Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866-1934) by Joshua A. FogelReview by: Leon HurvitzJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 105, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1985), pp. 769-770Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602764 .

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Reviews of Books 769

reader. He deserves credit for his superb command of English and for maintaining in the translation a tone that is appropri- ately elevated as well as a style that is fully idiomatic.

The translation appends both an index and a glossary, with Chinese characters, of all transliterated terms in the text and notes. Illustrations are well chosen, clearly reproduced, and concisely explained. Typesetting and minor editorial errors are very few. Both the translator and The University of Arizona Press are to be congratulated for the production of a fine volume.

LYNN A. STRUVE

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Politics and Sinologj: The Case of Nait5 Konan (1866-1934). By JOSHUA A. FOGEL. Pp. xxiv + 420. (The Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University.) Cambridge: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1984. $20.00.

A relatively short book (the preface and seven chapters take up 288 pages, while the 48 pages of notes are given over, for the most part, to references to other writings), the work under review attempts to say, if nothing else, two things that need saying: that Japanese Sinology, into our own day, is something that can hold its head high in the world of scholarship, and that Japan's adventure in China, the worst of which NAITO

Konan (Torajir-6)) 4 ,, Adj I4 (, ;Z )admittedly did not live to see, seems, on balance, to have had the support of virtually all of Japan's specialists in the study of China's cultural history. (I hasten to point out that there was a considerable body of Japanese opinion that did not "go along," but most of it had to choose between exile and prison. An American of my acquaintance, who grew up in China, told me that the number of Japanese who opposed the adventure was at least as great as that of the Chinese who took the side of the Japanese. The To}' shi ,. Ah t scholars, alas, were not among them.) What Naito sensei would have done, had he lived to be confronted by the choice, is something one will never know, but it is likely that he too would have "gone along."

In the space available, one cannot do much more than summarize the contents and comment on the points made above. To oversimplify a bit, during some 230 years of seclusion, when the "schools" (gakk&) were Confucian, and when most of the Japanese thoroughly literate in classical Chinese never saw China and never heard a word of Chinese spoken, since they read only in kundoku, the image of China was so idealized that no reality, however wondrous, could ever have matched it. When seclusion ended, the Japanese saw both China and the Occident for the first time. For

reasons not germane to this review, China and Japan did similar things in dissimilar ways, accommodating themselves to the victorious West. Japanese in the kanbun tradition, appalled by this Chinese development, felt it their duty to recall China to her former glory, much as a dutiful son would feel obliged to keep a widowed mother from consorting with other men. One might say that this thought was but a thinly veiled Japanese imperialism, and one would be right, but this must be qualified by the insistence that whole generations of impassioned Japanese Sinophiles did not see it in that light. The failure/ refusal of most of them to learn to speak Chinese made this self-delusion all the easier.

The first chapter of Fogel's book says what the end of seclusion meant for kangaku: an attempt to capitalize both on Japan's own self-immersion in the Chinese cultural tradition (by way of kundoku, to be sure) and on the newly acquired European standards of historical scholarship. (While these latter were introduced in Japanese translation, whereas now they are read in the original languages, this preoccupation appears to be present in Japan now no less than then.) This was affected by the vastly enhanced possibility of seeing China with one's own eyes. The latter led some Japanese to do what during seclusion would have been unthinkable: to formulate China policy, and this in two senses, that of a China policy for Japan and that of a policy, both foreign and domestic, to be pursued by China's own government. "If the Chinese, for whatever reason, will not do it for themselves, why, then we must do it for them!"

To the extent that this can be determined, Naita Torajira's first ambition was to be a journalist. At any rate, he began his career as a teacher in an elementary school in Akita, proceeding from there to Tokyo in 1887 (aet. 21, according to our reckoning), where he did, in fact, become a journalist, concerning himself more and more with Japan's new position in the world, specifically with Japan's duty to resist Christianity and to defend both herself and China from Western encroachments. It should be pointed out that this attitude did not affect his enthusiasm for European philosophy and science, which he knew only in translation. This is dealt with in the second chapter.

The third chapter concerns the 1890s, a time which, of course, spans the Sino-Japanese war and the acquisition of Japan's first colony, Taiwan. It was also marked by Naita's first visit to China, whose language he never learned to speak. From April 1897 to April 1898 Naita was editor-in-chief of the Taiwan Nipp&, a newspaper in which he set forth his ideas on what the Japanese administration should be, but was not, doing, to modernize the governance of the island. Following his return to Tokyo, he began to write about China for the Yorozu Choh5, in which he expressed the hope that K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, as well as their entourage, would do for China what the Meiji reformers had done for Japan. It was not to be, yet Naita hoped, upon the arrival of

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770 Journal of the American Oriental Societv 105.4 (1985)

the two men in Japan as refugees, to help them from there. After his return from a second voyage to China (1899), Nait6 began to express ideas about the ways in which Japan could help that country achieve the reforms she so badly needed, one of which was Japanese abandonment of one-sided antiquarianism. (Ironically, when he himself commented on contemporary China, he always cited examples from the past, sometimes from the mythical past.)

