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Orientalism and the Study of Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Richard H. Minear
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Extract

In his autobiography Loren Eiseley wrote: “One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place. But they are necessary in every human culture, like a drill sergeant's commands, something not to be questioned.” We who are non-Japanese students of Japan form a culture of our own, and Edward Said's Orientalism helps us to see, perhaps for the first time, the “drill sergeant's commands” to which we respons.

Type
Review Symposium: Edward Said's Orientalism
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , May 1980 , pp. 507 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1980

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References

1 Eiseley, Loren, All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), p. 105.Google Scholar

2 The older brother of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Basil Hall Chamberlain was of British middle-class background. His family had strong connections with the British military services: his father (a vice admiral) and maternal grandfather were naval officers, and several uncles rose to high rank in the Indian Army. Educated privately and in France, Chamberlain tried out a career with the House of Baring, leading British merchant bankers, before leaving for reasons of health. He lived in Japan almost continuously from 1873 to 1911. Between 1911 and his death in 1935, Chamberlain lived in Switzerland and worked in Greek, Latin, and French literature. His major works include: The Classical Poetry of Japan (1880); Kojiki (1883); Simplified Grammar of the Japanese Language (1886); Things Japanese (1890); Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Japan (successive editions, 1891–1913); Les rimes impérissables: huit siècles de poésie françhise (1927). On Chamberlain, see the following: obituary notice by Grace James, Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society, London 32 (1934–1935): xi-xv; Koizumi, Kazuo, comp., Letters from Basil Hall Chamberlain to Lafcadio Hearn (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1936)Google Scholar; unsigned obituary, London Times, 16 February 1935, p. 17; Parlett, Harold, “Obituary,” London University School of Oriental Studies Bulletin 8 (1935/1937): 284–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Chamberlain to Hearn, 17 September 1893; in Letters, p. 46.

4 Ibid.

5 The letter continues: “Take poetry, for instance. It is perhaps the best instance. I threw myself with the greatest ardour into Japanese poetry, even to the length of trying to compose it. I read practically all, from the Manyōshū downwards, and I now see that all of it together hardly contains so much imaginative power as half-a-dozen of Wordsworth's sonnets.... All of this is very sad to write, and I would not write it publicly, for the reason that many would ascribe the adverse judgment to other motives than dispassionate comparison.” Chamberlain to Hearn, 4 August 1891; in Letters, p. 157 (For Hearn's response, see Hearn to Chamberlain, August 1891; in Bisland, Elizabeth, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 2 vols. [Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906], 2: 40–41Google Scholar.) A few weeks later Chamberlain regretted the harshness of this judgment: “My conscience rather smites me anent the hard things I have recently said to you of the Japanese. Indeed I perpetually find myself swaying backwards and forwards like a pendulum. Just now the pendulum is to the amiable side; for, whatever may be their deficiencies, one thing is undoubted about these people, viz. that they are quite charming to live with.” Chamberlain to Hearn, 19 August 1891; in Koizumi, Kazuo, comp., More Letters from Basil Hall Chamberlain to Lafcadio Hearn (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1937), pp. 22–23Google Scholar. Still, the judgment was not significantly harsher than many statements Chamberlain allowed to be printed. David Kopf quotes a strikingly similar passage from Macaulay's Minute on Education (1835): “I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” To be sure, Macaulay was citing the Orientalists, many of whom, as Kopf points out, took exception to Macaulay's Minute. Chamberlain's statement is straight from Chamberlain.

6 Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Japan, 8th ed. (London: John Murray, 1907), p. 12Google Scholar

7 Jansen, MariusKeene, Donald, and Wright, Arthur, obituary notice in JAS 24, no. 4 (August 1965): 561.Google Scholar Like Chamberlain, Sansom had ties to the ocean: his father was a naval architect. Like Chamberlain, Sansom received much of his formal education on the continent. At nineteen he entered the British Consular Service, arrived in Japan at the age of twenty (the year was 1904), and stayed there except for periodic leaves until his first retirement in 1940; the last fifteen years he served as Commercial Counsellor. His life as an official continued beyond his first retirement, and from 1941 to 1947 he served first in Singapore and then in Washington. His second retirement led to his third career, as Director of Columbia University's East Asian Institute. Sansom's major works are: An Historical Grammar of Japanese (1928); Japan: A Short Cultural History (1931); The Western World and Japan (1950); Japan in World History (1951); and A History of Japan, 3 vols. (1958–1963). On Sansom, see also: “Sir George Sansom: Special Issue,” Orient/West 8, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1963), which contains brief appreciations by Reischauer, Edwin O., Ashton-Gwatkin, Frank, Miner, Earl, Morris, Ivan, and Webb, Herschel; Sansom, Katharine, Sir George Sansom and Japan: A Memoir (Tallahassee: Diplomatic, 1972)Google Scholar; and the delightful speech of 1956 in which, quoting lines from Ogden Nash, Sansom speaks of himself as “one small fossil,” “Address by Sir George Sansom,” JAS 24, no. 4 (August 1965): 563–67.

