Contemporary Japanese Thought

The “postwar” period was in many nations discussed domestically until the 1950s, when it was replaced by the term “contemporary.” In the case of Japan, why has the homogeneity that is the postwar era been unconditionally accepted for over fifty years now? Like heavy clouds, the postwar myth known as the “discontinuity” of 1945 has concealed everything. Along with this metahistory, various polls reveal that the overwhelming majority of Japanese (over 80 percent) have in one way or another affirmatively accepted the postwar. Here we can see a narrative of the “postwar as conservatism,” according to which “things are fine the way they are.” This is, so to speak, a narrative of the “postwar as talisman.”¹

Should this “vagueness” be perceived as the brightness of the early postwar period, right after the canopy of the nation-state had collapsed? Should one understand it as an empty shell of the vital spirit of reform and freedom that the postwar initially expressed? Or is it the result of the routinization of such reform and freedom? If none of these is true, must one think that the postwar was from its very beginning ironically bound up with the prewar? If so, then surely the key to redefining Japan in the larger context of the twentieth century lies precisely in the “modernization narratives” that were repeated both before and after World War II.

In fact, the postwar Shōwa era has been newly interpreted as the second leap of Japanese modernization, following the Meiji Restoration. In other words, the odious “Fifteen-Year War” is seen as a temporary deviation from the golden road to modern Japan. The nation returned to the initial track of modernization in the postwar period, which began with defeat and reconstruction. Such an analogy has proved to be a brilliant success: the modernization narratives repeated throughout the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa periods obliterated all wartime memories, while the nationwide “conversions” (tenkō) before and after 1945 were facilitated by both the persecution of war criminals at the International Military Tribunal and the people’s “victim consciousness.”

What has been excluded or concealed in this discursive space of the postwar? Carol Gluck, the North American scholar of Japan, has described the United States and the emperor system as postwar Japan’s “ghosts at the historical feast.” I should add here that “Asia” too was such a ghost, for the narrative of Japanese modernization and development has dragged along behind it the “shadow of Asia” while positioning the postwar in the comparative context of the Meiji Restoration.

In a sense, Japan’s view of foreign countries makes up an “important part of the nation’s spiritual territory, which has a profound relationship with both domestic and foreign activities and practices.” Alongside the escalation of actual geographic violence as represented by colonial rule, Japan’s imaginary geography of Asia as mapped out during the Russo-Japanese and first Sino-Japanese wars—especially the ideas and images of Taiwan, Korea, and China (Shina)—marked a decisive turn. In order to understand how deeply this imaginary geography was related to the Orientalism of the imperialist West, one need only see how Japanese colonies were discussed in analogy with Islam, which was central to Western Orientalism. As Tokutomi Roka writes, “The time of Mohammad is long gone. Islamic countries … will undeniably fall if they do not depart from Mohammad. I said before that the Korean Renaissance would begin when the Koreans abandon their white robes. Today I proclaim that the Renaissance of the Near East will begin when the Turks take off their red hats.”²

Such a view of Asia runs throughout Japan’s postwar national memory like an undercurrent. This becomes evident if one examines Yoshida Shigeru, who played a pivotal role in bridging the prewar and postwar eras. Yoshida, whom even Konoe Fumimaro referred to as a conservative politician of the old generation, was nevertheless the most important figure of Japan’s ruling elite after 1948, and even became a symbol of his generation. This represents postwar Japan’s obvious paradox.

Yoshida’s political reemergence signifies that the defeat did not destroy the bedrock of preexisting conservative forces. One should analyze Yoshida’s case in order to understand the Japanese empire and its imperial consciousness. Here is an essential element that links the prewar and postwar periods. As both the prewar “manager of the empire” and the “postwar architect of Japan–U.S. military relations,” Yoshida actually viewed the San Francisco Treaty (which brought postwar Japan under external control) in terms of the realization of “cooperative imperialism.” This notion clearly reflects Yoshida’s abundant experience of “imperial management.” Yoshida “did not easily accept the idea that Japan’s militarism was an immanent part of the Meiji Restoration, even after 1945.” Rather he boasted of the overall unity of Japan’s “principle of foreign policy ever since the opening of the country”:

Previous politicians from the time of the Meiji Restoration ran the government during a period of turmoil, but still achieved great deeds for the prosperity of the nation. From today’s perspective, the remains of their arduous management are clear. The basic course of diplomacy after the opening of the country was, in sum, the close alignment with England. But after tiny Japan gained its miraculous victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, England—which had significant interests in the Far East—inevitably recognized our country’s authority and voluntarily initiated a pro-Japanese policy.³

As should be clear in these recollections, Yoshida “belonged to the first post–Sino-Japanese War generation, which was deliberately inspired by emperor-centered nationalism and the resilient policies of imperialist expansion.” Yoshida’s impressions both repeat and reconfirm Japan’s modernization narratives as centered upon the “national polity.” This represents the conservative mindset that seeks to repair the dissolution of the empire (the war defeat) and the failure of official history through the power of repetition, as sustained by “genealogical and procreative metaphors.” In this sense, history is even in the postwar repeated as the “present past.”

What kinds of assimilation and distortion did the representation of Asia undergo through this repetition? I would like to consider this question by focusing on the field of Oriental History (Oriental Studies).

Japanese discursive space from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century is filled with ideologies of colonial imperialism. As cited above, Yoshida’s nostalgic recollections were repeated on the horizon of this same space. When Yoshida was finishing up his formal education, Japan had just won the first Sino-Japanese War and had begun to pursue the “aggressive idea of building a colonial empire equal to those of the Great Powers.” In 1897 Yoshida entered Gakushūin University, where he came to be inspired by the ideas of “Japanism” and “national polity” while also developing a great interest in Asia. The president of Gakushūin was Konoe Atsumaro, whose predecessor was Miura Gorō. It is well known that Miura was an avid advocate of the invasion of the Asian mainland. He even played a central role in the assassination of the Korean empress while acting as residential official and legation attaché in Korea.

It is highly symbolic that Miura established the field of “Oriental History” while president of Gakushūin, for Shiratori Kurakichi, who would later become a pioneer in this field, took a post at this university in 1890 after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University. This reveals the process that intellectual domination and cultural hegemony distilled in the geographic violence of the colonial empire. Such interaction between knowledge and power can be observed in Shiratori’s commentary on the relation between Gotō Shinpei, the “founder of colonial business,” and “Oriental Studies.” Shiratori explains Gotō’s academic achievements as follows:

The Count (Gotō) stands out among other politicians and entrepreneurs. He respects scholarship and conducts thorough research when engaging in practical politics and economic management. His enthusiasm even extends to other remotely related matters. On each issue, the Count not only planned and led academic research, he also looked after the data. Everyone knows that while in charge of Taiwan’s civil administration he gathered many scholars, set aside an enormous budget and led detailed investigations of Taiwan’s legal system, local customs and languages, etc. His achievements still shine forth, even in academic circles.⁴

This passage vividly describes the very beginning of the enormous system of knowledge and power as jointly produced by colonialism and Orientalism in Taiwan, the “(first) laboratory of colonial rule.” Along with the expansion of territory gained in winning the Russo-Japanese War, the results of Taiwan’s “live experiment” of “scientific colonialism” would be applied to Manchuria, Korea, and the Chinese mainland. Yoshida Shigeru later enthusiastically recalled that Gotō, who became the largest organizer of business in the colonial empire as president of the South Manchurian Railroad Company, “demonstrated such competence and authority as comparable to that of England’s former East Indian Company”

Gotō consistently emphasized the importance of field research. Wherever he went, he invariably “left behind research instituions and scientific studies,” which can be seen, for example, in the massive archives of the South Manchurian Railroad Company. Gotō’s idea of “scientific colonialism” can be traced back to his experience studying policy as a hygiene technician in the Department of the Interior. His Kokka eisei genri [Principles of national hygiene], published in 1890, systematically explains the concept of “scientific colonialism.” This concept belongs to the administrative system of state affairs, as based upon the Medizinalpolizei (hygiene police) and hygiene administration—or what Michel Foucault refers to as Polizeiwissenschaft (the science of political administration).

