Rousseau in Kimono: Nakae Chomin and the Japanese Enlightenment

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Rousseau in Kimono: Nakae Chomin and the Japanese Enlightenment Author(s): Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn Source: Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 53-85Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191779Accessed: 04-12-2015 19:53 UTC

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ROUSSEAU IN KIMONO

Nakae Chomin and the Japanese Enlightenment

TIMOTHY V KAUFMAN-OSBORN Whitman College

Where is the essence of the West in the countries of Europe and Amerca? All these countries have different systems. What is right in one country is wrong in the next; religion, customs, morals-there is no common agreement on any of these. Europe is discussed in a general way; and this sounds splendid. The question remains, however, where in reality does what is called Europe exist?

- Okakura Kakuzo (1887)

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Anticipating the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama recently asserted that we now witness "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."' As the West's rivals slip into insignificance, Fukuyama continued, we should expect a momentous transformation in the character of politics. On the international front, "growing 'Common Mar- ketization' of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states" intimates that Kant's regulative ideal of universal peace may at last assume the form of fact. On the domestic front, exhaustion of the dogmas engendered within less mature regime forms suggests that the politics of doctrinal struggle may "be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."2

My concern in this essay is neither with Fukuyama nor with the accuracy of his prognostication. I do, however, wish to begin by noting two premises implicit within this account of the meaning of contemporary world history. First, in applauding "the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 20 No. 1, February 1992 53-85 ? 1992 Sage Publications, Inc.

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54 POLITICAL THEORY / February 1992

Western liberalism," Fukuyama presupposes that there is such a thing as "the West," and that "it" possesses sufficient internal coherence to claim victory over the future's disposition. Second, although locating its objective incarnation in liberal political institutions and capitalist economic arrangements, Fukuyama holds that "the West" is first and foremost an "ideal," and it is to this concept that he attributes the power to move history "There are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run."3

What is this intangible agency of enlightenment, and what does it mean to contend that it will in time secure universal endorsement? Perhaps, we might speculate, "the West" is a phantasm evoked by the endunng spell of a

European philosophical tradition whose essentialist thrust requires that it subsume the labyrinthine contingencies of history beneath a single comprehensive theoretical construct. Perhaps "the West" can sustain its appearance of self-consistent identity only because this creature tacitly denies reality to the heterogeneous forms of association from which it has been abstracted. Perhaps it is only this illusion of unity that induces us to believe that "the West's" fundamental shape will remain unmodified as it, detached from its context of origin, wins adherents in ever more remote outposts of civilization. Perhaps "the West" should be exposed as a self-deconstructing category since its final victory entails the death of the alter ("the East"?) in terms of which it defines its own existence.

Yet in questioning Fukuyama's premises, let us not reject his endeavor. With him, we all now confront a political world that assumes the form of an

urgent question. The uncertain character of that world, which can no longer be divided unproblematically into free and unfree regimes, makes it ever more difficult to determine who we are merely by pointing to who we are not. Fukuyama's assertion of "the West's" ultimate triumph is one way to craft sense from this situation, but it is not the only way. What possibilities are obscured when, with Fukuyama, we detect in the future nothing other than a unilateral conquest (or is it a seduction?) of the inferior by the superior? If we are to explore such opportunities, we need to jettison many of the

categores that have dominated conventional political discourse throughout much of this century. We need to learn to recognize how the new is sometimes

engendered when internally intricate traditions, whose identities are more

tangled than our talk of "West" and "East" can ever suggest,4 come to

comingle. And we need to consider more thoughtfully the responsibilities of

political theorizing at a time when transnational political events daily chal-

lenge our Eurocentrc parochialism. These are the larger concerns which, although not the explicit topic of my inquiry here, animate its composition.



Kaufman-Osbor / ROUSSEAU IN KIMONO 55

A SAMURAI IN PARIS

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the fortuitous conjunction of a decaying feudal economy and escalating Euro/American meddle- someness disclosed the potential for significant political transformation in Japan. That potential achieved its dramatic consummation in 1868 when, in the name of the emperor, the leaders of the Satsuma and Choshu clans overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate. Replacing the prerevolutionary slogan of "Revere the Emperor and Expel the Barbarian" with a call to promote "Civilization and Enlightenment" (bummel kaika), the new order's leaders set about founding a centralized bureaucratic state of the Bismarckian stripe. Formally abolishing the old regime's complex status distinctions, the Meiji oligarchs established a legally undifferentiated citizenry whose individual members were universally authorized to own private property, required to pay taxes in cash rather than in kind, conscripted into the new state's military, and subjected to uniform indoctrination in a compulsory national school system.

In the early 1880s, the samurai who had spearheaded what is mislead- ingly called the Meiji Restoration confronted a wave of criticism from opposition groups asserting that the promise of 1868 had been betrayed.5 Calling for the immediate creation of a national legislative assembly and the protection of popular rights, many within the most powerful such group, the jiyu-mlnken-undo ("Movement for Liberty and the Rights of the People"), phrased their complaints in the egalitarian language of French republican- ism. They found it possible to do so, at least in part, because a translation of Book 1 of Jean Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract, composed in Chinese but transposed into classical Japanese grammatical structure, had been cir- culating in manuscript form since at least 1877 "Weeping, we read the Minyakuronyaku by Russo," testified one reader in a paean to popular sovereignty.6 Fearing that such political passions might spawn a Japanese incarnation of the spirit of 1789, at least one prefectural governor forbade his subjects to lay eyes on this suspect text. When this tactic proved counterpro- ductive, the central government adopted a more enlightened strategy. In 1881, the Genroin (Senate) commissioned an abrdged translation of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution In France, and this text was distributed to local officials so they might better counter the subversion of traditional verities. Dressed in kimono, London's paragon of civility was thus obliged to do combat with Paris's naked savage before a nation no longer certain what to wear.

The clash of competing schools of English, French, and German political theory defined Japanese public debate in the decade preceding promulgation




of the Meiji Constitution in 1889. As intellectuals sampled various European theories, they set in motion a highly accelerated reduplication of controver- sies which, in their original context, had unfolded over the course of two and a half centuries. Yet, of course, in a way these were not at all the same disputes. For European conceptual ingredients acquired quite different flav- ors when selectively blended into distinctively Japanese fare.

Perhaps the most imaginative theoretical eclectic of late nineteenth- century Japan was Nakae Tokusuke who, in addition to the dialogue discussed shortly, produced the translation of Rousseau's Social Contract cited earlier. Born in November 1847, Nakae was raised in Kochi, a castle town on the island of Shikoku, in a manner befitting a son of the lowest rank of foot soldier (ashigaru).8 Attending the local lord's academy, Nakae was given a classical education, first, in the Chu Hsl school of Confucianism (called Shushigaku in Japan) and later in that of Wang Yang-ming (Yomeigaku). Like many in the regions most immediately affected by the end of Japan's two and a half centuries of isolation, Nakae also learned some Dutch and a smattering of English. In 1865, after inheriting his father's samurai status, he was sent to Nagasaki and later to Edo to study French. Expelled from Murakami Eishun's academy because of his predilection for prostitutes, he continued his language training in Yokohama under the tutelage of a Catholic priest. That led to his eventual appointment as an interpreter for the French

envoy, Leon Roches, which in turn earned him a position as a low-level official in the Ministry of Justice. In the latter capacity he was assigned in 1871 to a diplomatic mission which, under the direction of Iwakura Tomomi, initiated contact with the French government dunng the early days of the Third Republic. Taking to heart the 1868 Charter Oath's injunction to "break

through uncivilized customs of former times" and to seek "intellect and learning throughout the world,"9 Nakae devoted his energies while in Paris and Lyon to an exploration of the texts of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mirabeau, Condorcet, Laboulaye, and Naquet.

Returning to Japan in 1874, Nakae accepted a position as head of the

Tokyo Gaikokugo Gakko (Tokyo Foreign Language School) and, shortly thereafter, as secretary to the commission created by the Genroin to translate Edouard-Juliean Laferriere's Constitutions d'Europe et d'Amerique. He re-

signed from the former after three months when his proposal to reinstate Confucian texts within the public school curriculum was rejected by the Minister of Education, and from the latter in 1877 as a result of a dispute with Mutsu Munemitsu who, among other offenses, had ordered Nakae to cease work on a second translation of the Social Contract. Soon frustrated by his

political inactivity but loath to endure another government appointment,



Kaufman-Osborn / ROUSSEAU IN KIMONO 57

Nakae in 1880 joined forces with a court noble, Saionji Kimmochi, in launching the Toyo jiyu shimbun (Oriental Free Press). Threatened by this paper's vigorous defense of popular rights, the Meiji government secured an imperial edict commanding resignation of Nakae's coeditor. Not so easily thwarted, Nakae turned to publication of his own magazine, Seitr sodan (Political and Moral Science Review), whose announced purpose was to "translate theories regarding the political ethics of the great Powers of Europe and America, and to explain in a simple manner the true principles of liberty and rights of the state and individual."'0 Its inaugural issue opened with a translation of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man," and the second included the first installment of Nakae's new translation of Rousseau, along with notes suggesting its relevance for contemporary Japan." (Incidentally, this work earned Nakae the sobriquet "Rousseau of the Orient" and inspired his adoption of the pseudonym "Chomin." Roughly translated, this means "a billion or trillion people," and it bears connotations akin to the English term "masses." Because this was Nakae's preferred form of self-identification after 1887, I shall use it henceforth).

