A common, perhaps stereotyped, perception of Japanese researchers in fields such as English literature and cultural studies, is of diligence, but also of conformism and lack of originality. This perception arises in part from variations in social and cultural norms, differences which have been explored in many standard works on Japan, while such an emphasis on cultural divergence is frequently advanced as an explanation of academic isolation. However, at least some of the problems Japanese students and researchers exhibit in interacting fully with their western counterparts may arise from the conditions in which academic research, especially in the field of English, has been conducted until very recently in non-Western nations. A culture of translation has dominated research and has channeled academic work into largely unproductive areas, even in countries such as Japan, which have a long history of higher education, and which have devoted considerable resources to academia. Moreover, the hierarchical nature of higher education in Japan has shaped an academic career structure where research, questioning and independent or radical thought has been actively discouraged. However, external factors, in particular the major economic realignments currently taking place, and internal pressures within higher education, have increasingly undermined and in some cases overthrown the traditional model of academic work in the Japanese university. In future, as the potential of globalized networks of information and communication within higher education and research begins to be fulfilled, it is to be hoped that Japanese research students and academics will take further active part within the world community of English studies.
Japanese intellectual life from the late 19th century to the present may usefully be considered in terms of the concepts of center and periphery, as proposed by Franco Moretti, following earlier work by such as Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi.(1) One key figure in the reception of the modern in Japan was Tsubouchi Shoyo, who was both instigator and major translator of Western, especially English, literature and of the development of Japanese modern literature itself. In his translations of the entire Shakespeare canon, the novels of Scott and others, and in his establishment of a school of literature at Waseda University in Tokyo, Tsubouchi took a major part in the creation of both the subject of literature and the faculty of humanities in which the subject would receive serious study.(2) Crucially, from this re-creation in the late-19th, early-20th century, Japanese literature, and the study of literature, have suffered from non-metropolitan modernism; that is, the process of becoming modern takes place, but only as a simulacrum or imitation of the central, metropolitan model. The effort of those key figures in peripheral modernism, such as Tsubouchi, has been one of grafting and transmitting the metropolitan modern into a radically different native tradition.(3)
In educational policy, as in the development of modern literature, the problematic relationship between the foreign and the native was the crucial factor in the creation of a higher education system. The Japanese university began in 1886 with the establishment of the Imperial University of Tokyo (now the University of Tokyo), an institution consciously developed as part of an overall project of national self-development.(4) Dominant figures in the modernization of Japan, such as Mori Arinori, the Minister of Education, demanded the provision of a system which would foster an educated elite, capable of administering the economic, scientific, and ideological structures of a modern nation. In the following decades, national universities were established in various regions of Japan, and private institutions were also established by major political figures, such as Okuma Shigenobu (Waseda) and Fukuzawa Yukichi (Keio).
Mori, the architect of Japanese education, was not only concerned with the nationalist regeneration of Japan, but also was deeply receptive to the problem of modernity, and like Tsubouchi, Fukuzawa, Okuma and others, an adept and influential transmitter of the concerns of the centre to the periphery. In considering the establishment of a university system, Mori perceived at an early date the necessity of the model of the research university; thus Tokyo University was founded as a research university almost coterminously with the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, which like Mori’s national university system, were heavily influenced by the German model. However, as Ushiogi Morikazu has pointed out, the Japanese research university was created by government diktat, and has atrophied since its inception. Indeed, by the 1990s, it was apparent to many commentators that even in areas of special concern to the state, such as engineering and applied science, almost no real research was being conducted in universities, the Japanese developments in these areas being made exclusively within the R & D departments of the major companies.(5)
The second critical aspect of the origins of the Japanese university system has been its essential foreignness. Though there had been institutions of learning attached to Buddhist temples in various parts of Japan, some of which, such as the institution on the holy mountain Koya, have since become Buddhist universities in the modern era, the Meiji bureaucracy, led by Mori, chose not to develop the national Japanese university out of such existing institutions. Rather, the Japanese university, led by the Imperial University in Tokyo, emerged from the area of “Dutch studies” or rangaku; that is, the research and study of foreign knowledge, by means of the translation of foreign documents. The institution which directly preceded the national university was an office, which had been in existence since the 18th century, and which facilitated the bakufo dictatorship’s desire for knowledge, particularly in the areas of medicine and astronomy. The office, called at various times Bansho Wakai Goyo (Office for the Interpretation of Barbarian Books) or Yosho Wakai Goyo (Office for the Interpretation of Western Books) was thus the forerunner of the modern Japanese university, a precursor of a translation culture which, as Nagai Michio has noted, seeks not simply the assimilation of foreign culture, but through that assimilation, a “regeneration of native culture”. (6)