Gotō was keenly aware of the necessity of “demographic investigation” and statistical “observations of social life” in order to facilitate the expansion of national resources by “integrating residents under the principle of marginal utility.” Gotō perceived Taiwan as the “training ground for colonial administration.” His science was realized in his large-scale “statistical research studies of the Taiwanese population and its changes, crimes, educational affairs, communication, agriculture and industries (such as the sugarcane industry).” Moreover, the results of his studies of “physiographic conditions” and local customs would later play a major role in bringing about the “new principles of territorial rule.” (Gotō held up these “new principles” and avoided “the words ‘colonial policy’”). As Gotō later wrote in his Nihon bōchō ron [Theory on Japanese expansion], as if boasting of his success:

I spent barely ten years in Taiwan, yet the experience I acquired there was my pride and glory…. As soon as I took a post in Taiwan, I conducted various experiments, thus deepening my awareness. But my work environment was so full of bustling that I could not pursue my goals as I wished. Nonetheless, my conviction that every political strategy should be built on biological principles was validated through actual experiments in Taiwan. Heaven assigned me the task of totalizing the irregularities of human life and rewarded me with the great gift of accurately interpreting their nature, meanings and principles.⁵

With the expansion of Japan’s geographic violence into the “Manchuria-Korea” region, “Colonial Governor” Gotō’s notion of “scientific colonialism” grew into a large-scale project.⁶ Shiratori’s Oriental History had prepared the authoritative academic discourse that would support Gotō’s project. In this sense, the encounter between Shiratori and Gotō was a symbolic event that intimately tied Orientalist discourse to the idea of a “powerful society through well-regulated economic and political systems.” Elsewhere Shiratori explains that the “Research Division of Manchurian History and Geography” was set up at the South Manchurian Railroad Company with substantial help from Gotō. In this institution, Shiratori led a research group whose members included Yanai Watari, Matsui Hitoshi, Inaba Iwakichi, Tsuda Sōkichi, and Ikeuchi Hiroshi. This group published such studies as Manshū rekishi chiri [Manchurian history and geography], Bunroku Keichō no eki [The battle of the Bunroku and Keichō], and Chōsen rekishi chiri [Korean history and geography]. Through these studies, the group institutionalized academic discourse on Manchuria, Korea, and China. Conversely, however, this process shows that colonialism’s “formation of power” acquired intellectual authority by appearing in various discourses and institutions (academic societies, schools, libraries, diplomatic organizations, etc.). Herein lies the source of Oriental History (Oriental Studies) in Japan. As if following European history, the intellectual domination of this “Japan-styled” Orientalism sought to enclose Asia within a “classification system of discipline and training,” with Japan as standard.

Yet Japan was haunted by an unavoidable dilemma. For despite the invention of various techniques and disciplines used to observe, dominate, and maintain Asia in such a way that Japan was posited as transcendental subject, no one could deny that Japan was itself part of this Asian topos. The question, then, was how Japanese culture could distance itself from Asia—which was a kind of proxy for Japan, even its own “hidden self”—and at the same time acquire the force and identity with which to establish an equal dialogue with the West as other. This is where the field of Oriental History came in. Shiratori must have been fully aware of this connection. It was made clear to him by Japan’s expansion into “Manchuria-Korea”:

I returned to Japan at the end of 1903. Around that time, Russo-Japanese relations had started to become tense. The climate was unpredictable. War finally broke out in the following February, and the whole world watched zealously. Fortunately, our troops steadily pushed the Russian troops out of the fields of Manchuria-Korea, finally gaining victory. In any case, the impressions I received during my study in Europe grew increasingly stronger. I came to the conclusion that Orientals must lead the research of the Orient. The fact is, however, that westerners had pioneered most of this research, leaving hardly anything for Japanese scholars to take up. The exception to this was Manchuria-Korea, a region over which previous wars had been fought and which Japan was about to conquer. Western scholarship on this region was still scarce. While some research of course existed, such as several useful language studies, issues of geography, history and archeology yet remained unexamined. Given the new political circumstances brought about by the war, the Japanese must conduct fundamental academic research on this region.⁷

When Shiratori writes that “Orientals must lead the research of the Orient,” he means of course the Japanese. In other words, “Orientals” incapable of self-representation would be represented by the Japanese, who were however also “Orientals.” The Japanese would then inform the West (the other) about “them.” It was in this twisted Orientalism that Oriental History found its reason for being. Furthermore, the domain of Oriental History expanded in the form of “savage lands” (Manchuria-Korea) to be explored together with the escalation of actual geographic violence. Here we can see the growth of Shiratori’s academic passions and expectations. The South Manchurian Railroad Company’s “Research Division of Manchurian History and Geography” became the site where “scholars from different fields could work together.”

