Rescuing the Nation from History: The State of the State in Early Modern Japan

Toby, Ronald P.; Ravina, Mark; Roberts, Luke S.

doi:10.2307/2668408

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Take, for example, the influence of ancient Chinese thought on the important kokueki developmentalist ideology that emerged in early eighteenth century Japan. Ronald Toby (2001) traces the origins of the word kokueki itself back to the Chinese thinker Sima Qian from the second and first century BCE who combined Confucianism with the goals of enriching the state and the people via the promotion of commerce, industry and agriculture. Pioneers of Japanese kokueki thought, such as Dazai Shundai (1680-1747), also drew on Shang Yang's idea of promoting 'a rich state and a strong army' (which was translated into Japanese as fukoku kyōhei).…”

Section: Influence In Japanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neglected Chinese Origins of East Asian Developmentalism

Helleiner

2021

New Political Economy

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East Asian developmentalism is often depicted as a derivative ideology with its origins in the diffusion of Western thought to the region, first to Japan after the 1868 Meiji Restoration and then to the rest of the region in the twentieth century following the Japanese example. Recent scholarship has challenged that perspective by highlighting important endogenous roots of the developmentalist ideology of Meiji Japan. This paper shows that Chinese developmentalism also has deep local origins in China's own intellectual history that long predated the importation of Western (and Japanese) political economy to the country in the early twentieth century. It also demonstrates that locally-originated Chinese developmentalist ideology diffused beyond China's borders in ways that influenced the emergence of 'developmental mindsets' elsewhere in the East Asia region in the nineteenth century, including in Meiji Japan. Rather than being a laggard in the regional embrace of developmentalist ideology diffusing from the West, China was a key source and exporter of this ideology to the region. For these reasons, Chinese thinkers deserve a more prominent place in histories of the origins of East Asian developmentalism, and of developmentalist thought in general.

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Section: Influence In Japanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neglected Chinese Origins of East Asian Developmentalism

Helleiner

2021

New Political Economy

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“…4 This is in contrast to those two empires that would come to be contiguous with Japan, those of China and Russia, who have both been beneficiaries of a flurry of studies of their early modern nature (Hostetler 2001;Perdue 2005;Burbank et al 2007) and incorporated into a wider effort to bring imperial formations from across Eurasia into contact with one another, under the rubric of global history (Subrahmanyam 1997;Calhoun et al 2006;Burbank and Cooper 2010). While opposition to the traditional view of Japan's early modern history associated with the notion of sakoku (Toby 1991;Walker 2002) has focussed attention on the position of Japan within this early globalization, this has largely centered upon questions of exchange, both cultural and economic (Makabe 2007;Hellyer 2009), and it remains most common to view Japan's early modern period in proto-national terms (Mitani 1997;Toby 2001;Berry 2006). While the fashion is for other early modern empires to be explicitly compared within a global framework, Tokugawa Japan has remained an outlier in this respect.…”

Section: Imperial Territorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Imperial Practice and the Making of Modern Japan's Territory: Towards a Reconsideration of Empire’s Boundaries

Boyle

2016

Geog. Rev. Japan B

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A renewed focus on the notion of empire has prompted an interest in questions of modern Japanese imperialism after the Meiji Restoration, both in Japan and abroad. It has also focused attention on the issue of comparing empires across Eurasia during the early modern period, under the rubric of 'global history'. Japan has not really been incorporated into this latter discussion. This article begins by examining the reasons for this lack of incorporation, before moving on to discuss the value of considering early modern Japan as an imperial formation. The lens it adopts is one of cartography, that quintessentially imperial practice that has featured heavily in discussions of a Eurasian early modernity. The article examines the cartographic incorporation of Japan's northern region of the Yezo into Japan itself, culminating in the area being newly designated as Hokkaido in the early Meiji period, the newest circuit within Imperial Japan's administrative map. This political outcome was the result of varied practices that found reflection across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. Yet this intense variety of practices, constantly shifting in response to contingency, served to form the state-effect, through which the land of Yezo was granted its unity and represented on the map. The territory on the map provided the visual, graphic representation of the demarcation of authority of the state that authorized the practice of its own mapping. In this manner, the state mapped itself into Hokkaido and from this perspective, the division between the early modern and modern eras is far less significant than is frequently assumed.

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“…Doak (1996Doak ( , 1997 undToby (2001). Letzterer nimmt die Unterscheidung von Staat und Nation in Bezug auf die politische Organisation der Tokugawa-Zeit vor und bezeichnet diese als "protonation"(Toby 2001: 227, 230).…”

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Staat, Nation und Familie: Zum Verhältnis von Feminismus und Nationalstaat in Japan, 1918–1945

Germer¹

2008

Japanstudien

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Rescuing the Nation from History: The State of the State in Early Modern Japan

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

Neglected Chinese Origins of East Asian Developmentalism

Neglected Chinese Origins of East Asian Developmentalism

Imperial Practice and the Making of Modern Japan's Territory: Towards a Reconsideration of Empire’s Boundaries

Staat, Nation und Familie: Zum Verhältnis von Feminismus und Nationalstaat in Japan, 1918–1945

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