By the end of Japan's Meiji period (1868–1912), a conception of “Japanese spirit” as the unseen and ineffable essence that binds the Japanese people together as a “people” had emerged. Reformulations of this view today call to mind Japan's cultural revolt against the West during the first half of the twentieth century and its efforts then and now to embrace its past and preserve its timeless traditions in the face of Western cultural domination. Recent scholarship has critiqued this problematic view of a “people” (Japanese or otherwise) imbued with a spiritual essence and upholding timeless traditions, presenting “Japanese spirit” instead as a modern invention of tradition and as part of a narrative of Japanese identity constructed in contradistinction to an imagined “West.”Footnote ¹

But the marked attention to “spirit” in Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflects not merely a turning away from “the West” to embrace or invent past tradition. The heightened concern with spirit at this time did not mark the rehabilitation of a vanishing cultural essence, as many Meiji thinkers claimed. But neither was it a purely “Japanese” invention pieced together from traces of Japan's past. Even as Japanese thinkers reacted against “Western thought,” they drew heavily upon Western conceptions of spirit in the formation of Japan's own. Spirit's emergence in Japan—a modern discourse on spirit distinct from earlier configurations in prior decades—was tied to the availability of a broad, transnational ideology informed by German Romanticism and the idea of Volksgeist (folk spirit).Footnote ² This ideology of Geist (mind or spirit) associated most notably with the thought of J. G. Herder and G. W. F. Hegel had a tremendous impact on ideologies of nation and national folk, not only for the nineteenth-century German states but for many parts of the world both within and outside Europe and the “West,” including Japan. What role, then, did this broad ideology of Geist play in the formation of the “Japanese spirit”?

In addressing this question, I limit my focus primarily to scholars associated with mid- to late Meiji folk psychology and their investigations of the relationship between individual mind and folk mind/spirit. As this is a study of an “appropriation” of spirit (a term suggesting not a mere borrowing but a creative reformulation), I am concerned with how psychologists and others in Japan engaged with German Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology) to reconfigure the narrative of Geist, both its content and form, to suit their own needs. I approach this narrative as a story linking spirit, the folk, history, and culture. Spirit, the subject of this narrative, operated as a kind of “hidden essence”Footnote ³ that could be invoked to substantiate the integrity of the folk (allowing for a heterogeneous population to be thought of as a homogeneous ethnic “folk”), to position the folk hierarchically in opposition to “inferior” folk or “non-folk,” and to explain and provide corrections for social fragmentation (strikes, riots, and other forms of social discord explained as a besieged folk mind). As spirit unfolded through history, according to the broad contours of this narrative, it approached its telos: in the abstract, a subject–object unity, and in more concrete terms, the perfect identity of, for example, the cultural folk, its morality, and knowledge. Thus this narrative with spirit as its subject and perfect identity as its telos possessed a performative and explanatory power.

Of course, the specific content of this narrative of spirit—the particular folk in question (German, Japanese), its culture and character, the nature of the social fragmentation the folk sought to overcome, and so on—varied according to social context. In particular, the orientalist representations of East Asia and the Christian theology woven into European narratives of spirit were not conducive to establishing an authoritative narrative of spirit in Japan and were thus altered for the Japanese context. But even as this ideology of Geist was modified for Japanese consumption, the power of the narrative form was retained.Footnote ⁴ In short, I argue that Japanese psychologists appropriated the narrative form of Geist ideology, retaining its performative and explanatory power even as they altered its substance by divesting Völkerpsychologie of its orientalist and Christian content.

POSITING THE SOCIAL MIND

“Folk psychology” (kokumin/minzoku shinrigaku) emerged in Japan at the turn of the century as a branch of social psychology. This new discipline has received little attention in contemporary scholarship, yet it was an important avenue by which “spirit” (and associated concepts of mind and soul) came to be appropriated. Claiming to take “folk spirit” itself as its object of analysis and regarding all other disciplines as secondary or supplementary because they merely studied folk spirit's varied moral, literary, legal, or aesthetic manifestations, this discipline represented itself as the foundational discipline for all others. In particular, psychologists and educators in Germany and Japan put psychology forward as a field of study prior to and necessary for pedagogy. Psychology in Japan thus paralleled similar efforts in Germany to represent Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology) as a Grundwissenschaft or foundational discipline.Footnote ⁵ Psychologists and educators in Japan drew upon works of German and French psychology and pedagogy, translating, summarizing, and critiquing texts by J. F. Herbart, Gustav Lindner, Moritz Lazarus, Heymann (Hajim) Steinthal, Gustave Le Bon, and others. The psychology of these thinkers, in their translated and modified forms, became a part of the intellectual terrain of mid-Meiji Japan and therefore warrants the same close attention we would give to the works of Japanese thinkers themselves. Together with their Japanese interpreters, they contributed to a discourse on the “social mind.”

The psychological study of the social mind in Japan began with the appropriation of the works of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) through translation work, study-abroad activities of Japanese students in Germany, and the lectures of German scholars, such as Emil Hausknecht, at Tokyo Imperial University.Footnote ⁶ Herbart, a German psychologist, philosopher and scholar of pedagogy whose works had an enormous impact in mid-Meiji Japan, understood mental activity as an operation of contending mental forces (Vorstellungen).Footnote ⁷ Stronger mental forces, according to Herbart, could suppress the weaker forces, driving them below the threshold of consciousness. In his later works he began to present the mental activity of an individual's mind as a model for explaining social friction. As competing mental forces in the mind of an individual corresponded to competing forces of ideas in society, an understanding of the individual Geist could lead to an explanation of social conflict.Footnote ⁸ Herbart's disciples built upon this framework to theorize and naturalize the sociality of mind.

Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823–99), for example, sought to create a Völkerpsychologie, a psychology of the folk that would take Volksgeist itself as its object of study. Their attention to literature, poetry, folksongs, folktales, and language as manifestations of Geist reflects their debt to J. G. Herder who, though only one of many to contribute to a discourse on Volksgeist, is notable for his early and detailed statements of this theory. Moreover, Lazarus and Steinthal restated Herbart's theory of a connection between mind and society with greater clarity: “In the collective mind (Gesammtgeist) . . . the individual minds behave in just the same way as the particular Vorstellungen, or mental elements in general, behave within the individual mind.”Footnote ⁹

The works of Gustav A. Lindner (1828–87), particularly his Manual of Empirical Psychology as an Inductive Science, were also an important part of mid-Meiji psychology discourse. Chair of pedagogy, psychology and ethics at Prague University from 1878, Lindner drew upon the ideas of Herder, Lazarus, and especially Herbart. Lindner conceived of the social mind as a “we,” explaining that just as the ego (Japanese: ga) develops from the individual consciousness, so a “we” (Japanese: warera) develops from the social consciousness.Footnote ¹⁰ He linked this “collective We” to national or ethnic community.

In Japan, psychologists and sociologists strove to legitimize the existence of collective consciousness. Higuchi Hideo (1875–1929), for example, a sociologist trained at Tokyo Imperial University, declared, “the social mind [shakai shin-i] does exist,” and, “the essence of society is psychological.” Dissatisfied with psychology's focus on the individual mind, Higuchi and others (like educator Tokutani Toyonosuke) therefore called for a shift from individual psychology to a social psychology that studies social mind or social consciousness (zocha-ru beusutozain, soshiaru maindo, or shakai ishiki).Footnote ¹¹

Social psychology, then, in Herbart's nascent form, in the Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steindahl, and in its various other permutations in Japan, presented the possibility of explaining social forces and frictions on the basis of individual mental activity. Here in one respect we see the explanatory power of Geist ideology. These works of psychology helped to naturalize the existence of the “social mind”; that is, to present the “social mind” as a given, natural object rather than a performatively produced construct. Psychology's statements on the social mind were performative in the sense that these statements themselves, while appearing merely to describe an object (the social mind) already present to observation, in fact produced (as an ideological construction) this object. Drawing the boundaries of this object, however, remained a challenge.

MAPPING OF THE SOCIAL MIND: ESTABLISHING THE FOLK AND ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATION

If the social mind was now psychology's object of investigation, an explanation of its workings required that the object itself be clearly mapped out.Footnote ¹² Yet where precisely did the boundaries of the social mind lie? Should it be approached as any mental interaction of two or more minds, as a grouping of family members, members of a nation, an ethnic community? Mapping the social mind became a challenging problem for the discipline of social psychology but it also provided an opportunity to trace the boundaries of the social mind in such a way as to encompass the mind or sprit of the Japanese folk. Of course, neither the social nor the folk mind was an object awaiting discovery and delineation, as Japanese psychologists presupposed; rather, they were objects produced through the practice of mapping. Thus I use the term “mapping” to refer to Meiji psychologists’ ostensibly innocent efforts to “discover” the boundaries of the social and folk minds. But I emphasize that this was a political project in which ideologies of Japanese character were projected geographically in an effort to imagine national, ethnic, and cultural lines of inclusion and exclusion.Footnote ¹³ Mapping involved an effort to describe an intellectual space by defining what lay outside it (the essentialized “characteristics” of the other) as much as what lay within it (the “unique characteristics” of the folk). In other words, mapping was a project to establish the integrity of the folk, to verify that the people living together in the Japanese archipelago could and should be thought of as a unitary ethnic folk rather than as a diverse and divided population.Footnote ¹⁴

A broad range of terms in Japanese, German, French, and English emerged to conceptualize the space of the social mind. Yamato damashii (“soul of Japan”), an old term now carrying a new semantic weight, began to appear with much greater frequency from the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5. The German term Volksgeist began to appear in dictionaries and as a furigana gloss for kokumin seishin at about the same time. Shakai ishiki (glossed as “social consciousness”) came to be linked to the idea of a collective “We” (warera) of the ethnic nation or to the “Japanese self” (Nihonga). “Collective soul” was yet another expression said to correspond to social mind. But as this list indicates and despite the variability in terms, a broad semantic space of social mind as Japanese ethnic or national mind was beginning to form.Footnote ¹⁵

Psychologists in Japan, explicitly linking their work to the Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal, maintained that the study of the social mind required research on the folk mind. Tokutani, for example, argued, “although the folk mind is but one part of the general social mind . . . there can be no doubt that the psychological interpretation of a folk's characteristics . . . will make a great contribution to the general investigation of the social mind.”Footnote ¹⁶ Ômichi Waichi and Higuchi Hideo took a similar view.Footnote ¹⁷ The proper subfield for investigating the folk mind, they reasoned, was minzoku-shinrigaku, a psychology of the folk.