Here it should be clear that the academic discourse of Oriental History was produced, repeated, and developed in various exchanges with political power, as could be seen in Japan’s imperial and colonial systems.

If we are to understand Orientalism as a “system of citation between writers,” then Oriental History can be said to have expressed (either fully or with partial modification) the persistence and tenacity of Japanese Orientalism in the postwar period. In other words, Oriental History demonstrates in an extremely condensed manner the way Japan used Orientalism for its modernization. Oriental History was the ultimate form of knowledge that responded to the historical question of how Japan could modernize while escaping from the objective category of the Orient. Likewise, it responded to the question of how Japan could impose an Orientalist cultural hegemony over Asia while preserving its identity with it. Japan constructed such an identity in terms of the relation between its idea of the “Orient” (which was discovered or created by both its identity with and difference from the West) and its imaginary geography and history of Korea, Manchuria, and China. Herein lies the aporia that was repeated throughout Japan’s process of modernization. It is in this sense that we must problematize the field of Oriental History and its pioneer figure, Shiratori. For what is expressed as an extremely refined system of academic discourse is how modern forms of knowledge were bound up with power in Japan’s modernization narratives, how the relation between “self” and “other” (Asia and the West) was created, and finally what kinds of ironic results were produced therefrom. As goes without saying, the problems of Shiratori’s Oriental History still haunt the public memory of “fifty years of postwar.”

Today the Manchurian Empire looks forward to a bright future as Japan’s neighbor. Is it right that many Japanese are ignorant of its history? We predicted around 1908 that research on Manchuria would be necessary, and I can console myself that our efforts have not been wasted…. Westerners still perceive Manchuria with a jaundiced eye. We must teach them about its basic history so that they realize that Manchuria has not simply been established as Japan’s puppet-state. In this regard, I believe it is necessary for not only historians but indeed laymen to conduct purely academic studies of Manchurian ancient history.⁸

After the Manchurian Incident, Shiratori’s ambitions for Oriental History greatly expanded in step with the founding of the Manchurian state and the invasion of the Chinese mainland. When Shiratori spoke of “Manchuria” or “Manchuria-Korea,” however, this imaginary geography did not include the actual inhabitants or ethnic groups of these regions. Rather his historical investigations focused only on the “location of castles, wartime military routes, traffic routes, and territories.” Shiratori’s project sought to establish a relation between Japan and “Manchuria-Korean” history as well as to clarify Japanese national identity and its historical mission. This project was only possible as based upon the “silence of the natives” in the face of the Japanese colonial empire’s overwhelming influence. In this respect, Shiratori complacently accepted the “assimilation” of the colonized through both Japanese historical narratives and the ideology of “universal brotherhood” (isshi dōjin). The waning geopolitical-cultural territory of the “Orient” was appropriated within Japan (which had become the “Orient’s” sole “flourishing power”), and its existence was recognized only as a corollary of Japanese history.

Despite the rhetoric of “universal brotherhood,” there was of course no mixing or harmony between the Japanese and the “subordinated races” as based on mutual respect and affinity. I will say more about this later but, in Shiratori’s case, both the “origin” of the Japanese people and the emperor system as unchanged and yet ceaselessly changing “national essence” (national polity) assumed a “religiosity” similar to that of Protestantism in the historical studies of Leopold von Ranke (whom Shiratori saw as a model). In this way, the possibility of granting equal rights and responsibilities to those colonized ethnic groups who had become “Japanized” as “imperial subjects” was foreclosed in advance. Here it must be understood how Shiratori’s discourse on the “Orient” was made possible by the twisted relations of identity and difference.