In its origins and early years, then, the Japanese university system was based on the translation of foreign documents, and thus of foreign knowledge. Moreover, in developing an indigenous professional academic class, Mori imported a large number of foreign teachers, spending the major part of the higher education budget in the final decades of the 19th century on o-yatoi gaikokujin.(7) The import of foreign teachers has become a tradition of temporary induction which has continued to this day, especially in the national universities, with the employment of gaikokujin koshi (a term usually, (mis)translated as “visiting professor”, the term actually means foreign instructor). Though the foreign instructors initially employed at the end of the 19th century were temporary assistants, necessary but never intended to be a permanent part of the intellectual culture, the obverse side of professional development was the requirement that young Japanese teachers or professors have some foreign experience at some point, preferably early in their careers. Nevertheless, it is also required, through the dynamic of centre-periphery, that the peripheral never completely absorbs the central, for that would be to lose its identity as peripheral, and become absorbed into the centre, and be part of an unindividuated bloc. Consequently, the “visiting” professor tends to be just that, a visitor, never wholly accepted, while the Japanese academic must not gain the foreign knowledge with too much skill or fluency, else she runs the danger of becoming non-native.(8)
It is still the case that the Japanese academic has to experience foreignness, the sense of other, in some sense before he or she can reach complete academic status. However, it is the foreign experience in itself which is often considered crucial, rather than the acquisition of knowledge or particular abilities, learning and skills which in many cases could be achieved quite easily at home. Moreover, it is seen as highly important that this foreignness is not completely mastered, but remains in some way unreachable; the foreign should remain too difficult to achieve with complete fluency. The novelist Natsume Soseki, sent to London for a period of some months, painstakingly recorded his feelings of alienation, which thus proved his essential Japaneseness. (Though it should also be observed that much of the alienation felt by Soseki resulted from the cultural insensitivities of his metropolitan hosts.)(9) Soseki’s work on his experiences in London continues to model perceptions of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, and is held in high regard for maintaining an alternate, alienated identity. Even today, there remains a great deal of suspicion of the Japanese academic or cultural figure whose sensibility and work meld too easily into the foreign.
Moreover, translation remains the principal academic activity within humanities disciplines such as English literature, and it is translation, the transmission of culture from centre to periphery, which is seen as the basis of intellectual knowledge. From the work of Tsubouchi Shoyo on, there has been a strong connection between the worlds of the university, especially English literature departments and academics, and of contemporary Japanese literature. Tsubouchi was the first of many, exemplifying the originary figure within peripheral modern literature as discussed by Moretti and Miyoshi, a figure who attempts, impossibly, to unite the native and the foreign.(10) The translation ethos of Japanese academia thus expresses a divided attitude: on the one hand an ideology of native tradition to which the foreign must be assimilated if it is to be appropriated; on the other hand a fear of and desire for the unattainable, irreducible other of foreign knowledge.
The conflict between the native and the foreign, between inside and outside, which runs like a deep faultline throughout Japanese history and culture can be immensely creative. However, while in literature itself, art, and cinema, the impossibility of translation has often produced striking adaptations, versions and reformations of the original, in academic study, the restricted nature of the canon, and the hierarchical nature of the education structure have combined to corrupt and inhibit intellectual practice.
Typically, and until very recently, an academic career in a major university depended upon being part of an apprenticeship system – either formalized in the national universities, where a senior professor would have two junior professors and a small number of postgraduate researchers in an official and rigid attachment, or, in private universities, in groups not so formal but tending in practice to the same small group structure. In this system, preferment, teaching and research opportunities came almost entirely from within; failure to enter into the habatsu/gakubatsu system (the name means something like study group, but denotes academic clique or faction) led inexorably to academic failure per se. Exceptions to this order were to be found in the further periphery of less prestigious universities and colleges, where the absence of any graduate school or other post-graduate provision rendered the faculty unable to replicate itself, and thus forced to employ outsiders. While this external hiring structure in less prestigious universities and colleges often led to some institutions and departments becoming closely connected with faculties and departments at the major, core institutions, the more open professional practice did allow the employment of faculty who were not the product of the gakubatsu system. Thus, paradoxically, in the 1970s and 1980s flagship universities such as Tokyo, Kyoto, Waseda, and Keio tended to employ almost exclusively their own graduates, with relatively few faculty holding recognized postgraduate qualifications, while smaller, less prestigious institutions often had numerous faculty with doctorates from North American or European universities. I should observe that there has been a marked tendency, especially in the hiring of junior staff in the major universities in very recent years, to require post-graduate qualifications; however, the reliance on home-grown scholars who have come up through the department doing the hiring is still strong.
