievement of hegemony was only partial.  In the same vein, Platt points out that the increasing use by commoners and local officials of designated government channels for their complaints, questions, and participation in education indicates an increasing acceptance of the central authority.  This is the contested space that Platt wants to explore.

            The book begins with a discussion of education in the late Tokugawa period in the province of Shinano (modern day Nagano), which remains Platt’s focus throughout the book.  In this Chapter, Platt is concerned with making two key points.  First, that literacy and education were not particularly uncommon in Japan of the Tokugawa Period, and second, that there is some continuity between educational goals and practices in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods in local areas.[5]

            In the second chapter, Platt is concerned, as he is throughout the book, with breaking down the binary oppositions with which historians have traditionally looked at education in Japan.  Platt begins here with an admonition to pay attention to more than just “the state” and “the People.”[6]  Instead, Platt dedicates the entire chapter to a discussion of the village elite and their position in the negotiation of education in late Tokugawa.  Beyond just this, Platt even problematizes historians’ view of Japan’s village elite by claiming that there was no standard set of ideas or actions that they followed.  Elites became education reformers, resisters of education reform, or even of general education.  Some elites became teachers and philanthropists, others reactionaries, and there was a gamut in between.  Since these people were critical in carrying out any reform of education, and in the politics that inevitably accompanied it, their positions, and activities, are important to analyze.

            In Chapter Three, Platt goes on to discuss the changes in education in the context of the immediate aftermath of the Restoration.  He looks at this period as a kind of liminal space – a time in which the old system was finished, and the new undecided, so that a plethora of ideas and policies could coexist, and compete for a share in the ideology and policy to come.[7]   This sense of endless possibility gave rise to various possible notions of education that eventually coalesced into the Meiji State’s policy by 1872.  the first was heavily influenced by “nativism” – the Kokugaku of Hirata Atsutane through his successor, Hirata Kanetane.[8]

            This did not, however, prevent the existence of alternative visions of education, some even responding to the same impulses.  Platt mentions a neat triad of individuals, whose names appear in nearly every history of early Meiji, and who had an impact on the education system, remolding it from the nativist vision to a nationalist one.  Iwakura Tomomi, who saw education as fulfilling two different purposes: “[first], we see the principle of schooling as a means of training men of talent for government service,” but, “[in] addition, Iwakura articulated the goal of achieving harmony and unity through moral instruction for the masses,” a very Confucian way of thinking.[9]   Itō Hirobumi echoed this call for education for the masses – a truly national education – but for purposes of national strength.[10]  Finally, Kidō Takahashi saw the goal of creating a system of national education for all Japanese for both economic and national strength purposes.[11]  These three, then, began articulating visions of the education system from the top center as a part of their visions of the modernization of the nation.  In some ways, Platt wants to show, their ideas resonated with nativist, Confucian, and Western ways of thinking about the nation and schooling that were already popular at the local level.  The final articulation of this vision was the promulgation of the Fundamental Code in 1872.  The main problem with this vision was that a national, centralized system of education came into contact with many of the education systems already built, or being built in the provinces.[12]

            The next three chapters of the book concentrate on the theme of negotiation/contestation at various points in the formation of the Meiji education system.  Chapter four is concerned primarily with early formation of local schools according to the Fundamental code, and the way in which the context in which local schools were created – both physical, in terms of geography, financial capability of villages, and available expertise, and ideologically, in terms of political and curricular organization.  Platt’s first point in this chapter is a claim that even the strongest state, in order to rule, has to negotiate terms with those it rules.  Platt wants to say that the Meiji state was neither strong nor stable at the point in which these reforms were being promulgated.[13]  In a way, what Platt is talking about here is a kind of extension of the liminal space found earlier in Meiji history.  He wants to set up a view of the 1870’s as an interstitial period, in which the opportunity for reinvention, liminal space style, coexisted with the growing stability and hegemony of the Meiji state in all areas of society.[14]  As education professionals (and those interested in education policy) redefined themselves, and as the Meiji state took for itself the ideas from that group that suited its needs, the possibilities remained numerous, and the realities fluid enough that rather than a simple imposition of hegemony, the Meiji state needed to negotiate its way to hegemony through accommodation of the needs and ideas of those whose services it required in order to carry out educational reform at all.  One excellent example that Platt gives is the fact that, as soon as the Fundamental Code was promulgated, education professionals in prefectural schools began to pepper the Ministry of Education with questions about application of the regulations.  The fact that the ministry took these questions seriously Platt says is an indication that just as the Meiji state was influencing local education, local elites and educators were influencing Meiji education policy.[15]