But the effort to map spirit was not confined to psychologists. Kuga Katsunan (1857–1907), journalist and founder of the daily newspaper Nihon, spoke of the need to restore and exalt the “folk spirit” (kokumin seishin) of Japan, which he understood in terms of Japan's “unbroken line of imperial rulers.”Footnote ¹⁸ Kuga drew upon J. G. Fichte's “Addresses to the German Nation” on the German folk spirit and the German national character, delivered during the winter of 1807–8 in French-occupied Berlin. For Kuga, Fichte's address made clear that national power and stability are closely tied to a nation's folk spirit and the unity it sustains. Kuga was equally impressed by the thought of Joseph de Maistre, whose “On Sovereignty” he translated in 1885 and from which he quoted approvingly.Footnote ¹⁹ “Nations,” de Maistre stated, “have a general soul and a true moral unity which makes them what they are. This unity is evidenced above all by language . . . When one talks of the spirit of a nation, the expression is not so metaphorical as is believed.”Footnote ²⁰ Conceptions of spirit and national character also run throughout the writings of literary critic Takayama Chogyû (1871–1902). In his “Japanism” and “On Unifying the Folk Spirit,” for example, both from 1897, Chogyû drew upon the thought of Herder, discussed the “Yamato folk,” and used the German Geist as a gloss for seishin.Footnote ²¹ The writings of Fichte, de Maistre, and Herder, in translation, helped to naturalize the idea of folk spirit in Japan. And as the conception of folk spirit became more embedded in the intellectual landscape, scholars of ethics, literature, and law made this concept an integral part of their respective academic disciplines then emerging: folk morality, folk literature, and the historical school of law. But because narratives of spirit presented a teleological unfolding of spirit, it was possible for certain folk to possess a more “developed” spirit than others. Indeed, according to these narratives, some social groups lacked spirit altogether and consequently fell outside the category of folk. Thus mapping was also a project of orientalist representation. The “development” of spirit and the existence of “non-folk” enabled the orientalist representations that were a part of narratives of spirit.Footnote ²²

Efforts to establish the integrity of the folk as a folk—in both Germany and Japan—relied upon assertions of ontological distinctions between self and other so as to position the folk hierarchically in opposition to an inferior other.Footnote ²³ For the majority of European thinkers who turned their attention to the Orient in the nineteenth century, the Orient served as an “other” against which to define and elevate the Occident. Though neither Herder nor Hegel referred specifically to Japan, their observations on China—their critical comments on the Chinese polity, its emperor, and Confucian morality, for example—were certainly a concern for Japan.

Herder, for example, viewed China as static and infantile. The Chinese empire, he said, had the “internal circulation of a dormouse in its winter sleep” and was governed by “unalterably childish institutions.”Footnote ²⁴ And Hegel, speaking of the “character of the Chinese people,” wrote, “its distinguishing feature is, that everything which belongs to Spirit . . . is alien to it.” He found in the thought of Confucius a “circuitousness . . . which prevents it from rising above mediocrity,” and in Chinese society a “great immorality.” Not merely mediocre in its morality, China for Hegel had no moral standpoint at all. The Oriental world, in fact, was deficient in “personality”: the peoples of the Orient, in other words, lacked subjectivity, they lacked the capacity for self-determination and moral judgment. “The moral standpoint,” Hegel concluded, “is [therefore] thoroughly obliterated.” There can be no morality without personality.Footnote ²⁵ All this while proclaiming, “the Germanic spirit is the spirit of the new world.”Footnote ²⁶ For Japanese thinkers seeking to assert the Confucian virtues of loyalty and filial piety as the very essence of Japan's folk spirit, Hegel's assertions posed a problem. We see this quite clearly in the exchange between astronomer and part-time orientalist Percival Lowell, who drew on Hegel to proclaim the Orient deficient in personality and therefore culturally inferior, and moral philosopher at Tokyo Imperial University Nakashima Rikizô, who sought to defend Japan's capacity for spirit.Footnote ²⁷

Lazarus and Steinthal, though not opposing the Germanic spirit to that of the Orient, equally relied upon a self/other opposition in their conceptualization of Volksgeist. “The whole self-consciousness of a nation in all of its members,” Lazarus insisted, “rests on its being distinct from other nations.”Footnote ²⁸ For Lazarus and Steinthal, such distinctions were to be found within Europe. They described the Germanic Volksgeist as possessing a cultural creativity devoid in other societies: “one must not forget, with regard to the unity of the national spirits in the Middle Ages, that this unity rested on the unity of the Germanic tribes. Every creative cultural force of the European Middle Ages was Germanic—not Iberian, not Celtic.”Footnote ²⁹ This knowledge of the self was produced within an ideology of spirit by way of opposition to others (a hierarchical positioning). The formation of a Japanese narrative of the folk equally relied upon a knowledge of the self by way of the other. But because the “West” as other positioned Japan as inferior, it became necessary to contest this cultural hierarchy.

Some Japanese thinkers who drew upon Romanticism and Geist simply omitted such orientalizing statements when they summarized or translated Hegel, Herder, and others.Footnote ³⁰ Others, like Nakashima Rikizô, mentioned above, contested orientalism more actively. But Geist carried multivalent connotations, not all of which reinforced the notion of European superiority. Herder, for example, despite his statements on the Orient as static and infantile, asserted elsewhere that no claim to superiority of one folk over another could be upheld because each moved within its own innate and particular genius (Geist).Footnote ³¹Volksgeist, then, was useful to Japan because of its potential to disrupt the West's claims to civilizational superiority. Japan could concede the West's superiority in scientific knowledge and technological innovation, but the worth of a people's inner spirit, the argument went, could not be so easily gauged or evaluated. Herder's thought had become a part of Japan's intellectual landscape at least by the early 1890s. Speaking for the late eighteenth-century German states, Herder contested France's claims to superior civilization by valorizing the German Volksgeist, the cultural spirit of the German folk.Footnote ³² Japan too, through its appropriation of the discourse on Volksgeist, asserted its own folk spirit and embarked upon a similar path of contesting the idea of “civilization,” its hierarchies, and its putatively universal telos (the “fully civilized” society defined by the West) towards which all societies supposedly advanced. Spirit, then, as a collective essence of the Japanese folk, was to function as a means to circumvent the West's orientalist claims to civilizational superiority. But German thought was not the only source informing Meiji Japan's discourse on spirit.