Rather than acquiring a doctorate, especially from a non-Japanese institution, and thus becoming somewhat tainted by too intimate a contact with foreignness, graduate students and junior researchers have been encouraged to publish a small number of articles, often in minor, nonrefereed journals, to give papers at a small number of colloquia (usually within the university, or at meetings of small scholarlyThe conflict between the native and the foreign, between inside and outside, which runs like a deep faultline throughout Japanese history and culture can be immensely creative.
societies), and to concentrate their efforts on attaining teaching, and eventually full-time positions within the patronage of the senior professor. In the humanities, and particularly within foreign literatures such as English, the senior professor himself, very occasionally herself, would be principally occupied with translation of canonical works, which had often already been translated.(11)
This situation of patronage and faction has been changing over the last decade, at an accelerated pace in the last few years. Government reform papers formulated in the 1990s are now being enacted, though often with chaotic and dismal results.(12) However, while the top-down pressures from civil bureaucracy and government are unfortunately prone to short-termism and simple cost-cutting, there has been a marked opening up of academic employment structures. Within my own department, for example, hiring decisions are no longer made by the department itself, a development which has already had a considerable effect on the various backgrounds and qualifications of newly hired faculty. In this new structure, graduate students must adapt to demands of a competitive, relatively open job market.
A shift in relations between the centre and peripheries in English studies or in academic research in the humanities will not come about as part of a reformist public policy on behalf of more progressive politicians, nor will it emerge from the best intentions of teachers and university administrators. Indeed, reforms which have been attempted in the past decade have almost completely failed in their aims, and students and junior faculty are no better trained or equipped to do research than they were previously. Rather, I would argue, dramatic changes in peripheral cultures have always been technological, rather than ideological in nature. It may well be seen, however, that in a post-modern world, different technologies come to bear, and in the electronic era the centre is at once everywhere and nowhere.
An optimistic view of the current changes would take note of how, historically, internal crisis and foreign technology have had a dynamic effect on Japan, from the introduction of writing and the Imperial system in the 7th to 8th century; through the imports of God, gunpowder, mercantilism and totalitarianism in the late-16th century; to the American interventions of the mid-19th and mid- 20th century. The immediate access to texts and information offered online has been readily and eagerly accepted by a new generation of Japanese graduates and young researchers. The most popular Japanese academic journal in the field of English literature is entitled Eigo Seinen – The Rising Generation; and it should be the case that the new generation of Japanese academics will rise to prominence not only within their own institutional culture, but also in the world of humanities and literary research.
Notes
- Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review (Jan/Feb 2000) pp.54-68; Fredric Jameson, “In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities,” introduction to Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1993) pp.vii-xx; Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (Berkeley: U of California P, 1974)
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (New York: Henry Holt, 1984), vol. I, Fiction, pp. 96-108; vol. II, Poetry, Drama, Criticism, pp. 410-17.
- On Japan’s translation culture, and the consequent uneasy relationship with the metropolitan West, see Sakai Naoki, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997).
- Byron K. Marshall, Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, pp.1868-1939 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992).
- Ushiogi Morikazu. “Graduate Education and Research Organization in Japan,” in Burton R. Clark, ed. The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) pp. 299-325.
- Nagai Michio, Higher Education in Japan: Its Take-off and Crash. Trans. Jerry Dusenbury. (Tokyo: U of Tokyo P, 1971) p.60.
- Nagai, pp.55-6.
- The position of foreign lecturers in Japanese universities, the vast majority of whom engage in teaching English language and literature, is described in Ivan P. Hall, Cartels of the Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop (New York: Norton, 1998); and Brian J. McVeigh, Japanese Higher Education as Myth (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002) pp. 164-77.
- Keene, Dawn to the West, vol. I, pp. 309-11.
- Sakai, p.147.
- Ushiogi, p.309.
- McVeigh, pp.245-55.