Furthermore, as should be clear from Shiratori’s remarks above, the “other” for Japan was the West. It was expected that the dialogue with history could take place, and indeed necessarily had to take place, only between Japan and the West. In other words, Shiratori tried here as well to undertake the question of Japan’s identity with and difference from the West. After the Manchurian Incident, however, Japan’s dialogue with the West became impossible, thus leaving Japan’s narrative as only “monologue.” To what extent was Shiratori aware of this aporia? If he was unable to see it, then what immanent problems existed within his thought and Oriental History?

From just prior to the Meiji Restoration to the outbreak of the Pacific War, Shiratori’s life was, as he himself relates, a “happy life in a happy age.” “Occasionally the Professor (Shiratori) remarked that he was very grateful for having, in the brief span of time from the Meiji and Taishō eras to the glorious era of Shōwa, witnessed the nation’s unprecedented prosperity and the striking development of Japanese life and culture. The Professor believed that his happy life was truly a gift of this age.” From the Manchurian Incident to the Pacific War, Shiratori lacked even the slightest doubt about the Japanese modernization (or progress) narrative that ran throughout the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa eras. It can thus be said that this great scholar gave no thought even to the “deviation” that was the “Fifteen-Year War.” This was perhaps the aporia encountered by Oriental History when, during the war, its mission had finally run its course.

When Shiratori pushed to its end the Japan-“Orient” distinction and described the West (the “other”) as the reverse image of Japan’s ideal, modern Japanese history devolved into “monologue” and lost sight of its dialogic “other.” Having largely achieved its goal of forming a nation-state in the Meiji era, the Japanese empire had by the Taishō era already come to regard its “Westernized” modernization as a “mechanical Trojan horse,” one that would confuse and disrupt those sociocultural structures “proper” to Japan. Here the attainment of modernization with its mixture of disillusionment cast a complicated shadow. This is clear in Gotō’s Nihon bōchō ron. Angry with Japan’s deadlock in foreign relations and confused domestic conditions after World War I, Gotō complained that “Europe shows no good-will, China betrays us, negotiations with Russia are at a standstill, and the U.S. has recently passed anti-Japanese immigration laws. We must recognize that Japan faces a rough road ahead. Now is the time for national reflection.” Gotō then attributes these hardships to Japan’s forgetting of itself and “fascination with imitating Western civilization” such as to neglect the “nation’s true self”: “We have been so dazzled by the external radiance of Western civilization that, with no regard to its substance, we value the West and demean ourselves.” The pendulum thus swings over to narcissistic national identity: “The Japanese nation deserves the highest award at the World National History Exhibit. Japan possesses the greatest glory and authority in respect to its prodigious capacity to incorporate, absorb, comprehend and assimilate, and particularly in regard to its organic absolutism as centered upon the Imperial family.”⁹

Gotō’s claim pervades the new motif of Shiratori’s Oriental History. Oriental History attempted now to separate itself from the West, just as kokugaku, or Japanese Classical Studies, sought to do so previously with China. Here the West came to be seen as an infirm “outside”; it was deprived of value and regarded as that which Japan must not become. Like the “succession of a bloodline,” Oriental History thus simply repeated its “monologic” history.

What was reflected in this term “Oriental History” was the ambiguity of modern Japan’s view of its position in the world. For the very category of the “Orient” is nothing but an “imaginary time and space,” one that emerged from the suffering common to non-Western societies in their attempt to reconcile civilization and culture, difference and identity. It is for this reason that Oriental History replaced China with the term Shina, thereby relativizing it by positioning it within a broader time-space than the “Orient,” and sought to discover within the “Orient” the origin of Japan’s historical narrative. This was at the same time supposed to open up the possibility of an equal dialogue with the West. For since the “Orient” was also the origin of the West, Japan’s focus on it in regard to its own past made this site a common ground where it could compare and compete with the West. By thus distinguishing both the West and Asia as other, Oriental History sought to create a sense of Japan as a modern “Oriental” nation.

It was of course impossible to treat both the “Orient” and the West within Europe’s unilinear temporal framework. Shiratori rejected this notion of time and yet maintained the West’s academic (scientific) epistemology. His achievement lay in this intellectual feat while drawing on Ranke’s historical studies.