In 1907, Nait6 Torajira became Kyoto University's first professor of "Oriental history." It is in that post that he was eventually to turn his hand to the area of scholarship with which he is most prominently associated, that of Ch'ing history, a history that was to come to an end in 1911, as he himself was constantly predicting, though he did not specify the year. For the rest of his life Nait6 was to remain a partisan of Chinese republicanism, whose origins he professed to see in the very nature of Chinese society, and that from early times. So great, on the other hand, was his preoccupation with Ch'ing history that he actually learned to read Manchu! It goes without saying that Ch'ing philology (k'ao-cheng) also preoccupied him, and that this came to include even Buddhist texts. So much for the fourth chapter.

Chapter five deals with what is probably the most important fact in Naita's life and for the study of East Asia in general, his periodization of Chinese history, as expressed in 1914 in his Shina ron, ". . probably the most influential work on Chinese history and China of the twentieth century" (p. 165). The principal feature of this theory is that the transition from T'ang to Sung was, for Naita, the beginning of "modern" history in China, a transition from aristocracy to autocracy on the one hand and to "populism" (heirnin shugi J J. ) on the other. By his standards, antiquity ended about the year 100 and, following an interim of about two centuries, the medieval period extended to mid-T'ang, the modern beginning ca. 960. (Whether "modern" is the real meaning of kinsei

,fj A is, of course, a question in its own right.) For Nait6, as chapter six demonstrates, not much hope was

to be placed in China's ruling classes, whether mercantile or political, to say nothing of the warlords. His seemingly contradictory position was that respect must be had for China's "populist" tradition (he stressed "village federations," hsiang tuan), but that foreign powers, including Japan, must take a firm hand. For Korea, as he saw it, the only course was total domination by Japan. While Korea was to be a colony, Manchuria was not. It was to have its own republican government, independent of both China and Japan. He opposed the restoration of the Manchu ruling house.

The seventh chapter sums up very effectively what was said in the previous chapters, particularly where Naito's attitude towards East Asia as a whole was concerned. In it the author dwells on a point to which he only alluded earlier, namely, Naito's hostility to Communism, particularly in its Chinese form, which he felt to be a denial of the above-mentioned

hsiang tuan. He also repeats what he said earlier about Nait6's failure to understand the Chinese nationalists' hostility to Japan and to Japan's China policy.

The book has the earmarks of a school dissertation, with all that that implies, whether for the better or for the worse. One can only regret that the author did not expand on one of the most important features of the intellectual history of modern East Asia, the enthusiastic agreement of a whole generation of educated Japanese, who had nothing but veneration for China, with their own government's bloodstained China policy, a policy of which they were far from ignorant.

LEON HURVITZ

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State. By JAY RUBIN. Pp. xvi + 348, with illustrations, Bibliography, Index. Seattle and London: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

PRESS. 1984. $35.00.

What remains most indelibly in mind after reading Injurious to Public Morals is the book's ending. Jay Rubin closes his study of government censorship in modern Japan with a translation of Tanizaki Jun'ichir6's abject contribution to a wartime collection of short, hortatory pieces, Streetcorner Stories, which was commissioned in 1943 by the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association (Nihon Bungaku H1koku Kai), an organization under direct control of the Cabinet Information Bureau (Naikaku J6h6 Kyoku). The "story," from one of the finest and most imaginative writers in the history of Japanese literature, consists of a flimsy eight lines of dialog and is a work about as flaccid, mechanical, and uninteresting as it would be possible to write.

Rubin concludes, "In order to induce a writer like Tanizaki to compose this feeble page of print, successive governments had invested countless man-hours and millions of yen in decades of legislation, committee work, police and administra- tive actions, trials, and schemes for indoctrinating, coddling, and brutally coercing the Japanese people."

And that is what Injurious to Public Morals is about. It is subtitled "Writers and the Meiji State," but in fact Rubin is interested in following a system of repression and coercion that began in the Meiji period (1868-1912) down to the time of its ultimate efflorescence during the Pacific War. Along the way he discusses the careers of various individual writers- Tanizaki, Soseki, Ogai, Kaffi-in addition to many lesser lights. Rubin examines the shaping of these careers, and the literary values they embodied, in relation to a sometimes surprisingly hostile national environment.

To return to the example of Tanizaki, Rubin shows the absurd lengths to which the Japanese government was willing

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