Following composition of a work titled Kakumeizen Furansu Niseiki no Koto (France During the Two Centuries Before the Revolution) as well as translations of Veron's L'Esthetique, Fouillee's Histoire de la Philosophie, and Rousseau's Discours sur les sciences et les arts, Chomin returned to more hazardous forms of political engagement. Like virtually all leaders of the now defunct Jiyuto (Liberty Party), Chomin indicted the new government for its vacillation in seeking reform of the unfavorable treaties extracted, first, by Commodore Perry in 1854 and, shortly thereafter, by representatives of Great Britain, Russia, and Holland. As a result, and in the company of more than six hundred others, he was expelled from Tokyo under the harsh terms of the Peace Preservation Law of 1887 12 Relocating in Osaka, he composed and published the discourse to be explored here-Sansuijin kerin mondo (A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government).

On February 11, 1889, after expermenting with diverse governmental forms for more than two decades, the emperor gave to his subjects the constitution he had promised in 1881. From Osaka, Chomin sought and won a seat in the Lower House of the newly created national Diet. However, when his efforts to form a coalition of opposition parties were thwarted by a combination of internal disarray and official chicanery, he published a vituperative editorial entitled "The Exhibition Hall of Bloodless Bugs" and resigned his seat. Chomin then turned to a long series of unsuccessful commercial ventures, including the establishment of an inexpensive brothel which, he insisted, insured egalitarian distribution of a service traditionally




restricted to well-placed government officials. In 1900, after an abortive effort to reenter politics via the Kokuminto (People's Party), Chomin was informed that he would soon die of cancer of the throat. Suitably inspired, he translated into Japanese the French edition of Schopenhauer's Grundprobleme der Ethik and composed his most sophisticated philosophical work, Ichlnen yuihan (A Year and a Half). His Zoku ichinen yuihan (A Year and a Half, Continued), finished just a few days before his death in 1901 at the age of fifty-four, bore the subtitle No God, No Splrlt.13

CONDORCET'S STRAY DOG

Nankal sensei "loves drinking and discussing politics" (p. 47).'4 So begins Chomln's Discourse. Over the years, sensei's neighbors have learned that pleasant sport is assured when he, induced to imbibe a bit more than prudence dictates, is drawn Into discussion about Japan's collective welfare. After six small bottles of sake, "his ears begin to ring and his eyes grow blind. He swings his arms and stamps his feet on the floor. Overcome with excitement, he falls down unconscious. When he comes to his senses after two or three hours' sleep, he has completely forgotten what he said or did while drunk, and seems to have been freed from his possession by the proverbial fox of madness" (p. 48).

One evening, after several days of rain, sensei is visited by two strangers who, bearing a bottle of Hennessy's brandy, seek enlightenment. The first, Yogaku Shinshi (literally translated: Gentleman of Western Learning), is dressed from tip to toe in the latest European fashions. "He had a straight nose, clear eyes, and a slim body. His motions were quick and his speech was distinct" (p. 49). The second, Goketsu no Kyaku (Heroic Guest), is a thick- armed man who, to his Japanese audience, cannot help but recall the dashing figure of Saigo Takamorn.15 "His dark-sklnned face, deep-set eyes, outer robe with splashed patterns, and hakama indicated a man who loved grandeur and cherished adventure, a member of the society of champions who fish for the pleasures of fame with their lives as bait" (p. 49).

Their conversation commences with a long and sometimes rambling polemic by the Gentleman of Western Learning. Citing Diderot, Condorcet, Darwin, and Kant, Gentleman repudiates the conventional Confucian representation of time as a degenerative decline from an ancient golden age. History, rightly understood, consists of an assured march through determinate evolutionary stages, culminating in universal achievement of cosmopolitan democracy and perpetual peace: "Democracy creates a single, large,




complete circle embracing the entire earth by bnnging together the wisdom and love of the people of the world" (p. 75). Before reaching this happy end, however, all peoples must pass through two prior stages: absolute monarchy and constitutionalism.

Echoing social contract theory, Gentleman contends that the human condition was originally anarchical: "In the beginning, human beings lived in caves or in the field, gathered food and water, and copulated without marriage vows" (p. 64). Seasoning his Rousseau with a pinch of Hobbes, Gentleman insists that the absence of any determinate source of authority rendered force the rule of everyday relations. Over time, the desire to escape such chaos induced the weaker to give up their natural rights to one who, claiming sovereignty, took it on himself to issue and guarantee laws of collective order.16

Although brutish, such rule represented a step toward enlightenment. As generations passed, the monarch's protection engendered sentiments of loyalty that rendered superfluous most grosser displays of power. This progress, though, was partial at best. For adherence to the custom of hereditary succession often engendered monstrosities; and even when it did not, the exercise of absolute authority invariably transformed its subjects, considered collectively, into "a mere lump of slimy, jellylike flesh" (p. 66). Thinking that timely payment of taxes exhausted their political responsibilities, persons so governed inevitably retreated into a state of numbing prvatism: "Under these circumstances, the function of the brain gradually shrinks, and the complete human being is reduced to a mere digester of food" (p. 66). Confirming the characterization so often advanced by colonial apologists, Gentleman argues that such is the plight of contemporary Japan which, at least for now, has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

"O, law of evolution! Law of evolution! Ceaseless progress is your true nature. Once you drove your children out of the wilderness of chaos and disorder into the narrow valley of despotism, where you let them rest for a while until they gained strength. After that, you drove your children out of the valley and made them climb up to the top of the wide hill of constitutionalism, where you let them dry their eyes and breathe freely" (p. 67). For reasons Gentleman does not elaborate, sometime during the seventeenth century the fickle god of evolution began to elevate certain European peoples out of somnambulism and into liberalism. Because liberal constitutionalism entrusted the power of law-making to representative bodies and furnished guarantees for the protection of basic rights--Including those to personal property, choice of occupation, freedom of speech, religion, press, and assembly - it transcended its heavy-handed predecessor. "Suppose a human




being has a head but no hands, or hands but no legs. This person is clearly physically handicapped. When a human being does not have the nghts I've mentioned, he is by necessity spiritually handicapped." With these rights assured, persons for the first time in history began to "realize their individu- ality" (p. 69).

Complete realization of that potential was and still is stifled, however, by liberal constitutionalism's definition of freedom in Hobbesian terms. Con- struing freedom as the absence of all restriction, liberalism invites persons to disregard the web of mutual obligations joining them to one another in a peculiarly human enterprise. Although formally committed to universal equal rights, its practice has proven unduly tolerant of those whose self- respect is purchased with others' dignity. "Therefore, I say that constitutionalism knows its mistakes but has corrected only half of them.... Constitutionalism is not bad but democracy is better. Constitutionalism is

spring with a faint touch of frost or snow; democracy is summer with no trace of frost or snow. As the Chinese might put it, constitutionalism is a wise man, but democracy is a sacred man. Or, in the phrasing of India, constitutionalism is a bodhisattva, but democracy is a buddha" (pp. 73, 75).

With this last claim, Gentleman intimates that the West rather than Japan may prove the more significant impediment to civilization's full extension. Granted, Japan's neo-Confucian orthodoxy, rationalizing hierarchical status distinctions in all quarters, is indefensible. But Gentleman knows with the

certainty of Condorcetian science that Japan cannot indefinitely keep at bay the West's subversive principles. By way of contrast, Europe's suppression of the egalitarian implications latent in its own liberalism is buttressed by sufficient economic and military power to stall if not halt the evolutionary god's otherwise steady progress.

Recognizing that Japan is in no position to force the West to confess its own inadequacies, Gentleman proposes a finer ploy: "If a small nation which is behind the others in its progress toward civilization were to stand

up proudly on the edge of Asia, plunge into the realm of liberty and brotherhood, demolish fortresses, melt down cannon, convert warships into merchant ships, turn soldiers into civilians, devote itself to mastering moral

principles, study industrial techniques, and become a true student of philosophy, wouldn't the European nations who take vain pride in their civilization feel ashamed?" (p. 50). Calling on Japan to act as a collective "Priestley or Lavoisier of sociological experimentation" (p. 80), Gentleman invites his

countrymen to set before a hypocritical Europe an unblemished vision of what history demands it become. "If we adopt liberty as our army and navy,




equality as our fortress, and fraternity as our sword and cannon, who in the world would dare attack us?" (p. 51).

BURKE'S DRUNKEN ANGEL

One obstacle standing in the way of Gentleman's scheme is sensei's second guest whom I shall refer to as "Champion." At first glance, Champion appears a stick-figure traditionalist. His belittling questions ("Have you lost your senses?"), his attire, and his defense of samurai virtues suggest a reactionary whose principal aim is to arrest the spread of creeping Western- ization. Champion's initial charge against Gentleman concerns the impracti- cality of his fantasies. "That philosophical ideas should blind the human mind to such an extent! . The principles of equality and economics are political theories. But to make the weak strong and to change disorder into order are political practice" (pp. 91, 117). Perhaps, snorts Champion, Gentleman might peddle his ideas with profit if he were to return them to their original residence. Even if hawked on the streets of Europe, however, the abstract cause of "progress" will prove far too removed from matters of everyday concern to elicit much attention. The senselessness of Gentleman's principles, in other words, stems not from their transplantation to an alien culture but from their presentation in context-free terms. Insisting that his conclusions are as incontrovertible as those generated by "the Indisputable logic of arithmetic" (p. 51), Gentleman gives Champion plenty of reason to suspect that an appeal to universal enlightenment is an Ideological ruse, which, when realized, will tolerate little questioning of its uncomplicated wisdom.