Shiratori, who belonged to the first generation of History and Liberal Arts students at the Imperial University, studied historical criticism in 1887 (Meiji 20) with Ranke’s disciple Ludwig Riese. He thus became acquainted with positivist history in its emphasis on facts, objectivity, and respect for data, as based on “how things originally were.” This differed from the technical methodology of Ernst Bernheim as introduced by Tsuboi Kumezō, who became professor of History and Liberal Arts after Shiratori graduated. Shiratori’s interest in Ranke was prompted less by the data and methodology of his historical criticism than by his ideas of history and original interpretations of spirit as illustrated by this criticism.

In Ranke’s historical philosophy, each nation’s history leads to God. Shiratori sought to discover in this philosophy the individuality and specificity of the Japanese nation as well as the synthetic principle through which Japan acquired its own particular historical reality. “Having spent his college years when German nationalist thought was being introduced to Japan, witnessing the promulgations of the Imperial Constitution and Rescript on Education and finally receiving a nobleman’s education at Gakushūin under Miura Gorō,” Shiratori sought a way to guarantee Japan’s particular identity while grounding the idea of the Japanese ethnos on a historical idea (the emperor system). At the same time, what utterly distinguished him from Ranke was his view that the emperor system, in its historical being as manifestation of the universal spirit, was (like a transcendental entity) an object of absolute devotion. It was the emperor system, at once historical and suprahistorical, which was the ultimate source of Japan’s “progress.”

In 1913 (Taishō 2), after the annexation of Korea and with the growing invasion of Manchuria, Shiratori remarked that “Japan, according to Oriental History, is characterized by progress.” He explains the cause of this progress as follows:

Shiratori concludes that just as Japan was able to skillfully incorporate only those aspects of “Confucian fundamentalism” that were compatible with “our national polity,” so too can it do the same thing with “Western culture.”

The certainty that Japan could now follow the same course of “progress” as the West without losing its identity was based on both historical and suprahistorical ideas. While part of the “Orient,” Japan was yet able to pursue the same course of “progress as civilization” as the West by “maintaining the framework of Oriental civilization” and combining “Oriental” and Western cultures. We can describe this notion of Japanese history as informed by Shiratori’s “Oriental History” as a narcissistic “discourse of Japanese heterogeneity.”

For Shiratori, there was an urgent need to elucidate Japan’s “origin” in its relation to Asian history. Here he could not ignore the massive amounts of Western Orientalist scholarship. Nevertheless, he sought to establish a “dialogue” with the West by elevating “Japan’s Orient” to the world stage through his own geo-historical dynamics.¹¹

Shiratori’s dynamics consisted of a dualism between “North” and “South,” which calls to mind Herbert Spencer’s dualism between military and civil society. Such dynamics not only explained the rise and fall of various nations, it also confirmed the “Orient” as a mediated existence between Japan and the West as well as provided a general framework situating Japan’s past within Asia. Shiratori’s ambition to make the Eurasian continent the world’s geo-historical focal point, thereby reducing the West to its mere peninsula, sought its foothold in the affinity between Japan and Korea as well as the problem of this affinity’s “origin.”

At the beginning of the first Sino-Japanese War, Shiratori had published “Tangun kō” [A study of Tangun, the legendary founder of Korea] in issue 28 of Gakushūin hojinkai zasshi [Journal of the Gakushūin Society of Academic Brotherhood]. Later he avidly researched Korean history, employing methods from comparative linguistics to prove that both Japanese and Korean were Ural-Altaic languages, with the former belonging to the Mongolian group and the latter to the Tungus group. Shiratori explains the aims of his research at the beginning of his “Kokugo to gaikokugo to no hikaku kenkyū” [Comparative study of Japanese and foreign languages] (1905): “This comparative study of Japanese and foreign languages is motivated by my desire to find the source of the Japanese language as well as to elucidate the origins of the Yamato race.” Here his intentions are quite clear.

The very concept and system of the “Japanese language” is impossible without the formation of the nation-state as “imaginary community.” Nevertheless, Shiratori sought to fulfill his desire for the language’s “pure origin”:

Nothing resembling the Japanese language can be found in other Asian nations, which proves that Japanese is a solitary language. Previously I believed that Korean and Japanese must share the same origin, and even presented several papers arguing this point. After much reflection, however, I came to realize that the two languages are absolutely unrelated. The more I examined Japanese in comparison with other Far Eastern languages, the clearer it became that Japanese is unlike these. It is now plain to me that there is no similar language anywhere in the world.