            In the fifth chapter, Platt addresses the fact that resistance, both to the Meiji government, and to its school reforms, existed in the same places, and often in the same people, as cooperation.  Not everyone signed on to the project of creating a new school system, and many who did, signed on at least in part to achieve other goals.[16]

            These goals were often personal, reactionary, or both, and in fact, one of the areas where Platt takes issue with the Modernization School is here.  Platt sees the 1870’s revolts in which schools were burned not as acts of demonstration against the Meiji reforms in general, but as having an element that specifically targeted schools.  He relates the general protest to the specific targeting of schools through the ideas of Herman Ooms, whose discussion of the naturalization of Tokugawa era cultural norms, including status hierarchy, and the perception of foreigners as dangerous and evil (and the idea of schools as catering to foreign needs) combined with local and individual concerns about how to pay for schools (everyone had to, not just parents of the students), and about the removal of children from work for school.[17]  For Platt, it is clear that schools were not on the periphery, incidentally related to local fear and anger over the reforms that were creating Meiji state hegemony, but were at the center of the question.

            In his final chapter, Platt uses the combination of the Nagano and Chikuma perfectural school districts (the prefectures were combined in 1876) as an example of the general set of problems, protests, and realities in the creation of a national education system in Meiji Japan.[18]  Ultimately, Platt’s conclusion is that the creation of a national education system was central to the Meiji state’s claim to hegemony in the creation of policy for Japan – and even in the creation of the concept of Japan, but that like other institutions, this process was not an imposition, but the product of a negotiation between local people and the state itself, with the participation of a very complex set of actors.  Elites, both supported and rejected the project.  Villagers protested, refused to pay, and yet agitated for local schools to be built close to them.  Teachers rejected the Meiji state’s vision and curriculum, but ended up working within it.  In fact, by 1890, according to Platt, controversy was not over, but protest and argument was conducted within the policies and pathways provided by the Meiji state.[19]  Hegemony had been achieved.  Still, contrary to the impression given by earlier books on the topic, attendance was never full, even in the so-called “education prefecture” of Nagano, nor were local schools prostrate before the central government.  Even when the basic shape of the education system was settled, the possibility for negotiation, compromise, and reform continued to exist.[20]

            Overall, with this nuanced treatment of educational reform through the early Meiji period Platt has achieved a useful synthesis of evidence and theoretical framing.  The book is influenced by Gramsci’s theories of hegemony, but not dominated by them.  Rather, Platt has done a nice job of finding complexity in the evidence, and then using Gramsci’s ideas to help him explain that complexity, so that he neither ignores his evidence and oversimplifies, nor becomes overwhelmed and incapable of making narrative judgments about it.  This is a sophisticated, and inspiring, book that has broadened my understanding of the early Meiji period substantially.

[1] Brian Platt, Burning and Building, Schooling and State Foundation in Japan, 1750-1890, (Cambridge, MA, and London:  Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), p 255.

[2] Ibid., p.7.

[3] Ibid., p. 6.

[4] Platt, p. 6

[5] Ibid., p. 57.

[6] Ibid., 66.

[7] Platt, p. 100.

[8] Ibid., p. 102.

[9] Ibid., p. 104.

[10] Ibid., p. 105

[11] Ibid., p. 105.

[12] Ibid., p. 130.

[13] Ibid., p. 144.

[14] For more on the idea of liminal space, see Victor Turner,  Dramas, Fields and Metaphors:  Symbolic Action in Human          Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1974, and Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 1960.

[15] Ibid. p. 149-155.

[16] Platt, p. 193.

[17] Ibid., pp. 190-195.

[18] Ibid., p. 216.  Platt here says that the combination of the two school districts created a microcosm of the problems and opportunities faced by the Meiji state and local entities in the early 1870’s.

[19] Platt, p. 258.

[20] Ibid., 254.

Bricolage » Japan

Ikegami, Eiko, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambirdge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, 2005).

In Bonds of Civility, Eiko Ikegami, a Sociologist, is refreshingly unapologetic about finding in her archaeology of Japanese aesthetic culture the preconditions of modernity – of the Meiji state, and of Japanese political, national, and social consciousness within aesthetic culture of the Edo period.[1] In fact, I found a number of ideas in Ikegami’s work to be free of the heavy debate over the nature of Japanese “modernity” that so overwhelms historians on both sides of the 1868 line.