8 Keene, Jansen, and Wright, , p. 561.Google Scholar

9 Page 139. Reischauer does begin his section on “The Japanese Character” with a disclaimer: his discussion “involves no value judgments,” “comparisons [between Americans and Japanese] merely provide an arbitrary means of expressing broad cultural differences...” (p. 100). But that disclaimer has little effect when set against the subsequent hundred pages of comparison.

10 The United States and Japan, p. 52. Reischauer deleted this passage from subsequent editions of the book.

11 Aware that his conclusion seems harsh, but unwilling to do away with all judgment of this sort, Reischauer instead expresses some uneasiness about his terms of reference: “Westerners tend to look on the relative lack of intellectual creativity of Japanese as a sign of inferiority, but this may be only a Western cultural bias” (p. 227).

12 From Chamberlain to Sansom to Reischauer: there is even an element of baton-passing in the relations of these three scholars. In the mid-1920s Sansom visited Chamberlain in Switzerland; Katharine Sansom reports: “And great had been his pleasure and pride when Chamberlain said that he counted on [Sansom] to carry on the work of interpreting the Japanese to the West” (Sir George Sansom and Japan, p. 15). Sansom wrote the preface for Reischauer's first book, Japan Past and Present. Reischauer returned the compliment almost twenty years later when he described Sansom as “above all a great interpreter of Japan to the rest of the world” (Orient/West 8, no. 1: 10).

13 These comments about the intellectual views of these writers are not intended to suggest that they lacked human feeling for Japan. On his way back to England for a brief visit in 1892, Chamberlain wrote to Hearn: “I was homesick for Japan even before leaving it” (Chamberlain to Hearn, 31 January 1892, in More Letters, p. 42). And from England: “Once safely back in the East, I shall never again leave it” (Chamberlain to Hearn, 5 May 1892, in More Letters, p. 46). So, too, with Sansom. See Earl Miner's comment that Sansom is “most himself when he loves Japan” (Orient/West 8, no. 1: 18). In a letter of January 1938 Sansom reports a conversation with Yashiro Yukio: “I told him frankly that I could not stand Japan in the way she is now going. He agreed, and was much touched when I told him that it was not anti-Japanese sentiment, but just a feeling of distress such as a lover might have when he saw his mistress losing her mind” (Sir George Sansom and Japan, p. 100). To be sure, having examined at length Flaubert's ties to the Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk Hanem, Said might subject Sansom's image to sharp criticism. Reischauer's emotional investment is less clear; he rarely comments in a personal vein, but on one such occasion (The Japanese, p. 405) he remarks that at the time of Pearl Harbor he felt no divided loyalty.

14 Nitobe's book went through twenty-five printings in English before the war, Okakura's through at least fifteen, and Sugimoto's through fifteen. Each was translated into at least one other Western language. Each author also wrote other books of less spectacular success.

15 See, for example, Baudet, Henri, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, trans. Wentholt, Elizabeth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Kiernan, V. G., The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).Google Scholar

16 Nobuko Miyamoto, untitled poem, in Minear, Richard H., ed., Through Japanese Eyes, 2 vols. (New York: Praeger, 1974), 2: 145–47.Google Scholar

17 Said touches on this aspect of the issue when he writes: “The real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer” (p. 273).

18 Historiographical treatments include the following: George Akita, “Eigoen ni okeru kindai Nihon seiji kenkyū-sono hyakunen-” [One hundred years of studies of modern Japanese politics in the English-speaking world], Kokka gakkati zasshi 81, nos. 9–10 (March 1969): 573–633; and 82, nos. 11–12 (December 1969): 809–67; John Dower, “E. H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History,” in Dower, , ed., Origins ofthe Modern Japanese State (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 3–101Google Scholar; Hall, John Whitney, “Thirty Years of Japanese Studies in America,” Transactions of the International Congress of Orientalists in Japan 16 (1971): 22–35Google Scholar; Johnson, Sheila K., American Attitudes Toward Japan (Washington: AEI-Hoover, 1975)Google Scholar; Lehmann, Jean-Pierre, The Image of Japan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978)Google Scholar; Richard H. Minear, “Japanese National Character: The Wartime Studies,” The Japan Interpreter (forthcoming); Minear, Richard H., “Helen Mears, Japan and American Japanists,” Asian Studies Committee Occasional Papers, International Area Studies Program, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst (forthcoming).Google Scholar