Japanese psychologists at the turn of the century also took a deep interest in the work of Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist whose reputation in Europe and the United States grew with the publication of his Lois psychologique de l'évolution des peuples (translated three times into Japanese between 1900 and 1910). Le Bon's own brand of folk psychology presented the space of the social mind as “collective souls of peoples.” “Each people,” stated Le Bon, “possesses a mental constitution as unfaltering as its anatomical characteristics, a constitution which is the source of its sentiments, thought, institutions, beliefs and arts.”Footnote ³³ This “mental constitution” is the people's soul; sentiments and beliefs are its manifestations and form the “character” of the race. “This aggregate of psychological elements observable in all the individuals of a race constitutes what may rightly be called the national character.”Footnote ³⁴ As the above shows, Le Bon's discussion of the souls of peoples (l'âme des peuples) and its expressive forms was remarkably similar to that of Herder, Lazarus, and Steinthal, although he nowhere mentions them by name. This connection was not lost on Le Bon's Japanese interpreters, one of whom in his translation of Le Bon's text provided a preface situating Le Bon's thought in the context of Lazarus, Steinthal and Völkerpsychologie.Footnote ³⁵

But Le Bon's “psychology of peoples” also contained a disparaging orientalism, much of it targeting Japan directly. Le Bon outlined a psychological classification of races, dividing humanity into four groups: the primitive, inferior, intermediate, and superior races. Primitives, he maintained, are devoid of culture, and inferior races remain mired in barbarism. Only the Indo-Europeans qualify as the superior races. “They alone have been capable of great inventions in the arts, the sciences, and industry,” attaining the highest level of civilization. The Japanese fell into the “intermediate” category, together with the Chinese and Mongolians.Footnote ³⁶ Maeda Chôta's 1910 translation of this work retained the overall orientalist framework, but edited out all references to Japan.Footnote ³⁷

Elsewhere in this work Le Bon discussed the futility of an intermediate race attempting to adopt the arts of superior races, arguing, “the arts of the different peoples correspond to a certain mental constitution” and cannot “pass indifferently from one people to another.”Footnote ³⁸ Essentially, his argument was to lock the various non-superior races into their inferior positions, never to join the ranks of their “superiors.” He provided “the example of Japan” to illustrate the “contradictions presented by the peoples which have changed their religions, languages, and arts.” (This, incidentally, was a section heading that was edited out of the Japanese version's table of contents.) Writing at the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5, Le Bon criticized those who accorded a level of civilization to Japan because of its military triumphs, “achieved at the expense of mere barbarians.” “It is possible,” he wrote,

Not surprisingly, this passage, too, is edited out of the Japanese version. Le Bon's point is quite clear: the Japanese race is handicapped by its mental inferiority. Try as it might to acquire “the arts” of Western civilization, it will at best attain a superficial approximation.

Such a blatant orientalist text was selected for translation not once but three times during the late Meiji period because it provided a useful framework for demarcating the social mind as folk soul. Le Bon's psychological classification of races offered legitimacy to Japan's claims about its own ethnicity, which came to be upheld in opposition to the “culture-less” “non-ethnicities” of Hokkaidô and Taiwan. Once the orientalist content directed specifically at Japan had been edited away, Le Bon's orientalizing gaze could be redirected toward Japan's neighbors.Footnote ⁴⁰ Works of social psychology and textbooks for the Teachers’ Colleges employed such a strategy. Central to its effectiveness was a careful differentiation between two semantically unstable terms: kokumin and minzoku.Footnote ⁴¹

In a textbook by legal scholar Soeda Juichi—intended primarily for middle-school students, but to be read, the author hoped, by students and teachers at the Teachers’ Colleges and the public generally—we see how this strategy is put to pedagogical use. Soeda, in this 1901 textbook, sought to clarify the distinctions between a political or civic community (kokumin) and an ethnic community (minzoku). He defined the former as “the people who live together under the state” and the latter as “those who share the same race, religion, manners, customs and language.” It makes no difference, he claimed, whether a given minzoku is grouped together under the same state; after all, the British and the Americans, he pointed out, are “one and the same minzoku” even though they occupy two different states. Yet, according to Soeda, although kokumin and minzoku are two discrete entities, in the case of Japan the two overlapped. “In our country,” he stated, “the kokumin and the minzoku are “of the same body.” This meant that Japan's civic community enjoyed the homogeneity of minzoku—common race, religion, customs, and language. But not all countries were as fortunate. “Unhappily,” Soeda continued, “in cases where there are different races within a given civic community, the concord of thought and an agreement of interests become truly unlikely.” In such countries, he predicted, “friction within the state will emerge and rebellion will brew.”Footnote ⁴² Incidentally, this is precisely what Japan experienced in late Meiji. Yet Soeda, by emphasizing unity, commonality, and concord, sought to move the thought of diversity and struggle, to paraphrase Herbart, below “the threshold of consciousness.” The idea of minzoku itself becomes, as it joins with spirit and national character, the stronger Vorstellungen or social force, at least in Soeda's argument. Soeda positioned Japan favorably vis-à-vis the West through his prediction of rebellion and social fragmentation for civic communities of mixed races. Here, his prediction is aimed at Western societies; Japan was to be spared such a fate. He sought to position the Japanese ethnic folk hierarchically in opposition to an inferior other, just as European architects of folk narratives did, but here the content has clearly been altered and the hierarchies reversed.

