A Genealogy of Japanese Self-Images

Eiji Oguma

• Editore: Trans Pacific Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781925608236
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Japanese History

This book presents a counter-argument to the Japanese belief that they are a homogeneous nation since the Meiji period. Eiji Oguma demonstrates that the myth of ethnic homogeneity was not established during the Meiji period, nor during the Pacific War, but only after the end of the war. The study covers a large range of areas, including archaeology, ancient history, linguistics, anthropology, ethnology, folk law, eugenics and philosophy, to obtain an overview of how a variety of authors dealt with the theme of ethnicity. It also examines how this myth of homogeneity arose and how the peoples of such Japanese colonies as Korea and Taiwan were viewed in the pre-war literature on ethnic identity. This is the first English translation of A Genealogy of "Japanese" Self-Images, which won the Suntory Culture Award in 1996.

Part One

The Thought of an ‘Open Country’

1 The Birth of Theories of the Japanese Nation

It is difficult to determine when discussion on the origins of human beings living on the Japanese archipelago began. As long ago as the eighth century, the Hitachi-no-kuni fudoki (The Hitachi-no-kuni Domain: Records of Wind and Earth) mentioned shell mounds, and there is also the Edo Period Confucian scholar Arai Hakuseki’s (1657–1725) theory of stone tools of 1725. However, the first theory of the origin of the Japanese nation based on a modern scientific discourse must be dated from the excavation of the Ōmori shell mounds by Edward S. Morse (1838–1925) in 1877.¹

Western Academics’ Theories of the Japanese Nation

During the Edo Period, Japan strictly limited all interaction with Western countries. However, after the Edo Bakufu was overthrown through the Meiji Restoration, the Meiji government introduced policies to modernise Japan and invited a large number of Western advisers and teachers to the country.

Morse had been a research assistant in biology at Harvard University in the USA, but fell out with his professor over the acceptance of evolutionary theory and resigned. He travelled to Japan to research Brachiopoda. Arriving in the port city of Yokohama in 1877, he was invited by the Japanese Ministry of Education to become a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and began his investigation of the Ōmori shell mounds in that year.² While giving lectures at the university and speeches to enlighten the Japanese about evolutionary theory, Morse unearthed a large amount of earthenware. His publication of the results of his excavations was the first academic paper to emerge from a Japanese university.

As to Morse’s theory of the Japanese nation, he concluded that the ancient people of the Japanese archipelago had cannibalistic customs. This conclusion was drawn from the discovery of damaged human bones in the shell mounds. Although this was a mistake, what is of importance is that he did not believe that this ancient people were the direct ancestors of the modern Japanese nation. The ethnic group that lives in the archipelago today other than the Japanese nation is the indigenous Ainu. However, based on the fact that the Ainu did not practise cannibalism and had not developed pottery, Morse hypothesised that the people who had formed the shell mounds were the direct ancestors of neither the Ainu nor the contemporary Japanese nation, but an earlier indigenous people, the pre-Ainu. Furthermore, based on Japanese legends, he argued that the present inhabitants of the archipelago, the Japanese nation, had come from the south, and had gained their present position after conquering the earlier inhabitants.

Morse was not the first to argue that an aboriginal people had earlier inhabited the archipelago and that the ‘Japanese’ were conquerors who arrived later. Phillip Franz von Siebold (1796– 1866), who came to Japan as early as 1823, had suggested in Nippon, a work that was published after he returned home to Germany, that the stone tools discovered in various parts of the archipelago had been left behind by the Ainu, an aboriginal people, and that a Tartar nation had later fought these earlier inhabitants and occupied their land.

The idea that the stone tools unearthed in various parts of Japan had been crafted by a people other than the ‘Japanese’ was also shared by some scholars of the Edo Period. The best known example is Arai Hakuseki, who developed the Shukushin theory. In 1725, he argued that the stone tools which had been thought to have been created by Buddhist and Shintōist deities and goblins were in fact left behind by a nation called the Shukushin which had entered the Tōhoku and Hokuriku regions of northern Japan from the Asian continent. Another Edo Period researcher of stone tools, Kiuchi Sekitei (1724–1808) advanced the theory that the Shukushin were the Ezo (in other words, the Ainu). Siebold was shown Kiuchi’s collection of stone tools and adopted his theory.³

The Japanese legends that Morse consulted were the so-called Kiki myths, which were contained in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. These ancient Japanese myths include the story of the ‘descent to earth of the descendants of the gods’ (Tenson Kōrin), which described the ancestors of the Japanese Emperor descending from the Heavens (or ‘Takamagahara’), the story of the ‘Eastern Expedition of the Emperor Jinmu’, which depicted the conquest by the Emperor Jinmu – the first (mythological) Emperor and founder of the Yamato Dynasty – of those who had not submitted to the authority of the Imperial Household, and the story of the conquest of a people known as the Kumaso by Prince Yamato Takeru-no-Mikoto. Peoples with different customs that were not ruled by the Imperial Household were described in terms such as Emishi (a clan that lived in northeast Japan: according to one theory, now dated, the ancient term for the Ainu) and Tsuchigumo.

