Abstract
This chapter investigates why Fukuzawa’s thought became increasingly conservative after the 1880s. Hwang specifically focuses on Fukuzawa’s preoccupation with “centrism” and “neutrality” as ideal standpoints. Ironically, this led him to support militarism in order to unify the “extreme progressives” and the “extreme conservatives” under the banner of the Japanese Emperor. According to this analysis, liberalism countered the growth of totalitarianism. But it was undermined by his focus on the neutrality of the state. Liberals simply underestimated the innate existential desire for recognition of one’s identity, which is so often found in reactionary movements.
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Notes
- 1.
“Chanchan” is a derogatory word for Chinese people that was used in late nineteenth-century Japan.
- 2.
Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fukuzawa Yukichi Zenshū [Complete collection of Fukuzawa Yukichi] vol. 14 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), 570–572, quoted in Yasukawa Junosuke, Fukuzawa Yukichi no azia ninshiki [Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Perception of Asia] (Tokyo: Kōbunken, 2000), 264. This was Fukuzawa’s comment on the process of the First Sino-Japanese War that ended with Japan’s overwhelming victory in 1894.
- 3.
Ibid., 667, quoted in Yasukawa, 261. Here, Fukuzawa denied the Japanese troop’s massacre of civilians in Lüshun in 1894, which is also called the Port Arthur Massacre by Western historians.
- 4.
See Maruyama Masao, Bunmeiron no gairyaku wo yomu [Reading An Outline of a Theory of Civilization] vol. 3 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987), 326.
- 5.
See Yasukawa, Fukuzawa Yukichi no azia ninshiki, 15–20.
- 6.
Yukichi Fukuzawa, An Encouragement of Learning , trans. David A. Dilworth (New York, Columbia University Press, 2012), 22. “Country” is my translation. The original translation is “homeland,” which is not a correct translation of the word “kuni,” but it makes sense in the context because Fukuzawa, here, explains how individual independence and autonomy would develop into more patriotic sentiments.
- 7.
For a defense of Fukuzawa’s turn to the right as being related to his involvement in the Korean liberals’ coup, see Kinebuchi Nubuo, Fukuzawa Yukichi to Chōsen [Fukuzawa Yukichi and Korea] (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 1997) and Hirayama Yō, Fukuzawa Yukichi no shinjitsu [The Truth of Fukuzawa Yukichi] (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2004).
- 8.
Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore. Jr., & Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965) 81–117.
- 9.
In the preface, Fukuzawa said he was already planning to revise and develop the ideas in Civilization. See Yukichi Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization , trans. by David A. Dilworth & G. Cameron Hurst III, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 4.
- 10.
See Maruyama, Bunmeiron no gairyaku wo yomu, vol. 3, 327–328.
- 11.
Zenshū vol. 5, 13. Obviously, the “progressivism” here is not the same as the American version of the same concept. It is related to Fukuzawa’s idealization of the Western Enlightenment, in broad terms, that would promote both material and ethical progress and the expansion of freedom.
- 12.
Ibid., 15. It seems to be inspired by Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution, which was popular among moderate conservatives in nineteenth-century Japan.
- 13.
Ibid., 17–18.
- 14.
See Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1.
- 15.
Zenshū, vol. 5, 17–18.
- 16.
For Fukuzawa’s understanding of social movements in nineteenth-century Russia, including socialists and nihilistic anarchists, see Zenshū, vol. 5, 37–39.
- 17.
Zenshū, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), 24–25.
- 18.
Marx summarized the dynamic role of technology under capitalism as: “Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. Even a history of religion that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e., to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one.” Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 493–494.
- 19.
The Ka’ei period is from February 1848 to November 1854. Commodore Perry’s “Black Ships” forced the Shogunate to open Japan’s ports in 1854.
- 20.
Ibid., 29.
- 21.
Zenshū, vol. 7, 662.
- 22.
Zenshū, vol. 5, 8–9. The section that Fukuzawa quotes from Wakefield is the following: “It is the fashion to praise this so-called education, and to insist that all sorts of good will grow out of it. I hope so—I think so—but I must be allowed to add that the good has hardly yet begun to grow. Thus far, the education of the common people has not improved their lot; it has only made them discontented with it. The present fruits of popular education in this country are Chartism and socialism.” Edward Gibbon Wakefield (ed) A View of the Art of Colonization (London: John W. Parker, West Strand, 1849), 67.
- 23.
Zenshū, vol. 5, 8–10.
- 24.
Maruyama, Bunmeiron no gairyaku wo yomu, vol. 3, 324–326.
- 25.
Maruyama. Bunmeiron no gairyaku wo yomu, vol. 1, 75–78.
- 26.
Fukuzawa, Civilization, 10.
- 27.