Like Soeda, Ômichi made use of the same strategy: clarifying the boundaries of folk mind by differentiating ethnic (minzoku) from civic (kokumin) groups. He categorized the Ainu (one of Japan's ethnic minorities) and the “former Chinese” and the aboriginal people of Taiwan (a Japanese colony since 1895) as Japanese kokumin; they did not qualify as Japanese minzoku.Footnote ⁴³ Echoing Le Bon's claim above, Ômichi explained that the Ainu and aboriginal people of Taiwan are people “without a culture” (mibunka) and that such people are not called minzoku. Indeed, this placed them in the lowest of Le Bon's categories: primitives. Minzoku, Ômichi explained, referred to a “cultural grouping” (bunka kyôdô).Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus Le Bon, Soeda, and Ômichi each formed their conceptions of minzoku by relying upon a common conceptual vocabulary of ethnic community and common cultural productions.

Lindner, in his Manual of Empirical Psychology, also struggled with the issue of demarcating the boundaries of the social mind. As mentioned above, he conceived of the social mind as a “we.” “‘We Germans’—‘We Americans’—‘We Slavs’ . . . The fate of the nation is, then, his fate; its mighty deeds, its history, its future, he makes a part of himself.”Footnote ⁴⁵ For Lindner, while the national/ethnic “we” is not the only possible form of the social mind, it had become, he said, increasingly dominant in modern times. “Since the discovery of printing . . . and in particular on account of the spread of modern means of communication . . . the national “we” [Japanese: kokumin teki warera] has had an enormous development.”Footnote ⁴⁶ And if Lindner's “social we” implied not merely the civic nation but the “ethnic nation” (he referred to community defined by common “language, customs, and ceremonies”), we find a more explicit example in the works of Endô Ryûkichi.

Endô Ryûkichi (1874–1946), a sociologist, educator, and lecturer at Tokyo Higher Teachers’ College, asked, “Do we as Japanese possess some kind of consciousness in regard to Japan?” Though it would seem, he argued, that each person is different, Japanese—like Chinese, Englishmen, and others—do indeed possess a kind of social “self.” For this common consciousness, Endô used a term reminiscent of Lindner's “we” (ga): he called it Nihon ga (the “Japanese self”). His larger purpose in this work is illustrated in a chapter titled “Japan's Spiritual Independence.” Here, Endô explained that both the West and the Orient have strengths and particular characteristics, but that it is extremely important to distinguish between the two. The strengths of the West should not be understood in terms of its underlying character. This logic allowed Endô to conclude that Japan can adopt the strengths of the West without simultaneously adopting their character, and indeed, without losing the character of Japan. Where Le Bon saw the superficial “varnish of European civilization,” Endô saw a deeply rooted “Japanese self” overlain with “strengths” (of science and technology) that could be skillfully used by any people. And with regard to the social mind, Endô asserted that “it is the particular characteristic of our country that the individual and social minds are in cooperative accord . . . we use the term social self or Japanese self in regard to the consciousness we have of a ‘self’ [ga] when we speak of our customs [waga shukan], our ethics [waga rinri], and so forth.” Endô's claims illustrate a move from the social mind of social psychology to national-character discourse and a conception of mind in terms of the commonalities of minzoku.Footnote ⁴⁷

As the above illustrates, folk mind in Japan emerged through the careful mapping of social mind. Once social mind came to be naturalized as a given object, it remained to show where its boundaries should be drawn. Though various potential boundaries came to be suggested (such as the mental interaction of two or more people, the family, and so on) it was the social mind as ethnic folk mind that dominated. Demarcating folk mind's boundaries involved efforts to outline Japan's unique national characteristics and institutions and to redirect the West's orientalist representations either to Japan's neighbors in East Asia or back to the West. It was not only psychologists who sought to demarcate the social mind in this way; educators, sociologists, journalists, and others contributed to this project as well. Yet they too drew upon psychology's theories of the social mind to legitimize their arguments. Together they produced an ideology of a unitary folk mind, legitimizing it through the tautological argument that the folk's cultural productions confirmed the folk mind from which they emanated while the folk mind provided the reassurance that these cultural productions belonged to the Japanese folk. This step from social mind, where sociality had been defined by some as the interaction of two or more individual minds, to “Japanese mind” is an important marker in the emergence of Meiji identity narratives of national character and folk soul. But this space of sociality demarcated by the Japanese ethnicity and its supposedly shared cultural forms was threatened, many believed, by a range of social disruptions. The “collective soul” of Japan was imperiled.

THE IMPERILED COLLECTIVE SOUL AND THE REGULATION OF THE FOLK MIND

“Socialism,” wrote Gustav Le Bon in 1895, “appears to-day to be the gravest of the dangers that threaten the European peoples.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Many in Japan saw a similar threat to their own country. The late Meiji period is replete with statements condemning socialism and other forms of “dangerous thought,” including individualism, feminism, and anarchism. In 1910, legal scholar Hozumi Yatsuka and former prime minister Yamagata Aritomo warned of “socialists who strive to the utmost to destroy the foundations for state-society's existence.” Socialist activists’ demands for political power, food and clothing, and an equitable division of wealth, they argued, must be resisted. The survival of the state itself demanded the regulation of those afflicted by the “disease” of socialism.Footnote ⁴⁹

