Nihonjinron
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''Nihonjinron'' (: ''treatises on Japaneseness'') is a genre of ethnocentric nationalist literary work that focuses on issues of Japanese national and
cultural Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
identity Identity may refer to: * Identity document * Identity (philosophy) * Identity (social science) * Identity (mathematics) Arts and entertainment Film and television * ''Identity'' (1987 film), an Iranian film * ''Identity'' (2003 film), an ...
. ''Nihonjinron'' posits concepts such as Japanese being a "unique isolate, having no known affinities with any other race", and has been described as racist. ''Nihonjinron'' literature flourished during a publishing boom after
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
with books and articles aiming to analyze, explain, or explore
Japanese culture Japanese culture has changed greatly over the millennia, from the country's prehistoric Jōmon period, to its contemporary modern culture, which absorbs influences from Asia and other regions of the world. Since the Jomon period, ancestral ...
and cultural
mindset A mindset refers to an established set of attitudes of a person or group concerning culture, values, philosophy, frame of reference, outlook, or disposition. It may also arise from a person's worldview or beliefs about the meaning of life. Som ...
.


History

Hiroshi Minami traces the origin of nihonjinron to before the
Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...
. The roots of the nihonjinron be traced back at least to the ("national studies") movement of the 18th century, with themes that are not dissimilar to those in the post-war nihonjinron.


Kokugaku

Kokugaku, beginning as a scholarly investigation into the philology of Japan's early classical literature, sought to recover and evaluate these texts, some of which were obscure and difficult to read, in order to appraise them positively and harvest them to determine and ascertain what were the original indigenous values of Japan before the introduction of Chinese civilization. Thus the exploration of early classical texts like the ''
Kojiki The , also sometimes read as or , is an early Japanese chronicle of myths, legends, hymns, genealogies, oral traditions, and semi-historical accounts down to 641 concerning the origin of the Japanese archipelago, the , and the Japanese imperia ...
'' and the ''
Man'yōshū The is the oldest extant collection of Japanese (poetry in Classical Japanese), compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in ...
'' allowed scholars of Kokugaku, particularly the five great figures of Keichū (1640–1701), Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769),
Motoori Norinaga was a Japanese people, Japanese scholar of active during the Edo period. He is conventionally ranked as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku (nativist) studies. Life Norinaga was born in what is now Matsusaka, Mie, Matsusaka in Ise Province ...
(1730–1801) and Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) to explore Japan's cultural differences with China, locate their sources in high antiquity, and deploy the results in a programmatic attempt to define the uniqueness of Japan against a foreign civilization. These scholars worked independently, and reached different conclusions, but by the 19th century were grouped together by a neo-Kokugakuist named Konakamura to establish the earliness of Japanese self-awareness. Chinese cultural beliefs, social rites and philosophical ideas exercised a political ascendancy for over a millennium within Japan, and informed the neo-Confucian ideology of the Tokugawa regime.


Meiji period

In the second half of the 19th century, under strong military and diplomatic pressure, and suffering from an internal crisis that led to the collapse of the
Bakufu , officially , was the title of the military rulers of Japan during most of the period spanning from 1185 to 1868. Nominally appointed by the Emperor, shoguns were usually the de facto rulers of the country, except during parts of the Kamak ...
, Japan opened its ports, and subsequently the nation, to commerce with the outside world and reform that sought to respond vigorously to the challenges of modern industrial polities, as they were remarked on by Japanese observers in the United States and Europe. The preponderant place of China as model and cultural adversary in the cognitive models developed hitherto was occupied by the West. But, whereas Japan's traditional engagement with Chinese civilization was conducted in terms of a unilateral debate, now Japanese scholars and thinkers could read directly what Westerners, themselves fascinated by the 'exoticism' of Japanese culture, said and wrote of them. Japanese contact with, and responses to these emerging Western stereotypes, which reflected the superiority complex, condescension and imperial hauteur of the times, fed into Japanese debates on national identity. As Leslie Pincus puts it, speaking of a later phase: There ensued an intense period of massive social and economic change, as, under the direction of a developmental elite, Japan moved from the closed world of centuries of Tokugawa rule (the so-called ''
sakoku is the most common name for the isolationist foreign policy of the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate under which, during the Edo period (from 1603 to 1868), relations and trade between Japan and other countries were severely limited, and almost all ...
'' period) to Meiji Westernization, and, again in close conformity with the prevailing occidental paradigm, to imperialist adventurism with the growth of the
colonialism Colonialism is the control of another territory, natural resources and people by a foreign group. Colonizers control the political and tribal power of the colonised territory. While frequently an Imperialism, imperialist project, colonialism c ...
. The Taishō period marked a slightly more 'liberal' turn, as the pendulum swung towards a renewed interest in the Western model ("Japan must undergo a second birth, with America as its new mother and France as its father"). With the crisis of 1929 and the concomitant depression of the 1930s, militarism gained the upper hand in this era of the , and nationalistic ideologies prevailed over all attempts to keep alive the moderate traditions of liberal modernity.