In the end, Shiratori’s desire for “origin” became enclosed within “monologue,” where it simply repeated its own self-identity within a world devoid of any dialogic “other.”

It was at this point that Shiratori abandoned his research of Korea (which “today is possessed of a uniqueness that is neither Mongolian nor Manchurian”), even in order to demonstrate the intimate relation between the Japanese and Korean languages. Korea now came to be confined within the geopolitical and cultural ideology of “Manchuria-Korea.” This signified that Korea was not a nation but rather a mere geographic area. Yet such a view was in no way unusual. Similar accounts can be found, for example, in the “blighted Korea” of Nitobe Inazō, who had served in colonial Taiwan under Gotō Shinpei as government-general engineer.

Nonetheless, Shiratori stands out in regard to the scope of his geo-historical research, which stretched from Korea to “Manchuria,” central Asia, India, and Eastern Europe. He tried to explain the decline of Korea and China on the basis of a “North-South dualism” that operated throughout the entire “Orient,” and prove systematically that Japan differed from the other “Oriental” nations. This represented a challenge to Western Orientalist taxonomy and the formation of a new taxonomic system that would transform Asia’s past from the West’s Orient to “Japan’s Orient.”

Shiratori’s theory of “North-South dualism” began to take shape during the Russo-Japanese War, and clearly reflects Japan’s own awareness of itself as a burgeoning colonial empire. This is clear from the fact that Shiratori discusses the dualism of “Oriental History” within the “North-South opposition” in terms of the political opposition between Russia and England on the Asian continent.

For years I have claimed that the basic trend of Oriental History derives from the opposition between the two great powers of North and South. In ancient times, the rise and fall of the Han race of the South and the so-called “Northern Barbarians” generally shaped the central stage of Oriental history. This same formation lives on in modernity in the opposition between England (South) and Russia (North). I believe that the history of the Far East is fundamentally shaped by such opposition. If one observes the facts of history according to this dualism, then one can very accurately interpret the rise and fall of all cultures from Central Asia in the West to Manchuria, Korea and even Japan in the East.¹²

For Shiratori, China’s decline was no accident. Rather it was caused by the loss of equilibrium in the opposition and strife between the North (the military society of the “Northern barbarians”) and South (the civil society of the Hans). Such dualism also accounts for the vertiginous rise and fall as experienced in such peripheral areas of the Chinese mainland as the Korean peninsula.

This was Shiratori’s basic schema of knowledge in regard to both China and Korea. To this extent, it was inevitable that such ethnic groups or nation-states were excluded from civilization’s “progress” and defined in terms of stagnation and decline. In contrast, there had existed in Japan “Northern barbarians known as the Ainu who sought the rich soil of the South,” but the “Japanese of the South” had “repelled” the Ainu and “driven them back,” eventually forming an ideal culture that combined both North and South. As Shiratori confidently concludes, “This North-South opposition is the basic structure underlying Oriental history and Asia’s political framework. I believe that one can clearly grasp the core of history in this manner. This is my brief answer regarding the proper way to view Oriental History as a whole.”¹³

The aim of Shiratori’s “Oriental History” was to ground the integration of “Japan’s unique” dualism upon the simultaneously historical and suprahistorical “national essence” (the emperor system). This also explains why the question of Japanese culture’s “origin” assumed such decisive importance. However, historical beginnings are to be found in “diverse differences” rather than in the inviolable identity of the “origin” (Ursprung). As Foucault writes, “Only metaphysicians seek the spirit of history in the faraway ideal of the ‘origin’”:

It is no longer origin that gives rise to historicity; it is historicity that, in its very fabric, makes possible the necessity of an origin which must be both internal and foreign to it: like the virtual tip of a cone in which all differences, all dispersions, all discontinuities would be knitted together so as to form no more than a single point of identity, the impalpable figure of the Same, yet possessing the power, nevertheless, to burst open upon itself and become Other.¹⁴

Undoubtedly captivated by the “chimera of Japan’s pure origin,” Shiratori forgot that history teaches us how to laugh at the “gravity of origin.” Although he required the physician that is history to exorcise the shadow from Japan’s spirit, as it were, Shiratori nevertheless returned to the world of myth by integrating all the differences, dispersions, and discontinuities within the single identity of Japan’s “origin.” As I have repeatedly pointed out, Shiratori left behind merely the empty principle of identity with no “other.”