In Rubon-shi minzoku shinrigaku and other late Meiji translations of Le Bon's Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples, the author (and translator) proclaim that when there is a high degree of commonality in sentiments, interests, and beliefs among a people, it will not easily be divided by social dissension. When these bases of the soul fragment, however, “peoples begin to break up.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Yamagata and Hozumi's critique of socialism provides little indication of an agreement of sentiments, interests, and beliefs among the Japanese, nor of a unified Japanese “self,” “collective mind,” or “folk spirit.” It reflects, rather, divergent political views and aims, violent class struggle, ideological tension, and a desire (articulated here as the eradication of a disease) to annihilate the social forces that threatened the state. For Japan, this was indeed a time of strikes, riots, and political upheaval. Some of the more significant episodes of conflict were the Hibiya Park Riots in Tokyo following the conclusion of Japan's war with Russia in 1905, the Red Flag Incident of 1908 involving a clash between police and proponents of anarcho-communism, the execution of twelve activists convicted of plotting to assassinate the emperor in the so-called High Treason Incident of 1911, and the Taishô Political Crisis of 1913 when tens of thousands of people opposed to the current Katsura administration rioted across the country, setting fire to police boxes and the offices of pro-government newspapers.Footnote ⁵¹

The danger of such severe social discord, according to Le Bon's warning and for his Japanese interpreters, was not simply a threat to social order or to the authority of the state; for many in Japan Le Bon's message called attention to the precarious, imperiled condition of its collective soul. A loss of foundational principles, a deterioration of character, a questioning of established beliefs: this, Le Bon argued, would result in the fragmentation of the collective soul and the destruction of a people.Footnote ⁵² For Lazarus as well, the concern was not merely the formation and development of Volksgeist, but also the potential “dissolution of peoples” (Untergang eines Volkes):

Lazarus maintained that the strength of the folk spirit stems from the extent to which such a spirit is collectively internalized. “All,” he stated, “must recognize their identity with the nation as the content of their being and the essential element of themselves.”Footnote ⁵⁴ But to attain such hegemonic authority for national identity, the folk soul needed to be regulated.

By the 1890s, Japan's state-directed education clearly aimed to disseminate an ideology of patriotic loyalty and to produce dutiful and obedient subjects. The “Explanation of School Matters” (Gakuji setsumeisho) issued by the Ministry of Education in 1891 outlined educational policy as the cultivation of “good and loyal subjects.” Emphasizing national spirit and customs, a spirit of reverence for the emperor, and patriotism, it called for a pedagogy that will follow “Japan's distinctive way.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Education and psychology were closely intertwined in a way that linked the making of loyal subjects, the pedagogy of Herbart and Lindner, and the regulation of the social mind.

Tokutani Toyonosuke noted in 1906 that scholars of social pedagogy had begun to apply the principles of social psychology to education.Footnote ⁵⁶ In fact, we see such a trend from the early 1890s with the introduction of Lindner's pedagogy. This made perfect sense for many educators, who viewed the two disciplines as closely intertwined. Tsukahara Masaji's Educational Psychology of 1898, for example, upheld psychology as the foundation for education. For Tsukahara, no other discipline had as close a relationship with psychology as pedagogy. For this reason, he argued, educators must have a clear understanding of the principles that govern mental activity.Footnote ⁵⁷ Herbartian educator Kuroda Teiji made similar claims: “Psychology is the root of all the other disciplines and, moreover, the most necessary of sciences.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Tominaga Iwatarô entitled his book Psychology as the Foundation for Education.Footnote ⁵⁹ Time and again, from mid-Meiji through the early twentieth century, educators, sociologists and psychologists emphasized the inseparable nature of pedagogy and psychology. The study of the mind and its cultivation (or regulation) went hand in hand.

By the mid-Meiji period, Herbartian-style pedagogy, as with its psychology, had come to be widely disseminated and put into practice.Footnote ⁶⁰ The purpose of this pedagogy was to transform a child's individuality, understood as a potential unique to each person, into “character.”Footnote ⁶¹ Such transformation, carried out through moral training, required the shaping of volition (explained as mental events that involve a “willing” and that initiate action), and Herbart provided five key ethical concepts for this purpose: inner freedom, perfection, benevolence, justice, and equity. Volition, according to Herbart, arises from various emotional states (feelings and desires), which in turn emerge out of the basic mental forces (Vorstellungen).Footnote ⁶² The educator's task was to help the pupil form a positive association among particular Vorstellungen and particular emotional states, and to link these to a particular act of volition. In other words, the educator regulates Vorstellungen and volitions, and thereby regulates a pupil's actions as well. Over time, and with repetition, a habit of volition becomes ingrained in the mind. “The oftener an identical act of volition is repeated, the stronger becomes the single volition, and soon a habit of definite action is formed, a habit, from which, if it has been fostered sufficiently long, we cannot loose ourselves.” “He who in youth is trained to give drink to the thirsty, food to the hungry, etc., will develop a habit of volition that is in harmony with this general volition.”Footnote ⁶³ Eventually, each time an action is required or performed, the same pattern of Vorstellungen, emotional states, and volition will come to the forefront of consciousness. The Herbartian educator, by relying upon and instilling the five moral concepts, acted “as an engineer whose job was to systematically direct the course of [a child's] development and to mold the child's character,”Footnote ⁶⁴ and moral character, according to Herbart, is the state in which ethical principles “dominate the entire individual volition.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Herbart's pedagogy, then, called for a performativity of sorts, for repetitive and routinized action that becomes internalized in the pupil's mind. And as the individual mind was upheld as a model for the social mind, education's larger goal was to direct or regulate social Vorstellungen and “social volition.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The performative regulation of the social mind took the form, for example, of daily recitations in classrooms across the country of the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890, an official pronouncement demanding obedience and self-sacrifice from all Japanese subjects.

