Civilizational Discourse and Models Of Modernity In The Meiji Revolution

During the Meiji revolution, Japanese writings on international arena, Western empires and the Western tradition nourished a discourse on civilization. At the same time, Japan’s civilizational works also reflected debate on models of modernity. Over the course of consolidation of the Meiji regime, deep engagement with different foreign traditions produced an exceptionally intense phase of inter-civilizational engagement which left a significant legacy. In this paper, three episodes of interpretation of civilization and modernity are explored: the construction of an urban public sphere in which this civilizational discourse emerged, creation (through conceptual and linguistic translation) of entirely new vocabularies for philosophy and sociology, and the conflicts around political perspectives expressed by the popular democracy movement of the 1870s. In the urban public sphere and the popular movement, Japanese intellectuals actively interpreted and relativized the cultures, religions and ideologies of other civilizations against a native cultural core. The famous Meirokusha publishing house and its journal Meiroku Zasshi instituted a centre of civilizational discourse for intellectual elites and the urban public sphere that they participated in. Within that public sphere, the Meirokusha set in train historically and culturally specific processes of translation of Western thought which included translation of the concept of ‘society’ itself and the development of Japanese vocabularies for philosophy and sociology. Social and political conflict around modernity manifested also in the wider movement for popular rights that arose in the 1870s and then subsided. A main claim of the paper is that consolidation of Japan’s imperial polity in the 1890s superseded all three sets of interpretations developed by the Meirokusha intelligentsia and the popular movement, but not the civilizational discourse that they instituted.