It is commonly assumed that Western ideas somehow wafted to Japan and there landed and took root. A moment's reflection, however, reveals this as unlikely. Ideas do not float from one country to another. They are packed, however carelessly, then exported, or imported. The packing material is language.
When the packaged idea arrives at its destination it is opened up and understood not in the context of the original sender, but in that of the addressee. Consequently, as historian Quentin Skinner has suggested, we ought to study the words that are used to represent ideas and the way in which they are employed in the arguments that constitute political events.
Douglas Howland, author of this interesting and original analysis, demonstrates that the early absorption of Western ideas in Japan was no linear process. "Unlike the tree that arrives with its roots secured in soil and burlap, there was no transplanting of the West in a neat package," he writes. The goal may have been "catching up with the West," but the means were not as simple as has often been assumed.
For one thing, words had to be translated to fit the concepts of the Japanese language. And, in the event, Japanese political leaders were much more enthusiastic in translating political concepts than they were in practicing them. The initial idea was to incorporate and the only container was the nexus at hand.
This nexus was a national vessel that was mainly Confucian -- or at least as Confucian as it suited the agenda of the Tokugawa government to be. Consequently, a conflict of interest arose between the paternalistic, even despotic government, which tried to introduce Western "civilization" on its own terms, and the people, who were already anticipating participation in government decisions.
Many were the torturous turnings of the Meiji oligarchy to rid itself of the problem. The very ideas they were seeking to translate were those that would undermine their authority. Among their many "solutions," outlined in full detail by Howland, was the creation of new words. It was hoped that these neologisms would adapt ideas to the point of popular acceptability -- in other words, that the thoughts would be verbally rendered fit to take their place within the Japanese order.
An example is the uses to which the word "jiyu" was put. In dictionaries it was purported to be identical in meaning with the word "freedom," but it continued to carry with it a hint of selfishness -- it still does. Individualism and freedom of action as advocated by 19th-century liberalism were contested by Japanese politicians. Liberty posed a threat to that Confucian ideal, social stability.
Another troubling import was the concept translated as "ken" (as in "kenri") or what the West calls "rights," as in "human rights." In the West, constitutions had begun to locate sovereignty in the people and were transforming the rulers' privileges into the people's rights. Nothing of the sort had occurred in Japan.
Ken is a Chinese character, an old word for "balance" or "scale," and thus refers merely to the power and authority of judgment. As Howland says, "unlike the original English term, the range of the Japanese translation philologically resonates with the expression for power -- particularly the human agency that commands power."
This agency was the Meiji oligarchy -- and the original reading still persists. Though things are now better sorted out conceptually ("tokken" is used to refer to privilege, "kenri" to rights, "shuken" to sovereignty and "kensei" to power), just try talking about your rights with your landlord. Even now, even conversationally, the phrase "jibun no kenri" (one's rights) carries with it a near-intolerable onus of selfishness and egotism.
Such concepts play small part in places where constructs like "liberty" and "rights" were allowed to develop. In Confucian lands such as Japan and China, however, such an onus must exist. Japan, after all, is a country so conspicuously competitive that the myth of "wa," that spontaneous and common accord, had to be invented.
Society as such could not, indeed, be said to exist in pre-Meiji Japan, in that there was no word for it. The neologism "shakai" (society) was introduced only in the 1877 translations of Herbert Spencer. Early translations of John Stuart Mills' "On Liberty" had to go without it.
This, then, was the state of affairs when Western political documents first began appearing in Japanese. Howland spells out the many developments in full detail and my above precis does not do justice to his scholarship. It will indicate, however, the importance of this book.
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