Postwar period

Total economic, military and spiritual mobilization could not stave off defeat however, and slowly, under occupation, and then rapidly with its reasserted independence, Japan enjoyed a decades-long resurgence as global industrial and economic powerhouse until the crisis of the 1990s. The cultural patterns over this century long trajectory is one of a continuous oscillation between models of pronounced Westernization and traditionalist
autarky Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states, and their economic systems. Autarky as an ideology or economic approach has been attempted by a range of political ideologies and movement ...
. Between the two alternatives, attempts were frequently made to mediate a conciliatory third way which would combine the best of both worlds: . The frequency of these chronic transitional upheavals engendered a remarkable intensity of debate about national directions and identity ( ''kokuminsei''; ''minzokusei''), whose complexity over time renders a synthetic judgment or bird's-eye view of the literature in question rather difficult. A major controversy surrounds the question regarding the affiliation of the post-war nihonjinron theories with the prewar conceptualization of Japanese cultural uniqueness. To what degree, that is, are these meditations under democracy on Japanese uniqueness innocent reflections of a popular search for identity, and in what measure, if any, do they pick up from the instrumental ideology of Japaneseness developed by the government and nationalists in the prewar period to harness the energies of the nation towards industrialization and global imperium? The questions are rendered more complex by the fact that in the early post-war period, the restoration of a 'healthy nationalism' was by no means something exclusive to right-wing cultural thinkers. An intense debate over the necessity to develop ideal, positive forms of national consciousness, regarded as a healthy civic identity, figures prominently in the early writings of Maruyama Masao, who called for a healthy , and in the prolific debates of members of the who preferred to speak of . These debates ranged from liberal center-left critics to radical Marxist historians. Some scholars cite the destruction of many Japanese national symbols and the psychological blow of defeat at the end of
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
as one source of nihonjinron's enduring popularity, although it is not a uniquely 20th century phenomenon. In fact the genre is simply the Japanese reflex of cultural nationalism, which is a property of all modern nations. The trend of the tone of nihonjinron argument is often reflective of the Japanese society at the time. Dale, defines three phases in the development of post-war ''nihonjinron'' discourse in the period covered by Nomura: Tamotsu Aoki subsequently finessed the pattern by distinguishing four major phases in the post war identity discourse. During the early post-war period, most of nihonjinron discourses discussed the uniqueness of the Japanese in a rather negative, critical light. The elements of feudalism reminiscent of the
Imperial Japan The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation state that existed from the Meiji Restoration on January 3, 1868, until the Constitution of Japan took effect on May 3, 1947. From Japan–Kor ...
were all castigated as major obstacles to Japan's reestablishment as a new democratic nation. Scholars such as Hisao Ōtsuka, a Weberian sociologist, judged Japan with the measure of rational individualism and liberal democracy that were considered ideals in the U.S. and Western European nations back then. By the 1970s, however, with Japan enjoying a remarkable economic boom, Ōtsuka began to consider the 'feudal residues' in a positive light, as a badge of Japan's distinctive difference from the West (Ōtsuka, Kawashima, Doi 1976 passim). Nihonjinron books written during the period of high economic growth up to the bubble burst in the early 1990s, in contrast, argued various unique features of the Japanese as more positive features.


As cultural nationalism

Scholars such as Peter N. Dale (1986), Harumi Befu (1987), and Kosaku Yoshino (1992) view nihonjinron more critically, identifying it as a tool for enforcing social and political
conformity Conformity or conformism is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to social group, group norms, politics or being like-minded. Social norm, Norms are implicit, specific rules, guidance shared by a group of individuals, that guide t ...
. Dale, for example, characterizes nihonjinron as follows: The emphasis on
ingroup In social psychology and sociology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify. People may for example ...
unity in ''nihonjinron'' writings, and its popularization during Japan's period of military expansion at the turn of the 20th century, has led some Western critics to brand it a form of ethnocentric nationalism. Karel van Wolferen echoes this assessment, observing a collectivism prevalent in the society.


