Takahashi Tomio's Henkyō , the Universal Japanese Frontier (an Interpretation)

85 Translation Translated by Nathan Hopson Takahashi Tomio’s Henkyō, the Universal Japanese Frontier (an Interpretation) In 1979’s Henkyō: Mō hitotsu no Nihonshi (The Frontier: Another Japanese History), historianTakahashiTomio(1921–­2013)appliedFrederickJackson Turner’s frontier thesis to the history of ancient Japanese state formation . The frontier, in Japan’s case the East and Northeast (Tōhoku), was thought of as a savage outback forever failing to attain the level of culture and civilization of the putative centers of Japanese political, economic, and cultural history. Takahashi argued that statist historiography had distorted the shape of history. The frontier was not empty of culture and value; rather, the history of the frontier was the true locus of state formation , and the history of state formation was the history of the frontier. Center and periphery, colony and metropole, capital and frontier were mutually constitutive. They had to be, because as Christopher Chase-­Dunn and Thomas Hall (1997, 70) later put it, “a frontier is a social relationship worked out in space,” and any relationship includes mutual influence. As Turner’s western frontier had determined American national character, Takahashi held that the eastern frontier had determined the course of ancient Japanese history and the character of Japan itself. As Kuan-­Hsing Chen (1998, 7) has argued, following Françoise Vérges, Octave Mannoni’s 1950 ProsperoandCaliban:ThePsychologyofColonization was a landmark revealing “a relation of mutually constituted subjectivity” between colonizer and colonized. However, by and large, it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that it became commonplace to view the metropole–­ frontier/colony relationship in terms of mutual influence. The impact of this insight can be found in some of the most sophisticated and enlightening works on the colonial relationship. For example, Patricia Nelson Limerick (1988, 18), writing of the American case, noted that a similar dynamic was at work in both slavery and conquest. “Like slavery,” she 86 Translation argued, “conquest tested the ideals of the United States. Conquest deeply affected both the conqueror and the conquered, just as slavery shaped slaveholder and slave.” Ashish Nandy (1989, 38–­ 39) pointed to the ambivalent dialectic of mutual constitution in British colonial relations as expressed by authors including George Orwell. Catherine Hall (2002, 8) described the dynamic between British metropole and Jamaican colony as “mutually constitutive.” Peter Perdue’s (2005, 409–­61) account of Qing China’s westward expansion likewise emphasizes that the Qing Empire was defined in large part by its central Eurasian frontiers and the efforts to control and assimilate these new lands and people. Takahashi Tomio’s explorations of the frontier’s meaning in Japanese history, which began in the 1950s, were largely independent of this late twentieth-­ century scholarly turn in the West.1 Perhaps it is best to see this as an example of convergence, of similar phenomena arising independently of each other in different locations. If that is the case, Takahashi’s frontier thesis is remarkable for its precocity, as it seems to have anticipated an important scholarly trend in colonial and postcolonial studies since the 1980s. The intent of Henkyō was revolutionary. National history is, conventionally and by its nature, written from the inside (the “center”) out. It is often little more than the history of the self-­declared core, metastasized into the territories it claims as its own (Applegate 1999; Hopson 2017). In Henkyō, Takahashi inverts this conceit. Henkyō is not so much the history of the frontier as it is history from the frontier. On one hand, Takahashi (1973, 4) recognizes that in national history, “the West is the Center; the East is the Provinces, the Frontier.” On the other, he contends that the history of Japanese state formation is the history not of that western center but of the eastern frontier. The Center/centers of Japanese history have been so since the outset. But, according to Takahashi at least, the history of the early Japanese state was defined as much by the expansion of its political and cultural sphere into the frontiers as it was by anything that happened in the areas around Nara and Kyoto. Takahashi Tomio was not, by any stretch, a Japanese Frederick Jackson Turner. He was never as (in)famous

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