The article explores the role of transcultural encounters for the development of the thought and philology of Shigeno Yasutsugu, an eminent Japanese scholar of history and Chinese learning in 19th-century Japan. It argues that a close look at the impact of Shigeno’s encounters with Western diplomats, Chinese scholar-officials and a German historian illuminates the richness in the biography of a scholar whom the literature has valued predominantly for his role in the introduction of “modern” Western historiography. Through an analysis of the multilayered foundations of his scholarly practice, the article aims to demonstrate the use of a transcultural paradigm in engaging the complexity of the history of knowledge in a period of Western imperialism.
This article attends to a formative moment in the history of Japanese historiography around 1900, when many Japanese historians began to identify with the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke—curiously, however, without a substantial preceding engagement with his work. The article employs the concept of the “scholarly persona” to explore the views of influential Japanese historians on the significance of Leopold von Ranke as an embodiment of scholarly virtues. Contrasting Ranke's image in Japan with that prevalent among German and European practitioners, the article argues that Ranke did not function as a marker of a “Western” or “modern” way of doing history, as most previous accounts of his impact in Japan have asserted, but as a universally appropriable icon of a globalizing discipline.
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