Specific theses

# The Japanese race is a unique isolate, having no known affinities with any other race. In some extreme versions, the race is claimed to be directly descended from a distinct branch of primates. # This isolation is due to the peculiar circumstances of living in an cut off from the promiscuous cross-currents of continental history, with its endless miscegenation of tribes and cultures. The island country in turn enjoys a whose peculiar rhythms, the supposed fact for example that Japan alone has , color Japanese thinking and behaviour. Thus, human nature in Japan is, peculiarly, an extension of nature itself. # The Japanese language has a unique grammatical structure and native lexical corpus whose idiosyncratic syntax and connotations condition the Japanese to think in peculiar patterns unparalleled in other human languages. The Japanese language is also uniquely vague. Foreigners who speak it fluently therefore, may be correct in their usage, but the thinking behind it remains inalienably soaked in the alien framework of their original language's thought patterns. This is the Japanese version of the
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition. One form of linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, regards peoples' languages as determining and influencing the scope of cultural perceptions of their surrou ...
, according to which grammar determines world-view.(1)Suzuki Takao, ''Kotoba no ningengaku'', Shinchō Bunko, Tokyo 1981.pp.109ff;(2) Itasaka Gen, ''Nihongo yokochō'', Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, Tokyo 1978 pp.69ff; (3)Kawashima Takeyoshi in Ōtsuka Hisao, Kawashima Takeyoshi, Doi Takeo, '' 'Amae' to shakai kagaku'', Kōbundō, Tokyo 1978 p.29 #Japanese psychology, influenced by the language, is defined by a particular cast of that conduce to a unique form of , in which clearly defined boundaries between self and other are ambiguous or fluid, leading to a psychomental and social ideal of the . # Japanese social structures consistently remould human associations in terms of an archaic characterized by , , and . As a result, the cannot properly exist, since will always prevail.


Major works

* Kuki, Shūzō (九鬼周造). 1930. 「いき」の構造 English tr. ''An Essay on Japanese Taste: The Structure of 'Iki. John Clark; Sydney, Power Publications, 1996. * Watsuji, Tetsurō (和辻哲郞). 1935. ''Fûdo'' (風土). Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten. trans. Geoffrey Bownas, as ''Climate''. Unesco 1962. *
Japanese Ministry of Education The , also known as MEXT, is one of the eleven ministries of Japan that compose part of the executive branch of the government of Japan. History The Meiji government created the first Ministry of Education in 1871. In January 2001, the former ...
(文部省). 1937. 國體の本義 (''Kokutai no hongi''). tr. as ''Kokutai no hongi. Cardinal principles of the national entity of Japan'', Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1949. * Nishida, Kitarō (西田幾多郞). 1940. 日本文化の問題 (''Nihon Bunka no mondai''). Tokyo. * Nakane, Chie (中根千枝). 1967. タテ社会の人間関係 (Human relations in a vertical society) English tr '' Japanese Society'', Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, UK, 1970. * Mishima, Yukio (三島由紀夫). 1969. ''Bunka Bôeiron'' (文化防衛論, A Defense of Culture). Tokyo, Japan: Shinchôsha. * Doi, Takeo (土居健郎). 1971. 「甘え」の構造 (''The Structure of 'Amae). Tokyo, Japan: Kôbundô. trans.''The Anatomy of Dependence'' Kodansha, Tokyo 1974 *Izaya Ben-Dasan, ('translated' by Yamamoto Shichihei:山本七平) 1972 '' Nihonkyō ni tsuite'' (日本教について), Tokyo, Bungei Shunjû * Hisao, Ōtsuka, Takeyoshi, Kawashima, Takeo, Doi. ''「Amae」to shakai kagaku''.Tokyo, Kōbundō 1976 * Tsunoda, Tadanobu (角田忠信). 1978. ''Nihonjin no Nō'' (日本人の脳―脳の働きと東西の文化, The Japanese brain). Tokyo, Japan: Taishūkan Shoten (大修館書店) . *Murakami, Yasusuke (村上泰亮), Kumon Shunpei (公文俊平), Satō Seizaburō (佐藤誠三郎). 1979. ''The 'Ie' Society as a Civilization'' (文明としてのイエ社会) Tokyo, Japan: Chūō Kōronsha.