Rather than rehash this debate, Ikegami moves very quickly, and in a lucid, well-constructed way, to give recognition to the complications that her “pre-conditions” argument creates for her, to set up a more complex version of Modernization Theory which recognizes no break in 1868, but rather posits a continuum of change from the 17^th through the 20^th centuries. Ikegami here is clearly closely connected to Hegel and Habermas in the way she views history as progressive. In fact, she directly acknowledges Habermas’ idea of the “Public Sphere” in her claim that Japan is moving toward civility during the Tokugawa period.[2]

Still, one of the most interesting and useful streams of though in Ikegami’s book is the distinction she makes between the “civil society” which Habermas describes as developing in 18^th and 19^th century Europe, and the “civility” she claims developed in Japanese aesthetic culture over roughly the same period.[3] In Chapter One the subject is “Civility without Civil Society”, and Ikegami here focuses on the fact of the success of the warrior elite at maintaining privilege, social distinction and hierarchy, and the creation of a de-centralized state as evidence that civil society, as Habermas defines it, with a political dimension, could not exist, but that civility – horizontal relationships, could.[4]

For Ikegami, the development of civility in Tokugawa aesthetic and cultural practice is a part of her argument for the Tokugawa period as a time of development in the direction of the “Modernity” of Meiji. However, Ikegami, unlike the Modernization School historians, does not preclude the possibility of other modernities in Japanese development during and after the Tokugawa period. She does try to make the point that when the political, economic, and military centralization occurred after 1868, social structures for civil society were already in existence, in the form of highly developed civility, based on the horizontal relations of aesthetic and cultural associations. Ikegami in fact defines civility as,”the effective grammar of sociability [which] allowed Tokugawa individuals to interact safely and confidently with those individuals whose backgrounds were unknown or apparently different from their own.”[5] This sociability, and its independence from the ties of politics, land tenure, or economics, meant, in Ikegami’s mind, that individuals within Japan were prepared by the late Tokugawa period to see themselves as members of a nation greater than their own local ties, and potential participants in national activities, culture, and history. They were, then, as she puts it, modern “before modernization.”[6]

In Chapter Two, Ikegami moves from the historical to the theoretical in order to deal with one of the most crucial problems in cultural history: the question of agency in historical change. This thorny problem is in many ways akin to the question of whether one should vote if one lives in a democratic society, since one vote in the United States, for example, is only one in nearly 75 million eligible to vote, the key is whether that one small voice makes any difference. In the same way, Ikegami has to deal with agency in both the production and consumption of culture. Her affinity here with Marx, Habermas, and Hegel is clear. In order to define culture and cultural consumption as modern or approaching the “Modern”, Ikegami, in her introduction and first chapter invoked the idea of the Tokugawa period as “proto-industrial”.[7] This makes it necessary, and possible, for her to dissect culture in terms of consumption on a Marxist model, which posits that mass culture (i.e. “national culture”) is not possible until a large group of consumers of that culture appear. The Frankfurt school of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, among others, was admant in the idea that mass culture requires both mass production and mass consumption, and neither of these are possible without the appearance of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. The public sphere of Habermas, which Ikegami invokes again in Chapter Two, is closely related to this idea, for it is in the bourgeoisie that Habermas locates the horizontal associations, existing within salons and coffee houses in Europe of the 19^th century, which he wants to call the “Public Sphere”, and where free discussions of ideas in multiple areas can create changes in social thinking.[8]

Ikegami makes a direct connection between her own thinking and Habermas here in the process of making her case that a series of social/cultural webs intersect with individual agents and thus mass activity and individual agency are both possible. In section two, Ikegami sets out to demonstrate the way this intersection works by showing how aesthetic associations acted as essentially horizontal associations that cut across hierarchical status and economic distinctions to create societies within societies, where individual members were parts of separate hierarchies dependent upon their mastery of the aesthetic rather than their lineage, wealth, or political position within the greater community. Ikegami calls these associations Za, using the Japanese word to pinpoint a social formation whose definition is not easily accessible in English.[9]

In the second section of the book, Ikegami shows how these Za Arts originated with the early Japanese imperial court, where they were not only developed, but became a means of communicating power relations in the earliest of Japanese political systems. Thus, the context of the appreciation of beauty as a part of a web of social and political relations was established very early. This provided the background against which a truly proletarian, horizontal development of associations within which individuals could express themselves as equals in the appreciation and execution of aesthetic practice could develop.[10] The development of Za Arts from a formalized court-style ritual which conveyed political power to a set of associational cultural activities in which participation was broad across all levels of Japanese society, though, required several centuries of historical change. Ikegami begins with a discussion of the development of linked verse (renga) and the way in which its departure both from the locus and the formality of the imperial court in a period of declining court power (the 12^th and 13^th centuries), along with the rise of the Muromachi Shogunate and the interest in newly powerful samurai in both court and associational culture moved linked verse to a new cultural space – literally a public space – where the limits of power met the limits of social divisions.[11]

The development of za arts in a non-political way in these liminal spaces in medieval Japan made possible the creation of associations in the spirit of ikki – groups of individuals who shared aesthetic and cultural values on an equal footing, regardless of their social or political standing.[12] By the end of section two, Ikegami has shown this pattern of growth of politically and socially neutral cultural spaces to be true for renga, tea ceremony, and popular music in the Medieval period.

