Rethinking the World in East Asia 1850s-1990s

Tosaka Jun’s exploration of the concept of ‘everydayness’ was a noteworthy philosophical study that reconceptualised everyday life in early 20^th century Japan. It emphasised reducing individual experiences of time to the immediacy of ‘today’, likening it to a worker focused on meeting their immediate tasks that are necessary for survival, unaffected by the concerns of ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’¹ This focus on the present highlights the importance of factual reality over abstract notions of time, which Tosaka argued was essential for conceptualising historical time and social change. Harootunian critically examines Tosaka’s distinct contribution to Japanese philosophy, emphasising his advocacy for a rational, efficient modern culture in Japan.

The growth of a new social life in Japan, with new subject positions in Japanese society, from “the people (minshu ̄), the masses (taishu ̄), the modern boy (mobo), modern girl (mogaru ̄), cafe waitress, bar maid, and so on”, made Japanese life increasingly unprecedented². Tosaka argued that these growing modern customs were constantly reshaping society, and couldn’t be accounted for in philosophical analysis without the presence of ‘everydayness’. He evaluated key dimensions of Japanese life, particularly the culture of the masses in their customs, social relationships, work and leisure life, and consumption habits, as well as the role of science in this new order³. Tosaka’s utilisation of the concept of ‘everydayness’ was therefore pivotal to move away from a more abstract understanding of philosophy, and towards a deeper engagement with the dynamic, lived realities of society. His work was not just an expression of enthusiasm for modern life; it embodied a strong conviction about the evolving nature of Japanese social life in the 1920s and how this was constantly building towards a new future.

Tosaka was not alone in his philosophical study of ‘everydayness’; his work derived from Heidegger’s prior articulation in Sein and Zeit (1926), and formed part of a widespread enthusiasm in the concept of custom (genjitsu) in Japanese intellectual and popular discourse⁴. What distinguished Tosaka, however, was his preference to the term ‘actuality’ over ‘gentjitsu’ to express a more factual understanding of everyday life.

Tosaka’s understanding of ‘everydayness’ shaped his approach to custom; he did not see it merely as a record of popular social practices, but as a concept with concealed historical and moral significance. For Tosaka, acknowledging everyday cultural practices (fūzoka, or custom) served as an “agent of…actuality” (genjitsu), providing an understanding of the reality of the masses that phenomenology couldn’t tap into⁵. He critiqued newspapers for oversimplifying the idea of custom by focusing on its popular aspects, which then failed to integrate the underlying economic and social structures underpinning these practices. Prostitution was a critical example of this, as Tosaka argued that it has been consistently overlooked as a vulgar and “transcustomary” practice, without interrogating it as a modern social problem worthy of philosophical analysis³.

This critique underscores his argument that an analysis of custom must incorporate the “character of the popular” (taishūteki) in order to reflect the thoughts and sentiments of the Japanese people.⁶.His focus on this topic highlights his broader effort to redirect Japanese philosophy towards its core purpose, serving as a lens that could access the overlooked realities of everyday life.

1. Robert Stolz, “The Principle of Everydayness and Historical Time”, in Ken C Kawashima, Fabian Schafer, Robert Stolz (ed.) Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2013) p.13 [↩]
2. Harootunian, Harry D. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton University Press, 2001) p. 97 [↩]
3. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
4. Ibid. p.127 [↩]
5. Ibid. p. 122 [↩]
6. Ibid. p.121 [↩]

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. [↩]

Shuzo Kuki, a prominent Japanese philosopher of the early twentieth century, is best remembered for his seminal work, ‘Iki no Kozo’ (The Structure of Iki). His book was published in 1930; it explores the aesthetic concept of ‘iki’, which is a term that encompasses a sophisticated style prevalent in the late Edo urban culture of Japan. Kuki argued, that ‘iki’ embodied both ideas of cosmopolitanism and modernity, comparable to that of Western cultures.¹ Furthermore, especially after the second world war, Kuki’s work would become more well known on the global scale, sparking recognition as a successful synthesis of both Western and Japanese aesthetics.

