Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into HistoryUniversity of California Press, 1995 M02 8 - 305 pages Stefan Tanaka examines how late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japanese historians created the equivalent of an "Orient" for their new nation state. He argues that the Japanese attempted to use a variety of pasts—Chinese, Indian, and proto-historic Japanese—to construct an identity that was both modern and Asian. |
Contents
31 | |
Toyoshi The Convergence of East and West | 68 |
CREATING DIFFERENCE | 105 |
Difference and Tradition | 107 |
Shina The Separation of Japan from China | 115 |
Shina The Narration of Japans Emergence | 153 |
Shina The Authorization of a Discourse | 188 |
Archeology The Institutionalization of Shina | 228 |
THE RENOVATION OF THE PAST | 263 |
WORKS CITED | 285 |
INDEX | 297 |
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Common terms and phrases
ajia ancient Asia Asian believed China chugoku civilization concept conflict Confucianism contemporary criticism debate discourse dynasty East emperor emphasized Europe European example framework Gendai Hattori Hayashi heaven Himiko historians Hsiung-nu Ibid ideal ideology imperial Inoue Inoue Tetsujirō intellectuals interpretation Japan Japan's past Japanese history kangaku kenkyū Kindai nihon knowledge Kojiki Korea Kume Kyushu language legends Location of Yamatai Manchuria Meiji Meiji period methodology minzoku Miyake modern Mongols Naitō Naka narrative nation nation-state nese Nihon ni okeru Nihon shoki North-South dualism objective origins Ozaki period philosophy of history political positivistic Princeton problem progress rekishi relation scholars scientific Shigaku zasshi shina Shinaron Shira Shiratori argued Shun similar Sinology social society spirit Taishō Taishō period theory tion Tokyo tory Tōyō Bunko tōyōshi tōyōshigaku tradition Tsuda tsuite understanding unique University of Tokyo University Press Ural-Altaic Wei chih West words Yamaji Yamatai Yamato
Popular passages
Page 8 - The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.
Page 16 - A unitary language is not something given [dan] but is always in essence posited [zadan] — and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystallizing into a real, although still relative, unity — the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary...
Page 22 - In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else's. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes mass of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition.
Page 39 - In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought, have studied natural events with the view of discovering their regularity : and if human events were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results.
Page 10 - We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life.
Page 18 - Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Page 11 - The very same thing that makes the ideological sign vital and mutable is also, however, that which makes it a refracting and distorting medium. The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual.
Page 39 - I hope to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous, to what has been effected by other inquirers for the different branches of natural science.
Page 8 - one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words)), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the...
Page 23 - The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own ; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers.