Tosaka Jun, a marxist philosopher associated with the Kyoto school of the early 20th century, was highly critical of prewar Japanese philosophy. He rejected the abstract metaphysics of members of the Kyoto School on the grounds that their ‘bourgeois’ ideology easily permitted fascist appropriation. He utilized historical materialism to call for a philosophy of the quotidian, centering the concept of ‘everydayness’. This stance led to his imprisonment under the anti-communist Peace Preservation Law, where he died shortly before Japanese surrender.
Placed in a global context, Tosaka’s work reflects a broader current of intellectuals reacting to an increasingly extremist world. His worldview and historical conception parallel the writings of Marc Bloch, the co-founder of the Annales d’histoire economique et social. Although these two conceptions of historical time emerged from different traditions, one from marxist materialism and the other from social history and mentalities, both rejected linear, abstract models of time and grounded historical understanding in human experience1. Acknowledged in comparison, Marc Bloch and Tosaka Jun’s conceptions of historical time show that history is constantly being made and remade within the quotidian, it is not simply the stories of ‘great men’ but a reflection of contemporary culture.
Tosaka argues that understanding time as temporal or spatialized deny the existence of historical time2. ‘Historical time is the fundamental concept of temporal things. And within that—without overemphasizing or understating it—is the division. But what is a division of historical time?’3 For Tosaka, division is a zeit, which comes from the contents or the character of the time itself.3 To explain this, he makes an analogy wherein character is a ripe fruit that falls from the tree of history, and ‘what manner people faithfully receive this fruit depends on the character of the people themselves.’4 Politics and material relations attach a character to a period.5 Tosaka argues that ‘a period then is none other than the dialectical development of various stages of historical time.’6
‘In the principle of the day- to- day—the principle of the quotidian—in the constant repetition of the same act though it is a different day, in the common activity of drinking tea, in the absolute inevitability of the principle of everyday life—in these things dwells the crystallized core of historical time; here lies the secret of history’7.
Similarly, Marc Bloch defines historical time as ‘a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible’8. For both Tosaka and Bloch, historical time is grounded in the tangible and material. While Tosaka takes this emphasis on the material a step further due to his marxist conception, Bloch ultimately values the contributions of ‘men in time’ to ‘the science of men’ or history9. Both explicitly reject Rankean historicism which they view as a tool of fascist expansion within the academy.
Though different in practice, both understandings of historical time ground history in ordinary human life, rejecting the narratives of authoritarian regimes. Both sought to reclaim history from abstraction and restore it to the people whose lives constitute it. In doing so, they participated in a broader global effort to resist authoritarianism not only through politics but through intellectual methodology. The Historians Craft became widely known in global scholarship, while Tosaka’s broader influence has remained limited until fairly recently. While Tosaka would disagree with many aspects of the later Annales, I believe he would find camaraderie in the struggle of the founders of the journal in their fight to invigorate their readers against fascism. Ultimately, both aided in redefining what history is and who produces it for future generations of scholars.
- Robert Stolz, Fabian Schäfer, and Ken C. Kawashima, (eds.), Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (Ithaca, 2013) p.4 [↩]
- Ibid., p. 7 [↩]
- Ibid. [↩] [↩]
- Ibid,. p. 9 [↩]
- Ibid [↩]
- Ibid,. p. 10 [↩]
- Ibid., p. 12 [↩]
- Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam, foreword by Joseph R. Strayer (Manchester, 1976), p. 27 [↩]
- Ibid., p. 27 [↩]