Social Turbulence and Local Autonomy

Social Turbulence and Local Autonomy:Japanese Historians Interpret Chinese Social Groupings1 Kishimoto Mio (bio) Translated by Joshua A. Fogel Introduction About a century ago, around the time of the 1911 Revolution, China entered a period of radical change in political and social thought as it confronted institutional upheaval unprecedented over the previous two thousand years. This period was effectively the era in which Japanese historiography was shedding its embryonic post-Meiji Restoration incarnation and beginning to demonstrate signs of independent development. Historical research and current affairs-as well as research on Japanese history and research on Chinese history-mutually influenced and indeed stimulated topics raised by one another.2 While this phenomenon may have emerged because Japanese historiography was at an immature stage when specialization and fragmentation had not reached high tide, as they have now, at the same time we can nonetheless see, as one often finds in newly developing academic fields, that scholarly concerns were at once naïve and yet developing with considerable liveliness. In this essay I shall use the case of a Japanese historian who was affected by movements in Chinese society around the time of the 1911 Revolution as a clue to examine what impact a comparison of Japanese and Chinese society had on Japanese historiography at that time and subsequently. To be sure, inasmuch as I am not a specialist in Japanese history, I cannot evaluate whether the theses proposed by the historian at that time are valid or not. What I would like to assess here, rather, are what questions he raised and how widely these [End Page 119] questions ranged. Looking at this with our present-day endpoint of minutely detailed studies, the issues to be discussed below may seem rather reckless as a comparative framework. However, by focusing once again on the questions raised by historians of that earlier time with a fresh eye, perhaps we may be able to uncover a beginning for a fresh dialogue between Japanese and Chinese historical research at present, one hundred years later. China after the 1911 Revolution as Seen by Miura Hiroyuki Let me begin with an essay entitled Sengoku jidai no kokumin gikai ("Popular Assemblies in the Warring States Period")3 by Miura Hiroyuki (1871-1931),4 a scholar of Japanese history and professor in the Department of History at Kyoto Imperial University. This piece, written in February 1912, only a few months after the events of the 1911 Revolution, is widely known in the world of medieval Japanese studies as "a pioneering work of scholarship into the history of ikki movements in medieval Japan,"5 as well as "a monumental work which clarified the tradition of self-governance of our people."6 It was also well known to medieval Japanese historians that this essay was inspired by various groups-"protection associations" (baoan hui), "citizens' assemblies" (shimin hui),7 and the like-which were being formed in many places in China, calling for "independence" amid the unrest following the 1911 Revolution and striving for the restoration of local order. Thus, focusing on the historical significance of ikki in the Warring States era in Japan (the period from the middle of the fifteenth through the middle of the sixteenth century when wars were fought continuously by the daimyōs or feudal lords), Miura came upon a new idea for directions in subsequent scholarship. [End Page 120] The term ikki is probably familiar only to scholars of Japanese history, but it is an important historical expression with a complex meaning. Originally, the term ikki (pronounced yikui in Chinese) came from the Chinese classics and meant literally a "unified standard." From this it came to be used generally in the sense of "identical." In the English-speaking world at present, the expression ikki as used in the field of Japanese history is translated as "peasant rebellion" and is usually understood as something pointing to a movement of protest by peasants. This is primarily how it has been used for the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), and it has a broader meaning when applied to the Warring States era on which Miura was working. James W. White offers the following definition: "A spontaneous, special-purpose organization

Aesthetics · Autonomy · China · Historiography · Literature · Political science · Politics · Social change · Social science · Sociology · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

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