| DATE: | Friday, March 19, 2004 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 1:00-6:00 p.m. |
| PLACE: | Toll Room, Alumni House |
| FORMAT: | Joint Colloquium |
| SPONSOR: | Center for Japanese Studies, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, IEAS |
Naoaki Hiraishi
Japan opened the country to the western world in the mid-19th century, giving up the previous policy of seclusion. This is called "kaikoku". But we can interpret "kaikoku" in a different and symbolic way, in which the word means a transition from "the closed society" to "the open society" in Karl Popper's sense, or a transformation of old society into new one through the contact with a different civilization. If we use "kaikoku" in this sense, we see that at least Japan has had three chances of "kaikoku" in its history: (1) the so-called Christian Ages from the mid-16th century to the mid-17th century, (2) "kaikoku" in the mid-19th century, and (3) the post-war periods in the mid-20th century when western ideas again poured into Japan after the end of the war. Comparing these three "kaikoku" with each other may give us suggestions of what intellectual problems we are facing with in the present world. In this lecture, I will examine this problem, using a 1959 article called "Kaikoku" written by Masao Maruyama (1914-1996), a leading Intellectual in Post-war Japan, as a main source of argument.
Born 1945. A.B., University of Tokyo, 1968. Research Associate, University of Tokyo, 1968-1974. Associate Professor, University of Chiba, 1974-1984. Associate Professor then Professor in the history of political thought in Japan, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, 1984-1990, 1990- respectively. Guest Professor, Delhi University, 1982-83, Center for Japanese Studies at Beijing, 1990, Berlin Humboldt University, 1997-98. Major publications include: Ogyu Sorai Nenpuko (A Biographical Study of Ogyu Sorai, 1984); Ten (A Historical Study of the idea of Tian, 1996); Nihon Seiji Shisoshi -- Kinsei wo Chushin ni (A History of Political Thoughts in Tokugawa Japan, 1997, revised edition, 2001, textbook for the University of the Air).
Takehiko Hashimoto
Japanese employed its own seasonal time system until 1872, when the Western Clock time system as well as Gregorian calendric system was introduced. Many foreign engineers, who arrived around that time of the Meiji Restoration, were frustrated with the Japanese unreliability on time schedule. Within the next hundred years or so, however, Japanese have succeeded in constructing punctual society and its infrastructure, as is symbolized in the on-time operation of the bullet train. The wide difference between the Japanese temporal discipline in the past and the present lead us to question on the origin and history of punctuality in Japanese society. The paper discusses and explores the struggle and confusion experienced in various sectors - schools, railroads, and factories - in that historical process before and after the Second World War.
Takehiko Hashimoto graduated the University of Tokyo, and received BA and MS in the history of science. He received his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University on the history of technology. Since 1991, he has been a faculty member at the University of Tokyo, and currently professor at Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology of the same university. He organized a collaborative research on the origin of punctuality at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, and consequently published a collection of papers, The Birth of Tardiness in 2001. His current research interest includes the social history of the clock and the history of media technology.
Shigehisa Kuriyama
In the century and a half since Matthew Perry arrived in Edo Bay, the incorporation of Western medicine has dramatically transformed the Japanese sense of embodiment. Once utterly alien concepts such as nerves and muscles, stimulus (shigeki) and excitement (k_fun), now figure as compelling, natural realities, while traditional notions of flowing ki sound vaguely fanciful and exotic. Stress, a word that entered Japanese only half a century ago, today expresses an intimate, quasi-universal complaint, whereas the once ubiquitous Edo malady called shaku has mysteriously disappeared. Interestingly, however, the widespread persistence of the affliction called katakori -- an affliction originally inspired by the belief in circulating energies -- hints that below the surface of this grand transformation, beneath the apparent alienation from once intimate truths, certain visceral intuitions from the past survive, albeit in subtly altered form.
Shigehisa Kuriyama is Associate Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, where he pursues research on the comparative history of medicine. He received his Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University. His book, The expressiveness of the body and the divergence of Greek and Chinese medicine (ZONE Books, 1999) received the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine in 2001. He is currently working on a study of the relationship between money and the body in Edo Japan.
Yosuke Nirei
In the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, a small number of ex-samurai youth converted to Christianity and led the subsequent development of the religion during the Meiji and Taisho periods. This paper discusses the provenance of Japanese Protestantism, the significance of the conversion of samurai youth, and the manner in which Japanese Protestant leaders interacted (and conflicted) with Western missionaries and collectively emerged as influential ideologues and critics of Japan's social progress and national/imperial development. The radical choice of their conversion, I argue, was not an isolated or idiosyncratic event in Japanese history or merely descriptive of their personal condition, but rather an important product of their times, closely related to the larger progressive, universalistic intellectual currents and reformist attitude of the bakumatsu and the early Meiji period, with which they resonated.
