T'IEN HSIA

Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective

Joshua A. Fogel
York University, Toronto

I have given many talks over the past thirty-five years here at the Jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo 人文科学研究所 (Research Institute for the Humanities) of Kyoto University and over in the Bungakubu 文学部 (Faculty of Letters), but never have I had the leisure to do so in English. For that alone I would owe the organizers of this conference, the Australian Centre on China in the World at The Australian National University and our hosts here at Kyoto University, an immense debt of gratitude. But, even beyond that, I want to thank all of the organizers for inviting me to take part in this event. I must say, though, that as a Westerner coming to the Temple of modern Sinology here at Kyoto University and lecturing on that topic bespeaks a little more chutzpah חוצפה than even I am usually prepared to utter.

Fig.1 Entrance to the Institute for Research on the Humanities (Jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo 人文科学研究所), Kyoto University. (Photograph: GRB, November 2011)

Many years ago, actually in mid-December 1976, while I was a graduate student at Columbia University, I first came to Japan—to Kyoto University and to the Jinbunken—to pursue research on my dissertation which was to be on Naitō Konan 内藤湖南 (1866-1934). By the way, at that time, Professor Iwai Shigeki 岩井茂樹, the present head of the Jinbunken, was a third-year college student here. For some reason, I assumed that all Japanese scholars of China were intimately familiar with their own long traditions of scholarship on China and that I would be able to talk with everyone of my own generation about my thesis topic. Among the older, mostly retired scholars I found that they were and I could. I was lucky to have been able to interview such giants of Japanese sinology as Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎 (1904-80), Kaizuka Shigeki 貝塚茂樹 (1904-87), and Miyazaki Ichisada 宮崎一定 (1901-95), among others—it was indeed a time when giants still walked the Earth. As it turned out, though, few younger scholars—the people my age give or take a few years—knew much beyond general theories and secondary books on Naitō and his generation of Sinological luminaries. It took me awhile before I realized this, in part because I always assumed that Japanese scholars knew more than I would—usually true—and in part because I assumed—wrongly—that Japanese scholars would have assimilated somewhere along the line knowledge of all their predecessors' work. When it all dawned on me, though, it seemed perfectly natural—and unfortunately so.

Negating the Past to Bolster the Present 今是昨非

How many Westerners still read Sir George Sansom (1883-1965) on Japan or Paul Pelliot (1878-1945) on China or numerous other Sinological giants of two or more generations ago? In the West we tend to work from a model of scholarship which is akin to patricide; that is, we make a name for ourselves only by disproving or debunking the theses or ideas of our predecessors—not our own advisors, of course, but theses that developed a generation before our own time. After a generation or two passes, we don't even bother to read those old guys anymore on the completely mistaken assumption that anything old is like last week's newspaper—it's old news and hence disposable. There are many people in the West who have elevated this kind of purposive ignorance to the level of an positive argument—claiming that Sinology is all about facts, cut-and-paste scholarship, and that what really matters is interpretation; those old fogies like Pelliot just piled up huge footnotes, etc. And, I should note that, at present, the very word 'philology', at least in the United States, has actually become a form of deprecation.

The fact of the matter is that we would all stop reinventing the wheel in countless ways if we bothered to read a few of those older studies from time to time. If you doubt what I'm saying, go back to old issues of T'oung Pao or Journal asiatique or Monumenta Serica. French isn't that hard; German is of course a bit harder, true. To be sure, it would take years to read through the mountains of secondary material that has accumulated in the major European languages, but I honestly believe that it might just be worth the effort. Now, throw in Japanese as a secondary field of scholarship on China and you present young graduate students with a Gargantuan task. And, just as they are trying to keep abreast of work in their field—to say nothing of the mountainous, Chinese-language secondary scholarship that seems to grow exponentially with each passing year.