What ikegami really wants to get to, however, is the growth of these networks of cultural associations in the Tokugawa period. She does so in the third section of the work, by noting a few major qualitative changes.

The first of these changes was the rapid growth of four systems of communicative networks that encouraged growing social ties in the seventeenth century. Those four included the processes of state creation, market-oriented trade systems, commercial publishing, and the growth of aesthetic associational networks. All of these acted together to create a kind of gestalt in which communication and awareness of cultural, social, and political connections among people at every level of society was on the increase.[13]

The second major change involved the need for the Tokugawa Shogunate to recreate itself as a public organization rather than a private warrior clan. The creation of this state publicness by the Shogunate led to the development of multiple levels of “publicness” and the arrival of the idea of private space, which was the result of the fact that categorizing public space led to areas of life that were not categorized, in which non-public, unregulated activities could occur. This private space then became the site of associational groups’, based on aesthetic pursuits, activities and communications. This is the development of a public sphere ala Habermas, albeit without the overt political element.[14]

In discussing “The Rise of Aesthetic Civility,” and the development of Haikai, Ikegami then brings the reader to her full argument, which is that interest in aesthetic pursuits existed across class boundaries, and in every part of Tokugawa Japan. Since the interest was there, and such activities existed outside of the formal regulatory system for the most part, such associations tended to cross hierarchical boundaries set up in the political, economic, and social arenas, and made it possible for Japanese to experience each other as different individuals with similar interests.[15] In addition, the long history of aesthetics as important in Japanese politics and social circles tended to reinforce the image of aesthetic pursuits as something intertwined with Japanese identity, despite the de-centralized nature of the political state that the Tokugawa had crafted.

Ultimately, Ikegami wants to present her argument of aesthetic associations as public space a la Habermas for three reasons – first to show the development of a proto-modernity as discussed above. Second, to broaden the idea of the public sphere beyond the bourgeouis salons of post-Enlightenment Europe and suggest that such associational forms were available in non-European cultures as well, and third, to show that associational developments outside of standard or official spaces for the expression of wealth, power, or identity can exist, and that such spaces have value as challengers to the status quo.

[1] Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambirdge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, 2005), 9. Here Ikegami states: “The fact that a plane of commonality evolved primarily within the realm of the beautiful in Tokugawa society, which was otherwise decentralized and divided, holds some suggestive implications for the post-Tokugawa development of the modern Japanese nation-state.”

[2] Ibid., 12-18.

[3] Ibid., 14-15. Here Ikegami goes briefly into the difference she sees, focusing “on the notion of civility rather than civil society.”

[4] Ikegami, 19-43.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ikegami, 15.

[8] Ibid., 45.

[9] Ibd., 67-76.

[10] Ikegami, 82-83.

[11] Ibid., 90-91. Here, the terms Ikegami is interested in are kugai and mu’en – kugai denoted a “public (but not political) space in the sense of a publicly usable space in a temple, or a market. Mu’en denoted a kind of topographical/political neutrality, a liminal space where the crossing of borders made redefinition of reality possible.

[12] Ibid., 115.

[13] Ibid., 132.

[14] Ikegami, 134-139.

[15] Ibid., 140-153.

Japan Focus online newletter has a good review of recent trends in neo-nationalism in populist and popular culture media, where it is easy to skip the rigors of real academic debate and feed the public “histories” that ignore the evidence and the research done by three generations of Japanese historians.

http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2413

Saturday news round-up:

In Okayama Prefecture, seven cases of suspected bird flu have been found.

A 35 year old man attending a Morning Musume concert at Yokohama Arena fell from the second level stands, badly injuring his head. It is not clear whether he will recover. For more information, see the Asahi News here:asahi.com：「モー娘。」公演３階席から２階に転落、男性重傷 – 社会

asahi.com：「勇気忘れない」　韓国学生ら駅で救助死６年　映画試写 – 社会

According to the Asahi Shinbun article linked above, six years ago today a Korean exchange student, along with a 47 year old Japanese camera man, jumped onto the tracks at JR Shin Okubo Station in the Shinjuku area to save a man who had fallen there, sacrificing themselves in the process.  Today, the parents of the Korean student, Mr. I, visited Japan to speak in support of a closer relationship between Japan and South Korea, noting that if their son’s act of sacrifice, and the film that is being released about it, could form the basis for the beginning of a closer relationship, that would be a good thing.  The film is opening today.

Mr. I’s parents then went, along with others including some Korean students, to tour Shin Okubo station and stand on the very same platform where the accident occurred.