TOKUGAWA JAPAN National Consciousness |
Robert Oxnam :: Japan's self-image evolved during the Tokugawa period. Clearly Japanese elites saw much of their culture as stemming from Chinese civilization. But they also saw themselves as unique. Indeed some Japanese thinkers began to ask the question this way — "How different are we from China?" Henry D. Smith, II :: It should be remembered that all Japanese intellectuals, and this meant all samurai in this period, were educated primarily in the Confucian classics. They could not speak the Chinese language, but they could read it. And a good samurai intellectual was expected to be able to compose Chinese poetry, for example. But this left them with the question of, "Well, what is my own language and what does it mean?" This is a complicated story, but in the end it led to a broad movement in the later part of the Tokugawa period asking precisely this question: What is Japanese, apart from Chinese, both as a language and as a culture? And this kind of development, and the same kind of doubts were raised against what is the West, led the Japanese increasingly to think about Japan and develop a consciousness that is central to the idea of a modern nation-state. So, however limited the contact, however controlled the contact may have been, it was crucial for the Japanese in developing a sense of otherness, of their own distinctive identity as a coherent cultural and political unit versus the rest of the world. |
| Back to Asian Topics Home |
