2001 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
A study of the thought about 'Sintic civilization and barbarism' in Japan in the 18th century
| Project/Area Number |
11610046
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
History of thought
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| Research Institution | Ritsumeikan University |
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Principal Investigator |
KATSURAJIMA Nobuhiro Ritsumeikan University, College of Letters, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (10161093)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1999 – 2001
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| Keywords | the Tehory of the nation-state / Tokugawa intellectual history / civilization and barbarism / Motoori Norinaga / Hirata Atsutane / National Learning / Mito Learning / 蝦夷地論 |
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| Research Abstract |
In recent research on the history of Japanese thought, the theory of the nation-state has been much in the limelight as a methodological perspective. This perspective tends to regard the entirety of modern scholarship as an ideological apparatus constructed for the purpose of "nationalization," and takes a sharply critical attitude particularly toward single-nation historiography, a cultural device that has been closely linked to the narration of the origin of the nation. Nevertheless, it is a good thing for us to be made aware that within the Japanese archipelago, until the Tokugawa period, the narration of an inherent history of Japan that treated the Japanese state as something self-evident basically did not exist To speak from the field of Tokugawa intellectual history, the conception that was most clearly lacking among Confucian scholars and other intellectuals in Tokugawa Japan was the idea of the peculiarity of Japan. Of course, as a result of the momentous changeover from the Ming to the Qing dynasties in China in the 17^<th> century, there was the beginning of a conception of "oneself" in connection with structural fluctuations surrounding the distinction between "[Sinitic] civilization" and "barbarism" in, for instance, the Yamazaki Ansai school. Nevertheless, this also was a debate about superiority or inferiority premised on a universal civilization existing within the sphere of Chinese civilization, and it was not concerned with the problem of indigenousness (koyusei), let alone an exclusivistic particularity. In my personal opinion, the consciousness of indigenousness or peculiarity (tokushusei) began as a result of the encounter with the Western empires, an encounter that propelled the final disintegration of the Chinese civilization sphere, and concretely speaking its embryonic form arose in the foreign consciousness of bakumatsu schools of thought such as National Learning (Kokugaku) and Mito Learning.
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