PhD candidate, History, University of California, Berkeley
MA, International Relations, Sophia University, Tokyo
BA, English Language, Sophia University, Tokyo
Dissertation: "The Ethics of Empire: Protestant Thought, Moral Culture, and Imperialism in Meiji Japan."
Publication: "Rôyama Masamichi no Tôa kyôdôtai ron: senji-ka jiyûshugi chishikijin no shisô" (Royama Masamichi's "East Asian community theory": a concept of a wartime Japanese liberal). Kokusaigaku ronshû (Journal of International Studies), Institute of International Relations, Sophia University, no. 32. (January 1994).
Sabine Frühstück
After the opening of Japan, Japanese modernizers returned from visits to Europe and reported that there, military rules were strictly followed, whereas in Japan there was no discipline neither within nor outside the military. The imperial armed forces (1872-1945) were to serve as mediators of modernization and as pioneers of a new culture: Western food was first cooked in the military; young men interested in music joined the military to learn how to play a brass instrument; health and hygiene were first monitored at a grand scale within the armed forces; and large-scale population data were based on conscripts and soldiers. Thus, the institutionalization of military service contributed to the creation of new notions of modern manhood and masculinity that were to be achieved through military training.
Frühstück is an affiliate of the History Department and the Anthropology Department at UCSB and the director of the East Asia Center. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo (1998-1999, 2001), at Berkeley and Stanford (2001-2002), and a visiting research professor at Kyoto University (2003). Her research interests within the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and society include problems of power and knowledge, sexualities and genders, and military-societal relations. Frühstück is currently completing a book on military-societal relations in modern and present-day Japan, Avant-garde: The Army of the Future.
James Bartholomew
Whatever date one selects to mark the inception of modern Japanese science -- 1720, 1775, 1868 -- or any other, two facts about the issue stand in sharp tension with one another: First, that there were important developments in the Tokugawa period, related both to the impressive growth of medical knowledge and to the early importation of European work in the physical sciences. But secondly, that the foundations for post-1868 expansion in Japanese medicine not only facilitated a remarkable efflorescence in that field but in some ways came at the expense of a widely, better informed, international recognition of Japanese achievements in scientific work. Japan is best known today for its contributions to physics and chemistry; but in the 19th century until about 1935, it was medicine that carried Japan's reputation abroad. Japanese medical achievements in some degree antedated "kaikoku;" those in the physical sciences would have been inconceivable without it. On the international scene these legacies from the past continue to shape both foreign and domestic understandings of what Japan has actually contributed to science worldwide.
B.A., 1963; M.A., 1964; Ph.D., 1972, Stanford University.
Professor Bartholomew is a specialist in modern Japanese history, chiefly interested in the history of science, medicine, higher education, and business in Japan. In 1985-86, he held a research fellowship from the National Science Foundation. His 1989 book, The Formation of Science in Japan received the1992 Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society and was issued in paperback in February 1993. In March 2001, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to write a book on Japan and the Nobel science prizes, 1901-1949.
Akira Tachikawa
It is absurd to assume that the dispositions and habits of thought among the Japanese underwent a drastic change simply with the arrival of the "Black Ships." It is true, however, that the 1850s marked a watershed of two periods from the perspective of ideas and practice of classroom education in Japan. As Tsujimoto has shown, in Tokugawa Japan, people typically conceived of education as imitation and mastery in which the teacher as the model and the pupil as the follower sat in tandem, as it were. The Meiji Japan envisaged education in terms of instruction and reception where the teacher opposed squarely to pupils to impart knowledge. As Emori has demonstrated, on the classroom level, the old Terakoya accommodated pupils at the sitting tables which were arranged rather irregularly. The teacher guided one pupil at a time while the others did their work on their own. In Meiji Japan, the ordinary class-room recitation has become the standardized setting where the teacher stood face to face with the entire class. As Manabu Sato has rightly argued, the new system reflected "colonialism" in education.
Akira Tachikawa is currently Professor and Chair of the Division of Education at the International Christian University. Educated in Japan up to his MA degree, he obtained his Ph.D. in the US at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a thesis on the early history of MIT. The most recent of his works published in English include: "Liberal and General Education for the Present Century." In Proceedings of the International Conference on The Challenges of Asian Christian Universities in the 21st Century. The Chinese Universities of Hong Kong, 2001; "Education and Democracy in Japan." In Philip Cam, ed. Philosophy, Democracy and Education. The Korean National Commission for UNESCO, 2003; "Cultural Tradition and War-time Scholarship in Japan." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Culture, Man and Human Resources at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Hanoi, Vietnam, 2003.