See also

*
Bunmei-kaika ''Bunmei-kaika'' () refers to the phenomenon of Westernization in Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912), which led to major changes in institutions and customs. The term is generally used for the period in the early Meiji era when customs and ...
* Heita Kawakatsu *''
Honne and tatemae In Japan, ''honne'' and ''tatemae'' are Japanese language, Japanese terms relating to a person's feelings and outward behaviors. refers to a person's , and refers contrastingly to . This distinction began to be made in the post-war era.Takeo D ...
'' *
International Research Center for Japanese Studies The , or Nichibunken (日文研), is an inter-university research institute in Kyoto. Along with the National Institute of Japanese Literature, the National Museum of Japanese History, and the National Museum of Ethnology (Japan), National Museum ...
*''
Ishin-denshin is an idiom commonly used in East Asian cultures, such as in Japan, Korea and China, which denotes a form of interpersonal communication through unspoken mutual understanding. Meaning The four-kanji, character compound () in Japanese language, ...
'' *
Japanese nationalism Japanese nationalism is a form of nationalism that asserts the belief that the Japanese people, Japanese are a monolithic nation with a single immutable culture. Over the last two centuries, it has encompassed a broad range of ideas and sentimen ...
*
Japanology , sometimes known as Japanology in Europe, is a sub-field of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on Japan. It incorporates fields such as the study of Japanese language, history, culture, literatu ...
*''
Kokutai is a concept in the Japanese language translatable as "system of government", "sovereignty", "national identity, essence and character", "national polity; body politic; national entity; basis for the Emperor's sovereignty; Japanese constitut ...
'' * National psychology * Takeshi Umehara *'' Yamato-damashii'' * Japanification *
Axial Age ''Axial Age'' (also ''Axis Age'', from the German ) is a term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. It refers to broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd ...


References

{{Reflist


Bibliography

* Amino, Yoshihiko (網野善彦) 1993 Nihonron no shiza: Rettō no shakai to kokka (日本論の視座) Tokyo, Shôgakkan * Amino, Yoshihiko (網野善彦). 1978 Muen, kugai, raku: Nihon chūsei no jiyū to heiwa (無縁・公界・楽. 日本中世の自由と平和:Muen, kugai, raku: Peace and freedom in medieval Japan), Tokyo, Heibonsha * Befu, Harumi (別府春海) 1987 Ideorogī toshite no nihonbunkaron (イデオロギーとしての日本人論, Nihonjinron as an ideology). Tokyo, Japan: Shisō no Kagakusha. * Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword : Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. * Benesch, Oleg.
Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan.
' Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. * Berque, Augustin. 1986 Le sauvage et l'artifice: Les Japonais devant la nature. Paris, Gallimard. * Burns, Susan L., 2003 Before the Nation - Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan, Duke University Press, Durham, London. * Gayle, Curtis Anderson, 2003 Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism, RoutledgeCurzon, London, New York * Gill, Robin D 1985 Nihonjinron Tanken (日本人論探険) Tokyo, TBS Britannica. * Gill, Robin D. 1984Omoshiro Hikaku-bunka-kō, (おもしろ比較文化考) Tokyo, Kirihara Shoten. * Gill, Robin D. 1985 Han-nihonjinron ((反日本人論)) Tokyo, Kōsakusha. * Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela 1988 Das Ende der Exotik Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp * Kawamura, Nozomu (河村望) 1982 Nihonbunkaron no Shûhen (日本文化論の周辺, The Ambiance of Japanese Culture Theory), Tokyo: Ningen no Kagakusha * Mazzei, Franco, 1997. Japanese Particularism and the Crisis of Western Modernity, Ca' Foscari University of Venice. * Miller, Roy Andrew 1982 Japan's Modern Myth: The Language and Beyond, New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill. * Minami Hiroshi (南博) 1980 Nihonjinron no keifu (日本人論の系譜) Tokyo, Kōdansha. * Mouer, Ross & Sugimoto, Yoshio, Images of Japanese Society, London: Routledge, 1986 * Nomura Research Institute. 1979. Sengo Nihonjinron Nenpyō (戦後日本人論年表, Chronology of post-war Nihonjinron). Tokyo, Japan: Nomura Research Institute. * Sugimoto Yoshio (杉本良夫) 1993 Nihonjin o yameru hōhō, Tokyo, Chikuma Bunko. * Sugimoto, Yoshio & Ross Mouer (eds.) 1989 Constructs for Understanding Japan, Kegan Paul International, London and New York. * Sugimoto, Yoshio (杉本良夫) and Mouer, Ross.(eds.) 1982 Nihonjinron ni kansuru 12 shô (日本人論に関する12章) Tokyo, Gakuyō Shobō * Sugimoto, Yoshio (杉本良夫)1983 Chō-kanri rettô Nippon (超管理ニッボン, Nippon. The Hyper-Control Archipelago) Tokyo, Kōbunsha. * Sugimoto, Yoshio and Mouer, Ross. 1982 Nihonjin wa 「Nihonteki」ka (日本人は「日本的」か) Tokyo, Tōyō Keizai Shinpōsha * Sugimoto, Yoshio and Mouer, Ross. 1995. Nihonjinron no Hōteishiki (日本人論の方程式, the Equation of Nihonjinron). Tokyo, Japan: Chikuma Shobō * Yoshino, Kosaku. 1992. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry. London, UK: Routledge.


