Translating and Transforming ‘Race’: Early Meiji Period Textbooks

Abstract

Although it is an almost established understanding in European and North American literature that race is a social construct, the general academic and social discourses surrounding race in Japan remain outside this model. This can be traced back to school textbooks and geography books in the early Meiji period, after these concepts and words were translated and introduced from Europe and the United States. This article will examine passages related to race in textbooks from the first half of the Meiji period, in order to explore the continuities and discontinuities in the state of knowledge production surrounding race and racial discrimination in contemporary Japan. Investigating the usage of words in educational practice allows us to see how 'race' was a term that was located in a position different from that of other words, and how the Japanese transformed their racial position in relation to others. 1 See Yamamuro, Shis o kadai toshite no Ajia.

African presentations and Japanese discourses: the construction and projection of difference

“…In Japan, the terms jinshu (race) and minzoku (ethnicity) have been adopted from Western ideologies and applied domestically (Kawai 2015;Morris-Suzuki 1998;Takezawa 2015;Weiner 1997aWeiner , 1997b. While such terms have overlapped temporally, the use of jinshu was more dominant in the prewar context, whereas minzoku came to dominate the postwar context (Takezawa 2015). While the use of minzoku has waned, the concept still holds influence and has historically strongly influenced Japanese ideologies and discourses (Kawai 2018).…”

“…While the use of minzoku has waned, the concept still holds influence and has historically strongly influenced Japanese ideologies and discourses (Kawai 2018). Minzoku is thought to combine notions of nationhood, blood, and culture (Kawai 2015;Takezawa 2015;Weiner 1995). Tessa Morris-Suzuki notes that minzoku allows for "a convenient blurring between the cultural and genetic aspects of ethnicity, while emphasizing the organic unity of the Japanese people" (Morris-Suzuki 1998, 32).…”

“…Historically, these categories have been used to justify Japan's colonial expansion and to construct an image of Japan as competitive with the West (Morris-Suzuki 1998; Lie 2001). These appropriations were also used to transform Japan's own racial positionality in a world that was becoming increasingly conscious of racial discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kawai 2015, 27;Takezawa 2015). Yuko Kawai explains that Japanese ideologies define "the Japanese (Yamato or Nihon) minzoku" as a "racialized cultural group [that] was designed as more modernized, civilized, and superior to other Asian groups and thereby legitimizing Japanese colonization" (Kawai 2018, 295).…”

Bodies and borders in post-imperial Japan: a study of the coloniality of biometric power

“…Evolutionary theories and their application to human society were popularized in Japan during the late 1870s and 1880s (Weiner, 1995: 442-3) but these essentially Eurocentric thoughts were soon translated in accordance with Japan's imperial expansion. Like the earlier introduction of the ideas of race and racial hierarchy that were applied to construct the Japanese race and other Asian races (Nishiyama, 2015;Takezawa, 2015), social evolutionary theories were adopted by Japanese scientists in order to construct racial hierarchical differences within East Asia. Korean and Chinese fingerprints and palm prints were interpreted as the biological traits of their degeneracy in comparison not only with Europeans but also with the Japanese people (Miyake, 1923).…”

Ethnicity as a Political Resource

“…These classifications not only justified the superior social position of European colonizers with regard to Asian subordinates but also evolved into detailed subdivisions between the colonial subjects themselves, wherein the elite characterized 'tribes' and other marginalized groups as 'barbarian' and 'primitive'. In Japanese school textbooks during the Meiji period , the views of representative proponents of racial classification of the Enlightenment period such as Blumenbach and Cuvier were repeatedly introduced (Takezawa 2015).…”