Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations
270
Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations
270eBook
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Overview
Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations critiques the formation of non-western International Relations by assessing Japanese political concepts to contemporary IR discourses since the Meji Restoration, to better understand knowledge exchanges in intercultural contexts. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of this dialogue, from international law and nationalism to concepts of peace and Daoism, this collection grapples with postcolonial questions of Japan’s indigenous IR theory.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786603692 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2018 |
| Series: | Global Dialogues: Non Eurocentric Visions of the Global |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 270 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Atsuko Watanabe is Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
How Did Two Daos Perceive the International Differently?
Atsuko Watanabe and Ariel Shangguan
It has been argued that through the appropriation of international law East Asian countries were admitted to the European international society. Although the topic itself has been relatively well investigated, the question as to why China's entry into the international society lagged behind that of Japan has not been comprehensively addressed in Anglophone International Relations (IR) (for recent investigations, see Suzuki 2009; Lorca 2014; Ringmar 2012). By contrast, this question has puzzled East Asian intellectual historians for quite some time (Sato 1977; Maruyama 1992; Kin 1995; Yoshida et al. 2010; Shu 2011). Inspired by international political sociology, this chapter readdresses this puzzle by linking these two debates from a slightly different point of view. It does so by taking Masao Maruyama's (1961: 39–41; 2006: 216–17) claim seriously that institutions require an ethos (seishin) to be activated in a society. If the international society has expanded from Europe globally, as IR theory (most notably the English School) posits, the process would have turned the globe monolithic, ignoring what L. H. M. Ling (2014) calls "multiple worlds." This chapter therefore asks how an institution forged out of an ethos is interpreted and activated through another ethos, in order to be perceived as "shared" among diverse ethe. It argues that international society cannot be perceived as a mere expansion of the European term, but is a product of different imaginations. To give evidence to this argument, this chapter takes a comparative genealogical approach by examining scholarly texts during this period, aiming to recover the spatiotemporal conditions.
A QUASI SOLIDARITY?
The first book on international law in East Asia was the Chinese translation of The Elements of International Law published in Beijing in 1864. Originally published in 1836, this book, written by the American diplomat Henry Wheaton, experienced remarkable success in East Asia. In the same year that the Chinese translation became available, it was brought to Japan and translated in 1865 (Tanaka 1991). In these translations, many Confucian notions were used to describe Western conceptions, helping readers to comprehend these foreign terms more easily (Okubo 2010: 159). Japanese readers understand Chinese characters, therefore, they can read the same text. However, their comprehension of the content was distorted, as they read the Chinese ideograms as Japanese kanji (Tsuda 1984; Kato 1991), which often differ in meaning from the Chinese original. As such, although En Shu (2011) is right in saying that this book was not just a translation but "burdened with a role as a medium to fusion two totally different worldviews," it was not just two worldviews — of the West and the East — but much more as this chapter will demonstrate.
Concerning the question of ethos and institution, this chapter examines social imaginary, which was evoked by the term "international" among people living in two different spaces during the same period. Considering the work of George Lawson and Robbie Shilliam (2010: 75), we argue that, while different forms of social life can exist, traveling ideas attain a "quasi" social solidarity across borders. This solidarity is buttressed by each social imaginary that rests upon each domestic context. Its focus is, therefore, domestic continuities rather than change in the international, but that buttresses the international transformation.
The intensifying debates on non-Western IR open the invitation to look into the conception of the "international" outside of Europe (Bilgin 2016). Recent contributions suggest that there has been a qualitatively different world order in East Asia from the European territorial order. Yaqing Qin (2016) proposes a relational theory of world politics inspired by Chinese thought, while Erik Ringmar (2012) argues that Sino-centric and Tokugawa systems were more relational than territorial, which suggests comparing the systemic difference among different orders. By contrast, we want to consider different relations in respective societies, instead of arguing which one provides a more relational outlook. In doing so, we reinvestigate the unquestioned universality of the international as a common space of analysis. By examining Chinese and Japanese debates around the appropriation of international law, we propose another way of understanding the complexity of the international as a space in which different forms of the social, rather than different systems, are imagined. In their contribution, Gunther Hellmann and Morten Valbjørn (2017) call a renewed attention to the "inter" as a space, stating that much attention in IR debates have been paid to the national. By contrast, we demonstrate a different possibility of envisaging the "international" by pointing out that the differences are not civilizational, regional, or national, but communal. By explicating the two examples, we propose the need of a thorough reconceptualization of the international, by not only historicizing the international but at the same time spatializing it.