Thus pedagogy during the mid- to late Meiji period, grounded in prevailing psychological theories, was a crucial means for regulating and “improving” the social mind.Footnote ⁶⁷ Pedagogy functioned to regulate Christianity, socialism, anarchism and other modes of thought deemed antithetical to the well-ordered folk mind—ideological currents social psychologists called social Vorstellungen but known more generally outside this discipline as “dangerous thought”—by regulating the Vorstellungen and volition of individual minds. These pedagogical techniques and aims of the Herbartian school held a ready and clear application to Japan's own pedagogical goals. Other features of this school, however, were deemed entirely unacceptable for Japan's educational environment.

SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

German psychological and pedagogical theories of mind were deeply interwoven with Christian theology. The psychology and pedagogy of Herbart and his followers were replete with references to the lives of Jesus and Luther, divine Providence, the immortal human soul, and God. Moral laws were explained as the “will of God” and education was directed ultimately to accustom the pupil “to regular religious worship” such that the exercise of “the religious sense” would belong to “the diet of life.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Christianity was also integral to Hegel's extremely influential conceptualization of Geist. He concluded his Philosophy of History (translated into Japanese in 1894) by emphasizing the all-important place of God in the unfolding of spirit:

This brief statement asserts that spirit, rendered as seirei (spirit/soul) in Japanese, and its realization are a confirmation of God. Without God, no spirit. Of course, Hegel's position on Christianity has been a matter of rival interpretations. He becomes, in the hands of different interpreters, either an astute apologist for Christianity or a critic.Footnote ⁷⁰ My purpose here, however, is not to question whether Hegel was or was not a “Christian,” but to illustrate the extent to which his understanding of spirit was informed by an engagement with Christian theology. Charles Taylor describes Christianity in Hegel's works as “a vehicle of his own philosophy,” albeit one that had been “systematically reinterpreted.” And W. C. Dowling argues that Hegel understood his own “avowedly theological” project as “a regrounding of Christian revelation” such that his narrative of spirit parallels the narrative of “God brooding over the abyss,” “Creation,” and “Apocalypse.”Footnote ⁷¹ Obviously, this brief account cannot do justice to the vast range of statements on Geist in nineteenth-century Germany, but it is suggestive at least of Geist's Christian overtones in the fields of psychology and philosophy with which Japanese thinkers engaged.

But many in Japan saw in Christianity a threat to social order and state authority as great as socialism. For the majority of the architects of Japan's folk spirit, Christianity was an inappropriate, even dangerous and foreign, teaching that was incompatible with the folk spirit of Japan. Le Bon's view that a new religion cannot be absorbed without risking the destruction of a people's soul was shared by moral philosopher Inoue Tetsujirô and all who sided with him in the so-called “collision between education and religion” of the the early 1890s, a state-sponsored movement to delegitimize and suppress Christianity in Japan. The psychological theory associated with Herbart of individual mind and its contending Vorstellungen as parallel to and microcosm for social mind provided a necessary explanatory model as well as a starting point for the pedagogical regulation of social mind. It was too valuable to simply disregard, yet too “Christian” to adopt unaltered. As with the case of Le Bon's orientalism discussed above, the Christian content in these works had first to be removed before they could become a basis for Japanese pedagogy and the regulation of Japan's collective soul.

The editing out of Christianity from Herbartian texts is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Yuhara Motoichi's translation of a work by one of Herbart's leading disciples, Gustav Lindner. In 1893, Yuhara, at this time a teacher at the Kôdo Chûgakko in Yamaguchi prefecture, translated and published selections from Lindner's Allgemeine Erziehungslehre (Teachings on General Education, 1877), a work Lindner produced under the direction of the Austrian Board of Education for use as pedagogical instruction in the teachers’ colleges. In the seven or eight years following its publication in Japan, roughly eighty percent of the teachers’ colleges throughout the country adopted it as a textbook. As Lindner's work was an explication of Herbart's pedagogy, Yuhara's translation encouraged the spread of Herubaruto-shugi (“Herbartism”).Footnote ⁷² In his preface to this translation, Yuhara noted important alterations he had made to the original:

For Yuhara, Western pedagogical theory was based on universal principles, but when these principles were put into practice, allowances had to be made for cultural differences:

In short, Yuhara judged Herbartian pedagogical principles to be sound, but rejected their underlying Christian foundation.

Yuhara noted that in Lindner's text, there were a number of discussions concerning prayer to God. In fact, the pedagogical works of Herbart and Lindner included “character-forming material” based on stories of the life of Christ and Luther, Biblical poetry, the Acts of the Apostles, and so on.Footnote ⁷⁴ These sections, Yuhara stated, have “not an inch of benefit” for Japanese scholars of education. He therefore omitted them. In their place, he added discussions of “the morality unique to Japan.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Specifically, biblical references in Lindner's text, as well as sample lessons concerning European history, were omitted, and replaced with excerpts from and explanations of the Imperial Rescript on Education and stories from Japanese history. He replaced the five moral concepts put forward by Herbart and retained by Lindner with the “five cardinal Confucian virtues” (justice, politeness, wisdom, fidelity, and benevolence). References to God he replaced with “Emperor” (tennô). Historian Takeda Kiyoko sums up this process:

Yuhara's translation, then, functioned to regulate Christianity. Yuhara himself, through his translation practice, played the role of the Herbartian educator by shaping which ideas or social forces would be available to the social mind.