Arai Hakuseki had already argued that ‘god is a man’ and that the ‘descent to earth of the descendants of the gods’ therefore described a movement from a place called Takamagahara, and that the legend that two gods, Izanagi and Izanami, had given birth to the archipelago was in fact a description of the conquest of various areas of Japan by warships. Western scholars took this idea one step further, and argued that the ‘descent to earth of the descendants of the gods’ was a legend that depicted the migration of a conquering people to the archipelago and that the conquered Kumaso and Emishi were earlier aboriginal peoples.⁴

Siebold’s second son, Heinrich Phillipp von Siebold (1852– 1908), who arrived in Japan several years before Morse, collected a large amount of pottery and numerous stone tools, and reinforced his father’s theory. There are two types of ancient earthenware in Japan: the earlier Jōmon pottery and the Yayoi pottery (the oldest periods in Japanese prehistory are known after this pottery as the Jōmon and Yayoi eras). According to Heinrich, the Jōmon pottery had been created by the Ainu who had once lived throughout the archipelago as far south as Shikoku and Kyūshū, but were later pushed northwards towards Hokkaido by a conquering people. Furthermore, John Milne (1850–1913), an English Oyatoi (foreign employee) who taught geology, also advanced the idea that the Ainu were Japan’s aboriginal people.

Alongside this thesis of the existence of an earlier aboriginal people and the immigration of a conquering nation to the archipelago, another thesis that was very influential among Western theories of the Japanese nation was that the contemporary Japanese nation consisted of a mix of various Asian nations.

For instance, in 1875, W. Denitz, a Professor at the Tokyo Medical School (this was merged with the Kaisei Gakkō in 1877 to form what later became Tokyo Imperial University), argued that the Japanese nation was a mixture of two types of the Mongolian race, including the Ainu, in addition to the Malaysian race. Furthermore, in 1883, the typology of the German, Erwin von Bālz (1849–1913, another Professor at the Tokyo Medical School), which is still known today in Japan, was made public. According to Bālz, leaving aside the Ainu, the ‘Japanese’ could be divided into two large groups, the ‘Chōshū type’, with long heads and thin bodies, a type which he argued was often seen in upper class Japanese, and the ‘Satsuma type’, with short heads and thickset bodies, which was often seen in lower class Japanese (both Chōshū and Satsuma were feudal domains that played a dominant role in the Meiji government). The first group, Bālz continued, was similar to Chinese and Koreans, and had arrived in south-western Honshū from the Asian continent through Korea, whereas the later was similar to the Malays, and had arrived in Kyūshū by a sea-route and had then moved northwards through the archipelago (see the map of Japan at p. vi). This ‘mixture’ theory became part of the theory of a conquered aboriginal nation through the idea that contemporary ‘Japanese’ consisted of a mixture of a ruling nation which came to the archipelago from overseas and conquered aboriginal peoples.

It seems that the ‘Japanese’ of this time appeared to those Westerners who advocated the mixed nation theory as a people with a vast range of personal features. Although this contradicts the notion that the ‘Japanese’ were frequently seen as an homogeneous group, at the time this seems not to have been an unusual impression. For instance, Around the World in Eighty Days, which Jules Verne wrote in the form of a compilation of information obtained from Western travel diaries of the time, stated that whereas all Chinese had the same ‘yellow’ faces, the ‘Japanese’ had many different facial colours and features. Much later, in 1934, Bruno Taut (1880– 1938) also wrote in his diary that the ‘Japanese’ had a large range of features.⁵

It cannot possibly be the case that Meiji Period ‘Japanese’ were much more diverse in their features than is the case today. One possible conjecture is that differences in individual ‘Japanese’ features that people are not usually conscious of today tended then to be seen by travellers who had experience, and were conscious, of multi-national regions which contained national differences. The view seen in Bālz that classes were directly linked to national differences, while quite baffling to many Japanese today, was an idea that may well have occurred naturally to Germans of the time.

Since this work will not investigate the origins of the ‘Japanese’, but rather focus on the discourse about these origins, it will not examine whether or not the Japanese nation was a conquering nation or a mixed nation. However, the theory that the ‘Japanese’ were a mixed nation and an immigrant/conquering nation was almost uniform in Western academic theories. In the early Meiji Period, these theories were the only ones seen as scientific views of the Japanese nation. It was not until after the second half of the 1880s that the ‘Japanese’ themselves began to develop theories of the Japanese nation based on Western anthropological methodology.

Japanese Anthropology and the Revolt against Western Scholars

In 1884, a number of students, including Tsuboi Shōgorō (1863– 1913), a young student of 20 who was studying biology at the Imperial University College of Science (this later became the Faculty of Science at the Tokyo Imperial University) called a meeting to research ancient Japanese history. A total of ten science students and staff members answered this call, and the research group that borrowed a classroom and opened proceedings is said to be the predecessor of Japan’s Anthropological Society.