Shiratori no doubt believed that only this notion of Oriental History could free Japan from the Eurocentric world order and its inferior status therein. Ultimately, however, this notion was nothing more than an attempt to elevate Japan to the rank of the Great Powers. In this regard, “Japan’s Orient” represented a Japan-centered “totality” that replaced that of the West. Shiratori never witnessed the way “Japan’s Orient” later became the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and ended in self-destruction. As Tsuda Sōkichi remarked, Shiratori was a “happy man in a happy age.” For the “Orient,” however, that age was an unhappy one.

The shadows of the past clinging to Shiratori’s “Oriental History” possess a real meaning that goes beyond mere historical reflection. For, as goes without saying, Asia’s stunning growth has brought about in Japan a desire to “return to Asia.” It is no longer unusual now to discuss the theory of “Escape from the West and Enter Asia” rather than that of “Escape from Asia and Enter the West” as a new alternative to Japan’s “Cold Peace” with the United States. Is Japan part of Asia? This at once old and new question has returned at a time when Japan’s national identity is linked with changes in domestic politics.

The postwar conservatives (as represented by Yoshida’s generation) who established Japan’s 1955 domestic political structure understood the San Francisco Peace Treaty as a “cooperative imperialism” that would enable the nation to, alongside the West, “peacefully” exploit Asia. This has since resulted in a rift between these conservatives and their followers. With the growing exhaustion of Japan’s postwar foreign and domestic systems, there has been a reemergence of certain historical memories evoking “Japan’s Orient” of the past. What does this reemergence signify?

As our examination of Oriental History reveals, the well-known term “Orient” (or Asia) came to be defined as a geopolitical order because of the Japanese colonial empire’s invasion following the first Sino-Japanese War. Prior to that invasion, there existed no fixed geopolitical-cultural space in the region, thereby rendering any sense of Asian unity impossible. In one stroke, Japan’s control of Taiwan and its invasion and colonization of the Korean peninsula as well as its expansion into the mainland raised Asia to the level of collective existence in international relations. A shared consciousness of a geopolitical-cultural order thus gradually came into being, with dispersed regions and countries now seeking their own identity in Asia.¹⁵ The “Orient” or Asia is, therefore, nothing but a regional order formed by Japan’s imperialist invasion.

Together with Japan’s history of imperialism, Shiratori’s “Oriental History” was fated to rise and fall with equal speed. Paradoxically, however, the United States came to replace prewar Japan in sustaining the regional order of the “Orient” during the Cold War. That is to say, rather than overturn “Japan’s Orient” as in a sense established by prewar Japan, the war defeat and consequent American rule actually repeated this regional order in the form of an “enforced regionalism from above,” as led by the United States. The fact that postwar Japan was, under the aegis of the United States, able to repeat its overwhelming economic force in the region is further proof that this notion of an Asian regional order has survived in a new form. In this regard, we have not yet fully broken the spell of “Oriental History” as an academic system institutionalized from the time of the first Sino-Japanese War to the beginning of this past century as an intellectual authority on the “Orient.”

9. Gotō Shinpei, Nihon bōchō ron, pp. 162–163. This expression of Gotō’s excessive nationalism reflects his deep dissatisfaction with the restraints placed on Japan’s imperialist and colonial policies by the West, as he believed that the nation should be accorded a position commensurate with its strength. Here we can see a rhetoric that renders Japan’s vital “force of assimilation’ equivalent to “Oriental civilization” as well as paraphrases the confrontation between Japan and the West as an opposition between “Oriental civilization” and “Occidental civilization.”

11. This passage is inspired by Stefan Tanaka’s Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). In his reading of the academic discourse of Shiratori’s Oriental History, Tanaka shows that the link between reality and scientific knowledge is not a necessary one, as it is formed through the mediation of contingent power.