The point I am trying to make is not that we should spend most of our time reading secondary literature, but that we need to both know what's out there and, more important, be aware of how much it has influenced the scholarly world which we enter into and in which we live today, often unawares. One more personal example: Until recently the most popular textbook for teaching the history of East Asian civilization was East Asia: Tradition and Transformation by Edwin O. Reischauer, John K. Fairbank, and Albert Craig. It has gone through many editions and actually survived the deaths of its first two authors, Reischauer and Fairbank, but one very important thing remains the same in its many editions. The authors suggest that the most important breaking point in Chinese history before the nineteenth century was in the late Tang through early Song dynasty, roughly the tenth century. Periodizing Chinese history in this way shows the influence of Naitō Konan's famous periodization at the Tang-Song divide. Naitō explicitly called the early Song and what followed until his own time in the early twentieth century: modern history, kinsei shi 近世史 (now usually translated as 'early modern history'). Reischauer, Fairbank, and Craig speak of it in similar terms, though nowhere in their text is any attribution to Naitō mentioned. In his memoirs, Reischauer later explained that he had learned of this thesis during his prewar years in Japan.

This is a fascinating idea, that modernity isn't something we have fashioned all for ourselves in our own times, but that it just might date back 1,000 years. Unfortunately, this idea had to basically go underground for most of the twentieth century. Naitō died in 1934, then came the war and the Japanese aggression on the Asian mainland intensified, and Japan's cataclysmic defeat in 1945. After the war, Naitō's ideas and he himself were roundly attacked by scholars of many persuasions, but mostly by Marxists. In the early postwar decades, any view not completely sympathetic to Communist China's aspirations for independence and its efforts to build socialism came under heavy fire. Many scholars who were implicated in the Japanese war efforts were swept out of their jobs and those posts filled by left-leaning or outright Marxist scholars. Now, to claim that China had entered modernity as long as ten centuries ago meant not that China was way ahead of everyone else but that China had in fact been mired in stagnation for a millennium, and to hint that China needed external stimulus to arouse itself from 'stagnation'—a term, by the way, that Naitō scarcely if ever used—was depicted as a justification for imperialism. Thus, all of the fascinating ideas associated with Naitō's periodization scheme for China were tarnished. Some scholars at Kyoto University continued—usually, very quietly—to support those ideas, but their impact was limited.

Some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, the Marxists in Japan began to lose their stranglehold on China Studies. In part this was a consequence of the obvious failures and disasters of the Cultural Revolution and earlier campaigns in China, and in part a younger postwar generation was coming of age, taking jobs at Japanese universities, and articulating their own ideas. This is just when I began coming to Japan regularly, and it was a fascinating phenomenon to observe. I was, of course, an outsider, but as someone deeply interested in postwar Japanese historiography on China, I was also keenly watching and reading what was going on around me.

Now, over three decades later, the situation has completely changed, in part fueled by the flood of Chinese students who have come to Japan to study and have helped to revive interest in Naitō and prewar Japanese Sinology in both Japan and China. In fact, after this conference is over, I am going to Osaka to meet with a handful of mostly young Chinese scholars who have organized a Naitō reading and study group. I need also to mention the seminal role played by Professor Tanigawa Michio 谷川道雄, now retired but formerly of Kyoto University. Tanigawa sensei has for over fifty years studied what we call in the English-speaking world the Six dynasties period, more specifically the era from the end of the Late Han dynasty through the founding of the Tang. He has written voluminously and, I think, brilliantly on many aspects of this period in Chinese history. I got to know him in the mid-1980s when I was translating one of his books in which I tried to introduce to the English-speaking world to the Japanese analytical concept of kyōdōtai 共同体 which he and his late colleague Kawakatsu Yoshio 川勝義雄 (1922-84) were using as a tool for explaining what transpired in China over those four centuries of division between the early third and early seventh centuries. It struck me that kyōdōtai as used by Tanigawa senseiˆ and a concept used by Naitō, kyōdan 郷団, were very similar. When I mustered the courage to ask Tanigawa sensei if it might be more than a coincidence, he was very pleased by the association. Since his retirement some years ago from Kyoto University, he has run a number of study groups in which ordinary citizens as well as scholars meet to read and discuss texts by Naitō. They have published several extremely interesting volumes. I only wish I could do the same thing in Canada where I now live.

