Author: j24

A Culture Crystallized over Centuries: The Role of Edo Political Thought in Watsuji Tetsurō’s The Way of the Japanese Subject

Like much of the Kyoto School, Zen Buddhism and concern about modernity played a deep role in the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurō, with his description of Japanese culture as having “passed through several fires”, positioning “world religions” as an agonistic threat.1. However, The Way of the Japanese Subject was not written in a vacuum, defining Japanese culture through differentiation from its East Asian counterparts predates the Meiji restoration and can be seen throughout the Edo period.

The “Japanization” of Confucianism is a concept on which Tetsurō’s draws from extensive Tokugawa writings.2. Before the Meiji restoration, many Japanese writers had to contend with the idea of China being the “central flowering” of culture, making peripheral nations around China barbarians.3 Due to this reputation as Dōngyí or Eastern Barbarians, Japanese writers up to Watsuji Tetsurō made a conscious effort to argue that Japanese cultural imports had been distinctly differentiated, making them on par with China. An example of this can be seen in the writings of Katsube Seigyo (1712-88), who argued that “Japan is an ingenious nation. We may not be particularly good at inventing things, but we can take something from China, study and learn from it, and make something that works even more splendidly”.4 Similarly, Hattori Taiho (1770-1846) summarized Japanese culture as excelling at “at taking something that someone else has made, utilizing it fully, and adding our own ingenuity to it”.5 Tetsurō takes this idea a step further that while Confucianism is the origin of Japanese obedience, this philosophy “was not an original strain of Chinese Confucianism. It was the Japanese samurai who gave shape to the concept from their own experience.”6

Whilst they reach the same conclusion, the argument that “bushido” was the “living embodiment of the Confucian Way” and the method to which it was Japanized is a major distinction from earlier authors and worth examining.7 The aforementioned emphasis on Bushido is emblematic of the widening cult of the samurai in Japanese culture following the 1890s, however this concept is somewhat anachronistic and therefore the role of warrior codes is less common in Tokugawa writings.8 This could partly be explained with Tokugawa insecurities about being identified with barbarians, as if they overemphasized violence it could play into negative Confucian tropes.9

However, not all Tokugawa writers attempted to define Japan relative to China, the importance of Imperial worship in Japan was emphasized before the Meiji restoration and the Sonnō jōi movement.10. Japan’s position at the “eastern crown” of Asia gave it’s unique claim to the land of the rising sun, and some Edo authors would emphasize its unique position to define Japanese culture 11  . Aizawa Seishisai (1782-1863) would write that the sun was “the source of the primordial vital force sustaining all life and order. Our Emperors, descendants of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, have acceded to the Imperial Throne in each and every generation, a unique fact that will never change. Our Divine Realm rightly constitutes the head and shoulders”.7 This statement of Japanese particularism which would put it above its neighbours to the west mirrors the writings of Watsuji Tetsurō that “venerating the emperor embodies the absolute in the Japanese nation” and that this way was “already understood by our ancestors more than one thousand years ago.”6 Even if the Meiji and Showa eras saw a distinct rise in imperial worship, these ideas did not spring out of nowhere but developed naturally from philosophy written during the Shogunate. Similarly grappling with the Japanese place in the world predates contact with Europeans and the crisis of “Modernity”. 

  1. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo, eds., Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, vol. 22, Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 581
    Wm Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition: 1600 to 2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 997. [↩]
  2. Ibid [↩]
  3. Watanabe Hiroshi, A History of Japanese Political Thought, 1600-1901, trans. David Noble (Tokyo: I-House Press, International House of Japan, 2012) 279. [↩]
  4. Ibid, 281-282 [↩]
  5. Ibid 282 [↩]
  6. De Bary, Gluck, and Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 998. [↩] [↩]
  7. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
  8. Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushidō in Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 76. [↩]
  9. Watanabe, A History of Japanese Political Thought, 279-280 [↩]
  10. Robert N. Bellah, “Japan’s Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji Tetsuro,” The Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 4 (August 1965): 573-74. [↩]
  11. Watanabe, A History of Japanese Political Thought, 283. [↩]

“Roaming through the Heavens”; Kang Youwei’s Imagined Cosmos and Global Unity

In Datong Shu, Kang Youwei highlights his lineage from a “tradition of literary studies for thirteen generations” and his survey of “several tens of nations of the earth,” giving him intimate knowledge of the world1. Yet in this preface, he also delineates the limitations of his discussion, and in doing so also defines the limits of his global unity, the heavens. He admits he has no connection to “the living creatures on Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune”, and that his Jen or Wisdom “can extend [only] to [this] earth.”2 The achievement of his global unity does not represent the ‘end of history’ but instead the perfection of one singular world in a complex cosmic system filled with “uttermost happiness” and “uttermost suffering.”.3 It’s hard not to link this view of the universe with his view of distinct civilizations and his utopia’s emphasis on racial unity and natalism. When considering the framework of these imaginary worlds with their unique “states, men and women, codes of social behavior (Ii), music, civilized pleasures”, one can appreciate how Kang hasn’t abandoned the paradigm of competing civilizations but instead projected it from the earth onto the heavens.4