It does not seem that the idea of “national rights” (kokken) was as fashionable before the “People’s Rights” (minken) Movement became very popular among young samurais. I guess the very expression “national rights” was a reactionary response to the egalitarianism of People’s Rights. What is meant by national rights broadly involves the modern idea of national sovereignty and national interests. For more information about Fukuzawa’s understanding of national rights, see Fukuzawa, “Tsūzoku kokken ron” [On a Popular Discourse of National Rights] in Zenshū, vol. 4, 599–673.
- 28.
Zenshū, vol. 5, 103–109. “The Way of Power” (kendo) can be defined as a seemingly unrighteous means to achieve a righteous goal in politics.
- 29.
Ibid., 118.
- 30.
Ibid., 120–121.
- 31.
Ibid., 121.
- 32.
Ibid., 130.
- 33.
Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance.”
- 34.
Yasukawa, 297.
- 35.
Zenshū, vol. 5, 127.
- 36.
Ibid., 167–169.
- 37.
Ibid., vol. 20. 145–151.
- 38.
Ibid., vol. 5, 177–178. What Fukuzawa says in this preposterous argument is that war is a disaster created by human beings while natural disasters are nature’s doing. If it is created by humans, it is logically easier to recover by human efforts, according to Fukuzawa. He then enumerates how many times Japan has recovered quickly from disastrous wars in history. Of course, such a view was relatively common among imperialists and conservatives at the time because they were yet to experience the world wars.
- 39.
Written as Ryūkyū in the original text. Okinawa is the largest island among the Ryukyu islands.
- 40.
Ibid., 179–181.
- 41.
Ibid., 186–187.
- 42.
Ibid., vol. 20, 145–151.
- 43.
Ishibashi Tanzan, a renowned journalist active from the 1920s, who also became a prime minister of post-war Japan, made a decisive critique of Japan’s reckless expansionism based on his reading of John Hobson’s Imperialism. According to Ishibashi, Japan’s imperial expansion was not only unprofitable by itself but also raised extra costs for national defense that otherwise would not exist. See Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition: Volume 2, 1600–2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) 860–868.
- 44.
Zenshū, vol. 5, 209–214.
- 45.
Ibid., 214. For “transforming one’s soul,” Fukuzawa uses a Buddhist term, “an shin ritsu mei,” literally “calming the body and erecting the destiny,” which is close to the state of nirvana.
- 46.
Yasukawa, 296.
- 47.
Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 321–323.
- 48.
Maruyama , Bunmeiron no gairyaku wo yomu, 320–321. For Bagehot’s original text, see Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 38–72. Walter Bagehot, now unfortunately an almost forgotten bourgeois thinker of the Victorian era, was recognized as “a man with sympathy to share, and genius to judge, its sentiments and movements: a man not too illustrious or too consummate to be companionable, but one, nevertheless, whose ideas took root and are still bearing; whose influence, passing from one fit mind to another, could transmit, and can still impart, the most precious element in Victorian civilization, its robust and masculine sanity.” See Frank Prochaska, The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), vii. His argument about the monarchy in The English Constitution is still considered one of the most authoritative justifications of constitutional monarchy.
- 49.
Zenshū, vol. 5, 263.
- 50.
Ibid., 264.
- 51.
Ibid., 268.
- 52.
For more information about the early anarchism in Japan and the High Treason Incident related to it, see F. G. Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
- 53.
Zenshū, vol. 5, 68–70. I have yet to find concrete evidence of the practice of appointing only Christian military officers. Although the United States was clearly founded on anti-Catholic sentiment and a Protestant base, there were certainly Jewish soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Perhaps Fukuzawa was talking only about the rank of generals or their equivalent.
- 54.
One of the liberal newspapers, Fusō Shinshi, criticized that “Mr. Fukuzawa is no longer himself as in the old days. … Around the time when he joined the Meiji Six Society [a pro-enlightenment academic society mentioned in the Chap. 3], there were worthy elements in his spirit and intellect … But now regarding Korea … he is overtly spreading preposterous arguments.” Quoted in Yasukawa, 296.
- 55.
Originally, this expression was used by Yasukawa, who criticized Fukuzawa’s opportunistic thinking. Maruyama, by contrast, defends Fukuzawa’s situational thinking as a deliberate method to approach political theories in relation to actual practices, which Maruyama called “a theory of current affairs” (jijiron). See Yasukawa, 21–25. See also Maruyama, Bunmeiron no gairyaku wo yomu, vol. 3, 313–315.
- 56.
Maruyama Masao, Fukuzawa Yukichi no tetsugaku—hoka roppen, 83.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (London: Routledge, 1960) 137–138.
- 59.
Yasukawa also briefly discussed the problem of the absence of the bourgeois class base in Fukuzawa’s liberal nationalism. See Yasukawa, 104.
- 60.
On Fukuzawa’s discussion of “credulity” (wakudeki), see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.3.
- 61.
For a brief account of the rise and split of the Freedom and People’s Rights movements, see Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000), 386–388.
- 62.