Leslie Pincus, in her work ‘Fascism and Aesthetics’, critiques the general presupposition of a favourable western interpretation of Kuki’s philosophy. Indeed, she makes the argument that there is a link between Kuki’s modern aestheticism and political fascism, believing that Kuki both admired and was antagonistic towards the West, fearing complete cultural colonization, which is why he tried to assert Japan’s cultural superiority over the West.²Pincus calls for a reevaluation of Kuki’s legacy; to reexamine the extent to which his work influenced cultural nationalism in Japan. She believes that by romanticizing the imperial rule as having ‘traditional harmony’, it led to the Japanese assertion of fascist ideologies,³ who sought to impose these ideas that perhaps never even existed in history to begin with. Pincus offer’s a critical look on Kuki’s work, relating it to still have prevalence in the discussion of Japanese nationalism, modernity, and the ongoing dialogue between the West and Japan nowadays.

1. Koshiro, Yukiko. Review of Fascism and Aesthetics, by Leslie Pincus. The Review of Politics 59, no. 3 (1997), p. 606 [↩]
2. Koshiro, Review of Fascism and Aesthetics, p. 606 [↩]
3. Koshiro, Review of Fascism and Aesthetics, p. 606 [↩]

Kuki Shūzō was a philosopher on the fringes of the Kyoto School in 20th century Japan. He pursued a uniquely Japanese aesthetic identity amidst the assimilation of Japanese culture to Western modernization, combining Western philosophical frameworks and Japanese sensibilities in his construction of iki–an identity made up of pride and restraint calling back to Edo-period lifestyles. Kuki’s philosophy negotiates contingency in defining Japanese identity, and his use of contingent aesthetics–particularly in his exploration of iki–can be both a source of cultural insight and critique.

Kuki’s major philosophical writings celebrated difference and individuality, defining the concept of contingency as the gap between analysis and experience which is generally opposed to universal judgments.¹ Though this particular discussion is heavily metaphysical, it is useful in understanding Kuki Shūzō’s contributions to identity during the interwar era. Iki was seen as possessing unstable qualities of being, which centered the role of tradition while moving into the future. Because every contingency is unlabeled, its existence is fragile and faces an inevitable realization of destruction.² This abstract concept relates to Kuki’s engagement with iki as a necessary but fluid development of Japanese culture and, in a contradictory manner, as a source of stability during the rapid development of the 20th century.

Kuki’s exploration of contingency allows his construction of Japanese identity to remain fluid and free from the essentialist constraints seen in Western identity frameworks.³ Kuki understood iki as contingent on historical and social factors, highlighting the inherent fluidity of the non-essential characteristics which shape Japanese cultural identity. From this perspective, iki became a tool to signify a unique sense of Japaneseness against the encroaching influence of Western universalism, yet Kuki relied on the frameworks of Western aesthetic to explore and justify it.⁴ Pincus further problematizes iki’s cross-cultural contingent foundations by arguing that Kuki’s exploration of the subject was built off of ‘Western desire’. She elaborates that Japan had spent a significant period assimilating to the West, which forced them to “delineate Japaneseness against, and within, Western discursive modes”⁵ Kuki reached for iki as an aesthetic style which preceded direct Western engagement with Japan, elevating it as the last distinctive signifier of Japanese culture.⁶ This makes iki contingent upon the West even as it reaches to establish itself as wholly Japanese, further complicating the role of contingent identity in establishing a cultural standard.

This is additionally explored by Koshiro, who critiques how the iki aesthetic could be used within Japanese nationalist ideologies by attempting to fix a contingent identity as a pure authentic ideal. As one example, Kuki has been criticized for his aristocratic worship of the emperor and his portrayal of it as an integral part of Japanese tradition in iki.⁷ The implications of using unstable aesthetics to define identity draws into question whether Kuki’s construction of iki has the potential to serve Japan’s authoritarian ends by masking contingency as pure authenticity, interacting with nationalist endeavors and Japan’s imperial identity. Thus, the role of contingency in Kuki’s work is both an intellectual asset and an obstacle, whose analysis offers insights into the complexities of building a stable cultural identity in a globalized world.