Fig.2 A scene at the Hakusa Sonso Hashimoto Kansetsu Garden and Museum 白沙山荘橋本関雪記念館, Kyoto. (Photograph: GRB, November 2011)

Why am I telling you all this seemingly personal information? I want to stress what I more or less said moments ago. We don't all face the history and culture of China we are studying with a clean slate. We are heirs to traditions which have deeply influenced many of the ideas we now take for granted. Even more important, if we ignore much of the research our forbearers produced, we risk proceeding to reinvent the wheel. Is this such a bad thing? No, this is not the equivalent of committing a crime, but it is faintly disrespectful, it is definitely a colossal waste of time, and historiographically it bespeaks ignorance.

Let me now turn to a related issue and try to tie them together. My own two pet peeves—or two parts of one pet peeve—are the ways in which politics and theory have been used to purposefully ignore wonderful scholarship of times gone by. Let me briefly explain. Both politics and theory—in similar as well as differing ways—have been used to stifle discussion—not always, of course, but sometimes. Politics can be used to stifle discussion by claiming such and such a scholarly view is consonant with a disreputable political stance. Thus, as I mentioned earlier, as soon as someone's views can be linked to imperialism—and the same now goes for racism, sexism, etc.—all of that person's scholarship becomes tainted, must be rigorously ignored or virulently criticized, and certainly must not be read. I am not speaking here of someone whose views are linked to Nazism or fascism or advocates of mass murder and who may have used some scholarly window-dressing to spruce up what are clearly repugnant ideas. What I am thinking of is so much of prewar Japanese scholarship on China which, however dated it may appear in some ways, still offers pearls of wisdom.

This sort of blatant use of politics to shut down a discussion was much more common several decades ago, and we thankfully don't see that much of it anymore—at least not in our field. However, rushing to fill the void has been the advent of 'theory'. In the West, as I'm sure you are all well aware, when we speak of 'theory' without any modifier, we are almost always speaking of post-modernism. While post-modernism hasn't pushed us to ignore libraries full of scholarship, as politics used to, it has more often than not been used as a substitute for doing hard nuts-and-bolts research in archives and in difficult languages. By no means all, but many of those who toss about post-modern language and pretend to be doing scholarship claim that they are uncovering hidden biases in the discourses in which we all find ourselves irrevocably embedded. They rarely move our understanding of anything forward, and they almost never write clear prose.

I would venture to say that the field of Japanese Studies in the West has suffered much more than Chinese Studies by the invasion of what one Sinological joker has called the stormtropers—that is, the theory-mongers. One can usually point to some small positive byproduct but in this case I fail to see it. The reason I feel so strongly on this issue is, and this relates to my earlier point, postmodern theory has provided a crutch to those who either won't or can't do the old-fashioned, nuts-and-bolts research essential to the advancement of scholarship. Again, I want to caution that this is not true 100 percent, as there are some theory-driven scholars who can and do regularly produce fine scholarship, but they are like an old man's teeth: few and far between.

I am being purposefully provocative today, because I want to provoke discussion on this issue. Fifteen years ago I gave talks here in Kyoto and elsewhere in Japan in which I began by asserting that the scholarly world in the West was divided into the shiryōha 資料派 and the rironha 理論派, a group based in textual sources and an opposing group based in theory, and described their differences as the essence of the what was then called the culture wars. There were other issues at stake, but this is the one I focused on. That fight has now calmed down—no one side can really claim victory, but neither do they engage in battle like they used to, largely because the two sides no longer talk much to each other and publish in different journals.