ETHOS AND SOCIAL IMAGINARY
In Thought in Japan, Maruyama (1961) explores the "issue of ethos (seishin) in institution" by discussing Japan's kokutai (interpreted as national polity, sovereignty, or body politic). He, arguing that it is in this malleable notion of kokutai that modernity was easily connected to pre-modernity in Japan, directs attention to the fact that economic and political institutions are largely considered to be "universal," even by scholars promoting cultural plurality. This is because its historicity is ignored (Maruyama 1961: 40–41). Although the modern Japanese state was modelled after the modern European state system in the late nineteenth century, the history of the term kokutai dates back at least to the beginning of the century. The term kuni, which means state in Japan and composes part of the notion kokutai, can even be traced back to China's Warring States Period (403–221 BC) (Ogawa 1928). Treated as a mechanism, the state as an institution has been considered to be evidence of modernity. However, once the state as a concept had started to travel, spreading out globally from Europe, what happened to its meaning when used in a specific context? To understand this neglected point, as Maruyama (1961) asserts, institutions, particularly those which incorporate political and ethical elements, must be understood in totality.
Maruyama's inquiry can be related to recent critics of the rise of social theories in IR. Patricia Owens (2015) criticizes the "obsession with things 'socio"' in IR and states that the fundamental issue of such theory is "whether the concepts and analytical tools that emerged in a specific historical and political context are adequate for addressing that context. " This question requires us to consider "the historical and political origins of social forms of governance and thought" (Owens 2016: 451, emphasis in original). The notion of socialization in Europe is a "product of a political and ideological crisis in liberal capitalist governance" (Owens 2015: 658). In this respect, most of social theory is a mere product of a particular European context. Then, to understand the "true" international, the fact that there must have been other variants of the social has to be acknowledged. Here, the comparison of Japan and China on international law is intriguing given that, as this chapter explicates, the conception has been inscribed with various meanings as it is contextualized in different situations due to its complex historical trajectory.
For this purpose, this chapter relies on insights of Japanese intellectual history, in which the difference of the historical relations between public and private in Japan, China, and the West have been compared. The notion of public ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) is important for this study because international law was translated as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]. The literal retranslation into English is "the public law among thousands of nations." In the two countries, this has brought up the association of the state as private. The Japanese historian Hiroshi Watanabe (2010) begins with the exploration on the relation between the two in the West. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "public" is defined as the opposite of "private," which pertains to "the people of a country or locality." Watanabe directs our attention to three points. First, "public" fundamentally means ordinary people and therefore the conceptual structure is bottom-up. Second, in this conception, public and private coexist, retaining each distinctive territoriality. Third, as the aforementioned definition implies, "public" denotes a group of people. Hence, the realm has externality.
Next, Watanabe defines Chinese private and public in the Ming-Qing era. First, koh ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] public) has no substantial referent object. In this respect, its conceptual structure is not explicit. Second, despite its apparent malleability, koh is singular and universal. If different "publics" come into conflict, one of them must be shi ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), that is, private. Therefore, third, public and private cannot coexist, but the two are in conflictual rather than oppositional relation.
Finally, in Edo Japan, ohyake ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] public) and watakushi ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] private) are essentially conceived in a vertical relation, in which watakushi is embedded in ohyake. Private and public cannot coexist in the same horizontal arena, however, the relation between the two has no explicit borders but indicates only vague territoriality. Public includes many multiple privates. For these reasons, any group of people can be public. Public can be invaded by private but not vice versa. The relation indicates power relations with the public as the stronger and greater and private as the weaker and smaller (Watanabe 2010). Thus, public does not indicate people but "authority."