Were Japan to adopt Gentleman's pacifistic recommendations, Cham- pion continues, the nations of the West would surely embrace this invita- tion to invade. "To insist narrow-mindedly on the ideals of liberty and equality or to express the sentiment of universal brotherhood at such time is like Lu Xiufu's insistence on teaching the classics as the Mongol armies attacked" (p. 95). Underwhelmed by Gentleman's exhortation to offer no resistance, Champion offers a lesson in the brute realism of international relations and, by implication, the world's recalcitrance to the wisdom of philosophy. "No matter how detestable it may be for scholars, war exists, and is an inevitable force in the actual world" (p. 92). To defend this assertion, Champion notes that in the animal kingdom only the strongest survive, and to drive home the import of this scientific truth, he points to intellectuals engaged in verbal combat: "Even scholars who seem to value theories and despise conflict in




reality simply love to win and hate to lose. ... With inductive logic as his

guns and rifles and deductive logic as his battleships, he [the intellectual] is

trying to destroy error-a strong enemy indeed-and to enter the city of truth" (pp. 93, 95-96).

In articulating his critique of Gentleman, Champion inadvertently reveals that he is guilty of a different but equally abstract sort of political thinking. His appeal to the brute facticity of nature Is in its own way as contextually callous as Gentleman's appeal to the providential hand of a secularized god. Each is readily available for export without regard for the historically qualified peculiarities of the situations in which they may be relocated. Moreover, when Champion defends the samurai warrior's code of honor by invoking the amoral but respectable language of modern science, he unwit-

tingly acknowledges that the currents of Western rationalism have already eroded much of that ethic's traditional ground. Finally, Champion proves equally if not more oblivious to the mind's residence in a body that has a

tangible stake in its political estate. Quite certain that Gentleman's truth will not shield Japanese flesh from a bullet's penetration, Champion is clearly itching for a fight. Yet when he describes a hypothetical clash between his

countrymen and the West, he does so in curiously disembodied terms. Gentleman, he complains,

pictures the suffering of soldiers exposed to wind and rain and believes that it is real. He

imagines the pain of soldiers being scorched and thinks that it is real. But is the suffering real? Is the pain real? War requires courage, and courage requires spirit. When a battle is about to start, men become almost mad, and their courage begins to boil over. They are in a new and completely different world. Where is there any place for pain? (P. 96)

Sure that the glory of an exultant spirit overcomes the agony of shattered

limbs, Champion seeks to breathe life into the eviscerated remains of aristocratic mythology. But when technological innovations effectively democra- tize war's torments, this fiction appears utterly anachronistic.

Appearances notwithstanding, Champion is no simple-minded jingoist. Recognizing that the isolation of the Tokugawa bakufu was a possibility whose geopolitical conditions are rapidly evaporating, he understands that the West's imperialist zeal is destined to drag Japan along a path whose

precise course can perhaps be shaped but never reversed. Dispute concerning that path's import for present conduct, he continues, is now dividing Japan's population into two warring camps: the "lovers of nostalgia" and the "lovers of novelty." "Those more inclined to novelty," by and large the creatures of

commercially active cities, tend to "value theories, despise physical force, and give priority to developing idustry instead of weapons. They study the




theoretical bases of moral principles and the law, examine the laws of economics, always take pride in being literati or scholars, and reject soldiers and champions and their bold manner of righteous indignation. They admire Thlers and Gladstone, but not Napoleon or Bismarck." Those inclined to nostalgia, growing out of the soil of self-sufficient domains, "regard freedom as willful and irresponsible behavior and equality as an axe that destroys by leveling all. They take pleasure in giving vent to resentment and righteous indignation, and dislike stifling jurisprudence or complicated economics.... Those who are nostalgic try not to bend; those who seek novelty aim not to fail" (pp. 108-9).

The irony of this dichotomy becomes apparent when Champion, a self- professed lover of nostalgia, insists that such internecine squabbling cannot help but scuttle any effort to bend Japan's fate to its own advantage. Asked by Gentleman which of the two must therefore be eliminated, Champion astonishes his antagonist by replying, "The nostalgic element. The element of novelty is like living flesh, and the nostalgic element is like a cancer.... A cancer is a diseased part of the body and can be cut out" (pp. 113-14). To Gentleman, a student of European utilitarianism, this selfless claim makes no sense. "Your argument seems contradictory, which goes to show that truth cannot be distorted" (p. 113). But Champion understands that the claims of truth are often beside the point in a world governed more by tragedy than logic. The pursuit of aristocratic valor, he explains, can have no place in a country which, if it is to survive, must become industialized and so must have capital: "If we wish to rush into the realm of civilization, we have no other way but to purchase what we need by paying money" (p. 102). Knowing that cash is nothing in the absence of people who desire it, Champion announces that "any nation deciding to climb the path of civilization behind other nations must completely change its earlier culture, character, customs, and feelings" (p. 103). Forced to the conclusion Gentleman has avidly embraced, Champion concedes that Japan must Westernize.

If the price of self-defense is Japan's cultivation of an entrepreneurial ethos, then its traditional values can be defended today only by those willing to accept permanent exile. This paradox explains the proposal that Champion offers as a counter to Gentleman: "I seem to have forgotten whether it is in Asia or in Africa, but there is a large country. I've forgotten its name, but it is vast and rich in natural resources. Why shouldn't we go and tear off a half or a third of that country?" (p. 99). A massive invasion of China, initiated by those whose warrior ideals now take shape as a resentful passion to destroy everything that testifies to their historical superfluity, will produce either of two results: "If we're successful, we will usurp the land, take firm root there,




and establish what may be called a 'cancer society.' If we don't succeed, we will expose our dead bodies on the battlefield and leave our names in a foreign land. But whether we succeed or not, we will have achieved the goal of removing the cancer for the good of the nation" (pp. 114-15).

The present moment, closes Champion, must not slip away. "If you look at the situation of Europe today, you'll see that those of us who try to survive on the Asian islands are like a lamp sputtering in a strong wind; if the wind gusts suddenly, the light goes out at once" (p. 117). Champion knows that one of the few weapons of the weak is heightened sensitivity to the opportunities time occasionally presents; only the powerful can afford to have their senses dulled by the habit of command:

Right now, when ominous clouds are about to nse simultaneously from Europe and Asia, our small nation has a rare chance to turn a misfortune into a blessing. Given these conditions, I am dumbfounded at the easygoing attitude of our nation. Instead of moving immediately, like the thunder that booms out before one can cover one's ears, we fidget and make a futile effort to preserve the country, relying on makeshift measures, like an old peasant woman mending a rag. (Pp. 120-21)

Committed to dispassionate dissection of every situation before taking a single step, Japan's lovers of novelty are ever more disarmed by the demands of the enlightenment they equate with salvation.

THE ORIENT EXPRESS

To this point, Nankai sensei's role in the discourse has been limited to refilling his guests' cups, assuring the good cheer of their ideal speech situation. Such reticence has encouraged his callers to reveal the full measure of their opposition, and so has served its purpose. Now, in accordance with the form of traditional Confucian dialogue, his visitors expect sensei to show the way to those not yet wise: "We have both emptied our hearts. Sensei, please criticize our ideas and instruct us" (p. 122). That anticipation is

promptly contradicted: "Mr. Gentleman's ideas are strong liquor that makes me dizzy. They make my head swim. Mr. Champion's ideas are harsh poison that rends my stomach and rips my intestines. I am an old man. My deterio-

rating brain cannot possibly grasp or digest your ideas" (p. 122). Why does the fare served sensei prove unpalatable? "Just what is it," he

asks, "that the god of evolution hates? Nothing other than talking and acting without regard to time and place" (p. 125). The arguments advanced by Gentleman and Champion are not so much wrong as inappropriate; their




claims are "no longer practicable and they have become mere trcks of political jugglers. Dazzling clouds [Gentleman's utopian speculations] show great promise for the future, but they can only be enjoyed from afar. Political machinations [Champion's intrigues] are a rarely seen relic of the past, and they are amusing only when we meet them in history books. But clouds and machinations have no use in the here and now" (p. 122).

To grasp sensei's notion of a politics suited to the "here and now," we must embrace Champion's challenge and make a brief foray into the heart of China. As we will see, in many ways sensei's teachings echo opinions expressed by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europeans (e.g., Edmund Burke in England, Alexis de Tocqueville in France, J. G. Herder in Germany) who feared the political excesses spawned by Enlightenment rationalism but at the same time were uneasy about calling for a wholesale repudiation of liberalism. Yet it would be a mistake to hear in sensei's words only an unadorned Japanese transliteration of the Enlightenment's more subtle European critics. For the stance he adopts, especially in distinguish- ing his position from that of Gentleman, is irreducibly informed by a long- standing controversy within neo-Confucianism about the relationship between rational principle and practical learning; and Chomln had every reason to believe that the Discourse's anticipated audience, schooled in Chinese classics, would perceive this connection.

Emerging in the eleventh century as a reaction against Buddhism and Taoism, Chinese neo-Confucianism was never a monolithic movement.17 One of its more heated debates, whose rival positions were first outlined by Ch'eng Hao (1032-1085) and his younger brother, Ch'eng Yi (1033-1108), concerned the most adequate interpretation of the InJunction, found in the opening passages of the Great Learning (Ta Hsiieh), 8 to extend knowledge by investigating things (ke wu). At the hands of Chu Hsi (1130-1200), Ch'eng Yi's most influential Sung Dynasty disciple, this directive was given a distinctively rationalist reading. Presupposing ontological commitments not unlike those informing Gentleman's politics, Chu Hsl expounded a dualistic metaphysics that sharply distinguished principles (li), which in their purity are unable to produce any thing, from the vital substrate, ch'i (literally "instrument"), out of which all concrete entities emerge: "What are hsing shang or above shapes, so that they lack shapes or even shadows, are ii. What are hsing hsta or within shapes, so that they have shapes and body, are things." So construed, each li stands prior to and independent of the concrete things that express its nature: "Before the instances of it exist, there is the li. For example, before there exist any sovereign and subject, there is the li of the relationship between sovereign and subject."19 Thus, although all things




appearing in time and space are composed of li and ch'i, it is the former that dictates the nature of the latter's concrete condensation, and each such principle is an individualized aspect of the one Principle, the Supreme Ultimate (T'ai chi), that is the ground of ethical truth in the cosmos.