The kenkyūkai 研究会

I have long felt that one of the great strengths of academic Sinology in Japan—and this is especially true of Kyoto and the Kansai region as a whole—is the emphasis placed on group work or kenkyūkai 研究会. Many in the West are petrified of the prospect that through the kenkyūkai system they might lose their individuality and their independence as researchers because the larger interests of the group might take control. It is unquestionably true that the professors at the big universities, Kyoto University in particular, exercise a great deal of power, but it is usually, at least in my experience, with the interests of the group at heart. For example, a professor with the resources of a Kyōdai faculty member has the power to name a research theme for a kenkyūkai for two or three or more years and, in fact, to name the people who will be invited to attend from outside his or her university. By the same token, it would never be in the interest of such a professor to alienate his or her constituency by selecting a seminar topic no one is interested in but him or her. Also, while the kenkyūkai system is the heart of academic life in this part of Japan, it is not the totality of it.

Insofar as the humanities are concerned, the system dates back at Kyoto University to 1906 and the very inception of the Bungakubu itself which celebrated its centenary just five years ago. Naitō Konan and several of his colleagues used to meet on Tuesday evenings, and together they read the Shi ji 史記 of Sima Qian 司馬遷. As this group evolved, they invited graduate students to join them as well, and thus an informal network was established that set the mold for future study groups of this sort. Now, while such study groups began at Kyōdai when its Bungakubu got started, this is not necessarily the origin of the institution of the kenkyūkai. The Kyōdai scholars of a century ago consciously fashioned what they were doing on the Chinese intellectual tradition of kaozhengxue 考證學. They were not, of course, simply going to write moral tracts or commentaries on the Confucian classics or for that matter reflections on the Yijing 易經. By the same token, they consciously sought to establish a basis for pursuing research on Chinese history and culture that was as far removed from politics as humanly possible and as contrary to traditional hierarchies as they could, both perversions they associated with the Imperial University in Tokyo. The contemporary political world might be understood—in fact, should be understood in their view—with the tools available from a broad understanding of the past, but that was a far cry from allowing contemporary political concerns to intrude on the scholarly world and play any role in determining courses of study and the like.

Fig.3 A scene at the Hakusa Sonso Hashimoto Kansetsu Garden and Museum 白沙山荘橋本関雪記念館, Kyoto. (Photograph: GRB, November 2011)

Why am I so hot on the kenkyūkai (or kenkyūhan 研究班 as it's now called at Kyōdai) as an academic institution? First of all, there are several different kinds of research groups. Some, like the first ones 100 years ago, were comprised of a group of people who studied or translated a text together, and the end product might be an annotated translation of a given text. Such an undertaking would, if even possible, often take an individual many, many years to accomplish on his or her own. A group makes it possible in just a few years. Other research groups might take the full run of one or more journals specific to a time or place or historical event and read them together, with individual members responsible for specific issues of the journals. The end result of such a venture would be that everyone involved would have a thorough reading at his or her disposal of entire runs of seminal journals, again something that an individual would need years and years to accomplish all alone. And, yet another kind of research group organized around a theme enables everyone involved to learn from others. The end product would typically be a collection of essays drawn from the best individual projects under the umbrella of the research group's theme. There are many example of this.

Thus, in all such instances, the kenkyūkai not only makes large projects possible, but it also builds bridges among scholars that can last for decades. The last ones with which I had contact were concerned with Liang Qichao. In retirement, Professor Shimada Kenji 島田虔次 (1917-2000) organized a group ranging in ages to translate Liang's nianpu 年譜 (chronological biography). This turned out to be a phenomenally difficult task, and the finished product in five volumes (and at an exorbitant price) only appeared after Professor Shimada had passed away. Nonetheless, we now have a complete translation of this important work—and it is so good that a modern Chinese translation of it (and its new appendices) would not be a bad idea at all. I think a number of the participants signed on with the project because they realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work closely with Professor Shimada.