As indicated elsewhere (Rösch and Watanabe 2017), similar points are being made by Michel Foucault during his lectures in Japan in 1978. He argued that Confucianism in Asia functioned analogously to Christianity in Europe. However, while Christianity's pastoral power rested on individual promises of salvation in the afterlife, Confucianism promotes a this-worldly essentialism. While Confucianism aimed to stabilize the society as a whole by clarifying the rules imposed on the society, Christianity tried to subject each individual (Foucault 2007: 161). Confucianism, therefore, defined "practices between the state, society, and individuals, whilst reflecting on the world order" in Asia. Defining it as "the state as philosophy," he maintained that in European history, it was only after the French Revolution when this type of state appeared (Foucault 2007: 145–46). Maruyama (1961: 41–42), on whose study on Confucianism Foucault relied in his lectures, argued that while in Chinese Confucianism natural law had a normative and contractual character, in Japan, loyalty and gratitude were stressed, rendering its authority (public) context-dependent.
This divergence of three societies is epitomized in the notion of heaven. Ryu Shosan (2006: 67–69) claims that the "divergence of Western and Eastern philosophy appeared first and foremost on the knowledge of 'heaven.'" He argues that while Catholic heaven, connoting God as the Creator, composes a distinct realm in opposition to the present world, Chinese heaven, by contrast, exists at the intersection of "religion, politics, observation, and mathematics, and people and notion of the world." Thus, there is only one heaven; its substance has no form and therefore no externality. It contains everything and its influence on humans is continuous, even unconscious. Thus, as Foucault claims, Confucian heaven represents a this-worldly value, as found in contemporary debates of "All-under-heaven" (tianxia, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]). To illustrate, Tingyang Zhao (2006: 30) argues that tianxia, which is "very close to the Idea of empire," means "an institutional world" of the social that "consists of both the earth and people," whose viewpoint is a "world-wide-viewpoint." By contrast, in Edo Japan, the same term exclusively meant the shogunal sphere of influence, which largely matched the geographical area of Edo. Although the emperor, who lived in Kyoto, was called the "child of heaven" (tenshi, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), it did not mean that the shogun was under the emperor's influence or vice versa. Rather, the relation of the two was left ambiguous (Watanabe 2010: 58–59). The above points enable us to highlight the divergent appropriations of international law in the two countries in relation to the association of the social as the space of its enforcement. European international society was, together with the state as its component, a foreign idea for Asians in the nineteenth century. In addition, the society was, and still is, an unobservable institution. In the course of comprehension, it was each of the collective imaginations of the social that played a significant role.
Suzi Adams (2015) identifies ten trends in recent debates of social imaginaries. Of them, seven are of our interest. First, the emphasis of the social aspect of imagination. Second, imagination is "authentically creative rather than as merely reproductive or imitative." Third, the shift from imagination to social imaginary pronounces that from reason to varieties of rationalities. Fourth, social imaginaries indicate meaning as social but not reducible to intersubjectivity. The analysis of social imaginaries highlights the "transsubjective aspect of socio-cultural activity." Fifth, the analyzation of cultures as "open." Sixth, a posit society is a "political institution," stressing "the situated nature and collective forms of interaction." Seventh, it "does not reduce analyses of social formations and projects of power to normative considerations alone" but to address the question on "political." Then, it is social imaginaries, or in Maruyama's words, ethos that customize/localize the ready-made institutions.
As demonstrated in the following section, it was not until the notion was comprehended in reference to local notions that the international was successfully localized in China and in Japan. Moreover, although both local referent notions were ostensibly similar Confucian-derived notions, their meaning slightly, yet crucially differentiated: while Japanese intellectuals understood the international in a relativist formula, the Chinese tried to consider the same notion in a universalist formula.
(Continues…)
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