The human mind (hstn), like any other concrete particular, is composed of ch'i, whose identity is a function of the li that defines it. Its enlightenment is accomplished when the mind, grasping "what is above shapes" through "what is within shapes," overcomes the deficiency of its embodiment and so realizes its true nature. Chu Hsi's assertion of the ontological primacy of li thus finds its complement in an ethical doctnne affirming that the mind must first grasp the pure pnnclples governing human relationships if it is to accord them perfect expression in conduct. Identifying diligent study of the ancient sages as the best means to such edification, Chu Hsi's account of "practical learning" counsels contemplative disengagement of the mind's reason from the mundane affairs in which the body is daily implicated.

The state, like all things, has its peculiar li. Echoing Confucius's claim that "the people may be made to follow [the 'Way'] but cannot be brought to understand it,"20 Chu Hsi argues that the pnnciple of the state will be grasped by some but never by all, for the ch'i in a few is uncorrupted, like a pearl lying in clear cold water, while in most it is turbid, like a pearl in muddy water. As with all li, the truth of the state is not contingent on the actuality of a political entity informed by its principle. Therefore, those who are genu- inely enlightened are those who, regardless of historical circumstances, affirm the indestructible reality of an interdependent but stratified hierarchy in which lords rule over vassals, fathers over sons, masters over servants, husbands over wives. Perhaps not surprising, about a century after his death, Chu Hsi's teachings were proclaimed China's official state doctrine.

In 1492, following Chu Hsi's precepts, Wang Yang-mlng (1472-1529) discovered that seven days of concentration on growing bamboo brought him no closer to a discovery of its principle, although it did make him quite ill. From these inauspicious beginnings emerged the foremost Ming Dynasty elaboration of Ch'eng Hao's wisdom, and it is the teachings of this school of neo-Confucianism that resonates throughout sensei's call for a "practical" politics of the "here and now." According to Wang Yang-mlng, heaven, humanity, and all things on Earth originally formed a single unity. To

acknowledge this primordial oneness is to see, contra Chu Hsi, that reason does not exist apart from the things it knows. For the spiritual/intellectual/ emotional activity of "mind," dynamically integrated with the body it inhab-

its, is that unity's most refined manifestation, and so the medium through which it can be recovered when lost.




The ethical implication of this departure from Chu Hsi is intimated when Wang Yang-ming notes that the term wu in the phrase ke wu is ambiguous. Whereas his mentor employed this term to point toward mundane entities residing in a world separate from that of pure li (tung-hsi), Wang Yang-ming notes its conventional use in reference to ordinary human affairs (shih). Interpreted in light of his antidualistic ontological premises, he derives from this observation the conclusion that the prosaic affairs of everyday life comprise the only world there is. To become enlightened, accordingly, is to become conscious of the way in which concrete concerns participate in this more inclusive whole.

In his dialogue on ethics, Instructions for Practical Living (Chuan-Hsi Lu),21 Wang Yang-mlng announces that appreciation of the relationship between any given affair and the cosmos's unity cannot be accorded complete expression in language. To state what has been intuitively grasped is to abstract the principle from the affair in which it has its full being. Hence the ability to use words in talking about some matter is not the same as knowing that thing: "Knowing how to converse about filial piety and respectfulness is not sufficient to warrant anybody's being described as understanding them."22 Affirming "the unity of knowledge and action" (chih hsing ho yi), Wang Yang-ming thus denies that intellectualized excellence is either an antecedent condition or an ironclad guarantee of virtuous action, for the only sure evidence of knowledge's truth is the sincere conduct through which it is expressed: "When the will desires to care for the comfort of parents in both winter and summer, and to serve and support them, the will exists but not yet the sincerity of the will. Before the will can be said to be sincere, there must be the actual practice of caring for their comfort and of serving and supporting them."2 To fail to assure the correspondence of word and deed is, consequently, to give proof of knowledge's insufficiency: "If one sincerely loves the good known by the innate faculty but does not in reality get nd of the evil as he comes into contact with the thing to which the will is directed, it means that the thing has not been investigated and that the will to hate evil is not sincere."24

Inseparable from enlightenment, sincerity is a good available to all, since every mind by nature partakes of the principles resident in the cosmos's original unity: "In innate knowledge and innate ability, men and women of simple intelligence and the sage are equal."2 The sage is distinct from others only insofar as her unreflective sense of right and wrong is given ceaseless and undivided expression in conduct that expresses a nature indistinguishable from its exercise. The phrase "investigation of things," so construed, sum- mons not scholastic discovery of hidden essences but unaffected rectification




of quotidian affairs: "The extension of knowledge must consist in the investigation of things. A thing is an event. For every emanation of the will there must be an event corresponding to it. The event to which the will is directed is a thing. To investigate is to rectify. It is to rectify that which is incorrect so it can return to its original correctness."2

To quickly recapitulate, for Chu Hsi every ethical principle exists apart from its embodied expression, and the relationship between knowledge and action is one of applying the pure to the impure. Worried that disciples of Chu Hsi may choose to "abandon human relations" in favor of lives of "stubborn emptiness and abstract tranquility," Wang Yang-ming argues that ethical principles have no being apart from their concrete articulation: "When the mind is engaged in serving one's father, there is the principle or filial piety, and when the mind is engaged in serving the ruler, there is the principle of loyalty, and so forth." Correlatively, because the learning of principle cannot be disjoined from its practice, exhortation to the good is no substitute for personal experience: "Whether the forks of the road are rough or smooth cannot be known until he himself has gone through them."27

SHOOTOUTAT THE tOKyo CORRAL?

Sensei's response to his guests, but especially to Gentleman, is best read in light of this ongoing controversy within neo-Confucianism, as exported to

Japan.2 Gentleman is sure that Japan's superstitious attachment to unprincipled traditions is the cause of its backwardness, whereas Europe's embrace of "the great principle of liberty" is the "true foundation" of its "colossal structure" (p. 59). To grasp their respective situations, he searches for an account of world civilization that will situate East and West in a common history and so explain why one has come to conquer and the other to submit.

The theones available to Gentleman include Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, Guizot's Histoire de civilization en Europe, Buckle's History of Civilization in England, and Spencer's Principles of Sociology, all of which cite universal scientific laws regarding the material and ideational presup- positions of progress in accounting for the superiority of European civilization.29 When Gentleman employs such narratives in making sense of

Japan's fate, he executes a double abstraction. The doctrine he Appropriates originally emerges out of a European spatio-temporal context, one which furnishes the native ground and reference for its distinctions of principle. Gentleman thinks he must transplant these principles to Japan because it does




not enjoy the sort of culture that can yield such fruit. To complete the circle, he seeks to turn the abstractions of Enlightenment rationality into imple- ments of cultural transformation, which, when they succeed in making Japan more European than Europe, will persuade a chastened West to forego its

colonizing ambitions. Convinced that Japanese culture can be neither fully legitimate nor fully

real so long as it fails to conform to reason, Gentleman is certain that its dictates are entitled to literal, immediate, and wholesale application to his native land. "I wish to transform us into living embodiments of moral principles" (p. 92). However, because the truth of such principles is eclipsed by the power of feudal superstitions, Gentleman worries that his countrymen may yet retreat into the shadowy cave of partial being they inhabited before the West began forcing them to be free. The political bent of that worry is metaphorically indicated via Gentleman's appeal to the god of evolution. Proclaiming that this god's route is straight and narrow, Gentleman delivers himself to a seductive conceit. What he calls the law of evolution is a propositional claim derived from an imaginative reconstruction of the meaning of history's movement through time. When he ascribes authorship of that hypostatized "law" to an anthropomorphized divinity, Gentleman authorizes subordination of the complex web of unrefined experience to rule by a monistic principle, which, as we have seen, is ultimately derived from peculiarly European circumstances.

Once that god's word has been uprooted, it becomes available for virtually any political purpose. For some, it can be used to justify the sort of pernicious radicalism which, in the name of reason, obliterates whatever the unconcerted conduct of many generations has unreflectively wrought. For example, on Gentleman's account, Enlightenment principles command in- stant extirpation of the customary inequalities that frustrate realization of unconditional equality:

Both we common people and the aristocrats are lumps of flesh made of a combination of a few chemical elements. And yet when we meet, this lump of flesh bows low with clasped hands, while that lump of flesh remains standing, with only a slight nod of the head. As long as hundreds, or even a few dozen, of these beings exist in a nation, even though it has constitutional government and its millions of citizens have obtained their freedom, that freedom is not genuine because the great principle of equality is not exercised completely. (Pp. 55-56)

Here, the logics of biology and arithmetic conspire to define equality in terms of its lowest common denominator. How that definition translates into a program of political action is intimated when Gentleman characterizes those




who resist God's truth as so many "rocks" and "stones" that must be "kicked aside" or trod underfoot (p. 53).

By others, such abstracted "knowledge" can be employed to ratify as

necessary and right whatever is now. As sensei sarcastically notes, echoing a criticism leveled by Wang Yang-ming against Chu Hsi: "He [the god of

evolution] preferred feudalism in the feudal period. He favors counties and

prefectures now that there are counties and prefectures. He favors national isolation in times of national isolation and trade in times of active commerce. He relishes boiled barley and rice as well as steak. He savors unrefined sake as well as wine. He likes braided as well as tumbling hair. He loves the monochromatic watercolors of Chen Shitian as well as the oil paintings of Rembrandt. Indeed, the god of evolution is the world's greatest lover of variety" (p. 124).