In this way, I have been more a visitor and observer of this institution than a long-term participant in various kenkyūkai, but as an observer I have found the whole thing utterly fascinating. Many years ago, I tried to organize such a research group in the United States that would meet to read texts together, but it just didn't work for an assortment of reasons. The main reasons are fairly simple—there are fewer China scholars in North America, and we're spread out over a vast terrain, while Japan is much smaller; even more important, though, are the facts that North American scholars are much more individualistic about their research and much less willing to share primary and secondary work until it's really much closer to a finished product and ready to show the world. There are plenty of seminars for graduate students and professors to showcase their work, but they are rarely organized around anything more than a vague theme such as 'modern China'. One exception that worked remarkably well and demonstrates the value of one other irreplaceable element I haven't mentioned yet was the three-year seminar in the early 1990s run at the University of California, Berkeley on Shanghai history. The irreplaceable element is, of course, money—money to support the transportation and lodging for scholars flown in from various and sundry places, money to support invitations to Chinese scholars to participate, etc. The University of California is now completely broke, and few other places have any money to speak of—except, of course, for The Australian National University.

One other thing related to the kenkyūkai system and historical scholarship in Japan is the repeated publication of new multi-volume series of all sorts. These are invariably useful. Why, I always ask myself, do the major Japanese presses continue to publish such multi-volume series? They are not in the business of being nice guys, and they're not a branch of UNESCO. Obviously, as expensive as they are, these series continue to be at a high quality and are bought up by Japanese scholars in sufficient numbers to warrant doing it again. The only comparable series I can think of in the Anglophone universe is the Cambridge History of China which has been coming out for over thirty years and is still missing a few volumes. A number of the original editors—John Fairbank, Denis Twitchett, Liu Kwang-ching, Fritz Mote, and Herbert Franke—have all passed away, and the whole project dropped into the lap of the next generation. I should add that the Cambridge History of Japan (in far fewer volumes) came out much more smoothly.

Slow Reading

How is it that Japan has been able to do this and we in the Anglophone world have not? What's needed would seem to include money (lots of it), proximity (namely, shorter distances between universities), leaders and would-be leaders willing to give of their time, organization and staff, and a group of scholars committed for the long-term. I think connected to all of this as well is the system of graduate school study in Japan that significantly differs from ours, even as the Japanese system is changing. In North America, Europe, and (I imagine) Australia, students enter graduate school often with a research topic already in mind, take a few years of courses, pass (or possibly fail) a series of written and/or oral examinations, and then set off to write a book-length piece of original scholarship (i.e., their PhD theses) based on original research which often includes a year or two of study and research in China or Taiwan. Speed is of the essence and, considering that language training almost always takes up a huge chunk of time even for native speakers, the sense of being rushed through graduate school is almost palpable.

There is, I have to admit as well, a certain underlying irrationality to this whole process. How can someone who has never written a book and probably has no published articles to be expected to write a book all of a sudden while still in their mid- to late-20s? Dissertations are, of course, not books, though most advisors expect them to be pretty close to books. With funding to support graduate students seemingly always getting smaller and with a ferociously difficult job market out there, the leisurely approach to grad school is definitely a thing of the past. Meanwhile, and this is definitely changing, my Japanese friends had to take rigorous, cut-throat tests to get into graduate school, but once in they received support, studied and worked with professors, and in the process established bonds for life. Through the famous 'old-boy networks', they got jobs and only much later did they put together several decades of scholarship into a book which would stand in for a PhD dissertation. Most of them did this final step in their late forties or fifties; some of the older generation never bothered with the PhD at all. As the market in Japan has gotten more competitive and especially with so many Chinese students now studying at Japanese universities, getting a PhD has become a more pressing issue. My good friend Ishikawa Yoshihiro got his PhD in his early forties, so things are definitely changing.