Tsuboi was the grandson of a Japanese rangakusha (scholar of Dutch studies) and the son of a doctor in the service of the Shōgun (bakushin’i). From his days as a student at preparatory school, he had published a number of handwritten circulating newspapers, including Kore demo shinbun (It May Not Look Like One, But This is a Newspaper), Tonchinkan (Irrelevancy), Negoto hanbun (Half Nonsense), and was an active and brilliant student.⁶ The official title of the research group was first ‘Jinruigaku no Tomo’ (Friends of Anthropology),⁷ but was later changed to the ‘Jinruigaku Kenkūkai’ (Anthropology Research Association) and then the ‘Tōkyō Jinruigakkai’ (Tokyo Anthropological Society) in 1886. In 1931, it became the ‘Nippon Jinruigakkai’ (Anthropological Society of Nippon).⁸ At first, this group was nothing more than a gathering of young students in a classroom who discussed the Ainu and earthenware. However, in 1886, an official journal, the Jinruigakkai hōkoku (Anthropological Society Bulletin) was issued at the same time as the title of the association changed from Association to Society. The title of the journal was changed again the next year to the Tōkyō jinruigakkai zasshi (Tokyo Anthropological Society Magazine), and later to the Jinruigaku zasshi (Journal for the Anthropological Society of Nippon) in 1911. This publication became the central academic magazine for anthropology in Japan.

For these budding anthropologists, the origin of the Japanese nation was an area of great interest from the start. Japanese anthropologists, like Western anthropologists, would later engage in fieldwork in various areas of Asia, but Japan at this time was the focus of research by the Western Powers. Japanese anthropologists thus struggled to shoulder the burden of studying their own country, though anthropology in Japan eventually emerged from the situation where the overpowering influence was the Western mixed nation theory. Although many talented individuals, such as Torii Ryūzō (1870–1951), a student of Tsuboi’s who was to become the leading spirit behind the surveys of areas to which the Great Japanese Empire had expanded, and Koganei Yoshikiyo (1859–1944), who was to become the father of Japanese physical anthropology, participated in the Anthropological Society, almost all adopted the mixed nation theory. There was a debate between the vast majority, including Torii and Koganei, who believed that the Ainu were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago, and Tsuboi, who claimed that the original inhabitants were an extinct race, the Koropok-guru or Korobokkuru, mentioned in legends. However, this can be seen as a rehash of the debate between the Siebolds, who claimed that the Ainu were the original inhabitants, and Morse, who claimed that it was the pre-Ainu who were the first inhabitants.

This was true of others apart from these young anthropologists. For instance, the nativist (kokugaku) scholar, Yokoyama Yoshikiyo (1826–1879), argued that the Japanese nation was a mixture of ‘the earlier native inhabitants, the race descended from the Sun Goddess [the Tenson], and later arrivals from China and Korea’. According to Yokoyama, ‘the earlier native inhabitants’ were the same race as the Ainu. Ono Azusa (1852–1886), one of the intellectuals of the Meiji enlightenment, in his introduction of Yokoyama’s theory accepted the theory advanced by Morse, stating that ‘a cannibal race once inhabited Japan’.⁹

It was natural for there to have been an adverse reaction to this mixed nation theory. One example is Kurokawa Mayori (1829– 1906), the author of Kōgei shiryō (A History of Japanese Arts and Crafts), a pathfinding work on fine arts and crafts, who wrote a number of papers on ancient Japanese peoples from about 1879 when Morse’s theory began to emerge, and much earlier than scholars such as Tsuboi.

In ‘Emishi jinshu ron’ (On the Emishi Race) published in 1892, Kurokawa argued against the theory that the Ainu were the original inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago and were the mythical Emishi.¹⁰ According to Kurokawa, the word Emishi originally came from a term that referred to all rebels who refused to obey the orders of the Imperial Family and was not a term for an alien nation. Moreover, he stated that the ‘ Ainu of today [in Hokkaido] are descendants of Japanese who stopped evolving because they moved to the far frontiers of the state’. In other words, no alien peoples existed on the archipelago and, from time immemorial, the only inhabitants had been the ‘Japanese’. He argued that those who claimed that the Ainu were an aboriginal people conquered by migrants led by the Imperial Family who arrived at a later stage were ‘rogues giving vent to delusions’ who ‘are in contempt of the Imperial Court’, or in other words were themselves Emishi in revolt against the Imperial Household.

Naitō Chisō (1823–1900), a Mito (a school influenced by nativist thought) scholar who became a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, stated in 1888 in his ‘Kokutai hakki’ (Manifesting the National Polity) that ‘there is not a single person in this land who is not descended from the gods’. He criticised the theory that the ‘Eastern Expedition of the Emperor Jinmu’ and the ‘descent to earth of the descendants of the gods’ merely depicted the experience of an immigrant conquering nation, as ‘viewing the Japanese national polity (kokutai) as equivalent to that of other violent and brutal countries.¹¹ According ...