That such a god is worshipped at the present moment is no surprise. The mind's desire to rule all it surveys is most insistently called forth when human beings, bewildered by rapid change, seek a comprehensive worldview to replace what they have lost. Thus does sensei explain why so many of his

contemporaries, finding Confucian cosmology smashed to bits by the instru- mentalities of European industrial and military science, now look not to heaven but to the West for guidance. Yet, as with Gentleman, what they find there are so many philosophical counterparts to the imperialist ventures

currently jeopardizing Japan's autonomy. Whether built on the bedrock of natural law or natural right, God's providential will or the secularized reconstruction of that will proffered by Spencer, Kant's a priori rules of reason or John Stuart Mill's refined utilitarian calculus, each antidote to the

present's disorientation explicitly or implicitly affirms that it alone com- mands exclusive access to truth. Unable to coexist with its rvals, each demands that Japan renounce its native pantheism and embrace in its stead a monotheism of principle which, like Chu Hsi's ontology, locates the hidden font of knowledge somewhere beyond the intricately woven web of culture it longs to untangle.

To subvert Gentleman's hyperrationalism, sensei begins by recharac-

terlzing the evolutionary god's movement: "The path of this god is crooked - it rises and falls, it turns to the left and to the right, it boards a boat or takes a carriage. It retreats while it seems to progress and moves forward while it seems to retreat" (pp. 122-23). It is the height of folly, consequently, to hold that myopic humans can anticipate this god's eccentric course, and so remove whatever obstacles retard its advance. When such hubris is joined to an

analogy between the state and a single individual obeying the dictates of

enlightened principle, the result must be a displacement of politics by




despotism. "A state," sensei affirms, "is a mixture of many desires. Consist-

ing of the sovereign, the government officials, parliament, and the common

people, it has a highly complex structure. Therefore, a state cannot decide its direction or start a movement as freely as an individual can" (p. 131). So chastened, sensei invites his guests to adopt an agnostic's enlightenment, that is, one that has the courage to question the Confucian representation of

history as unavoidable retrogression in the absence of any assurance that the cause of progress is underwritten by God's design.

"The god of evolution is not enshrined solemnly above the head of society, nor is he hiding under society's foot." Instead, sensei submits, "he crouches in the public mind" (pp. 128-29). Although for the wrong reasons, Champion is quite right to insist that Gentleman's proposals are "impractical"; they do fail to pay adequate heed to reality. But, for sensei, the term "reality" refers neither to the brute facts that Champion locates in Darwin's nature nor to the metaphysical truths that Gentleman discovers in the Enlightenment's Elys- ium. Rather, it gestures toward the densely textured tissues of experience that can become objects of investigation only because they are already non- discursively "had" as things resident in the affairs of everyday circumstance. To acknowledge reality, so construed, is not to condemn its deficiencies in

light of certain timeless pnnciples (Gentleman), nor to defy time's generation of the unanticipated (Champion), but to participate in teasing a more sensibly sufficient future from the possibilities disclosed in the present.

Gentleman rejects as "the cliche of an old man" the conviction that a "political system must be appropriate to the stage of development of the people" (p. 82). Saying so, he reveals his failure to understand that rapid change can empower rather than baffle only when it is soluble within

acquired habits of sense-making conduct. Sensei, by way of contrast, knows that "the public mind is a storehouse for the ideas of the past" (p. 128). Because every thing (in the sense of shih) proves intelligible only in virtue of its tacit reference to the contextualized background against which it assumes determinate shape, the meaningfulness of the new turns on the possibility of its assimilation to the old. Consequently, the abstract principles ideologized by Gentleman can overcome the deficiency of their statement only when, thoroughly digested, they course through the veins of the body politic.

To characterize that digestion, recall Wang Yang-ming's central tenet: "Knowledge in its genuine and earnest aspect is action, and action in its intelligent and discriminating aspect is knowledge."30 The fertility of unfa- miliar knowledge, regardless of its orginal context, cannot be determined prior to or apart from concrete actions undertaken by those who, in reshaping




the circumstances of daily life, simultaneously refashion the principles that enter into the sense of their overlapping situations. Accordingly, Gentleman must abandon his belief that enlightened collective action is possible only when all have been brought to identical apprehension of an independent reality. "Mr. Gentleman," chides sensei,

you may worship an idea as it exists within your mind, but if you, a single individual, try to force the masses to worship it as an opinion of the god of evolution, it would be like placing a single dot with India ink on a piece of paper and trying to make the masses recognize the dot as a perfectly inscribed circle. This would be ideological despotism, and is precisely what the god of evolution does not like and what a scholar should be warned against. (P. 129)

"Because we live today in Country A," Gentleman insists, "we are of that nationality. However, if we live in Country B tomorrow, we will be of that nationality. It's just that simple" (p. 51). Sensei understands that individuals can join the ranks of Gentleman's cosmopolitan nomads only after they have become homeless. Champion's explicit call for the voluntary exile of Japan's nostalgics thus finds its inverted echo in Gentleman's implicit call for a politics of domestic dislocation. That their dispute has come to such a pass hints at their shared malady: "Your main ideas may seem as incompatible as ice and hot coals, but I think that you share a common disease: excessive anxiety" (p. 129). Obsessed with Japan's standing vls-a-vis the West, both define its identity exclusively in terms of what it is not: One argues that Japan must become a clone of Europe, while the other asserts that its unique essence must be unconditionally defended against the barbarian horde.

But sensei rejects indiscriminate appropriation as well as uncritical

repudiation of all things European: "We should examine the existing constitutions of Europe and America and adopt what should be adopted" (p. 136). While meanings always originate within specific contexts, their sense is not

inextricably bound by or limited to those native circumstances. Were that the case, there could be no space for conceptual innovation; there could be

only totalistic usurpation or displacement of one unified body of meanings by another. Seeking a more subtle accomplishment, sensei dares to hope that Japan's crash program of state-directed modernization might be given significant democratic spin by citizens whose egalitarianism, articulated

through countless struggles to rectify everyday injustices, is underwritten by the virtue of sincerity. In sum, he proposes a marriage of Wang Yang-ming to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The vehicles of this union may be called "ideas," providing one recalls

Wang Yang-mlng's teaching concerning the inseparability of ideas from



Kaufman-Osbor / ROUSSEAU IN KIMONO 73

the situated conduct that affords them unaffected expression: "I tell you, Mr. Gentleman, ideas are seeds planted in the field of the mind. If you truly love democracy, talk about it, write books about it, and sow its seeds in the minds of the people. Then in several hundred years, democracy might flourish all over the country. Today the plants of the sovereign and aristocrats are still rooted in the public mind. Isn't it wrong to try to gather a rich harvest of democracy immediately, simply because the seed of democracy has sprouted in your own brain?" (p. 128). Unlike Gentleman, sensei knows that the collective Japanese psyche cannot become enlightened as a result of its incessant bombardment by so many discrete Imported ideas-such as "constitution," "representation," "democracy," "liberty"- that have little if any basis in the sediment of native cultural experience.31 To exhort persons already disoriented to rally to the causes intimated by such abstractions is to think that their minds can be delivered to the truth before their bodies have had appropriate opportunities to acquire the habits of democratic conduct. It is to incite persons to act in ways sure to elicit state repression before they have learned the skills needed to resist its power. It is to invite confusion of alterations in style with changes of substance; adoption of a tangible symbol of the new - a Western umbrella or fork - is thereby mistaken for a change in the webs of meaning through which such equipment is located in a world of sense. It is, finally, to substitute an incomprehensible battle of free-floating principles for more mundane efforts to craft the localized experiential contexts within which such words can begin to acquire corporeal significance.

The mind that entertains such ideas is not the Sino-Cartesian substance celebrated by Chu Hsl and presupposed by Gentleman when he declares, "I see only moral pnnclples as having any importance" (p. 90). Rather, as Wang Yang-ming taught, the mind is a mode of intentional conduct that relates persons to each other as well as to the natural and social things implicated in everyday affairs. Consequently, when strange Ideas start to infiltrate conventional meanings, as these are expressed in accustomed practices and institutions, conflict is likely to occur. The mediation of such conflict is a matter of discriminating judgment whose exercise can never be exhaustively codified in rules and whose adequacy to the unfolding moment can never be guaran- teed in advance. It is, moreover, a matter for which there can be no claims to authority predicated on specialized mastery of abstract knowledge. At last acceding to Champion's demand that he state his view of the future, sensei reluctantly offers the following:

I would simply establish constitutionalism, reinforce the dignity and glory of the emperor above and increase the happiness and peace of all the people below. I would establish Upper and Lower houses of Parliament. Aristocrats would be assigned to the Upper




House and membership would be hereditary. Members of the Lower House would be chosen by election. That's all.... Upon hearing these words, sensei's two guests laughed and said, "We've heard that Master's ideas are unusual. But if they are what you've just said, they're not at all unusual. Nowadays even children and servants are familiar with them." (Pp. 136-37)

This singularly commonplace program, soon to find more or less complete expression in the Constitution of 1889, tacitly questions the elitist pretensions that invariably accompany belief in reason's omnipotence; and it reminds the Discourse's audience that political conduct, no matter how deep its dissatis- faction with the present, must always begin with an affirmation of one's embeddedness in circumstances, which, even in the best of times, prove only partly responsive to the knower's grasp and the reformer's touch.

Sensei's cautionary precepts are not to be interpreted as so many excuses for quiescence. The acquisition of a new idea, advised Wang Yang-ming, is a matter of learning how to do something. If intuitively grasped truth is not so realized, selfishness masquerading as intellectualism is the probable cause. Proposing a relntroduction of neo-Confucian ethical instruction in Japan's public schools, Chomin once wrote:

No matter how many foreign languages a person knows, or how advanced his knowledge might be, if he is not virtuous in his behavior, he cannot be considered educated. In the West religion is the basis for nurturing virtue. Since it Is impossible to use Buddhism or

Christianity for that purpose in contemporary Japan, Confucianism, even in the foreign language school established by the government, is the most suitable thing for maintaining the morality of Japanese citizens and enlarging their human stature.32

In this spirit, sensei asks whether the egalitarianism of Europe's Enlighten- ment might be divested of its problematic radicalism by disengaging it from a metaphysic that denies value to all unrationalized experience and then folding it within Wang Yang-ming's doctrine of the original unity of all things. So relocated, realization of this principle might take shape not as indiscriminate leveling but as sincere cultivation of whatever equalitanan intimations are already implicit in the situated experiences of everyday life.