Additional

* S. N. Eisenstadt, translated by Junichi Umetsu et al. in Japan: Comparative Civilization Studies, 1,2, Iwanami Shoten, 2004. * Yoko Kudo, Introduction to the Critique of European Civilization: Colonies, Republics and Orientalism, University of Tokyo Press, 2003. * Reiko Shimokawa, The Confucianism of Kitabatake Chikabo, Perikansha, 2001. * Hiroyuki Tamakake, Studies in the History of Japanese Medieval Thought, Perikansha, 1998. * Terumasa Nakanishi, A History of National Civilization, Fusosha, 2003. * Sadao Nishijima, The Ancient East Asian World and Japan, Iwanami Modern Library, 2000. * Takeshi Hamashita, The Tribute System and Modern Asia, Iwanami Shoten, 1997. * Yuko Yoshino, The Structure of the Emperor's Accession Ceremony, Kobundo, 1987. * Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and Japan in the 21st Century, translated by Suzuki Shuzei, Shueisha Shinsho, 2000. * Diversification of the World: Family Structure and Modernity, translated by Emmanuel Todd and Fumitaka Ogino. * Tadao Umesao, What is Japan: The Formation and Development of Modern Japanese Civilization, Japan Broadcasting Corporation Press, 1986. * Umesao Tadao, 77 Keys to Japanese Civilization, Bungeishunju, 2005. * Shinichiro Fujio, The Jomon Controversy, Kodansha, 2002. * Heita Kawakatsu, Japanese Civilization and the Modern West: Rethinking the "Closed Country", Japan Broadcasting Corporation Press, 1991. *
Samuel P. Huntington Samuel Phillips Huntington (April 18, 1927December 24, 2008) was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affair ...
, The Clash of Civilizations, Shueisha, 1998. *
Ryōtarō Shiba , also known as , was a Japanese author. He is best known for his novels about historical events in Japan and on the Northeast Asian sub-continent, as well as his historical and cultural essays pertaining to Japan and its relationship to the r ...
, The Shape of Japanese Civilization: Selected Dialogues of Ryōtarō Shiba (5), Bungeishunju, 2006. *
Ryōtarō Shiba , also known as , was a Japanese author. He is best known for his novels about historical events in Japan and on the Northeast Asian sub-continent, as well as his historical and cultural essays pertaining to Japan and its relationship to the r ...
, The Shape of Japanese Civilization: Selected Dialogues of Ryōtarō Shiba, Bungeishunju, 2006. * Kotaro Takemura, Solving the Mystery of Japanese Civilization: Hints for Thinking about the 21st Century, Seiryu Shuppan, 2003. * Terumasa Nakanishi, The Rise and Fall of Japanese Civilization: This Country at the Crossroads, PHP Institute, 2006. * Tetsuo Yamaori, "What is Japanese Civilization?", Kadokawa Shoten, 2004. * Shuji Yagi, The Individuality of Japan: An Introduction to the Theory of Japanese Civilization, Ikuhosha, 2008. * The Association for the Creation of New History Textbooks, New History Textbooks, Fusosha, 2001. * Nishio Mikiji, New History Textbook Wo Tsukuru Kai, Kokumin no Rekishi (History of the People), Sankei Shimbun News Service, 1999.


External links


Community, Democracy, and Performance: Nihonjinron

Dissertation preview - Globalization and Japanese animation: Ethnography of American college students


article by Chris Burgess in th
''electronic journal of contemporary Japanese studies''
19 April 2004.
Nihonjinron.com: A look at contemporary and historical issues affecting Japanese national and cultural identity.


article by Sonia Ryang on the role of ''The Chrysanthemum and the Sword'' in Nihonjinron

Japanese studies Society of Japan Ideologies Ethnic nationalism Japanese nationalism National identities