Focusing on the process by which language was reformed and re-theorized in Meiji-era Japan, Atsuko Ueda's study Language, Nation, Race explores how the consolidation of kokugo (national language) was intertwined with the emergence of nationalistic and racialist thinking. In analyzing this history, Ueda strives to avoid facile narratives that fail to acknowledge the constructedness of key concepts or unwittingly presume an inevitable telos.
In the book's first half, Ueda considers several Meiji proposals to reform Japanese style and orthography. She argues against a tendency to assume that reformers simply advocated “Westernization and de-Asianization” by showing that they were informed by native phonological studies and by kangaku. Through the fascinating materials that Ueda assembles, we get a good sense of the variety of approaches these thinkers pursued and their engagement in a robust debate.
Surprisingly, Ueda's analysis of these materials is occasionally marred by misinterpretation or conceptual imprecision. Consider her analysis of an early effort by Nishi Amane to romanize the Great Learning:
物有本末。事有終始。知所先後。則近道矣。
Mono hon-batsu ari; waza siu-si ari. Sen-kou suru tokoro wo sireba, sunavatsi mitsi ni tsikasi.Footnote 1
Notice how he italicized the kanji compounds as if to retain the orthographic difference in the Roman alphabet. Despite his rejection of kanji, Nishi was never against the use of kanji compounds in the new language he sought. In effect, in “employing sounds of kanji,” it is likely that he was looking for a way to represent kanji compounds as a unit, whether by italicizing them or by devising something else to mark their “kanji”-ness. (pp. 37–38)
Readers may wonder how Nishi can simultaneously “reject . . . kanji” and support “the use of kanji compounds.” They may further wonder what “orthographic difference” Ueda sees Nishi endeavoring to “retain” when he romanized this exclusively Sinographic text. But putting these questions aside, we see that Ueda's analysis (that Nishi uses italics for kanji compounds) is erroneous if we read just slightly before the example she has chosen:
大學孔氏之遺書、而初學入德之門也。
Dai-gaku va Kou-si no i-siyo ni site, sikausite siyo-gaku toku ni iru mon nari.
Clearly, toku and mon are not “kanji compounds,” and yet Nishi italicizes them. Why? The underlying principle guiding Nishi is not related to script at all, but rather concerns lexical provenance: whether a given word is wago (native Japanese vocabulary) or kango (Sinitic vocabulary). If anything, Nishi is engaged in an effort to create an orthographic difference where none exists by separating these two categories of lexemes.
This is one of several instances in which issues of script and lexical stratum are confused. About Yano Ryūkei's 1886 treatise on style, Ueda argues,
His discussion compares the number of syllables between what he refers to as dogo (“native” language) and shinago (language originally from China), which roughly align with kun-yomi (the “kun”-reading or “indigenous” pronunciation) and onyomi (the “on”-reading or phonetic approximation of original characters) of kanji, respectively. (p. 48)
Rather than the “focus on the phonetics of kanji” that Ueda sees, Yano is concerned with whether utterances use wago or kango vocabulary (dogo or shinago). This matter of etymological provenance can overlap with the separate question of Sinoxenic versus Japanese readings of Sinographs, but it is fundamentally a matter of lexical, not graphic, choice. Throughout, Ueda tends to posit a certain Sinographic orthography as given and frames the question as how to pronounce those Sinographs. It is revealing that Yano's text gives the enunciated pronunciation, in katakana, as the primary representation of the pairs of spoken utterances that he compares, relegating the conventional orthography, in a mixture of Sinographs and katakana, to a parenthetical note, but Ueda reverses this order and foregrounds script.Footnote 2 Similar problems occur in Ueda's discussion of Sekine Masanao, who drew the same distinction between native and borrowed vocabulary (kungo and ongo) in an 1888 essay.
The larger narrative that Ueda works toward (that kanbun kundokutai was of vital importance in the creation of kokugo and that national language scholars wrested control over it in part by suppressing its foreignness) is one with which many scholars concur. Yet the arguments she marshals to demonstrate the specifics of that process are sometimes undercut by superficial engagement with the sources.
Part two of Ueda's book presents a provocative reading of race in modern Japanese literature and language policy. Over the last two decades, several scholars have sketched an illuminating three-part structure in which Japan's acquisition of overseas territories is understood as “mimetic” of Western colonial powers (in the words of Robert Eskildsen), or as a process of “imperial mimicry” (in the words of Robert Tierney), or, in Komori Yōichi's terms (to which Ueda makes passing reference), as a combination of outward “colonialist consciousness” toward the territories it acquired and a “colonial unconscious,” the partially suppressed memory of Japan's self-colonization in the face of Western imperial incursions.
Ueda offers a new twist on these ideas, reframing the imitative process by which Japan adopted imperialist policies as, by definition, a pursuit of “whiteness.” She explains, “The Japanese could disavow their ‘yellowness’ if they could act ‘white’ vis-à-vis the rest of East Asia” (p. 94). This framework varies in its cogency. Where successful, Ueda's analysis reveals aspects of canonical Meiji literary texts that have not been sufficiently appreciated; but in its application to Japanese colonial language policy, it seems less germane.
Consider her attempt to understand Ueda Kazutoshi's theorization of kokugo using the notion of “whiteness”:
Despite his fanatic nationalism, Ueda never conceptualized kokugo as a language that belonged only to the Japanese . . . he conceptualized Japanese as an imperial language, and thus he conceptualized it as ‘white.’” (p. 89)
Atsuko Ueda does not introduce any evidence whatsoever that Ueda Kazutoshi or anyone else at the time ever linked mastery of kokugo with whiteness. Rather, it is simply axiomatic in her framework that something held to be paradigmatic or normative in an imperial context is coded “white.” I think many scholars would agree that Japanese colonial policy was often framed in racial terms, but the pursuit of “whiteness” does not seem to capture the particular contours of this process by which the Japanese Empire shores up its own superiority by constantly producing inferior others. With regard to colonial linguistic policy, Ueda argues, “The more ‘inauthentic’ speakers of kokugo (the language of whiteness) they can create, the more ‘authentic’ the imagined dominant majority become” (p. 97). As her definition of Japanese kokugo as “the language of whiteness” shows, she uses it to mean basically “civilized” or “desirable” or “privileged” within the imperial context. To this reader, such a capacious understanding of “whiteness” deprives it of its specificity and potential utility as an analytical tool.
That “whiteness” (more narrowly conceived) does have analytic utility in the context of Meiji Japan is clear from Ueda's final chapter, which illuminates the salience of racial themes in the works of Natsume Sōseki. She provides abundant textual evidence showing how racialized descriptors, like skin color, are mobilized in Sanshirō to depict regional and other differences among the Japanese characters. Ueda also observes the tendency of Sōseki's translators to smooth over such passages, seeing their failure to convey the racialized language in his works as evidence of a field-wide reluctance to reckon with racism squarely (though Ueda does not explicitly cite the most flagrant uses of pejorative racialized language in Sanshirō).
Ueda's thought-provoking study takes up the well-explored topic of language reforms in Meiji Japan, highlighting many figures and their engagements with enduring questions. Her work calls attention to several recent developments in the secondary literature and illuminates neglected aspects of the period.