1. John C. Maraldo, ‘Kuki Shūzō’ in James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo (eds) Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Honolulu, 2011) pp. 829, 834. [↩]
2. Ibid., p. 846-847. [↩]
3. Leslie Pincus, ‘In a Labyrinth of Western Desire: Kuki Shuzo and the Discovery of Japanese Being’, Boundary 2 18: 3 (1991), p. 147. [↩]
4. Ibid., p. 148. [↩]
5. Ibid., p. 144. [↩]
6. Ibid. [↩]
7. Yukiko Koshiro, ‘Fascism and Aesthetics’ Review of Leslie Pincus, The Review of Politics, 59: 3 (1997), p. 607. [↩]

Charismatic sainthood was a tool used by redemptive societies in the twentieth century to construct magnetic leadership for emerging salvationist organisations.

‘Redemptive societies’ is a western term for the wave of religious activity that sought to save China and the wider world from social decline and apocalypse. For redemptive societies, sainthood provided a middle ground where modern science and technology could legitimate a religious leader’s authority, while referencing a familiar cultural heritage of sainthood practices, such as establishing a lineage, constructing a hagiography or the practice of spirit writing.¹ In this way, redemptive societies reframed traditional conceptions of religious leadership to survive in the modern context.
David Ownby isolates the systematic construction of charisma in religious leadership, defined as ‘the embodiment of the qualities of leadership, the attraction of followers, the representation of their interests and dreams in real or utopian projects’.² The two leaders discussed in this blog post, Zhang Tianran and Li Yujie, used their charismatic power to influence the actions of the divine and the humans around them. Under Zhang Tianran’s leadership, the redemptive society Yiguandao became the largest religious organisation in China, while Li Yujie successfully guided and established Tiandijiao as a redemptive society organised around spiritual healing and science. Nonetheless, both leaders offer very different forms of charismatic authority, providing a fascinating comparison in terms of their relationship with the divine, their interactions with the political system and their long-term legacy.

Both Li and Zhang were highly skilled at establishing relationships with the secular power structures around them, utilising their charisma to foster support from the state, academia and business. However, while Li maintained a more mediatory role as an interlocutor between the divine and the earthly realm, Zhang consciously assimilated into the traditional religious hierarchy. Zhang claimed to be the reincarnation of the Living Buddha Jigong, a twelfth century Buddhist monk associated in popular religion with eccentricity and spirit possession cults. Jigong’s image has been used extensively as symbolic representation of Zhang, who has thus become deified as a transcendent omnipresent, omniscient figure. This was strengthened after his death when Zhang appeared in spirit writing sessions, directly interacting with his disciples and interfering with the present organisation of the movement. While there is an abundance of documentary evidence of Li, Zhang remains ‘elusive’³, with sources about his life restricted to hagiographical accounts or propaganda pieces against him. This, combined with mystery around the location of his burial site, results in a further intangibleness attributed to his self that elevates him beyond the earthly realm.

On the other hand, Li Yujie’s time as leader of the Tiandejiao movement was grounded in his political principles and institutional ties. While Li would also appeal to traditional perceptions of holy men by preaching about the intimate relationship between god and man, retreating for a few days every year to ascend to heaven and wearing dark glasses to protect others from his blinding healing gaze, he was also engaged in earthly matters to a very high degree, as listed in President Li Denhui’s eulogy in 1994.⁴ He served as a member of the Finance Ministry under the GMD, owned and edited a newspaper that extensively advocated for freedom of the press, and used scientific language to frame his religious treatises. As Ownby argues, this did not appear to be a contradiction for Li, and in fact, his secular contacts served to strengthen his religious goals as in the case of gaining approval from the Taiwanese government to operate as a public religious institution despite their martial law.⁵

This differing use of charisma, the relationship between the leader and their followers, from these two saints demonstrates the abundance of approaches to sainthood amongst redemptive societies at the time, all seeking to aid China and rescue the world from apocalyptic decline.

1. David Ownby, ‘Introduction’, in Making Saints in Modern China, eds. David Ownby, Vincent Goossaert, and Ji Zhe (New York, 2017), p.7. [↩]
2. ibid. p.17. [↩]
3. ibid. p.229. [↩]
4. David Ownby, ‘Sainthood, Science, and Politics: The Life of Li Yujie, Founder of the Tiandijiao’, in Making Saints in Modern China (New York, 2017), p.252. [↩]
5. ibid. p.249. [↩]

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. [↩]