Tsūzoku kokken ron was a pamphlet written in 1878. The pamphlet became infamous for Fukuzawa’s turn to realist international politics, saying “A hundred volumes of international laws are not as good as a few cannons, piles of peace treaties are not as good as a box of ammunition. Cannons and ammunition are not for arguing existing principles but for creating nonexistent principles.” Zenshū, vol. 4, 637.
- 63.
As a side note, Ueki was not able to read foreign languages. He relied on translated work to learn Western political philosophy. See Maruyama Masao and Katō Shūichi, Honyaku to nihonno kindai [Translation and Japan’s Modernity] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998), 49–53.
- 64.
Ienaga Saburō, Kakumei sisō no senkusha: Ueki Emori no hito to shisō [The Pioneer of Revolutionary Thoughts: Ueki Emori’s Life and Thoughts] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1955), 111.
- 65.
Fukuzawa’s immediate response to the brutal execution of the entire family line of rebels was expressed in his pamphlet “The Execution of the Independence Party of Korea.” See Zenshū, vol. 10, 221–226.
- 66.
Zenshū, vol. 10, 211.
- 67.
For a positive interpretation of Fukuzawa’s interest in Korea, see Kinebuch, Fukuzawa Yukichi to Chōsen.
- 68.
See Micheline R. Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
- 69.
On may argue against my view that an internationalist spirit was “emerging” by suggesting that a cosmopolitan worldview had existed in East Asia ever since the Sinocentric order became secure following the Ming dynasty. It is certainly true that the Sinocentric order had a cosmopolitan worldview, and actually in East Asia, modernization meant the emergence of nationalist consciousness. I thus chose the word “internationalist” rather than “cosmopolitan.” At any rate, the Sinocentric cosmopolitanism was inherently hierarchical, viewing the Chinese Emperor as the leader of the world and the all other races as barbarians. It is by no means the same as the modern cosmopolitanism that has been related to socialist internationalism. Sinocentric cosmopolitanism would be rather similar to the ancient Roman kind, which is the root of cosmopolitanism in the Western tradition.
- 70.
This is the greatest problem in Yasukawa’s Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Perception on Asia and most of his other writings. Even with his unprecedentedly expansive review of Fukuzawa’s writings, paradoxically, Yasukawa never escaped his obsession with the version of Fukuzawa created by Maruyama Masao. By firmly believing that Maruyama Masao glorified a hypocrite, he concentrates all his efforts on proving that Fukuzawa is not worthy of the respect he receives now, rather than trying to find a theoretical explanation for how such a contrasting evaluation of the same person can be possible.
- 71.
This claim seems questionable to some scholars who study the intellectual history of liberalism, but it is noticeable that modern liberals often concede to the claims of cultural relativists or collectivists. For example, John Rawls’s continuous modifications of his theory clearly show signs of retreat from the universalist position. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2005); Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Moreover, ever since Habermas renounced the Hegelian idea of progress, many Habermasian liberals have focused on the procedural side of democracy rather than the idea of progress.
- 72.
Mannheim, 137.
- 73.
Ibid., 138.
- 74.
Ibid., 239. See also the following account by David Kettler: “Disinterested certification and specification of the perspectival character of all political positions, Mannheim thought, could change the climate of political conflict or at least stop each one’s self-serving exposure of all other ideologies from poisoning the atmosphere. The theory that can explain the perspectival character of thought will also bring with it a clearer understanding of the multifaceted, common historical situation, without, of course, pretending to bring about agreements on what is to be done. It is this catalytic role that Mannheim’s notorious “free-floating intellectuals” are to perform … Rather than approximating Spengler’s celebration of incommensurable morphological forms of cultural life, organically closed and determined, as Lukacs charges, Mannheim proposes in his sociology of knowledge to take note of but then to find rational uses for the existential rootedness and historical particularity of thinking and the cultural entities that thinking informs. As each ideological collective subject gains insight into the material foundations of its perspective, it partially accepts the realistic cognitive mode that provides the insight and partially becomes capable of communicating with other subjects so enlightened.” David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr. “Rationalizing the Irrational: Karl Mannheim and the Besetting Sin of German Intellectuals,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 6 (May, 1990), 1458.
- 75.
Ishay, xxiii.
- 76.
Eduard Bernstein’s opposition to the war was a rare exception among those considered as the right-wing of the social democrats. His opposition to war, I believe, was possible because of his distinctive view of Marxism as a regulative ideal in the vein of Kant, rather than “free-floating” between the perspectives of the working class and the bourgeoisie. See Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. and trans. Henry Tudor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 77.
Zenshū, vol. 6, 363.
- 78.
See Matsuda Kōichiro, “Kyomōni kakeru kotoha kanōka?” [Is It Possible to Bet on a ‘Fiction’?] Gendai Sisō, Maruyama Masao Tokushū [Modern Thought: A special issue for Maruyama Masao] (August 2014): 98–106.
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Hwang, M. (2020). Existential Turn: Seeking National Recognition. In: Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Bourgeois Liberalism. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21530-9_5
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