Like Wang Yang-mlng, sensei takes the Great Learning's injunction to "investigate things" as a call to "rectify affairs." Such knowing/mending, as this classical text states, takes place in many simultaneous contexts, ranging from those nearest at hand to those farthest from view:

Only when many things are investigated is knowledge extended; only when knowledge is extended are thoughts sincere; only when thoughts are sincere are hearts rectified; only when hearts are rectified are our persons cultivated; only when our persons are cultivated




are our families regulated; only when our families are regulated are states well governed; only when states are well governed can the world be at peace.

No doubt some attempts to live by this precept will appear crude to a real man of principle. For example, when the rulers of the new Meiji state instituted a system of compulsory universal education, hoping that literacy would wean the Japanese from their antimoder prejudices, public schools were ordered to promote good penmanship by distributing an adequate supply of writing paper to all homes. This agency of enlightenment proved true to its name when widely used to replace traditional wood and straw window coverings, thereby illuminating the gloomy confines of Tokugawa- era residences. From Gentleman's standpoint, persuaded that enlightenment must sustain its theoretical purity as it works its way into the fabric of culture, such misuse is to be lamented as a measure of the depth of popular ignorance regarding the conditions of liberation. From sensei's standpoint, such cre- ative misappropriation testifies to the common sense of those who know that so long as everyday concerns remain in the shadows, words of enlightenment are not worth the paper they are written on.

At other times, the rectification of affairs may involve shrewd appropriation of texts originally intended to serve quite different objectives. The first article of the Charter Oath of 1868 stated that "deliberative assemblies shall be widely convoked, all matters shall be decided by public discussion." This clause was inserted so as to reassure feudal lords who feared that the Choshu and Satsuma clans might use their pivotal position in the Restoration to secure

hegemony. Yet now, two decades later, that clause can be teased away from its framers' intent by recasting the referent of the key term "public." Using Europe's liberal account of citizenship to question Japan's elitist past, what once designated feudal lords, court nobles, and samurai can be rhetorically nudged toward a reading aimed at secunng the political inclusion of all adults subject to the new state's authority.

These two examples suggest that "ideas and actions do not align themselves in neat rows; they form a crooked line - and this line is the history of all nations.... Ideas give birth to actions. Actions in turn give birth to new ideas. This endless flux is the essence of the path of the god of evolution" (p. 128). Rarely do the intentions animating political action engender only the consequences anticipated by its authors. Hence the hubris of the French Enlightenment, presupposing its capacity to definitively diagnose and erad- icate the root of all evil, must today be supplanted by a politics of nemawashii, that is, of "digging around the roots" in an endless effort to loosen the crust of undemocratic convention. Asked how Japan would respond if the nations of Europe were to invade, sensei avers, "We would all become soldiers,




defending ourselves at strategic points or attacking the invaders by surprise. We would advance or retreat, appear or disappear, and aim for unpredictabil- ity and the element of surprise" (p. 132). Transposed to the domestic arena, this image hints at a combative politics whose tactics of skirmish and ambush are, from the perspective of Gentleman and Chu Hsi, unprincipled.34 Reject- ing the rule of universal moral axioms in favor of nuanced responsiveness to the unique possibilities tendered by passing circumstances, the conduct of such politics is grounded in nothing more substantial than the hope that someday this world's woes may prove less weighty than they are right now.

In the final analysis, sensei agrees with Gentleman that Japan has a special opportunity to teach the West something about the relationship between enlightenment and democracy. Democracy's prospects, he contends, turn at least in part on a critique of rationalist fantasies, whether found in Chu Hsi's Reflections on Things at Hand or Condorcet's Progress of the Human Mind. Hegel was right to argue that the Enlightenment finds its abstract logic fulfilled in either a "maximum of frightfulness and terror" or in the "beautiful soul" who flees from this world's imperfections. Drawing on Wang Yang- ming's neo-Confucianism, sensei tries to pass beyond these mirror images by showing how we might puncture reason's pretensions without abandoning our desire for a more humane politics; how we might grant the continuity of

past, present, and future without acquiescing in the unjust privileges of

decaying elites; how we might refashion the institutions that reproduce the conditions of exploitation without forgetting the humanity of those who live within their confines.

THE SUN ALSO RISES

May we now deem sensei's guests enlightened? May we assume, as does

virtually every English-language discussion of this work, that sensei is the vehicle through which we, Chomin's readers, are told the truth about politics?35 The answer to both these questions must be a qualified no. In a vital

sense, sensei's guests (as well as his readers) now know less than when they started, and that is as Chomin intends.

Chomln understands that even those most acutely aware of rationalism's fallacies will sometimes give way to its temptations. Recall the descnption of sensei offered at the outset of the Discourse. His penchant for heady drink is well known, as is his tendency to grow intoxicated listening to his own words: "Although his body remains in his small room, his eyes scan the whole world.. . At such times, he thinks to himself, 'I am the compass for human




society. It's a great pity that the world's nearsighted politicians haphazardly take control of the rudder and cause the ship to strike a rock or to be grounded in shallow water, thus bringing calamity upon themselves and others' "

(p. 47). Pnvileging his sense of sight because of its capacity to objectify all it surveys, even sensei occasionally becomes Western or, more precisely, Cartesian. His speech no longer grounded in the facticity of the world, its circumstances come to appear as artificial encumbrances to be overthrown at will. Losing his grip, he plunges into Mukayu, the legendary realm of absolute freedom and nothingness.

Were sensei (or Chomin) to represent his claims as truths demanding assent in virtue of their incontestability, the form of his utterances would belie their content. Granted, as Gentleman remarked at their first encounter, sensei's "learning encompasses both the Occident and the Orient" (p. 50). But no matter how erudite, the statement of a political program is never the final measure of its adequacy: "Both of you should keep up with your efforts, and when the time comes, test your ideas in the real world. I'd be most content simply to observe" (p. 122). Directed by a master who refuses to command, the Discourse's anticlimactic conclusions and unresolved tensions, communicat- ing the depth of Japan's ambivalence about the West, are the signs of its truth.

If his guests are to appreciate that truth, sensei must curb their inclina- tion to defer to his personal authority. Finishing his critique of Gentleman's evolutionism, sensei "suddenly sat upright. 'But what I have said is more or less a joke. Please forgive me both of you' " (p. 126). Through such self- deprecation, sensei reminds his listeners that there is a vast difference between their present colloquy, which has much the character of play, and the political affairs that are the theme of that play. "On a topic meant for casual conversation, there is no harm in competing for novelty or strangeness, or in making a joke for temporary amusement. But in discussing such a topic as the master plan for our country's next hundred years, how could we amuse ourselves by consciously seeking the bizarre or by stressing novelty for its own sake?" (p. 137). This is not to diminish the value of their conference, nor is it to deny the need to gain occasional respite from the gravity of this world's affairs. It is, rather, to discourage its participants from making the mistake that defines Gentleman, that is, that of conflating the distinction between their speech and the political world about which they speak. It is just this difference that is concretely confirmed when, as dawn breaks, sensei's two visitors, "taken by surprise," hear a cock crowing. "You didn't notice, did you? That rooster has crowed twice already since you arrived. When you return home, you'll realize that two or three years have gone by. Such is the calendar of my house" (p. 137).




Seeking illumination rather than resolution, sensei's speech is for the most part figurative rather than literal. He toys with the ideas of his guests, trying one analogy after another until he stumbles across a way of speaking that enables his ears to hear their sense. Not surprising, it is just this feature of his tongue - with its talk of seeds and snowballs - that so frustrates his guests, especially the analytical Gentleman: "Sensei's argument, filled with meta- phors and epithets, is most delightful, but what is the main point? I cannot help feeling as if I were trying to catch a shadow. Sensei, please give us the main point of your discourse" (p. 136). Yet if democracy has something to do with the constitution of a cultural order inhabited by persons whose autonomy consists in their appreciation of the tentativity of all claims to truth, sensei must not pronounce words that pretend to be more than they are.

Toward this end, Chomin makes use of one final stratagem. At the very beginning of the original text, he places twenty-one incidental phrases, each of which signals the initiation of a new moment in the unfolding narrative. Not so formal as chapter headings, these locutions enable the Discourse's author to become present in the text even though absent as a character. For example, gesturing toward the passage where Champion will describe the sorrow of the samurai when ordered to relinquish their swords, Chomin checks the knee-jerk response of one segment of his audience by noting: "The former Liberals will surely object and jeer." Anticipating the response of orthodox Confucian literati to Gentleman's insistence that nations under the thumb of despots can produce no great literature, Chomin injects: "Masters of Chinese studies, please respond here." Just a few pages later, though, he calls attention to his own inability to equal the literary prowess of past masters: "Laughing, the author answers, 'This passage is a poor imitation of Chinese writing.' " Although not stated by anyone, these sub voce asides echo throughout the text as reminders of the partiality of all its claims. Gently chiding the Discourse's author, its characters, and its readers, Chomin induces reflection by summoning the conduct of thinking.