Yet Christianity could not so easily be edited away. The effort to regulate the forces of the social mind intensified during the well-known conflict between education and religion, or, more precisely, between the state's pedagogical agenda and Christianity, of the early 1890s. Though tension between the state and Christianity clearly existed earlier in the Meiji period, Uchimura Kanzô, the Christian evangelist and instructor at the First Higher School in Tokyo, set off a heated debate when he chose not to bow before the Imperial Rescript on Education during a school ceremony in 1891. Although he later accepted that bowing to the Rescript would not violate his religious commitments as a Christian, Uchimura's act was viewed as lese-majesty since the Rescript was issued as the emperor's own pronouncement on virtuous conduct for Japanese subjects. As a result he was suspended from his teaching position. Meanwhile, Christianity's detractors (conservative scholar Inoue Tetsujirô most notably) denounced Christianity with its ultimate loyalty to God as incompatible with the Rescript's demand for complete loyalty to the state.Footnote ⁷⁷

The attack on Christianity, however, went beyond its putative conflict with the Rescript and loyalty. Inoue Tetsujirô attacked Christianity as incompatible not only with the Rescript, but with civilization, science, and progress.Footnote ⁷⁸ “It is extremely difficult to invite Jesus into our country,” Inoue argued, “as it is one which practices the sciences.” Moreover, because Christianity, according to Inoue, was a superstition, it was an impediment to progress. “If we are to pursue progress,” Inoue asserted, “we must destroy superstition.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Takayama Chogyû was equally critical of religion, arguing that it ran counter to the character of the Japanese folk. He spoke of “the pathological [byôteki] phenomenon of the human mind known as religion” and called for a psychology of religion to clarify the psychological basis of such superstitions.Footnote ⁸⁰ Here too, then, psychology is recognized as a potential arbiter of healthy social forces, as the appropriate discipline for differentiating ideas that are and are not suitable for the Japanese mind. Moreover, Inoue and Takayama's labeling of Christian belief as a superstition indicates an understanding of Christianity as a product of mind, or, more specifically, of a mind gone astray.

Inoue and Takayama's critique of Christianity operated through a claim to occupy a space of science, rationality, and progress. In this sense, they sought to distance themselves from superstitions and religion. But despite their pretensions to scientific rationality, the position they defended, that of “folk spirit,” closely paralleled Uchimura's in that both drew upon a kind of “hidden essence” for its explanatory power. While Inoue and Takayama laid claim to science and rationality as a way to critique Christianity's superstitious presupposition of an “unseen” God, they themselves presupposed the “unseen essence” of folk spirit. Christianity was the target of such hostility not because it was truly at odds with Inoue's position (i.e. an irrational superstition at odds with the rational, progressive, scientific state), but because it functioned as a kind of mirror reflecting back the ideological features of Inoue's own position and because it was in competition with the state for the authority to demarcate and speak for spirit and its content. This conflict between education and religion, then, between the state and Christianity, concerned not merely the separation of religion from politics and the question of where Christianity's ultimate loyalties lay; it was an ideological struggle for the hegemonic authority to define “spirit.”

But Uchimura too turned to psychology to argue his position. He called attention to this reworking of Herbart's thought in translations like Yuhara's discussed above. In his 1903 article “The Great Difficulty Facing Japan,” Uchimura argued that by adopting the Christian civilization of the West without Christianity, Japan was making an enormous mistake. “This is the root of all our difficulties today . . . The Japanese people have adopted a Christian civilization, but refuse to accept Christianity which is its very base, origin, and the spirit and life-giver of that civilization.” He linked the possibility of responsibility, an ever-pressing matter for the state in its efforts to produce dutiful subjects, to Christian belief:

Here, Uchimura claimed that Christianity is necessary if social responsibility is to be effectively inculcated in the Japanese subject. “What the Japanese educators have done is to delete the word God as written by Herbart and to replace it with the word Emperor, on the ground that the word God does not fit in our national polity.” This he called a “sin of deception.” He further claimed that without Christianity, Christ, and Christian-style education, there can be no order in society, only greed and corruption among leaders, a lack of freedom, no great creativity and advances in science, and no expansions in mankind's intellectual horizons. “A body that lacks soul,” he concluded, “is impossible to manage.” Uchimura's crucial point concerning Herbart's thought was that it was inextricably bound to Christianity. He argued that by removing its Christian elements, not only was a disservice done to the integrity of Herbart's psychology and pedagogy, but also this reconfigured pedagogy lacked a foundation and was therefore unworkable. Herbart's pedagogy would not function without its theological ground.

Indeed, for Herbart, a psychology of mind required a grounding in a metaphysics of the soul (Seele). Vorstellungen and all mental activity, according to Herbart, were manifestations of “the immortal human soul.”Footnote ⁸² He maintained that his object of study was not the soul itself, which was beyond our ability to apprehend directly and therefore ultimately unknowable, but only the soul's verifiable and measurable manifestations; that is, the mental forces he called Vorstellungen. Nevertheless, the presupposition of soul played an important role in his system as the ontological or theological ground for all that emanated from it. Given that mental activity is the interaction of Vorstellungen, and that Vorstellungen are manifestations of the soul, removing Soul would seem to destabilize Herbart's explanation of mental activity. And if, as Herbart's disciple and folk psychologist Lazarus maintained, the minds of individuals function in society exactly as the Vorstellungen function in the individual mind, the possibility of a social or folk psychology would also seem to depend upon this foundation.

As an alternative to Christian theology, Japanese translators and interpreters of Geist discourse turned to an ideology of the emperor and Japan's “unbroken imperial line,” to the “uniquely Japanese” virtues of obedience and patriotic loyalty in the Imperial Rescript on Education (upheld as the “sacred book” of Meiji because, though drafted by others, it was disseminated as the emperor's own words), and to the state (that which defended spirit from corrupting foreign influences and secured its continuation).Footnote ⁸³ The ensuing struggle for hegemonic control over the ideological terrain of mid-Meiji Japan led to the suppression of views of spirit (e.g. those of Christian apologists) at odds with those disseminated by the state.