I would like to make one final, related point that concerns both academic Sinology in Japan and elsewhere in the world. This is the enduring power of the disciplines to establish barriers that often inhibit communication and whose overcoming can lead to extremely fruitful results. What do I mean? In the prewar period, Kyōdai Sinology in particular—Shinagaku 支那学—aimed specifically at bringing different approaches to the study of China: literature, history, classical textual studies, epigraphy, whatever; what was usually not part of the mix was contemporary China, though some scholars did address issues of relevance to the China of their day. The idea was, obviously, that the disciplines may have been useful was to organize knowledge and to pass that knowledge from teacher to student, but the disciplines were nonetheless artificial, and there was no good reason for a historian of Ming China, to take but one example, to ignore evidence from the great novels of the Ming into his or her historical research; similarly, a historian of Tang China would surely want to incorporate information from Tang poetry into research on Tang-period history. My sense is that—and I maybe wrong here—after the war with the reorganization of education in Japan, the disciplines which were then so important to American education began to exert a powerful influence on Japanese academic life. In China Studies that meant that people working in different divisions of the same university might not know of each others' work. And, people working in similar topics in other parts of East Asia—such as Japanese Confucianism or Korean Buddhism or whatever—would rarely have much contact at all. Happily, I think these barriers are falling, and more cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary work (all meaning the same thing) is being produced that before.

This practice mirrors a similar phenomenon in the West, especially the United States—and I mention the United States in particular because it had such a powerful impact on postwar Japan. In the postwar era, the American government funneled a good deal of money into what was called 'area studies', and the areas to be studied were those that the U.S. government deemed hot spots around the world. One of the lessons it had learned from World War II was being caught off guard and finding itself fighting an enemy—Japan—it hardly understood and had few people who knew its language. So, the newly risen Communist China was one of those important hot spots that the government wanted to be sure would have experts to advise it about as the Cold War progressed. 'Area studies' concentrated its attention on the modern and contemporary period and it stressed language training, but it did all this in an inter-disciplinary way; that said, it didn't have much time or patience for the humanities and emphasized the social sciences in a big way—and I think it took the 'science' part of social science far too literally. The topic, though, was (in our case) 'China' and not literature or history or sociology or whatever. The idea was to understand China by whatever means were required. While I much appreciated the inter-disciplinary nature of this approach when I was a student, it did have the fatal flaw of ignoring pre-contemporary history and culture almost completely.

More recently, area studies has been vigorously criticized for other reasons as well. In addition to a reinvigoration of the disciplines, especially the social sciences, which thus criticized the use of 'China' as a meaningful topic, the use of Western-derived theory which I discussed a moment ago has made an all-out effort to break down the entire Sinological approach of the past as representing an elite discourse. I shan't say any more about this, but I think it might for an interesting topic for discussion.

Finally, I have always felt that Kyoto was the exception to all the rules in Japanese Sinology. Just when I would feel most frustrated about the development of Sinological studies here, I would run into the exception here. Kyōdai may the last place on planet Earth where literary Chinese, literary Chinese (wenyanwen 文言文), is still rigorously taught in the Bungakubu, while at the same time contemporary China is being studied here in a kenkyūkai at the Jinbunken as well as probably elsewhere. Also, in recent years topics of concern to the entire East Asian region have been taken up in research groups. Why this last theme has taken so long to develop in Japan as elsewhere might be an interesting subject of speculation as well.

But, I shall end here and thank you all for your patience and the organizers for inviting me to participate.

Post-script:

Several days after our conference concluded I had a private discussion with a faculty member of the Jinbunken who was in attendance that day. I asked him first if he followed my talk and if he agreed. He was able to follow most of it, and he suggested that the discussion of the kenkyūkai system was an accurate description of the 'good old days'. In recent years, faculty members at Japanese universities have been increasingly saddled with enormous quantities of bureaucratic work—which, like everywhere else, is all but completely a waste of everyone's time and sanity. The problem has apparently become so acute over the last few years that kenkyūkai, in order to have a core group of members, had to start meeting on weekends. That was, of course, not a satisfactory solution, and it meant that aside from the few that continued to meet during the week had fewer members and were in fact fewer in number themselves. No one knew exactly why there has been such a precipitous increase in the amount of bureaucratic paperwork, but it has nonetheless become a fact of life. Let us all pray to our respective source if divine powers that it is temporary.

Related material from China Heritage Quarterly:

• Scholarly Perspectives on China: The View from Japan, by Nathan Woolley and David Brophy
• Asian Values, a review essay by Leigh K. Jenco
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