Abstract
By the Interwar Period, the Japanese had Access to a Wide Variety of information about the United States and Europe. Japanese youth were known to be voracious readers, devouring great volumes of books. Reading Western literature, philosophy, and history, Japanese were well educated about Western ideas. However, American critics suggested that the number of books did not equal quality and fell back on Orientalist assumptions to describe Japanese reading habits. Robert Nichols, who had recently taken over Lafcadio Hearns’ old post as the chair of English Literature at Tokyo Imperial University, stated his opinion unabashedly.
It is a curious and in some ways pathetic sight to observe these young men and women swimming before the great glass cases [of Western books]. They appear to select at random—so much of what the Japanese do seems done at random … It is in many ways a primitive and naïve race.1
Some claimed that the old emphasis on Confucian readings was being displaced by focus on Western ideas.
The old bookstores, containing the Chinese classics and other writings in the Chinese, are no longer, as they once were, the cornerstone of culture in Japan … The younger generation not only takes little interests in books in Chinese, but they find difficulty in reading them.2
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Notes
E.E. Speight, “The English Reading of Young Japan,” The Living Age, excerpted from Japan Advertiser, Vol. 316 (March 17, 1923), 663. Robert Nichols, “Young Japan and Its Reading,” The Literary Review, Vol. 3 (July 7, 1923), 818.
Rev. S.H. Wainright, “What the Japanese are Reading,” The Missionary Review of the World (December 1923), 991–992.
Tsurumi Yusuke, Contemporary Japan, (Tokyo: The Japan Times, 1927), 88–92.
Quoted in Genzo Yamamoto, “The Pacific War as Civilizational Conflict,” Historically Speaking, Vol. 4, No. 1 (September 2002), 26–27.
Nitobe Inazô, “The Manchurian Question and Sino-Japanese Relations,” and “Japan and the United States,” The Works of Nitobe Inazô, Vol. IV, Takagi Yasaka, ed. (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1972), 221–233, 259.
Nitobe Inazô, “Character of the Occidentalization of Japan,” The Works of Nitobe Inazô, Vol. I, 444.
Katsuji Kato, “Editorials,” The Japanese Student, Vol. 3, No. 6 (March 1919), 179.
Kawashima Saijiro, “A Word to Japan and America,” trans. Katsuji Kato from Dai Nihon, August 1921, The Japan Review, Vol. 5, No. 12 (October 1921), 214–215.
Shibusawa Eiichi, “American-Japanese Relations and World Peace,” (translated from Taiyo, 1919) The Japanese Student, Vol. 3, No. 8 (May 1919), 257.
The Autobiography of Ozaki Yukio: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in Japan, trans. Fujiko Hara (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 327–328.
Professor Yoshino Sakuzo, “Japan’s Rising Tide of Liberalism,” The Living Age, November 22, 1919, reprinted from Japan Advertiser, September 11, 1919, 154.
Baron Yoshiaki Fujimura, “China As Seen by Foreigners,” Japan Review, Vol. 5, No. 4 (February 1921), 62–63.
T. Okamoto, “American-Japanese Issues and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance,” The Contemporary Review (1920), 355.
Yamato Ishibashi, “Industrial Plight of Japan,” Asia, Vol. 19, No. 9 (September 1919), 906–908. Fujimura, “China as Seen by Foreigners,” 62–63. Gordon Chang, Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writings, 1942–1945, 56.
Kenkichi Mori, “Japan’s Effort in China,” The Japanese Student, Vol. 2, No. 3 (February 1918), 92–93.
Ryutaro Nagai, “Japan between Scylla and Charybdis,” The Living Age (November 22, 1919), 445. Sharon Minichiello, Retreat from Reform: Patterns of Political Behavior in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1984), 1–2.
Nagai, “Japan between Scylla and Charybdis,” 445–446. See also a report of Japanese reaction to the Versailles Treaty in Quarterly Letter, V.S. Peeke, Series IV, No. 4, July 20, 1919, 2. Found in V.S. Peeke Papers, Yale Divinity School Library Special Collections, Hereafter referred to as YDSL, New Haven, CT.
Jon Thares Davidann, A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan, 1890–1930, Chapter 2. Setsuo Uenoda, “When East Meets West I. Japan’s Right to Empire,” Asia, Vol. 19, No. 12 (December 1919), 1214–1217.
Ozaki Yukio, “Kokka no sombo to kokusai remmei,” (“The League of Nations and the Fate of the Nation”) Kokusai Chishiki (International Understanding), February 1921, 2–3. National Diet Library, Tokyo.
Nitobe Inazô, “Why Is Japan in the League of Nations,” International Gleanings from Japan (Tokyo: The League of Nations Association of Japan), Vol. 3, Nos. 10, 11 (October–November 1927), 1, 7, 8. National Diet Library, Tokyo. Nitobe Inazô, “Dr. Nitobe Answers Japanese Objections to the League,” International Gleanings from Japan, (March 1928), articles first published in Japan Times, 3, 7, 10. Ebina Danjo, “Urging the Awakening of the Nation to the Spread of the Attitudes Surrounding the League of Nations,” Kaitakusha (March 1920), 15.
Shigetomo Sayegusa, “A Practicable World Order,” Contemporary Japan, Vol. 2 (June 1933), 62–63.
Anesaki Masaharu, “Bunka mondai toshite no kokusai remmei,” (“The League of Nations and the Problem of Culture”) Kokusai Chishiki (International Understanding), November 1920, 20–21.
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© 2007 Jon Thares Davidann
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Davidann, J.T. (2007). Japanese Response to Orientalism. In: Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609730_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609730_3
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