Kang Youwei’s interest in astronomy dates back to 1886, when he began writing the Book of the Heavens.5 Cited in Datong Shu by name, the book opens with Kang gazing at Mars through a telescope, and deducing that “the heavens being infinite in number, they then must be hosting an infinite number of peoples, governments and religions, customs and traditions, rituals, tunes, and written records”.6 The book weaves Confucian doctrine with modern scientific discoveries, asserting in chapters 10 and 11 the existence of extragalactic heavens and God, who resided above all the heavens.7 Lecturing on the subject in Shanghai, Kang was deeply attuned to Scientific debates at the time, refuting Einstein in the final chapter of his book and citing the discovery of “Martian canals” as proof of extra-terrestrial civilization.8

Whilst he does occasionally pull from these imagined communities to mirror mankind’s flaws such as war, more often this focus on Earth represents a place in contrast with the “vast and boundless” space around it.9 Similar to how Kang describes the expansion of “our Yellow Emperor race” displacing the Hmong-Mien peoples and filling geographic space, he recognizes that the earth constitutes the final geography boundary.10 This historic expansion of the Han from the Central Plain to all of China through incorporation and extermination is the model for the spread of a single “superior race” to encompass a single planetary state.11 He envisions this super race inheriting the best traits from the “silver” and “gold” race, embodying all the qualities of the world as he sees it.12

Furthermore, Earth’s place among a family of imagined communities ties with Kang’s championing of natalism. The primary goal of his great unity is to relieve suffering which is independent of population growth, however Kang’s vision for a unified society emphasizes childbirth, something he believed would increase once certain social barriers were lifted. Despite praising the power of the “silver race”, he is deeply critical of Western family structures, describing how many Westerns did not wish to get married and that “Frenchwomen do not wish to bear children; the population of France is declining”.13 Kang relates the danger of population decline with the metaphor that whilst those who dedicated themselves to Buddhism are “noble”, if everyone did so “China would not be inherited by the Chinese” and “all the vastness of the Divine Land would for ever be a colony of a different race.”14 Kang’s interpretation of Divine Land transcends China however, made clear when he applies the latter principle to the whole world, arguing “inside of fifty years mankind would become extinct”.15

He argues just as it would be a betrayal to let Chinese people die out and their land be occupied, so too would it be a betrayal of the earth to not grow its population. Why Kang Youwei insists on smelting the “silver” and “gold” races together was their supposed balance in power, with the white race being “assuredly superior, while the yellow race is more numerous”, showing he recognized population size as a strength in and of itself.16 Social Darwinism assumes that if one group can successfully propagate more relative to another group, they are self-evidently superior, and therefore global population growth is occurring in the context of the “billions” of lives on Mars and other planets.17 This is why Kang applies special emphasis to how his abolishment of family and marriage would liberate families from the “toil of nurturing” and therefore encourage “human propagation”.18

Even if Kang concedes the limits of his knowledge in Datong Shu, elsewhere in his writtings he asserted that “There must be wireless electronic devices to communicate with our earth and other planets”, and given his global vision transcends millennia, he almost certainly believed contact was inevitable.19 These glimpses into his vast spatial imagination are invaluable to understanding his perspective on humanity and global relations, just as Confucianism is to understanding his philosophy. His ideal world was deep within the context of and theoretically modeled against the many competing civilizations of his imagined galaxy. Kang’s universalist philosophy was limited by the pace of scientific progress and his ability to imagine a cosmos, and yet that did not prevent him from applying his principles of universal brotherhood to all life;

“All us earthlings are heavenlings: we truly are creatures of the heavens…when all of us will realize that the Earth is but one celestial body [among many] in the heavens, we will then understand ourselves as celestial beings.”20

  1. Laurence G. Thompson, Ta t’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei (London: Routledge, 2005) 67-68 [↩]
  2. Ibid, 66-80 [↩]
  3. Ibid, 67 [↩]
  4. Ibid, 67. [↩]
  5. Lorenzo Andolfatto, “Kang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens and the Porous Epistemological Grounds of Early-modern Chinese Science Fiction,” in Chinese Science Fiction: Concepts, Forms, and Histories, ed. Mingwei Song, Nathaniel Isaacson, and Hua Li (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 39. [↩]
  6. Thompson, Ta t’ung Shu, 40. [↩]
  7. Zheng Wan, “The Relationship between Science and Religion in Kang Youwei’s Confucianism” (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2019), 222. [↩]
  8. Ibid,
    Andolfatto, “Kang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens”, 48. [↩]
  9. Thompson, Ta t’ung Shu, 67 [↩]
  10. Ibid, 142 [↩]
  11. Ibid, 147 [↩]
  12. Ibid, 141 [↩]
  13. Ibid, 174-175. [↩]
  14. Ibid, 157. [↩]
  15. ibid. [↩]
  16. Ibid, 141. [↩]
  17. Ibid, 80. [↩]
  18. Ibid, 165-186 [↩]
  19. Andolfatto, “Kang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens”, 48. [↩]
  20. Ibid, 49. [↩]