HOW THE WEST WAS WON

Mr. Gentleman is a type character standing for that larger class of beings who believe that Western civilization is destined to achieve universality. At the head of that class now stands Mr. Fukuyama. Fukuyama's account of the

meaning of the present takes for granted reason's ability to extract from human history a unilinear account that, as an encompassing theoretical vessel, situates and renders intelligible its more particular details. Persuaded




that all such grand narratives require an identifiable author, Fukuyama then fashions his "idea of the West," which hovers eerily above those whose unwitting conduct it conveys to their appointed end. From sensei's perspective, this unmoved mover is merely one more suspect god. Like Gentleman, the possibility of Fukuyama's faith turns on his failure to distinguish between the discursive tale he shapes from the matter of history and the noncognitive experience of that history itself. Reading the latter as if it were the former, Fukuyama's theology produces a blind spot whenever its devotees approach phenomena that might induce them to ask whether Western liberal democ-

racy, like all previous regime forms, will finally prove transitory.36 Following sensei's lead, we might also inquire whether Fukuyama is

wrong to ascribe reality to a West whose solidity insures that it will retain its essential form no matter where it finds itself repositioned. From the vantage point of the East, the West is a fiction: "While Great Britain is a school textbook, France is a drama. Great Britain is a framed painting by Raphael; France is a mural by Michelangelo. Great Britain is Du Fu's poetry, strict and formal; France is Li Bo's more relaxed and flowing verse. Great Britain is the rigid General Cheng Bushi; France is the more pliable General Li Guang. And what about Germany9 She practices politics but is not yet a nation with a political theory" (p. 77). If the West itself displays such internal diversity, then can we demarcate in any unambiguous way the peninsula that is Europe from the Asian continent to which it is attached?

Chomln understands, as Fukuyama and sensei's guests do not, that "East" and "West" are counterabstractions that, doing more to hide than reveal the pluralities to which they refer, serve chiefly to confirm theoretical generalizations about the rational and irrational, the superior and the inferior, the humane and the barbaric.37 Such imaginative geography, which can testify to its own correctness only by suppressing the ambiguities present in the experence it compartmentalizes, establishes a polarity that makes each into a caricature of the other and so circumscribes their capacity for mutual engagement. Just what that confrontation might in time engender is not a matter for theory to determine.

NOTES

1. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?," National Interest (Summer 1989), p. 4. For a more troubled reading of Western civilization's apparent hegemony, see V. S. Naipaul, "Our Universal Civilization," New York Review of Books 38 (January 31, 1991): 14-17.

2. Fukuyama, "The End of History?," 18.




3. Fukuyama, "The End of History?," 3-4; emphasis in original. 4. Because it is stylistically inelegant, I will not continue to place the terms "East" and

"West" in quotation marks. However, as I have already indicated, it is vital that we recognize the conventional character of the constructs so designated. Hence the reader should supply quotation marks whenever they are absent but appear appropriate.

5. For a good discussion of whether the events of 1868 should be labeled a "transition," a "restoration," or a "revolution," see Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, "Overview," in Japan in Transition, edited by Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Pnnceton, NJ: Pnnceton University Press, 1988), 6-13.

6. Quoted m Shm'ya Ida, "Chomm: The Rousseau of the East," UNESCO Courier 6 (1989), 42. 7. The flavor of that debate is well indicated by Ito Hirobumi who, more than anyone else,

was responsible for the final form and content of the 1889 constitution:

We were Just then [about 1880] in an age of transition. The opinions prevailing in the country were extremely heterogeneous and often diametrically opposed to one another. We had survivors from former generations who were still full of theocratic ideas and who believed that any attempt to restrict an imperial prerogative amounted to something like high treason. On the other hand there was a large and powerful body of the younger generation educated at the time when the Manchester theory was in vogue, and who in

consequence were ultra-radical in their ideas of freedom. Members of the bureaucracy were prone to lend willing ears to the German doctrinaires of the reactionary period, while on the other hand educated politicians among the people, having not yet tasted the bitter significance of administrative responsibilities, were liable to be more influenced by the dazzling words and lucid theories of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and similar French writers. A work entitled History of Civilization by Buckle, which denounced every form of government as an unnecessary evil, became the great favorite of students of all the high schools, including the Imperial University. (Quoted in G. B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan [Tokyo: Charles Tuttle, 1977], 347-348)

To the best of my knowledge, the earliest works of political philosophy to be widely studied in Japan were John Stuart Mill's Considerations on Representative Government, portions of Herbert Spencer's Social Statics, Sir William Anson's writings on Parliament and the Crown, Sheldon Amos' Political Science, and Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lots.

8. The following biographical account synthesizes information furnished in several sources. These include Margaret Dardess, "The Thought and Politics of Nakae Chomin" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1973), passim; F. G. Notehelfer, "Nakae Chomin," in Kodansha Encyclo- pedia of Japan (New York: Kodansha, 1983), 311-12; and Nobuko Tsukui and Jeffrey Hammond, "Introduction," to Nakae Chomin, A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government, translated by Nobuko Tsukui (New York: Weatherhill, 1984), 19-24. In the sketch offered here, I exclude much material that does not bear directly on Nakae's contact with the West.

9. For the complete text of the Charter Oath, as taken by the Emperor on April 6, 1868, see "Japanese Government Documents," Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, edited by W. W. McLaren (Tokyo: Yushodo, 1964), at 8. For an interesting discussion of two rival translations of this document, see Sansom, The Western World and Japan, 318-20.

10. Nakae, quoted in Nobutaka Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), at 125.

11. Nakae showed few qualms about departing from a strict translation in order to convey Rousseau's ideas. Consider, for example, the following two passages, the first taken from




Rousseau's original and the second from Nakae's translation, as rendered into English by Margaret Dardess:

L'homme est ni libre, et partout il est dans les fers. Tel se croit le maitre des autres, qui ne lalsse pas d'etre plus esclave qu'eux. Comment ce changement s'est-il fait? Je l'ignore. Qu'est-ce qui peut le rendre legitime? Je crols pouvolr r6soudre cette question.

In ancient times when men were first created, they followed their own course of action and did not bend to the will of others. This they called the right of liberty. Today men cannot escape painful constriction anywhere In the world. Kings, dukes, and great men have placed themselves above others yet when we look closely, we see that they are restricted even more than ordinary people. Heaven gave the right of liberty to us so that we could be our own masters. Why things are as they are today I do not know. But when it comes to the way to abandon the nght of liberty there is a legitimate way and an illegitimate way. This is the subject I wish to discuss.

12. In addition to authorizing the suppression of all secret societies and open assemblies, this regulation provided that any "person residing or sojournlng within a distance of three ri [approximately 7 1/2 miles] around the Imperial Palace or around an Imperial place of resort, who plots or incites disturbance, or who is judged to be scheming something detrimental to public tranquility, may be ordered by the police, or local authorities, with the sanction of the Minister of State for Home Affairs, to leave the said district within a fixed number of days or hours." For this regulation's complete text, see McLaren, ed. "Japanese Government Docu- ments," 502-4.

13. The gist of these final works is suggested by the following quotation, attributed to Chomin in conversation and reproduced in Japanese Thought in the Meiji Era, vol 8, edited by Masaaki Kosaka (Tokyo: Tokyo Bunko, 1969):

I am not in agreement with the interpretation that there is a distinction or a separation between the flesh and the spirit in human beings. Physiology and psychology ought not to be separated. Upon reflection, the complete health and vitality of the spirit is intimately related to the complete vitality and health of the body. The malfunction of a part must, of a certainty, affect the well-being of the whole. There is no question about it, the spirit is the fire, the body is the fuel: when the fuel is exhausted the fire goes out! There is no possibility for the existence of the spirit outside the body, and therefore I remain an obdurate materialist. (P. 333)

14. All passages are taken from the translation cited in note 10; hence in quoting, I furnish only page references. (The reader should note that I have departed from this translation by preserving the title sensei in referring to Nankai. In Japan, sensei is used generically in referring to anyone whose age and experience have brought some measure of wisdom. To translate sensei as "Master," as does Tsukui, is to ascribe to Nankai a measure of authority that is denied him by the form as well as the content of Chomin's Discourse.) An earlier abridged translation of the Discourse was published by Margaret Dardess as an appendix to her "The Thought and Politics of Nakae Chormn," cited in note 8. For the Discourse's Japanese text, see Sansuijin keirmn mondo, edited by Kuwabara Takeo and Shimada Kenji (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965). For the most part, English language discussions of the Discourse appear in the context of commentaries on late nineteenth-century Japanese intellectual history. For representative samples, see Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan, 124-29; Ryuichi Kaji, "Nakae Chomin: The Man




and His Thought," Philosophical Studies of Japan 7 (1966), 53-71; Joseph Pittau, Political Thought in Early MeijiJapan (Cambrdge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 65-67,112-13, 234-35; and Tetsuo Najita, The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 93-96, 99-101. For recent Japanese scholarship on Chomln, those whose mastery of the language is better than mine might have a look at the essay collected under the title Nakae Chomtn no Sekat (The World of Nakae Chomm), edited by Kinoshita Junji and Eto Fumlo (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1977).

15. In 1877, Saigo Takamor set in motion the last significant military resistance to the political order created by the architects of the Mejii restoration. The crushing of the Satsuma Rebellion convinced the unpersuaded that opposition to the new order must now assume other forms.

16. One of the more remarkable struggles to Import a Western political concept into Japan concerns the idea of right, whether natural or conventional. At the time of the Restoration, the notion of right, as contrasted with that of obligation, was quite absent from the jurisprudence that Japan had borrowed from China in the seventh century. Transmission of this idea required invention of a new compound word, kenri, which synthesized the term for "authority" or "privilege" with that for "interest." It is not clear, though, that this term does a very good job of conveying the sense of the English phrase "rights of the people."

17. For some of the better work on neo-Confuclanlsm, see Chang Carsun, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought, 2 vols. (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957); Chan Wing-tsit, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Pnnceton University Press, 1963), 450ff; The Unfolding of Neo-Confucwanism, edited by Wm. Theodore De Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979); and Pnnciple and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). I wish to thank Professor David Deal, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of History at Whitman College, for his assistance in identifying helpful literature on neo-Confucianism.

18. For the text of the "Great Learning," see The Humantst Way in Ancient China: Essential Works of Confucianism, edited by Ch'u Chai and Winberg Chai (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), 294-302.

19. Chu Hsi, quoted in Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 296, 298. For a translation of the neo-Confucian anthology compiled by Chu Hsi and Lii Tsu-ch'ien, see Reflections on Things at Hand, translated by Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967). For Chu Hsi's commentary on the meaning of ke wu, see the chapter "The Investigation of Things and the Investigation of Principle to the Utmost," 88-122. Some recent scholarship has tempered the familiar characterization of Chu Hsi as an archrationalist. See, for example, Chung-ying Cheng, "Practical Learning in Yen Yuan, Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming," in Principle and Practicality, 45-51.

20. Confucius, quoted in David Nivision, "The Problem of 'Knowledge' and 'Action' in Chinese Thought Since Wang Yang-ming," in Studies in Chinese Thought, edited by Arthur Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), at 114.

21. For an English translation of this work, see "Instructions for Practical Living," in Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, translated by Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 3-267. In this collection, see "Inquiry on the Great Learning," 271-80, for a synoptic statement of Wang's philosophy. For an interesting attempt to show the congruence of Wang's philosophy with that of existential phenomenology, see Hwa Yol Jung, "Wang Yang-ming and Existential Philosophy," International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (December 1965):612-36.




22. Wang Yang-ming, quoted in Nivlson, "The Problem of 'Knowledge' and 'Action' in Chinese Thought Since Wang Yang-Ming," 121.

23. Wang Yang-mlng, "Instructions for Practical Living," 106. 24. Wang Yang-mlng, "Inquiry on the Great Learning," 279. Think here of Rousseau who,

in his Discourse on the Origins ofInequality, condemns philosophers who debate moral rmceties while commoners separate those fighting in the street below. Wang Yang-ming's comparable example, well-established in Confucian discourse, is that of a bystander who, in unreflective

compassionate response, rushes to rescue a child about to fall into a well. 25. Wang Yang-ming, "Instructions for Practical Living," 108. 26. Wang Yang-ming, "Inquiry on the Great Learning," 279. 27. Wang Yang-ming, "Instructions for Practical Living," 103, 251, 93. Cf. 100: "To learn

archery, one must hold out the bow, fix the arrow to the stnng, draw the bow, and take aim. To learn writing, one must lay out the paper, take the brush, hold the inkwell, and dip the brush into the Ink. In all the world, nothing can be considered learning that does not involve action."

28. Wang Yang-ming's neo-Confuclanism was imported to Japan following a visit to China

by a Japanese monk, Kelgo Ryoan (1425-1515). Growing to prominence through the work of Nakae Toju (1608-1648), Kumazawa Banzan (1619-1691), and Sakuma Shozan (1811-64), this school was quite influential in shaping the thought of several of the more prominent leaders of the Mejii restoration, most notably Saigo Takamori and Okubo Toshimichi.

29. In his History of Civilization in England, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Green, 1882), for example, Henry Buckle drew a fundamental distinction between European civilization and "civilization exterior to Europe." Taking India as a representative example of the latter, Buckle argued that its climactic conditions insured an abundance of food, great inequalities in the distribution of wealth, and the inevitability of slavery as "the natural state of the great body of the people; it was the state to which they were doomed by physical laws utterly impossible to resist. As a natural consequence, it is in Europe that everything worthy of the name of civilization has originated" (pp. 80-81). In an interesting twist on such arguments, Marx suggested that Japan of the mid nineteenth century reveals more about feudalism in the West than do most historical accounts written by Europeans. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol 1. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 718n: "Japan, with its purely feudal organization of landed property and its developed petite culture, gives a much truer picture of the European middle ages than all our history books, dictated as these are, for the most part, by bourgeois prejudices."

30. Wang Yang-ming, "Instructions for Practical Living," 93. Cf. 11: "I have said that knowledge is the direction for action and action the effort of knowledge, and that knowledge is the beginning of action and action the completion of knowledge."

31. Nor will the Japanese people become enlightened through the multiplication of technological conveniences. A decade after the restoration, a tune titled the "Civilization Ball Song" was composed under official patronage. To be sung in conjunction with a new game, children were instructed to count the bounces of a ball while reciting the names of the ten devices most worthy of Japan's immediate adoption: gas lamps, steam engines, horse camages, cameras, telegrams, lightning conductors, newspapers, schools, letter post, and steamboats. Unlike the leaders of the current regime, sensei knows that a technical innovation's tangible embodiment of the reason that makes it possible (e.g., the knowledge of physics given expression in the rifle) is too often confused with knowing its full import. The proliferation of gadgets is insufficient to elicit critical thinking about their capacity to confuse or to enhance existing habits of sense making.

32. Chomin, quoted in Margaret Dardess, 'The Thought and Politics," 33. It is altogether likely that Chomin's proposal was prepared as a response to the growing influence of Fukuzawa




Yukichi. In his 1875 work titled Bummetron no gairyaku (An Outline of a Theory of Civilization), translated by David Dilworth and Cameron Hurst (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973), Fukuzawa developed a comprehensive theory of world history to show why Japan must now radically extirpate its Confucian past.

33. "Great Learning," 295. On this point, see also Wang Yang-mlng, "Inquiry on the Great Learning," 273:

To manifest the clear character is to bring about the substance of the state of forming one body with Heaven, Earth, and the myrad thmgs, whereas loving the people is to put into universal operation the function of the state of forming one body. Only when I love my brother, the brother of others, and the brothers of all men can my humanity really form one body with my brother, the brothers of others, and the brothers of all men. When it truly forms one body with them, then the clear character of brotherly respect will be manifested.

34. From an American standpoint, one might suggest that sensei's view of political action reflects Japan's "pragmatic" temperament. This possibility is intimated by a passage in Chonun's Ichinenyuhan, as quoted in KuwabaraTakeo,Japan and Western Civilization (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983):

Compared with other peoples, the Japanese are adept at changing in response to the needs of the times, rather than stubbornly clinging on. The same disposition also explains why Japan has no original philosophy nor any political principles, and why no political struggle ever lasts very long. Japanese are cunning and crafty, not cut out to accomplish any great work. The people are practical and cannot possibly be expected to go beyond the confines of common sense. (P. 80)

35. In The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan, Nobutaka Ike claims that the "third individual, Nankal, who acts as the moderator, serves as the vehicle for Nakae's ideas" (p. 126). Margaret Dardess, in the introduction to her abridged translation of the Discourse, insists that "Nankal senset, the political moderate, is consistently a vehicle for Nakae Chomin's viewpoint in 1887 and may be considered to be a spokesman for the author" (p. 11). In The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, Tetsuo Najita argues that Chomin "allowed himself to argue, as one of the 'drunkards,' the possibility of the steady expansion of human freedom in modern Japan through intellectual dispute and political struggle, even though objective conditions, including the constitutional order, might turn out to be far less than ideal" (p. 96). I do not deny the obvious similarities between sensei and Chomin, most notably their shared fondness for drinking and theorizing. However, I do take exception to any simple-minded identification of the two. Such an equation overlooks what Chomin recognizes, namely, that the conduct of politics can only be appreciated adequately by those whose identity is as complexly ambiguous as political experience itself. By peopling his discourse with three distinct characters, Chomin finds it possible to analytically distinguish and so clarify the various views with which he has some sympathy. This is not to say that he endorses all three. Rather, it is to suggest that he is able to grasp the sense of his characters' views without thereby evading the necessity of taking a stand. The attempt to identify the Discourse's speakers with historical individuals, including its author, is a distraction that obscures our effort to unpack the meanings engendered by the characters in their various relations to one another.

36. Although acknowledging that nationalism, race, and ethnicity may yet spawn conflicts that challenge the authority of Western liberalism, Fukuyama cannot ascribe these any real




import since his story requires, as a condition of its closure, that systematiccontradictions emerge no more. When such forces do erupt in the present, they may be dismissed as lacking "universal

significance" (p. 14). In passing, it should be noted that Fukuyama comes perilously close to

acknowledging history's capacity to outwit our best theoretical generalizations. In an easily overlooked footnote, he states that he employs "the example of Japan with some caution" (p. 10n) In defense of his overall thesis. Explaining why, Fukuyama refers to Alexandre Kojeve who, in the second edition of his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, edited by Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), noted that a trip to Japan in 1959 had caused him to question his conviction that the

American way of life was the type of life specific to the post-historical period. Post- historical Japanese civilization undertook ways diametncally opposed to the American

way. This seems to allow one to believe that the recently begun interaction between

Japan and the Western World will finally lead not to a rebarbarzation of the Japanese but to a "Japanization" of the Westerners. (Pp. 159-62n)

37. For an account of the history of Europe's construction of the "Orient," see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Fora delightful account of Japan's initial construction of the United States, see Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

Timothy Kaufman-Osborn teaches political theory at Whitman College. He is author of Politics/Sense/Experience: A Pragmatic Inquiry into the Promise of Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1991).

Women and the History of Philosophy: Genre, Canon, Audience

is the title of the annual conference of the British Society for the History of

Philosophy to be held at Girton College of Cambridge University April 13-14, 1992. Speakers include Dorothy Atkins, Gillian Beer, Stuart Brown, Michele le Doeuff, Eileen O'Neill, and Letizla Panizza. Inquiries should be sent to Sarah Hutton, School of Humanities and Education, Hatfield Poly- technic, Wall Hall Campus, Aldenham, Herts, WD2 8AT, England.

